Movies of 2013: My Top Twenty

Who's in the mood for me jizzing over a bunch of obscure foreign films? Hmmm?

* Crickets *

Well, anyway...

20) 3 Iron (Bin-Jip, 2004, Ki-Duk Kim)

This was most definitely a film set up for disappointment. After listening to Jez rant about how Kim Ki-Duk is the greatest thing to happen to art since Marcel Duchamp (Jez may or may not have actually said this), I started with this deeply beloved film of his to see if he lived up to his reputation. The first thing to note here is that I was, actually, disappointed. It just didn’t blow my head wide open as I’d expected, but perhaps the more important thing here is that it was still a truly excellent bit of filmmaking. Completely idiosyncratic, it uses a wonderfully colourful palette to portray the offbeat world of our central character and is very spare on the dialogue. It’s most definitely artistic filmmaking as well, with a meaning all its own and at times quite perplexing. Whatever my overall impression of this film was when I first watched it, I certainly have to note how firmly and deeply so many of its sequences resonated with me then, and continue to resonate now.

19) Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Like Ozu, Antonioni is a director whose few films I’ve seen I’ve loved, but are otherwise quite difficult to track down. More is needed. Red Desert is a plaintive examination of depression, one that’s brutally honest but somehow, also, exquisite to look at. Antonioni uses colour vividly to depict emotion, and the whole spectrum comes out at one time or another. As in L’Avventura (the other Antonioni film I’ve seen), Monica Vitti delivers a consummate performance in the lead, drawing an intimate portrait of melancholia with shades of desire and even playfulness at times. It’s amazing, to me, how difficult it is to discuss an Antonioni film without sounding atrociously pretentious, but here it is. This is just a beautiful artistic film, gorgeous to look at while evoking deep contemplation.

18) That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du désir, 1977, Luis Buñuel)

Another Buñuel? Well yes, and with very good reason. I see this one as almost a companion piece to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, not just because they both feature many of the same actors, but because they both seem to stem from a similar creative seed. However, this film is not only more coherent in at least having a storyline, it’s also just more entertaining. Framed by a man telling a group of strangers on a train the story of why he just poured a bucket of water over a woman in full view of them all, it goes on an adventurous narrative arc into a complicated and frustrating relationship. Fernando Rey is delightful as the conflicted and obsessed Matthieu, while Buñuel’s ingenious decision to cast two different women as the ‘obscure object’ of Matthieu’s desire not only lends his trademark surrealism to proceedings but elicits two vibrant performances from the actresses involved. This has all the charm of Bourgeoisie, but hits with greater success for combining it with a compelling and resonant story.

17) Rosetta (1999, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Yes! It’s another Dardenne film, and – here’s a shock – it’s about a young person grappling with parental issues while trying to forge a meaningful existence. This was also my first taste of the Dardennes and I still consider it their most emotionally striking. The incredibly nuanced performance from Emilie Dequenne as the eponymous Rosetta helps a lot in this regard: it’s somewhat elusive at times to know what’s going through her head, while at the same time what motivates her is clearly borne out by her actions. What makes this film so emotive is that her goal is such an unassuming one: to make a living. To be independent. Somehow that goal remains just out of reach, and as she strives towards it, the Dardennes drive the story towards their signature conclusion of ambiguity and inconclusiveness. Inconclusive, but strangely satisfying.

16) The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985, Woody Allen)

Ah, speaking of directors we haven’t heard from for a while, we reach the top of my Woody Allen pile this year with this charming little gem. To me this has all the elements that made Midnight in Paris such a success: a quirky meta-narrative full of daydreams and wry jokes about people’s expectations in life. I enjoyed this a lot more than Midnight, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Mia Farrow is just wonderful as the simple cinephile who dreams of escape and adventure. The second reason is simply that it just feels so symmetrical to have Woody making a humorous riff on people going to the cinema. The whole schism in reality that the film delivers is something out of the absurdist theatre: wonderful conceit and increasingly amusing and charming as it unfolds.

15) Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)

I basically watched Terrence Malick’s filmography in completely the wrong order. Well maybe not completely as I began with The Thin Red Line, but then caught up with The Tree of Life before jumping backwards to watch his two indisputable masterpieces, Badlands last year and this this year (Leaving The New World ‘til last seems like a bad idea). There’s a similar vibe to Days of Heaven as with Badlands – the cinematography and music in particular are shot from the same artistic barrel, and they are both as beautiful and evocative as each other. Sam Shepard is as Sam Shepardy as you can get here, which is always great value, and Richard Gere is surprisingly good as the ambitious and unscrupulous labourer trying to con his way into Shepard’s fortune. Performances aside though, the winner in this film is unmistakeably Nestor Almedros’ camera work and the haunting score from Ennio Morricone, all brought together through Mallick’s elysian vision. Really gorgeous film.

14) Shallow Grave (1994, Danny Boyle)

So after working my way through Danny Boyle’s filmography and finding a large number of them closer to the bottom of the list, I had to reach the conclusion that his first film is also his best. As is obvious from looking at his body of work, he’s a director who likes to try his hand at different things, but I think when it’s a dark canvas he’s working on, his style shines through best. This feels similar to some of the Coens’ best work (similar but not equal to): the ordinary people caught in over their head, with a lot of morbid humour and some strange Gothic imagery. I could watch Christopher Eccleston for hours on end in any role, and fortunately he also has a really meaty part here acting-wise, although Kerry Fox and Ewan McGregor have the lion’s share of screen time. This is definitely a genre film, with little meaning beyond being a bit of a caper, but it’s an absolute bullseye for me in terms of the visual flair and atmospheric chills it delivers.

13) 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni si 2 Zile, 2007, Cristian Mungiu)

Another film I caught up with due to the high regard given to it by Filmspotting, this gritty Romanian drama was one of the most compelling things I sat through all year. Set in the 1980s when abortion in Romania was criminalised, we follow a pregnant young lady (the implication of the title is that she is this far gone) and her loyal friend going through the process of organising an abortion for herself through illegal channels. There’s a lot going on in here even while not much ‘happens’, as the interactions between the two friends and their ‘contact’ vacillate between anxious misrepresentation and brutal honesty. It’s overall a totally gripping drama about the choices we have to make and underlying it all is a political statement about how larger decisions about society affect individuals.

12) High + Low (Tengoku to Jigoku, 1963, Akira Kurosawa)

Ah, with all that Mizoguchi discussion and riffing on Ozu I was starting to think we’d never get to the real Japanese master, the deliverer of my #1 film of 2011. This was the only one of Kurosawa’s oeuvre I caught up with this year, but what a film to choose for that option. Strangely more procedural and intimate than most of his other work I’ve seen, High and Low deals with the fallout of a kidnapping that goes wrong when the son of a rich man’s chauffeur is taken instead of the rich man’s own son. Following the scenario closely from the first moments through to the final wrap-up of the investigation, the film manages deftly to weave in a lot of meditations on wealth, class and morality, which never reach fever pitch as much as they do in some of Kurosawa’s other works. It’s complex as it goes along, but I thought it finished somewhat conventionally. That’s not a bad thing as it’s greatly satisfying, while instead of leaving questions about the plot unanswered it leaves us instead hanging with the thought of ‘what did it all cost?’

11) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, 2007, Julian Schnabel)

I went into this film with a certain quantity of dread. The synopsis itself just gives me claustrophobic chills thinking about ‘locked-in’ syndrome and what it would be like to experience. And indeed the first half-hour or so has moments of that utter impotent frustration, except that the writers and conceivers of the film are clever enough to include Jean’s internal monologue to take the edge off. The story of his learning to communicate, and ultimately dictate his own memoir, is all told with a patient hand and restraint that holds this from falling into the precipice of TV movie territory. What really, really stuck out for me though is the final (?) sequence, which takes us back to the moments before the stroke which basically destroyed his nervous system – only, we’re not told it’s the moments before, and the suddenness of it is terrifying and gut-wrenching. It’s a deeply dreadful moment, even while the rest of the film becomes so powerfully inspiring.

