Jan. 04, 2012 - Issue #846: Year in review

A year in reels

A pair of Vue's film critics offer their picks for the year's best films

How do we make sense of the past? What paths does memory take en route to truth, trauma or transcendence? What patterns emerge? Many of my favourite films of 2011, listed below in no particular order (though the first is first for a reason), respond to this question by contrasting the unfathomably vast with the infinitesimal, deep history with willful amnesia, the beginning and end of everything with the harrowing loss of a single life. (Or a single mind.) 

Nostalgia for the Light
The central location of Patricio Guzmán's essay film is Chile's Atacama Desert, a place where mothers and widows of the disappeared scour the desert floor for traces of loved ones while astronomers search the outer reaches of the universe for ancient signs of life. Like many of Guzmán's earlier films (The Battle of Chile, Salvador Allende), the film interrogates his home country's selective erasure of unresolved past horrors while waxing nostalgic about its collective fascination with the wonders of the night sky. One of several selections on this list that never appeared on Edmonton's big screens (but is now available for viewing on various small screens), Nostalgia For the Light is eloquent, inventive, rigorous, tender, curious and immensely humane.

The Tree of Life
Wildly ambitious, Terrence Malick's latest (a perfect complement to Guzmán's) pushes his large canvas/whispered epiphany esthetic into ever more rippling, impression-flecked terrain, juxtaposing scattered moments of revelation, joy and pain from the childhoods of three Texan boys with nothing less than the origins of life on Earth. The final, mystical sequence is somewhat dubious, but I wouldn't excise a second of The Tree of Life if it meant dismantling any crucial element in this rare marriage of the spectacular with the personal. 

Take Shelter
On that note, Jeff Nichol's follow-up to Shotgun Stories, his impressive debut, follows the mental collapse of an Ohio labourer and family man (embodied with singular unease by Michael Shannon) whose knowledge of his possible schizophrenia has him no less convinced that he may be a prophet of the End Times. Set against an all-too recognizable contemporary landscape of economic worries and catastrophic weather, Take Shelter speaks to our moment while remaining a character study.

Carlos
"Weapons," our titular terrorist seductively tells us, "are an extension of my body." Revolution turns this guy on—or is it simply the promise of spectacular violence undertaken with whatever sort of justification? Oliver Assayas' wildly ambitious, action-oriented, 333-minute biopic starring the tireless and valiant Venezuelan-born actor Édgar Ramírez, was a fascinating double-study of the abstraction of criminal celebrity and the palpability of a human body trying to merge with a mythical idea of itself.

White Material, Of Gods and Men
Claire Denis' return to Cameroon finds the formidable Isabelle Huppert refusing to abandon her coffee plantation despite the escalation of a surrounding civil war. Xavier Beauvois' latest chronicles the final days of a group of Trappist monks who resolve to remain in Algeria during the outbreak of its 1996 civil war. Both films convey a sophisticated sense of the foggy ethics of post-colonial relations and of one's sense of belonging somewhere; both use music to achieve sublime moments of lyricism. White Material is insightful, savage and sinisterly seductive, though one might argue that it too features an awkward ending, which transitions rather abruptly into the mythic, dragging its heroine along with it.

Le Havre
The intermingling of Europeans and Africans is also very much at the heart of Aki Kaurismäki's latest, which, set in the titular French port city, finds an aging shoeshiner helping a boy with no documents find a safe place to rest and safe passage to London, where he hopes to be reunited with family members. Le Havre is beautifully crafted, with great narrative economy, dry wit, masterful compositions and numerous affectionate homages to French cinema to balance its dour diagnosis of French xenophobia. 

Meek's Cutoff
Fear of the Other is also key to Kelly Reichardt's most recent work. It's a western, albeit one giving iconoclastic attention to the everyday chores and struggles of homesteaders lost in 1860s Oregon. The film's handful of desperate families are led astray by a charismatic frontiersman and are ultimately confronted with the possibility that the dreaded Indian captive they're travelling with may be their sole hope for survival. Blending classicism with quietude, Meek's Cutoff ensures Reichardt's place within the finest American filmmakers of cinema's second century.

Certified Copy
Another filmmaker in transition: Abbas Kiarostami strays from his native Iran to make a film with a French star (Juliette Binoche, brilliant) and an English opera singer in Italy; the result is very much a Kiarostami film, riddled with a compelling balance of ambiguity and complex emotional/philosophical truths. An author on tour in Tuscany takes a drive with an antique store owner. They discuss the notion of how we place value on the real thing versus the fake, or originals versus copies, of how we invest things with authenticity, and soon we're unsure about the reality of the relationship we're watching develop. Did they just meet, or are they in fact an estranged couple? All that matters is the immense resonance of their ongoing questions, grievances and longings.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Werner Herzog's documentary takes us into France's Chauvet Cave and offers glimpses of the modern artistic soul already alive and well in Stone Age man. Herzog's focus remains firmly on people—souls, if you will—who provide us with illuminating, strange and diverse testaments to the irrepressible drive to survive and create. Not a bad way to finish off a tumultuous year.

