30. Brand Upon the Brain! (d. Guy Maddin, USA/Canada, 2007) Maddin is as much a collage artist as a filmmaker, picking and choosing from a mad collection of sources—the history of cinema, pulp novels, his own memory, bizarre images that may have been glimpsed in a nightmare—and making something totally, invigoratingly, frighteningly new. Contradictions abound, as they do in a dream or a memory: his movies are frightening and silly, singular and allusive, mad and understated, filled with pulpy stories and abstract non-narratives. Quite simply, there's no one else making movies like him, and there never really has been—but distinctiveness is not his only, or even his foremost, quality.Marcel Proust may seem like an absurd comparison to Maddin, but both the writer and the filmmaker spring forth from their own hazy memories, creating something operatic and highly formalized from the interweaved fabric of their pasts. Even though the plot of Brand Upon the Brain! involves a demented mad scientist performing midnight experiments, an orphanage run from a lighthouse that offers mysteries such as the disappearance of a boy named Savage Tom and bizarre drillholes in orphans' heads, a brother-sister detective duo known as the Light Bulb Kids, cross-dressing and ambiguous sexuality, mother-daughter sexual antagonism, and other oddities, Maddin still insists that 96% of the movie is accurately drawn from his own childhood. Figuratively speaking, that's actually easy to believe; this deranged world must be forged from some very troublesome and intimate memories, wedded to an absolutely unique artistic mindset.
Shot on archaic-looking black-and-white film (with some sporadic sparks of color) and edited together in a jagged, schizophrenic manner, the movie is exhilarating in a purely formal sense; even its intertitles, which are meant to both embrace and send up the hyperbolic storytelling styles of 1920s silent cinema, are highly entertaining in their mixture of postmodern irony and cinephiliac enthusiasm. But Maddin's movies are not just indulgences in postmodern tomfoolery; considering how amusing his films are, it's surprising how genuinely frightening, unsettling, and emotional they remain, especially in Brand Upon the Brain! and Cowards Bend the Knee. Watching something like this is like flipping kinetically through Maddin's family photo albums, but the pictures seem to have been recorded in some other alternate dimension.
29. Wendy and Lucy (d. Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008) Deceptively simple, Wendy and Lucy is unquestionably one of the saddest movies made in the last ten years, but it also may be the one that most ably encapsulates how this country's recent economic hardships have affected the lives of individuals. Michelle Williams gives a flawless performance as Wendy, a young woman trying to travel to Alaska, where a lucrative job awaits, with her beloved dog. She has planned her funds carefully; she has just enough money to make it to her destination. So when her car breaks down en route, her dire economic straits force her into a series of increasingly difficult decisions. The underlying, and painfully relatable, truth: our relationships with those we love should not be endangered by poverty, but sometimes they are; money should not be a greater priority than happiness and togetherness, but sometimes, due to external circumstances that we cannot change, this is the case. Much of the movie is understated—the most hopeful moment, for example, is a brief interaction in which a kindly security guard covertly loans Wendy a few dollars from his own minimal savings, which we come to recognize as a magnanimous self-sacrifice—but it doesn't seem accurate to call the movie “quiet.” Its compassion towards Wendy and Lucy, her dog, is painfully sincere; its bitterness towards the kind of world where money dictates our behavior and our relationships is palpable, and justified. This passionate, humane outrage, which culminates in an astonishingly bittersweet final scene, leaves you staggering by the time the movie ends.
28. Bright Leaves (d. Ross McElwee, USA/UK, 2004) The director of Sherman's March again creates a compelling, free-flowing mosaic that simultaneously explores his family legacy, the history of the American South, the role that cinema plays in our lives, and other fascinating tangents. Watching this gorgeous, stimulating movie, I kept thinking about Chris Marker's Sans soleil (1983)—one of my favorite movies, and one in which any jumble of interrelated topics that appeal to Marker at any specific point in time will become the new subject of his documentary. I like documentaries like this: the truth about any particular subject can never really be exhausted, especially not in a medium as subjective as cinema, so I usually find it more compelling when directors use the documentary format to ruminate about a number of challenging ideas, posing questions instead of offering answers.But whereas Marker remains a cypher in Sans soleil and most of his movies (we never get a sense of the director as a flesh-and-blood character), McElwee's movies are primarily about his own life, his own history. Even when he originates with a specific historical topic, as in Sherman's March, the subjects very quickly begin to center around McElwee's life history, his family, their troubles. Bright Leaves, for example, is broadly about the tobacco industry in North Carolina, but this subject appeals to McElwee because his great-grandfather, John McElwee, was one of the titans who gave birth to that industry. Creator of the Bull Durham line of tobacco, John McElwee's career was essentially destroyed by his rival, James Buchanan Duke—founder of the Duke dynasty. This rivalry, McElwee hypothesizes (after being convinced by a second cousin), was in fact the inspiration for the 1950 film Bright Leaf, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The tangents and subtopics branch out compellingly from there, but the central glue that ties it all together is McElwee's family and their close connection to the world in which they grew up.
