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Read Top 10 Films 2019 – Part 1
This will be the crème de le crème, my top five films of the last year. I have decided to include my biggest disappointment of the year up front, so as not to end on a sour note. Here’s to hoping that 2020 compels me to abandon my principles again.
Biggest Disappointment of the Year
Joker
You’re right Arthur, I don’t get it. Todd Phillips’ relentlessly bleak foray into the DC universe is a mess of a film, confusing pretension with profundity, pity with sympathy. I admire the concept. In an age of relentlessly mind-numbing comic book extravaganzas, the idea of a character-driven dissection of the Joker had appeal. But the result is a whiny hodgepodge of superior films. Its Taxi Driver meets King of Comedy, with a healthy dose of You Were Never Really Here and Fight Club thrown in. Arthur Fleck is the Forrest Gump of inner-city malaise. He has little agency in the film, merely reacting to external stimuli. There is virtually no introspection about the morality of his actions. Fleck starts the film at like eight on the crazy scale, making his ‘descent’ into the Joker persona too predetermined. By contrast, Travis Bickle’s gradual transformation into mohawked vigilante gave Taxi Driver a sense of psychological realism. Phoenix tries his best, but his relentless mugging for the camera- often captured in torturous slow-motion- becomes tiresome and ever-so-slightly grotesque. Phillips also sells out his own vision, tacking on an awful dramatization of the Wayne family demise in Crime Alley, reminding us that underneath all the self-important arthouse cosmetics lies a film-franchise in waiting.
Top Films (5-1)
5. Midsommar
It’s just a classic tale of girl meets boy, boy ghosts girl, girl sacrifices boy in ritualist bear-suit. ArI Aster avoids the sophomore slump with an eerily transcendent follow-up to the domestic melodrama of Hereditary. Midsommar is a spiritual successor to Hereditary, with the early off-screen obliteration of the family network at the core of the psychodrama to follow. This film instead focuses on the families we choose- whether they be relationships, university fraternities or fanatical Swedish cults. The Midsommar festival unfolds like a hallucinogenic fever-dream, a stage for all the repressed things to come and play. Florence Pugh’s tour de force performance takes you on a journey through the entire spectrum of human experience. The scene where she is placated by a group of female acolytes plays like a demented companion piece to the quaint sisterhood of Little Women– for which she is currently Academy Award nominated. Alongside the death of a loved one or losing your job, break-ups are amongst the most traumatic experiences in one’s life. So why not have a movie that reflects that sense of psychic rupture? Does for the Swedish tourist industry what Hostel did for Eastern European backpacking.
4. Knives Out
What do you do once you’ve incurred the most vitriolic wrath that any filmmaker could endure? Knives Out is what you do. Rian Johnson has made a career out of deftly subverting genre filmmaking. Brick was to film-noir what The Brother’s Bloom was to the crime caper. It was his very idiosyncratic nature that doomed him with Star Wars fanatics, whose need for reassuring formula was shamefully exposed by The Last Jedi. Now he has turned his attention to the most hackneyed genre imaginable: the classic whodunit. Knives Out is an intricately constructed mystery that invites the viewer into a whimsical game of cat and mouse. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc is hilariously anachronistic as a Southern reconfiguration of Hercule Poirot. But it is Ana de Armas who truly astounds as Marta Cabrera, the emotional true north amongst this den of vipers. The film not only entertains tremendously, it also works as a satire on American political polarisation- the ‘alt-right trolls’ and ‘liberal snowflakes’ are both reduced to irrational wrecks when their parasitic existences are threatened. It champions the role of the immigrant class in exposing the petty entitlements of the top 1%.
3. Parasite
Parasite is a South Korean Masterwork in the vein of Park Chan Wook’s Oldboy or The Handmaiden, morphing with the dexterity of Lady Gaga’s wardrobe changes . It begins as a sly comedy of manners, investigating the more superficial tensions of contemporary class warfare. But the film descends into a far darker rumination on the very foundations of this society, with the weight of history slowly starting to exert its phantom influence. It becomes an excoriating Marxist critique, with violence as the logical endpoint to generational inequality. Ho’s camerawork reminds me of vintage Fincher, at once fluid but utterly exacting. The production design is similarly precise, as the post-modern behemoth at the centre of this parable reveals and conceals in equal measure. But the true magic of the film lies in the rich ensemble. Very rarely are so many finely textured characters contained within one series, let alone a film. Parasite is perhaps the most thematically complex crowd-pleaser you are ever likely to see.
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The convergence of love and art is a cinematic staple which the French have mined for decades. What makes Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire so unique is its adherence to the primacy of the female gaze. Marianne is a painter assigned to secretly capture the likeness of Heloise, thereby securing Heloise’s marriage to a wealthy Italian gentleman. We view Heloise solely through Marianne’s eyes, first as artistic subject and then as the object of desire. The film eschews a score, marooning the audience in Marianne’s headspace as she negotiates her dual-persona as artist/lover. This silence is broken by a haunting female choral verse, signalling the power of feminine solidarity in one hypnotic mantra. The island setting recalls the prelapsarian utopia of Call Me by Your Name. Like Luca Guadagnino’s masterpiece, time feels bifurcated in this isolated space. Shots linger, giving an illusion of eternity that jars with the painfully real constraints imposed on their tryst. This is a ravishing film, one which juxtaposes the enduring power of art against the fragility of experience. Noemie Merlant (Marianne) and Adele Haenel (Heloise) give such achingly real performances, it would have been a shame if something as frivolous as an Oscar were to define them. It’s also refreshing to have a lesbian love story sans self- indulgent titillation. Romantic to its core, like Orpheus you will find yourself looking back.
1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Read our Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review
Even the most ardent Tarantino fan must have balked when it was announced that he would be tackling the Manson Family Murders. His iconoclastic style and penchant for historical revisionism seemed to virtually ensure a disrespectful bloodbath . Instead we get a wildly cathartic bloodbath and his most deeply felt film since Jackie Brown. He has written his love letter to the final vestiges of Old Hollywood, capturing in breath-taking detail all the nuances of the fading studio system. He focuses on the friendship between faded Western star Rick Dalton and his laconic stuntman Cliff Booth. They are just the sort of periphery players that Tarantino fetishizes, their interplay reminiscent of the casual camaraderie between Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield. Sharon Tate is the light at the centre of the film, emblematic of the ‘innocence’ that was seemingly lost that night in 1969. Tarantino decides to immortalize her, turning his bit-part Hollywood has-beens into executors of an imagined justice. Tarantino couldn’t make a film that changed the course of history. So he chose to create a tiny fragment of redemptive celluloid, a fairy-tale where Sharon Tate and all the forgotten icons of his youth could live happily ever after.