1. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Probably the most ravishing experience I've ever had in a cinema. I had the huge luck and blessing of meeting Chantal Akerman, the extraordinary person and artist behind No Home Movie (and a monumental filmmaker that in my opinion is in many ways the mother of modern European Cinema), in August at the Locarno Film Festival where she premiered this film. Before the film she stood there on the stage, sad and fragile, barely managing to speak, overwhelmed with emotion, trying to explain to us almost like excusing herself, how much her (relationship with her) mother meant to her. Her mother died a year before and the film captures the last moments of their relationship. It is a film that seems to portray not only the mother and their relationship, but even more the vast emptiness left behind by her death, a void too big to be ever filled again. For Chantal Akerman, "mother" shared the same meaning with "home" and with her mother's disappearance so did the home, thus.. No Home Movie.
Less than 2 months after seeing this film and meeting her, I read the news, heartbroken that Chantal Akerman passed away. Sadly, after meeting her and seeing her film back in August, this news didn't shock me. Walking through the Ambika P3 Gallery in November, staring at the Chantal Akerman Now exhibition, I couldn't get out of my mind the image of that sad and fragile little lady who looked as if she drained all her life and energy in her last film. Looking back now, the ending of No Home Movie seems not only to speak about the emptiness left by a mother's death in the life of an artist, but also about the vast emptiness left in Cinema by the disappearance of the great Chantal Akerman.
2. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
As a huge admirer of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's work (and Taiwanese Cinema in general with emphasis on the "holy trinity": Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang and Edward Yang) I was both extremely excited and extremely worried when I first heard the filmmaker will direct his first wuxia film. While I enjoyed recent (or lets call them modern) wuxia epics, none really went beyond or even matched the class of King Hu's filmography. Many have tried, but in my opinion none have succeeded and knowing the importance of King Hu in Taiwanese Cinema and his huge influence on Taiwanese directors (as we can clearly see in Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn or Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), I wanted to see if Hou Hsiao-Hsien's film would be up to the task. Were my expectations met? They were (more than) surpassed. There are Hu influences in the film and the same obsessiveness towards authenticity is there, but The Assassin's strengths lie in the differences to the point of being at the exact opposite of Hu's wuxia epics. The poetry and mundanity of an every day life of a character in a wuxia film and still keeping underneath all that calm surface, tremendous energy. A truly perfect film for which I cannot personally criticise, but only be hypnotised. A martial arts film without martial arts and to quote the director a love story without love. "Love is always with obstacles, love is not what we imagine. If love was easy, then there would be neither literature nor drama—nor cinema."
Also... some of the best cinematography out there.
3. Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello)
Each year there is a film that takes me completely by surprise and makes me say "I've never seen anything like this before", and I've seen a lot of films. That's exactly how I felt in 2014 at Cannes Film Festival at the premiere of The Tribe. Surrounded by amazing films and amazing filmmakers, there it was, this film by a director I've never heard of before (funnily enough I had seen a short film by him before but it definitely didn't ring the bell at that time) that totally blew me away. Well, in 2015 the same thing happened with Lost and Beautiful (or Bella e perduta), a film by Pietro Marcello, a documentary director whose previous films I've enjoyed before, but did not prepare me for this amazing film. It combines documentary and fiction in a way I've never thought it was possible. I don't wanna say too much about it. Hell, I don't even think I would know how or what. It is such a beautiful and unique film that I think should definitely be experienced first hand. Unfortunately, out of all the films in this list, this will probably be the least advertised or shown anywhere… so I'm urging you, please go and watch this film if by any chance there's a screening around you (which unfortunately is HIGHLY UNLIKELY as the film was even taken out of theatres in its second week in Italy - it's origin country) or if you find it anywhere on the internet (don't worry, the director is known to support this practice, but obviously if there's any other alternative - cinema, dvd, bluray, etc. please support the film)!
