My top
three films for 2018 are Burning, Cold War and The Sisters Brothers. Films that go against the idea of man as a homo
economicus who rationally pursues his individual interest. These films show that man is primarily a
moral being, including all the advantages and disadvantages this has.
Not surprisingly
landscape plays an important part in this year’s selection. 4 of them could be called westerns ( The
Rider, The Sisters Brothers, Sweet Country, Dog Man) Other themes are: children (Jeannette, Girl, The Rider) or, in particular films, the care of children (Jusqu'à la Garde, Mia
Figlia, Den Skyldige), the triumph of love, illicit (God’s Own Country,
Disobedience, Sir) or impossible and at the same time passionate (Cold war,
Phantom Thread), the search for truth (
McQueen, I, Tonya, 3 faces), trying to realize one's dream (The Rider, I, Tonya, Girl, 3 faces)
Beoning (Burning) - Lee Chang-dong
Jong-su
bumps into a girl who used to live in the same neighborhood as him, who asks
him to look after her cat while on a trip to Africa. When back, she introduces
Ben, a mysterious guy she met there, who confess his secret hobby.
“For a
long time, I’ve wanted to tell a story about young people, and in particular,
the young people of this generation. Some of my past projects were named
‘Project Rage.’ That was because it seems that today, people all over the
world, regardless of their nationality, religion, and social status, are angry
for different reasons. The rage of young people is a particularly pressing
problem. The millennials living in Korea today will be the first generation
that are worse off than their parents’ generation. They feel that the future
will not change significantly. Not able to find the object to direct their rage
at, they feel a sense of debilitation. This film is about young people who feel
impotent, with rage bottled up inside them.”
Zimna
wojna (Cold War) -
A
passionate love story between two people of different backgrounds and
temperaments, who are fatefully mismatched and yet condemned to each other. Set
against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin,
Yugoslavia and Paris, the film depicts an impossible love story in impossible
times.
“Yeah, I
like placing a person within their landscape. I guess I just like good
photography? I think, How do I shoot this? As much like a photographer as
possible. It’s not all that intellectual, not symbolic. There was a little of
that in Ida, the headroom hovers above her in an intuitive, natural, and
significant way. But here, a lot of it was less eccentric than that. I’m just
trying to build depth, and in a frame where a face or a body takes up less of
the screen, you can fit more into the background. Maybe not depth, there’s some
shallowness of field, but a more complex frame. Above all, I wish to connect my
heroes to the environment which they traverse. I don’t want to foreground the
setting, but I do want to leave it plenty of room in the background to be
present. “
“After a while, they kind of grew into this
amazing love story. Like the mother of all love stories, for me. And great
because it didn’t look like a love story for most of the time. But it’s the end
that justifies the story.”
“They ended up living together in Munich, too
tired to fight, and very ill. So in the end they were just kind of like a
doddering old couple, but totally in love with each other, and holding hands.
They were just the most tender, touching couple. Again, knowing that there’s
nothing in the world more precious, or important, or stable than each other.”
The
Sisters Brothers - Jacques Audiard
In 1850s
Oregon, a gold prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm is chased by the infamous
duo of assassins, the Sisters brothers, in the pay of a wealthy man known only
as the Commodore. He is also pursued, at first by John Morris, a scout also in
the Commodore's employ, who befriends him.
“The
western for an American director is really a foundational text. For me, no, it
isn’t. The western is just a period piece for me. Men wearing hats, guns,
riding horses. In that sense, my approach is different. Within the mythology,
there’s a landscape of space. I don’t share that mythology, so I don’t [focus
on] the [literal] landscape. I pay much more attention to dialogue between the
characters. For me, the dialogue and the characters are the landscape.”
“I feel very free with the mythology. There are things that I really like and are fun for me inside the conventions when I look at them. But in the morning when we start working, we don’t say to ourselves, “Let’s do a very original western!” Very often in the western there’s something missing about the characters. It’s black or white. They don’t have dreams or a conscience. They have no problems of hygiene. When you locate that humanity inside the characters, then something changes, and they exist in a different way.”
Slant Magazine
“My desires have evolved in tandem with my consciousness about the purpose of cinema and how to make use of it. The world moves before us in all its complexity, so one has to find narrative and aesthetic forms to convey this — in a specific way, simplify it and make it teachable.”
“My desires have evolved in tandem with my consciousness about the purpose of cinema and how to make use of it. The world moves before us in all its complexity, so one has to find narrative and aesthetic forms to convey this — in a specific way, simplify it and make it teachable.”