Ross McElwee displays wit and self-reflexivity in amusingly subdued ways—for example, in his inclusion of dialogue scenes that show him debating how he should film the following scene, or in musing about the filmmaking process while constantly emphasizing himself as a creator who works at the behest of chance, luck, and whatever the world around him has to offer. The movie is meta, then, but for a reason: McElwee reminds us that—for all of us, not just for this passionate filmmaker—cinema plays an integral role in fashioning the myths and half-formed truths by which we lead our lives, ultimately becoming an addiction not unlike the cigarettes that built North Carolina's economy and endangered the well-being of McElwee's family.
27. Up (d. Pete Docter & Bob Peterson, USA, 2009) I will always remember Up as the movie that had me bawling before a stone-faced five-year-old who was staring at me intently, sitting on her mother's lap in the row in front of me; I will remember it, also, as a movie that could take you from that place of intense sadness to euphoric highs that practically sent you sailing from the theatre. We should have known by now that Pixar's incredible winning streak was no fluke, that they kept on making one incredible movie after another not because they were lucky but because they are probably the best storytellers and stylists working in American film today. But many people still seemed wary, expecting them to fail spectacularly at some point. After seeing Wall-E, I found myself having similar doubts, especially when I heard that Up was coming out less than a year afterwards—one masterpiece couldn't possibly be followed up by another, could it?
My doubts were foolish. The makers of Up are so profoundly in love with the life experience, and so obviously compassionate towards the worlds and characters that they create, that we can't help but be affected by what happens as though they were occurring in our own lives. (This is why the emotional states that I mentioned before are so overwhelming: the pain is our pain, the joy ours' too.) This incredible sensitivity is mixed with a wild storyline that has an elderly widower and a fresh-faced eight-year-old Cub Scout careening to South America on a balloon-equipped house, ultimately finding talking birds and a nefarious plot conducted by a hermetic villain. The unusual plot and beautifully maintained pathos do not contradict each other; in fact, the unexpected twists and turns in the story turn out to provide the perfect outlet for the movie's themes on loneliness, companionship, adventure, and a sense of fulfillment.
It may seem hyperbolic to claim that Up's predominant theme is the entirety of human life, and even more so that it satisfies the complexity of this theme; but astonishingly, I would say that this is close to being true. Childhood, love, marriage, parenthood, friendship, aging, lost dreams, death—these are all conveyed with intense sympathy by Up. This is why the movie makes you feel overjoyed about living, even when it makes you feel life's intense pain as well.
26. Cure (d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001) Kurosawa's slow-burn brand of horror is epitomized by Cure, a difficult and hypnotic chiller that offers no easy answers. A series of bizarre murders are committed in Tokyo in which each apparent killer is a normal, mild-mannered, everyday person who carves into their victims a sinister “X.” The only connection shared by these unfortunate murderers is that, shortly before their crimes, they came in contact with “Mr. Mamiya,” a mysterious cypher with a sinister history in hypnosis. This story makes for awesomely ominous serial-killer fodder, and Kurosawa satisfies the creepy potential of this setup. The horrific home of Mr. Mamiya, for example, is every bit as creepy as Buffalo Bill's mannequin-laden lair in Silence of the Lambs, and the numerous interactions between Mamiya and our detective hero, Takabe, are almost unbearably intense, filmed as they are in Kurosawa's distinctly removed, often static aesthetic. But ultimately, Kurosawa is more concerned with theorizing about the nature of evil than simply providing a good genre picture. All of the everyday people who become murderers in Cure are saintly, noble folks, almost to the point of parody; Takabe himself, for example, sacrifices himself to care for his wife, whose sanity is quickly deteriorating. A significant point to the movie is that we begin to see Takabe unravel far before he even comes in contact with Mamiya. The underlying idea is that good and evil are separated only by the thinnest of threads, and that one can topple over into the other with alarming abruptness. This theme takes on even greater power when we recognize that Japan's recent J-horror trend in film reflects a largely unexplained rise in violent crime committed in Japan's urban areas over the last decade; what could contribute to such a violent plague?
Cure is probably Kurosawa's most cryptic and disturbing movie, especially thanks to its staggeringly bizarre ending. Many have criticized the last half-hour of the movie as being too slow, too difficult, too confusing, which would be a valid criticism if Cure were only concerned with providing a good story with a neat resolution. But its climax and ending make it apparent that the movie is trying to unsettle us with its narrative as much as its characters are unsettled with their inexplicably gruesome actions. Ultimately, as seems to be true in real life, the sudden transformation from good into evil cannot be explained; it can only be fleetingly, disturbingly witnessed.
25. Silent Light (d. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/ Netherlands/Germany, 2009) The opening and closing shots of Silent Light are miraculous: beautiful night photography records the long journey of darkness into dawn for the opening shot, and for the final image, the pattern is reversed—the magnificent colors of twilight are embraced as day fades into night. Both shots take several minutes, as the shot arcs gracefully through the sky. Even if you've seen a sunrise or sunset (which we all have), the images still seem totally new, something that only cinema can accomplish. This description could apply to much of Carlos Reygadas' filmmaking. One of the most austere and provocative arthouse directors working today, his movies include Japon (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), both of which feature explicit sex and nudity, incredibly long, often static shots of either the horror or wonder of nature, and bare storylines that are meant to evoke the profound ethical confusion of the human experience—the lack of a definitive moral code that tells us what is right and what is wrong.
