Films of 2009
Thursday, December 31, 2009 | 1 Comments
Best of 2009
I've now seen about 40 of the point-earning films from the 2009 IndieWire Critics Survey, which seems a reasonable enough number. I'm not even sure how IndieWire qualifies a film as a 2009 release, although given the appearance of Sokurov's The Sun (which I saw in September 2005!), I assume they go by the one-week theatrical release rule. I've taken the coward's route and included eleven films because I just couldn't decide which one to leave off. All in all, I'd say it was a good but far-from-great year. As one guide, none of these films made my Favorite Films of the Decade list, and I can't imagine any of them will gain greatly in stature over time. (Although after a single recent viewing of The Headless Woman, I wouldn't be surprised if I later come to the realization that it's Martel's masterpiece. Still thinking on that one.)
- 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) [ more ]
- Revanche (Gotz Spielmann) [ more ]
- Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung) [ more ]
- Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso) [ more ]
- The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
- Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
- Birdsong (Albert Serra) [ more ]
- Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
- Duplicity (Tony Gilroy)
- Two Lovers (James Gray)
- Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
Favorite New Films I Saw in 2009
Distribution rules be damned! I saw about 80 films this year that qualify under this category, which is a catch-all: If I saw a recently-produced film in 2009, and it was my first opportunity to see it, then it qualifies. So I'm working from a deep pool here: shorts and feature-length films; narratives, essays, documentaries, and the avant-garde; DVDs, festival films, theatrical releases, museum installations, and, in one case, a pre-release screener. From this vantage, 2009 looks a hell of a lot better.
- Phantoms of Nabua / A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul) [ more ]
- Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat) [ more ]
- Face (Tsai Ming-liang) [ more ]
- To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
- Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
- Lucky Life (Lee Isaac Chung)
- The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
- Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes)
- Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
- In Comparison (Harun Farocki)
Favorite Discoveries of 2009
Were it not for my "one film per director" rule, this list would likely consist of nine John Ford films and Jeanne Dielman. Instituting the rule makes it more representative of my movie-watching year, though. Along with the thirteen Ford films I saw, I also went through a brief '80s phase last spring, when I made a couple great discoveries, and there were a couple hold-overs from last year's trip through the Borzage and Murnau DVD releases.
- 7th Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927)
- City Girl (F. W. Murnau, 1930)
- Emergency Kisses (Philippe Garrel, 1989)
- Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980) [ more ]
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
- The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940)
- Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980) [ more ]
- The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)
- Tren de Sombras (Jose Luis Guerin, 1997) [ more ]
- Voyage en deuce (Michel Deville, 1980) [ more ]
Favorite Films of the Decade
Sunday, December 20, 2009 | 1 Comments
I'll follow Tom Hall's lead and call this my "Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade." Consider it a snapshot of my taste right now. Conspicuously absent are several filmmakers who made great films this decade but who, for whatever reasons -- my age? critical backlash? the weather? -- didn't make the final cut. Check back in another ten years and things will likely look much different.
The ground rules: Feature-length films of any genre. One film per director, although I don't think the list would look too much different without that qualification (Denis, Jia, and Costa would probably get in another film or two). I went by theatrical release date, mostly because there are quite a few 2009 festival releases I haven't yet seen, and that just doesn't seem quite fair.
Warning: A few of the clips below contain spoilers. Don't blame me if your curiosity gets the best of you.
1. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 2000)
Quite possibly my favorite film of any decade, Beau Travail constitutes a genre unto itself. Equal parts literary adaptation (Melville's Billy Budd), contemporary dance piece, psychological character study, formalist experiment, postcolonial analysis, and music video, it is also on my short list of Truly Beautiful Things.
2. The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)
The format they established in The Promise and Rosetta -- hand-held cameras, natural lighting, the famous "back of the head" shot, and moral questioning along the lines of Dostoevsky and Bresson -- made the Dardenne brothers the most influential art-house filmmakers of the decade (judging by the slew of imitators that land in festival lineups, at least). The Son is the one I keep returning to, though. Olivier Gourmet as a wounded carpenter: the conceit is six feet thick with metaphorical implications, most of them valid and compelling, but it's his body -- the sheer, muscular physicality of it -- that drives the film's momentum.