The Rider -
After
suffering a near fatal head injury, a young cowboy undertakes a search for new
identity and what it means to be a man in the heartland of America.
“The
cattle industry is now completely monopolised by the big meat industry, which
is horrible, and so the small ranches are disappearing. If you raise your
cattle in a factory lot, why would you need cowboys? These young guys, they’re
on Facebook, they have YouTube channels, they’re listening to hip-hop – they’re
trying to figure out what it means to be a modern-day cowboy. So there’s a new
identity emerging, and I think by capturing that, in a weird way The Rider is
reinventing the western – and it’s not because of me. “
“As
someone who really loves this country, I find it very sad how divided the media
has made us. I’m obviously a liberal, but if you were to ask me, having been in
America since 1999, who were the 10 kindest, nicest people I’ve met, I would
say more than half of them are from Trump states. It wasn’t a decision while
making the film, but I think subconsciously the team and I wanted to connect
with people whose lives are so different from ours. When we are sitting there
together while the world is being pulled apart, it makes me feel like it’s not
doomsday, like there is hope. We’re not going to kill each other, like the
media say we are.”
Phantom Thread -
Set in
1950s London, Reynolds Woodcock is a renowned dressmaker whose fastidious life
is disrupted by a young, strong-willed woman, Alma, who becomes his muse and
lover.
“This
film came about a few years ago. I wanted to find a way to work with Daniel
again, and I wanted to make a – I’m an aficionado of the adopted romance genre,
which I’m sure you show a lot of here starting with Rebecca, Gaslight,
Suspicion, all those ones that we all know and love. Those are the ones that I
always gravitate towards. And so I had an idea that started with a very
strong-willed man who was ill, and how nice he became when he was ill, and his
spouse thinking, “Mhm, I kinda like him when he’s like this.
And that
was enough to get started, to start writing this story, and that was a – we
needed a job for this character to do and we both discovered some interesting
designers: Cristóbal Balenciaga, who was a great Basque designer who worked in
Paris in the ’50s. Charles James was another one – great American man and/British
designer who worked kind of all over the place.
But
they’re very interesting, self-obsessed, preoccupied with their work, demanding
men, and that seemed a great venue for a story like this – for a kind of gothic
romance story like this with beautiful dresses and women in lab coats and that
kind of thing. So, that’s kind of – “
Jeannette,
l'enfance de Jeanne d'Arc - Bruno Dumont
In the
midst of the Hundred Years' War, the young Jeannette, at the still tender age
of 8, looks after her sheep in the small village of Domremy. One day, she tells
her friend Hauviette how she cannot bear to see the suffering caused by the
English.
“Dance
is a way of expressing Péguy’s mysticism- it’s the way of embodying it. So for
example, the little girl would say to me, “I don’t understand this part.” Then, I would say, “
Well, then dance.” Dance becomes another way of expressing the inexpressible.
There are a lot we don’t understand in Péguy's texts. What we have in there is
the rhythm, and that’s where the correspondence is. Like the headbanging. There
is not explanation for that. It’s a form of expressing grace. In a Heavy Metal
concert, there is that absolute grace in that energy. So when we came to the
part we didn’t understand, we’d go, “Girls, go ahead. Headbang!” What we are
looking for is harmony. It’s the dance, the shots, in the editing… it’s the effigy
of harmony, whether it’s in the words, in the movements. It’s the formal thing
that is an absolute quest and the meaning doesn’t matter. We are looking for
beauty, we are looking for the shots to be happy between themselves.”
“I
think my interest in religion comes from philosophy. When I deal with religion
in my films, it’s in an effort to bring religion back to poetry. I’m not a
religious person, but I think the power of religion lies in poetry. I really
like seeing angels in trees, people flying, etc, because I think that’s the
true poetic reality of things, and I don’t think it necessarily belongs to
religion. In a way, religion stole poetry from us. At the cinema, I can believe
in God without any trouble. But when I leave, it’s over. It’s a special
spiritual phenomenon, and I think our spiritual life can blossom in the arts
and in the cinema. At the cinema, we believe that what we see is real, but at
the same time, we don’t. We know that what we’re watching is just cinema, but
we still believe in it, on a certain level. The same thing goes with God: you
must believe in Him, and not believe in Him at the same time. “
Jusqu'à la
Garde (Custody) -
A broken
marriage leads to a bitter custody battle with an embattled son at the centre.
