TOP
TEN FILMS SEEN IN THE YEAR 2012
(Films not released or shown in
As John Waters noted in his ArtForum Top Ten
list john waters - artforum.com
/ in print, "Misery is really in this year." The subject
of human brutality seems to be dominating many of the films this year, creating
difficult experiences for viewers, including one of the best armed forces
documentaries seen in awhile, a prevalence of sexual abuse of men, women, and boys,
though that is counteracted by Wes Anderson’s marvelously inventive and
perfectly innocent children’s fable. Of
note, several first time filmmakers have joined the ranks of more heralded
directors in making some of the best films of the year. Missing in
Small budgeted American indie films are having a harder
time getting financed, as in a time of economic uncertainty, studios wish to
invest in what they consider sure things, which are star-driven and marketable
blockbusters. So other than an
exceptional few that actually reach the theaters, art films are largely being
made overseas where certain filmmakers like Carlos Reygadas, Claire Denis, the
Dardenne Brothers, or Michael Haneke are not restricted to films that must make
a profit, so they can choose more challenging material.
The Top Ten films will be added to this website (cranes are flying) which has
provided over 330 film reviews this year, 18 new films from the annual European
Union film festival which are screened and reviewed every March, thoughts on a
summer trip to Stratford,
and a Chicago Film Festival summary 2012
Chicago Film Fest Wrap Up where 32 films seen were reviewed. All reviews continue to be added to a larger
site, cranes are flying online
film project which was recently updated and with the patient help of Eric
C. Johnson may go through yet another major overhaul in an attempt to make it
more accessible.
Best wishes to everyone for a fabulous new year.
Robert
Top Ten Films of 2012
1.) Beasts
of the Southern Wild
3.) Moonrise
Kingdom
4.) Holy
Motors
7.) Something
in the Air (Après mai)
9.) King
of Devil's Island (Kongen av Bastøy)
10.) Sister
(L'enfant d'en haut)
Honorable Mention
2.) In the
Family
3.) The
Scapegoat
4.) We
Need to Talk About Kevin
5.) House
of Tolerance (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la...
1.) BEASTS OF THE
SOUTHERN WILD Beasts
of the Southern Wild A
I
see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right. —Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis)
A film that comes with accolades, having won awards at
Cannes and Sundance, which may play into the audience’s preconceived
expectations of what an acclaimed film is *supposed* to be, but if New York has
its post 9/11 films, like 25th HOUR (2002), then this is among the
most evocative post Katrina films from Louisiana, the most definitive, of
course, being Spike Lee’s journalistic exposé WHEN THE LEVEEES BROKE: A REQUIEM
IN FOUR ACTS (2006). One has to wonder
what David Gordon Green thinks of this film, which is arguably as good or
better than anything he’s ever done, as it’s an original composite of his indie
style films (that he all but invented but doesn’t make anymore) like GEORGE
WASHINGTON (2000) and the magnificent poetry of Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE
DUST (1991), which this most closely resembles, especially capturing the
harshness and beauty of a remote island culture, using a child narrator
throughout whose inner thoughts transcend the poverty-laden conditions of their
world with an uncanny elegance and nobility.
Though the filmmaker happens to be Jewish from Queens, New York,
studying with the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, he actually wrote this
film with co-writer Lucy Alibar in summer camp when they were both teenagers,
where the film is their adaptation of her play Juicy and Delicious, changing the protagonist from a boy to a
little girl, before he moved to Southern Louisiana where he’s lived for the
past six years and made the short film GLORY AT SEA (2008), which can be seen
here: Watch
Benh Zeitlin's incredible short GLORY AT SEA YouTube (25:48). Interestingly, the film title, Beasts of the Southern Wild, comes from
a 1973 collection of short stories by Doris Betts, also mentioned in the
opening line of William Blake’s 1789 poem The
Little Black Boy The
Little Black Boy by William Blake : The Poetry
Foundation.
Apparently dividing audiences along many of the same lines
as Terrence Malick’s equally enthralling The Tree
of Life (2011), both films couldn’t be more visually intoxicating, rich in
atmospheric detail, touching the very soul of man through intensely personal
journeys, where the key is developing a shared emotional understanding, like
opening a new window to the world around you.
This is a fiercely independent feature, shot on Super 16mm by Ben
Richardson, which intentionally takes much of the picturesque beauty out of the
movie, leaving a naturalistic film that actually feels like the raw edge of the
universe, a place where the last inhabitants of earth might dwell. This apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenario
runs throughout the film, which prominently features the possibility of rising
floods, toxic environmental conditions, and abandoned children. The entire film is seen through the point of
view of a 6-year old girl, Hushpuppy, the sensational Quvenzhané Wallis, just
one in a cast entirely comprised of non-professionals, who lives with her drunk
and perpetually angry father Wink (Dwight Henry, a local baker in real life) in
the squalor of the Delta backwoods, where they live in hand-built corrugated
tin structures that resemble dilapidated trailers on a tiny island in the flood
plains south of New Orleans nicknamed the Bathtub (fictitiously modeled on a real place, The Island - Isle de Jean
Charles), as once
another storm hits, the levee was built to protect wealthier residents, while
the Bathtub is destined to be submerged under water. “They think we're all gonna drown down here,
but we ain't going nowhere.” With this
in mind, her father teaches her to be strong, to survive, pretty much forcing
her to fend for herself against the elements.
The unique touch here is the inventive use of the
imagination, where heightened realism becomes fantasy, which is inherently part
of a child’s view of the world, where strange prehistoric monsters called
aurochs once ruled the earth that would just as soon eat people for breakfast,
where Hushpuppy is driven to find her place in the universe and leave her mark,
but she is constantly threatened by these giant creatures that still exist in
her mind. She internalizes their
presence whenever life is threatened, where they become a symbol of death
knocking at the door, and if this film does anything, it provides a rich,
atmospheric blend of love and death, where both couldn’t feel more intensely
real. This extremely well developed
inner realm is the real surprise of the film, where there’s a subtle complexity
that just has a way of touching people, where it is the director’s choice to
stray away from narrative, to allow the story to evolve without definition,
where some may find the community where they live a band of drunken misfits and
outcasts, where filth is strewn everywhere, hardly worth caring about, but
others may understand it as protecting a nearly extinct way of life, living off
the land much like the Indians did, where Wink makes a nearly unnoticed remark
about not wanting to eat food from a supermarket, a concept that’s hard for
most people to understand. These
isolated individuals have a zealously paranoiac view of government as
completely untrustworthy, obtained from incidents like The Tuskegee Syphilis
Experiment — Infoplease.com and centuries of lies and historical
mistreatment in Louisiana, where in their view government serves and protects
the wealthy and all but ignores the needs of the poor, where so many end up
languishing in prison, as Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the
world (>:
Louisiana's Incarceration Rate "Highest in the World") also (La.'s
incarceration rate leads nation - Law Enforcement News). So it’s no surprise those in the Bathtub,
both black and white, relish living free in their own homes, outside the reach
of government, seen as one of the last bastions of freedom and
individuality.
2.) POST
TENEBRAS LUX Post
Tenebras Lux A
Pierre
had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is
created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of
natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from
superfluity.
—War and
Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, 1869, quoted at a dinner party by Juan
(Adolfo Jiménez Castro)
Carlos Reygadas makes challenging art films that play in
film festivals, where you can count on extreme visualization and an austerity
of form, where in this film he nearly disregards narrative altogether, feeling
very much like a Godless Bruno Dumont film, as he examines many of the same
themes evoked from the title, “After the darkness, light.” Impressively shot by Alexis Zabé, for the
first time not on ‘Scope, strangely using a boxed 1:37 aspect ratio with
refracted images on each side of the screen which has a dizzying way of
expressing shadow images that suggest an everpresent duality of meaning. Told out of sequence, as if that hardly
matters, suggesting it’s the overall whole that matters, not each individually
selected piece, the film does suggest a good and evil scenario, also God, the
Devil, and redemption, class differences, also crime and punishment, where once
again nature is viewed at its most thunderous best, literally overpowering the
people that populate this film. While
there are likely moral and spiritual messages, they tend to get lost in the
random order in which this film is told, where perhaps they are the hardest for
each individual to discover in their own lives as well. While this may be the most challenging film
of the year, many are instead taking the easy route, suggesting it is so
incomprehensible that the odor of pretentiousness defines this picture. One must understand that similar charges were
weighed against Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR (1975), for instance, yet many
now think this may be one of Tarkovsky’s most hauntingly beautiful films. There is a dramatic, Dumont-like scene near
the end that takes place in an open field, where the aftermath of rainfall can
only be attributed to Tarkovsky, offering a baptismal-like cleansing that
evokes John the Baptist, as if this mythical undertaking might wipe away the
sins of the world.
