APOCALYPSO DREAMS
A film snob's favorites of '06
by Chris Dashiell

When I read accounts from the film festivals, it appears that we’re living in a golden age of cinema. Exciting, creative work is bursting out all over the world.
The question is: how much of it actually makes it to screens where I can watch it? You know the answer: not much at all.
Therefore, the real number top position on my “favorites” list is reserved for all the films I didn’t get to see. Chances are they’re not as good as they seem when I’m just reading about them. But I suspect that they’re better than Me, You and Dupree.
Insert here the usual caution that movies from last year’s December rush didn’t make it most places until January or later, to explain what to big city folks might seem like anachronisms in my top three spots and elsewhere. To qualify, as usual, a film had to be no more than three years old, and play a big screen near me in ’06.
There’s not just one reason to like a film, or only one valid kind of enjoyment. (How boring if there were!) Ranking, then, is a game of incommensurables--at least most of the time. It’s great fun if you realize it’s a game, kind of dumb if you don’t.
If there was a trend to the year’s films, I would guess it’s that fantasies are starting to become nightmares. So, we need to stay awake.

2. Caché (Michael Haneke).

Pity and terror, the classic elements of tragedy, are taken to another level in Haneke’s latest disturbing and provocative experiment. An affluent married couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) receive a series of videotapes showing their home from the vantage point of the street. The belief that they are being stalked eventually starts to fragment the couple's relationship. The husband gets a hunch that the person sending the tapes is a figure from his childhood, an Algerian boy involved in an incident so guilt-ridden that Georges conceals his suspicions from his wife. His memory has connections to a wider historical guilt--that of France itself in the disastrous Algerian war of the 50s and 60s, and to a prevalent yet barely acknowledged racism and fear of difference.

Haneke is interested in implicating the audience, drawing our attention to the act of watching a film itself, and this meta-fictional critique reflects the ethical and psychological dilemmas of the narrative. The mystery can easily lead us astray—for instance, if we assume that the Auteuil character was actually guilty of something, rather than simply notice his inability to acknowledge guilt feelings—but this being “led astray” is perhaps part of the point. In addition to the story's social and political echoes, the central mystery of who is sending the tapes takes on a strange power. We are not given an answer directly, but here again form and content reflect one another, resulting in the collapse of the fictional illusion that we tend to assume when we watch a movie and in a sense, forget that it's only a movie. Describing Caché in these ways makes it sound like a mere intellectual exercise, but the experience of watching the film is visceral and deeply troubling. It still haunts me.

3. Darwin’s Nightmare (Hubert Sauper).

This rigorously truthful film about globalization’s destructive impact on the poor starts with the introduction of the Nile perch, a fish that is sometimes more than six feet long, into Lake Victoria, Africa. The perch has gradually killed off most of the smaller species, and poses a threat to the ecological survival of the lake itself. From there, Sauper carefully explores the horror and degradation experienced by impoverished fishermen and other fish workers, along with prostitutes and street kids in Tanzania.

The film is centered wholly upon the candid on-site words and actions of the people involved, so that whatever "case" is made seems to unfold in the same way it might have for a visiting observer. We see businessmen making excuses, a security guard explaining how war can be a good thing (since soldiers get regular pay and decent food), and we meet sad and eloquent children displaying a knowledge of suffering beyond their years. Sauper also interviews the Russian pilots who fly the perch out of Tanzania to grace the tables of restaurants in Europe. But what are the cargo planes bringing into the country? The director’s off-screen voice continues to ask the difficult questions. When the truth finally becomes clear, we realize that we are not witnessing some unavoidable tragedy, but a sinister and deadly form of neo-colonialism. Darwin’s Nightmare is a brave, and very distressing, look at the face of exploitation, a shattering human document.

4. Iraq in Fragments (James Longley).

Taking the opposite approach of Sauper’s film (like a modernist contrasted with a classical style), this three-part portrait of occupied Iraq uses bold art-film methods to create a feeling of immediacy. Most previous films on the subject have either been critiques of the political situation, or focused on the experiences of American soldiers. Here the crisis is viewed from the perspectives of Iraqis. Longley spent three years in Iraq, from the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to early last year, and he gained an astonishing level of trust from the people he filmed.

The first part is about an eleven-year old boy, a Sunni, living in a poor section of Baghdad and working in a machine shop. The boss abuses and humiliates him, and the relationship seems to reflect the psychology of living under dictatorship and occupation. The second part takes us to southern Iraq where militant Shiites rally behind the radical cleric Moktada el-Sadr. Here we are right in the midst of the simmering anger and religious zealotry that has helped ignite civil war, and the tension is palpable. In the third part, we meet a boy living in a Kurdish village in northern Iraq. The Kurds have established their own separatist enclave, and this section seems more hopeful, but there are conflicts and contradictions here as well.

