Best of 2014: Cinema

Few years in recent memory have felt as lousy as 2014. I fear that I might make such a claim every year, but in looking back, it's been a while since I've struggled to put together ten films from a given year that I could call "the ten best films of the year" or even "my top 10," if I'm trying to keep things more subjective. While cinema seemed to stand still, I saw far more impressive work on television this year, as TV continues to "up its game" on nearly all fronts (well, maybe not CBS). HBO's The Comeback and Olive Kitteridge, Comedy Central's Broad City, and Amazon Prime's Transparent all stood taller than any of the new films I saw this past year—a claim my snobby, cinema purist 21-year-old self would scoffed at if he heard me say it.

This year, I noticed critics and audiences grabbing hold of a bunch of films whose flaws (or lack of charisma) tended to outweigh the strengths. From impressive feats like Boyhood to above-average sci-fi actioners like Snowpiercer to avant-garde critical darlings like Under the Skin to standard, moderately spooky horror yarns like The Babadook, so few films managed to shake me in the ways my top 5 of 2013 did—Stranger by the Lake, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Top of the Lake (which I would have disqualified from the list if I had known it would be returning for a second series), Bastards, and Spring Breakers. For at least those five, I had zero reservations singing my praise about them.

With each of the 2014 films I've chosen (some of which are festival leftovers from 2013 that had a U.S. theatrical run during this calendar year), there's a hesitation I feel in each one. I was impressed on different levels by them all, or I wouldn't have made this list, but something's still missing. In an attempt to focus on the strengths of the films I've listed over the weaknesses, I've decided to leave the #1 slot blank—possibly to be filled at a later date, or perhaps to remain as a reminder of how lackluster of a year 2014 was for film. I'll be posting a couple runners-up and a music list at a later date. So, at last for 2014, here are my 9 favorite films, an honorable mention, 9 runners-up, and the 2 films I truly hated. Click here to read the posts in descending order. NOTE: The "Runners-Up" section is for the best of the year, not the worst. Just to clarify.


1.
2. Force majeure (Turist). Ruben Östlund. Sweden/France/Norway.
3. Ida. Paweł Pawlikowski. Poland/Denmark/France/UK.
4. Xenia. Panos H. Koutras. Greece/France/Belgium.
5. Misunderstood (Incompresa). Asia Argento. Italy/France.
6. Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse). Catherine Breillat. France/Germany/Belgium.
7. Maps to the Stars. David Cronenberg. Canada/Germany/USA/France.
8. Child's Pose (Poziția copilului). Călin Peter Netzer. Romania.
9. Obvious Child. Gillian Robespierre. USA.
10. Only Lovers Left Alive. Jim Jarmusch. UK/Germany/France/Greece/Cyprus.

Honorable Mention:

• Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier. Denmark/Germany/France/Belgium.

The Worst of 2014:

• Whiplash. Damien Chazelle. USA.
• The Normal Heart. Ryan Murphy. USA.

Runners-Up:

• Young & Beautiful (Jeune et jolie). François Ozon. France.
• Something Must Break (Nånting måste gå sönder). Ester Martin Bergsmark. Sweden.
• Under the Skin. Jonathan Glazer. UK.
• Gerontophilia. Bruce LaBruce. Canada.
• You and the Night (Les rencontres d'après minuit). Yann Gonzalez. France.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past. Bryan Singer. USA/UK.
• Boyhood. Richard Linklater. USA.
• Gloria. Sebastián Lelio. Chile/Spain.
• Little Gay Boy. Antony Hickling. France.

Best of 2014: #6. Abuse of Weakness (Catherine Breillat)

#6. Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse). Catherine Breillat. France/Germany/Belgium.

Perhaps still best known for their brilliant, unsettling portrayals of dark sexuality, writer/director Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) and actress Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher) teamed up after all these years for a semi-autobiographical film that Breillat adapted from her novel of the same name. Despite their association to a certain trend of extremism in French cinema during the early '00s, neither of these women could be dismissed mere provocatrices. In the past ten years or so, Breillat has made a pair of deconstructed fairy tales into films and Huppert has continued to act steadily in projects as diverse as Michael Haneke's Amour, Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country, and even a special episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But it still felt like destiny when it was announced that Huppert would play a filmmaker named Maud Shainberg, a thinly-veiled version of Catherine Breillat (not unlike Anne Parillaud in Sex Is Comedy from 2002), in the director's latest film.

Titled after a French legal term, Abuse of Weakness recounts two traumatic events in Breillat's life: suffering a stroke that left half of her body paralyzed and falling victim to notorious conman Christophe Rocancourt, who swindled over €500,000 from her after she cast him opposite Naomi Campbell in what would have been her first English-language film. Appropriately, Abuse of Weakness is not a reactionary tale, nor is it an angry one. Breillat takes these events to explore the unexpected emotions that Vilko, the Rocancourt character played by rapper Kool Shen, stirs in Maud. Inexplicably, Huppert continues to outdo herself here, not simply due to her uncanny ability to convincingly play a character who has suffered a stroke. Maud's personality is like a bouquet of strong and unusual characteristics. Driven and meticulous, while also girlish and flirty, it never quite matters what it is about Vilko that charms Maud into writing him all those checks. It's Huppert's giddiness, determination, and her faith in Vilko's ability to play the male lead in her next film that shows us all we need to know about the "why." But again, Abuse of Weakness isn't a defense piece. Instead, it's a quietly devastating film that is as haunting as any of Breillat's finest work.