“The film is about domestic violence, but I
think the real subject is how do children experience and move through this kind
of situation. I don’t think it would work to make a film on domestic violence
where we only try to understand the violence between partners. Doing that would
allow us to forget that kids are also victims. In France, the expression we use
is violence conjugal, which means “violence against partners.” In the United
States, you use domestic violence, which I think is a more accurate term. It’s
an error to differentiate between the partner and the parent. You have to
include both.”
Slant Magazine
“Antoine
is a man who has chosen violence and who is pro-patriarchal; in the sense that
he considers that his wife belongs to him and that his children are his
property. He feels he can act and demand what he wants from them. He put the
ring on this woman’s finger, she bears his name, she carried his children, so
it is unbearable that she could go and live elsewhere without him. In France, a
woman is murdered by her spouse or ex-spouse every 2 or 3 days. In 90% of
cases, it is at the time of separation or just after that these murders occur.
Antoine is one of those men who act in France and all over the world. What’s
chilling is that many men today still think this way – “We are married until
death do us part. Only death will separate us – it is not you who has the
control to separate us. I’d rather know you were dead than alive without me.”
There’s nothing romantic about this way of loving.”
Den Skyldige (The Guilty) - Gustav Möller
A police
officer assigned alarm dispatch duty enters a race against time when he answers
an emergency call from a kidnapped woman.
“I definitely
want to continue working in the tradition of genre film, but find an angle that
hasn’t been seen before. I need a concept, an angle, because I’m not interested in just making a
three-act-structure film. I can’t invest several years just to do that.” (…) “What I want to do is work with genre film in
a way that uses it to draw audiences in, not only to entertain them but also to
challenge their world-views and introduce complex subject matter.”
Variety
“For Jakob, he was intrigued by the challenge to carry every frame of the film…For me, what really made Jakob right for the part is his eyes. It’s like he’s is keeping a secret from you, but at the same time you can read a lot from just looking at his eyes.”
“For Jakob, he was intrigued by the challenge to carry every frame of the film…For me, what really made Jakob right for the part is his eyes. It’s like he’s is keeping a secret from you, but at the same time you can read a lot from just looking at his eyes.”
God’s
Own Country - Francis Lee
Young
farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual
sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites
an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path. Set in Yorkshire.
“I
really wanted to show the landscape in the way that I had experienced it. It
didn’t have the feeling of freedom or the pastoral. At times it felt oppressive
and brutal. I wanted to see the landscape’s effect on the characters, rather
than the landscape.”
The Guardian
“The
only thing I thought about was telling a truthful story as authentically as I
could, from the world I was from, in a way in which I saw it, the only way I
knew how. I didn’t think beyond that. But I knew I didn’t want to tell a story
about coming out. I wanted to represent characters who weren’t actually
struggling with their sexuality. I wanted to see a queer character struggling
with something else! And the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do was fall in
love. To be open enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.”
Disobedience -
A woman
returns to her Orthodox Jewish community that shunned her for her attraction to
a female childhood friend. Once back, their passions reignite as they explore
the boundaries of faith and sexuality.
“When I
became attached, it was at a time when I was receiving offers to direct in
English, and so I was reading a lot of scripts. It was hard for me to find
anything that really clicked, or I could relate to until I heard the basic
lines of the story behind Disobedience. I just loved the dynamics between the
characters and the particular love triangle, especially the fact that these are
human beings that are trying to do their best, and who are operating against a
backdrop of more or less fixed ideas. I thought it was an interesting
opportunity to explore the tension between those two elements, and of course,
the fact that Rachel Weisz was going to produce was also a big reason to accept
because I have always admired her, and so it was very tempting. “
“Then I
read the book and I liked it, and even though I'm not British or Jewish,
because of the processes that the characters were going through, this alien
universe seemed at the same time strangely familiar. These are characters that,
in the wrong way, are willing to pay the price to move on to the next level,
and are willing to disobey not only what society commands, but to disobey what
they thought the world was, or reality was. So they are willing to even go
against their own belief system and I think that's something I could relate to.
The idea of disobedience, especially today, becomes particularly urgent; disobedience
is understood almost like a human right because if no one disobeys, then the
status of everything stays the same and nothing progresses. “
Figlia
Mia -
A
daughter torn between two mothers, one who raised her with love and her
biological mother, who instinctively claims her back.