3. Still Life / Dong (Jia Zhang-ke, 2006)
Jia is, for lack of a better word, the most "important" filmmaker of the decade, I think. Each of the seven features he made documents globalization by examining some small corner of China. Watching his movies is like watching helplessly as a museum is looted. There's an urgency to his project, as if he's reluctant to put his camera down for too long or risk losing his tenuous grasp on a nation's culture and history and humanity. I consider Still Life and Dong, made and released simultaneously, a diptych -- each benefits from the juxtaposition. Together, they're Jia's best, most complex, and most compelling work.
4. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
Any of the Vanda Trilogy films could fill this spot. But Colossal Youth was the first I saw and, so, it left the deepest impression. I remember thinking, only 30 minutes in, "Well, I didn't know the cinema could be this." Like several other directors on this list (Denis, Jia, Godard, Lynch, Varda, Zahedi), Costa is also significant for his contributions to the evolution of digital filmmaking, which is surely the real story of film in the first decade of the 21st century. More here.
5. What Time is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
My favorite Tsai films, What Time is it There? and Face, probably won't be the ones he's best remembered for (my money's on the more sexually transgressive The River and The Wayward Cloud), but his treatment of grief -- the strange tangle of pain and desire, shame and beauty -- is what he does best. I watched parts of Time over and over again in 2004, after my mother- and father-in-law died suddenly, and years later it still brings me great comfort. More here.
6. Syndromes and a Century (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
After being frustrated by a first screening of Claire Denis's L'Intrus, I was offered a useful insight by my friend Girish: "The line separating narrative film from the avant-garde is pretty arbitrary, really." Apitchatpong has erased the line completely, and God bless him for it. I mean, just watch this clip. Not for all tastes, obviously, but there's a magic and beauty in those few minutes that many great filmmakers will fail to achieve in a lifetime.
7. Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2004)
Hou's films were more groundbreaking in the '80s and more ambitious in the '90s, but he has perfected his craft and refined his taste to such a degree that I find him almost impossible to write about or discuss: he makes these perfect little objects full of soul and wonder. That Cafe Lumiere was inspired by Ozu never interested me much, except that it gave Hou an excuse to deal with a father/daughter relationship. The trailer I've linked to is almost ruined by the music, but it includes my favorite moment from the film: the shot of the father picking out the potatoes from his meal and giving them to Yoko.
8. In Praise of Love (Jean-luc Godard, 2001)
Suddenly it occurs to me that a good number of the films on my list are obsessed with history, memory, power, and image-making, which I'll blame, in part, on my having spent the first half of this decade in a graduate English program. But it's a reasonable obsession, right? Certainly it's nothing new for Godard, whose first feature of the 21st century borrows techniques from the films he made 40 years earlier (I love equally the first-person interviews in Masculine/Feminine and In Praise of Love). Also, this film ranks high on my list simply because I got to see it projected on 35mm at a multiplex in Knoxville, Tennessee.
9. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
For the longest time, Waking Life seemed destined to fill the Linklater spot on my list, but after rewatching it and Before Sunset recently, I realized that the latter does all of the things I most love about the former -- it delights in human curiosity, engages with life, and champions the creative imagination -- but it does so in a form (the romance, generally speaking) that tends to degrade those qualities in its characters. It's quite a feat.
10. RR (James Benning, 2007)
At the start of the decade I could have counted on one hand the number of avant-garde films I'd seen. Now, it would take, like, fifteen or twenty hands, which is a start, I guess. More here.
11. Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
There Will Be Blood is finding its way onto many Best of the 00s lists, but Glazer gets my vote for Kubrick Heir Apparent. More here.