With: Isabelle Huppert, Kool Shen, Laurence Ursino, Christophe Sermet, Ronald Leclercq

Gallo, Ozon, Reichardt, Schnabel, Hellman, Kechiche, Coppola, etc, Screening at Venice

The complete line-up of the 67th Venice Film Festival was announced yesterday, with twenty-two films competing for the the Golden Lion, the festival's highest honor which was awarded to Samuel Maoz's Lebanon last year. Not paying attention to films in production has its benefits; quite a few of the filmmakers presenting their works this year came as a pleasant surprise. Among those surprises: Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff which re-teams the director with her Wendy & Lucy star Michelle Williams; a brand new film written, directed, starring, composed and edited (naturally) by Vincent Gallo called Promises Written in Water; Pablo Larraín's follow-up to Tony Manero, Post mortem; Abdellatif Kechiche's Vénus noire [Black Venus], his first film since La graine et le mulet [The Secret of the Grain] which won a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 fest; Tran Anh Hung's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood; and Road to Nowhere, the first feature-length film from Monte Hellman in twenty-one years (following, uh, Silent Night, Deadly Night 3) which stars two former "It" girls Shannyn Sossamon and Dominique Swain. Gallo will also be presenting a short entitled The Agent as part of the Horizons sidebar, which–like Promises–stars Sylvester Stallone's son Sage. Other high profile filmmakers in competition: Sofia Coppola with Somewhere; Julian Schnabel with Miral; François Ozon with Potiche; Tom Tykwer with Drei [Three]; Tsui Hark with Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame; Takashi Miike with 13 Assassins; Darren Aronofsky with Black Swan; and Álex de la Iglesia with Balada triste de trompeta [A Sad Trumpet Ballad]. Four Italian films will be screening in competition, and unfortunately the national titles have proven to be the weakest entries in recent history. The sore thumb of the lot appears to be Barney's Version, whose fine cast feels overshadowed by the fact that the last film outing from the director, Richard J. Lewis, was a direct-to-video sequel to the buddy-cop-and-dog classic K-9 (starring, uh, Jim Belushi). Tran Anh Hung and Darren Aronofsky are the only past Golden Lion winners in competition, for Cyclo in 1995 and The Wrestler in 2008 respectively. The competition line-up can be found below. The festival runs from 1-11 September.

- 13 Assassins, d. Takashi Miike, Japan
- Attenberg, d. Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, w. Yorgos Lanthimos
- Balada triste de trompeta [A Sad Trumpet Ballad], d. Álex de la Iglesia (Dance with the Devil), Spain/France, w. Carmen Maura, Fernando Guillén Cuervo, Antonio de la Torre
- Barney's Version, d. Richard J. Lewis, Canada/Italy, w. Dustin Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver
- Black Swan, d. Darren Aronofsky, USA, w. Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Bruce Greenwood, Scott Speedman
- Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame, d. Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China), China/Hong Kong, w. Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Li Bingbing, Tony Leung Ka-Fai
- Drei [Three], d. Tom Tykwer, Germany, w. Devid Striesow
- Happy Few, d. Antony Cordier (Douches froides), France, w. Marina Foïs, Élodie Bouchez, Roschdy Zem, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Jean-François Stévenin
- Meek's Cutoff, d. Kelly Reichardt, USA, w. Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson
- Miral, d. Julian Schnabel, France/Israel/UK/Italy/USA, w. Hiam Abbass, Freida Pinto, Willem Dafoe, Vanessa Redgrave, Alexander Siddig, Stella Schnabel
- Noi credevamo, d. Mario Martone (L'odore del sengue), Italy/France, w. Luigi Lo Cascio, Toni Servillo
- Norwegian Wood, d. Tran Anh Hung, Japan, w. Rinko Kikuchi
- La passione, d. Carlo Mazzacurati (La lingua del santo), Italy, w. Stefania Sandrelli
- La pecora nera, d. Ascanio Celestini, Italy, w. Maya Sansa
- Post mortem, d. Pablo Larraín, Chile/Mexico/Germany
- Potiche, d. François Ozon, France/Belgium, w. Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, Judith Godrèche, Jérémie Renier
- Promises Written in Water, d. Vincent Gallo, USA, w. Gallo
- Road to Nowhere, d. Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop), USA, w. Shannyn Sossamon, Dominique Swain, John Diehl, Fabio Testi
- Silent Souls, d. Aleksei Fedorchenko (First on the Moon), Russia
- La solitudine dei numeri primi [The Solitude of Prime Numbers], d. Saverio Costanzo (In Memory of Me), Italy/France/Germany, w. Filippo Timi, Isabella Rossellini
- Somewhere, d. Sofia Coppola, USA, w. Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Benicio del Toro, Michelle Monaghan, Benicio Del Toro
- Vénus noire [Black Venus], d. Abdellatif Kechiche, France/Italy/Belgium, w. Olivier Gourmet

Out of competition, you'll find directorial efforts from both the Affleck brothers. The elder will follow his well-received (but, still, not that good) Gone Baby Gone with The Town, a crime thriller about a Boston-area gang of thieves. Casey's directorial debut is I'm Still Here, a documentary that received a lot of press last year which follows Joaquin Phoenix's retirement from acting to pursue a career as a rapper. In addition to 13 Assassins, Takashi Miike's Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City will premiere, likely as part of the festival's midnight screenings, which will open with Robert Rodriguez's star-and-"star"-studded Machete. Julie Taymor's return to Shakespeare, The Tempest, will close this portion. Below you'll find a selection of the films playing out of competition.

