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A Very Good Year
Irritating? Check. Pretentious? Oh, you bet. Confused, absurd, a film only a semiotics major would make (and only the most fanatical Dylan geeks will begin to understand, let alone love)? Check, check and check. The most thrilling two hours I spent in a theater this year? Unquestionably. Cate Blanchett is uncanny (and the absurd notion that Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde might be best played by an Australian in drag pays off beautifully), but my favorite moments are the strangest: The Basement Tapes as a frontier town filled with circus performers and outlaws, pitched somewhere between Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and La Strada. 2. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach) The standard line on this film is that it is a well-acted, convincing (and exasperating) portrait of the worst human being this side of Idi Amin. True enough, I suppose, but that neglects the confidence and aggression of Baumbach’s filmmaking: the ruthless speed of the storytelling, the lunging camera, the hazy natural light and a half dozen thorny, constantly surprising supporting performances. 3. RR (James Benning) An ambivalent history of Manifest Destiny told through static shots of trains moving through landscape, each held the length of time it takes for the entire train to enter and then clear the frame. As in all late Benning, the meanings are implicit and elusive: a snatch of Woody Guthrie overheard here, a bit of Biblical verse there. Once the structure becomes clear, much of the film’s considerable pleasure lies in sitting back and waiting, wondering all the while just how long each new train might be. 4. Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso) and “Wood” (David Fenster) The first is a gripping, feral trip through the rain forests of Argentina, played out in real time with a handheld camera, as close to documentary as fiction gets. The latter is a short, speedy documentary on the timber industry, told with precisely framed compositions and the voices of the workers. Fenster’s made a terrific short feature (the absurdist Trona) and the hilarious, indescribable short “Notes For Those Beginning The Discipline of Architecture”; some enterprising producer needs to get him some real money so he can keep pushing further. 5. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian) A 1932 musical probably has no business on a Top Ten list for 2007, but what the hell: only a handful of movies I saw that were actually made this year came close to its wit and loopy invention. Any movie that opens with a musique concrète fanfare that evolves into Maurice Chevalier randily singing his way to work and then ten minutes later uses Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t it Romantic?” as the occasion for the most crazily ingenious (not too mention hilarious) production number this side of The Bandwagon deserves a full-blown theatrical revival. 6. Killer of Sheep and “When it Rains” (Charles Burnett) Once a secret that passed from cineaste to cineaste in hushed tones, now Burnett’s debut feature is available through Netflix, along with his second feature My Brother’s Wedding and several shorts, including the delightful, riffing “When It Rains.” Burnett is often described as a sort of American urban neo-realist, but that’s misleading: Killer of Sheep is an extended, unstable metaphor that is as funny as it is horrible, and which builds slowly to an oblique climax of awesome, offhand emotional power. 7. Ou git votre sourire enfoui? (Pedro Costa) and Histoire(s) du Cinema (Jean-Luc Godard) All due respect to Thom Andersen’s magnificent Los Angeles Plays Itself and Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (not to mention Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy and Hartmut Bitomsky’s Das Kino und der Tod), these are the two best documentaries about cinema I know. The first is a reverent account of the editing of one of the last films completed by Jean-Marie Sraub and the late Danielle Huillet. It’s about work — my favorite scene is a long argument between the filmmakers over the proper placement of a cut: they disagree over one frame (which is to say, 1/24 of a second) and the reasoning is as much moral as aesthetic — and it’s about love: these two dogged old politicos have spent their entire adult lives in a small, smoky room arguing about whether this close-up should end on this frame or that frame with a profound conviction that nothing in the world could matter more. Their devotion to one another is as palpable and as complicated as their devotion to their work; both are profoundly inspiring. 
Godard’s series has been compared to Finnegan’s Wake, and while it’s not quite that impenetrable, the connections and leaps it makes from moment to moment are dizzying, erudite and often so personal as to be private. There is simply nothing to prepare you for the experience of this work — it’s a dense collage of image, text and sound, with multiple layers superimposed and crashing into one another, all adding up to a completely singular vision of not just cinema, but the twentieth century. 8. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa) Kathy Fennessy on Costa: “To quote the NME’s Stuart Maconie, ’Yes, there are people in the world who do not love Scott Walker. But what must their hearts be like?’ Just replace Walker with Costa.” The moral imperative here is odious: if you don’t like Costa’s work, it’s not that you’re bored by the aimlessness and obscurity of his narratives, it’s that you are a bad person. Costa’s defenders are evangelical: they see him not as a mere filmmaker, but as the cinema’s savior, here to jerk us rudely into the 21st century. Caveats up front, then: I couldn’t follow Costa’s magnum opus from scene to scene. The clarity and assured calm of his visual style supports a disregard for conventional storytelling so complete that I’m still not sure, after two viewings, whether or not the film featured flashbacks and if a major character was, in fact, living. Its length is punishing, and I dozed off at least twice. And yet, and yet . . . Costa’s fans are messianic for a reason. There’s a radical melding of styles here, somewhere between neo-realism and formalist rigor, that is wholly unique to Costa. He makes his films with non-actors in a Lisbon slum, and the shooting style suggests an approach pitched exactly between documentary and narrative. His work is worth seeing if only for the smudged, shimmering cinematography, shot with consumer digital cameras and lit with mirrors and sunlight, then blown up to 35mm. His compositions are endlessly surprising and energetic, so that meandering dialogues shot in static long takes grow more fascinating as they drag on. Costa’s insistence on exploring the most marginal figures in society at such length and with such sympathy is bracingly radical. So no, he’s not everything his supporters say he is. Yet. 9. Control (Anton Corbijn) and Once (John Carney) Ian Curtis has always been the grad student’s own rock icon, a depressive epileptic who hung himself just before his terse, perfect summation, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was released. Corbijn managed a film about him that avoids both hagiography and hand-wringing: the emphasis here is on the life lived rather than its significance, and it gets the details just right. Once is about as close to Godard’s description of A Woman is a Woman — a “neo-realist musical” — as we’re likely to ever see. It’s a modest, sweet film that tempts sentimentality at every turn but never succumbs. 10. No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen) and Ratatouille (Brad Bird) It’s a shame that these two excellent films — one a noir potboiler, the other a charming confection about gourmandizing rats — seem so old-fashioned in their commitment to craftsmanship and storytelling, their loving attention to detail. Hollywood should be producing a couple dozen films this good every year. |
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1. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes) 