The best films of 2017

The best films of 2017

                                                                                   

                                                     

1.       American Honey   Andrea  Arnold

2.       Grave   Julia Ducournau

3.       Paterson  Jim Jarmusch

4.       Nelyubov    Andrey Zvyagintsev

5.       Personal  Shopper  Oliver Assayas

6.       Une vie  Stéphane Brizé

7.       Agasshi    Park Chan-wook

8.       Lady Macbeth  William Oldroyd

9.       Jackie  Pablo Larrain

10.   Sieranevada  Cristi Puiu

11.   Certain women  Kelly Reichardt

12.   Moonlight  Barry Jenkins

13.   Sameblod  Amanda Kernell

14.   Wonderstruck Todd Haynes

15.   Loving   Jeff Nicholls

16.   Una mujer fantástica  Sebastián Lelio

17.   20th Century Women  Mike Mills

18.   A monster calls  J.A. Bayona

                                                                                     

American honey is  a parable on freedom.  A young woman,Star,  joins a troupe of youngsters that sell magazine subscriptions. Apparently an alternative way of living, but it is ruled by the same laws of making money, as in the 'real' world. She falls for Jake but he is not the romantic lover he claims to be, he is just a petty thief who steals personal jewellery from his 'clients'. His feelings for Star are ambiguous, to say the least.  We are in the  Midwest, Trump’s country. In the end Star buys food for 2 kids in a house, in a milieu she knows so well, with a mom on drugs and a man flat out on the floor. Scenes  of poverty and disarray never seen in an  American fiction film. 

                                                                              

Grave chooses  another route for a young woman’s journey into the  understanding of herself.  Justine enters the vet school where her sister is. The action is set against the hazing period.  This debut film by Julia Ducorneau  is a rollercoaster. The scenes that lead to the eating of her sister’s finger (peeing on the rooftop, the Brazilian wax goes wrong,  the fainting of  Alex, the older sister, the craving for the finger) and the eating  make one of the best  sequences I saw this year.  The film is (not) about cannibalism:   it’s about the awareness of the body,  about desire,  the discovery of sexuality, ultimately  about sisterhood, fighting and settling,  finding a solution.   it’s about  coming to terms with who one is and the refusal to conform. 

                                                                                     

                                                                                   

                                                                                  

Personal shopper and Paterson both concentrate on one character.   Maureen, brilliantly played by Kirsten Stewart, is the personal  shopper,  who tries to make contact with her twin brother, who has passed away.   It starts in the house, where he died, hoping to receive a signal from him and it ends in the house,  where her  boyfriend stays in Oman,  where it appears her own spirit is present.  This meditative journey annex thriller is a beautiful portrait of modern times, where the material, the digital and the spiritual world mix. On her journey to London and back to Paris  to pick up clothes for the renowned actress or model she works for, a stranger sends her text messages and he gets her tell what she is afraid of , what she would be; he even persuades her to put on a dress  of her boss, an infringment,  and send him a photo.  Her mistress gets murdered, the old house has been sold, her brother’s partner has found a new boyfriend,  time to move on, life goes on.  

                                                                                 

                                                             

                                                                                   

Personal shopper has many different houses, rooms and spaces. In Paterson there’s really one house, a kind of Charleston. ( Charleston, near  Lewes in East Sussex, England,  the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, decorated by Bell and others ).. Paterson (Adam Driver)  wakes up, drives a bus, writes down his poems during lunch hour, eats with his very creative wife (played by Golshifteh Farahani)  , takes the dog for a walk and ends  his day with a beer in  the pub.  A daily routine of beauty,  in one place, the name of the town being Paterson,  slightly shaking up by an accident involving the destruction of his manuscript of poems.   The film  is not an adaptation of  the epic poem Paterson  the American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. Williams lived and worked in Paterson.  Williams held the conviction that poetry was, in his friend Kenneth Burke's phrase, 'equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.'  That spirit is in the film.

                                                                    

                                                                                

The ending of a film is mostly reassuring:  end of the story, end of the character(s), all’s well, everything is neatly wrapped up.   Thank God films don’t end with the title  The End or Fin anymore.  In  two of the saddest films of the year Nelybov, better known  in the English title Loveless, and Stephane Brizé’s stunning film adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s novel,  Une vie,  the ending is ambiguous perhaps deceitful.

                                                                                         

                                                                                       

                                                                                   

 Loveless is a portrait of Russia under Putin,  a  society   disintegrating, governed by fake news, about a couple about to divorce and the search for their son, who has had enough and leaves.  Un Vie shows 30 years of the life of an aristocratic woman at the beginning of the nineteenth century in France. Lies and deceit are disclosed.  Is Jeanne’s son really coming to live with her? Or is it another false promise? Is Aleksej, the lost son really dead, does  the couple deny him, when they during an identification in the morgue are confronted with a corpse, or did he escape their hell?

                                                                         

                                                                        

Best films of the year 2017 : 


According to Cahiers du Cinema

According to Film Comment

According to Sight & Sound

According to Little White Lies

According to Esquire

According to Filmkrant