- 1960, d. Gabriele Salvatores (I'm Not Scared), Italy
- The Child's Eye 3D, d. Oxide Pang, Danny Pang, Hong Kong/China
- I'm Still Here, d. Casey Affleck, USA, w. Joaquin Phoenix
- The Last Movie, d. Dennis Hopper, USA, w. Hopper, Tomas Milian, Samuel Fuller, Sylvia Miles, Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Henry Jaglom, John Phillip Law, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Toni Basil
- Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, d. Andrew Lau, Hong Kong/China, w. Donnie Yen, Shu Qi
- A Letter to Elia, d. Martin Scorsese, Kent Jones, USA
- Lope, d. Andrucha Waddington (House of Sand), Spain/Brazil, w. Leonor Watling, Pilar López de Ayala, Sonia Braga, Luis Tosar
- Machete, d. Robert Rodriguez, USA, w. Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Steven Seagal, Don Johnson, Rose McGowan, Tom Savini
- Passione, d. John Turturro, Italy
- Přežít svůj život [Surviving Life], d. Jan Švankmajer, Czech Republic/Slovakia
- Raavanan, d. Mani Ratnam, India, w. Aishwarya Rai
- Reign of Assassins, d. John Woo, Su Chao-Bin, China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, w. Michelle Yeoh, Kelly Lin
- Shock Labyrinth 3D, d. Takashi Shimizu (Ju-on), Japan
- Showtime, d. Stanley Kwan (Lan yu), China, w. Carina Lau, Tony Leung Ka-Fai
- Sorelle mai, d. Marco Bellocchio, Italy
- The Tempest, d. Julie Taymor, USA, w. Helen Mirren, Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, Djimon Hounsou, David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Ben Whishaw
- That Girl in Yellow Boots, d. Anurag Kashyap (Dev.D), India
- The Town, d. Ben Affleck, USA, w. Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively
- Vallanzasca - Gli angeli del male, d. Michele Placido (Romanzo criminale), Italy/France, w. Kim Rossi Stuart, Filippo Timi, Moritz Bleibtreu, Paz Vega
- Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, d. Takashi Miike, Japan

The Horizons portion of this year's selection will open with La belle endormie [Sleeping Beauty], another fairy tale adaptation from Catherine Breillat following last year's Barbe Bleue; like its predecessor, La belle endormie was produced by Arte Télévision and employs a cast of unknowns. Hong Sang-soo's Oki's Movie will close the section; Oki's Movie is Hong Sang-soo's second film to premiere in 2010 following Ha Ha Ha, which was awarded the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes in May. Not a whole lot of information was available about the rest of the films (some of them shorts), but I listed below the films from directors I knew. And following that is a selection of the films screening as part of the Venice Days, one of the festival's autonomous sidebars.

Horizons

- The Agent, d. Vincent Gallo, USA, w. Sage Stallone, Gallo
- La belle endormie [Sleeping Beauty], d. Catherine Breillat, France
- Better Life, d. Isaac Julien, UK/China, w. Maggie Cheung
- Cold Fish, d. Sion Sono, Japan
- Guest, d. José Luis Guerin, Spain
- The Leopard, d. Isaac Julien, UK/Italy
- A Loft, d. Ken Jacobs, USA
- News from Nowhere, d. Paul Morrissey, USA
- Oki's Movie, d. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea
- Painéis de São Vicente de Fora, Visão Poética, d. Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, w. Ricardo Trêpa
- Red Earth, d. Clara Law, Hong Kong/China

Venice Days

- L'amour buio, d. Antonio Capuano (Luna rossa), Italy, w. Valeria Golino
- Le bruit des glaçons [The Clink of Ice], d. Bertrand Blier (Beau-père), France, w. Jean Duhardin, Albert Dupontel
- Cirkus Columbia, d. Danis Tanović (No Man's Land), Bosnia & Herzegovina/France/UK/Slovenia/Germany/Belgium/Serbia, w. Miki Manojlović, Mira Furlan
- Hitler à Hollywood [Hitler in Hollywood], d. Frédéric Sojcher, w. Maria de Medeiros, Micheline Presle
- Incendies, d. Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique), Canada/France, w. Lubna Azabal
- Noir océan, d. Marion Hänsel (The Quarry), w. Adrien Joliver
- La vida de los peces, d. Matías Bize (En la cama), Chile, w. Santiago Cabrera, Blanca Lewin

...Two Months (and a few days) Later

Inspired by a recent conversation with my oldest friend Dan, I’ve been positively motivated to write what I wanted to but couldn’t, for several reasons, put together for the posting of my list of The Decade List of 100. Tying ideas together successfully has always been the weakest facet of my writing, so the prospect of sifting through ten years of cinema, especially from the perspective of someone who entered those years at the age of 15, felt like an insurmountable task. It still, to some extent, seems outside the realm of possibility, but at least now I can attempt to explain or defend some of what was going through my head while arranging the list at hand.

