SCREENERS

Our favorite films of 2003

Runners-up: Down with Love (Peyton Reed), Stuck on You (Peter and Bobby Farrelly), Big Fish (Tim Burton), Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki), The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan), City of God (Fernando Meirelles), Whale Rider (Niki Caro), Hulk (Ang Lee), Intolerable Cruelty (Joel Coen), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quention Tarantino), The Flower of Evil (Claude Chabrol), Head of State (Chris Rock)

Performance of the year: Zooey Deschanel, All the Real Girls -- David Gordon Green's sophomore effort has more than its fair share of flaws, but Zooey's performance as the precocious, mercurial Noel is a thing of rare, luminous beauty.

Koi...Mil Gaya (Rakesh Roshan).
You'd think Bubba Ho-Tep or Kill Bill would be the wildest genre pastiche in 2003, but that honor goes to this Bollywood import; a strange mishmash of Flowers for Algernon, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, starring a leading man with two thumbs on one hand and given the traditional three-hour musical treatment. Why Preity Zinta isn't a superstar on these shores, I'll never know.
Stone Reader (Mark Moskowitz).
Obsession film #3. The fate of Dow Mossman is not as interesting as the film's meditations on becoming an evangelist for a book (or a thing), and the nature of publishing's one-hit wonders. Too bad it never made me the least bit interested in reading The Stones of Summer.
The Triplets of Belleville
(Sylvain Chomet).
Twilight Samurai (Yoji Yamada)
An entry in the Chicago Film Festival, I hope this Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee gets a wider release in 2004. In a way, it's the mirror-image of Ikiru, in which a man finds his fulfilment, but in the menial, the family.
28 Days Later (Danny Boyle).

3. Blissfully Yours
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul).
From Thailand, Weerasethakul's gorgeously gentle feature, about three people who manage a temporary reprieve from their daily cares to go on a mountainside picnic, generously allowed me to spend time with these characters without pushing a story; just by being with them I absorbed their personalities and desires and drank in their humanity. In its own unassuming way, the film pushes headlong against several boundaries in contemporary cinema: documentary vs. fiction (Kiarostami), pornography vs. art (Breillat), mundane vs. sublime (Tsai). Few films have seemed more receptive to letting the beauty of the everyday speak for itself.
4. Elephant (Gus Van Sant).
Critics of Elephant regarded it as a stylistic exercise too evasive in its meaning for its own good; Derek Lam offered a memorable tagline: "an unhappy menage-a-trois between Abercrombie, Fitch and Bela Tarr". For me, it stands as the one teen movie in the history of teen movies that gets how so much of what defines the high school experience is found in what it feels like to walk down a high school hallway during recess. Here is a film that understands that both movie storytelling and the experience of life itself are matters of perspective, and seeks to frame one seemingly inconsequential moment of high school life in a series of shifting perspectives among several students, captured in long winding steadicam shots that are beautiful to behold, right before this moment explodes into inconceivable horror. I loved this film because it makes the audience ask questions about what it is seeing and how it is being presented for them to see it -- even moments that appear at first to give rhetorical explanations as to individual motives, upon reflection become open-ended provocations that force the viewer to question what real explanations lie behind the most unthinkable acts.

