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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
A year of erotic masterpieces and exhilarating amorality proves good movies still get made, even if they don't always get seen.
Dec 23, 2002 | The operative word in any year-end best list should be "best." And in any year, that can't be limited to an arbitrary number. Ten may be standard, but it's meaningless in discerning the quality of the year in movies. Some years there are barely 10 films to fill out a list, and in the dismal spring and early summer of 2002 it looked as if it was going to be that kind of a year. But with no explanation that I can think of, it has actually turned out to be a pretty good year for movies.
As always, good movies continue -- somehow -- to get made. The bad news is that they don't get seen. Audiences didn't turn out for two of the most daring and original American movies of the year, "Femme Fatale" and "Punch-Drunk Love." A good movie not on my list, Steven Soderbergh's rigorous, risky and relentlessly personal "Solaris" -- a disturbing meditation on memory as emotional fascism -- is dying in theaters. Two charming entertainments, "Possession" and "CQ," were sabotaged by knuckleheaded reviews. The shaky state of foreign film distribution meant that the highly praised Taiwanese movie "What Time Is It There?" was gone from theaters in two weeks.
Paramount Classics did everything it could to sabotage Clare Peploe's blissful film of the Marivaux play "Triumph of Love." And as I write this, Lynne Ramsay's beautiful and utterly original "Morvern Callar" is about to open in New York with hardly any advance publicity. (The people I've alerted to it haven't even heard of it.) This is not an atmosphere in which advocacy should be parsimonious. So, sick of culling things down and leaving off worthy movies that any 10-best list entails, I offer up this list of the 16 movies that deserve to be called this year's best.
1) "Y Tu Mamá También" Alfonso Cuarón's road movie is one of the handful of great erotic films ever, and the fact that it turned out to be successful was among the most heartening of the year's developments. If freedom in the movies is the refusal to fear risk, then Cuarón has made one of the freest movies of all time, and certainly one of the most joyous. Primal forces who haven't surrendered to respectability, the movie's two sweet-tempered horny heroes, played by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, walk around in a pot haze with rockets in their pockets. And as the "older" woman they take on their road trip, Maribel Verdú is the movie's carnal Madonna.
2) "What Time Is It There?" Magic. This film from the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang has been described by the critic Howard Hampton as Buster Keaton inhabiting the soul of Antonioni. Tsai's perpetual lead, Lee Keng-Sheng, plays a street vendor who sells a watch to a Taiwanese girl (the ineffable Chen Shiang-Chyi) heading off to Paris. Filled with longing, he spends the rest of the movie setting all the clocks in Taipei to Paris time. A boy-never-meets-girl story that cuts between two continents, "What Time Is It There?" is a deadpan, nearly silent comedy about the connections between people who remain separate. And, as in the great silent comedies, the jokes coalesce out of the mundane. What makes Tsai's film so moving is the director's determination to find poetry in an urban world that has seemingly banished it.
3) "Femme Fatale" As a visual storyteller Brian De Palma is without equal in contemporary moviemaking. Inevitably, his films are dismissed by critics and audiences who have become too lazy to process visual information. (Here's a decoder: When a critic describes a De Palma film as "incoherent" it usually means he was too lazy to follow it.) Like a plush seat at the swankiest peep show in town, "Femme Fatale" allows us to luxuriate in De Palma's chic, sleek erotic trickery. He signals us to every trick he is playing on us and, because movies are about wanting to be fooled, we are only too happy to be taken in. De Palma has always loathed the sentimental manipulations of movies, and in "Femme Fatale" he turns the misogyny of film noir on its head, giving us a corrupt heroine and making us acknowledge that we love her for being so bad. As De Palma's heroine, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos gives a sexy, gleeful performance that leaves the sexual timidity of more established actresses in the dust. No movie this year offered the sensual pleasure that this sex-fantasy thriller did. No American movie was better.
4) "Morvern Callar" The combination of kitchen-sink realism and visionary poetry that failed to coalesce in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's acclaimed debut "Ratcatcher" takes flight in this adaptation of Alan Warner's seemingly unadaptable novel. Samantha Morton, playing a supermarket clerk living in a bleak Scottish port, continues as the most astonishing actress working in movies. The suicide of her boyfriend on Christmas day turns out to be the potential key to her freedom. Descending into the derangement of grief but suspending any moral judgment in order to immerse us in her heroine's psyche, Ramsay moves the picture to the shifting rhythms of somber, luxuriant solitude and freedom that is no less compelling because it holds a knife's edge of danger. "Morvern Callar" works on you like a drug, its mood still transfixing you long after you leave the theater.
5) "Far From Heaven" Todd Haynes' homage to the '50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk is far from an Imitation of Strife. Supple where Sirk's films are brittle, flowing where Sirk is schematic, Haynes' suburban melodrama avoids every trap of archness and camp. By the end the film has turned into a kiss goodbye for the entire genre. To imagine any future life for the film's three protagonists, played by Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert, you have to imagine not just why American society at the end of the '50s had to change, but why American movies did, too.