Before I had a chance to come up with a better name for it, “The Decade List” stuck, serendipitously masking any questionable adjective one might have used to modify “Films of the ‘00s.” Neither “best” nor “favorite” felt like the correct modifier, as I tried to objectively assess the films I chose without completely abandoning some of the personal attachments I’ve developed with them over the years (or, in some cases, over much smaller of a time frame). That 43 of the films were at least partially financed by the French film industry certainly points to one of the personal biases I didn’t try to look past. That only 3 were documentaries shows another, one I’m not exactly proud of. The double (and triple and quadruple) appearances of 17 directors might suggest I didn’t put that auteur inclination aside either, but it isn’t exactly true, as omitting Clean, The Boss of It All, Time of the Wolf, Anatomy of Hell and Last Days was a lot easier than eliminating films whose directors only made a single appearance on the final list.

Though I never properly introduced the project (as I didn’t have a clear idea of where it was headed upon conception), I did establish a single rule for inclusion: the film had to make its international premiere after December 31, 1999 and before January 1, 2010. Considering the nature of the project, that rule might have sounded redundant, but it needed to be clearly stated, as it cancelled out films such as Claire Denis’ Beau travail, Nagisa Oshima’s Taboo, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources, all of which officially premiered in ’99 but hit the U.S. within the acceptable window.

It’s hard to decide which of the two grave sins of omission (not defending the list as a whole or not defending the film I chose as my #1) is worse, but I like to think the reason I had nothing to write about Dogville was the best vindication for its placement. No other film I watched for the sake of making this list screamed out, “this is it,” the way Dogville did. The sensation isn’t something I can successfully articulate nor defend in any intellectual manner. That I happened to chose a film that was appearing with some frequency on top of others’ similar lists made the task even more difficult. Do I really have anything new to say about a film that’s been written about as extensively as Dogville, and even if I did make a check-list of all the things it does right, would that come close to defining that seemingly inexplicable feeling I got while watching it?

What I will say, however, was that no other film made me re-examine and eventually adjust my once rigidly negative feelings toward its filmmaker the way Dogville did. Whether a harsh reaction to the emotions von Trier conjured inside of me with Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves and The Idiots or the inability to determine why he was doing so, my hatred for the director vanished midway through watching Dogville for the first time, and by the time the saxophone comes in on “Young Americans,” I was singing a much different song about von Trier. While I still think his motives in Dancer in the Dark are tough to define, Dogville and its world of invisible physical boundaries revealed the man behind the curtain and provided me with a special kind of elation (the sort that comes best from misanthropy).

With regard to Michael Haneke, a filmmaker who seems to be falling out of favor with a lot of people I know (or read), I feel no qualms about having him as the most featured filmmaker on the 100. While I do generally like Time of the Wolf, I think Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché and The White Ribbon represent the upper tier of his work over the past decade. However, Dan asked me if The Piano Teacher really is better than Caché, and likely, it isn’t, especially when considering Haneke’s oeuvre as a whole and his cinematic obsessions. While I acknowledge that, in terms of Haneke’s career, Caché will likely stand out as his “masterpiece,” The Piano Teacher marked my first experience with Haneke on the big screen and still remains one of my finer theatrical experiences, even though it was still fantastic to see Caché on opening night with an even larger audience. This particular bias is probably more common with albums than films as I can’t think of any other films on the list that would fall under this distinction.

The “well, it was my first time” bias wasn’t the only that was at work when organizing the films. For the majority of the year, I spent more time bestowing praise upon Sébastien Lifshitz, the one filmmaker I knew most people weren’t familiar with, than most of the other directors represented. So on some level, I think I felt it my duty to include either Wild Side or Come Undone in my top 10 instead of judging either of the films against all the rest. A close friend of mine, who also shared my enthusiasm for Lifshitz, sent me an e-mail recently saying he’d rewatched Wild Side and been surprised to have found it to be more ornamental than he’d remembered. As I read that, I knew exactly what he meant and perhaps even thought something along those lines when watching it again in December. In looking at the ten films that follow Wild Side on the list, I recognize now that all ten are better films. Had I not spent so much time absorbing as much cinema as I could over the past decade, I would have preferred naming just the ten best films of the Aughts: ten years, ten films and (likely) ten filmmakers. With that in mind, spot number 10 becomes nearly as important as spot number 1, signifying not the tenth best film you saw so much as the one film you wanted to be sure you didn’t leave off the list. So when dealing with a list of 100, both spots 10 and 100 fall prey to that idea.

If I thought really hard about it, I could probably come up with predilections for about half, in addition to factors working against about a fourth of them. As I don’t care to do so, I’ll simply point out the ones that came to mind first. Time certainly didn’t work in the favor of In the Mood for Love, allowing its director to commit a giant fuck up with My Blueberry Nights, which wouldn’t have been as damning if it didn’t share the thematic and stylistic traits that defined the rest of his works. And while the same could be said for Michael Haneke and his Funny Games remake, he at least had the chance to redeem himself (in my eyes) with The White Ribbon. Time didn’t seem to work in the favor of Mulholland Drive in the ranking either, as it had nine years to lose some of its luster from being analyzed/decrypted to death and failing to retain the magic of seeing it for the first time in its subsequent viewings. Time did work in the favor of There Will Be Blood, however, and the fact that I only watched it twice with my opinion of it growing exponentially the more I thought about it.

