tenbest2002

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by Derek Lam

September seems a little late for an overview of the ten best films of last year. Nevertheless, many of the best work from 2002 have since come out on DVD in various countries, so those devoted enough to get a multi-region DVD player and hunt the films down on internet mail-order websites will find themselves amply rewarded with some worthwhile repeat viewings. As reports from Cannes have overwhelmingly indicated, 2003 may not be the most vintage of film years. A number of exciting titles in the upcoming NYFF lineup notwithstanding (among them, new films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Tsai Ming-Liang, Lars von Trier, and Gus van Sant), here's to re-viewing the best of 2002!

1. Ten (available on DVD in the UK, soon to be released in France and the US)

There's nothing nostalgic, either in its view of women or its thrillingly present-tense DV, about Kiarostami's lastest, masterful film. The backdrop is contemporary Iran, which has confused those inclined to interpret international cinema as "foreign" films either extolling the charms of the exotic and far-flung or denouncing the ills and trials of those less fortunate than Americans into mistakenly grouping the film with such recent Iranian fare as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman as merely a condemnation of the injustices suffered by women in Islamic society. Not to say that a critique of male chauvinism is absent, but Kiarostami's interest lies somewhere else, and one gains far more from his film by identifying with the protagonists as recognizably like us rather than as specimens of the Other to be pitied for their predicament. The numerous characters of Ten's universe-in-a-car occupy various positions along a wide spectrum of stances on an individual's possible independence from emotional attachment. It's one thing to be imprisoned or suppressed in terms of legal rights, another to be in emotional bondage. As usual, Kiarostami has found interesting people and listened to them carefully. Their views at times reflect ideology, embody character, even provide insight or, in a remarkable, transcendental moment, catharsis. This, then, is philosophical inquiry in the form of journalism, and Kiarostami at his best, the blurring between fiction and documentary prompting an astonished "how did they arrive at truth?" that's surely more magical and state-of-the-art than any CGI imagery.

2. Adaptation (Fox Home Video)

Mental suffering as spectacle: Jonze and Kauffman clearly have little interest in art-house ennui. "Give 'em a good show and make it entertaining" might be Hollywood's approach to any subject, but as before, Jonze-Kaufman lift Tinseltown's credo to giddy, surrealist heights. Their prodigious sense of invention just about prevents Adaptation from crossing the line into a glib assemblage of hip attitudes. Judging from such recent indie successes as Ghost World and the current, grossly overrated American Splendor, it has become fashionable to deflate the creative artist into a dyspeptic, unattractive loser whose self-deprecation and humiliations are so extreme as to border on the pathological. This, surely, is the postmodern riposte to the modernist enthronement of the heroic, Romantic artist, whose torments and sufferings now provide the fodder for countless, soon-to-be-tiresome masturbation jokes. It may be too much to ask for the reintroduction of mystique in an era of Presidential blowjobs, but surely one misses the attempt at transcendence or profundity in these depictions of creative activity without it being tongue-in-cheek. What can one say? Our pathetic antiheroes today are comic book artists and screenwriters trying to make a buck and vent some steam, hardly the Mishima of a Paul Schrader or Minnelli's Van Gogh.

3. Russian Ark (Wellspring Masterworks Edition)

Nostalgic for life before the revolution, Sokurov's yearning backwards glance at Russia's past sublimely conflates the artistic with the religious in positing the Hermitage as a spiritual sanctuary and mystical time-space continuum that survives even the most brutal of history's ironies. Detractors find Sokurov's politics reactionary and his religiosity sentimental, a case of too much soul, too little mind. Better to appreciate the director's very Russian and post-Soviet sensibility as a valid aesthetic alternative to rationality-based, Western preferences for rigorous logic and spiritual restraint in art. More devotional than analytic, static in their meditative approach towards time rather than developmental, Sokurov's elegies most closely resemble the neo-romantic dirges of such former Eastern Bloc composers as Pärt, Kancheli, and Silvestrov, mourning the loss of an idealized past and luxuriating in textures far removed from the grimy, depressing realities of everyday life today in Ukraine or Georgia. "Russian music makes me break out in hives," complains the French diplomat Custine in Russian Ark, perhaps anticipating the condescension of such well-known, latter-day prejudiced as the Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel ("life is too short for Rachmaninov") or French avant-gardist Pierre Boulez ("Pärt is a waste of time"). Too bad for them: Sokurov's was the most sublime film of 2002, its heartstopping leave-taking a twilight-of-an-era ball to rival Visconti's, and made to look all the more resplendent in Wellspring's gorgeous DVD transfer.

4. Springtime in a Small Town (available without subtitles on Chinese VCD; to be released in France by Ocean Films as a deluxe, collector's edition)

Suffused, like Sokurov's film, with a longing for the past (and thus operating as an implicit critique of the present), Tian Zhuangzhuang's remake of Fei Mu's landmark classic is a film of gorgeous, immaculate surfaces, lovingly crafted and breathtakingly delicate. In a year that brought us further evidence of the aesthetic confusion met with by his fellow Fifth Generation directors now trying to compete in an international market beyond the art-house circuit (Chen Kaige with the crass if self-revelatory Together, Zhang Yimou with the disastrously overstuffed Hero), Tian emerges as a wily survivor, in effect belatedly joining the club of colleagues in Taiwan and Hong Kong who have tapped into the contemporary Chinese desire for things retro. Like Tsai Ming-Liang's The Hole and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, Tian's film takes near fetishistic pleasure in evoking its period through gorgeously meticulous costumes and set-design. Feminists might object that the films hanker for a time when female sexuality was suppressed and sublimated rather than openly expressed (Tsai, as usual, is the progressive exception: the gaudy, flamboyantly sexualized fantasy-musical segments of The Hole indeed comment on the repression of female sexual desire that continues today in Chinese society). They have a point, although what filmmakers like Wong and Tian seek from the pre-pill era might also be a culture more allowing of subtleties and nuances, the eloquence of the elided, circumlocuted, or unsaid. Indeed, one need only to look at the in-your-face explicit, pornographic Dog Days to know that the time has long passed since one had to resort to such coy allusions to the naughty deed as "the beast with two backs."

5. Domestic Violence (no DVD release)

Has the American public lost patience with the observational and non-interventionist Wiseman in an age that celebrates the sound-bite driven, "entertaining" approach to documentary epitomized by Michael Moore? I hope not. A truly harrowing experience, Domestic Violence deserves far greater exposure and recognition than it has thus far received.

6. Divine Intervention (available in the UK on DVD)

A far subtler and funnier polemicist than Michael Moore, Elia Suleiman makes despairing comedy of the Palestinian condition, its most stunning coup a brilliant appropriation of Hollywood blockbuster language and F/X that reverses the politics such gimmicks are conventionally deployed for in American cinema.

7. To Be and To Have (Etre et Avoir) (available in France as a collector's edition DVD)

Beautifully observed, Nicolas Philibert's radiant portrait of a utopian classroom has been a huge hit in France and the subject of much critical as well as public discussion. One hopes it gets a comparable degree of attention when it receives its belated release later this month in New York. Although much has been made of the fact that Philibert chose to depict a rural classroom secluded from the myriad problems of contemporary urban education (even Olivier Assayas jumped on the bandwagon in a recent Cinemascope interview complaining about the film's topical irrelevance), that seems to me to miss the point. Clearly, like the latter-day Wiseman, Philibert has chosen to inspire by example and learn from an institution that works rather than scrutinizing the errors of one that fails. His sensitive, unobtrusive filming yields a wealth of privileged moments, not least the many instances of shared wisdom from the saintly teacher, Georges Lopez, whose gentle affection and genuine care for the children he teaches for once truly inspires. It goes almost without saying that we need far more films like this that seek goodness and poetry in common lives and the everyday, if anything to counter the manufactured craze for exploitative reality television, increasingly a warped view of humanity that foregrounds some of its worst attributes.