5. The Fog of War (Errol Morris).
The fallacy of perception is one of numerous lessons from Morris' masterfully manipulated interview with former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Ever since A Brief History of Time (or perhaps even earlier with The Thin Blue Line), Morris' films have explored how men attempt to impose a sense of order on their worlds, a theme reflected in Morris' self-conscoiusly stylized brand of "documentary." Morris uses a self-designed camera that allows both him and the camera to make eye contact with his subject during filming; yet he frames McNamara at different positions and repeatedly uses jump cuts to disrupt the mellifluous flow of McNamara's charismatic delivery. Despite McNamara's conveyance of great experience and attendant wisdom, the film doesn't exonerate him for what he has done, nor provide a clear conclusion as to what is the right and moral thing to do in times of war, putting the audience in the uncomfortable but necessary position of having to make their own assessment of this man and his views of how we should learn from our collective history in order to apply them to the crises of the present.
6. (tie)
Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman).
Suleiman's deeply personal, aloof but refreshing comic meditation on Palestinian life under Israeli occupation has a fragmented, episodic structure that may baffle many viewers, but somehow I found it to be quite suitable to the state of living it is trying to reflect: half-concealed, half-unresolved, with moments of inexplicable violence and unexpected beauty. There are plenty of laughs in this movie, but they are born of a world faced with terror and absurdity on a daily basis.
7. (tie)
Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako).
This ravishing feature about the multifaceted denizens of a Mauritanian port city was one the most beautiful portrayals of a multicultural city I've seen, at once languid in its daily rhythms, yet in constant cultural flux. The film puts a lot of confidence in the innate specialness of its characters, and it's a risk that pays off -- you're not so much following a story as tracing a cavalcade of lives moving poetically from one encounter to the next. Count this as a major addition to the undervalued canon of African cinema. Both my #s 6 and 7 offer an "environmental" experience of cinema, one you don't so much watch for its narrative as to absorb its lived-in rhythms and sense of community.
8. (tie)
Raja (Jacques Doillon).
Doillon's intelligently nutty post-colonial farce involves a rich Frenchman in Morocco who invites local girls to work on his yard, only to become smitten by one of them. Numerous questions are raised as to how the Frenchman and the Moroccan girl may be using each other, and whether genuine emotions have any part in the negotiation of their relationship, as well as how their affair affects various contingent parties. A comedy that turns into a tragedy borne of collective intentions: good, bad and ugly.
9. (tie)
Seafood (Zhu Wen).
Zhu Wen, novelist-turned-director, issued perhaps the most transgressive Chinese film I've ever seen, about a prostitute who goes to a seaside hotel to kill herself, but is noticed by an affable police officer who tries to save her from her own morbid thoughts, with rape being part of the rehabilitation. I suppose one could read this scenario allegorically as the relationship between underprivileged Chinese people and their government; I was taken in more by how the story and the characters seemed to reinvent themselves from scene to scene. Both my #s 8 and 9 elicited a live-wire spark through intuitive performances and a refusal to rest on narrative convention, qualities that are rare for movies of any age.
10. Down With Love (Peyton Reed).
The 50s retroheads who flocked to Far From Heaven last year apparently couldn't be bothered to embrace a film that had a far greater sense of joy and liveliness regarding its own unabashed nostalgia -- was it all just a fashionable trend, people? While the lukewarm re-enactment of familiar gender and race grievances in Far From Heaven left me underwhelmed, Peyton Reed's film, for all its nostalgia, manages to hit squarely upon a conundrum that still preoccupies working women roaming in a world of seemingly conflicting desires. (After all, if this movie's worldview is as outmoded as some critics claim, then why is Sex and the City such a hit?) The eye-popping production design and the hilarious script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake are worthy of the period and films being paid tribute, but most impressive are Reed's inventive use of montage and split-screens (which contribute to one of the most hilarious phone sex scenes ever filmed).

Favorite performances: Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean; Robert McNamara, The Fog of War; Keisha Castle-Hughes, Whale Rider; Oksana Akinshina, Lilya 4-Ever; Sol Kyung-gu, Oasis; Tim Robbins, Mystic River; Miranda Richardson, Spider; Kati Outinen, The Man Without a Past; The Friedman family, Capturing the Friedmans; The ensembles of Dogville and Raja.

Memorable moments from the New York Film Festival:
Hearing a packed audience of Americans cheer at the end of Dogville.
Seeing a security guard push aside Naomi Watts to make way for Susan Sarandon at the screening of Mystic River.
Tsai Ming Liang's awkward post-screening exhortation for people to buy shares or sell tickets for Goodbye Dragon Inn. With his shaved head and characteristically charismatic, tranquil demeanor, was he parodying a Buddhist sage stumping for temple donations? I sure hope it was just that...