Silent Light is a departure from these two movies in some ways. There is no onscreen sex or nudity, for example, and the setting is totally different than almost any movie that's been made before: Silent Light is filmed in a remote Mennonite community in Mexico, using non-professional actors who actually live within that sect. (Even the language spoken in the movie—a Germanic dialect called Plautdietsch—has reportedly never been heard in a film before.) But in other ways, Silent Light absolutely abides by Reygadas' stylistic and philosophical interests: its cinematography is stark and breathtakingly beautiful, and its characters are still tempted by passions and loves that they know are “wrong,” which forces them to make decisions that harshly reveal the painful confusion of living a human life.
The two main characters are Johan and Marianne, who are carrying on an affair even though both of them are married. Maybe in most modern communities this would be an unspectacular story, but in this austere and close-knit community, this affair is absolutely a betrayal of these characters' ideals. However, there is real love involved between them, and Johan has already confessed this affair to much of his family, including his wife Esther, who resignedly accepts this fact while continuing to love her husband. There are no tearful arguments between loved ones, no grand confessions; there is primarily great inner turmoil that centers around the rift between one's faith and one's natural human desires, between a self-imposed moral code and a passion that is impossible to resist.
I've grown tired with a lot of movies that have recently come out on the international arthouse scene: while I used to respect practically any movie that offered a stark, austere aesthetic, a somewhat abstract narrative, and muted performances meant to convey inner pain, I've since recognized that this mode of filmmaking can in fact lazily disguise a lack of any profound ideas with a style often unquestionably referred to as “artful.” But Reygadas continues to fascinate; his gruelingly long takes and intensely muted atmosphere try to get at some deeper human pain, and do achieve a profound beauty. He embraces the arthouse legacy that was originally conceived by mentors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer and Andrei Tarkovsky. The style of Silent Light is meant to reflect the solemn moral code by which its Mennonite community lives: in both cases, great passion and pain lurk beneath the surface.
24. There Will Be Blood (d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2007) There Will Be Blood really does seem like nothing that's been made in Hollywood before (or maybe even on the American independent scene); its closest antecedent may be Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), but only in the vaguest genealogical way. Anderson's movie is an adaptation of Oil!, the Upton Sinclair novel, that only uses the first 150 pages as a springboard; it's an allegorical portrayal of the war between modern capitalism and institutionalized religion that exposes how the two may be more closely linked than separated; it's a cryptic horror movie about murder and evil and being torn apart from within; it's absurd and brazen and funny and heartbreaking. Daniel Day Lewis gives maybe the most singular performance I can think of in any movie over the last decade as Daniel Plainview, a formidable big-oil man in the early twentieth century who destroys those around him in his quest to own everything within his grasp, people included. Paul Dano, who deserves commendation for being able to stand his own against Lewis' titanic performance, is a pair of identical twin brothers—one of whom, a manipulative evangelist, stands in the way of Plainview's empire. The focus of the movie is actually quite concentrated, mostly taking place in the barren fields of Texas at the heart of Plainview's oil operation; but the movie still feels epic in scope and majestic in execution, thanks largely to Anderson's distinct and intuitive aesthetic.
To call the movie a triumph of style over substance (as some critics did) is to miss the ways in which Anderson absurdly hyperbolizes Plainview's loneliness and desperation. Yes, so much of the movie is brilliantly over-the-top: the famous milkshake speech (which was partially based on actual Congressional transcripts from big business trials in the 1920s), Plainview's humiliating beating of Paul Sunday followed by Sunday's humiliation of Plainview in his church, Plainview's vicious castigation of a businessman while dining with his son in a restaurant, and Paul Sunday's ultimate fate are all grandly evoked, but they all also center around Plainview's realization that his fierce ambition will always outweigh and eventually obliterate his relationships with those around him. You could say, then, that both There Will Be Blood and Anderson's earlier Magnolia are operatic epics, but whereas the latter is exhausting and somewhat more of a stylistic prank than an effective drama, There Will Be Blood is as awe-inspiring in its characterizations as in its visual majesty.
23. The New World (d. Terrence Malick, USA/UK, 2005) How can you capture the discovery and exploration of a totally new world on film? Such a film would require euphoria and terror, awe and loneliness, exoticism and intimate beauty. Some movies have succeeded at this daunting task: we may think of the moment in which T.E. Lawrence first appears through a desert haze in Lawrence of Arabia, or the sense of splendor that runs throughout Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. But The New World is perhaps the only movie I've seen that maintains this sense of awe throughout its entire (lengthy) running time; as the film plays out before you, you really do feel like you're being guided through uncharted territory. It may be little surprise that Terrence Malick is responsible for such an overwhelming achievement. Maybe the most sensitive stylist in the history of American movies, Malick's filmmaking is always beautiful, but that beauty is meant to manifest some deeper emotion: longing, love, passion, heartache. There's plenty of the above in The New World, which is basically a retelling of the well-known Pocahontas tale. This is no Disney movie, though. Malick's film is more specifically about the birth of this country, the seemingly limitless potential of this beautiful untouched land at its origins, and how quickly that potential was besmirched by the colonial mindset of entitlement and Manifest Destiny. Love and loss, indeed; the classic tragic-lovers tale of Pocahontas and settler John Smith is paralleled to the rapture and violence that accompanied the arrival of European explorers in this country. This is why The New World can simultaneously seem so majestic and epic, and yet essentially is an intimate look at individual people who find themselves lost in an overwhelming world.
