Fragments on films watched in 2022
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I watched 86 films in 2022. This is up from 82 films in 2021 and 70 in 2020. Here are some highlights.
Martin Eden (2017)
A loose adaptation of Jack London's novel, it the story of a working class auto-didact who rejects the Napolitian socialist culture of his environment, becoming a Nietzsche influenced individualist anarchist. This in turn means rejecting the writerly circles he gains access to through his literary brilliance. In the process, finally ending in a quite lonely place.
It is sumptuously filmed. I watched it off the back of going through the Paolo Sorrentino back catalogue and feeling like I'm missing Italy. Sorrentino is a highly derivative director, of Fellini and the whole canon of Italian brilliance. However, he is still very good indeed, as he processes out those influences well. The Great Beauty (2013) is obviously incredible, Il divo (2008) is a gripping political drama (and presumably quite controversial) and Hand of God (2021) is a profound piece of auto-biographical cinema. For me his greatest work is The Consequences of Love (2004). A brilliant multi-layered film that has stayed with me since I saw it. Even the title hits very hard.
The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1972)
A strange film about a strange man operating strangely. It has a very odd pacing, but is quite brilliant.
Toyko Sonata (2008)
After watching a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror films in the last few years, I decided to watch this family drama from him. Suffice to say, it was utterly amazing.
One day, the authoritarian patriarch of a middle class family in Toyko loses his job. Instead of telling his family, to save face he decides to just continue pretending to go to work. Meanwhile, his son takes his lunch money and secretly pays for piano lessons.
This combination of family drama with secrets kept and social criticism regarding precarious work recalls Parasite (2021). Apparently Bong Joon-ho is a fan of Kurosawa, so it is possible the two films influenced one another.
The final scene is completely beautiful and made me cry.
Possum (2018)
Possum is amongst the best horror films I've recently seen. Possum is pure creep: set in an unnamed grim English town and its surrounding woods and marshes, filled with spidery dread, strangeness and psychological turmoil. Sean Harris in the central role is taut and spinderly. Apparently he remained in character throughout the shoot, which must have been horrifying. The puppet at the center of matters is a brilliant creation.
The director Matthew Holness is best known for his work on the extremely strange and very funny TV programme Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which follows in the canon of British comedy with undergirded by horror and the surreal like The League of Gentlemen. Holness takes the comedy distancing filter off and the result is very unsettling. Not since watching Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) have I watched a film where there have been sequences where I've considered stopping watching because I didn't want to see what happened next. Suffice to say, it's great.
Rose Plays Julie (2019)
A recent Irish film about repressed violence and people pretending to be other people. The soundtrack is also great.
Wild Tales (2014)
This Argentinian anthology film is truly wild and completely brilliant.
Lift to the Scaffold (1958)
An incredible piece of noir, which features some incredible scenes of double meaning and a long time stuck in a lift. It has a brilliant Miles Davis soundtrack also, which uses delays to brilliant effect.
Don't Look Now (1973)
This is rightly a horror classic. Study of grief and the supernatural with a famously shocking ending. It is as good as they say, but said ending feels diluted by parody. In the following there are spoilers, but I think we have handle it for a film released 51 years ago.
A review I read called it a difussion of giallo - the lurid Italian thriller genre that preceded and influenced American Slasher films, associated with directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Though this doesn't really do justice to the film, it is an interesting way to think about it. It seems to be the case in terms of sound design, the Italian locations and the use of the shocking red throughout. Thematically ESP and precognition are common things to find in the more supernaturally inflected types of Giallo. One interesting thing to observe is several scenes that are impossibly tense would now be non-problems, by the fact everyone is chained to their phones.
I read the short story on which the film is based by Daphne du Maurier. Some people have been puzzled by the film's title, but in the short story, it's the first line where the wife says "don't look now" to try to get her husband to not stare at the two sisters looking at them. What the film brilliantly adds is that their daughter's death is by water, which makes the Venice setting more powerful. In the short story, their daughter dies of meningitis. What the short story implies more heavily than the film, but one can also pick up, is that John the father himself potentially has psychic powers.
Originally released as a double feature with The Wicker Man (1973). What an afternoon at the cinema! The Wicker Man was the "B" film, but it is difficult to say which way round they should be.
Brute Force (1947)
This is a prison set film noir, that pitches the brutal governer against a cell of inmates As an anti-prison film it really hits home and applies the time worn "prison as reflection of wider society" trope. But I read it more as a tragedy in a near Shakespearean mode.
I also watched the same director's The Naked City (1948). Which is also excellent.
The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006)
Loach is often framed as an overly didactic director, but I think there is a political honesty to his films, where real and complete human beings confront political events. Ideologies do exist, but there is a complete realism to how they map onto actually existing political realities, and how people hold them more or less lightly when confronted with those realities.
Land and Freedom (1995) his Spanish Civil War film is also excellent. Like this film, no one comes out looking incredible, and there is a truth to it.
Force Mejeure (2014)
Very very funny, very sad.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
I didn't see it when it came out and entirely unfairly I have always mentally sorted the Coen Brothers under "quirky". The themes were well rehearsed on release and in particular, chance stands out.
Like many films and TV series that are adaptions, there is something about how a novelist does themes that increases the richness of films when that translation is made. The final scene – a discussion of dreams over breakfast that cuts with perfect timing to black – is sublime. I clapped.
While a violent film, in three instances, we arrive at the scene in the aftermath of terrible violence. A lesser set of directors would have shown what happens. But it is worse that we don't see it - we arrive on the scene as the characters do.
A perfect film. Apparently the Coen Brothers spent most of the film thinking it was going to turn out quite badly: a lesson to take!
The Untamed (2016)
This film is a lot: it needs a strong stomach but I think overall, it works in the general canon of "elevated horror".
Genre-wise, it is a science fiction body horror: a meteor brings an alien to Earth and we deal with the fall out, which involves sex. Think Species (1995) [which I've never seen], The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) or Under the Skin (2013). It's a film about sexual desire and obsession and the liberating and corrupting influence it can have, but also loneliness, class, homophobia and family.
I read that it was influenced by Possession (1981) and having now watched that film, I was slightly disappointed how similar they were, as I felt The Untamed was really original.
However, Posession trades in a very disturbing Lovecraftian vision saturated by a weird metaphysics. I loved the inversion of the classic privation theory of evil in the dialogue about "Goodness is only some kind of reflection upon evil. That's all it is". The Untamed is, by contrast, quite grounded in the real world.
Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)
Last film watched in 2022, this Chinese film is about time, memory, homecoming and loss.
It is basically in two parts, the second part being an almost hour long unbroken cut, filmed to be watched in 3D. This sequence is strange and infused with unfolding, looping dream-like logic, that continuously references the previous section of the film but in a way that both distorts, obscures and clarifies it's referents. Like dreaming itself, filled with hidden passageways and places that are familiar, but look different.
To my mind, it recalls Tarkovsky; there is a even a sequence of raining inside.