The experience of viewing a film like this is certainly
unlike that of seeing other movies, where in a similar manner of say Yasujirô
Ozu, the director forces the viewer to alter their perception of what they’re
seeing onscreen simply by the way he chooses to express it, where in Ozu’s case
he uses a fixed point of reference where he’s simply observing life as it is,
while with Tarkovsky or Dreyer, cinema is a means that transcends human
limitations, like music, literature, or great art. Even before the viewer sets foot inside the
theater, they know a Reygadas film will be visually spectacular, where nature
manifests itself in a glorious, Edenesque simplicity, while also exploring the
pathetic interior failings of mankind, pitting spiritual themes against the
existential crises of men. Described as
a semi-autobiographical film where reason barely intrudes, Reygadas has
suggested this film is “like an expressionist painting where you try to express
what you're feeling through the painting rather than depict what something
looks like,” supposedly shot in Mexico, Spain, Belgium, and Britain, all places
where Reygadas has lived, which might help explain the final shot of the film,
which otherwise seems quite random, though the director played rugby for the
Mexican national team. With this in
mind, it may be useful to view this as one might an experimental film, perhaps
even a video installation, where you’re not so much interested in what’s going
on at any given moment as the effect it’s having internally as you experience
it. All Reygadas films have premiered at
Cannes, where his first film JAPÓN (2002) won the Caméra D’Or award for the
best first feature, SILENT LIGHT (2007) won the Jury Prize (3rd place), while
for POST TENEBRAS LUX, Reygadas was awarded the Best Director at Cannes in
2012.
The opening of this film is as powerful as anything seen
this year, where a small girl (the director’s daughter Rut) is wandering around
a waterlogged open soccer field pointing out various animals like dogs, cows,
and horses, while thunder and lightning flash across the sky, as man and nature
commingle, but the most prominent effect is the incessant sound of dogs
barking. A supernatural element follows,
something along the lines of what we might come to expect in a Weerasethakul
film, before a realist, more recognizable family scene reveals Rut is the
younger sister to Eleazar (the director’s son), whose affluent parents are Juan
(Adolfo Jiménez Castro) and Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo), living in what
resembles an architecturally designed house in what is otherwise a poor rural
area of Mexico. The parent’s
relationship revolves around old literary language, continually calling one
another love, or my love, even though Juan has a vile temper, seen viciously
beating one of his prized dogs (offscreen).
Sometime later, the parents are at a wealthy dinner party, where Juan
proudly quotes Tolstoy, generating mocking sneers behind his back, finding him
pretentiously arrogant and snobbish. In
stark contrast, the couple later enjoys themselves visiting a hip Paris sauna
when trading partners was in vogue, where Natalia is a big hit literally
offering herself to the somewhat lecherous clientele. Each of these scenes is an example of the
disharmony in man, a fall from grace, where there are eventual consequences,
even when expressed as a random act. In
some mysterious way, man is ultimately punished, perhaps by God, perhaps by the
Devil, but this film presents apocalyptical acts of damnation, followed by a
Biblical cleansing. Whatever one makes
of this film, there is little to suggest it is an act of extreme provocation,
or an empty exercise of self indulgence, as claimed by some, as there were a
scattering of boos at Cannes as well, instead one might suggest it’s a
profoundly influential modernist and narrative free work that simply operates
in a different cinematic vernacular, existing in a dreamlike plateau where
humans often play a secondary role.
3.)
A candidate for the most delightful and thoroughly
enjoyable film of the year, much of which feels autobiographical and is
curiously fascinating from the opening few shots, showing a doll’s house view
of a comfortable old home (a converted lighthouse), with various inhabitants
seemingly occupying each individual room, with kids keeping separate from the
parents, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, who are themselves seen in separate
rooms, the camera quickly moving from room to room in an inquisitive fashion,
where one can only marvel at the meticulous detail. Each shot is
perfectly composed and color coordinated, which continues throughout the entire
picture, shot on 16 mm by cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman in what is surely
one of the most gorgeously composed films seen in awhile. In addition,
what is immediately noticeable is how perfectly edited each shot is, all in
tempo with the music, which is the narrator’s version of Leonard Bernstein
playing Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack
01. The Young Person's Guide To .. YouTube (
Accordingly, Sam leaves a note for his Scout Master (Edward
Norton, wonderfully buttoned-down and straight-laced) resigning from the Khaki
Scouts, claiming none of the other scouts liked him much anyway, placing a poster over the hole in his tent where he escapes,
in an obvious nod to THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994). His escape is all
part of an elaborate plan that has been carefully choreographed with Suzy ahead
of time, mostly by correspondence through the U.S. Mail agreeing to meet at a
designated spot and then hike into secret oblivion, hoping no one will ever
find them. What’s apparent is that both kids are viewed as troublesome
because they’re the smartest kids around, immune to typical conformity measures
used by authority figures to make kids act alike, making them both outcasts
where they’re easily drawn to one another. The two are a marvel of
casting, as they’re probably smarter than the adults around them as well,
making them undeniably appealing characters for their beguiling ingenuity,
where Sam shows a surprising outdoorsman scouting aptitude for taking care of
Suzy in the wild. Interestingly, they meet backstage at the town church
during a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Noye's
Fludde, Moonrise
Kingdom Soundtrack 18. Noye's Fludde, Op.59 - Noye, take thy wife anone
YouTube (2:13) which includes a children's chorus of colorfully costumed animals
and birds, where Sam is immediately drawn to Suzy’s bird outfit, that and the
fact she isn’t smiling gleefully like the others. Actually all the
children in the film exhibit plenty of individual flair and personality, adding
a bit of theatrical showmanship and are in perfect synch with Anderson’s
idealized child fable, made even more clever by Suzy’s habits of reading her
favorite books at night out loud for Sam, amusingly putting him to sleep
initially, but later sustaining his interest completely, where the stories
within the story are always wonderfully inventive and near revelatory.
Elfish narrator Bob Balaban shows up intermittently in unexpected places,
always absurdly dressed, reinforcing the element of a magical realism and
whimsy.
Adding a level of seriousness (and complete lack of
sentimentality) is Sam’s back story where he’s an orphan, having lost his
parents early on and grown up in an orphanage, pictured in flashbacks from the
50’s as all boys with wild hair in jeans and white tee-shirts standing around
working on cars while Sam remains in his bed reading, the subject of constant
humiliation and torment. When the local police (Bruce Willis) contact his
parents to report him missing, they don’t want him back, finding him too much
trouble, thinking he’s a bad influence on their other children, whereupon
social services is contacted, Tilda Swinton in her matching blue uniform and
cap, exhibiting the pious and rigid attitude of the highly repressed, Christian
women who founded the social work movement providing charity while
administering the church's mission to the poor. Listening to her, Sam’s
chances for the future are doomed, as adding charges of a runaway to his record
will only mandate intense psychological testing, perhaps even electric shock
therapy. While this may sound outrageous, and hearing it from the
emotionally severe Swinton it most certainly is, what reverberates throughout
the minds of all the kids is what an utterly barbaric experience that must be,
and while none of them particularly like Sam much, they don’t hate him enough
to wish that upon him.
So this turns into an utterly enchanting children’s story
about wild adventures in the woods, featuring the obligatory love song (in
French, of course) Françoise
Hardy - Le Temps de l'Amour - YouTube (2:26), and the dysfunctional and
often irrelevant parents searching for them, lavishly decorated in Britten’s
Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream
subtext, Moonrise
Kingdom Soundtrack 09. A Midsummer Night's Dream ... YouTube (3:05),
thoroughly enhanced by the use of children’s songs and a children’s chorus,
cleverly intermixed with a little playful Hank Williams, which beautifully
accentuates the children’s fairy tale aspect of the film, heard here by
Alexandre Desplat’s “A Veiled Mist” Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack
06. The Heroic Weather-Conditions ... YouTube (
4.) HOLY MOTORS Holy
Motors A
My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the
more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet
continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of
it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken
parts to make something completely new.
Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to
many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a
try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the
movie itself. In other words you don’t
even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this
film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself. Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema,
where at 24 his first film BOY MEETS GIRL (1984), shot in black and white on
location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next MAUVAIS SANG
(1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer
Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film
art. Given a free reign over his next
project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production
in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing
the extravagant THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (1991), a sumptuous and romantic
tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal
flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after
his previous film. When his next film
POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where
we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning
another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally
defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are
simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the
director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an
art film in the modern era.
This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of
conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside
every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like
performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who
literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he
injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes. What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer
questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of
visiting spirit from a world beyond.
While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or
disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or
loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be
a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the
pure unadulterated joy of cinema. Lavant
is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets
of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Edith Scob, the aged star of a
French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE
(1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her
hair. She may as well be the driver of
dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and
receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself
into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room
on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into
disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might
die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the
modern world. Much like the use of
memories in Last
Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if
not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles,
literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of
context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of
time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.
The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site
locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an
otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone
in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up
intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to
earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in
complete bewilderment at Lavant. In one
assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little
green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters
a word but instead makes weird animal sounds.
When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street,
people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos
of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty,
but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where
he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo
shoot. When she attempts to communicate
with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever
heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other
freaks of nature. Lavant simply grabs
the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that
exists in stillness and in silence. In
such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of
the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic,
using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as
Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much
like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn
around the empty warehouse settings.
Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads
“Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black
and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus
act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let
my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece
of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to
the film. Who knows where Carax comes up
with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed
skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous
MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an
unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in MICKEY ONE (1965), becoming highly
experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a
shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant
somewhere entwined. Using two
cinematographers,
5.) THE
INVISIBLE WAR The Invisible War
A
The knife
wasn’t for the Iraqis. It was for the guys on my own side.