Not unlike Herzog in many of his movies, Malick is concerned with how the natural beauty of this world may be ruined by the greed, ambition, and folly of man. He's not unwilling to see some aspects of human civilization as majestic, as is evidenced by Pocahontas' initial journey to England late in the film (her introduction to a new world is almost as rhapsodic as John Smith's introduction to America earlier on); but for the most part, the visual splendor of The New World is meant to remind us of how this country's edenic nature no longer exists.
The movie is not without flaws; Malick romanticizes the native American Indian population unabashedly, which sometimes turns the movie into a simplistic indulgence in exoticism not unlike Dances with Wolves. But even during these weaker moments, The New World achieves a poetry uncommon in any kind of cinema. Malick and his cast are sensitive and smart enough to turn some sappy, wooden dialogue (“He is like a tree, he shelters me,” says Pocahontas of one character) into a solemn trance of sorts—intoning words of love and desire while the camera evokes likeminded images. This is the kind of movie you get lost in, becoming hypnotized by its images and thirsting for more.
22. Into Great Silence (d. Philip Gröning, France/Switzerland/ Germany, 2007) I saw Into Great Silence at the Times Cinema in Milwaukee back when it still catered to foreign/arthouse films and retrospectives of classics, all on 35mm. Since I had no car at the time, I had to venture practically all the way from the east to the west side of Milwaukee on the bus, then walk an additional fifteen minutes or so to the theatre from the bus stop on Vliet St. (This may mean little to non-Milwaukeeans, but for me, and maybe for other folks who have undertaken a similar crosstown journey to see a movie, the half-invigorating, half-tedious memories are flooding back.) It was, therefore, an hour-long trek to see this lengthy documentary about the Grande Chartreuse, a 900-year-old-plus Carthusian monastery hidden in the French Alps. Turns out such a heavy investment in moviegoing befits a film as momentous as Into Great Silence.Director Gröning wrote the monks of the Grande Chartreuse in 1984 asking for permission to film there. Because they are among the most ascetic order in the world, it took the monks of the Grande Chartreuse sixteen years to give him permission to do so, and even then only with strong restrictions: Gröning could use no voiceover narration and no artificial lighting, and he was not allowed to bring a crew along with him—Gröning himself was the cinematographer and sound-man.
I don't know if Gröning would have decided upon a similar aesthetic regardless, but this stripped-down style is entirely appropriate for Into Great Silence. We simply observe the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, going about their everyday lives. These lives involve the sort of religious austerity that we may have predicted—chanting, praying, studying scripture, and so on—but they also include a great deal of levity and immediate pleasure—going sledding, enjoying an orange in a sunlit garden, etcetera. This makes Into Great Silence not so much about a specific religious institution, but about joy and spirituality and its ubiquity in the world. It may sound like poetic naivete to say that one can find God in an act as simple as sledding in the sunlight or in peeling an orange, but this seems almost incontrovertible, given all the simple and joyous beauty that this movie has to offer.
There is a certain ethnographic pleasure to be gained by the movie: we are granted access, for 165 minutes, to a sealed-off world of rigorous simplicity that we would otherwise never know. In some other ways, though, Into Great Silence offers an immediate connection to our own lives, reminding us that divinity and bliss need not be confined to the pages of the Bible or the walls of a church. This is why my hours-long voyage to and from the west side of Milwaukee to see Into Great Silence was so appropriate: waiting for the bus in twenty-degree weather with the lights of downtown in the distance, everything, after watching this movie, seemed full of majesty.
21. A Christmas Tale (d. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008) How do you describe an Arnaud Desplechin movie? Part screwball comedy, part operatic tragedy, teeming with both self-reflexivity and genuine melodrama, bounding with allusions to existentialist philosophy, Renaissance painting, hip-hop music, and other cultural artifacts, Desplechin's movies resemble what may have been the result if a dozen disparate and unique directors from the history of film collaborated on a single madcap epic. No surprise that his movies are usually marked by two-and-a-half-hour-plus running times, then. Like Kings and Queen before it (and, to a lesser extent, like Desplechin's My Sex Life...Or How I Got into an Argument), A Christmas Tale is about a dysfunctional family, the bombastic personalities that comprise it, and the struggle it faces to remain connected. A Christmas Tale in particular takes place around the titular holiday, as the matriarch (played inimitably by Catherine Deneuve) discovers she needs a bone marrow transplant to battle her liver cancer and must turn to her family for a donor. If this synopsis sounds like a million other happy-sad yuletide family dramas, you will be bewildered by the movie itself. (Even if you have no idea what to expect from the movie going in, you will probably be bewildered—I absolutely was, wonderfully so.) It's as though Desplechin is using this cliched setup not only to poke into the most interesting nooks and crannies of these characters—relying upon teary-eyed confrontations as well as the most unexpected and fleeting moments between them—but also to indulge in his stylistic and metacinematic inclinations. He uses the story as a springboard to dabble in the limitless tricks and narrative devices available to the filmmaker, nodding reverentially towards a history of wildly diverse cinema.