12. In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, 2007)
I can't decide if I should feel guilty for loving this film as much as I do. Formally, it's as perfectly controlled as any movie I can name. Guerin has made a little cinematic fugue here, discovering new rhythms and dissonances as he returns to and transforms images -- hair blowing in the wind, a hand sketching faces, a man with a limp trying to sell a lighter, two people walking. But, really, this movie is about the pleasures of watching, and parts of it (the cafe sequence, "Heart of Glass," the final five minutes) just make me smile like an idiot.
13. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)
I spent the majority of my spare time between 2001-2006: 1. researching and occasionally writing a doctoral dissertation about the American Left and the Cold War, 2. swallowing bile. I'm sympathetic to the complaints leveled at this film, but I have watched The Fog of War at least a dozen times, and it's the only Iraq/Bush-era documentary that comes close to representing my deeply-felt ambivalence about the "American Century" that came to an end ten years ago. I was pleased to find this clip on YouTube because it's my favorite section of the film. You see McNamara's prevarications, his pride and shame, but most of all you see the ironies contained in that poisoned word, "efficiency." Did Hannah Arendt ever write about spreadsheets?
14. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
I wonder if other cinephiles of my generation have had this experience? After discovering Blue Velvet as an undergrad and declaring Lynch The Greatest Director Ever (cough, cough), I matured, turned my back on him, and declared him That Overrated Director Who Is Loved Only By Pot-Smoking Undergrads. So, in 2007 I rewatched all of his films, ending with Inland Empire, and concluded that he deserves neither title. Rather, he is just exceptionally gifted at making a particular type of film. I'll stand by my comments from two years ago: "My Damascus experience came midway through the first season of Twin Peaks, when I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed by the deep sorrow that pervades the Laura Palmer story. While watching Inland Empire again last night, it occurred to me that one reason I'm completely unconvinced by all of the critical praise being heaped on the Coens' treatment of evil and violence in No Country for Old Men is because violence -- real, non-metaphoric violence -- is always sorrowful and tragic. Lynch seems to have been born with a peculiar sensitivity to that fact, and has spent his career perfecting the formal means of articulating it."
15. When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, 2008)
It's easy to forget that, for the better part of a century, the experience of cinema was created by projected light, fast-moving gears, and strips of celluloid. And then you see something like When It Was Blue, and you hear two projectors running behind you, and you're occasionally blinded by the brightness of the bulbs, and you ask yourself, "What am I seeing? How did she get that image on that frame of film?" More here.
16. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
Last year I saw, within just a few days of each other, Agnes Varda and Terrence Davies introduce and discuss their latest films, The Beaches of Agnes and Of Time and the City, both of which are autobiographical essay films. And I'm still struck by the juxtaposition: Davies the bitter nostalgist versus Varda the curious anthropologist. Varda is my hero. At 80, she's as alive to the wonder and potential (and the sorrows and ironies) of the world now as she was 55 years ago, when she first picked up a camera. The Gleaners and I makes me want to be a better man.
17. In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)
In 2000, Caveh shot at least a minute of video a day and then assembled it into this remarkable film. Ironically, there are no clips from this YouTube-anticipating project on YouTube, so, instead, I've embedded a clip from The World is a Classroom, his short contribution to the post-9/11 collection, Underground Zero. More here.
18. Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
Life on Earth (1998) is my favorite of Sissako's films, but Bamako was the first I saw and it left me teary-eyed and speechless. The court scenes are didactic and on-the-nose -- deliberately so -- but it's all that life going on around the court that makes the film work. It all culminates in one of my favorite scenes of the decade, as an elderly man sing-speaks his testimony to the court, an act of astonishing beauty that also exposes the absurdity of the proceedings.
19. Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007)
This is the only film by Klotz I've seen, and, frankly, I'm surprised to find it on my list. I'd anticipated including a Haneke film instead (Code Unknown, probably, or maybe Cache), but Heartbeat Detector is the film I found myself most eager to revisit. The first of two Mathieu Amalric performances to round out the top 20. More here.
20. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
I considered cheating here by naming two films, this one and Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach (2006). While their styles and ambitions are quite different, I've decided I like Desplechin and Hong for basically the same reason: their movies constantly surprise me in small but significant ways. On the Kings and Queen DVD, Desplechin recounts a story about Truffaut's frustration with a screenwriter. "How do you expect me to shoot a four-minute scene that expresses a single idea?" he asked. "I want every minute of film to express four ideas!" Desplechin has taken that as his motto, and you can see the results in each of his films, which are consistently messy, ambiguous, and haunted -- Kings and Queen especially so. I mean, just try to summarize Louis Jennsens's (Maurice Garrel) deathbed letter to Nora (Emmanuelle Devos). Watching a scene like that, I actively envy the imagination of its creators.
And ten more (alphabetized) that just missed the cut
Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005)
Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000) [ more ]
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)
Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina, 2006)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuaron, 2004) [ more ]
I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)
TIFF '09 Wrap-Up
Monday, September 28, 2009 | 0 Comments
To carry on the tradition from past years (2006, 2007, 2008), here's a breakdown of the feature-length films I saw at TIFF, more or less in order of preference.
Masterpieces
Will likely end up on my short list of favorite films of the decade:
- none
Stand Outs
Will be among my favorite films of the year:
- Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
- To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
- Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
- Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
- Wild Grass (Alain Resnair)
- Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
- Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
- In Comparison (Harun Farocki)
Strong Recommendations
- Carcasses (Denis Côté)
- The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
- White Material (Claire Denis)
- Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
- Independencia (Raya Martin)
- Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)
- To the Sea (Pedro González-Rubio)
Solid Films
- Le Père de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)
- Colony (Carter Gunn & Ross McDonnell)
- Les Derniers Jours Du Monde (Arnaud Larrieu & Jean-Marie Larrieu)
- Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani)
- Karaoke (Chris Chong Chan Fui)
- My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog)
- La Pivellina (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)
- Women Without Men
- Defendor (Peter Stebbings)
- Antichrist (Tars von Trier)
- L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea)
- Petropolis (Peter Mettler)
- Hiroshima (Pablo Stoll)
- Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Duds and Misfires
- At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
- Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton)
- The Man Beyond the Bridge (Laxmikant Shetgaonkar)
- Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
- Moloch Tropical (Raoul Peck)
- The Wind Journeys (Ciro Guerra)
- Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)
TIFF Day 3
Friday, September 25, 2009 | 0 Comments
Antichrist (Tars von Trier)
When asked at TIFF what I thought of Antichrist, I got in the habit of saying, "Well, it's a testament to von Trier's talent that he can make such an unremarkable film of such remarkable imagination and control." It's a genre film, right? A psychological horror movie with a few unexpected plot twists? I enjoyed it on that level, and I was amused, also, by its ostentatious wanderings into psychoanalysis-bashing, the history of gynocide, and bizarro-world astronomy, all of which beg pedantic interpretation. But I can't seem to muster much energy for it myself. The most compelling defense of the film I've read is from Victor Morton, who sees it as a "raw production of von Trier’s inner depressive state." There's a strange and irresistible grandeur to von Trier's images -- the way he warps nature with a slow pan of his camera, for example, or that signature shot of arms reaching through the knotted roots of a tree. The actual experience of watching the film is more interesting and complicated than any of its rabbit-hole provocations. Having never suffered through it myself, I can't speak to whether or not Antichrist accurately evokes, a la classic Surrealism, the true terrors and violence of depression (regrettably, I can vouch for Punch-Drunk Love's anxiety attacks), but the film certainly has an uncommon tenor that I found both exciting (as a cinephile) and despairing.