10) The Place beyond the Pines (2012, Derek Cianfrance)

There has been so much written about this film from Derek Cianfrance, all saying basically the same thing, along the lines of “I wish the third act didn’t exist” or “I wish the second and third acts didn’t exist.” The fact is that I agree. The first act, with Ryan Gosling as a stunt motorcycle rider who tries to provide for a woman and her child he’s just learned is his, is beyond amazing. Absolutely idiosyncratic filmmaking, with a devastating grungy wash and an arresting moral ambivalence that just pushes the envelope of what film storytelling can be. I was also totally invested in the second act, with Bradley Cooper at his best that I’ve seen as the cop who (sudden spoiler alert) shoots Gosling dead at the end of act one. The third act is most definitely a let-down. Not just because it’s the weakest of the three, but because it feels like a tacked-on bit of conventional filmmaking, trying to achieve neat closure in a story that neither demanded nor required it. There are strengths all the way through, in particular the presence of Ben Mendelsohn who I genuinely feel has the on-screen charisma of a young Brando: I can’t imagine material that wouldn’t be improved by his involvement. But still, when the first two thirds are some of the most inventive and powerful filmmaking I’ve seen all year, the third act is an uncomfortable return to conformity. What I’m saying is, if the third act had gone differently and the film had ended elsewhere, this could have been pushing for my number one spot.

9) Gravity (2013, Alfonso Cuarón)

Talk about films set up for disappointment. When I finally forced myself to watch Y Tu Mamá También last year (not looking forward to it) and it became one of my top ten films of that year, Cuarón cemented his place as one of the directors I just watch closely, because everything he does is gold. Then this film came on my radar and I salivated through most of the year. Then it came out, and not one person in existence failed to stop me in the street and tell me it’s the greatest movie ever made and that I must see it on pain of death. I finally did get a chance to catch it in a near-deserted cinema on a Wednesday night, in 3D. And it was not disappointing. On the contrary it absolutely knocked me on my back. There are undoubtedly problems with it: the 3D objects occasionally knocking into the camera were annoyingly distracting; George Clooney is smug and far larger than the film demands; there are numerous ‘as if’ moments and questionable bits of science… But absolutely none of that matters. What Cuarón has created here is something unique: the camera work, the sense of weightlessness, the silence. It’s a piece not only of filmmaking art or visual art, but sensory art. All of this film’s problems can be excused because the experience of this film is unlike anything another film could ever hope to be.

8) Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, 1955, Alain Resnais)

On the subject of the filmmaking art, here is another piece of mind-blowing brilliance. In this short documentary, Resnais amasses one of the most heart-wrenching and evocative half-hours of film imaginable. The visuals consist of a combination of panoramic tours around abandoned concentration camps, entwined with brutally shocking archival footage of those camps at their peak and their inmates. The voiceover is spare, but asks all the right questions: the questions that make your head spin with the enormity of what happened here, that still haven’t really been answered and never will. In all the years I’ve watched holocaust films, studied Jewish history in school, etc. I’ve never been so moved as Resnais managed in the short running time of this piece. Got a spare half an hour? Watch this film. Go on, do it right now. I’ll wait here.

7) Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)

I watched this film purely on the basis of Kusturica coming up on some random dude’s list of directors – I can’t remember where the list was and didn’t necessarily give it any credence, but the fact I hadn’t heard of Kusturica made him seem worth checking out. Having seen this film (which is apparently now on the top 250, TIL), my one regret is now I’ve discovered how hard his other work is to come by. This is a very weird, but somehow very real and grounded film at the same time. There is a wonderfully carnivalesque vibe to much of it which almost belies the seriousness at its core. In particular the two leads, Predrag Manojlovic and Lazar Ristovski (who remind me a lot, respectively, of Roberto Benigni and Gerard Depardieu as strange as that sounds), lend a surreal joy to the bizarre circumstances they find themselves in, and Manojlovic in particular wears his mask of whimsical joviality well to conceal his hidden malevolence. It’s a film about war, and about the interpersonal bonds that war can both tear apart and forge. Above all that, though, it’s a film of and about Yugoslavia, and a brilliant piece of fantastical narrative.