This appraisal may make A Christmas Tale sound like hollow showboating, but there's definitely nothing hollow about Desplechin's movie. Just because the film isn't conventionally melodramatic doesn't mean it's not emotional. The unpredictable glimpses we are offered into the characters' lives—a live DJ performance that comes out of nowhere, or a glance shared between a husband and wife after a bittersweet development that seems to speak pages of dialogue in a few seconds—turn the Vuillard family into a brightly-colored tapestry in increasing danger of ripping each other apart. (Paradoxically, the intense relationships among this family are also what keep them so intimately connected, as Desplechin reminds us that love and hatred are flip sides of the same coin, separated only by the thinnest of boundaries.) The movie may not be as emotional as Desplechin's prior Kings and Queen, but it comes close (and both of them are among the most striking comedy-drama-whatevers of the last ten years).
The incredibly complex backstory of this family resembles some Dickensian epic, as it contains siblings who died in their youth, economic swindles, banishments, suppressed lust and longing, and other tragedies. Heavy as much of this plot is, though, the main feeling we experience while watching A Christmas Tale is euphoria, excitement, a giddy anticipation of what is going to happen next. His panoply of styles and moods is doubtlessly overwhelming, but it leaves you with a satisfying fatigue, like coming down off of a high or waking up the day after Christmas with a magnificent hangover.
20. The Hedge of Thorns (d. Anita Killi, Norway, 2003) At 13 minutes, The Hedge of Thorns contains more visual poetry and overwhelming sadness than most feature-length dramas. Gorgeously animated in a languid stop-motion style not unlike (and, for what it tries to achieve, superior to) Fantastic Mr. Fox's, Killi's film is about two neighbors, a young boy and girl who play together almost every day in the snowy plains between their homes. When World War II encroaches upon their world, though, tensions rise and a protective barrier is built between the two families (the titular hedge of thorns), separating boy and girl until years later, when the war has ended. That the ending is an impassioned tearjerker is not all that surprising, considering that The Hedge of Thorns is an unabashed antiwar movie (made during the initial years of the War in Iraq). What is surprising is how effective and genuine its sentiment is, achieving profoundness through understatement and simplicity rather than moralistic showboating. Several movies in the past have tried to decry war by filtering it through the innocent worldview of children—for example, René Clément's Forbidden Games (1952) and Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988). The latter is actually a perfect point of comparison for Killi's short: both masterpieces of animation and pathos, The Hedge of Thorns and Grave of the Fireflies are able to evoke astonishing pain and loss through their young characters. Most war movies—even (or especially) those which claim to be antiwar—in fact have clear-cut heroes and villains, portray combat in a viscerally exciting way, and concentrate more on the valor of soldiers than on the violence and loss experienced by civilians. The Hedge of Thorns, with bitter succinctness, makes us feel the destruction, physical and otherwise, that war instills.
I saw The Hedge of Thorns in 2003 at a film festival for children held in and around Milwaukee, where I was volunteering as a projectionist and subtitle-reader (the festival unfortunately no longer exists). Seeing the movie for the first time (while simultaneously reading its subtitles to the audience) surrounded by young children and their families who were obviously as affected as I was, I realized how often critics and filmmakers underestimate the intelligence and sensitivity of young audiences. I thoroughly enjoy the insanity and creativity of many children's movies, but I wish more of them attempted the sincere message of peace and loss that The Hedge of Thorns accomplishes (as do Up and Wall-E), and took place in a world that had some bearing on our own reality. I've tried to find Killi's film since then online or through the production company, but—in a fate common to many international short films—it now seems unavailable except on DVD through the Norwegian Film Institute. However, a representative clip from the film can be viewed online here:
http://www.trollfilm.no/new/eng_torne_1.html
19. Café Lumière (d. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan/Taiwan, 2005) J. Hoberman calls Café Lumière “exquisitely understated,” which itself seems like an understatement. Directed by the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien—whose movies are distinguished by an incredibly tranquil (some would simply say boring) pace, a typically stationary camera that observes scenes play out, a melancholy love for his homeland and ambivalent observation of its transformation into modernity, and incredibly subtle social commentary that depends upon at least some prior knowledge of Taiwanese culture, politics, and history—Café Lumière is decidedly for those viewers who like to disappear into the movies they watch, get lost in them, spend time with the images they offer to us. Patience is required, but once you let yourself sink into the movie's beauty, boredom is the last thing on your mind.Café Lumière is Hou's homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, commissioned in honor of Ozu's 100th birthday. The two directors are akin in many ways—Ozu shares many of the stylistic and thematic preoccupations I mentioned above, although he integrated them a bit more evenly into a studio style and a narrative format—but Hou is able to attempt an even more languid, reverential style that Ozu, as a contract director, was not exactly free to indulge in (even if he had wanted to). Of course, too, Café Lumière observes the technological and sociocultural shifts of modern capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, which Ozu (who passed away in 1963) was unable to do. (One imagines, though, that if Ozu had lived to see the new millennium and made films about the transformation, the result may have been pretty close to Café Lumière—see Ozu's masterful 1959 satire Good Morning as an example of his bemused interest in modern technology.)