- I don't know if I'm allowed to post links here as I would've liked to leave a link to a clip of the film, just to entice people a bit -
4. Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman)
Charlie Kaufman is one of the most interesting modern American filmmakers. He is known mainly as a writer that plays with bizarre ideas, turns conventions upside down and pokes fun at audience in unexpected ways; basically a writer that uses/hides behind gimmicks. Yet Charlie Kaufman is a very unique case because beyond all these gimmicks, he manages to reach and explore the complicated simplicity of human life (despite the intricate nature of his stories). If Charlie Kaufman would be anybody else but Charlie Kaufman, I think he would be just a gimmicky, uninteresting, trying-way-to-hard and full of recycled platitudes filmmaker (I'm looking at you Jonze). Back in 2008, Kaufman had his directorial debut with his absolutely brilliant but flawed Synecdoche, New York, an amazing film held back only by its overzealous editing. But since then, nothing.. just a few rumours here and there. Until Anomalisa came as Charlie Kaufman's second film… and what a beautiful film it is. A normal drama, especially by Kaufman standards, that follows Michael a business writer with a definite and serious ego and commitment problem (and a touch of self indulgence) and his relationship with the world (I don't wanna spoil too much). It is at times a gentle and at times a caustic examination of human connection and the need for it. Lisa and Michael getting to know one another in his hotel room is definitely one of my favourite scenes from any film of last year. Charlie Kaufman once again successfully dived in the mysterious core of what makes us human. An animation that was wittily named "the most human movie of the year".
5. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
It is always difficult to properly pin down Apichatpong's cinema into words. Add to that the divisive reactions to his films and some political controversy and a lot of people might be put off from watching his filmography. However, the serene and mysterious worlds of his films always situated between dream and waking life can lure you and reveal powerful examinations of memory, past, human connections and relativity. So is the case with Cemetery of Splendor, his first proper feature film after his Palme d'Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. But with this new film I think the director reached a point where the calm and stillness blur the line even further (to the point of being indistinguishable) between spirits, deities, mysticism and ordinary reality. The film feels a bit like a follow-up to his 2006 film, Syndromes and a Century. A group of soldiers who are ordered to dig up a building site for the government fall ill with a mysterious sleeping sickness and they start being cared for at a temporary hospital. The film centres on Jenjira, a lonely volunteer at said hospital. Though his films seems to resemble the style of the monumental master-shot made famous by the likes of previously mentioned Hou Hsiou-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Weerasethakul adds a certain openness and gentle serenity that strongly personalises his work. Cemetery of Splendor lacks some of the exhilaration of the director's greatest work, but it is a film of subtle beauty and humble love, humour and powerful but quiet emotion.
6. Carol (Todd Haynes)
When I went into the cinema to watch this film I was expecting Far from Heaven 2, another Douglas Sirk wanna-be 1950s melodrama. I've read The Price of Salt some time ago and it all sort of played out in my head already, seeing how Todd Haynes might steer the ship into that direction. The film however takes the expected style of Douglas Sirk and turns it unto its head, inverting the overbearing Sirkian paradigm. It achieves a sort of naturalism rarely seen in a film about that period, without the intention of being a cinema verite and raw powerhouse. In many ways the film works like a time machine, with a beautiful opening shot of extraordinary transportive quality, doing a spellbinding job in placing the audience into another era (more so than most bullshit attempts I see in modern Hollywood films). The cinematography is beautiful but bold and not at all academic as I initially thought.. and it did surprise me several times. It's Edward Hopper translated to film without overdoing it. Sometimes I felt like I was grabbing and leafing through a Life magazine from the 1950s. Powerful performances, yet restrained from both Blanchett and Mara. And the music, another unexpected and interesting take with a minimalist sound in the style of Philip Glass / Michael Nyman creating a strange and eerie sound for a 1950s
period.
7. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)
In most trailers and posters I've seen, this film is advertised with the fact that it's "based on the acclaimed science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers", clarifying immediately who the Strugatsky brothers are, "authors of the source novel for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker". Leaving aside the fact that if you know Tarkovsky's Stalker you most likely know who the Strugatsky brothers are and if you know the Strugatsky brothers you most likely know that one of their most famous novels is Hard to be a God.. I find it both funny and sad that an art house film from a late art house Russian director (not overly known, but enough) who passed away just before the film was finished needs to be pushed by this kind of faux-advertising to mainly art house viewers. Not to mention how misleading it is as the film is nothing and I mean NOTHING like Tarkovsky's Stalker (just random name-dropping when the film's own director has a huge value and importance in the Russian cinema). It is however one of the most astounding technical and cinematic achievements done in the past few years. It breathes a world like no other film does, but it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. It's a bleak, apocalyptic, chaotic and disorienting film set in an archaic world portrayed by stunning cinematography that embraces the grotesque. It sometimes makes Bela Tarr feel like a light Sunday TV movie (in terms of bleakness, because in terms of artistry very few can match the great and amazing Bela Tarr). Definitely a film not recommended for kids or the faint hearted.
8. El Club (Pablo Larrain)
In the beginning of last year, Pablo Larrain's ("No") most recent film, El Club won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Reminding of Spotlight subject wise, but way different in tone and artistry, the film tells the dark tale of a secret house in a small Chilean beach town where disgraced Catholic priests are hidden from the eyes of the world. It is a film that sometimes breaks through it's dark comedy status and becomes simply a brutal view of well known situations that nobody seem to (want to) do anything about. It's about impunity and the fact that the Church believes its members can only be judged by God. In the words of the director, "it's not that the Church is afraid to admit to these things because of jail or that they'll get into Hell, it only fears the Press". Like an image and mass media paranoia. The director makes clear that he believes Vatican's PR department is right now as important as the Pope himself. Expressing his view that the Catholic Church is an almost impossible to separate attribute of daily life in South America, Pablo Larrain tries to trigger alarms even when the rest tell him it won't change anything. In fact there is a very important and often overlooked character in the film - the silent village, that never says anything as if too embarrassed to get involved. Maybe the silent village is us, and not only do we not ask for justice to be made, but we're not looking or want to know the truth either or think it simply won't change anything.
9. Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti)
I should've switched the last two films (Mia Madre and Right Now Wrong Then) for the sake of symmetry. Since the first film on my list is No Home Movie in which Chantal Akerman captures her mother's last moments and the inability to cope with her loss, here we have Nanni Moretti's last film which focuses on a film director struggling with a shoot while her mother dies in the hospital (Nanni Moretti's own mother died while he was working on Habemus Papam). The dangers of trying to transpose these things in a fiction film are those of self absorption and self indulgence. But Moretti's hand is soft and balanced. His structural principle is not about adding more and more pressure to his character pushing her (and the audience) to her breaking point. The director is a master of deflation, of diversion from your obvious-dramatic path.
10. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang Soo)
Right Now, Wrong Then won last year's big award at the Locarno Film Festival. I personally don't think it deserved it (obviously since I have in this very list a few films that were in the same competition as Hong Sang-soo's last film), but that doesn't mean it isn't a great film… and the director's time to win the big award was long overdue. In many ways his films remind me of Woody Allen's films… and one way is that they are different from each other, but at the same time they're extremely similar. And there's a saying that if you hate one Woody Allen film you most likely will hate all of them (at least this saying worked for Woody Allen's older films), which probably applies very well to Hong Sang-soo's recent filmography. This film is actually so familiar to Hong Sang-soo's opera that sometimes it feels like he plagiarises or satirises himself. Reminding of (actually of all his films, but mostly of) Our Sunhi, the film presents two variations of a romantic outcome between an artist and an acclaimed filmmaker (probably the most generic Hong Sang-soo description ever made). The film reminds me a bit of (a much better version of) Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda.
Special mention: Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro)