2010: the year in movies

The classified ad version might go something like this:

DAUGHTER SEEKS BIRTHPARENT; SECRETLY UNEMPLOYED DAD SEEKS JOB; WELL-DRESSED SEXUALLY REPRESSED MOM SEEKS LOVER BUT DOESN’T KNOW IT; OVERPROTECTIVE PATRIARCH SEEKS SEX PARTNERS FOR SEQUESTERED ADULT CHILDREN; BOXER SEEKS GIRLFRIEND TO ASSIST WITH MEDDLING PARENT-MANAGER, CRACKHEAD BROTHER-TRAINER; PSYCHOPATHIC IMPERSONATOR SEEKS BACK-UP DANCERS; AILING FATHER SEEKS MONKEY GHOST OF CHILD, REGULAR GHOST OF WIFE.

Does the fact that the majority of my favourite films of 2010 concern families parting, reuniting, expanding or contracting reflect some renewed tribal impulse brewing deep in our collective cinematic unconscious, or am I just getting sentimental with age?


Truth is I have my reservations about a few of these, particularly with regards to those tricky final acts, you'll spot them when you get to them. But in every case there was something at the heart of the film sufficiently charged with real vivacity, audacity or fascination to merit their inclusion.


Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
The latest from what’s arguably the most playful and provocative new voice to emerge within the last decade opens with fecund visions of errant livestock and fleeting sightings of mysterious jungle-dwelling beasts before crafting a gentle, funny, funky portrait of Thai country life, interrupted one evening by apparitions of loved ones who have either died or been transformed into exactly what you’d get if you crossed a wookiee with a jawa. Using the simplest of screen tricks, this sequence is the most magical thing I saw at the movies last year, though it was nearly matched by some even more oneiric episodes that follow, which include nocturnal spelunking, a slide show about an oppressive future-world without movies, and a catfish hip to cunnilingus. The author’s name is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but he says we can just call him Joe.


The Social Network
You tired yet of discussions about whether or not David Fincher’s bio-pic about Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg “says something about the times we live in”? Me too! I’m still itching for a second viewing to confirm how well it all works once the initial rush has washed off, but in the meantime I’m confident declaring The Social Network an awfully smart, at times exhilarating piece of entertainment, with rich characters, pithy exchanges, and a central performance so shot through with boyish smugness and wildly articulate spite it makes your nerves ache. To call it the 21st century’s Citizen Kane isn’t to equate Fincher with Orson Welles but rather to acknowledge that this film knows something about enterprise, opportunity, ambition, and buckets of money, all wrapped up in an elegant achronological structure.


Dogtooth
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ very memorable, very strange, and finally very resonant sophomore feature concerns a father and mother who have sequestered their children within the family compound and controlled their education right down to their most basic uses of language—new meanings are invented for common words—their notion of how they’re related to icons of popular culture—the kids believe Frank Sinatra’s their grandpa—and their understanding of perspective and depth—they see planes flying overhead and wish one would fall so they could catch it in their hands. So it’s a comedy, kind of. There’s a stunning interpretive dance sequence improvised to Irene Cara’s ‘Flashdance… What a Feeling.’


Tony Manero
Speaking of dancing... It’s Santiago, Chile, 1978, and there’s blood on the dance floor. Literally. The terrors of life under Pinochet prompt some toward resignation and despair, others toward resistance, and a select few toward the recognition that destiny has granted them tacit permission to act out fantasies both heinous and tawdry-glamorous. Pablo Larraín’s deadpan character study, about a middle-aged guy who lives in a commune yet is chillingly antisocial, who just wants to transform himself into the hero of Saturday Night Fever on local television—at any costs—is also a study in vast, consuming darkness, in how evil proliferates, and in the secret perils of Hollywood disco fantasy.


A Prophet
Jacques Audiard’s The Beat My Heart Skipped remade, of all things, James Toback’s seethingly creepy cult classic Fingers, so you know we’re dealing with an artist ready to follow the most morally fraught criminal figures to the very end of the line. The rough but basically innocent Arab youth imprisoned at the start of A Prophet kills another, seemingly benevolent Arab convict more or less by force. He thereafter spends the rest of this bracingly violent, quietly polemical, often surprising, not un-Scorsese-like crime drama figuring out what that makes him now. The power of Audiard’s vision derives in part from its leaving viewers with the same question, and no simple answer in sight.


Shutter Island
Still more ambiguous is the nature of Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled visit to the Aschecliff Hospital for the Criminally Insane, located on an island in Boston Harbour almost perpetually cloaked in many kinds of fog. He’s ostensibly there to investigate a disappearance, yet he’s increasingly disinclined to trust any of his designated aids. The fabric of reality in Martin Scorsese’s heavily stylized adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel seems as potentially unstable as those DiCaprio encountered just a few months later in Inception, but I have a feeling that time will prove Shutter Island to possess the more enduring mysteries. It already seems more genuinely dreamlike.