The main character is Yoko, a Japanese woman who has just returned to Tokyo after a stay in Taiwan. We observe her wandering throughout the city, snapping pictures and conducting research for a project about twentieth-century Chinese composer Jiang Wenye, whose music acts as the movie's soundtrack. This being said, though, Café Lumière doesn't exactly have a plot. We observe characters eating meals and watching the metropolis around them, sometimes in frustration, sometimes in awe. The whole movie can be summarized as a testament to observation, to listening as well as watching: while the patient cinematography and the title's homage to one of the founders of cinema point to a fascination with sight, a minor character—a bookstore clerk named Hajime who pines for Yoko and who spends his free time recording the sounds of Tokyo for his computer-created artwork—equally respects the act of listening.
Hajime's use of his computer to create art, his digital recorder to capture sounds, and a camcorder to capture images—not to mention Yoko's use of numerous technological apparatuses to conduct her research, or Hou's beautiful, almost-abstract compositions of Tokyo's train system—indicate Café Lumière's multifaceted view of modern technology. It's a standby of modern arthouse cinema to portray technology as a deadening force, suppressing communication and alienating urban populations. While this theme is somewhat understandable in recent Southeast Asian cinema, given the turbulent sociocultural shifts that have been experienced in that region over the last several decades, the reality seems more shaded than that: technology can also connect people, can create beauty and art, can forge a more intimate connection between individuals and cities rather than a pronounced distance. Hou is sensitive to this tricky relationship between people, their cities, and their technologies; Café Lumière is enraptured by these relationships as well as, sometimes, dismayed by them.
I consider myself a city-lover—I can't imagine myself settling down outside of a metropolis—so to see the beauty and joy of modern city life so calmly captured by Hou (along with its frustrations and difficulties) is a wonder to behold. Like the aforementioned Into Great Silence, Café Lumière will leave you giddy about something as simple as walking around outside when the movie is over—taking in sights and sounds which suddenly seem so quietly majestic.
18. Golden Door (d. Emanuele Crialese, Italy/France, 2007) Deftly interweaving somber realism and fantastical surrealism, Golden Door turns its dual filmmaking styles into a metaphor for the immense migration of Europeans to the United States in the early twentieth century. The commingling of cold reality with bewitching superstition represents the rift between the Old World and the New: the movie opens with a visit to a witch in the Italian countryside convinced that a young pregnant woman must be exorcised of demonic snakes within her belly, but this scene could not be more different than those set at Ellis Island later in the film, in which immigrants new to this country are detained by an infinite amount of red tape and modern bureaucracy.Golden Door ably evokes the claustrophobia, grime, disappointment, and heartache of the voyage to America, but impressively, it also conveys the hope, expectation, and electrifying uncertainty that accompanied it. The sporadic dream sequences that arise out of the characters' fraught states of mind are not just brightly-colored distractions meant to alleviate the film's bleakness; suggesting the extent to which desperate individuals rely upon their own fantasies for hope, such scenes in Golden Door underline the drastic gap between the American myth of open arms for all foreign peoples (represented by Lady Liberty herself) and the actual experience that such immigrants underwent.
For all of this, and considering how unsettling are the movie's scenes of foreigners being randomly married off to American suitors, Golden Door contains a great deal of joy and sweetness. This is primarily thanks to a tenuous central relationship between an Italian immigrant named Amato and a bourgeois woman played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who, having just been jilted by her lover, depends upon Amato for admittance into the United States. Their rapport together is not the stuff of romantic comedy—meaning there's no grandiose union at the end of the movie—but it's enough to make Golden Door a movie of bewitching contradictions: real and dreamlike, sweet and somber.
17. Crimson Gold (d. Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2004) Jafar Panahi is one of modern cinema's most potent realists; here, working from a script by the equally great Abbas Kiarostami, he creates an unforgettable movie not only about class stratification in modern Iran, but about impoverished people living throughout the world, eager to change their lives for the better but often given scant opportunity to do so. Essentially, the movie is about the robbery of a jewelry store, but to label it such is to ignore what it's really concerned with. The narrative structure—presumably conceived by Kiarostami and perfectly constructed by Panahi—makes us aware of the inevitability of the movie's events before they happen, then circuitously doubles back and shows us the circumstances out of which this tragedy arose. Wielding a slow, quietly-unfolding aesthetic familiar from Kiarostami's filmmaking, Crimson Gold gains tremendous power from the lead performance of Hussein Emadeddin, playing a Tehran pizza delivery driver. Large, stocky, often blank-faced, Hussein (the character and the actor) seems to coast through the movie, impelled by external forces but rarely taking any initiative of his own—that is, at least, until the desperate moments that open and close the film. We realize by the end that Hussein is not actually blankly wandering through a world that does not affect him; he is observing and internalizing, and ultimately decides that the only action he can take is a foolish and drastic one.
Panahi's previous movie, The Circle (2001—also excellent), is about the plight of single women in modern Iran, and their inability to play a decisive role in their society. Crimson Gold also takes a committed sociocultural stance, but its theme is based on class, not gender. Both the female characters in The Circle and the impoverished characters in Crimson Gold are given few (almost no) opportunities by a society that favors the wealthy and the politically powerful. The subdued passion with which Panahi delivers these critiques of his home country helps to explain the censorship woes and visa difficulties with which Panahi and his movies have been faced in Iran, and reminds us that cinema is still one of the most powerful forms of artistic activism available to us.
