Best Films of 2022

 

Cinema going returned. 

My love for French cinema was confirmed.

My appreciation of the serious, austere and not necessarily ultimately uplifting was present and correct.

Vicky Krieps continued to suggest that she is one of the most astounding actors at work at the moment (Corsage, Hold Me Tight and Bergman Island to add to other stellar outings).

Also confirmed was the urgent need to correct weaponised nostalgia and simple stories in favour of complexity, criticism and a warning that the siren voices of creeping social and political authoritarianism have to be confronted. 

The usual 10 - 1 ranking follows but there are several films which only just missed the cut which deserve a mention particularly Corsage; Il Buco; Bergman Island; Flux Gourmet and The Quiet Girl.

10. Parallel Mothers : A tremendous performance from Penelope Cruz who is on screen for almost the entire running time anchors this film which is a stonking great melodrama of the kind that Almodovar can carry off with aplomb and of which Douglas Sirk would have been proud. The dignity of the grieving, the need to know the truth and not to inflict loss on others is the deeply poignant thread with the disappeared of the Civil War.

9. Lost Illusions : So very, very good. It may be a straight up period drama but it feels as much 2020s as 1820s: an attention economy in which controversy sells, mobs rule, true sentiment is dangerous, social class counts and enemies are inexorable and vicious. Great performances all round and a fully immersive experience amidst the hurly burly.

8. One Fine Morning : Yet again Mia Hansen-Love finds an unexplored angle in human relationships, this time a wonderfully rendered account of experiencing simultaneous grief and love which is grounded rather than elevated in style making it all the more moving. Aided by some truly great performances, particularly from Lea Seydoux who conveys both an aching sadness and deep stoicism in the face of a father who is forgetting her but better remembers his sometime partner and a married lover for whom she feels like a mistress. In both cases she is deeply hurt by giving love but only partially receiving it. But then perhaps there will be one fine morning when her love is returned fully.

7. Memoria : A film that demands to be seen and, even more significantly, heard in the cinema since the immersive state of being in a black box provides the requisite sensitivity to sound and motion to allow the full strangeness of the experience to be savoured.

In essence this film is about the immanence of sound in the environment. 

There will be numerous takes on the sound, but a relatively straightforward reading is that it represents the accumulated experience of a place resonating over time. It is there for those who choose to hear and have been sensitised to do so. That acclimatisation may well be the result of individual trauma which then allows the echo of the past, perhaps heard most readily in relation to past trauma, to be accessed. 

What might slightly facetiously be considered a Terrence Malick moment towards the very end of the film was both beautiful and wholly unnecessary. The subsequent sequence of clouds moving through the mountains as they have for thousands of years is a much better representation of the timelessness of the echo that can be transmitted to those who are willing to hear. 

And perhaps more of us need to be attuned to the echo of the past as the present threatens it more than ever before.

6. The Souvenir Part II : Instantly demands a second viewing not least to work out how the many layers intersect. Strangely for a film that is about coming to terms with grief and trauma and trying to understand what actually happened, the tone is light, optimistic and often very amusing. The fabulous final sequence might be described as an honest fantasy. The very end demonstrates that Julie has now truly taken over direction of her own life by making a film which reflects on her previous attempts to make a film about the trauma of the relationship which was the focus of ... The Souvenir.

5. Decision To Leave : Between the mountain and the sea lie the mists of longing and obsession clouding judgement, offering glimpses of insight but also more tendrils snaking their way to further confusion and obfuscation. The sheer density of the material immediately suggests a second viewing but on a first encounter it is a gorgeous, enveloping masterpiece of editing and cinematography with stellar performances and, for this viewer at least, a magnificent and deeply satisfying closing sequence.

4. The Banshees of Inisherin : Tragi-comedy is the hardest of genres to pull off sucessfully but, as here, the results can be breathtaking. A brilliantly acted drama about the choice between sociability or solipsism as a means to happiness. That such a binary can never be the means of truly achieving personal or artistic fulfilment other than in narrow and self-defeating terms is the source of both the comedy and the tragedy. That purported choice is also rooted in despair about the human condition and how insularity can entrench myopic hatreds which just find more reasons to fester. The civil war heard and occasionally glimpsed on the mainland is far more than a distant echo.

3. Aftersun : Desperately sad and beautifully acted with some bravura sequences, not the least of which are the final few minutes which achingly entwine the past and the present. The father - daughter relationship is illuminated with wonderful restraint and often in a light that is lambent rather than effulgent.

2. Saint Omer : Austere, rigorous, beautifully framed and completely enthralling examination of motherhood with the wonderful notion of the chimera at its heart: mothers and children fused through organic tissue from each which persists in the body of the other.

1. Happening : Cannot ever remember gripping the seat quite so hard as at times during this unflinching and sadly utterly necessary description of the desperate situation that results from criminalisation of reproductive choice. The central performance is simply outstanding. To anyone with even a vague grip on sanity the scenario is frankly terrifying. This should be required viewing in Texas, the US Supreme Court and other sloughs of zealotry who would take us back to such awful days.