8. About Schmidt (New Line Home Video)

Among the talented Amerindie filmmakers of his generation, Alexander Payne is the one least prone to hipness and, for that, possibly the most important. Unlike Todd Solondz, he has little scorn for common people and no time for fashionable, adolescent cynicism. His material is meatier, more substantial in its depiction of Americana than Wes Anderson's, embodying the pathos of a place like Omaha rather than the charmed air of New Yorker salons. Modestly ambitious, he does without the grandiose rhetoric of a P.T. Anderson, while the pop cultural saturation Tarantino indulges in he disregards as an irrelevance to the lives of his Midwestern characters. Like Payne himself, his films are plain-spoken and homespun, unvarnished despite the presence of stars. Why aren't there more young filmmakers who would show you the remnants of a meal sitting in the sink or your grandmother's armpit? In our post-Titanic, MTV times, where attractive teenie-boppers seem to be the commodity of choice for the demographic with the most disposable income, Payne's focus on characters whose age and background often mean being sidelined by the commercial mainstream makes him a most valuable asset to film culture. Plus, he's funny, too.

9. Unknown Pleasures (upcoming French DVD edition to include Platform)

Unlike Sokurov or Tian Zhuangzhuang, Jia Zhangke has little use for nostalgia. Like Kiarostami's film, his is one that emphatically takes place in the present, and going beyond Payne's unvarnished naturalism, doubles as documentary by being shot on location with nonprofessional actors (as is the case with Ten and Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days). Unfortunately, I can't say that it is the director's best film to date. Jia reportedly shot it quickly without much preplanning, and signs of haste can be seen in both the film's mix-and-match approach to acting styles (Bin Bin's mother blatantly fails to act while Xiao Wu's pickpocket returns to hungrily chew the scenery) and ideas that are often signposted all too easily (from the U.S. dollar bill circulated with naïve awe to the Coke Bin Bin drinks while the TV reports on Sino-American tensions). Nevertheless the ideas are there, and even if there is a pervading sense that Jia has done all this better before, there remains the fascination of his locations and his relevant inquiry into pop culture's role in mediating the rural periphery's ambivalent relationship with disseminating urban centers. Good thing that the French DVD release of Unknown Pleasures will include his best film, Platform. Will anyone make available on video Xiao Wu or Wang Bing's remarkable, similarly-themed documentary Tie Xi Qu?

10. Dog Days (Hundstage) (UK DVD edition on Metro Tartan)

Months after its U.S. debut last year at MoMA's New Directors/New Films, Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days finally receives its belated theatrical release this summer in New York. Seidl made his name in Austria with a number of documentaries that focused on the not-so-seemly in a country that managed to vote Jörg Haider into power. Good News explored the plight of Asian immigrants in menial jobs ekeing out a living serving the well-to-do in Vienna. Economic disparities between Austria and the neighboring Czech Republic served as the subject of Seidl's first film, while his most disturbing, Animal Love, focused on the unhealthy relationship between owners and their pets even as it painted a portrait of the homeless and mentally disturbed sleeping in the subways beneath Vienna's distinguished cultural landmarks. Out to épater les bourgeois, Seidl, whose predilection for the freakish puts him in the Herzog category, may be considered as providing a rude wakeup call complementary to compatriot Michael Haneke's more upscale, polite acts of subversion. Whereas there's no nudity to be found in Haneke's "theses" on sex and violence, there's plenty of naked bodies and sexual activity on view in Seidl's. Haneke gravitates towards classically elegant physiognomies, Seidl the ugly, old, and wizened. Everything is contained and predetermined in Haneke's control-freak universe; Seidl's thrives on the spontaneous and unpredictable. Accomplished as it is as an unflattering portrait of Vienna's own, ugly suburban sprawl, I don't think that the fictional Dog Days contains ideas as interesting as those to be found in his documentary work. The film is borderline adolescent in its view of pervasive human cruelty and there is only the most feeble attempt to contextualize all the misery on view in any concrete, socio-historical terms. Moreover, like Herzog and acolyte Harmony Korine, Seidl courts charges of voyeurism and exploitation, a point he brazenly foregrounds with his often uncomfortably exhibitionist, frontal tableaux compositions. Nevertheless, his eloquently disturbing films testify to an uncompromising talent that's one to be reckoned with.