The Kids Are All Right
Mark Ruffalo, Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson each gave one of my favourite performances of 2010, and the fact that all these performances occur within the same movie must say something about its director and co-writer, Lisa Cholodenko. Yet this warm, witty, sexy story of a family trying to sort out whose roles are whose and when it’s time to let go is so supple and complicated as it sets up expectations and demolishes presumptions—about parenting, about desire, about gender, about lifestyle choices—that you can’t help but feel like the film falls a little short of it’s goals with what’s finally an oddly conservative, overly tidy finale.


I Am Love
I don’t know that you’d deem the finale of Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love tidy exactly, unless you call sweeping an unholy mountain of dirty dishes off the table to fall crashing ever so operatically onto the floor a method of tidying. A dual-homage to the films of Luchino Visconti and Douglas Sirk, with a little Lady Chatterley thrown in for extra spice, this is nonetheless an exemplary high style melodrama about fleeing wealth and duty for haute cuisine and hot love amongst the birds and bees. Playing the universally admired but under-loved matriarch, Tilda Swinton’s iconic visage seems designed for such total transformation, and John Adams’ thundering music gloriously ushers us through the protracted climax, even after a fairly dopey crisis point.

Carlos

“Weapons,” our titular terrorist seductively tells us, “are an extension of my body.” Revolution turns this guy on—or is it simply the promise of spectacular violence undertaken with whatever sort of justification? Oliver Assayas’ wildly ambitious, action-oriented, 333-minute bio-pic, made for French television, starring the tireless and valiant Venezuelan-born actor Édgar Ramírez, was 2010's marathon matinee, and a fascinating double-study of the abstraction of criminal celebrity and the palpability of a human body trying to merge with a mythical idea of itself.


The Fighter
David O. Russell’s latest may be his most conventional picture, but it’s a knock-out, featuring an unforgettable coven of big-haired sisters, a shrewd understanding of boxing technique, Amy Adams in short-shorts, and yet another sublimely entertaining, ultra-committed performance from Mark Wahlberg, who, in his way, may just be America’s most underappreciated movie star. Yes, Christian Bale’s also very good as the crazy, drug-addled brother to Wahlberg’s aspiring fighter, but I’m a little more drawn to the less technically polished fiery spunk of Wahlberg, Adams, and of course Melissa Leo as the mother you wouldn’t want to face in the ring.


Exit Through the Gift Shop
Legendary mysterious street artist Banksy made a movie about a goofy French guy trying to make a movie about him, and it is the fucking funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. This documentary presumably takes a few liberties with facts on its way to a breezy but sly analysis of how art is commodified and everything gets domesticated sooner or later. But you could do worse than simply watching it for the unfathomably enthusiastic, sublimely inarticulate Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash, whose particular artistic limitations will refresh your notion of what “so bad it’s good” means.


Tokyo Sonata
Has cinema ever experienced an about-face quite as successful as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s? He’s helmed some of Japan’s finest horror films of the last 15 years—Séance is especially creepy—but they started to get a little stale, so he tried on a poignant comedy about the strains of contemporary middleclass family life, and it might just be the best thing he’s done. Dad gets downsized, Mom’s taken hostage, one kid joins the US military and the other has to save his lunch money to fund secret piano lessons. As with Kurosawa’s Cure, there’s a contagious disease driving the narrative, but in this case it causes those afflicted to want to start their lives over. Wonderful.

TIFF '08: Kuroawa, Assayas, Kore-eda and others keep it all in the family

John Cale lives in a hippy commune in Patagonia. That’s really all I needed to know. A friend suggested I see Salamandra and, knowing full well of my special fondness for Cale and the Velvet Underground, he started his hard sell with the above item and I told him just to stop there. Cale’s brief, rather crazed appearances—chomping into glass, toying with a knife, singing in Spanish with a junkyard band, replete with a ragged chicken bone for percussion—comprise several of the highlights in Pablo Agüero’s feature debut, which follows a young single mother, freshly released from some sort of institution, as she uproots her six-year-old son from his established life with his grandmother and whisks him down to El Bolsón to live amongst the unwashed, the heavily bearded and the incense-drunk.

Agüero errs on the side of unimposing, his observational hand-held camera seeming to will precious little into action, counting on our connection to the protagonists, the boy in particular, and the rising absurdity of their deeply dubious attempts at roughing it in this cold, wet and largely unfriendly place to engage the viewer. The images frequently yield layers of metaphor, and the technique overall works well enough, though it’s difficult not to wonder if things couldn’t be pushed a lot farther, if the real hard work still to be done by Agüero wouldn’t involve driving his nervy, New-Agey, curly-haired mom past the point of mere constant nail-biting and deluded nattering. Still, an interesting, and certainly very sensitive picture that offers a glimpse at a most marginal life.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so goes the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. Salamandra is just one of many films showing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that deal in some compelling manner with the grand old theme of family life, a theme that when applied to drama hardly requires the word ‘dysfunctional’ to be placed before it. Happy or unhappy, TIFF ’08 sees a number of families struggle to realize some fresh level of self-knowledge both for its parts and as a whole. And I think the finest—and funniest—example of this that I’ve managed to see came from one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata.