6) Fallen Angels (Duo Luo Tian Shi, 1995, Kar Wai Wong)

So of all the directors this year of whom I managed a bit of a retrospective, Wong unsurprisingly hits near the top of my list with his highest-ranked entry. You’ve probably gleaned from my previous two reviews that there is something unmistakeably beautiful about his films that I just react to, regardless of the onscreen content. In this case the lush beauty of his camera work and production design is backed up by a killer story, part of which Kim Ki Duk’s 3 Iron reminded me of when I watched it later. Strangely, we’re lacking the charisma of Tony Leung here, although a very different-looking (different from his more conventional roles in House of Flying Daggers and Red Cliff) Takeshi Kaneshiro steals the show with his mute loner who breaks into people’s shops at night and opens them for business (that’s the bit that reminds me of 3 Iron by the by). This three-or-four-pronged story is beautifully intertwined, with the surrealism of Kaneshiro’s character providing an odd foil for the killer protagonist and the various broken women that seem to fascinate Wong so. It left me musing, as do all of Wong’s films, on what rare beauty can be invoked from a hypermodern world.

5) Four Lions (2010, Chris Morris)

When I was telling Bec a couple of months ago about how much I enjoyed this film, she was actually quite shocked when I explained what it was about. “That’s horrible!” I distinctly remember her screeching, before saying something or other about me getting a haircut and a real job, and how come I always record the weather lady’s segments on the morning news… Blah blah blah… Anyway, the point is it didn’t really occur to me in isolation how – I don’t know – inappropriate? the idea of a comedy about a group of suicide bombers sounds. Basically it didn’t occur to me because this is so absorbingly and adeptly made. It’s black, yes - not just dark in tone but actually disturbing at times – but it’s also very, very funny. Most of the humour is character-based, but a large amount is culture-clash humour: comedy based on the incompatibility of different ideologies trying to make sense. More than just being funny, though, this film has a surprising humanity to it: these guys, as simultaneously funny and scary as they are, come off the screen as real people, and to be able to do that to radically indoctrinated potential murderers is no easy trick of script writing. I genuinely believe that comedy, in the form of films like this, can go a lot further towards reducing the hysteria around ‘radical Islam’ than the presence of however many friendly Muslim faces in the media could hope to do. Brilliant, modern film.

4) The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador, 1962, Luis Buñuel)

So speaking of directors of whom I managed a retrospective falling near the top of my list, Buñuel tops the list with this bizarre effort. To be honest, looking at my top ten, something I really responded strongly to this year was surrealism in film. Underground, Fallen Angels and this all lean heavily on the world of the slightly bizarre in getting their story across, perhaps none more simply or as overtly as this. Quite simply, the plot is: a group of guests stay beyond their welcome at a dinner party because, for absolutely no reason, they are unable to leave the room. The whole thing is claustrophobic, minimalistic, and a little childlike and playful. It reminds me a lot of my number 1 film of last year, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in that it just has that shroud of childlike imagination about it, a gigantic game of “we can’t leave this room” among a group of bourgeois adults. Of course, into the mix Buñuel throws some characteristic snappy dialogue and inter-class sniping as the guests get increasingly frustrated with their predicament. Of course no explanation in the end is offered, but the beauty of this type of surrealist filmmaking is that we can project our own interpretation onto the action if we want or, if we don’t want, just take it as we see it, perhaps with one eyebrow raised at the absurdity of it all.

