FILM
Age’s Wisdom & Queer Time
The year’s tops include several striking valedictories
BY STEVE ERICKSON
My choices for the fi lms of the year
amd the runners-up follow:
1. “The Irishman” (Martin Scorsese): Picture
“The Sopranos” if its fi nal episode were
closer to that of “Six Feet Under,” which followed
every character through their entire lives, showing
their aging and moment of death. I’m still
stunned by the way this fi lm uses its 210-minute
running time to create a sense of complicity
and identifi cation with the life of its protagonist
and then dives into its ultimate emptiness and
despair. Few elderly directors have made fi lms
this remorselessly devoted to staring down
death and the physical deterioration that comes
with its approach. Scorsese’s dis of the Marvel
Comic Universe scandalized fanboys, but this
fi lm is a far more successful and self-critical
version of the elegiac take on a changing cinema
Tarantino tried in “Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood.” And the silence of its women is an
active, judgmental one that winds up spinning
its protagonist’s narration of his own life on its
head.
2. “Transit” (Christian Petzold) “Transit”
lays the horrors of the past over an uncertain
but oppressive present in a way that makes the
continuity between all forms of fascism clear
without preaching. German director Christian
Petzold has spent most of his career making art
fi lms informed by Hollywood genre work. Here,
he takes the raw material of “Casablanca” into
a saga of refugees’ desperation with no obvious
exit route.
3. “Souvenir” (Joanna Hogg) Hogg shaped
the raw experiences that formed her as a student
fi lmmaker, especially a relationship with
an older man who turned out to be a heroin addict,
into a narrative built by connecting jagged
fragments. Drawing on Maurice Pialat, “Souvenir”
tells a story full of gaps and apparent digressions,
conveying the horror of how Hogg’s
alter ego got used without reducing her to a
victim.
4. “The Image Book” (Jean-Luc Godard)
Nearing the end of his life, Nouvelle Vague legend
Godard refl ects on the history of cinema,
sitting in front of his video collection and laptop
loaded with editing software, and decides
that it made the world more violent and racist
(especially toward Arabs). “The Image Book”
is made up almost entirely of clips from other
fi lms, shown in a degraded form that looks like
NETFLIX
Bobby Cannavale in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” the year’s
best fi lm.
a fourth-generation VHS dub. But the longest
section shows Godard dipping into the history
of Arab cinema and expanding his notion of
the canon. While “The Image Book” is an even
bleaker missive from an elderly director than
“The Irishman,” it suggests the future lies in
the Middle East.
5. “End of the Century” (Lucio Castro)
Theorist Jack Halberstam has written about
the notion of “queer time”: the possibility that
we can escape from the treadmill that heterosexuals
are expected to automatically live out.
By depicting three different encounters between
an Argentine and Spanish man that
can’t all take place in the same reality, “End of
the Century” needs to go outside naturalism to
illustrate the dizzying changes in the options
available to gay men over the past 25 years,
queering the Latin surrealist tradition.
6. “An Elephant Sitting Still” (Hu Bo) An
elephant sits over this fi lm : its director killed
himself before its release. But its bleak monumentality,
which draws in time frame (it’s four
hours long) and style from Hu’s teacher Béla
Tarr’s “Sátántangó,” would remain even if he
went on to direct rom-coms for Netfl ix. This is
the saga of people struggling not to be trapped
by a society with few options, set in one day,
where hope exists only in metaphorical form.
7. “Parasite” (Bong Joon-ho) Combining
Spielberg spectacle and a desire to entertain
with a cutting view of class warfare and Buñuelian
lack of sentimentality about the poor, Bong
managed to make an intervention into pop culture
around the world even though his fi lm is
in Korean. There are no heroes or villains here,
just a conviction that the status quo can’t continue,
as diffi cult as it is to change.
8. “In My Room” (Ulrich Kohler) Allegorically
rich while remaining vague, “In My Room”
turns to post-apocalyptic sci-fi devoid of explanations.
It resonates most as a refl ection on
freedom and its price: it’s the story of a man
who can only improve his life when no one else
is left on the planet. “In My Room” also affi rms
that not everyone is meant to live in a heterosexual
couple, even if they’re the last two people
on Earth.
9. “Los Reyes” (Iván Osnovikoff & Bettina
Perut) This Chilean documentary, shot in a
skate park where teenage stoners and elderly
dogs alike spend their days, is as concerned
with growing old as “The Irishman” and “The
Image Book,” but plays the theme out in a far
less literal form. The directors use image and
sound as two paths to a similar destination,
layering the kids’ talk over footage of the dogs.
Even though it’s a fairly mellow fi lm, its evocation
of life in the park with little to do and diminishing
prospects cuts to the bone.
10. “Atlantics” (Mati Diop) Finding poetry
amidst exploitation in contemporary Senegal,
Mati Diop makes a remarkable feature debut
with this ghost story, where one has to die and
come back to life to have any chance of getting
justice or living out love.
The runners-up were:
“Ali Aqa” and “None of Your Business” (Kamran
Heidari)
“The Art of Self-Defense” (Riley Stearns)
“The Burial of Kojo” (Sam “Blitz” Bazawule)
“Cellophane” (Andrew Thomas Huang; music
by FKA Twigs)
“Chez Jolie Coiffure” (Rosine Mbakam)
“Cunningham” (Alla Kovgan)
“The Farewell” (Lulu Wang)
“Ghosts of Sugar Land” (Bassam Tariq)
“High Flying Bird” (Steven Soderbergh)
“A Man of Integrity” (Mohammad Rasoulof)
“Memento Stella” (Takashi Makino)
“Midsommar” (Ari Aster)
“Movies” (Natalie Mering; music by Mering aka
Weyes Blood)
“Pain and Glory” (Pedro Almodóvar)
“Pasolini” (Abel Ferrara)
“Synonyms” (Nadav Lapid)
“Us” (Jordan Peele)
December 19, 2019 - January 1, 2 32 020 | GayCityNews.com
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