At the end of a year in which we all felt rather at the mercy of things much bigger than ourselves, here is my list of the ten best new films that I saw in 2021 (including some at festivals which have yet to be released in the UK) which provided some comfort that humans at their best (and goodness knows we've seen plenty of humans at their worst particularly in what seems to be an ongoing death spiral for liberal democracy in one of the homes of cinema at the behest of a pathetic narcissist who just can't accept that he lost) can entrance each other with empathetic appreciation and aesthetic wonders. In other words the genius of cinema at its best lies in its recognition of the plurality of experience - the very thing that the know nothing reactionaries and authoritarians around the world want to deny us.
Generally, a very strong year probably at least in part because of titles being held up by the pandemic (or more precisely, and sadly, the early waves of the ongoing pandemic) and there were a lot of films that narrowly missed out such as: Azor, Malmkrog, Promising Young Woman, I Never Cry, The Mad Women's Ball, Rose Plays Julie, The Green Knight, After Love, Quo Vadis Aida? and Nomadland.
I also have yet to see some others that have scored highly elsewhere such as The Lost Daughter and Minari and I haven't yet steeled myself sufficiently to watch Titane.
Then there are some films which have figured prominently in listings which left me somewhat cold notably The French Dispatch, The Father and Drive My Car which just seemed far too long (although it was seen quite late in a very warm cinema which probably did not aid the experience, notable also for someone deciding to bring their dog into the screening).
So, here is my list starting with ...
10. The Power Of The Dog : The less said about the Cumberbatchian accent the better but for the rest this is wonderfully rendered, subtle film making, particularly the final 45 minutes which are a masterpiece of understatement. Kodi Smit-McPhee (above) looks as though he has wandered in from a David Lynch film which actually is entirely appropriate.
9. Compartment No.6 : Film as the ‘machine that generates empathy’ in full operation. Magnificently done, this is a paean to people finding themselves through others and to throwing snowballs at someone for whom you have feelings as being more significant than finding prehistoric petroglyphs on an icy promontory in the Russian Arctic.
8. First Cow : Bread is a staple and a luxury and therein lies the rub. Quietly melancholic but resonant account of natural sympathy and intimacy on the frontier amidst capitalist dynamics evolving out of the Oregon mud. Another gem from Kelly Reichardt.
7. Shiva Baby : A horror comedy watched partly though the fingers in excruciating embarrassment, partly almost asphyxiated with laughter. It has a claustrophobic intensity redolent of a panic attack with the plangent off kilter music and the actual baby adding to the tension and tipping sections over into outright absurdist terror. Some fabulous dialogue too: Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps is quite the description.
6. Dear Comrades! : The Big Lie is a depressingly familiar concept. Dear Comrades! examines the moral and mental contortions required to continue to believe in the face not just of atrocity but of a requirement to deny what you have seen and heard and your own deepest anxieties. It exposes the inherent craziness of existing under a regime that requires unblinking acquiescence in all things but in which hope comes from the small chance that there are still people left with a smidgeon of humanity. It also plays on the irony and inherent comedy in a society in which everyone is drilled to know nothing or know only what they are meant to know.
The result at times resembles something from the Czech New Wave, shot in absolutely sparkling black and white, particularly in the earlier stages when the focus is on the hypocrisy, laziness and dogmatic certainties of everyday life. The massacre itself manages to convey the sheer capriciousness of who lives and who dies. The subsequent cover up and asphalting over of what happened is then contrasted with a very human search for at least some resolution.
The very end rather brilliantly captures and expresses the contortions: there will always be new uplands for the workers.
5. Ninjababy : Rather magnificently this manages to be extremely funny, very serious, dramatic, ridiculous - and fabulously, fabulously entertaining.
Should be required viewing in Texas although, as ever, I fear the people who most need to see it never would.
Oh, and if anyone happens to have flatmate Ingrid's number ...
4. Petite Maman : Absolutely lovely. Tender and profound memories foretold amongst the autumn leaves of childhood. Celine Sciamma is incapable of making anything which is less than stellar.
3. Limbo : A profoundly humanist film with much of the gentle, deadpan absurdism of Kaurismaki and deep emotional resonance about refugees awaiting asylum decisions and undergoing ‘cultural acclimatisation’ in the Outer Hebrides. They converse through the universal language of American sit coms and music but with an underlying sadness about being parted from their homelands.
There are marvellous grace notes such as the post van that delivers decision letters which arrives playing opera at concert volume.
The focus is, however, resolutely on the identity of the refugee. There are no saviours. There is just the wind and the rain, the sun and the snow and the old fashioned phone box on the moors which is the fulcrum for conversations with family and all of the associated guilt, hope and longing.
It is a fabulous conceit, magnificently realised.
2. What Do We See When We look At The Sky? : Well the answer to the question in the title is something quite magical, droll, a quotidian world in which the uncanny is also immanent, portrayed with a wonderful guilelessness but also the awareness that these rhapsodic moments in their golden light occur as the world burns.
Rivette would have made an 8 hour version.
That question though.
One answer is that we see what we wish to see. And that can provide some hope amidst the chaos. There are genuine moments of magic like the existence of Lionel Messi (I’d suggest Mo Salah but then I’m an LFC supporter) able to do things with a football that few others would even attempt. Like what happens to the main characters in this film.
Football is also a near universal language. For heaven’s sake even the dogs are obsessed and have their own specific viewing positions. In this film there’s the dog ‘Vardy’ who is a big England fan. They have as much right to enjoy it as the humans.
But then we choose to watch the football whilst everything else goes to hell. And what will we tell future generations about that choice?
But then again football can provide genuinely communal feeling like few others things. Their film contains perhaps the most rhapsodic football sequence ever.
So perhaps the answer that we should give about staring at the sky is to acknowledge that it is not just us humans who see it.
1. The Worst Person In The World : Exquisite from the start, surprising, funny, touching - all that one might hope - the film then hits you with a rhapsodic freeze frame set piece from which it accelerates towards a finale of jaw dropping low key magnificence, sad and hopeful in equal measure.
There is a sequence (episode 11 if you must know) which is perhaps the best ever encapsulation of the fragility and profundity of true intimacy when Julie and Aksel observe that when they are both gone all that passed between them will then be unknown to the world. I admit I wept at that point.
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