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10.Gosford Park -- Robert Altman Robert Altman's most assured return-to-form since 1998's Cookie's Fortune poses as a dinner-party whodunnit merely for the sake of a conversation piece, one among many in the tempestuous, but keenly regulated flurries of dialogue that crowd the picture's soundtrack from beginning to end. An ensemble piece of titanic breadth and scale (with approximately 30 high-profile personas to its credit), Gosford Park showcases Altman's central stylistic trademark -- spatially multilayered dramatics -- in its tightest execution, capturing the spontaneity of real human communication without deviating into the sloppy, self-excusing aimlessness that characterized some of his less notable work (Dr. T and the Women). With discourses and exchanges bouncing back and forth off every corner of the screen, the picture would've guaranteed a rather wearying experience, albeit a verisimilitudinous one, without the help of the cast's razor-sharp timing and deep-seated affinity for the material. And even when half of the chatty nuances may dodge one's attention in the long run, the nagging dissatisfaction underlying one's response to the film only complements the sensation of "eavesdropping" that pervades its whole presentation: after all, the relationships intertwining before us are fragile, knotty, and impossible to fully penetrate in one, two, three, or even a dozen separate screenings, so why should Altman prop up the character conflict with artificial scene-staging gambits when he can simply kick back and bask in the details? With so much behavioral dimension just scintillating onscreen, viewers may even enjoy themselves too much to realize they're gazing at one of the most incisive class studies in years.
9. In the Mood for Love -- Wong Kar-wai For a picture so strongly predicated on the experience of emotional suppression, In the Mood for Love often appears shockingly remote as it gropes, quite futilely, for some level of intimacy with its own characters. In the end, the most deliberately mannered of the year's arthouse releases also turns out to be, in a number of ways, the most distancing and viscerally mute. Perhaps this curious Korean production would be most aptly labeled an uncompromising "anti-romance," if anything at all. Still, it defies categorization quite nobly. Writer-director Wong Kar-wai (Chungking Express) mounts this production with a solid -- and somewhat audacious -- determination toward that glorious art-film lacquer that tends to characterize most of this country's memorable Korean imports (of which Chunhyang remains 2001's only other noteworthy example). But what demarcates In the Mood for Love from all the other hedonistically stylized films of its breed is Kar-Wai's emphasis on his style as the core of his story. Naturally, as he's dealing with a tale of two neighboring apartment tenants who consider elopement but never even come close to perpetrating it, the director isn't convenienced with any plot-heavy devices to fall back on. The film devotes itself entirely, therefore, to the evocation of an atmosphere of psychological asphyxiation, the kind spawned by emotional self-containment and what some might call sheer cowardice. The camera takes careful measures to capture those fleeting scraps of time two total strangers can inhabit together, the half-real, half-perceived glances, the miracle of split-second eye contact that can strike the infatuated like a breath of fresh air. In the meantime, the burden of culture, propriety, and ethics hangs heavily over the "lover"'s conscience, keeping all those boisterous passions right in check where they should be. Most films would prefer to chronicle a breakthrough past this sort of inhibition, but Kar-wai's much more fascinated with the men who knowingly condemn themselves by ignoring their instincts. The result he's fashioned, like it or not, turns out to be an often maddeningly restrained motion picture: a viewer can constantly sense the undercurrents of a story desperate to catch up to the sumptuously romantic atmosphere in which it's being illustrated. The production itself is so gorgeous, so dreamy, so otherworldly that it serves as the most ironic (and excruciating) counterpoint of all to the stagnancy of the spirits that occupy it. Simply put, these characters have chained themselves to their own realism. They're both in the mood for love, but they can't convince themselves that it exists anywhere beyond their wildest fancies.
