AKA a gallery of late-style fantasia. This year, long established auteurs triumphed, simply producing more fruitful work than their younger counterparts. As we inevitably head to the finish line for many of these directors' careers, it feels more like a blessing than anything to see our increasingly turbulent world observed through the lens of those who've gazed upon it longer than most of us have been alive.
10) AGATHE, SOLANGE ET MOI
(Dir. Louise NARBONI)
Resurrecting old ghosts and connecting the passages of previous lives lived to contextualize the present moment and give hint to future lives ahead. Narboni's home videos interspersed with her postured chronicle of Agathe in the present day cleverly chart an artistic maturation for both over time, paying loving tribute to the experience of life as symbiotic to abstract pursuit. Just beautiful.
9) GHOSTLIGHT
(Dir. Alex THOMPSON, Kelly O'SULLIVAN)
Exactly the form of contemporary American drama I've been mostly starved of since Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea. A loaded morsel of regional specificity in constant modulation of its spectrum of tones, inscribing mannered realism with splashes of abstraction that help shape the realer parts of the fiction. Thompson & O' Sullivan's distribution of revelatory info surrounding the tragedy of the Muellers notably seems to always coincide with moments of raised emotional urgency, which never fails to effectively make one fully feel their weight due to their revealing always being accompanied by raw expressions of outburst or catharsis.
8) JUROR NO. 2
(Dir. Clint EASTWOOD)
The epochal bursting of a lifetime of socially conservative and structurally libertarian views once coagulated now made fluid with prominent streaks of empathetic liberalism. Clint's anti-government sentiment is now obfuscated; seemingly reconciling with the existential consideration that 'good' government may be achieved with the willing participation of 'good' individuals.
7) HARD TRUTHS
(Dir. Mike LEIGH)
Leigh sketches the cacophony of relational crises around Jean-Baptiste's Pansy as too obfuscated for us to ever properly assess or grasp, making her severe state of anguish all the more upsetting in their varied implications. The abrupt shift towards silence after the explosive & talky first half, slyly hinting at the shared pain being so isolated and so metastasized that hardly any speech could effectively render it out further anymore worked like a vacuum to my soul. Potential for amends reduced to a moot state because what plagues Pansy and her family has simply become too entrenched.
6) THE TASTE OF THINGS
(Dir. TRÂŃ Anh Hùng)
Simply astonishing. Tran organizes the drama rather succinctly amidst his clear preoccupation for the film's sensorial pleasures - and rightly so. The food is rendered as delectable as can be, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, DP Jonathan Ricquebourg's work here has to easily rank amongst the most striking of digital imagery I've seen done yet with the nocturnal scene by the lake doing things with digital no other film of the same format has even remotely approached. Surface textures are well defined and colored with a wide distribution of rich tones. The slight overexposure in background elements looks quite possibly the best I've ever seen it.
5) CLOSE YOUR EYES
(Dir. Victor ERICE)
The eyes. They've seen a lot.
4) COUP DE CHANCE
(Dir. Woody ALLEN)
Some truly masterful economy on display here - both in Allen's direction from scene to scene & the precision with which each of his actors lock in to their roles in the fiction. A glossier spin on Chabrol-ian mischief with some inward critique of the unchecked spoils of the upper class, which I reckon Allen may know a thing or two about.
If nothing else, I can just watch Lou de Laâge roam around Storaro's lit sceneries forever.
3) THE ROOM NEXT DOOR
(Dir. Pedro ALMODOVAR)
Astonishing praxis of classical poetics imbued into a pool of formal ellipsis. A hall of mirrors for both the physical likeness & persona of Tilda Swinton, tracing a line from her origins in the avant-garde to her dedicated work stints to her present self, refracting moments of a life lived to be memorialized and released back into the ether for eternity. In art, there is no death as long as the witnesses (us) to what came before continue to see more days.
2) TROIS AMIES
(Dir. Emmanuel MOURET)
Tracing amorous rectification and allowing its characters to feel, grieve & discover through their own paths and at their own individual paces. Mouret presents an Allen-esque quotidian exploit and surprises midway with an emotionally honest pivot towards transcendence that reveals the film's true heart, observing its ensemble with an omnipresent empathy freed of any clever pretense. A film pulsating with love and unburdened by the melancholic spontaneity of its romantic longing.
1) LAST SUMMER
(Dir. Catherine BREILLAT)
Breillat presents a concatenation of spontaneous bursts unvarnished from edification, cloying to the sheer euphoria of momentary sexual release as "worth it" in the face of mounting consequences and systematic punishment as the organic aftermath of the taboo relationship. Pushing beyond the straits of forbidden love, is the high that comes from taking control of it. Drucker's Anne, always seemingly christened with the protective veil of her high status and blonde hair, is sketched with a cryptic aura in constant question of the extents of her calculations. In pursuit of her classically androgynous French step son Theo (played by Samuel Kircher, who evokes an uncanny throwback to Björn Andrésen and is later brilliant in his poisoned state of trauma), the genius of Breillat's game lies in the duplicitous quandaries of Anne's actions. Do her destructive acts come more from pure carnal instinct or perverse rarefied desire? And to what extent does the processing of her own power influence her doing?