This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends
women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them
sane. He said in
—Spc. Mickiela Montoya, age 21
Perhaps the best war documentary since THE FOG OF WAR
(2003). Since the shameful debacle that was Vietnam, a war that divided
the nation in the 60’s and 70’s, America has reversed course and applauded
veterans, where patriotism and serving your country go hand in hand, where
soldiers are publicly recognized as a noble profession, routinely recognized at
sporting events and in human interest stories on the local news broadcasts, often
showing sympathetic portrayals of the medical hardships so many damaged
veterans suffer upon returning home. One subject the newscasts routinely
omit is the prevalence of rape in the military, where more than 20% of
currently serving female veterans will be sexually assaulted, sometimes with a
loaded weapon pointed at their heads and threatened to be killed if they talk,
so more than 80% of those will never report the crime (to almost exclusively
male commanders), as their careers are effectively tarnished or destroyed just
for reporting the crime, where women who report rape are considered traitors,
often reduced in rank, singled out by unsympathetic police and subjected to
humiliating treatment, forced out of the military or charged for petty offenses
themselves, where there are few legal provisions in place to actually charge
the rapists or hold them accountable for their actions. 25% of women
don’t report because their commander was their rapist, the same person
responsible for investigating the charges and rendering an impartial decision,
while another third don’t report as the rapist was one of his drinking buddies,
where irrespective of the circumstances, if the victim was drinking the case is
automatically thrown out. Consequently, commanders often order their
subordinates to drink, sometimes involuntarily, before they rape them.
With only 3% of the accused ever spending time behind bars, where the
punishment is often only a matter of days, like 30 to 60 days of confinement
for a felony crime that would receive years of civilian jail time, where the
military likes to keep the confinement under a year so offenders never have to
register with the National Sex Offender Registry, that’s a pretty hefty number
that continue to get away scot free for committing such a heinous criminal
act. Astonishingly, the official position of the Armed Forces is to
consider this an “occupational hazard,” where under U.S. law, veterans are not
allowed to sue the military for potential damages, no matter the severity of
the offense.
Similar to Kirby Dick’s insightful film TWIST OF FAITH
(2005), revealing decaying moral aftereffects of generations of sexual abuse by
Catholic priests ignored by the church hierarchy, the portrait in each case is
an insular organization that is more interested in protecting their own, where
this vile all-male behavior is allowed to toxically infect the faithful from
within, offering no solace or relief, undermining the very values both the
church and the military purportedly stand for. Much of the information in
this film was first reported in a March 7, 2007 article in Salon by Helen
Benedict, seen here: The private war of
women soldiers - Salon.com, one of the journalists seen in the film, along
with a handful of women who were violently attacked by fellow soldiers, some
drugged ahead of time, waking up with someone on top of her, one women with her
jawbone permanently broken as a result (requiring reconstruction surgery that
the VA refuses to pay for), another gang-raped simply walking down a hotel
hallway, grabbed by several drunken aviators who were preying on women.
Perhaps the most egregious example of the lack of justice is a woman who is
herself an investigator in the Criminal Justice division of the military, a
woman who investigates accusations of rape, who was herself raped by her
superior officer. In each and every one of these cases the rapist was
never charged or even arrested, and in some cases was actually promoted, one of
many decorated officers still serving in the military, while the affected women
on the other hand, remain physically and mentally traumatized with greater
severity than soldiers wounded or scarred from battle, some with permanent,
lifelong injuries that affect their quality of life. All suffer severe
post traumatic stress symptoms, mostly from a violation of trust, as these
rapes have a deep-rooted incestual quality to them, as the military
incorporates a psychological system of faith and trust in one another, brothers
in arms, leave no man behind, supposedly looking out for one another, where the
victims continue to have flashbacks and nightmares, and where sexual attention,
even from the intimacy of a spouse, is often still seen, years later, as a
threatening act. The damage is visibly apparent just from spending a few
moments with each victim, all of whom are smart and sympathetic figures,
excellent soldiers, many coming from military families, where it was their
dream to proudly serve their country. This film documents how that dream
is crushed, not by the intensity or harsh reality of war, but by a military
that condones soldiers repeatedly raping and violently attacking fellow
soldiers in their barracks without any repercussions to prevent it from
happening again, so the problem becomes systemic, attracting a culture filled
with repeat offenders.
Amir Bar-Lev’s film The
Tillman Story (2010) similarly documents how the Army lied and repeatedly
covered up the truth about how pro football player Pat Tillman was killed in
Afghanistan, initially glorifying his death, making him a larger than life,
mythical war hero, awarding him the Purple Heart, turning him into a poster boy
to help recruit young soldiers, only reluctantly revealing afterwards that he
was killed by his own group of Army Rangers from unfriendly fire, most likely
the over-reactions of trigger-happy 19-year olds, shedding light on the systematic
corruption, incompetence, and lack of accountability in the military and in
government. Dick’s film is a more harrowing interior journey into horror,
given an intense Kafkaesque feel at just how random and unnecessary these
nightmarish tragedies are, as they could happen to anyone, even the best
soldiers, as there’s simply no concerted effort to eliminate rape once and for
all from the military. Part of the problem is the government’s bold
public contention, often before Congress, that they have a “zero tolerance”
policy in place, while in reality the current system protects the perpetrators,
who remain serving in the military even more emboldened knowing they can get
away with it in a system that allows them to become repeat offenders, while the
victims leave in disgrace, depressed and humiliated, often affected for
life. The military has a history of this sort of thing happening before,
the 1991 Navy Tailhook scandal where 87 female recruits were forced to run a
“gauntlet” of 100 drunken officers that amounted to a gang rape, the Army
Aberdeen Scandal in 1996 where male officers were found raping 30 new female
trainees, or the 142 allegations of rape uncovered in 2003 at the Air Force
Academy in Colorado Springs. Statistics reveal the military is
waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army
recruits, that incoming Navy recruits already have a previous history of rape
or sexual assault at twice the rate as the civilian population, suggesting the
military is a recruiting grounds for potential serial rapists.
All the rapists in the film happen to be heterosexual, some are married men,
suggesting this is not a gay issue, but predators don’t discriminate the sex of
their victims, as to them it’s all about exerting control and domination
against males or females (because there’s significantly more men in the
military, more men are raped than women, but the percentage of women is much
higher), using their rank and position to force subordinates into sexual
compliance, sounding very much like the repeated sexual assaults within the
prison system. In each, the system barely acknowledges the victims,
claiming they don’t keep statistics on unlawful and uncontrolled human
behavior. Part of the argument criticizing the military’s effectiveness
always points out collateral damage, how innocent civilians are killed with
greater numbers than the targeted enemy, where much like inner city gangs, most
of those killed are unintended victims killed in the crossfire. The unintended
victims here are those women serving alongside male sexual predators that are
allowed to hide their criminal activity behind a protected and shielded
military chain of command. Watching highly decorated female officers
publicly defend this system of what amounts to tolerated rape within the
military is simply mind-boggling, claiming rape victims who are unhappy with
the results of the lackluster internal military investigations could write
their congressmen, an outrageous acknowledgment of systematic incompetence, all
but suggesting the only avenue to justice is outside the narrow confines of
military culture. The film cuts through the hypocrisy of high-level
military personnel and government officials while conveying its message of
misogyny through victims still living with the pain and trauma with a
brilliantly assembled series of personally compelling testimony that
collectively amasses in equal degrees both heartbreak and outrage, becoming a
fierce indictment against a promising career that tolerates felonious sexual
assault while advocating “Be all you can be.” Army
Commercial - Be All You Can Be (1986) - YouTube (29 seconds), Army
be all you can be (1994) - YouTube (31 seconds).
6.) BULLHEAD
(Rundskop) Bullhead
(Rundskop) A-
A brutally dark and uncompromising film that encompasses
many different styles, veering into film noir, but most often using the suspenseful
manner of a thriller featuring a loner character on-the-edge who’s capable of
doing anything, often coming very close to the cringe factor, as this film
ventures into territory few would wish to explore. Despite the exquisite
direction, which is never showy or ever intended to draw attention to itself,
it’s quite surprising this film, from a first time director, was chosen by
Belgium over the nation’s patron saints of cinema, the Dardennes Brothers’
latest Cannes offering The
Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) as the country’s selection for
Best Foreign Film, and even more surprising that the American Academy Award
Foreign Film Selection committee, which has had fits in this category in year’s
past, overlooking what many felt were the best films, named this as one of the
five finalists for 2012. Because of the uncomfortable subject matter,
which keeps the audience at an arm’s distance while simultaneously telling a
riveting story, brilliantly using old-fashioned film techniques like
storytelling through editing and camera movement, integrating the sound design
or changing the film speed, it’s a daring and superb choice, one that chooses
art over individual comfort. If truth be told, there are literally
hundreds of films that explore damaged women, who have been raped or abused in
some manner, where the psychological implications become the narrative of the
film. Isabelle Huppert has made a living playing this kind of part.