A couple of people seemed surprised to see not only how high I’d ranked Sex Is Comedy but that I’d placed it above the rest of Catherine Breillat’s other films. For reasons I’m not exactly sure, several films got knocked down in the rankings for containing scenes or moments I couldn’t defend intellectually or artistically. For Fat Girl, I couldn’t justify Breillat’s need to violently murder two of her characters. For Inside, I couldn’t see the explanation of why Béatrice Dalle was terrorizing Allyson Paradis as anything but a lame cop-out. For Mysterious Skin, I kept hearing that awful line Joseph Gordon-Levitt screams in the middle of the film. For Trouble Every Day, I’m still not even sure. None of Breillat’s other films really came to life the way Sex Is Comedy did on repeat viewings. Of course, I had always regarded Sex Is Comedy as a lesser film in Breillat’s canon, so finding out that I was wrong placed it in favor of discovering that I wasn’t truly satisfied with one of Fat Girl’s consequential elements.

In reviewing the annual Best Of lists I’ve written for this blog, I’ve called some truly worthless films (like The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down—Christ, drugs must have been involved) the best of their given year, as well as films that ultimately weren’t anything special (like Pan’s Labyrinth and 2046). With that said, I’ll probably recognize at least one or two of these films as being shitty after some time passes, even though I spent a lot more time on this than any of annual run-downs.

I suppose the sort of defense for my ’00 list that would make the most sense (much more so than overanalyzing my own prejudices and miscalculations) would be one where I explored the commonalities between the films I ranked highest or what I looked for when ordering them (I won’t pretend to make some sort of hyperbolic umbrella statement about the decade in cinema). Malheureusement, I can only come up with some really facile descriptors like “bold” and “obstinate” to connect the films, and those will do about as much justice to the films as forcing some loose, interlocking theme would. I made the list because I thought I would enjoy doing so, and I did… some of the time. Ultimately though the whole thing was simply a way for me to hopefully introduce films and/or filmmakers to others—the exact reason I started a blog, only in project form. If I happened to succeed on that level, then the self-inflicted exhaustion and frustration was (probably) worth it.

DVD Release Update, 25 February

Included in this DVD update are Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard from Strand, a bunch of Robin Hood films from Sony, Tony Manero from Kino Lorber, Alain Cavalier's Le combat dans l'île from Zeitgeist and Jean Becker's One Deadly Summer [L'été meurtrier] with Isabelle Adjani from a studio I've never heard of called Bayview Films.

- Legend of Witches, 1969, d. Malcolm Leigh, VCI, 27 April
- Malice in Wonderland, 2009, d. Simon Fellows, Magnolia, 27 April, w. Maggie Grace, Danny Dyer, Nathaniel Parker
- 9 to 5: Days in Porn, 2008, d. Jens Hoffman, Strand Releasing, 4 May, w. Sasha Grey
- The Bandit of Sherwood Forest, 1946, d. Henry Levin, George Sherman, Sony, 11 May
- Legend of the Tsunami Warrior [aka Queens of Langkasuka], 2008, d. Nonzee Nimibutr, Magnet/Magnolia, also on Blu-ray, 11 May
- One Deadly Summer [L'été meurtrier], 1983, d. Jean Becker, Bayview Films, 11 May
- The Prince of Thieves, 1948, d. Howard Bretherton, Sony, 11 May
- Rogues of Sherwood Forest, 1950, d. Gordon Douglas, Sony, 11 May
- Sword of Sherwood Forest, 1960, d. Terence Fisher, Sony, 11 May
- Tidal Wave, 2009, d. Yun Je-gyun, Magnet/Magnolia, also on Blu-ray, 11 May
- Iscariot, 2008, d. Miko Lazic, Brink DVD, 18 May, w. Gustaf Skarsgård, Michael Nyqvist
- North Face [Nordwand], 2008, d. Philipp Stölzl, Music Box Films, 18 May, w. Benno Fürmann
- Southern Gothic, 2007, d. Mark Young, IFC Films, 18 May
- Tony Manero, 2008, d. Pablo Larraín, Kino Lorber, 18 May
- Toe to Toe, 2009, d. Emily Abt, Strand Releasing, 8 June
- Antarctica, 2008, d. Yair Hochner, Here! Films, 15 June
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volume 7, 2009, d. Matt Maiellaro, Dave Willis, Warner, 15 June
- Sex Positive, 2008, d. Daryl Wein, Here! Films, 15 June
- Bluebeard [Barbe bleue], 2009, d. Catherine Breillat, Strand Releasing, 22 June
- Le combat dans l'île, 1962, d. Alain Cavalier, Zeitgeist, 22 June, w. Romy Schneider, Jean-Louis Trintignant
- Raging Sun, Raging Sky [Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo], 2009, d. Julián Hernández, TLA Releasing, 22 June
- Say Hello to Yesterday, 1971, d. Alvin Rakoff, Scorpion Releasing, 28 June, w. Jean Simmons, Leonard Whiting

Also on the Blu-ray front are individual releases of some of the Mel Brooks titles included in the box set released last year: High Anxiety, History of the World: Part 1 and Robin Hood: Men in Tights on 11 May. Individual releases of Batman Returns, Batman Forever and (cough) Batman & Robin will also be available from Warner on 4 May.