8. The Widow of Saint-Pierre -- Patrice Leconte This picture's founding premise purports to become the breeding ground for yet another blatantly relevant political allegory in the tradition of The Crucible: a fisherman (Emir Kustirica) in drunken stupor dwindles to committing a senseless act of murder, for which he is promptly sentenced to death by guillotine (the veuve, or slang term "widow," of the title) and for which he is gradually forgiven by the radical-minded protagonist (Juliette Binoche) as well as the rest of the community. As the townsfolk vie for the condemned man's freedom against a corrupt and defensive political hierarchy, one is almost tempted to analogize The Widow of Saint-Pierre to 2000's The Contender as period-piece propaganda, a brand of filmmaking that has proven successful only on rare occasion. But instead of taking a dialectical approach, Leconte works to submerge us in the moral dilemma underlying the political one, and in the process he just about dispels from our minds the notion of politics altogether. Eventually, this supposed "moral dilemma," as I've termed it, actually turns out to be rooted more in adultery than in murder, as the interactions between the three central figures (those portrayed by Kustirica, Binoche, and Daniel Auteuil, who serves the role of the woman's impetuous husband) end up spawning a sort of implicit love triangle that takes sexual fatalism to whole new levels. The resultant series of events reveals a multitude of ambiguous motives, most of which remain ambiguous and thereby inspire the viewer's intense sympathy with a figure who at one point spontaneously poses the question: "Why?" No effort is made toward a reply, and perhaps this is primarily what retains Widow's fragile sense of intrigue. Vital to this intrigue is Leconte's claustrophobic handheld cinematography, which displays a bit of a penchant for tremulous close-ups and occasional POV shots; this visual idiosyncrasy contributes well to the atmosphere of self-absorption in which the characters find themselves suffocated. And by this time this suffocation has reached its logical conclusion, one discovers that The Widow of Saint-Pierre, as topical as it may appear, has turned out to display little concern for the moral nature of capital punishment. The film has stricken another vein of an entirely different quality, and it has somehow caught us off guard with a small, intimate tale of three human beings who discover the peril of mixing their separate passions and their separate ideals in one and the same basket.
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring — Peter Jackson Regardless of its legendary literary origins, the stirring first installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy remains little more than a full-blown, deftly realized adventure flick in the tradition of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, with a canny dash of The Matrix for added adrenaline rush. For a three-hour epic showdown between good and evil and the wee folk in between, the film paces along with staggering agility from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, encapsulating the book's events as economically as possible while transfiguring them for some unique, action-oriented designs. Consequently, while fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's holy writ may relish director Peter Jackson's visualization of the Middle-Earthian universe, they'll nonetheless find the novel's spirit conspicuously absent. This is not The Fellowship of the Ring as most enthusiasts would have it. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings was intended in its purest form not as an exhilarating swords-and-sorcery epic, but rather as a celebration of the intricacies of culture, language, and geography, with a compelling and mythically timeless storyline to guide us through the sea of textural tidbits that constitute the book's true meat. Jackson should at least be credited for capturing the work's "unintentional" parallelism with World War II, but he's only concerned with the details as far as they can bolster his production's lavish atmosphere. And though Fellowship seldom pauses to wallow in its own stultifying visual majesty, the film is indeed densely atmospheric. It functions in its own dimension of pure escapism, on terms wholly independent from the novel's, for a result about as beguiling as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon afforded us last year.
6. The Circle -- Jafar Panahi Banned from its home soil on the obvious grounds of ideological intolerance, this scathing examination of women's rights (or lack of them) in Iran flaunts its political agenda on its sleeve without the slightest taint of remorse or hesitation, even in an age when agitprop seldom goes over well with critics and audiences alike. Oddly enough, though, it doesn't smack of the same sort of propagandistic determination that characterized Ken Loach's latest, similarly up-to-the-minute social drama Bread and Roses. A rarity indeed, this is a political production that somehow transcends its own politics (as the director himself would be quick to point out). What distinguishes The Circle from a wide host of other such gritty, ultra-relevant humanist polemics is its capacity to function -- with equal urgency, to be sure -- on two separate but interdependent levels, one concretely relevant, the other notably more abstract. First and foremost, with his naturalistic sensibility offering a far-from-optimistic glimpse of the female perspective in Iran, native auteur Jafar Panahi clearly intends some harsh criticism concerning the dynamics of a regime, Islamic or otherwise, sustained by the philosophy of oppression. His denunciation of a misogynistic Iranian society can't achieve timelessness in and of itself, but some of the observations strewn across the dimensions of his attack are so uniquely microscopic, so utterly "trivial," that they manage to make a sharp point without literally sticking it to us. Panahi's sense of understatement is epitomized in one scene in which a female bus passenger is prohibited from smoking (admittedly a minor restriction) under the condition that none of the nearby men are indulging themselves at the same time. Features on the level with Divorce: Iranian Style have delivered much more graphic depictions of persecution in Iran, but by choosing to catalogue the more minute dimensions of this sort of patriarchal tyranny, The Circle illustrates the true extent of these women's social imprisonment. Panahi has also supported his production as being more universally oriented than some would make it out to appear. Far from playing down the matter, it might be valuable to note that these women, as severe as their own circumstances undoubtedly are, exist in The Circle essentially as small allegorical spokespersons for any specific underdog entity the viewer feels free to associate. As the picture's wide circle of characters vie futilely for their own liberation, winding through a jungle of "circular" motifs Panahi's planted in their paths, one can't help but acknowledge the lucidity of the director's own self-observation: this is indeed a picture ultimately concerned with "restrictions, circles of restrictions," as he says, but not just the literal ones he appears to concentrate on.