It’s quite rare, however, to see such an accomplished examination of a brutally
damaged man, especially one exhibiting this degree of skill behind the
camera. We saw glimpses of it with Michael Fassbender in Shame
(2011), but this is something different altogether. Written by the
director, cinematography by Nicolas Karakatsanis, there is an immediate
connection to the screen from the opening shot, a superb rural landscape, where
one doesn’t wish to look away to read the subtitles, as there’s also a brief
opening narration which gives the audience a clue what to expect when there is
an imbalance in nature.
Among the many things happening in this film is a playful
dig at Belgium’s own split culture, the Dutch-speaking Flanders and the
French-speaking Wallonia, where each side refuses to learn the language of the
other, as they’ve basically grown up to despise the other half, where lifelong
prejudices rule the day, which becomes somewhat comical in this film as the
story plays into this built-in prejudice. Heavily grounded in near
documentary style realism, it’s also an examination of machismo, especially as
defined in rural outbacks or in the criminal element that remains outside the
bounds of mainstream society. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Jaky, who gained
60 pounds of muscle to bulk up for this role, using bodybuilding techniques to
become a hulking muscular mass, a kind of gentle giant walking among us who has
the strength to tear any man apart, yet he works quietly on his family farm
with his own parents raising cattle. What separates them from other
farmers is they inject illegal hormones into their beef in order to fatten them
up prematurely, where bigger cattle means more money, also saving money in the
long run as they don’t have to keep them as long. This is as much a
family way of life as cooking crystal meth is in the Ozarks, or bootlegging
moonshine whisky in
The film is also something of a police procedural mixed together with bits and
pieces of Jaky’s past which resurface with the police killing and the attempted
entry into forbidden territory, where Jaky has to come to terms with what’s
haunted him his entire life. He’s such an imposing presence, bulking up
by injecting the same drugs he uses on the animals, which affects his mental
outlook, creating such an unstable force the audience recognizes a potential
train wreck when they see one. It’s significant to recall, however, just
what little harm he’s caused others up to this point, as he largely keeps to
himself and his small circle of friends. It’s this unfortunate business
on the other side that’s creating havoc, stirring up something inside, which
plays out like long lost memories rising to the surface. Once the
external circumstances are revealed, the director changes focus and moves
inward, becoming a hyper intense interior examination of personal tragedy,
where Jaky is continually battling his internal demons. Set largely in
the rural outskirts away from the mainstream of life, they set their own laws
out there and define their own cultural traditions, where this concept of macho
strength and male personal fortitude has a different definition altogether,
becoming an intense character study. Schoenaerts truly offers an
astonishing, testosterone-laden performance, chasing the boundaries of inner
rage, where his behavior grows more erratic and unpredictable, becoming a human
timebomb waiting to explode. Darkly disturbing, but also internally
complex, the audience may feel alienated from the brutality, but drawn to the
impressive craftsmanship of the director who really pulls it all together in
this psychologically probing and constantly inventive work that challenges our
own preconceived notions of masculinity.
7.) SOMETHING IN THE
AIR (Après mai) Something in the Air (Après mai) A-
With
a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
has gone from ear to ear:
I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:--I did those then
but that was then
that was then--
O I would quiet old men
say to them:--I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again--
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.
—“I
Am 25,” by Gregory Corso, from Gasoline, 1958
This is an elegiac and largely autobiographical account of
Assayas’s own youth, a companion piece to his earlier work COLD WATER (1997),
arguably his best film, where both beautifully capture the mood,
atmosphere, and raw, unpretentious intensity of anxiety-ridden adolescents
caught up in their own indecisions, the terrible choices they do make, how easy
their emotions are sparked and then extinguished, and how eloquently,
beyond their own words, the films describe their fatalistic viewpoint about
their all-too-hopeless future. The
French title, After May, is much more
apropos, as the film is a collection of leftover remembrances after May 1968, a
historical moment in French history that nearly brought revolutionary change, a
combined student and worker protest that involved nearly a quarter of the
entire French population over a period of two continuous weeks, initiated as a
student rebellion, but eventually spreading to workers across the nation who
joined the students, ultimately quelled by the forcible actions of the police
who literally clubbed and beat the protesters into submission. The film won the Best Screenplay award at
Venice, opening with blistering footage of these protests, as the streets are
aflame with police in riot gear with clubs literally attacking the students,
with the guys wearing jackets and ties, or sweaters, but also helmets, who are
seen running for their lives through the tear gas, many of them hauled off to
jail APRÈS MAI
[SOMETHING IN THE AIR] OLIVER ASSAYAS - clip YouTube (1:03). There is scant evidence of rebellious long
hair, jeans, sandals or beards. The
Assayas film views this period as a rite of passage, an intensely personal
account of developing political idealism through a radicalization process
initiated in high school, where teachers, interestingly enough, were actually
teaching students about Marx, how he challenged socialists as small thinking
utopians, advocating instead a complete overhaul of the economic system. In the high school segment, various factions
are still arguing many of these same theories about how to best implement a
radical change.
Set in 1971, Clément Métayer as Gilles is a stand-in for
the director, a somewhat moody kid who draws and paints and sells leftist
newspapers on the street while getting instructions from older
Trotskyites. He and a small clan of
students initiate a clandestine night raid spray painting activist political
messages directly onto their school building, where the school ID of one of the
activists is found on the scene, where the authorities unsuccessfully attempt
to get him to name names. Also in the
clan is Gilles’ girlfriend Christine, Lola Créton (where interestingly Gilles
and Christine were the names of the protagonists in COLD WATER), perhaps his
best friend Alain (Felix Armand), a fellow artist, who has a visiting American
girlfriend Leslie (India Menuez), the implicated student Jean-Pierre (Hugo
Conzelmann), who works at his father’s socialist printing press, while Gilles
is also secretly seeing another woman on the side, Laure (Carole Combes), a
free spirited soul with wealthy parents who’s about to leave the country for an
extended summer excursion. Her absence
brings Gilles closer to Christine, where they also travel together to
Much of this pays tribute to Bresson’s 60’s films,
including the youthful impressionism of the budding painter in Four
Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971) and the
disenchantment with radical politics of The
Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement) (1977). The Grandaddy of post May 1968 films is Jean
Eustache’s The
Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), often viewed as the
end of the French New Wave and the best expression of the end of the 1960’s
hope and optimism. Like COLD WATER, the
defining scene of the film is a spectacular party sequence with music and
dancing, beautifully shot by Eric Gautier, where Laure has become a drug
addicted bohemian living at a palatial country estate, where bonfires are set
and the musical choices are simply sublime, in perfect synch with the moment,
expressing a kind of trippy psychedelia from Syd Barrett and the Soft Machine,
Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band.
Assayas integrates music into his films as well as anyone else alive,
where the unspoken fluidity of this sequence speaks volumes, offering an
elegiac poetry to the expression of the counterculture, which has since faded
from view. It should be noted that many
of the wordless sequences from this film are among the best Assayas has ever
done. As Gilles tells his father, however,
a television screenwriter (as was Assayas’s), he felt the writing on the show
was “too strained.” This aptly describes
much of the forced political positions which are squeezed into this film, where
there are more ideas than the film knows what to do with, where perhaps the
weakest element of the film is a lack of development of the characters, none of
whom, outside of Gilles, are sympathetic or really very memorable at all. This unfortunately detracts from the overall
impression of the film, which bears a similarity to Lou Ye’s SUMMER PALACE
(2006), where the vitality of the youthful counterculture and freedom movements
in each film are literally off the charts, expressed with dazzling camera
virtuosity, where youth is like a bright flair burning in a sea of societal
indifference, where once it burns out, all that’s left is the
indifference.
8.) A SIMPLE LIFE
(Tao jie) A
Simple Life (Tao jie) A-
One of the more thoughtful and lyrical films on the subject
of aging, told without an ounce of condescension or pretense, where the
director herself is about the exact same age as actress Deannie Ip, coming out
of retirement, as she hasn’t made a movie in over a decade. Much like Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry
(2010), where Korean actress Yun Jung-hee performed in over 300 films in her
career, coming out of retirement after sixteen years of living in Paris to be
in nearly every scene of the film. While
this doesn’t have the novelesque density of that movie, Ip dominates this film
as well, though the writing is more quietly observant, paying attention to
small details, where many sequences during the opening half hour are near
wordless. In an innertitle following the
opening credits, the audience quickly learns about Ah Tao (Ip), whose father
died during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, while her mother gave her
away to a wealthy Chinese family in Hong Kong, making her an orphan, where she
served that same family as the household maid through 4 generations for the
next 60 years, where all but one have moved away, either to Mainland China or
to the United States, where the seventyish Ah Tao remains the servant of Roger
Leung (Andy Lau), a middle aged bachelor otherwise living alone, a successful
movie producer with a knack for reading financial records. The circular choreography of the elderly Ah
Tao serving meals to the young Master is a sight to behold, as they needn’t utter
a word to be on the same wavelength, where she serves the various courses of
the meal exactly as he desires. Earlier
we see her shopping in the market, asking the price, checking each item for
freshness until finding the very best vegetables in the marketplace, which are
the only ones she’ll use. Based on the
real life of co-writer and producer Roger Lee, Ah Tao is a perfectionist in the
kitchen, as is Roger, both extremely picky about what food they’ll eat.