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Southeast Asian film programmer Raymond Phathanavirangoon dedicated the screening of Independencia to Alexis and Nika, which almost surely deepened my affection for it. Shot entirely on soundstages and with obviously-painted backdrops, the film alludes to a curious collection of precedents -- early cinema, melodrama, newsreels, popular theater, the avant-garde (particularly Brakhage's film scratching), and who knows how many Filipino influences that were lost on me. But I was most often reminded of wax figure museum displays of the sort one finds at national parks and tourist-friendly historic districts. Decades-old, dust-covered mannequins costumed as heroic leaders and noble savages, they recite, again and again and again, some story about our shared history, told from whatever enlightened perspective was en vogue at the moment of the display's dedication. I'm not sure how much credit to give the politics of Independencia's content, but its form strikes me as being something quite original and potent (despite the many idle comparisons to Guy Maddin I keep reading), as if the wax figures were suddenly coming to life and confronting museum patrons who are in search of simple and comforting self-justifications.
Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat)
There's much to like in Women Without Men, visual artist Shirin Neshat's first feature. Like another, better TIFF film, João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man, it's a work of magical realism that imagines an Edenic space where oppressive social and political forces are kept at bay -- temporarily, at least. I have a weakness for stories like this one, which concerns four women: 30-something Munis, who lives at home with her domineering brother and spends her days crouched beside the console radio, hungry for news of the coup that would soon install the Shah; her friend Mahdokht, who lives in disgrace after being raped; Zarin, an anorexic-looking prostitute (played by Orsolya Tóth from Kornél Mundruczó's Delta); and Farrokhlaqa, the bored, cultured wife of a wealthy officer. Each is drawn to a small orchard outside of Tehran, an idealized sanctuary where they are allowed a brief respite from their suffering, and where, under Farrokhlaqa's influence, they have parties, discuss art, and sing secular songs. Neshat has a nice eye for composition, although much of the film feels familiar, like we've seen these shots and met these women in other Iranian films. The shock of what is new in Women Without Men, the female nudity and frank treatment of sexuality, seemed less radical when I learned afterwards that Neshat has spent her adult life in the States and that she had made her film outside of Iran and with some non-Iranian actresses.
Le Père de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Hansen-Løve didn't make it to Toronto, but her producer introduced the film by saying it was loosely inspired by a once-prominent member of the French film industry. It was only at the midpoint of the film, after the main character Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) puts a bullet through his brain, that I realized he was standing in for Humbert Balsan, who committed suicide in 2005 after producing nearly 70 films, including Claire Denis's L'Intrus, Lars von Trier's Manderlay, and Bela Tarr's The Man from London. Generally, I enjoy films that break in two, but in the case of Le Père de mes enfants, the two halves are a bit out of balance, owing mostly to de Lencquesaing's charismatic performance. Perhaps it's inevitable that a film about the death of a good husband and father will feel his loss: there's a narrative and emotional void in the second act that Hansen-Løve can't quite overcome, despite another impressive turn from Alice de Lencquesaing (also memorable in a similar role in Assayas's Summer Hours). All the best parts of Le Père de mes enfants (and they're very good) are the small gestures -- the way Grégoire kisses his younger daughter's hand when she reaches for him from the back seat of the car or the scene in which he patiently explains the history of the ancient church they tour together. Liquidating the foundered production company, which is the main focus of the second half of the film, seems so irrelevant by comparison. And maybe that's the point.
Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
I hope, eventually, to write at length about this film, one of the best I saw at the festival. In the meantime, read Michael Sicinski's essay, "The Unbroken Path: Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May." It's fantastic.
TIFF Day 2
Monday, September 21, 2009 | 0 Comments
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Given the generally low opinion of Like You Know It All among many Hong fans, and given my enjoyment of it, I've concluded I just can't tell the good ones from the bad. This one has everything I enjoy about his work: a self-absorbed, unintentionally cruel, and likable protagonist; a complicated web of sexual entanglements; a calculated yet surprising structure built upon doublings and distorted echoes; and gallons of booze (and arm wrestling!). Here, Kim Tae-woo plays a young filmmaker who wanders through the scenes of his life with little concern for the often-significant consequences of his behavior. He's more of a catalyst than a person in the film, drifting into the isolated homes of friends only long enough to unsettle the happy chemistry of their lives. I like Hong's women. They're independent, sexually liberated, and as confused as the men, which is what makes the final scene in Like You Know It All (and its echo in A Woman on the Beach) so tender and melancholy. Hong's men expect the women in their lives to grant them access to some secret insight, answers to life's grand questions, and the film is structured in a way that portends epiphanies. But they never come. Not in so many words, at least.
Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
Those at Cannes who were lukewarm on Face were just plain wrong. Along with being a Tsai greatest hits package -- the busted pipes, musical numbers, and obsessive behaviors -- and a sequel of sorts to What Time is it There?, Face also includes five or six scenes that are among the most visually arresting and heartbreaking he's ever filmed. (Does the photo above make more sense if I tell you Laetitia Casta is Salome? How many artists have reimagined the beheading of John the Baptist over the centuries, and how many filmmakers in 2009 would be able to find new textures in the story?) Perhaps this is obvious, but while watching Face I was struck by how much of Tsai's cinema can be boiled down to simple action. Laetitia Casta taping a window dark or struggling to carry her cumbersome wardrobe up a ladder. Fanny Ardant moving a mounted deer head or applying makeup to Jean-Pierre Leaud's battered face. And, most moving of all, Chen Shiang-chyi and Yang Kuei-Mei loading and unloading a freezer. It's elemental. A rich human comedy. I watched Face again on the last day of the fest and am tempted to call it my new favorite Tsai film.
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)
La Pivellina fits a certain mold popular these days at international film festivals. At my most cynical, or when beaten down by a particularly thoughtless film, I think of it as "poverty tourism" -- an opportunity for upper- and middle-class liberals like myself to safely experience the "gripping, real lives" of those less fortunate. La Pivellina fits the mold, but much to its credit, it avoids a fatal flaw common in the genre: the crisis, which usually involves a rape (see below), a beating, or the theft of the hero's cherished something or other. (Oh, St. De Sica, look at what thou hath wraught.) Instead, Covi and Frimmel give us three characters who are genuinely kind and generous. In the opening moments of the film, Patty (Patrizia Gerardi), an aging carnie, finds an abandoned toddler with a note from its mother promising to return for the child as soon as possible. Patty walks home with the little girl, and the rest of the film follows her, her husband Walter (Walter Saabel), and their 13-year-old neighbor Tairo (Tairo Caroli) for a week, as they bond with baby Asia. La Pivellina is filled with nice little moments, wonderfully performed -- I especially like a scene in which Walter teaches Tairo how to box -- but I wish the film had stronger structural bones. The episodes begin by the second hour to feel too disconnected, which leads to a predictably unresolved and, in my opinion, somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. Still, a nice character study of grace.
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
Fish Tank is from the more vicious school of poverty tourism that takes its cues from Hardy, Norris, and Crane (and Von Trier?), the sadists of Naturalism who aren't satisfied until their heroines have been suitably degraded, preferably under the shadows of Stonehenge. I saw Fish Tank despite my frustrations with Arnold's first film, Red Road, chalking up her lapses in taste there to her involvement with the "Advance Party concept," which put certain rules and restrictions on the production. The fact is, I'll see Arnold's next film, too, because I really like the way she shoots, especially night scenes, in which characters are back-lit with yellows and reds. Fish Tank is a portrait of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a 15-year-old with no friends (apparently), a drunken whore of a mother, and an adorably foul-mouthed little sister. Mia's lonely, horny, and mature beyond her years, so when her mother brings home a new man (Michael Fassbender, awesome as usual), they strike up a friendship. And then he drinks a little and rapes her, although the film is designed to make it all seem perfectly consensual. Lovely, even. (Cameron Bailey describes it as a "taboo-breaking love story.") The final act of the film features characters who barely resemble those we get to know in the first 90 minutes. Arnold has great promise as a director, but the writing needs work. Bonus points to her, though, for digging out Bobby Womack's cover of "California Dreaming."
Darren Hughes is a web designer and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee.