One of the most joyful rediscoveries this year was Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe which in a wonderfully surreal manner captures the magic, literal and figurative, that a most unlikely outsider brings to the moribund, allowing them to realise what they have been missing through their obsessive introspection and to grow through the recognition of the value in difference. Could there possibly be a message in there?
In the 'they do still make'em like that' category the outstanding example was the The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan which was pure pleasure from the tip of its épée to the handle of its poignard, running full tilt with the ridiculousness of the plot half way round France and back across the Channel without pausing for breath. Hats are worn with an angle of jaunt worthy of an Expressionist noir, swords are barely ever in a scabbard, panelling is chewed liberally and Eva Green's use of her belle poitrine auditions it for separate billing in the cast list. Critically though the film is never knowing; rather it knows the source material and takes both it and the audience for a seriously good time.
However, onto the serious stuff because 2023 proved to be a very strong year with several favourites just missing out on the top ten including The Zone Of Interest, Afire, Fallen Leaves, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Alcarras, A Human Position, The Eight Mountains and Earth Mama.
The following films made the cut. In reverse order ...
10. Other People's Children : Piquant but extremely enjoyable romantic drama in which Virginie Efira once again excels providing a nuanced and captivating central performance in a sophisticated look at the ties that bind us not just to partners but to their children.
Anyone who has had to leave a relationship unwillingly knows the tangible feeling of loss for everything that has gone with it, including friends, relations and children. We do, however, remain a meaningful part of their lives even if we are not as central as we may wish.
One of the rather marvellous aspects of this film is an understated acquiescence and recognition that time moves on inexorably and whilst we may fight it and scheme away to make good on our biological clocks we ultimately have to make the best of it. And making the best of it means both self care and care for others including those with whom we would wish to remain closer.
The milieu of the comfortable, urban bourgeoisie may seem hermetic and a rather safe place in which to act as an adult and to be seen and to be comfortable and desired in your (alright early) middle aged body. But goodness me it is refreshing to have a film that is unashamedly adult in approach and in which the tone and register is far removed from gushing emotionalism and a requirement to express innermost feelings in as dramatic a manner as possible.
9. Amanda : A touch of Greek Weird Wave in well heeled Italy. Questioning, aching sadness and loneliness are gradually resolved through the playing out of mutual antagonisms which are by turns hilarious and deeply melancholic. If you are tuned to the same wavelength it's a wonderful ride. "One day you’re nobody. And the next day you wake up, you have a best friend, a boyfriend, and almost an electric fan and a horse." Fabulous.
8. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed : Wonderfully constructed documentary which embodies the notion that the personal is political by developing the story of the pain felt by Goldin alongside the huge societal pain felt from public health crises which have been ignored (wilfully or otherwise) and the impunity and apparent imperviousness of the powerful in the face of that pain. Those come together in a moment of sheer horror when the recording of a 911 call is played in court: a wailing shriek of despair with the pitch and intensity of a dentist's drill.
7. Babylon : A film about the human consequences of industrial change. I heard Babylon described as 'pummelling maximalism'. Generally that would see me heading for the exits but on this occasion it found me completely absorbed by what's on screen. Adjectives like brio, gusto and just sheer vim can all be applied liberally to the surface freneticism but these have to be balanced against a profound underlying melancholy about the effects of the shift from the unhinged energy and unthinking liberality of the silent era to the talkies and the early rumblings of the Code in which who you were mattered far more. For some retraining was never realistic.
Some have found the juxtaposition of the final sequences which laud the silver screen as problematic. In fact it seems entirely in keeping with the idea that the work lives on when the people have long gone; that shared stories meet a basic human need which we satisfy in part by sitting together to watch those who are long dead speak to the living.
6. Past Lives : Has an exquisite delicacy in delineating the different life stages of a relationship that is restrained by circumstance and reflects a longing for something that, actually, you never had and the wistful sense of possibilities unfulfilled. The opening and closing sequences are in themselves minor marvels.
5. Totem : A near miraculous piece of film making which elicits remarkable naturalistic performances, particularly from the young actress playing Sol, conveys a sense of true familial bonds permeated by both tensions and deep warmth and imbues the scenario with an aching sadness about impending loss.
The culminating rendition of an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor is so perfect as an encapsulation of all that has gone before that the urge to both laugh and simultaneously burst into tears is near overwhelming.
This is a very odd comparison to make but in terms of depth of feeling that sequence put me in mind of the swoon inducing rendition by Harriet Andersson of The Princess of Castile in the theatricals in Through A Glass Darkly. The world of art and theatre intersecting with the quotidian, illuminating it and prefiguring what is to come.
4. Tar : Engrossing, cerebral, chilly and chilling with a powerhouse Cate Blanchett performance as a star conductor who conducts far more than just music: she directs, manipulates, bullies and charms everyone in her orbit curating herself as a spectacle of success whose whole aesthetic contributes to her image of impervious perfection.
Unsurprisingly below the surface there are cracks which are quite overtly repressed, particularly her family background and her relationships. The film largely represents the world as she sees it which means huge swathes of what has happened are missing. We see some of the consequences for her but the others are signified largely by their absence. They literally disappear.
But we do start to see representations of her as seen by others. These develop during the course of the film and present a completely different view of her which at times borders on the ridiculous. Some of that framing is deliberately manipulated to the extent that it is fake. That doesn’t matter until it does. And it does when the transactions on which Tar has based her whole career start to falter.
Is it important that Tar is a gay woman and not, say, a man? Yes it is because she is good at her job but unsympathetic. She’s not what women are still often supposed to be: likeable. And for a long time that doesn’t matter. But then it does and her fall is all the more sudden and all the more profound as a result. She glissades right down the icy mountain of her own creation. But her gradual disintegration also plays into one sense in which the expectation of women may have some actual resonance: she does feel (manifested as sounds) some uncertainty, some dread. She may actually feel less impervious, less entitled than a man in the same position.
So Art or Rat or both? It is both. She is a predator. But it’s predominantly Art. What we see is someone who is giving effect to art. The intriguing point is that Art can be performed in both senses: it is a performance of who you are or how you want to be seen as well as conveying the substance of the material. Arguably it is when Tar is moved more by the latter than the former that some of her misjudgements start to really matter.
Tar is a quite wonderful film which makes us actively reflect. The character is conflicted: a genius and a manipulative bully. A pedestal is a precarious place to be. When your foot slips and you stumble there may be few to pick you back up and many cheering silently, and indeed not so silently.
When the ’s’ drops from ‘star’ where do you end up?
3. Return to Seoul : Stunningly good: bracing, visceral, completely engrossing and constantly surprising with an astounding central performance.
Freddie is in effect living as a protean version of herself: nuanced, complex. challenging, dislikable, self destructive, constantly dissatisfied and constantly evolving, trying out different versions of how to live to see how they work for her and for others.
That constant evolution is a search for connection and the result of experiencing how it develops and how it is lost. If we want to understand ourselves can we ever do so if we don’t really know where we have come from and the role of our parents and how their feelings for us have determined our lives (even if that means putting someone up for adoption in the hope of a better life for them)?
Lack of connection feels like a constant sense of rejection. This is reflected in some astonishing moments particularly when Freddie simply announces to a boyfriend “I could erase you from my life with a snap of my finger”.
She could - and does.
But she is doing this to herself as well.
There is also a profound role for music: listening, dancing and performing. Music is universal but also specific. It can help to situate someone (hence the extraordinary opening scene in which Freddie borrows headphones in order to hear better what someone else has been playing); it can be total release (hence the wild dancing) and it can be complete expression.
In the latter context how better to sum up the film than playing Bach variations on a battered piano in an empty hotel in an unidentified place. Music is connection but it is also manifold, indeed endless, layers of complexity.
2. Poor Things : Extraordinary, careening, kinked, Art Nouveau inspired fantasia about female self-invention which is laugh out loud funny, grotesque, bawdy, mordant and moving. Emma Stone’s performance from a stiff limbed, mischievous infant to a refined, self confident woman via a suite of interactions with various manifestations of arrogant, wheedling male hypocrisy is utterly magnificent and deserves to win all of the awards. The only disappointment: dropping the original Glaswegian setting.
1. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World : Astounding. Scabrously hilarious culminating in a sequence informed by an iconic Bob Dylan video which - as a commentary on corporate business culture and its sheer contempt for the people it employs - achieves a level of bathetic humour that might lead the viewer either to levitate or simply expire on the spot.
Angela is such a fiercely intelligent, caustic, chaotic but deeply human character that this viewer could happily spend days just sitting in her car. The potty mouthed videos that that she produces cosplaying andrew tate are priceless. An autodidact she's a demotic modern day Proust (for eagle eyed viewers of her bedside table) and pretty much a Renaissance woman.
Add to this a magnificent Nina Hoss extended cameo as an Austrian corporate princess who conveys a truly stunning level of bemused superiority and amoral indifference.
Do Not Expect Too Much ... may be long but it is so rewarding in showing the experience of the worker in the era of late stage capitalism and so fabulously contemptuous of a world dominated by rampant on line culture.
So, onto the worst. And the worst were truly terrible. In reverse order five to avoid:
5. The Adults : If spending time with people acting out their childhood selves in adulthood as a means of coping with unresolved trauma - complete with cartoon voices, dance routines and choreographed playlets - is your thing, knock yourself out. Otherwise you may find yourself stuffing your fist into your mouth to try to deal with mounting irritation and to guard against a desire to commit physical violence.
4. The Nature Of Love : Had to walk out of the cinema to escape this irritating dramedy complete with some very well travelled character tropes - the intellectual bourgeoise, the rustic, the ineffectual husband, the slightly wacky friends - harnessed to a hackneyed scenario of cod philosophising amidst the off piste passions. Rather than a penetrating examination of mid life choices it comes across as excruciatingly complacent.
3. Elvis : On the upside, Austin Butler is great, particularly in the performance sequences. On the downside ... pretty much everything else: it's turgid; massively too long; has an absolutely atrocious, gurning Tom Hanks performance; trowels on some important points about influences which lose impact simply through repetition and ends up a mawkish mess.
2. Amsterdam : Love the city; hate the film. Woefully overextended, beset by overacting and overcome by exhaustion as it staggers to a conclusion having wasted a tolerably intriguing set up in a series of decreasingly interesting, deliberately farcical, set pieces. A waste of a worthwhile scenario - a reminder of a previous attempt to usurp the government and introduce fascism in America - and a stellar cast.
1. Saltburn : Wildly misjudged mash up of Brideshead Revisited and Theorem which amply proves that Emerald Fennel ain’t no Waugh and she certainly ain’t no Pasolini. Instead we have a ridiculously over long trudge of stultifying tedium through a whole series of class based aggressions which, whilst certainly worthy of dissection, require a scalpel not a mile wide shillelagh. And on it goes seemingly to eternity finally culminating in a sequence of such resounding embarrassment that it might dislodge the planet from its axis. Pride And Prejudice With Zombies - all is forgiven.
Nor does it help that the protagonist, from Liverpool which is 'up North', sounds like a distant relative of Julie Walters' character in Educating Rita and has a haircut resembling something from the cover of an early album by The Beatles.
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