The film takes a turn when Ah Tao suffers a stroke, losing
muscle control on one side, relying heavily upon a cane to walk, announcing
she’s retiring and intends to live out her years in an old folk’s home,
insisting she pay her own way, nothing fancy, just something practical, as she
refuses to be a burden. Roger offers to
pay but complies with her wishes, where despite his busy schedule which
requires extensive travel throughout
Born in
9.) KING OF DEVIL’S
A different side of Scandinavian films that we rarely see,
one that is as brutally harsh as the bleak wintry landscape, where fortitude is
built by learning how to survive in the worst circumstances, where in this part
of the world surviving the elements is a continual test of character.
Based on a true story in 1915, set on the island of Bastøy on the North Sea
inlet south of Oslo, they run an Alcatraz style prison for delinquent boys,
where some may be orphans, some have mental health issues, others may have been
caught for petty crimes, or may just be poor, but boys from 8 to 18 languish on
this penal colony for years paying a kind of eternal penitence, where getting
lost in the system is an understatement, as their release depends upon the
discretion of the sadistic Governor in charge, Stellan Skarsgård, who firmly
believes hard work and a firm stick will somehow transform these unruly boys
into model citizens. His job is to mold them into compliant citizens that
obey rules and follow orders. The truthful severity of the brutal acts
against children make this kind of film off limits to American filmmakers, as
this honestly exposes a kind of monstrous inhumanity within Norway’s own
history that’s missing in American films. Some of the best remembered
prison films are A
Man Escaped (Un Condamné à Mort s'est échappé) (1956),
THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), COOL HAND LUKE (1967), IF… (1968), ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), SHAWHANK REDEMPTION (1994), where each one raises the
question of prisoner escape, seen by the other inmates as an act of heroics,
yet not so the warden who must make an example to deter similar actions,
resorting to ruthless measures if caught, making one think twice about ever
doing it again. Each of these movies suggests men can only endure so much
torture and relentless oppression, resorting to wit and bravery to conjure up
improbable acts of escape, but not so here, as someone instead irrationally
refuses to escape when the door is left wide open, where this may have you on
the edge of your seat.
Unraveling as a story within a story, where a young harpooner aboard a Moby Dick style whaling ship marvels at
the endurance of a whale that has been shot 3 times, yet still manages to elude
them throughout most of the day, a theme turned back upon the humans, as it is
their own beastly behavior that takes centerstage in this film. With the
arrival of two new inmates, a burly young sailor Erling (Benjamin Helstad)
immediately disrupts the balance of power by challenging the status quo, threatening
escape almost immediately, which places the other boys in jeopardy, especially
Olav (Trond Nilssen), who is given responsibility over his dormitory as he’s
expecting his release soon, considered a model prisoner. What’s
especially interesting is the interplay between these two, as they are polar
opposites with uniquely compelling viewpoints. They immediately test one
another with a kind of LORD OF THE FLIES (1963) psychological battle of wits,
while at the same time the Governor is testing the rebellious nature of Erling,
continually adding harsher work details which makes his workmates miserable,
but he continually takes the brunt of it, routinely given added punishments
where he’s mindlessly ordered to move a pile of rocks ten feet away into another
pile, only to be instructed afterwards to move them all back again. The
viewer soon discovers the island is a child labor camp, where they perform
farming and forestry work details, with society getting a special bonus out of
their cheap labor. Except for the leads, most of the kids are
non-professionals, where with little dialogue the director subtly weaves into
the fabric a sense of community from the boys point of view, as they’re all
victims of the same inhumane living conditions, where what’s missing is the
capacity to look out for one another.
What’s especially effective is the gorgeous ‘Scope
camerawork from John Andreas Andersen whose sweeping panoramas and wintry
landscapes look brutally cold, where winter never looked harsher and more ominous,
where these are boys, after all, continually punished and brutalized in the
name of some utterly fictitious social good, the Governor’s goal of making them
“honorable, humble, and useful Christian boys,” as if he could beat them into
submission. While the tense build up of the inevitable rebellion may be
held back too long, as there’s little doubt the floodgates at some point will
open, when they do it comes with a flurry, all precipitated by extreme abuse to
the weakest among them, a boy violated by the housemaster, Kristoffer Joner, in
a role reminiscent of Donald Sutherland’s sick portrayal of a fascist baby
killer in Bertolucci’s 1900,
especially when the peasants turn on him. So it’s not heroics but abuse
of power, a cowardly cover up, where contemptible lies are met with anger and
disgust, which has an initial liberating effect, but a bit like Haneke’s FUNNY
GAMES (1997), the initial wave of hope is crushed with even harsher and more
barbaric methods, making things seem hopeless before a sea change of communal
emotion comes swiftly crashing through the gates like a raging flood, an
apocalyptic response to the torrent of sins heaped upon them. The chaos
that follows is just that, a sprawling, sweeping flow of events that comes to
resemble the image of that wounded whale ferociously fighting for its last gasp
of freedom. Holst is at his best in the extremely personal finale, pitch
perfect and beautifully staged, thrilling to watch, where he judiciously takes
his time allowing events to play out, becoming a poetic reverie of innocence
lost. Shot mostly in
10.) SISTER
(L'enfant d'en haut) Sister
(L'enfant d'en haut) A-
France
Switzerland (97 mi) 2012 d: Ursula Meier Official
site [Hungary]
This is another small and
hauntingly beautiful film, set in Le Valais, a French-speaking part of
Switzerland in the Swiss Alps where the gorgeous mountain scenery, luminously
captured on 35 mm, is a perfect backdrop for this story which is largely an
examination of class differences, where the wealthy live in a blissful
affluence above the clouds, while the workers that serve them live in a more
starkly real world of poverty below.
Kacey Mottet Klein is 12-year old Simon, an enterprising young kid who
scrounges what he can from the abundance of unattended ski equipment and
backpacks of visiting tourists, returning home down the mountain afterwards
with a bag of goodies that he sells to the kids in town, a variation on Robin
Hood spreading around the wealth, making Simon extremely popular with the
locals, as he’s cornered the black market on high-end merchandise, where
there’s some interesting similarities to the Polish film Yuma (2012),
where the initial taste of Eastern bloc capitalism is seen as an open market
free-for-all. He lives in a high rise
building with his older sister Louise, Léa Seydoux from Belle
Épine (2012) and Christophe Honoré’s LA BELLE PERSONNE (2008) playing a
very different kind of role, a girl with a harder edge, a reckless and largely
indifferent influence in his life, as she’s usually off on her own spending
time with flashy guys, returning broke, miserable, and alone, where Simon is
actually supporting her, which doesn’t
seem to bother her at all, as she’s used to others taking care of her. The squealing electric guitar score from P.J.
Harvey producer John Parish offers a quirky sound design, while the superb
cinematography is from Agnès Godard, who usually works with Claire Denis, but
interestingly also worked with Erick Zonca in THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS
(1998). Actually it was hard not to
think of Zonca and his exquisitely gritty depiction of social realism using a
near documentary style, as he also made the short film LE PETIT VOLEUR (1999),
which translates into The Little Thief,
which may as well be the theme of this film, as that’s what people end up
calling Simon. Zonca’s slice-of-life
technique is utilized here, as the seeing eye,
hand-held camera literally follows Simon wherever he goes.
Written by the director and her co-writers Antoine
Jaccoud and Gilles Taurand, reminiscent of the works by the Dardennes
brothers, like ROSETTA (1999) and their more recent The
Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011), where initially there’s
a certain amount of affection shown between the siblings, where they fight
playfully over who gets the best stolen sandwiches, as all they have to eat is
whatever Simon steals, but her long absences take a toll on both of them, but
particularly Simon, as he has no real friends or adult influences in his life,
so despite his thievery expertise, knowing the value of the merchandise,
learning a ski culture that is otherwise foreign to him, he’s not a very good
judge of when he’s gone too far. When he
inadvertently gets caught, the guy that catches him, Mike, Martin Compston from
Andrea Arnold’s
Simon makes his way up and down the hill daily, where his
apartment begins to resemble a stolen goods warehouse, also burying equipment
under the snow at the top of the hill, where he’s got operations going at both
ends for the Christmas holidays. Louise has a greater presence in the
latter segments, becoming a more uncomfortable fit in Simon’s life, bringing a
guy home with her, where it’s clear she thinks Simon is in the way, often
subjecting him to a fury of scorn and resentment, as if he’s screwed up her
life. Most of the film is seen through the isolated prism of Simon’s
daily routines, where he’s left alone to fend for himself, doing the best that
he can, where we wonder what else is he supposed to do?
His sister’s selfish rants have a way of seeping through the protective armor
he’s forced to wear, literally demeaning him in a personally hurtful way that’s
obviously worse than the humiliation of getting caught stealing or being beaten
up. Curiously, their playful fighting takes on a harsher tone, where both
are struggling to inflict painful and damaging blows, both obviously hurt by
the other, where Simon is hurt by the continuing attention paid to Louise by
guys who could care less about her, and Louise sometimes wishes that Simon had
never been born, as he’s always been an unwelcome burden in her life.