Longley uses rapid editing and jump cuts, avoiding the usual naturalistic pace of documentary. The color photography is stunning. We may draw political conclusions from what we see—the people in the film are not shy about their opinions, which often accompany the images in voice-over. But Longley is even-handed—the point is to catch a glimpse of the reality, complex and tragic, of this beautiful, unfortunate land.

5. L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne).

The Dardenne brothers have mapped out a territory all their own: small-scale stories about people on the margins, poor and working class, struggling with their situations and coming to terms with moral and spiritual dilemmas. Here we have Bruno (Jérémie Renier), a petty thief and hustler, employing local kids to do burglaries and purse snatchings and then pawning what he takes in. He's always on his cell phone, trying to swing some deal or other, and although he's playful and affectionate towards his girlfriend Sonia (Déborah François), he seems very passive and uninterested in his new baby son, Jimmie. When Sonia allows him to take the baby on a walk in a stroller while she waits in line for her welfare check, Bruno arranges to have his baby sold on the black market, telling her later that "we can always have another one." She collapses and is hospitalized; he decides to somehow get the baby back.

The Dardennes' unusual style involves a hand-held camera following the characters' incessant movements, lack of musical score or emotional cues, non-professional actors, and the use of something close to real time in many of the sequences. The plot element of baby selling is sensational, but the point is not merely that poverty breeds ignorance and callousness, but that there's still the possibility of moral awareness even in the most unlikely places or people. What creates this possibility? It's only after a great deal of suffering and attempts on the part of Bruno to evade the question that the film finally lets us discover the answer. Part of that is realizing who the child of the title really is, and the film’s quietly moving ending is both beautiful and true.

6. Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck).

I like it when a film bursts the bounds of genre—in this case, the inner-city teacher film. Half Nelson is about a white Brooklyn junior high history teacher named Dan (Ryan Gosling), smart and witty, who uses unconventional means to inspire interest in the civil rights movement and progressive history in general. Trouble is, he's also addicted to crack. One day he's getting high in a locker room after hours, when one of his students, a 13-year-old black girl named Drey (Shareeka Epps), comes back for her sneakers and finds teach in a bathroom stall, strung out and disoriented. After this event, Drey keeps seeking out Dan in friendship. We witness their different yet parallel lives intertwine, and eventually some truth, sad and hopeful by turns, comes to light.

The direction is a model of patience, understatement, and observation of the way real people act. Gosling’s performance is brimming with humor and pathos, and many-sided in a way that even includes being unlikable at times. Epps is a revelation, serious to the point of heartbreak, making you forget her character's age until a sudden smile or moment of vulnerability breaks through. The picture is about the dilemma facing people who want to do something about the suffering in the world around them, but are plagued with feelings of powerlessness. A late sequence in which Dan's real family and Drey's surrogate one act out their dysfunctions, culminates in a terrific scene where the two friends meet in the worst possible circumstances. This is a movie that faces the hardest realities with real feeling and courage.

7. The President’s Last Bang (Im Sangsoo).

This fictionalized account of South Korean President Park Chunghee's 1979 assassination injects a bracing, sardonic view of politics into what could have been just another violent thriller. Most of the drama takes place in the President’s safe house, where he has a little drinking party with two nubile young women, accompanied by his chief bodyguard, his secretary, and Kim, the head of the Koran CIA (Baek Yun-shik). Kim is plotting to assassinate his boss that very night, with the help of his stoic right-hand man and a hothead chief agent (Han Suk-kyu), who is as close as we come to a point-of-view character in the movie. The motives are murky, the crime seems curiously unplanned, as if done on a sudden impulse, and precious little thought is given to a strategy for the aftermath. Just about everything that could go wrong, does.

Im is determined to rip the veil away from power and the mystique of history, to show the ordinary baseness of human character and actions beneath. The greatest matters of state are resolved in terms of crude vanity, resentment, and self-interest. Yet he doesn't turn the characters into satiric cartoons--the behavior and dialogue seems all too real. It’s an anti-heroic slapstick suspense film, with uneasy laughter shading into profound disgust.

8. Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood).

A remarkable look at the losing side in the battle of Iwo Jima. Nothing fancy here—in fact, Eastwood’s old Hollywood style seems more pared down than usual. The approach is right because the film’s subject is the Japanese soldiers’ struggle with themselves and each other, not the battle. The official line was that soldiers needed to fight to the death, or commit suicide, rather than surrender, and we sense that this is linked with empire and subservience to its leader. Here it’s played out in the casual attitudes of the officers and soldiers, and then in the desperate decisions of battle, as the hope of life and memory of family causes resistance in the mind of the soldier Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and others.

