This is the season of the year when I try to catch up with all the best films of the prior year, as determined by annual polls of critics, notably from Film Comment and Indiewire. Some pictures on these Top 50 lists are better than Oscar’s “Best” and some are worse, but all have merits for those with eyes to see. I list them according to my own level of enthusiasm, in descending order.
The Loneliest Planet (2012, MC-76, NFX) was a film I wanted to see from the time of its forecast in a New Yorker summer preview as about “a young couple who confront life-changing dangers while backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains,” just a couple of weeks before my son and his girlfriend were about to be backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains. Thankfully, Nat and Nicole returned without confronting life-changing dangers, but this film had the extrinsic interest of showing me just where they had been. The picturesque is all well and good, but the surprise came in the brilliance of Julia Loktev’s film, which turns on a blink-of-the-eye sequence halfway through. What comes before and after is pretty much the same, the couple and their guide hiking though a remote landscape in long, slow shots, but completely different, in a way that is described with an absolute minimum of dialogue. Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are excellent as the couple, and their guide is appropriately strange and unreadable. Admittedly I had an extra involvement in the material, but I found this film stunningly structured and cannily captured, despite its leisurely and seemingly haphazard progress.
Oslo, August 31st (2012, MC-84, NFX) snuck up on me in several ways, vaguely familiar through intriguingly different. After the fact, I realized that I had seen the work of director Joachim Trier and his lead actor Anders Danielsen Lie in an earlier film, Reprise, which I reviewed here. The set-up was reminiscent of Silver Linings Playbook, but with an entirely different emotional color – a thirtysomething guy is released from an institution (in this case, drug rehab) and goes back to all the things that drove him crazy in the first place, while trying to win back the love of his life. The story is based on the same novel from which Louis Malle made The Fire Within. The Oslo setting gradually emerges as a character in its own right, a hip place to be young and smart. The main character is bright, having made an early name for himself as a writer but then flamed out. Now his world is dark with wasted opportunity and ruined relationships, and nothing can revive the spark of life within him. Through a long day and night he tries to find a reason to go on, a way to connect with his former life, old friends and lovers, without running into the same old dead ends. It’s a highly sympathetic passage through purgatory, but with no purging in sight. Then the dawn of the dateline comes inexorably, for the character and the place.
This is not a review of This is Not a Film (2012, MC-90, NFX), because I take the title as literal description, and not a thought-provoking conundrum on the order of Magritte’s painting, “This is not a pipe.” Jafar Panahi is under a six-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking for what the Iranian government considers sedition. This message in a bottle was smuggled out on a flashdrive hidden in a cake, and shown at Cannes. It’s a significant document, bravely defiant, a day in the life of an artist under house arrest in a turbulent society, filmed by another cameraman and his own cellphone. Panahi is certainly to be supported, and light thrown on his situation, but let’s be honest here, this is not much of a movie. The most dramatic thing in it is a pet iguana climbing up a bookcase in an upscale Tehran apartment. You’d be better off watching one of Panahi’s real films, Offside or The Circle, which portray the position of women under fundamentalist rule, as does the film he was stopped from making, and here tries to relate verbally, until he gives up in frustration.
An odd little number that does its business and moves on, Craig Zobel’s Compliance (2012, MC-68, NFX) starts from real events to get inside the story of a twisted prankster, who calls fast food joints impersonating a police detective and induces the manager and staff to hold one of them as a robbery suspect, subjecting her to prolonged interrogation and sexual harassment. In the vein of the infamous Milgram experiments, how far will ordinary people go in humiliating and hurting a subject at the behest of a remote authority? Pretty far, according to this film, which plays as impossible bad dream for the characters and as real-life horror story for us. Well-acted by (crucially) unknown actors in a documentary-like chain-restaurant setting, this movie remains about as tasteful and thoughtful as it could be, given the subject of a teenage girl being molested and tormented. Makes for a close call, but it remains on the better side of provocative, however violently reactions may diverge.
In Cosmopolis (2012, MC-58, NFX), master of the macabre David Cronenberg adapts a Don DeLillo novel set mostly in the stretch limo of a young titan of finance, as he tries to cross Manhattan to get a haircut, while he is losing hundreds of millions on speculation in the yuan. Robert Pattinson is suitably vampire-like as the megalomaniac tycoon, and through the day a variety of others spend time in the limo with him, including his art dealer/sex partner Juliet Binoche, his theoretical guru Samantha Morton, and eventually his nemesis, disgruntled ex-employee Paul Giamatti. There are other encounters with underlings and enemies in amusing cameos. By the time it reached gunplay, this film had lost me, but up till then I appreciated the phantasmagoria of the novel’s creepy prescience about the financial meltdown of 2008, and the truly horrific characters behind it.
On rare occasions a science fiction film breaks through my indifference to the genre, but Looper (2012, MC-84, NFX) is no Gattaca. Clever and well-made, with a Terminator-like set-up involving time-traveling hit men, this is the kind of thing I would rarely bother to see. Looper does have a bit of indie credibility since it reunites the Brick team of director Rian Johnson and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but the obligatory descent into bloodbath was not to my taste. JGL (with disconcerting fake nose) and Bruce Willis play the same character at different ages, brought face to face by time machine – who will wipe out the other, with what mind-blowing consequences? There are some good supporting roles -- Jeff Daniels as head of the hit men, Emily Blunt as the mother of an effectively spooky young boy, who may grow up to be the “Rainmaker” -- and some credible design of a dystopian future, plus a plausible switcheroo ending. But the best I can say is that the movie is okay, if you like that sort of thing.
You can time-travel in the other direction with Farewell, My Queen (2012, MC-67, NFX), Benoît Jacquot’s evocation of three days at Versailles in 1789. Obviously shot on location, with great attention to styles of dress and décor, peopled with lovely and effective actresses, the film lacks some element of vital engagement, so we get less sense of this Marie Antoinette than we got from Sofia Coppola’s. Here it’s Diane Kruger with the porcelain glow of a Fragonard figure, while Léa Seydoux is watchful and adoring as her servant reader, and Virginie Ledoyen is imperious as her lover and confidante. Told from the point of view of the servant girl, the film covers the fall of the Bastille from a downstairs perspective, until it swaps with upstairs as the world gets turned upside down. It’s all very watchable, but not very involving.
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