A Non-Hierarchical Top Ten List
Posted in true love on January 30th, 2006Now that the first month of the new year is nearly over, and I’ve finally managed to see everything I’ve wanted of the official 2005 releases, I figure it’s as good a time as any to do the top-ten thing. A couple of lush epics, a revenge saga, a fairy tale of sorts, and numerous small and immaculately-calibrated films, the common denominator is their ghostly ability to stay with me long after an initial viewing.
Forty Shades of Blue
Upon walking out of the theater, I felt subtly let down by Forty Shades of Blue but, months later, it remains floating at the top of my mind. What at first seems an inchoate cinematic effort now feels deliberately fuzzy, encouraging of an expansiveness, brilliantly brought into sharp focus by Dina Korzun as a trophy wife to Memphis musical legend Alan James (Rip Torn). A Russian émigré who has always coasted on her beauty – drifting easily if passionlessly through life – her slow and startling awakening to desire (arriving in the unexpected form of her husband’s son) and the simple realization itself - that she can actually want and expect beyond what she has - makes this a profoundly nuanced and affecting portrait of a woman, of a kind not often found in American cinema.
Innocence
Gorgeously dreamy (and somewhat reminiscent of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock), Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s enigmatic film plumbs the mysteries of femininity with an assured yet gentle touch. Set in a boarding school for girls – located in wooded isolation – Innocence grapples with the nature of female sexuality through its vivid imagery - bodies of water, cavernous tunnels, thickets of trees - without ever resorting to explanation. Though lush and lulling, this (mostly) self-contained world also exudes a vaguely menacing aura. The unsettling quietude renders the film the more engaging - its obscurity creeps up on you with hidden resonances, and entrances.
Me and You and Everyone We Know
I don’t care what anyone says, I refuse to cave in to the trendy backlash against this singular movie by Miranda July. Big-hearted, idiosyncratic, and somehow intrinsically feminine (perhaps one of the underlying reasons for its popular - of late- dismissal?), its sweetness and fragility feels refreshing, almost revolutionary in its slightness.
The New World
Though one-sheets featuring Colin Farrell and resplendent neophyte Q’orianka Kilcher embracing against a dramatic backdrop lend the impression of an ordinary Hollywood epic, director Terrence Malick’s rendering of the John Smith-Pocahontas love story is not so much a stodgily traditional history as – and who would have expected any less? - a poetic reverie. Malick rhapsodically captures the utter wonder of newness as the Native Americans and English settlers encounter each other for the first time, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold this discovery. Finding expression in evocative images – filled to the brim with a euphoric sense of tactility - and stream-of-consciousness narration voiced by the three central characters (including a triangulating Christian Bale), Malick doesn’t seem to concern himself with accurately depicting historical details so much as breathing passion and believability and life into them. When Pocahontas eventually gets strapped into a corset and fitted with heels, we mourn the curtailment of her rambunctious and expressive communing with nature as much as she does. And the longing in both Kilcher’s and Farrell’s eyes, visual contrasts between the verdant wilderness inhabited by the “naturals” - as they’re dubbed by the British - and the manicured grey of Western civilization, plus elegant pauses on flowing water and bristling treetops makes thoroughly immersive and achingly emotional - so much it hurts! - a genre to which I’d mostly thought myself immune.
Other memorables: 5 x 2, Broken Flowers, Good Night, and Good Luck, Grizzly Man, Munich, Nine Lives