Having grown up seeing kids like Simon at ski resorts, the director creates a
bleak but tender coming-of-age story that literally teases the audience with
possible outcomes, often lingering in pause mode allowing the full effects to
sink in, where Simon could be destitute, an outcast lost on his own, or he
could get arrested and thrown into some bureaucratic jungle of youth homes, or
this could turn instantly tragic, with these ski lifts constantly hovering
above these shimmering, snow-packed mountains. There’s an interesting
shot where Simon is lost, literally paralyzed in thought, sitting alone on the
edge of the wooden terrace overlooking the spectacular panoramic landscape,
where humans themselves barely register in the majestic enormity of it all,
where a lone bird lands on the terrace and amusingly hops across, where every
step taken feels as random and as inexplicable as whatever’s running through
Simon’s mind. Meier has crafted an unflinchingly honest and touching film
that slowly intensifies the quiet devastation building within, featuring
sympathetic performances that are achingly real, all told without an ounce of
pretense, winner of a special Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival.
Special
Mention
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE This
Must Be the Place A-
Home is
where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb - born with a weak heart
(So I) guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing
Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up say goodnight . . . say goodnight
Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from the other
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time Before we were born
If someone asks, this where I'll be . . . where I'll be
Hi yo We drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head
Ah ooh
—This Must Be the
Place (Naive Melody), by Talking Heads, 1983 Talking
Heads - This must be the place (Naive ...
YouTube (5:20), live performance from Jonathan Demme’s STOP MAKING SENSE
(1984)
From one of the most original visual stylists working
today, this is a very clever take on the stranger in a strange land theme,
starting with a mystifyingly weird portrait of the stranger himself, Sean Penn
as Cheyenne, a reclusive Gothic rock star, now 50, who hasn’t performed in 20
years, something of a cross between the Cure’s Robert Smith and the stunted
mental development of Ozzie Osborne, where the character is pathologically shy,
continually speaks in the quietest voice register, and is perhaps understood
only by his adoring wife Jane, Frances McDormand, who loves him
unconditionally. Cheyenne never travels,
apparently, anywhere outside of walking distance of his home, an immense
private estate in Dublin, Ireland where he pretty much remains locked inside,
occasionally venturing out for groceries or trips to the mall, where he often
meets Mary (Eve Hewson, daughter of U2’s Bono), perhaps his best friend,
another Goth teenager or young twentysomething who has a room down the street
with her mother, Olwen Fouéré, while also living much of the time with
Cheyenne.
Co-written by the director with Umberto Contarello, who
also co-writes the latest Bertolucci film ME AND YOU (2012), this is the first
English-language Sorrentino film, which initially feels like a parody of a
burnt out rock star, living off the extravagance of his royalties, but turning
into a Michael Jackson recluse, complete with a clearly visible personality
disorder. What truly makes all
Sorrentino films unique is the brilliant cinematography of Luca Bigazzi, where
his camerawork is simply exceptional, often mixing exaggeratedly stylish Brian
De Palma style crane shots with another look more reminiscent of the
oversaturated colors of Lynne Ramsay, where he’s actively engaged in developing
every shot. The entire tone of the film
shifts when
Weirdly elusive and oddly intoxicating, as channeled
through Cheyenne this is certainly one of the more unusual ways to approach the
subject of the Holocaust, where Cheyenne is fond of saying “Something's wrong
here. I don't know exactly what it is, but something's wrong here.” As he goes in search of the perpetrator’s
family members, staying at cheap, rundown, roadside motels, calling his
befuddled wife from pay phones along the road, where these visits with
strangers are astonishingly tender, as the introverted Cheyenne is just as
soft-spoken, but what he has to say is more direct and to the point, where in
contrast to his gloomy outward expression, his gentle nature reveals an
amazingly attentive listener, where he actually displays curious insight into
his so-called subjects. Peppered with
original musical selections throughout, much of them shot using a music video
style, most written by Will Oldham and David Byrne and performed by a band
named The Pieces of Shit, Sorrentino creates a highly impressionistic
Americanized landscape, occasionally adding the poetic lyricism of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel - YouTube
(5:32), initially heard here in an excerpt from Gus van Sant’s GERRY (2002)
that beautifully parallels this film’s similar drive into the desert. One of his visits is to the granddaughter of
the Nazi war criminal, Rachel (Kerry Condon), who knows nothing of his Nazi
past, whose somewhat shy son takes a peculiar fascination to Cheyenne, actually
coercing him to play guitar while he enthusiastically sings (joyously off key)
the title track as his mother proudly looks on, Sean Penn,
Singing, movie, this must be the place ... YouTube (1:42). Harry Dean Stanton has an amusing albeit
brief cameo, additionally there is a skillful and poignant use of a probing
inner narration from the journals of Cheyenne’s deceased father, but
Sorrentino’s kinetically inspiring visualizations hold the key to the film, as
it is in the desolate emptiness of a desert landscape encased in wintry snow
that he finds his fugitive, a place that may as well be the end of the
world. Told with restraint, the audience
is always backed into a different way of discovering each of these subjects, as
IN THE FAMILY In the Family A-
Just
because laws have limits doesn’t mean our lives do. —Paul Hawks (Brian Murray)
This is ultimately one of the most emotionally devastating
films of the year, yet also one of the most understated, where so much of the
dramatic impact is built on the accumulation of small details that bear an
autobiographical stamp of authenticity.
While set in Tennessee, it explores the closeness of a small town
Southern community without playing on any of the usual stereotypes or
prejudices, showing a more generous side of the South that feels more
close-knit. Written, directed, acted and
produced by newcomer Patrick Wang, a gay Asian-American who grew up in Texas,
the film was initially rejected by as many as 30 major film festivals and
distributors, perhaps due to the length, until he was obliged to distribute the
film himself in true indie fashion, initially starting in just one theater in
Manhattan where it generated excellent reviews before slowly building a wider
audience. Still, this is the kind of film
likely seen by only twenty or so people in the audience, where the experience
is dramatically moving, presenting the material in a more respectful manner
than what we have become accustomed to seeing on television or in movie
representations, where there are push button issues that often lead to
explosive fireworks in the manner of KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979), a film that
doesn’t really hold up over time, but here it’s more intimate, where much of
the carefully observed narrative is quietly ushered in with artfully designed
silences that carry the full weight of the material, feeling more like a
theatrical experience. This shrewdly
written film has a well-designed structure that slowly unleashes its power,
much of it told in flashback, where its greatest strength comes from its
characters, adding layer upon layer throughout until by the end the audience is
fully engaged with everything that’s happening onscreen. Wang’s acting is key, as he’s such a
good-natured and level-headed guy, nothing flashy, not without his own faults,
but basically the kind of person who defines the word friend, as he’ll be there
unhesitatingly and instinctually, providing the calm during the storm, having
the good sense not to overreact or take things out of proportion, which is how
this subject matter is usually presented.
What starts out as a fairly uneventful and low-key family
drama eventually becomes a starkly intense testimonial on the meaning of life
itself, not in any grand philosophical terms, but in everyday language that’s
impossible to misunderstand, a riveting confessional with profound impact in
all of our lives. Using a spare and
unpretentious film technique, a no nonsense style where no particular thing
stands out, initially the focus is on a wired, energetic 6-year old named Chip
(Sebastian Banes), a captivating and endlessly curious kid with two Dads (Cody,
Trevor St. John, his biological father and his partner Joey, Patrick Wang), who
seems perfectly content with this living arrangement, where he’s smart and
obviously thriving in his home life. The
routine of their lives is captured in all its simplicity, where the morning
cereal ritual becomes so familiar to the audience that we feel like uninvited
guests in their kitchen after awhile, where this setting could be just about
anywhere, but it just happens to be Martin, Tennessee, where a slight drawl can
be detected in the voice inflections.
Only after the audience gets comfortable with the “lack” of drama in
their lives does the initial drama begin, where out of nowhere, like a clap of
thunder on an otherwise perfectly clear day, a life-changing event occurs
offscreen where Cody gets in a terrible auto accident, where in a flash we’re
transported into Cristi Puiu’s The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), a bare-bones, near documentary
Romanian exposé on the atrocious hospital standards provided to severely ill
patients and their families, where Joey is rather unceremoniously left out of
the picture as he is not considered immediate family. While the word gay is never heard, the
unforgivable actions speak for themselves and are immediately offset by Joey’s
own exemplary behavior, as he does a heartfelt job preparing Chip for what to
expect seeing his Dad in intensive care.
Like Joey, we are denied admittance to Cody’s final hours, as he dies
shortly afterwards. With difficulty,
Chip and Joey attempt to regain a balance in their lives, both reluctantly and
unknowingly becoming the centerpieces of the film.
As Joey is digging through all the paperwork of Cody’s bank
accounts and personal statements, he shares what he finds with Cody’s sister
Eileen (Kelly McAndrew), who shockingly reports that Cody left everything to
his sister in a will written years before he met Joey. When Eileen reports her intentions of raising
Chip, using the will as her legal grounds, declaring her beliefs that these
were Cody’s written intentions, Joey’s world literally changes, as everything
he has come to know and rely upon are suddenly in jeopardy. As the emotional bond between Joey and Chip
has already been well established, Joey’s fierce insistence not to part with
him does not seem unreasonable, so when Eileen literally kidnaps Chip, refusing
to return him after a family overnight visit while serving an order of
protection to keep Joey away from him, a multitude of harsh thoughts of
retribution spring to mind as the audience is challenged to consider what they
would do in similar circumstances. Once
more, Joey is locked out of the room, reinforced by his discovery that gay
partners have no legal grounds, sending him into an emotional tailspin of
despair, seen sitting alone in an empty kitchen. While he is visited by various friends
showing neighborly concern, some of whom bring food or drink or just sit around
and commiserate with him, often shown in long takes, his solitary life is
joyless and empty. This void is
interrupted by flashbacks of Joey and Cody together, like scenes of when they
first met or shared family holidays, including one unforgettable sequence when
they first kiss, a near 9-minute uninterrupted shot leading to the moment when
Cody impulsively plays Chip Taylor’s song “Little Darts.” Chip Taylor (Jon Voight’s brother, by the
way) plays Cody’s father in the film.