3) Incendies (2010, Denis Villeneuve)

So no, in case you just read the titles and nothing underneath them, this isn’t my #149 film of the year but rather somewhat higher. Among all the films this year that were set up for a disastrous disappointment from my celestial expectations, this film perhaps had the easiest ride through to the top. I knew nothing about it going in, I hadn’t seen any of Villeneuve’s other work, I frankly knew nothing at all about Villeneuve. That’s a pretty good situation to go into a movie as fucking good as this is. I hate to ruin that situation for everybody else by ranting about how good this is, but there’s little else I can do. Essentially this is just as riveting as storytelling in film form goes. We are presented at the beginning with a mystery - a conundrum - that our brother-sister protagonists (chiefly the sister) set out to investigate. We learn more about the mystery as she does: the twists and turns in the story; and at the same time feel her hurt, her fear and trepidation, and the actual danger she discovers as she attempts to find out who she is and who their now deceased mother was. When Jez put this near the top of his list last month, he made a point about how satisfying the ending is. I’m not usually a sucker for endings, but there certainly is a real completeness to the closure this film achieves, and it is hugely satisfying to have watched this story unfold.

2) The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Oh, this film. What bad luck it has. Snubbed completely by the Academy, it nevertheless managed to ride from January 2013 to November as my number one film. It was going to get that top spot, and nothing could topple it. But then... I’ll save the big reveal of what could possibly top this for now, however, and discuss this film. Firstly, I love Paul Thomas Anderson. Like Cuarón he’s a filmmaker who can seemingly do no wrong but, unlike Cuarón, he’s a filmmaker who also writes about as well as could be, and doesn’t have to compensate for his plot shortcomings with an amazing sensory experience. The Master is immaculately crafted cinematic art, both in terms of the story and characterisation and in terms of PTA’s incredible, mind-blowing visual eye. It produced so many of the year’s memorable, iconic moments and sequences - and one in particular that has continued to reverberate with me for its – wait for it – sheer surreal absurdity. It’s probably also not any of the ones you think, if you’ve seen the film. It’s the sequence in which Freddy is undertaking the ordeal to get admitted to Lancaster Dodd’s ‘movement’ and inner sanctum, and as the sequence goes on, and on, and Freddy’s suffering increases and stamina is pushed to its limits, Lancaster stands up as casually and arbitrarily as you like and says something like “examination over”. Just the random, arbitrary nature of that is mind-blowing, and cuts to the very heart of the great baffling mystery this film presents. What, after all, does this film mean? I have no idea. I have some theories (not mine, but ones I’ve heard from other people) that satisfy me to varying degrees, but that’s all part of the wonder of this film and PT Anderson’s genius. However, the slight lingering confusion is perhaps the only thing that stands between The Master and…

1) Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Bom Yeoreum Gaeul Gyeoul Geurigo Bom, 2003, Ki-Duk Kim)

Yes, as miraculous as I found The Master, there was that lingering doubt, that chaos and confusion of what it all meant. In late November I sat down to watch this gorgeous piece of filmmaking from Kim Ki-Duk, and while I still sat on the question for a month of ‘is this a better film?’ I had to sit this one on top for the simple reason that it resonated in complete form the first run through. There’s a distinct possibility that The Master will overtake this on subsequent viewings as I get a better grasp of its themes, but as you know I don’t do things that way when it comes to my end-of-year lists. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring is part of the crop of artistic films to which I strongly responded this year, and is also the most beautiful. It’s a meditation on life, death, love and rebirth, told from the setting of a remote monastery on a lake surrounded by mountains, and represented by the changing of the seasons. It would be ruining the film to summarise the plot of any of its sections, but it’s basically a journey through a life, starting with a coming-of-age and journeying between the trials, retributions and struggles we all have to suffer through to reach inner peace in the later stages of life. There’s a heavy Buddhist subtext to it all - with a heavy emphasis on the endless cycle of life - and it’s told with all the relaxed pace and naturalist imagery you would expect from such a subtext. There are still some ambiguities left by the end of this film, some unanswered questions as well:  but they’re not inscrutable, simply ponderous. This film doesn’t shove its message down your throat, but it’s a very pleasing, satisfying work of art, one that poses some very important philosophical questions, but also provides the most curious and probing answers.

And with that, I have nothing more from 2013 to count down... That gives me time to concentrate on my crippling emotional pain.