Kurosawa is most famous for his distinctively brooding and image-centered horror films, such as Cure (1997), Charisma (00), Pulse (01), and my personal favourite, the über-creepy Séance (01). As far as I’m aware, Tokyo Sonata marks Kurosawa’s first stab at comedy, and I have to wonder if it isn’t in fact his real calling. His horror films are smart, infectious and remarkably chilling, but they can also be overly ponderous and, in the case of Pulse in particular, simply over-long and limpid. It’s difficult to describe just what a refreshing about-face this new film signals without simply seeing it for yourself. Yet it occurs to me that the film does actually have something in common with Cure: where the characters in the older film are afflicted with a disease that drives them to kill, the protagonists in this new film seem to be afflicted with one that makes them crazy to start their lives over—even the little kid.

The downsizing of Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), the result of his company’s outsourcing to cheaper China, is the catalyst. He goes home that night and begins the familiar charade, not telling his wife and children what’s happened and instead putting on the suit and pretending to go to work everyday. He mostly hangs out at the library and eats his lunch with the homeless. He meets another unemployed businessman who goes so far as to set his phone to ring every hour so can feign business calls in public—even though there’s usually no one around he could possible need to impress. It sounds pathetic, yet it actually impresses Ryuhei deeply. Ryuhei spends most of the movie looking like his head’s about to blow up, and I guess he can’t help but admire the other man’s mood-management.

We soon see that all three male members of the Sasaki clan are deceiving the family for their individual reasons, the quiet 12-year-old Kenji (Kai Inowaki) being the most sympathetic. When he’s suddenly struck one day by the lulling sounds emanating from a suburban piano class, Kenji asks his parents if he can take lessons and is brutishly denied by his newly emasculated dad, so he goes in secret, using his lunch money to pay. Meanwhile his remote older brother is secretly joining the US military just as they decide to send more troops to Iraq, and his over-burdened and under-loved mother is slowly descending into quiet desperation, nearing bottom and its accompanying implosion.

There are characteristically elegant, beautifully composed sequences here, such as the opening, in which papers blow through the empty house during a storm, or the moving finale, which manifests the title as something more than just an homage to Ozu’s classic. But much of Tokyo Sonata is sharply focused on clear, concise storytelling, terrifically goofy comic interplay, and steady character development, each strand of the narrative building to the point where there is a synchronicity of panic boiling over. It goes on for a while, but is never less than diverting and propulsive. There are moments of utter cruelty and hopelessness, yet Kurosawa somehow pulls things together in such a way that the film finally finds itself lighting upon a coda of redemption and new awakening.

If Ozu can be traced in the title and broad themes of Tokyo Sonata, from the intermediary landscape shots on down, he’s positively haunting virtually every aspect of Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, a heartfelt, often solemn, but still vivid, sensual, lovingly detailed and warm depiction of familial differences amongst adult children and their elderly parents, most of them irreconcilable. Centered quite simply around a family reunion, this is the sort of movie where no viewer can fail to recognize some fragment of their personal experiences. Kore-eda’s film was inspired by stories he was told by his own mother in the months before she died, and his story is very much informed by the absence of a key family member.

This same sort of near-palpable absence is equally essential to Oliver Assayas’ Summer Hours, which finds three adult and nearly estranged siblings—played by the impressive trio of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier—negotiating their way through what seems an inevitable complete break with the past after the death of their mother, wonderfully played by Edith Scob, the striking actress who many years ago starred as the titular victim of Eyes Without a Face (60). Marred only by a few unneeded scenes of bathetic weeping, Assayas’ survey of the increasingly rapid erosion of artifacts that bind us to our families and our collective history is at times positively biting and all-too resonant. But the film is also brimming with humour and, with its special, loving attention to its younger supporting characters, is equally invested in nurturing a sense of regeneration.

Okay, one last film before I sign off here, and one which brings us back full circle to Latin America. Dioses is Josué Méndez’s second feature, and reveals a genuinely propositive sense of camera placement and movement. Concerning an upper-class Peruvian family that includes a father, a teenage daughter and son, and the father’s new girlfriend—a dead ringer for Halle Berry, should that grad your attention—Méndez takes a series of more or less conventional dilemmas—a party girl with an unwanted pregnancy; an angry young man sick with his sinking into bourgeois rot and in love with his sister; a gold-digger painfully ashamed of her indigenous background—and frames them in such a way that we’re often able to re-examine our assumptions. Ménez has a knack with these slow zooms out and back in he uses, his juxtaposing of music and image in seemingly contradictory ways, and his fun game of having characters move in and out of frame from unexpected places.

The way Méndez conveys Diego’s inner anguish in particular is frequently tender, perverse and hilarious all at once, cutting to Diego’s amusing permanent scowl at inspired moments. The treatment of Eliza on the other hand can feel trite, especially in the very cutty scene that finds her rehearsing inane comments to make when around her new coven of snobby middle-ages wives, but the performance of Maricielo Effio, which shifts in subtle ways, goes a long way to gaining our sympathies. She’s the bridge between the worlds of wealth and poverty in Peru that Méndez seems very keen on imparting upon us, though the handful of scenes with the servants are some of the most telling of all. These women, always present and rarely visible, are in their way members of the family themselves, interlopers into a realm of elitism that, as its portrayed here, seems on the brisk of collapse under its own dead weight.