- Apollo 13, 1995, d. Ron Howard, Universal, 13 April
- Elizabeth, 1998, d. Shekhar Kapur, Universal, 27 April
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age, 2007, d. Shekhar Kapur, Universal, 27 April
- Flashbacks of a Fool, 2008, d. Baillie Walsh, Anchor Bay, 25 May
- Spartacus, 1960, d. Stanley Kubrick, Universal, 25 May

The Decade List: Une vieille maîtresse (2007)

Une vieille maîtresse [The Last Mistress] – dir. Catherine Breillat

The lack of bite in The Last Mistress (or, as it is more accurately translated, An Old Mistress) is not something I fault Catherine Breillat for, as it offers a shift in tone and voice from the filmmaker, working for the first time from source material outside of her own. Based on the novel by the Barbey d’Aurevilly, The Last Mistress focuses on a handsome young bachelor Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou) torn between the love of his young virginal wife (Roxane Mesquida) and aging Spanish mistress (Asia Argento).

In using a voice less confrontational than she’s known for when directing from her own material, Breillat composes the film like a painting, adorned with almost entirely flat, picturesque dimensions, infrequently interrupted by a close-up (usually of Aattou). In the visual blueprint of The Last Mistress, we’re reminded of what Breillat’s really about: meta dissections of crippling male/female relations. Only here, it’s dressed up like a sordid tale of corset-wearing, carriage-riding liaisons dangereuses. As Ryno’s Spanish mistress Vellini, Argento’s career obsession with playing women ripe with sexuality would have made her a perfect candidate for Breillat. Argento embodies a rawness that almost feels out-of-place. Her presence isn’t as mellifluous as Amira Casar in Anatomy of Hell or Mesquida and Anaïs Reboux in Fat Girl, and yet it’s in the roughness that Argento places on Vellini that distinguishes her from the otherwise sedated refine of the rest of the cast and ultimately gives The Last Mistress its haunting quality (Breillat told Argento to use Marlene Dietrich in von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman as inspiration).

Breillat’s craft yields a mesmerizing effect on The Last Mistress. The film subsists somewhere on a different plane than the director’s other work, relying more on the perils the central romance than abrasive stylization to stick with the audience. On a larger scale, it doesn’t resonate as long as Fat Girl has; the latter still haunts me to this day. Yet, it’s still just as surprising of a work as anything else Breillat has made. Additionally, The Last Mistress has one of the best single lines of dialogue of the ‘00s, occurring between Argento and Amira Casar as an opera singer at a lavish dinner party: “I hate anything feminine… except in young men, of course.”

With: Fu'ad Aït Aattou, Asia Argento, Claude Sarraute, Roxane Mesquida, Yolande Moreau, Michael Lonsdale, Anne Parillaud, Amira Casar, Jean-Philippe Tesse, Sarah Pratt, Lio, Isabelle Renauld, Léa Seydoux, Nicholas Hawtrey, Caroline Ducey
Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on the novel by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis
Country of Origin: France/Italy
US Distributor: IFC Films

Premiere: 25 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 7 October 2007 (New York Film Festival)

The Decade List: Sex Is Comedy (2002)

Sex Is Comedy – dir. Catherine Breillat

Though obviously inspired by her experience working on Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat does more than simply “defend” some of the more provocative elements of her work with Sex Is Comedy, her underappreciated ninth feature. To call Sex Is Comedy a “defense” for Fat Girl doesn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, Breillat would never feel the need to justify herself in such pedestrian terms. She’s too smart for that; check out any interview with her or read any of her books, and you’ll understand. Secondly, Sex Is Comedy doesn’t even address what I would argue to be the more controversial aspect of Fat Girl (the final act, namely). Instead, it centers on the “scènes intimes” a director named Jeanne, played by Anne Parillaud, tries to authentically depict in her own film despite the frustration of working with two actors who seem to hate one another.

Sex Is Comedy, above all else, is a film about the illusions of cinema, and a transformative one at that. The film within the film supplies a bevy of illusions, most of them intangible (like the way in which a freezing, overcast shoot on a Portuguese beach can mask as a romantic summer interlude through camera trickery), some of them corporeal (the director has a prosthetic cock molded to prevent the likely case of the actor being unable to achieve an erection, among other reasons). The fallacy of Jeanne’s highest concern is that of passion. She suspects the actors of undermining her and the film itself, a concern she vocalizes to Léo (Ashley Wanninger), her assistant director. Whether the actors’ mutual dislike of one another is in fact a manifestation of their anxiety about filming the sex scene or an actual clash of personality, Jeanne makes it her primary goal to elicit the illusion of intimacy from the two, played by Grégoire Colin and Roxane Mesquida, essentially playing herself acting out the scenes she portrayed in Fat Girl.

In keeping things especially meta, Sex Is Comedy employs its own set of illusions. For starters, the film Jeanne and company are making only resembles Fat Girl though both the use of Mesquida and certain script specifics (like Mesquida’s character’s virginity and the use of a prosthetic penis). In the film, Colin’s character takes Mesquida back to his place, while, in Fat Girl, she invites her lover (played there by Libero De Rienzo) to her parents’ vacation home while sharing a room with her sister. Parillaud’s character, while bearing quite a few similarities to the director, isn’t named Catherine. Like Anaïs Reboux’s character in Fat Girl, Parillaud actually looks quite a bit like Breillat but, instead of a rounder, pre-teen version of the director, resembles a “movie star” projection (have you noticed that all of the women in Breillat’s films tend to be brunettes?). Jeanne’s slight immobility, as a result of slamming her foot too hard against the ground (“a metaphor for the film,” she adds), is simply coincidental, as Breillat didn’t suffer the stroke that left her physically impaired until two years after Sex Is Comedy was made.