“The
landscape in my films is very important; this is why I devote a lot of time to
location scouting. The way I work, it takes me a couple of years to prepare the
film. What we do is write the first draft and then I take a journey, for
location scouting, and we write a second draft and then I return to the
location and then write some more. We keep doing this through the drafts. It’s
also true that places can take on metaphorical images in my films – the cave
can act as a reminder of a woman’s womb. I am terrified of the idea that my
landscapes might become too postcard picturesque. I want to know the landscape
well so it becomes familiar so that my camera doesn’t become fixated on it
instead of the characters. “
“Vittoria
is a little girl who at the beginning of the film looks at herself in the mirror,
as if she had a sensation of which she has no awareness: she is a little girl
different from her friends, who plays the organ in church, that cannot stand at
her friends’ level when they laugh. She is a kind of different girl who slowly
makes this great journey, and I wanted that at the end of the film she became a
superhero, that she was a little girl who picks up her story, her truth within
a short summer during which she discovers she has two mothers and in which she
physically crosses this rebirth to become a strong child, which is different
perhaps from what you would expect at the beginning of the film.”
Sir -
The poor servant
Ratna works in the house of Mr. Ashwin, a rich bachelor whose planned marriage
has just been cancelled. A love story set in Mumbai.
“Actually the idea
of it being subtle. Well, it’s not that I was trying to be subtle. I was just
trying to be really honest to the characters and to be true to them. Because
they wouldn’t even be able to do something big. It has to be like this because
of the nature of their relationship. So it didn’t come from a stylistic
aspiration. It just came from the characters and space they actually have to
maneuver within. It’s so restrictive where they live and how they live. So that
is where it all came from. It could be in a tiny moment where you feel that
they are noticing each other. That’s how small it can be.”
“Yes, when you fall
in love with someone you really see the world from their point of view. I think
that’s what one needs to build a more just society. They need to see the point
of view of somebody else as much as you can also examen your own prejudices
because we all have them. It can be about this is one particular kind of
prejudice. It may be the idea that a person will be smarter than that another
person because he or she went to this distinct university or maybe he or she
has a different kind of background or whatever. There are always some
assumptions people make about other people. I feel it’s really about breaking
out of that and seeing people for who they are as individuals and not what they
represent. Whether it regards a person of a certain class certain color,
background or religion. It’s about going past that.”
I, Tonya -
White
trash ice skater Tonya Harding rises amongst the ranks at the U.S. Figure
Skating Championships, but her future in the activity is thrown into doubt when
her ex-husband intervenes, resulting in the leg bashing on January 6, 1994 of
her competitor, Nancy Kerrigan.
“What I
love about this film, which I guess is what documentaries have, is that we’re
giving you their version of what happened. Everyone has different versions of
what happened; I know I do. I loved having that opportunity because we’re
choosing to give different versions that the audience perhaps isn’t aware of.
We started off fairly clearly telling the story but then once you get into the
second half, I get you deliberately loose track of whose version you’re
hearing. I don’t know if the audience is particularly aware of it and I sort of
made some of those choices in the edit. When Jeff gets that phone call to look
on the tv, and he’s saying, “what the fuck are you talking about?”, that’s
Jeff’s version of the story. We’ve switched from Tonya but it’s kind of being
done in a subtle way. I had the choice, editorially, to have him saying, “This
is what happened”, but I wanted to see if we could get into that greyer area
where you get involved in the story and don’t need to keep track of it. At the
end you can ask yourself, “What is the truth and what really happened?”.
McQueen -
The life
and career of fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen: from his start as a
tailor, to launching and overseeing his eponymous line, and his untimely death.
“I had
never done a documentary before, and Peter had, and it became clear that you
need all hands on deck with a documentary. There are less clear roles than in
narrative filmmaking [with] the collage you create and the trust you need to
build with the contributors as well as the investigating work that you have to
do through the archive. It is not as defined and what’s interesting as well is
we always approached the film as a movie. It’s not like we’re going to
interview a bunch of people and let’s see what they tell us. One of our mottos
was emotion over information, so anything that we were trying to tell in the
film had to have an emotional impact or follow an emotional beat that was part
of the narrative. [With] Peter having more experience on that side than I did,
it just naturally fell into place that we were making the film together. And we
had a really short time as well.”
“Documentaries
are [typically] made up of a lot of interviews, but an audience comes to see
Lee, so they want to hear from Lee, so however much we could get other people
to say things, we always tried to make sure that Lee would confirm what they
were saying or actually start the argument that other people would talk about.
One thing that we feel that people really take from the film is the home
footage [where you] see Lee very up close and in a more candid way because when
you do an interview, you can potentially censor yourself or you can project an
aspect, and as Peter says, there was tradition [with Lee], but at the same
time, he’s slightly punk in the way he’d say things [to get a rise], but on the
other hand, you see the soft side of him where he plays with the dogs and he
was really good friend to his friends. While we were making the film, we realized
how much people loved him and still now feel emotionally still in pain for his
passing.”
Sweet Country - Thornton Warwick
Story
set on the Australian Northern Territory frontier in the 1920s, where justice
itself is put on trial when an aged Aboriginal farmhand shoots a white man in
self-defense and goes on the run as a posse gathers to hunt him down.
“The
funny thing is the film is actually based on a true story. It actually happened
in 1929, so it came with all its baggage intact. If I set it in space—space is
a great place to set something—it would have been something different. But it
came with all of that, so it very naturally progressed into a Western. They did
have guns, they didn’t shower very often, there were no women and there was no
law.”
“Well,
the Western has always represented that gap between what we know and what we
don’t know. Thats not just a cinematic thing, it’s a human thing. It’s been
passed down from pre-word, from oral history. There’s a Western in oral
history—the fear of the unknown, the place over there you’re not supposed to go
to. And there are always those people who want to make that journey—but who
can’t help but bring with them the things that make them feel safe. Which is
why Western people have to have some kind of law, because that constitutes a
kind of democracy. But there’s also the second part, the desire to control. To
tame.”
Dogman - Matteo Garrone
Marcello
takes care of dogs in a poor village just outside Naples and earns some money
as a coke dealer. His main customer is Simone, a violent giant who terrorizes the whole neighbourhood,
and also his 'friend' Marcello. That goes so far that Marcello has to
intervene.
“I wanted to
explore the conflicts and desires of this man, as well as his fears. The true
story behind this film is famous in Italy because it’s about torture. It’s an
incredibly dark story, but for me Marcello is not a character that could
inflict this type of suffering on someone, it’s not possible. Yes, there’s
plenty of violence, but this isn’t a splatter movie, it's a film about a man
who just wants his dignity back.”
“For me,
that’s the most difficult part. I like that I can laugh in a movie, and at the
same time I like that I can cry in a movie. And it’s difficult to control the
tone. If there is too much of the comic aspect, then the drama can be less
strong. We knew that the first part could be more light and comic, and the
second part, where he falls in a sort of hole of his mind, can be darker. And
we were lucky, because the weather helped us in this direction. When we were
shooting the first part, there was a lot of sun–and when we were shooting the
second part, it started to rain and to be cloudy. [Laughs] The place loves me.
“
Girl - Lukas
Dhont
Lara is
a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who dreams of becoming a
ballerina.
“I
wanted the audience to understand what it’s like to be born in a body that’s
not yours. A lot of people have a body they don’t feel fully connected to. I
wanted to talk about the relationship with the body, and next to that, I really
wanted to show the father-child relationship. The conflict is not between them,
there is no question at all from the father’s point of view whether the child
should do this, this is a supportive character who shows a lot of love.”
“Sidi
Larbi Cherkaoui was the choreographer and when I was talking with him about the
film and the scenes, we had agreed that we didn’t want to highlight the
choreography, but more the effects of it on the body. We wanted to make a
physical film rather than a dance film. When we were talking about it, it was
really a collaboration between Sidi, Frank van den Eeden (my DP), and I about
how to make it visceral. If you watch the ballet in the film, you’ll see how
it’s used as a metaphor. This character has difficulty finding her way in that
world and so she wants to manipulate her body to fit into that world and so
that’s the big metaphor.”
Se rokh (3 faces) -
Three
actresses at different stages of their career. One from before the 1979 Islamic
Revolution, one popular star of today known throughout the country and a young
girl longing to attend a drama conservatory.
A road movie in search of the girl, who
wants to become an actress and
has threatened to kill herself.
“Despite
the obstacles that I was facing after the ban, I kept telling myself that I couldn’t
give up and had to find a way to keep working. I am not alone. Many other
Iranian filmmakers work under difficult circumstances. But instead of quitting
or complaining, they persist and still make their films despite all the
hurdles. Their determination to keep working against the odds makes me so
hopeful about the future of Iranian cinema.”
Sadly I
haven’t had the opportunity to see a .o.
‘Zama’ by Lucrecia Martel, ‘Transit’ by Christian Petzold, ‘You were never
really here’ by Lynne Ramsay, ‘Western’
by Valeska Grisebach, Manbiki kazoku (
Shoplifters) by Hirokazu Koreeda and ‘Dawson city – frozen time’ by Bill
Morrison.
according
to Esquire
according to Film Comment
according to John Waters
according
to Mark Kermode
according to The New York Times
according
to The New Yorker
according
to Sight & Sound
according
to Slant Magazine
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