5. Ghost World -- Terry Zwigoff Terry Zwigoff's misanthropic portrait of Western civilization seems to rank among a class of drab, downbeat, desperately barbed black comedies aiming to zero in on the follies of the higher social order without much of a thought in the other direction. Tempered by the same sensibilities that brought us Crumb, Ghost World is indeed, fairly enough, likely to invite such assumptions almost naturally. But as the film's dramatic arc gradually inches along (some may say unnoticeably, paying an unwitting credit to screenwriter Daniel Clowes), one comes to recognize that Zwigoff's sights are set just as much on his underdog, antisocial characters (and, therefore, on himself) as on the vacuum-wrapped phantom universe surrounding them. On one level, of course, the picture's deadpan, supposedly "merciless" criticism of mainstream homogeneity must seem addressed to the cynic lurking in all of us, that inner Diogenes ever-awaiting a chance to lash out against normalcy merely for the sake of appearing keen and urbane. But in the long run, Ghost World proves to be established on more tough-minded intentions: its vision of modern-day U.S.A. evolves into a shockingly periscopic and indiscriminate one as it mows down one social pretension after another, including those of its uncompromising anti-heroine Enid (Thora Birch, who understates the role's personality in the year's most underrated performance). This progression isn't a particularly hilarious one, but whatever sour laughs the picture can earn for itself are actually most indicative of the futility, in this case, of conventional humor for the sake of Zwigoff's designs. The absurdity of the human condition has ceased to be amusing in this context, and the last thing our civilization needs is one more glib round of ridicule from yet another "observant," self-important comedian-cum-social-commentator who thinks he can set the record straight. Ghost World rises above that sort of hand-me-down clownery to achieve something slightly more relevant, slightly more illuminating, and considerably less fabricated.
4. In the Bedroom -- Todd Field It would serve no slight to Todd Field's achievement here to acknowledge that his strategically subdued debut feature is about as tidy in its narrative composition as a motion picture can possibly be. In the film-school setting, In the Bedroom would stand out as an A+ student venture for its structural polish alone, as it carries its lead figures through three distinct, but fully ripened story acts that force their own cataclysmic progressions on the central conflict one by one, each drastically altering the struggle of will and personality between the picture's two central figures (here embodied by Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson). With each pivotal "turn of the screw" (to use noir terminology in describing a film that's been implausibly set aside in a class with The Man Who Wasn't There), Field's oppressively serene little melodrama sheds most of its previous thematic trappings and reveals a raw new horror beneath the surface, the presence of which remaining mostly unmolested by foreshadowing and therefore considerably tough to anticipate. By the time its jarring Act Three rolls around, In the Bedroom has virtually capped off a full-scale evolution from a study of waning adolescent ambition to a study of the aftermath of domestic crisis to a study of the fierce dynamics of revenge, all the while allowing a note on class tension to fester in the background. Unexpectedly, the disparity of this picture's separate sequential dimensions of plot fails to work against In the Bedroom's unusual wholeness and balance, as Field is content to let one circumstance gradually (and therefore credibly) sink its way into another. For this reason, one might mistake the feature's grim, stagnant Second Act as a meandering stroll through the miseries of a shattered family life, whereas it would be more reasonably described as a steady succession toward the inevitable: that is, the transmutation of unfocused grief into calculated vengefulness. Field's story reveals how fluidly -- and fatally -- such a transition can insinuate itself into a parent's psychology.