But nothing is quite as haunting as having a friend secretly call him on
a speaker phone so he can hear the sounds of Chip playing, where he sits
transfixed, unable to utter a word, paralyzed in thought.
Overheard by an elderly client whose old books he is rebinding,
Joey is again speechless to discover this retired elderly lawyer (Brian Murray)
will take his case, urging him to forget about the restrictions of the law,
which can be so divisive, but consider how to reframe the issue in more humane
terms, where he may not obtain a legal victory, but he might negotiate a better
arrangement with Cody’s sister. What
follows is perhaps the most devastating and beautifully written sequence of the
year, a thirty minute deposition scene taking place in real time, a soliloquy
of emotional candor, using a generic setting like Conference Room B for such a
confessional outpouring, a scene unlike anything else in recent recollection,
easily the
THE SCAPEGOAT – made for TV The
Scapegoat A-
Well
aren’t you the country gentleman?
—Johnny Spence (Matthew
Rhys)
This is a small gem of a film, a British made-for-TV
production that only the British can make, that is arguably a smaller yet
better film than the much more heralded, Academy Award Best Picture winning THE
KING’S SPEECH (2010), which is a star driven, crowd pleasing vehicle that makes
all the headlines and has tens of millions of dollars to spend on wide reaching
advertising, eventually grossing more than $350 million dollars. More in line with the late Robert Altman’s
GOSFORD PARK (2001), an unexpected dip into Agatha Christie territory where
everyone knows his or her place and social proprieties are strictly observed,
this is adapted from a 1957 Daphne du Maurier novel and a director adapted
remake of the 1959 film directed by Robert Hamer, starring Alec Guinness and
Bette Davis. From the opening shot, the
production values are exquisite and the acting impeccable, with one of the best
musical scores heard all year from Adrian Johnston, where this turns into a
mysterious whodunit, where the clues are continually hidden from view, much
like an opening shot from cinematographer Matt Gray of a mammoth country estate
shrouded in fog. As the director of Brideshead Revisited (1981), it’s clear Sturridge loves big houses. A teacher is seen leaving a young boy’s
academy, apparently due to a change in curriculum from Greek to conversational
French, where John Standing (Matthew Rhys) walks into town where he plans on
catching an evening train. Stopping in a
local pub, he’s about to leave when he receives someone else’s change, catching
a glimpse of that other person who looks surprisingly like himself. As it turns out they are exact doubles who
share no family history, where the other person’s name is John Spence (played
by the same actor in dual roles), as the two talk well into the night getting
acquainted.
Set in 1952, a time when
The curious narrative is a variation on The Prince and the Pauper or THE MAN WHO
WOULD BE KING (1975), where Standing has literally inherited a new upper class,
aristocratic life where he continually has to play this game of filling in the
empty spaces, like uncovering all the missing ghosts of the mansion, hoping he
won’t disturb them and contribute to the literal undoing of the entire
family. He quickly discovers he’s having an affair with his sister in
law, Sheridan Smith, and a French mistress, Sylvie Testud, while his sister
Blanche, Jodhi May, hates him (“You disgust me!”) for some reason. The
lady of the manor, Eileen Atkins, deliciously haughty and superior, is a
recluse with a morphine habit, while his own neglected wife, Alice Orr-Ewing,
is nearly invisible, quick to blame herself first when things go wrong, but
fortunately he has an adorable young daughter, Eloise Webb, that almost
singlehandedly makes it all worthwhile. Sorting out the mess that was
left behind is quite an undertaking, as there’s a world of responsibilities
that have been neglected, where the director has a field day unraveling the
clues with an entertaining relish, building suspense and tension throughout,
especially the secret return of the real Spence who has malicious designs,
where he has set up a pawn in the game as an unsuspecting scapegoat. But
in this film, knowledge is everything, as is knowing how to use it, where
Standing is a quick learner, an improvement in every respect from the real
Spence, actually making a difference when all was thought to be lost. A
battle of good and evil where both are one and the same, Spence is literally
amazed, “You’re almost as good at being me as I am.” Rhys is excellent in
the dual roles, where his scenes together with Jodhi May are exemplary stand
outs. Underneath it all, of course, we learn the real source of power is
not held by either man, but exists in the stern and watchful eye of the
housekeeper, Phoebe Nicholls from Brideshead,
who understands the workings of the household better than anyone, where the
secret of the film is that destiny often comes from unexpected places, as she’s
the one with insights into the newly celebrated Queen, suggesting she wasn’t
raised to wear the crown, yet her coronation was the first to be televised and
is one of the longest reigning monarchs in British history.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN We
Need to Talk About Kevin
B+
“Way worse than I imagined,” was the comment heard coming
out of the theater, which perhaps unintentionally perfectly expresses the point
of the film, where the words of the title suddenly take on greater
magnitude. A decidedly difficult film, told completely out of sequence, which
has a jarring effect on the viewer, keeping them continually off balance, as
the story has a fractured and impressionistic style, revealed only in
pieces. It’s simply impossible to get comfortable with this film due to
the harsh and uncompromisingly bleak nature of the story, despite the
beautifully chilly and austere production values that might resemble a Kubrick
film, cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, and once again a superlative musical
track from Jonny Greenwood, but the downbeat mood, especially from Tilda
Swinton’s continuously frustrated portrayal of the mother of a loathsome child
Kevin, a son who hates her from birth, couldn’t be more oppressive. Based
on the best-selling novel by the same name from Lionel Shriver, adapted by the
director and Rory Stewart Kinnear, the film hints all along of greater
catastrophes lurking ahead. Ramsay interestingly presents the town’s
hateful reaction to Swinton before revealing what horrifying event they are
responding to. But all along, Kevin devises ways to express his contempt
for his mother, while switching gears to become the supposedly happy and
perfect son to his clueless father, John C. Reilly. In another realm,
this would be a child of the devil, told with horror subtext, where grotesque
exaggerations would fill the screen along with impaled bodies, but here what
damage Kevin does is almost always offscreen, where the audience is forced to
draw their own conclusions.
Originally trained as a photographer, Ramsay reworks the
text into a highly stylized, contemporary visual world, including the perfect
suburban home that becomes infested with dread, like a haunted house, where
Kevin becomes the personification of evil. Moving freely between the
present and the past, Swinton experiences her own horrors from Kevin early on,
where he simply refuses to do anything she asks, but she matches his vitriolic
meanness directed at her with her own inappropriate behavior, growing more
irritated over time, as the two develop their own language of avoiding one another.
In one of the strangest sequences of the film, Swinton is reading him a bedtime
story, where in reality her eloquence with language is renowned, like listening
to the voices of Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles, but this time Kevin grows so
attached to the lurid description of bows and arrows in Robin Hood that
he doesn’t want his mother to stop, actually curling up next to her in a sign
of affection. Afterwards, however, he remains his meanspirited and
completely detached self, feeling nothing but contempt for his family
members. His father, however, buys him a bow and arrow set, becoming
extremely proficient over time, which has the effect of introducing firearms to
a mentally unstable kid. Jumping ahead, while we never see any traces of
Kevin with other students in high school, the audience is instead treated to
the aftereffects of a horrendous, catastrophic event at the school which turns
the entire town against Swinton, where interestingly Ramsay uses the lovely
innocence of Buddy Holly’s song Buddy
Holly - Everyday on YouTube (2:13) as a prelude to the event.
