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www.camerastylo.com
by Derek Lam
1. Eloge de l'amour (In Praise of Love)
The year's greatest love story. Consider it a characteristic, self-reflexive Godardian riposte to Titanic: a true historical romance whose subject is as much history as it is love. At once an intellectual's mournful, regret-laden backwards glance at an affair inachevée and a passionate cri de coeur against postmodernism's essentially ahistorical (and for Godard, immoral) impulse to appropriate, decontextualize, and commodify experience, Eloge is itself a stunning act of resistance, as gorgeous and moving a film as any Godard has ever made.
2. What Time Is It There?
Pace Jim Hoberman, The River remains Tsai's masterpiece to date, but What Time finds the director fruitfully exploring uncharted territory, most notably in introducing a character whose social class distinguishes her from the milieu Tsai has hitherto restricted himself to. And full marks for surviving the international co-pro with his rigorous yet aleatory style intact.
3. La Captive
Screened first at the Walter Reade's Rendez-vous, then brought back briefly at BAM for its Best Undistributed Films series, Chantal Akerman's intense, hypnotic update of Proust struck me as a more charged experience than Wong Kar-Wai's relatively benign, gently wistful In the Mood for Love.
4. I'm Going Home
It's a commentary on the sad state of affairs in the U.S. market for international cinema that so exquisite and accessible a film - with a recognizable star, no less (and a cameo by John Malkovich) - can have difficulty attracting a distributor. No one I know who has seen I'm Going Home has had anything but praise for Oliveira's gem of a film.
5. Fat Girl
Jack Valenti will be singing the praises of Godard, in French, the day Hollywood makes a film as unflinchingly honest about teenage sexuality, from as uncompromising a female perspective, as Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl. Let the Americans eat pie. Fat Girl, along with the locally popular Les mauvaises frequentations, caught the dark side of adolescent sexuality in a way that will forever elude Hollywood.
6. Mulholland Drive
What more to add to the chorus of approval? A triumphant return-to-form for David Lynch, in which his trademark obsessions come across not so much as mere mannerisms but as integral elements of a truly horrifying yet surreally comic nightmare.
7. The Royal Tenenbaums
On second viewing it did seem to me a little less substantial and "lived" than Rushmore, but there's no doubting Anderson's stylistic assurance and completely original voice. The pleasure is in the details: there's enchantment in every nook and cranny of Anderson's precisely imagined, fairy-tale world where, hearts willing, wrongs can always be righted, fences mended, and wounds healed. The vision is pleasurably innocent and child-like; the question is whether it will mature and deepen and admit of pain and darker feelings only glimpsed at here.
8. Mysterious Object at Noon
A curate's egg of a film: a heady Thai conflation of surrealist experiment and documentary filmmaking. Completed with the Hubert Bals fund at the Rotterdam Film Festival, this innovative project - dedicated at once to representing localized culture and avant-garde formal experimentation - is the sort of independent production we should be seeing more of from young filmmakers all over the world. And yet in America, what do we have? Project Greenlight.
9. Kandahar
Okay, it's a mess, but for all its rough-and-ready didacticism, it has a doc-like authenticity (particularly in its Red Cross camp scenes) and sheer sense of outrage that put to shame the humanism-by-rote and sub-Griffith sentimentality of Majid Majidi's crowd-pleasing Baran.
10. Little Otik
There are moments in Svankmajer's films that make you pause and wonder whether the director isn't a little too eager to lay out, capitalize, italicize, and once again reiterate his preoccupation with appetite - sexual, gastronomic, human, or otherwise. Little Otik takes awhile to heat up, and there are moments where the Freudian humor is surely too heavy-handed, but once the porridge starts boiling over, we know we're in prime Svankmajer territory.
Best Performance: Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive; Michel Piccoli, I'm Going Home
Best Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, The Royal Tenenbaums
Best Cinematography: Mark Lee Ping-Bin, The Vertical Ray of the Sun
Best Sound: Hafner/Monheim/Musy, Eloge de l'amour; Du Tuu-Chih, What Time Is It There?
Best Director: David Lynch, Mulholland Drive
Honorable Mention:
Faat-Kine, The Legend of Rita, Cure
Ousmane Sembene's new film was nothing to set the world alight, but on its own terms, Faat-Kine is a modest, welcome achievement - a genial, sensible film devoid of rhetoric that manages to be populist without ever insulting the intelligence of its audience. Likewise, The Legend of Rita might not be a masterpiece, but for a relatively mainstream effort, it's as smart, stylish, and serious as should be expected. Finally, is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure a genre film of unusual inventiveness, or more? The only other Kurosawa title I've seen so far is his '99 NYFF entry, License to Live, and there's something to be said about the spooky sense of spiritual unease that runs through both. To put things into perspective one might compare Kurosawa with another Japanese genre-bender who had a good year in New York, Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive, Audition). Miike seems to me a much lesser talent. Next to his anarchic, tub-thumping attempts at subversion, Kurosawa appears ever more the master, his unnervingly quiet films surreptitiously working their way on the viewer, choosing to insinuate rather than to harangue.
Best of the Retros
Face Value (JVDK), Il Posto (Olmi), I Am Twenty (Khustiev)
And my picks for the year's retro discoveries: from the MoMA retrospective of Johan van der Keuken's documentary and avant-garde work, the at once abstract and humane ode to the global village, the sensuously humanist Face Value; Il Posto, from the Walter Reade's Olmi tribute, as great a film on the workplace and adolescence as any I've seen; and finally, an encore from last year's Soviet Cinema in the Sixties series, as it played 2001 at BAM before returning to Russia, Marlen Khutsiev's groundbreaking, New Wave urban youth drama, I Am Twenty. If this were a French film with stars like Belmondo or Léaud, it would be textbook viewing. But since it's Russian and three hours long, it's not available on video and screened only once every leap year. I saw it twice on the same day when it played at BAM, and my enthusiasm for it remains undiminished.
Links:
Camera-Stylo's Ten Best Films of 2000
Village Voice's Take 3 Poll of the Best Films of 2001
All written material (c) 2002 by Derek Lam