Josef Braun // josef@vueweekly.com

 

In 2011, film's best turned inwards. Such slow-boiling considerations could've come off as philosophical treatises titled "Of ... ", but grandly cinematic little things—spectral mood, rigorous framing, hypnotic tracking—made these 11 quietly profound.

 

OF MEN AND GOD

Of Gods and Men
Faith and endurance amid extremism. Xavier Beauvois' tender restraint—especially in the eerily merciful finale—elevates this film, about terrorists threatening eight French monks in an Algerian town, to one of profound introspection in the face of incomprehensible violence.

The Tree of Life
A wonder for its sense of childhood—when rebelliousness, yearning and curiosity are animalistic. Such curiosity's reflected in the searching, moving camera, with cosmic wandering and wondering rooted in a boy's struggle with his strict father in '50s Texas.


OF ART AND FILM

Certified Copy
A wisp of a romantic comedy doubling as a study of imitation, replication, and the echoing of art in life. In Tuscany, a couple—for a day, or married 15 years?—engage in both a parody of and homage to marriage. This hall of meta-mirrors opens up the bright space of the real world.

Hugo
Cinema's origins as adventure-story. A snowglobe sense of '30s Paris epitomizes how film, through beautiful artifice, preserves a time and space. Gears, sprockets, bodies and dreams hum; Martin Scorsese steams into the spirit of an art imagined by humans but brought to life by machines.
 

OF BOY-TO-MANHOOD

Submarine
A wry, sly pinballing through the self-centredness and arrogant naïvete of 15-year-old Oliver Tate, a hyperarticulate Welsh spin on the French New Wave. Yet an undertow of awkwardness and fearfulness nearly pulls him, and us, into the dark blues of adolescence.

NEDS [Non-Educated Delinquents]
A glare at '70s Glasgow ganglife shadowing one lad, John McGill (Conor McCarron, terrifyingly good). Glints of humour and flashes of surrealism illuminate kitchen-sink darkness. A knife-edge of self-hatred slices through a row-house, little-hope life when schools, the only respite and release, were viciously hierarchical.
 

OF WOMEN

Martha Marcy May Marlene
A gradual, eerie immersion into one woman's post-cult daze and nights. Identity fractures; past and present blur; rituals of abusive sect and repressive bourgeois materialism blear together. The ending is perfectly ambiguous.

Poetry
An aching, lovely late-life refrain. Aged-but-naïve Mija (Yun Jung-hie) takes a class to discover that strange, beautiful force called "poetry" in her life—beset by maid-work, failing health and an awful crime rippling back to her grandson. The moral rightness of the ending's matched by the emotional rightness of Mija's poem, finally written.

Meek's Cutoff
An anti-Western reframing the frontier through two cultural clashes: with women and a Native. The plodding plight of a lost settler party's struggle to find water over the next hill is tightly framed: cracked earth beneath tired feet, wagons lowered by rope down a steep side, beautiful but unrelenting horizons.
 

OF NATURE

Le Quattro Volte
Drolly observes nature cycles, human rituals and seasons changing in Calabria. The human world's shouldered aside by bleating sheep, a shepherd's dog, an immense tree felled and raised for local celebrations, and a charcoal kiln. A sublime poetic-essay.

Project Nim
This doc, ostensibly about a chimp trained in sign-language for a '70s study, exposes academics proving primacy, asserting dominance and rationalizing violence (one excuse: "science is very objective"). Our closest animal relative's still so far away as Nim's made, almost fatally, a mirror for human failings.

UNFORGETTABLE ODDS AND ENDS Werner Herzog's pondering of Paleolithic paintings in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, along with an albino alligator; Whit Stillman's literary-musical-campus comedy Damsels in Distress; Alexander Payne's look at the dirt and mess beneath everyone's idyllic surface in The Descendants; Gore Verbinski's daffy, rollicking Rango; Michael Winterbottom's middle-aged melancomedy The Trip (edited down from the even more brilliant six-part TV series).


OVERLOOKED MUST-SEE

Two-Legged Horse
After screening at 2008 festivals, this never got distribution—easy to see why, since it's so hard to watch ... yet so hard to look away from. Redefining "unflinching," this portrait of a poor boy paid to carry around a wealthy, legless boy is a brutally honest exploration of poverty in wartorn Afghanistan. Its utter disregard for any soft Western gaze at foreign hardship marks an astounding leap forward in social-realist filmmaking. Find it online.

Brian Gibson // Brian@vueweekly.com

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