While the film recounts shocking and astonishing events by
connecting personal family tragedy with the public’s reaction to unspeakable
horrors, one might wonder why there’s an absence of psychiatric intervention,
as this kid is definitely a danger to himself and others, and while that may be
true, he’s also likely a smart and gifted student and not exactly a willing
participant for treatment, especially at an early age where he’s already
learned to manipulate adults through his own behavior, so why would he want to
change that? Swinton grows so suspicious of him that she searches his
room for any sign of something amiss, intriguingly set to the Beach Boys In My Room - The Beach Boys on YouTube
(2:10), where it’s as if his room has been wiped clean of any and all forensic
evidence, knowing this would be one of the first places people would
look. His entire life shows a cunning and willful emotional detachment,
which Swinton tries to match in personal indifference by avoiding having her
buttons pushed, but she’s hopelessly drowning in the turmoil of her own
shortcomings, feeling completely powerless and inept at being able to reach
this kid. What’s evident, however, is that this is a story of communal
judgment, where she’s been judged an incompetent mother by the entire town,
subject to sneers and stares, even getting socked in the face, and worse,
developing a witch hunt mentality where she’s judged responsible for the
behavior of her sociopathic son. Swinton herself may be her own worst
critic, grown weary from continually blaming herself, expressed through her
cold and severe manner, but what’s inevitable is every day having to face the
horror, guilt, and shame of living with a world soiled and contaminated by your
own offspring. Nine years since her last film, the first to branch away
from working class
HOUSE OF TOLERANCE (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison
close) House
of Tolerance (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la... B+
aka: House of Pleasures
Stylistically, this is one of the more remarkable films of
the year, beautifully shot by Josée Deshaies (the director's wife), where the
French title is more appropriate, as souvenirs
is a French expression for a remembrance or a memory, where perhaps the most
exact usage here is a cinematic reverie, where the film has a remarkably lush
decorative bordello environment, as champagne flows freely, a perfect
compliment for the open display of naked female bodies which are prominently
featured throughout this film. There’s nothing remotely pornographic
about this movie, as it rarely shows male anatomy, never aroused, and there are
scant few shots of couples actually engaging in sex, and no sex is ever
graphically revealed. Instead, Bonello is more interested in the down
time, in the type of activity that normally occurs offstage when they’re not
working. His camera is all over documentary style repetition of banal
detail in showing the ordinary, day-to-day routines that the women follow,
cleaning themselves and rinsing their mouths regularly, lorded over by the
house Madame, Noémie Lvovsky, usually seen in lighthearted, dialog-driven
French comedies, and a writer/director in her own right, where the rarely seen
LIFE DOESN’T SCARE ME (1999) was one of the best films of the year. Lvovsky,
however, is exceptional in the smart yet manipulative way she understands the
business, where the secret is to keep the girls incurring more debt to the
house in costumes, clothes, perfume, and other refinements so they can never
move elsewhere or obtain their freedom. In this way, they are literally
owned, the property of the house, a flesh and blood commodity to be used in a
business transaction. Very much in the exotic mode of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers
of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), both historical pieces and both
nearly entirely studio shot, where the deep richness of the plush interior
colors are illuminated by candlelight, giving these films a rarely seen sensual
opulence that overshadows the more deeply disturbing side of forgotten and
discarded souls.
Bonello’s interest lies in the suffocating treatment of
women, where despite the everpresent titillation of the flesh, nothing that we
see is the least bit sexually arousing. In fact the audience is numbed by
the desensitization of their dreary working lives, much like the monotonous
routine of real life prostitution highlighted by Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE (1962),
as despite the frequent repeating customer that asks for you, what you’re
expected to endure, because the customer is paying for it, is filled with
sexual humiliation and degradation, which is seen as part of the tools of the
trade, something women are supposed to get used to. Set in the waning
months of the 19th century, one should recall child labor was prevalent, there
were few opportunities for women, as this was the era of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which portrays a woman
in a loveless marriage as a caged animal where all the power and rights belong
to the husband, as he has a source of employment, effectively owning his wife
as his own exclusive property, under the law, free to do with as he
wishes. Here, as in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work, the filmmaker establishes the
various character traits of the women, who and what they like, showing their
habits and general tendencies so they become familiar to the audience. Bonello
also accentuates the developing sisterhood between the women, who share the
same harrowing fate, often seen lying listlessly and motionless in the precious
few moments before they have to come to life for their customers. One of
the women of the house beautifully performs as a wind-up porcelain doll for her
paying clientele. In both films, the idea of a wealthy man buying their
freedom and taking them out of prostitution for marriage is the ultimate dream,
where many believe their beauty and dazzling sexual prowess will bring them
what they desire, thinking they are more alluring than a continually deserted
wife who doesn’t know how to fulfill her husband’s needs. Perhaps the
ultimate insult is the lie and continual betrayal of men who keep promising to
leave their wives, but never do. Left on their own without a wealthy
benefactor, these women age and deteriorate quickly.
While Bonello dwells on the demeaning internalized side
effects of continually pretending to be something you’re not, constantly
feigning happiness, he also shows the devastation once reality sets in, using a
theme of a brutally treated woman who becomes horribly disfigured, but has
noplace else to go, so works in the kitchen or as a maid, or helps dress and
prepare the women. In a rather macabre turn, her value as a grotesque
object becomes a specialty item, a sexual novelty that interests the perverse and
exotic interests of an aristocratic secret society, similar to Kubrick’s EYES
WIDE SHUT (1999), but as imagined by Diane Arbus. What seems to set the
wheels in motion for a steady downward descent is the mention by one of the
regular house customers that recent scientific studies suggest prostitute’s
brains, along with criminals, are decisively smaller than a normal brain, which
accounts for their idiotic behavior. Rather than the illusory beauty that
opens the film with a rush of intoxication, naked flesh, and perfume, the
filmmaker retraces the precious few moments before the brutal attack, adding a
parallel story of shame from the deteriorating health by one of the women
succumbing to syphilis, which at the time was incurable, accounting for the deaths
of noted artists Franz Schubert and Édouard Manet. The director shows no
less than a thousand endings, and easily prolongs his movie, some may be a bit
overdone, but each one adds another piece of the carefully constructed mosaic,
becoming a lament for a forgotten era layered in the heartbreaking sadness of
these women, perfectly expressed in one of the most haunting sequences set to
the Moody Blues L'Apollonide
Nights In White Satin - YouTube (2:59), a kind of vacuous last dance that
eptimomizes their lost dreams slipping away. Bonello reverses the brief
whisp of hope offered by Nora’s freedom at the end of Ibsen’s play as an
illusory phantom and leaves her stuck forever with no escape from A Doll’s House. By the end, all
the women characters inhabiting this film do look and feel a bit like
glassy-eyed ghosts, lost and dispossessed souls with vacant looks emptied and
disassociated from the real world.
One should mention some of the featured actresses, all
excellent, who let it all hang out for this film: Samira, Hafsia Herzi
from THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (2007), Julie, Jasmine Trinca, the daughter in THE
SON’S ROOM (2001), Clotilde (Céline Sallette), Léa (Adele Haenel), Madeleine
(Alice Barnole), and Pauline (Iliana Zabeth), while two noted French directors
are among the house regulars, Jacques Nolot as Maurice and Xavier Beauvois, who
recently directed the acclaimed OF GODS AND MEN (2010).
BEST ACTOR
Peyman Moadi – A Separation
*Matthias Schoenaerts – Bullhead
Denis Lavant – Holy Motors
Harry Lennix – Mr. Sophistication
Kacey Mottet Klein – Sister
BEST ACTRESS
*Tilda Swinton – We Need to Talk About Kevin
Léa Seydoux –Sister (1) + Belle Épine (2)
Quvenzhané Wallis – Beasts of the Southern Wild
Nadezhda Markina – Elena
Deannie Ip – A Simple Life
Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook
BEST SUPP ACTOR
Stellan Skarsgård – King of Devil’s Island
*Shahab Hosseini – A Separation
Lucas Pittway – Snowtown
Ezra Miller – The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Dwight Henry – Beasts of the Southern Wild
James Gandolfini – Killing Them Softly (1) + Not Fade Away
(2)
BEST SUPP ACTRESS
Pernell Walker – Pariah
Rinko Kikuchi – Norwegian Wood
Tehilla Blad – Beyond
Song Seon-mi – The Day He Arrives
*Elena Lyadova – Elena
Bella Heathcoat – Not Fade Away
BEST DIRECTOR
Wes Anderson USA Moonrise
Kingdom
Kirby Dick USA The
Invisible War
*Benh Zeitlin USA Beasts of the
Southern Wild
Michaël R. Roskam Belgium
Bullhead
Andrei Zvyagintsev Russia
Elena
Carlos Reygadas Mexico Post Tenebras Lux
BEST SCREENPLAY
Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski – Carnage
*Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola – Moonrise Kingdom
Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, adapted from Lucy Alibar –
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Zdenĕk Juráský – Flower Buds
Ursula Meier, Antoine Jaccoud and Gilles Taurand –
Sister
David O. Russell, adapted from Matthew Quick – Silver
Linings Playbook
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Lee Ping-bin – Norwegian Wood
Josée Deshaies – House of Tolerance
Oleg Mutu – Beyond the Hills
*Alexis Zabé – Post Tenebras Lux
Luca Bigazzi – This Must Be the Place
Robbie Ryan – Wuthering Heights
BEST ENSEMBLE ACTING
Carnage
King of Devil’s Island
*Elena
Flower Buds
Silver Linings Playbook
Not Fade Away
BEST ART DIRECTION
*Pina
Norwegian Wood
House of Tolerance
Moonrise Kingdom
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Post Tenebras Lux
BEST EDITING
King of Devil’s Island
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Bullhead
Snowtown
Moonrise Kingdom
*Post Tenebras Lux
BEST COSTUMES
Pina
King of Devil’s Island
Norwegian Wood
*House of Tolerance
The Deep Blue Sea
This Must Be the Place
BEST ORIGINAL MUSIC
Thom Hanreich – Pina
Johan Soderqvist – King of Devil’s Island
*Jonny Greenwood – Norwegian Wood (1) + We Need to Talk
About Kevin (2) + The Master (3)
Adrian Johnston – The Scapegoat
David Byrne and Will Oldham – This Must Be the Place
BEST DOCUMENTARY
*The Invisible War
Aita
Pina in 3D
The Central Park Five
An Encounter With Simone Weil
Drought