Waiting

 

"Everybody’s crazy

What’s your excuse baby?

Standing in the middle waiting for something to happen."

Ah, the lost and greatly lamented Veronica Falls one of my favourite jangly, indie, bubblegum, breathy, Sixties crossed with a Noughties take on Britpop inflected New Wave, covertly energetic, bands. A niche category but a good one.

The song is about indecision and prevarication; everyone is as uncertain as everyone else. But perhaps it is also about paralysis in the face of things that are just too big. 

In the case of the song, approaching someone you kinda like. 

In the case of many humans in the early 2020s, the sense that perhaps everyone really is crazy makes one feel that actually standing in the middle isn't the worst place. The trouble is that the crazies might catch up with you anyway.

Waiting no longer feels like just waiting for the weekend, for something to turn up or even to improve. The notion that things might actually get better seems fanciful in itself.

Waiting now has the sense that no news is actually very, very far from the worst news.  Slow news days are not just to be welcomed but absolutely treasured. Culling of notifications from news sites is a prudent way of avoiding being presented with something truly dreadful before being properly prepared. Just making it through a week  feels like a minor triumph. 

Yet the waiting goes on subliminally. 

A classic coping strategy for worry and uncertainty is to discount. To imagine the worst so that you have as a mental exercise gone through it and come out on the other side at least in some order. 

Discounting is however hard when the worry is about things which simply do not feel susceptible to such techniques. Things from which we do not come out the other side in some kind of recognisable order: climate change, warfare, fascism corrupting liberal democracies, economies that malfunction to such an extent that they do not provide a decent life for millions; global famine; endemic diseases for which the boffins have no answers. 

Yet the waiting is even stranger since on the surface not that much has changed. Not yet anyway. The striving is for normality by which we mean how it has been up to now. We celebrate rain in the summer as properly British after heatwaves that leave everyone shaken because the sky was a shade of blue more commonly associated with the Sahel than Surbiton. 

Whilst not that much may have changed there is an ineluctable sense that it will. Our rational minds tell us so. Not to listen would be crazy. To give up in favour of the fantasy and the stupidity that characterise so much of what passes for politics in places like Britain and the US.

So here we are waiting for something to happen, knowing that at least some of it will, knowing that it is only rational to accept and prepare and adapt and make the case for the Enlightenment and the dangers of demagogues and standing up to fascists and to try to do things that could make a difference but also desperate to know how bad is bad because that way we can try to cope. But bad is likely to be very bad. And we don't really want to know what it would be like because we are really not sure we can cope with knowing.

And so we end up "standing in the middle waiting for something to happen" and wishing it was just that a pretty girl (or your chosen preference) might smile. 

Because then we'd know what to do. 

Fugue

 

A book set in the past which speaks so loudly to our present times as to be shouting in our faces. Except that it would do so in the most understated and droll manner behind a distinct partina of politeness and perhaps just a little condescension at our inability to appreciate the true architectonics of our financialised economy and society. One in which transactions are all ultimately mediated through money.

It would be unforgivable to say too much about the plot because there are so many delights to be savoured from the gradual unfolding of a series of ventriloquised perspectives on nominally the same events in which who is saying what and why is constantly in play.

There is also much joy to be had in considering who might be the model for some of the people at the heart of the novel, notably Andrew Bevel whose ambition to 'bend and align' reality so that he is always shown to have been, well, right is so reminiscent of so many powerful men and their equally powerful sense of entitlement. 

Men moreover who constantly refuse to accept that their success is a product of privilege or inheritance. All is down to their own genius. Unearned and unwarranted success is an anathema. Government intervention to prevent the great men from carrying out their vision is the great sin. 

Underpinning all of this is some spectacular gaslighting of the role of women and expressions of truly fundamental sexism. 

Yet the delicious irony of the book is that for all of the emphasis on mathematics and hard numbers it is art as much as science that underpins success.

One could almost say the music of mathematics. Bach would certainly have known that concept albeit with a side helping of the divine order and perhaps even numerology.

What an appreciation of the modernist novel and the music being written by the avant garde in the first decades of the 20th century provides is a sense that reality is just as much about what happens in the mind. 

Modernism was very concerned with technological progress. The outside world was changing but also how humans work inside, their psychology, the way that they thought about the world.

Modernists also rejected the omniscient narrator and 'character' as a nexus of social change. Interiority is much more important.

In the context of the novel there is a magnificent irony that the patterns of musical notation and the insights of the modernists which are concerned with understanding the dynamics of how things work in practice come to be considerably more significant than the assertion that genius, character and force of will are supreme.

The fugue is the perfect expression of the variations, the changes in order of the notes, the changes of rhythm. If you understand what causes the variations you understand the dynamics and you understand the world in practice, rather than in theory. 

In a nice parallel fugue is also a dissociative state of mind; in effect an amnesia for your own personality and identity resulting from long term trauma. 

For my money, so to speak, there is also a deliberate reference to Thales of Miletus; a pre-Socratic Greek philosophy who aimed to explain natural phenomena through hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves. He might have based his system on water. What if, instead, the world is actually based on money?