2011: the year in movies

How do we make sense of the past? What paths does memory take en route to truth, trauma or transcendence? What patterns emerge? Many of my favourite films of 2011, listed below in no particular order (though the first is first for a reason), respond to this question by contrasting the unfathomably vast with the infinitesimal, deep history with willful amnesia, the beginning and end of everything with the harrowing loss of a single life. (Or a single mind.)


Nostalgia for the Light
The central location of Patricio Guzmán’s essay film is Chile’s Atacama Desert, the most arid region on Earth, home to two of the world’s most powerful telescopes, a place where mothers and widows of the disappeared scour the desert floor for trace remains of loved ones while astronomers search the outer reaches of the universe for ancient signs of life. Like many of Guzmán’s earlier films (The Battle of Chile, Salvador Allende), the film interrogates his home country’s selective erasure of unresolved past horrors while waxing nostalgic about its old collective fascination with the wonders of the night sky. Nostalgia For the Light is eloquent, inventive, rigorous, tender, curious and immensely humane.


The Tree of Life
Wildly ambitious (and thus, appropriately, divisive and awkward), Terrence Malick’s latest (a perfect compliment to Guzmán’s—and a perfect corrective to the largely superficial but similarly personal-versus-total-apocalypse narrative of Melancholia) pushes his large canvas/whispered epiphany aesthetic into ever more rippling, impression-flecked terrain, juxtaposing scattered moments of revelation, joy and pain from the childhoods of three Texan boys with nothing less than the origins of life on Earth. The imagery is breathtaking, its arrangement inspired, dictated by its own internal psychic rhythms. The final, mystical sequence is somewhat dubious, but I wouldn’t excise a second of The Tree of Life if it meant dismantling any crucial element in this rare marriage of the spectacular with the personal.


Take Shelter
On that note, Jeff Nichol’s follow-up to Shotgun Stories, his impressive debut, follows the mental collapse of an Ohio labourer and family man (embodied with singular, shambling unease by Michael Shannon) whose knowledge of his possible schizophrenia has him no less convinced that he may be a prophet of the End Times. Set against a all-too recognizable contemporary landscape of economic worries and catastrophic weather, Take Shelter at once speaks broadly to our moment and remains a character study. Like Tree of Life it takes risks and as a result features a problematic finale; like Tree of Life it features a truly remarkable supporting performance from Jessica Chastain in a very difficult matriarchal role.


White Material, Of Gods and Men
Claire Denis’ return to Cameroon finds the formidable Isabelle Huppert refusing to abandon her coffee plantation despite the escalation of a surrounding civil war. Xavier Beauvois’ latest, based on real events, chronicles the final days of a group of Trappist monks who resolve to remain in Algeria during the outbreak of its 1996 civil war. Both films convey a sophisticated sense of the foggy ethics of post-colonial relations and of one’s sense of belonging somewhere; both use music (courtesy of Tindersticks and chanting actors, respectively) to achieve sublime moments of lyricism. White Material is insightful, savage and sinisterly seductive, though one might argue that it, like several other titles on this list, features a clumsy ending, which transitions rather abruptly into the mythic, dragging its heroine along with it.


Le Havre
The intermingling of Europeans and Africans is also very much at the heart of Aki Kaurismäki’s most recent deadpan delight, which, set in the titular French port city, finds an aging shoeshiner helping an African boy with no documents find a safe place to rest and safe passage to London, where he hopes to be reunited with family members that are in an only marginally more secure social position. Le Harve is beautifully—and, typically, idiosyncratically—crafted, with great narrative economy, dry wit, masterful compositions and numerous affectionate homages to French cinema to balance its dour diagnosis of French xenophobia.


Meek’s Cutoff
The fear of the Other is also key to Kelly Reichardt’s most recent work, by far her most industrious yet. It’s a western, albeit one with iconoclastic attention to the everyday chores and struggles of homesteaders lost in 1860s Oregon. The film’s handful of desperate families are led astray by a charismatic frontiersman and are ultimately confronted with the possibility that the dreaded Indian captive they’re traveling with (the magnificently stoic Ron Rondeaux) may be their sole hope for survival. Understated, blending classicism with quietude, and featuring yet another engrossing slow-burn of a performance from Michelle Williams, Meek’s Cutoff ensures Reichardt’s place within the finest American filmmakers of cinema’s second century. Will she continue to branch out into a grander scale of production or retreat into the familiar small? I look forward to whatever she does, either way.


Certified Copy
Another filmmaker in transition: Abbas Kiarostami strays from his native Iran to make a film with a French star (Juliette Binoche, brilliant) and an English opera singer in Italy; the result is very much a Kiarostami film, riddled with a utterly compelling balance of ambiguity and complex emotional/philosophical truths—which says a lot about what we may have reduced to being an exclusively Iranian, Middle Eastern or Third World approach to cinematic storytelling. An author on tour in Tuscany takes a drive with an antique store owner. They discuss the notion of how we place value on the real thing versus the fake, or originals versus copies, of how we invest things with authenticity, and soon we’re unsure about the reality of the relationship we’re watching develop. Did they just meet, or are they in fact an estranged couple? All that matters is the immense resonance of their ongoing questions, grievances and longings, a dialogue with echoes of both Last Year at Marienbad and Before Sunset.


Margaret
While Certified Copy mines a marriage for questions of how to make sense of the messy lives of its disparate halves, Kenneth Lonergan’s legally troubled, long-gestating and long-awaited (yet appallingly neglected) follow-up to the beloved You Can Count On Me examines the awakening of a young woman’s sense of existential responsibility. A horrific accident following an essentially innocent exchange of glances between Anna Paquin’s college student and Mark Ruffalo’s MTA bus driver prompts a complicated series of events involving familial dysfunction, litigation, mourning and arduous self-realization. Intricate and novel-like, Margaret is a film which would probably appear on more Best Of lists if more people (critics included) had actually seen it. It’s a meal of a movie, and deserves far more attention.


Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss
This pair of documentaries from the one and only Werner Herzog touch on numerous themes running through this list, most especially the modern as viewed against the ancient-mysterious and the balancing of crime with punishment in a violent world lacking moral guidance. Cave of Forgotten Dreams takes us into France’s Chauvet Cave and offers glimpses of the artistic soul already alive and well in Stone Age man; Into the Abyss ushers us into the US penal system to examine the lives of incarcerated young men whose abysmally meaningless crimes of murder are met with cold-blooded state-sanctioned murder. In both of these films Herzog’s focus remains firmly on people—souls, if you will—who provide us with illuminating, strange and diverse testaments to the irrepressible drive to survive, create and look ever-forward. Not a bad way to finish off a tumultuous year.

TIFF '11: Fueron con dios

The 1917 Mexican Constitution featured a number of severe restrictions against demonstrations of faith. The opening scene of The Last Cristeros, which consists of only voice-over and a black screen, gives us the rundown—one year imprisonment for ringing a church bell, for example—and efficiently provides all the context needed to comprehend or at least intuit all that follows, even if you’re unfamiliar with post-Revolutionary Mexican politics. The government’s war against the Cristeros—those who took up arms to defend their right to worship—officially ended in 1929, but the film takes us into the mid-1930s, following a small group of hold-outs as they make their way across gorgeous, arid and unforgiving northern terrains, where the occasional bullet comes seemingly out of nowhere, where nights are long and cold and food and water in short supply, and doubts blossom.

Directed by Matias Meyer and co-scripted with Israel Cárdenas, who co-directed the tender and memorable Cochochi, The Last Cristeros is a beautifully photographed and edited modern-Mexican take on the anti-western (if the term suits). Not unlike Meek’s Cutoff, it depicts an arduous journey through wilderness where danger looms quietly and everyday tasks are depicted with great accuracy and empathy. But the film also recalls Of Gods and Men, in that this is a story, peppered with many songs and prayers, about spiritual integrity and acts of bravery in a situation where such acts have arguably lost all practical purpose. Meyer’s Cristeros, their faces deeply lined under massive sombreros (some of the actors are actually descendants of Cristeros), clearly have no chance of making any difference in Mexico with regards to religious intolerance. And it’s equally clear that they will not survive. Which is why the last scene is so poignant—this isn’t The Wild Bunch; isn’t going to end in thrilling slaughter, so instead opts for a final moment of tranquility, the Cristeros in Christ-like loin cloths, in the face of looming death. The film is one of only two Mexican films at TIFF this year, and a major highlight of my Festival thus far.

Of Gods and Men: the limits of brotherly love

We know that Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prize-winner Of Gods and Men was drawn from the 1996 incident in which seven Tibhirine Trappist monks were kidnapped and eventually beheaded during the Algerian Civil War, the exact circumstances of their slaughter a matter of controversy and contention to this day. So we might expect something draped in dread to unfold here, a drama whose hopeless fluctuations amount to nothing more than a death march. But inevitability is a force one strives to come to terms with when one’s life is devoted to worship and public service. That things are bound to end poorly becomes a matter of secondary importance once Beauvois and his collaborators usher us into this realm of carefully nurtured quietude, where disparate, overwhelming inner struggles are conducted and resolve terribly hard-won, where fraternal bonds are largely strengthened as much through disagreement and prolonged panic as they are through a sense of harmony and shared ideals. This is indeed a meditative movie (how could it be otherwise?), yet also at times a joyous one, one that reminds us of several important things: that running away only brings new things to run from; that need, vocation, and genuine communion transcends the confines of dogma; and that god (or God), whether regarded as a concept or a true presence, is only alive when his followers engage fully with the world in all its disorder.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, and photographed with a loving (and necessary) bias toward natural light by Caroline Champetier, Of Gods and Men pulls us in by immersing us in the monks’ daily activities, especially those of the abbot Christian (Lambert Wilson), an Islamic scholar who has the magnificent nerve to quote the Koran to Muslim terrorists threatening his life, and Luc (Michael Lonsdale), a trained physician who administers humble remedies (not to mention shoes) to the local, largely impoverished Algerian population. As the threat of uprising prompts government officials to plead with that monks to flee and the townsfolk to plead for their steadfastness, each of the monks are forced to make their cases for staying or going, the disagreements causing considerable tension that seems only to abate when the group joins in song, their roster of Gregorian chants emerging as one of the film’s most fortifying refrains, the other being Beauvois’ dogged use of lingering close-ups to glean some sense of the monks’ individual inner turmoil, which emerges as diverse and resonant. Luc, who is not the eldest among the monks but whose health is poor, seems to be the only one who knows from the start what his choice is. “I’m not scared of death,” he says. “I’m a free man.”

It’s serendipitous that Of Gods and Men should arrive in theatres while Claire Denis’ White Material still lingers in the memories of many moviegoers (at least in the US; here in Canada the film has yet to enjoy a well-deserved release). Both concern the legacy of French colonialism as it effects those attempting to make a life for themselves in those countries afflicted, but the contrast is fascinating. Denis’ mise en scène is narcotic in its way, but also secular, dark, fierce and brutal, where Beauvois’ approach centers on the serene and a universal, non-denominational sense of religious feeling, even when the grotesque looms just outside the monastery gates. It’s a gift to have both these visions circulating through our collective consciousness, helping us to reflect on the complexity of global ruptures, and those ghosts from the past that continue to haunt us.