It’s wonderful how Eastwood and his screenwriter Iris Yamashita have made this struggle so vivid and tragic, when the premise is so foreign to Americans to begin with. This isn’t an anti-war movie in the usual sense—there’s no political critique. The point is that war is fought by individual human beings, each with his own past, family, desires, hopes and fears. This is seen more powerfully in a case where the cause is lost, and unjust in our eyes. The fight is between notions of honor that are really masks of cruelty, and simple shared humanity. One of the soldiers was sent to Iwo Jima because he was unable to shoot a child’s dog when ordered to. That sums it up.

Letters From Iwo Jima is anchored by a world-class performance from Ken Watanabe as the general in command of the doomed island force. I was fascinated by the way the film refrains from making war even the slightest bit exciting. The pale colors of the photography match the sense of exhaustion and futility of war that this movie so beautifully conveys.

9. The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry).

Gondry takes his fascination with dreams and fantasies and runs it up against the realities of love and romantic obsession. In the movies, these two things are usually the same, but this film doesn’t settle for that softer, easier way.

Gael García Bernal plays Stéphane, a young Mexican artist in France who has trouble distinguishing his waking life from his dreams. One of the film’s recurring motifs has him hosting a dream TV cooking show where he plays all the instruments, interviews guests, and creates dreams out of various ingredients. He also likes to create unusual art objects using household materials, and when he meets his next-door neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), he discovers that she shares his surrealistic interests.

The amazing art direction and production design employs funny animation effects using paper, cellophane, and all kinds of unusual props. The camerawork and editing is intuitive, fast and fluid. The sensibility is off-the-wall and often hilarious. Even so, whenever the story seems to be entering fairy tale wish-fulfillment territory, we are pulled up short by Gondry’s melancholy vision of the difficulties of romance and love. Stéphane may be charming and cute, but he’s also immature, spiteful, self-centered, and incredibly insecure. His slipping in and out of dream states becomes a painful symbol of his desperate neediness and disconnection. There’s a special insight here about the drawbacks involved in being an artist-give Gondry credit for showing both the beauty and the limitations of the life of imagination.

10. Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Jonathan Demme).

Oh, you say, it’s just a concert film. Well, yes, it is a film of Neil Young’s premiere performance of his Prairie Wind album at Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium. But Young is not your everyday musician, and Demme shows how to imprint a concert event on your soul, and make it about more than just a show.

With the help of Demme’s impeccable visual sense, Young evokes a sense of gratitude for the American musical tradition through beautiful songs exploring dreams, mortality, the bonds of family, and coming to terms with both our loves and our failings. The concert is all of a piece—certain strategies, such as not showing the audience, using different light set-ups, and holding shots where other directors might move all over the place—create a feeling of warmth in which the songs flow together into a larger narrative, a cinematic dream state. Every year there has to be at least one film on my list that helps me feel grateful for life, and reminds me of love and wonder and the belief in higher things. This is the one.

The B-sides:

11. Since Otar Left… (Julie Bertuccelli).
A portrait of three generations of women in Tblisi, Georgia—grandmother, mother, and daughter—that is true to the fragility, tensions, and hard-won wisdom of life. When the son in Paris dies in an accident, the two younger women foolishly hide the fact from the doting grandmother. This is a film where the stories of women are central, shot with a sense of careful detail and regard for city life and domestic routines. A theme emerges—our journeys start with family, and continue only by finding a way to break free from family while retaining some connection.

12. Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki).
An ambitious history of modern American militarism, brilliantly edited, Why We Fight shows that the executive branch's preemption of war-making powers from the Congress started long ago, as part of the development of a permanent war footing after World War II. It examines the military, the weapons contractors, the "think tanks" that now determine policy, and the changing views of Americans about war. Jarecki makes a strong case that the military-industrial complex is threatening our freedom and well-being as a nation.

13. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón).
A dystopian thriller about a time (2027) when worldwide infertility spells a human race without a future. In other words, like the best science fiction, this is a critique of the present, taking well-aimed swipes at “homeland security” and anti-immigrant hysteria, among other things. Clive Owen shines as the low-key hero trying to get the world’s only pregnant woman to safety. The dialogue is brisk and intelligent; while Cuarón manages to combine heart-stopping excitement with gravity and a sense of loss. A film to be reckoned with.

14. Sophie Scholl: the Final Days (Marc Rothemund).
Sophie Scholl was a 21-year-old university student in Munich who helped launch an underground anti-Nazi group in 1942 called The White Rose. The film details her arrest, interrogation, trial, and execution. Fueled by Julia Jentsch’s terrific performance in the title role, the picture gets more intense as Sophie takes each heroic step towards her ultimate fate. The picture may prompt you to ask yourself how far your own courage could take you in her situation.