The setting of a film shoot also vaguely masks the fact that the way Jeanne speaks of her art is precisely the way not only Breillat does but all of her characters seem to in relation to their sexuality, among other things. It is, given Jeanne’s closeness to the director, a believable one, but the more interesting fallacies of Sex Is Comedy are ones Breillat directly alludes to within the film. In one scene, Colin’s character crudely plays around with his fake cock amongst the crew in a veiled act of charming them, while Jeanne and Mesquida’s character both recognize it as a way of precluding his own nervousness about the scene he’s about to film. But the film’s most telling moment occurs when the cinematographer (Bart Binnema) points out that Jeanne’s frustration with Colin directly mirrors the way she’s felt about all of her male actors in the past. In calling the director out in failing to recognize the sexual prejudices she seems to notice in everyone else, Breillat dispels the same myths about herself as she does the act of imitating passion for the greater good of art.

With: Anne Parillaud, Grégoire Colin, Roxane Mesquida, Ashley Wanninger, Dominique Colladant, Bart Binnema, Diane Scapa, Júlia Fragata
Screenplay: Catherine Breillat
Cinematography: Laurent Machuel
Country of Origin: France/Portugal
US Distributor: IFC Films

Premiere: May 2002 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 14 October 2004 (Austin Film Festival)

DVD/Acquisition Update, 5 December

Here's a quick DVD update, as I haven't posted one in a little while... there's not a lot of surprises to speak of, unless you consider the re-release of a made-for-television movie starring Casper Van Dien as James Dean (and Diane Ladd as his mother!) a serendipitous blessing. Only two Blu-ray releases seemed worthy of mentioning, both from Warner on 2 March: Desmond Davis' Clash of the Titans and, one of my childhood favorites, Wolfgang Petersen's The NeverEnding Story. As I told my friend Mike, I bet Limahl's theme song will sound truly breathtaking in high-definition sound (fingers crossed that the music video is included!).

It appears as though Kino will be the official DVD studio for Lorber Films, with the first title being Kay Pollak's As It Is in Heaven [Så som i himmelen], a 2005 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film from Sweden.

In (exciting) acquisition news, Cinema Guild picked up two films in the past week: Maren Ade's Everyone Else [Alle Anderen] and Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's Sweetgrass. Both films screened at this year's New York Film Festival to some really positive notices. Look for them sometime in 2010.

Though I already posted about Strand picking up Catherine Breillat's Blue Beard [Barbe bleue], they informed me that the film, which also screened at the NYFF, will begin its limited run in NYC on 12 March, followed by a DVD release in June. And finally, the DVD release update is below, in descending order of release.

- The Invention of Lying, 2009, d. Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson, Warner, also on Blu-ray, 19 January
- Good Hair, 2009, d. Jeff Stilson, Lionsgate, 9 February
- The Sarah Silverman Program, Season 2, Volume 2, 2008, Comedy Central/Paramount, 9 February
- The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, 2009, d. Rebecca Miller, Screen Media, also on Blu-ray, 16 February
- The Damned United, 2009, d. Tom Hooper, Sony, also on Blu-ray, 23 February
- James Dean: Race with Destiny, 1997, d. Mardi Rustam, MPI, 23 February, w. Casper Van Dien, Diane Ladd
- The Last Hurrah, 2009, d. Jonathan W. Stokes, Cinema Libre, 23 February
- Mr. Right, 2006, d. David Morris, Jacqui Morris, Wolfe, 23 February
- The September Issue, 2009, d. R.J. Cutler, Lionsgate, 23 February
- Kiki's Delivery Service, 1989, d. Hayao Miyazaki, Disney, Special Edition, 2 March
- Ponyo, 2008, d. Hayao Miyazaki, Disney, also on Blu-ray, 2 March
- The Wedding Song [Le chant des mariées], 2008, d. Karin Albou, Strand Releasing, 9 March
- Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, 2009, d. Ti West, Lionsgate, 16 February
- Coco Before Chanel [Coco avant Chanel], 2009, d. Anne Fontaine, Sony, 16 February
- The Beaches of Agnès [Les plages d'Agnès], 2008, d. Agnès Varda, Cinema Guild, 23 February
- Drool, 2009, d. Nancy Kissam, Strand Releasing, 23 March, w. Laura Harring, Jill Marie Jones
- The Lark Farm [La masseria delle allodole], 2007, d. Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Image Entertainment, 23 March, w. Paz Vega, Mortiz Bleibtreu, Ángela Molina, Arsinée Khanjian, Tchéky Karyo

Good News, Otherwise

Just a day after learning about the Catherine Breillat/Naomi Campbell team-up being canceled, Strand Releasing announced that it has picked up her latest Bluebeard [Barbe Bleue] for US distribution. Bluebeard premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and screens at the New York Film Festival this weekend. Expect it sometime in 2010.

Bad News, Bad Love

I suppose we should have known better, but Catherine Breillat's planned remake of her own Parfait amour! in English with Naomi Campbell has been scrapped. According to several news sources, Bad Love's cancellation has everything to do with Breillat's choice to cast infamous con artist Christophe Rocancourt in the male lead. As they say, once a thief... Rocancourt reportedly scammed Breillat out of around 650.000€, and the project is now dead. Though this source reports that Breillat will release a (likely scathing and exquisitely written) book entitled Rocancourt et moi about her wretched experience with him (Wikipedia claims the book will be called Abus de faiblesse).