16. In the Mood for Love (d. Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong/France, 2001) It boggles the mind how a movie can be so blissful and so sad at once, although that difficult emotional state represents perfectly the bittersweet passion of an irresistible love affair. Among the most gorgeous movies ever made, In the Mood for Love soars on atmosphere, showing us how this love affair unfolds in oblique, suggestive, yet no less fiery images. Set in 1960s Hong Kong (the setting of Wong's own childhood), the movie concerns Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, who are renting adjacent apartments in a crowded building. Eventually deducing that their spouses are themselves having an affair, the two characters, compelled together by proximity as well as sadness and loneliness, can hardly avoid the intense passion into which they are thrown. If 2046 (this movie's pseudo-sequel) is a boldly fractured and kaleidoscopic fantasy of doomed love, In the Mood for Love begins to step towards that hyperbolic world, though its erotic melancholy is still rooted in reality (albeit a color-soaked reality that only the cinema can evoke). That the movie is essentially about love, lust, and passion, although the main characters never touch and their relationship is never consummated onscreen, points towards the burning intensity of this movie—enraptured by its images, you feel something close to lust yourself. And by the time the movie's astonishingly somber and aching ending rolls around, you feel like a love of your own has just trickled through your grasp. A movie to watch on sweetly lonely nights, In the Mood for Love achieves an extreme of both sadness and desire that is sublime to behold—it's a movie that you live through.
15. Tropical Malady (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Germany/Italy, 2005) Speaking of lust: Tropical Malady is a movie about ogling, about looks filled with desire and desperation, about how passion and the romantic chase can literally transform us. The first half of the movie concerns a tenuous relationship between a dreamy soldier named Keng and a shy farmboy named Tong. This first half is itself dreamy and romantic, patiently observing Keng and Tong as they flirt coyly, venture into a cave supposedly haunted by spirits, hold hands and discuss mixtapes they've made for each other (with dialogue that sweetly and gently parodies the cliches of romantic melodramas), and enjoy streetside singers in Bangkok. Halfway through the movie, though, in typical Weerasethakul fashion, the movie stutters and reverses itself. The second half appears to take place in an alternate but parallel universe: in the same agrarian setting around Tong's farm, villagers have been plagued by a tiger who has been ridding them of their livestock. Taking the shape of a traditional folktale, this second half posits that the tiger is in fact a mythical beast inhabited by the spirit of a man (who may or may not be Tong himself). A soldier ventures into the forest to track and trap the tiger—the soldier may or may not be Keng. Even if the storyline does not transition quite so conveniently between its two halves, it is undeniable that the latter half, like the first, is about an erotic conquest, about the power of looking between two beings—a theme that culminates in a burning exchange of stares between the soldier and the immense tiger beast, lit by a hypnotic jungle moonlight, staring down Keng, the camera, and the audience.
Truly unlike practically any other movie ever made (except, maybe, by other movies by its director—Blissfully Yours in particular), Tropical Malady soars along on its own dream logic, and by the end of it somehow makes a perfect dreamy sense. The movie and its shimmering jungle scenery seem themselves to be inhabited by spirits—how else to explain its majestic beauty?
14. The Circle (d. Jafar Panahi, Iran/Italy/Switzerland, 2001) If Crimson Gold delivers its passionate social commentary to us with aching restraint—revealing to us only gradually how dismayed it is with Iran's current cultural state of affairs—The Circle condemns its homeland's gender politics with unabashed, vitriolic anger. Little surprise that the movie was banned in Iran, though Panahi's film in fact reminds us that reacting with justifiable anger to the injustice of one's home country is maybe the most committed form of patriotism imaginable—caring so much about your country that you'll do whatever it takes to change it for the better.The circle of the title is a vicious cycle by which single women in Iran are perpetually oppressed. The beginning of the film shows two women in a figurative prison, attempting to travel to a distant city where they might find work and shelter but unable to do so because they lack the proper identification or the companionship of male relatives. The end of the film features a group of women in a literal prison, with Panahi's appropriately restrictive aesthetic showing us a woman speaking desperately through a sliding panel of the prison door—to an unlistening guard, and to the overwhelmed audience. Doubtlessly a hopeless ending, Panahi leaves the audience in the same plight as the besieged women in his film—trapped by a cruel cycle of heartless codes and strictures, with no chance of escaping an arbitrarily demeaning social system.
Elsewhere on this list, I've commended movies that offer bleak storylines, themes, and commentaries while balancing out that bleakness with humor, beauty, levity, and so forth. No such luck with The Circle—although it does offer some moments of humor, the overall effect is unremittingly oppressive. This is appropriate, as is the movie's complete lack of ambiguity. Its artfulness lies in its directness, and its beauty lies in its impassioned humanism. Not just a movie that tries to affect its audience (though it undoubtedly tries to do this as well), The Circle is out to change the world.