15. Deliver Us From Evil (Amy Berg).
A documentary about Father Oliver O'Grady, a priest who sexually abused countless numbers of girls and boys in California over three decades. Berg’s interviews with him reveal a man whose apparent remorse masks a peculiar obliviousness to the suffering he has caused. He was enabled by the Catholic hierarchy, including the current archbishop of L.A., who instead of turning him in, would move him off to other parishes where he would abuse other kids. The film scrupulously examines why church attitudes about power, sex, and authority have resulted in such incredible corruption and denial.

16. Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski).
A dryly funny, fly-on-the wall view of a group of young people in New York—self-conscious characters who talk around their feelings, constantly hesitate, and seem to completely inhabit the moment while staying in their heads. Bujalski practices a sort of aesthetic-by-subtraction, in which the absence of color, sets, make-up, good-looking actors, or a budget provides relief from the usual movie nonsense and leaves us alone with the humor, and the discomfort, of our self-regard.

17. The Proposition (John Hillcoat).
The western is dead. Long live the Australian western. Lawless colonial Queensland is the setting for a tale of revenge that takes unexpected turns. A captain (Ray Winstone, great as usual) captures two of the outlaw Burns brothers, and threatens to hang the youngest one unless Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) can bring him older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), the head of the gang. Beautifully shot, the picture has a raw feeling of dread and fatalism, and the violence is not taken lightly. Nick Cave wrote the script, and he does a lot with few words.

18. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro).
The evil that men do, reflected in the dark fables of childhood. In 1944 Spain, a 10-year-old girl (Ivana Baquero) goes with her mother to live with her new stepfather (Sergi López), a brutal fascist officer in charge of mopping up pockets of rebel resistance. While the outside world descends into violence, the girl enters a magic labyrinth where she is given three difficult tasks by a sinister-looking being. Del Toro’s baroque style is full of dark flourishes, a heady brew of melodrama and horror. He has fashioned a tragedy about the way children are trapped in the maze of adult arrogance and power, and offers the slender thread of self-sacrifice as a way out.

19. The Queen (Stephen Frears).
I find it amusing to see this film, in the midst of Oscar hype, marketed as some sort of uplifting spectacle. In fact, The Queen is an agreeably modest, witty social comedy. The subject is the curious behavior of Queen Elizabeth II and her family after the death of Princess Diana in a 1997 car accident, and in a wider sense the film examines the ridiculous game of images that politics and public life in general has become. The disconnect between the banality of everyday palace life, out of touch with reality behind a wall of privilege, and the rising tides of events outside, gives the film a delicious feeling of absurdity, but Frears doesn’t go overboard into farce or caricature, and in this he is aided immeasurably by the brilliant work of Helen Mirren in the title role.

20. Ballets Russes (Daniel Geller and Dana Goldfyne).
Here is a case where a film’s technique doesn’t stand out very much, beyond the virtues of simplicity and directness. But the subject—the exciting Russian ballet companies that dominated the form in Europe and America during the first part of the 20th century—is so marvelous that a conscious style would only seem an intrusion. The numerous clips from actual ballets of the period, punctuated by interviews with the dancers themselves, create a blissful, enchanting effect.

Other performances I admired:
Conor Donovan (Twelve and Holding)
Frances de la Tour (The History Boys)
Robert Downey, Jr. (A Scanner Darkly)
Cyndi Williams (Room)
Laurent Lucas (Lemming)
Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick)
Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada)
Leonardo Di Caprio (The Departed)
Sarala (Water)
Ben Affleck (Hollywoodland)
Catherine O’Hara (For Your Consideration)
Adam Beach (Flags of Our Fathers)
Danny Perea (Duck Season)
Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat!)

Frances de la Tour

Adam Beach

Music:
Clint Mansell, The Fountain.
Bad film. Passionately beautiful score. Go figure.
Runners-up:
James Horner, The New World
David Julyan, The Descent
(for making the film seem more substantial than it is).

The New World

The Fountain

Avenue of the Overrated:
Little Miss Sunshine.
Slightly better than the formula we're used to, so the film caught on. I'm sure saturation marketing didn't hurt either. But really, what's all the fuss about?
Runner-up:
Dreamgirls. Some good moments, but the songs are weak and there’s no second act.

Duds:
The Fountain. I winced throughout at the sheer pretentiousness of this attempt at cosmic significance.
Also: The Da Vinci Code, Click, V for Vendetta

Just asking: Am I the only one who’s sick of seeing Christopher Walken appear in every other movie? In a fright wig?

Sir! No Sir!

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