Thankfully, Breillat has lined up her next project, funded by French television, with a modern adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, continuing to stray from using her own writings as source material, after The Last Mistress [Une vieille maîtresse] from Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly and Bluebeard [Barbe Bleue] from Charles Perrault, the man also responsible for Sleeping Beauty. The Sleeping Beauty project appears to be part of a series of films updating classic contes de fées. According to Toutlecine.com, filmmakers Jacques Doillon (Ponette, Le premier venu) and Marina de Van (Dans ma peau, Ne te retourne pas) are rumored to also be contributing to the series. Sounds compelling, but can I hope then that Breillat casts Campbell as belle au bois dormant? We'll see...

All of the links, except for Breillat's Wikipedia page, are in French, but you can read Rocancourt's Wikipedia page for details in English.

The Decade List: Flandres (2006)

Flandres [Flanders] - dir. Bruno Dumont

[Edited from an earlier post]

At one point a couple years ago, I (along with a handful of others) noticed a trend in contemporary French cinema. There was this abundance of films coming from the country that were branded with a certain blend of controversy. Most of them were minimalist examinations of human relations that traveled beyond realism to metaphysical art pieces. They usually contained unsimulated sex, though it was never for titillation or even a pragmatic depiction of life. Some of them were gruesome, films whose minimalism aided in the dread and shock of the eventual violence. They were generally considered part of a movement of French extremism, though a friend of mine preferred something along the lines of analytical, anatomical art films. Catherine Breillat was their unofficial leader, if for no other reason than the residual hatred she stirred from her films as a result of her uncompromising forcefulness and (perhaps) her detractors' underlying misogyny. Bruno Dumont was one of the chief filmmakers of this so-called movement, whose The Life of Jésus [La vie de Jésus] and L'humanité won him praise that was swiftly taken away with 2003’s Twentynine Palms. Naturally, I loved Twentynine Palms, but people certainly stopped paying as close of attention to Dumont afterward. Flandres was awarded the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but with little fanfare. No US distributor wanted it, and it was released on a total of two screens sometime in May of 2007.

It makes a kind of unfortunate sense that no one knew quite what to do with Flandres. On its surface, Flandres is a war film about no war in particular. The decision to leave the war unnamed poses as difficult in marketing in a country that’s still at war. Audiences want their war films didactic, whether undeniably patriotic or bluntly skeptical, and they want a name. It’s that name that gives these films their so-called power and keeps them from revealing any form of art. But that’s being hypothetical; the box office failures of Rendition and Lions for Lambs proved that American audiences really didn't want anything to do with their own war when Flandres was released… at least not in their cinema. The Hurt Locker's recent success among the arthouse crowd may suggest things have changed, or may just speak for the film's quality (and Rendition and Lions for Lambs' lack thereof). On another surface level, Flandres retains the minimalist approach Dumont exhibited in Twentynine Palms. In fact, I’m not terribly sure what I took or what I’m supposed to take from the film. Yet I can’t say it hasn’t found its place in my afterthoughts. It reminds me a bit of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. Both films appear to give the viewer close to nothing in way of plot or action (though still notably violent and grisly), yet there’s something unnerving at work. Some of the most difficult films I’ve ever watched appear simple, a sort of wolf in sheep’s clothing, though seeing Béatrice Dalle bite the flesh off a young boy or a soldier being castrated aren’t the images you’d associate with a sheep.

On another level, Flandres is about the effects of war on life and vice versa. Dumont introduces the film with two friends, quiet farm boy Demester (Samuel Boidin) and neighbor Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux). They go on walks together and fuck apathetically in the grass. Barbe meets Blondel (Henri Cretel) at a bar, fucks him in the back of his car, and introduces him to her and Demester’s small circle of friends. It turns out that Demester and Blondel are both enlisted in the same squadron. Thus a love triangle begins, but Dumont isn’t as interested in the triangle as much as the psychology of those involved and their subsequent actions. The story is as stripped down as the characters, who Dumont never seems to recognize as "human beings." As usual for Dumont (outside of L'humanité), he uses non-actors to play the parts (I’d be surprised if you’d heard of any of Dumont’s actors, save Katerina Golubeva who appeared in a few Claire Denis film and infamously had unsimulated sex with Guillaume Depardieu in Pola X, though you’ve probably already forgotten about that). His use of non-actors, especially as homely as they tend to be, is just as effective as Catherine Breillat’s casting of a Gucci model and a porn star in her super-meta Anatomy of Hell [Anatomie de l'enfer]. Without asking for “performances,” he boils Flandres down to implications and intentions. One isn’t supposed to deduce motive or understanding from the actor’s face as you might in an Isabelle Huppert film, but instead make assertions from actions. Flandres is a film whose understanding is completely onscreen and, at the same time, nowhere to be found within the frame.

With: Adélaïde Leroux, Samuel Boidin, Henri Cretel, Inge Decaesteker, Jean-Marie Bruveart, David Poulain, Patrice Venant, David Legay
Screenplay: Bruno Dumont
Cinematography: Yves Cape
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: International Film Circuit/Koch Lorber

Premiere: 23 May 2006 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 21 April 2007 (City of Lights, City of Angels)

Awards: Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)