10 films of the year

10 films of 2007

If last year was the year of the documentaries for me (The Ister and When the Levees Break both ranking high on my top 10) this year is the year of duos with 3 of 10 films coming from two person teams (No Country, Europa, and Darkness). While I was less than enthusiastic about Battle in Heaven, I'd be very surprised if Silent Light (a story about infidelity in a Mexican Mennonite community that is apparently a revamp of Dreyer's Ordet), when I eventually get to see it, doesn't rank with the best of 2007. The disappointments of the year were Andrey Zyvagintsev's The Banishment, two large steps back from his formidable debut, The Return, and Monte Hellman's short, Stanley's Girlfriend (although a friend, well-versed in the work of Monte Hellman, ranks this with the best of the year, so I wouldn't discourage anyone from checking it out).

Here are my personal favourites:

1. Cristian Nemescu: California Dreamin' (Endless)
A humourous but never infantalizing look at contemporary Eastern European geopolitics (something in itself an accomplishment) and the pervasive effect globalisation via interventionism has on ordinary lives. I reviewed the perfect balance of social commentary with bittersweet humour of this film earlier in the year (on this blog), and my memory of the powerful impact this film had on me still resonates loudly many months after.

2. Paul Greengrass: Bourne Ultimatum
Preempted by two excellent forerunners, Greengrass completes his subversion of machismo with a complete desouvrement of the action-thiller genre via the very foundational aspects of the genre -- the most Hegelian (and thereby greatest) of all action films in virtue of being the exact opposite of the action film.


3. Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet: Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre
Significantly departing from the original specified thematic premise of re-envisioning Rossellini's Europa '51, Straub-Huillet decide to instead focus on the immediacy of the original with their own exploration of the final straw that led to the recent French suburban riots. A meditative yet ugly piece, Straub-Huillet take us to the high-voltage electrical transformer park where two youths met their death at the hands of French police (consequently starting the riots of the summer) and slowly and repeatedly show us the place of death in a manner meant to evoke both anger and mourning.

4. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen: No Country for Old Men
(Almost) every critic has applauded the innovative way the Coens have given us two films and they all predictably prefer the second, more serious, subtler of the two. But the strength of No Country is not in it being two films, but in the very fact that it (specifically in the third act) disallows this binary set-up, entirely excluding the possibility of choosing to simply watch the former, cat-and-mouse thriller version, leaving only the one film. Appropriate to the sense of helplessness -- or at least death of the belief in teleological progress - driven home in this film, this screencap seems to reference Marker's Grin Without a Cat.

5. Jacques Rivette: Ne Touchez Pas La Hache
Previously underwhelmed with this Rivette entry, most likely due to the unfair expectations of wanting to see Rivette at his most experimental, after sitting with me for awhile -- and in the meantime reading not Balzac, but Marquez's tale of sexual tension, Love in the time of Cholera - I came to appreciate the rich detail and the decidedly prissy caution of the characters, all of which contributed to a charmingly funny tale of unsatisfying lives lived adjudicating desire.

6. Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne: Dans l'Obscurité (Darkness)
In this short for Chacun son cinéma the Dardennes offer their homage to Bresson, but in their characteristic Levinasian manner, evidenced by their phenomenology of the ethical call of the face and the violence of focusing on/describing (objectifying) the parts of the body. This shift of relation to violence and then back to relation, ad infinitum, is seen here to never be anticipated (we don't know what the child is doing or why) and always only seen after the fact.

7. Anton Corbijn: Control
The autistic, cold look at Ian Curtis's life excels in focus and in delivering a tightly-woven film that presents to every fan exactly what they already know. Never, for a second, is there an exploration of Thatcherism, the underlying factors that might have contributed to an epidemic of apathy in the youth, Joy Division's lasting legacy, nor a concrete answer to the question posed by the final act of suicide. Corbijn does not make Curtis into a saint, excusable in his actions, nor even likeable. Instead we are offered a story that affords us (as close as is possible) that confused, unilluminated coldness of 1980.

8. Tony Gilroy: Michael Clayton
This is as close as we are likely to get to Hitchcock nowadays. It is hardly surprising that the mind behind Michael Clayton is the same man behind the Bourne series who, once again, takes the structure of the thriller, ups the standard level of intensity, literacy, and intelligent social criticism, and ends up with something much more.


9. Judd Apatow: Knocked Up
Far better than its overrated brother, Superbad, Knocked Up is a believable and heartwarming comedy. Its crudeness never lends itself to the depravity and nihilism of many contemporary comedies and, instead, it opts to be one of the most humane and personal films of the year. A major departure from the stock characters of most comedies, Knocked Up offers us real people who we can feel for and laugh with.

10. David Fincher: Zodiac
In many ways Zodiac feels like a filmic version of HBO's The Wire (itself a television show of filmic proportions): we are led into another world -- no, an ultra-specialized allegorical slice of our world -- that comes to represent our word in its entirety, a world that can hardly carry itself under its own weight of endless facts and prematurely-ending hunting paths, from which, underneath, escapes a pieced-together narrative, (a) life. This film, one we might dare to call simple or minimalistic, sure goes a long way in attempting to shed light on what we might (overzealously?) call the human condition.