13. Cowards Bend the Knee (d. Guy Maddin, Canada, 2004) The plot keywords on Cowards Bend the Knee's IMDB page include “wax museum,” “abortionist,” “hairstylist,” “murder,” “sex,” “urination,” “shower room,” “ghost,” and “ice hockey.” Yeah, that sounds about right, but such a checklist still can't get close to the bewildering effect that Maddin's film achieves. In idiosyncratic fashion, Maddin wields a stuttering faux-silent-movie aesthetic (black-and-white 16mm film with flashes of faded color, emphatic intertitles, a jagged Eisenstein-meets-MTV editing style, photographic effects like smears and lenses that blur the images into a half-remembered cinematic dream) and a surreal Freudian storyline to simultaneously embrace and obliterate the conventions of film history. Cowards Bend the Knee may be Maddin's most aggressively weird movie yet; somehow, though, it's also sweet at times, and is often mouth-gapingly hilarious. The movie begins with a drop of semen splurted onto a microscope slide; inside this unlikeliest and gooiest of settings, the rest of the movie ostensibly takes place. (The first image we see when we zoom microscopically in to the specimen slide? A group of ice hockey players—the Winnipeg Maroons—immersed in a tense game.) The story veers wildly to include the Maroons' star player, his pregnant girlfriend, a blonde vixen who runs a hair-salon-slash-back-alley-abortion-clinic, the blonde's voluptuous daughter, incest, amputation, and other unpleasantries.
If you wanted to, you could pull a plethora of sadomasochistic, psychosexual themes from this phantasmagoria; indeed, within all of the madness, certain central motifs (the knotty relationships of families, expected gendered behavior from males and females) do become apparent. But Cowards Bend the Knee is better experienced, I think, as a madcap, frenzied trip through the skeleton-strewn closets of cinematic history, and/or as an addictive hallucination transplanted directly from Maddin's own singular psyche. Endlessly watchable, even among all the torridness (at only sixty minutes, I watched it twice in a row the first time I rented it), Cowards Bend the Knee is the most invigorating hour you'll ever spend within a sperm sample.
12. Spirited Away (d. Hiyao Miyazaki, Japan, 2002) My favorite of the Japanese master's movies, Spirited Away (like many of Miyazaki's films) is simultaneously an astonishing journey into pure imagination and a powerful analogy for the alienation and confusion of youth and aging. It opens with ten-year-old Chihiro and her family moving to a new town; they stumble upon a mysterious tunnel hidden deep in the woods (as her father tries to forge a shortcut), and venture through it to a fantasy world that is at once threatening and enchanting.The marvelous wonders of this movie are in its details. The massive baby that acts as the villainess's henchman of sorts; the dustball creatures that befriend Chihiro as they labor away in the bowels of the village's bathhouse; the faceless slime monster who regurgitates gold and is repulsed by, yet thrives on, the greed of those around him—these are fantasies that turn Spirited Away into the stuff of legend, the cinematic version of a folktale you could recite to your children as they fall asleep.
Miyazaki's subtle but pressing concerns with preserving our environment are reiterated (by this same sludge monster, a river spirit who throws up all of the discarded waste we've tossed into our bodies of water), as is the gentle beauty of his animation, among the most beautiful and complex work ever completed for a hand-drawn animated movie. It's an auteurist triumph, then, but it's also simply a world you can dive into—it will scare and transfix you in sublime ways.
11. Wall-E (d. Andrew Stanton, USA, 2008) There's never been another American animated movie like Wall-E. Its emotional sincerity, visual splendor, social commentary, and narrative structure are almost unparalleled in the history of American animation. The only other movie that's come close in a few of these categories is Pixar's Up, although it's still impossible for me to determine which of the two movies had me bawling more uninhibitedly.That Wall-E is a gorgeous triumph of computer animation almost goes without saying, although it bears repeating that the sequences set in the dark reaches of space are among the most beautiful ever completed for any American movie. (The “dancing” demonstration between Wall-E and Eve as the Captain learns of earth's way of life in the control room is basically miraculous.) What's so unexpected about Wall-E is its heartfelt passion for preserving our planet, and its alarm at the fact that practically every sign points to our rapid destruction of it. No dreary, condescending eco-lecture, Wall-E and its makers cherish life and remind us of the immense tragedy of destroying it. That some could accuse the film of condescending to its audience by supplying us with a liberal talking point (as some conservative critics did) is unfathomable; the movie may be about protecting our environment, but this is a humanistic and optimistic concern, not a political one. Others claimed that an animated Disney movie is no place for a movie about ecological peril and changing our way of life—as though “children's” movies had to be divorced from pressing issues currently facing us in reality. (Such a reaction is far more condescending towards young audiences than Wall-E ever could be.)
But enough about its social themes and its interest in reality; Wall-E is truly memorable as one of the most emotional and romantic movies made in the United States over the last several decades. It should be a sobering lesson to live-action filmmakers that it takes two robots to remind us of the sublime tenderness that movies can offer us. Comparisons of Wall-E to the silent comedies of Chaplin and Keaton are apt, not only because of the movie's dialogue-free first act (in which Wall-E attempts to woo Eve and experiences repeated pratfalls) but also because of the sincere relationship evoked between the two characters throughout the rest of the film. No dialogue is needed; we observe their interaction and it seems we know what love looks like.
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