3. Waking Life -- Richard Linklater Richard Linklater's visionary gray-matter roller-coaster ride, guided along by imagery and discourse rather than a true narrative progression, has been deliberately fashioned as a testament to the sheer inexorability of human thought, and even when its wildest ramblings seem to emulate and even inflate the pretentiousness of the less legitimate bull-session grandstanders, Waking Life clings to a love of ideas that transcends any notion of intellectual restraint (Linklater's self-indulgence is even vaguely reminiscent of Woody Allen in his mid-period "Bergmanesque mode"). Its absurdities only function to celebrate the hyperanalytical foibles of the undying scholars in all of us, fueled by an inclination to question Life, the Universe, and Everything with the naiveté of an infant as well as the egoistic "insight" of a humanities academician. Whether the individual viewer may dare to swallow that bold breed of egoism without complaint, this trip will have any willing member of the human race high on life more than he could've ever imagined.
2. Amores Perros -- Alejandro González Iñárritu The fiercest blood-'n-guts "crime saga" of the new millennium finds its charge in pressure-cooker melodrama rather than the traditional, high-octane thrills and spills of modern Hollywood, but after all the screenplay's emotional carnage finally subsides, viewers are left imprinted with the urgent conviction of a moral epic unlike any other. Amores Perros (loosely translated into the cheeky platitude "Love's a Bitch") might often seem to be gleaning tropes from Tarantino in its three-part story structure, Bergman in its overheated character dynamics, Polanksi in its sheer portentousness, and Scorsese in its kinetic visuals, but the creator's overall vision is by no means eclectic in the impressionable sense, or, for that matter, even slightly ridden by the notion of subscribing to the trend of hard-edged ferociousness that's pervaded contemporary cinema ever since Pulp Fiction. No real post-Tarantinian posing to be seen here, you can be sure. But whether its flashier, gorier dimension may function as roller-coaster ride or mere kick-in-the-gut, the picture still holds claim to an anchor of humanism that out-and-out shames any of Hollywood's purported "family drama" stock in its sheer earnestness and immediacy alone. Just as love may inflict its pains in due consequence (so the film and its title assert), Amores Perros' sense of compassion carries its own price of physical and spiritual torment for its characters as well as its audience. It's not difficult to connect with this picture's core of ethical sincerity, but amid all its streams of crimson and visual excess, viewers may find this focal point excruciating -- and hopefully somewhat cathartic -- to cling to. To be sure, the experience promises a degree of absolution one wouldn't have expected from an "edgy arthouse thrill-machine," as some have perceived and labeled it. But as its nearly three-hour running time is divided into three physically independent, but thematically interlinked short-story segments, writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu concocts in his screenplay a chance to showcase his range beyond the usual sub-Tarantinian devilry championed by the likes of Guy Ritchie and Christopher McQuarrie. While the first chapter, "Octavio y Susana," clearly recalls the vulgar antics of Reservoir Dogs (sure to appeal to any adolescent arthouse brat worth his own testosterone), the second, "Daniel y Valeria," is more reminiscent of Cries and Whispers, and the third ends up fusing both likenesses into one fully rounded stylistic entity, a brutal but meditative capstone to this picture's kaleidoscopic progression of tonal contrasts.
1. Mulholland Dr. -- David Lynch Filmgoers enamored with the convoluted horseplay of pictures like Memento, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, and Vanilla Sky might not meet common Lynchian fare with the same approval, regardless of how much more of a challenge even his most ramshackle productions can afford us. While Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and his troupe strain to reinvent the structural conventions of potboiler noir, David Lynch (Blue Velvet) is effortlessly hunting down a redefinition of the whole notion of experimental narrative, intent to confound viewers with anti-logic rather than disarm them with last-minute punch lines (as the box-office revenue for The Sixth Sense demonstrates, U.S. audiences prefer punch lines). As is to be expected, though, his endeavors more often than not meet with grim, resounding failure, since his very career is something of an overwrought experiment in and of itself. Indeed, how often can one subvert tradition until subversion evolves into a tradition of its own? With Lynch's filmography remaining of meager value aside from its uncompromising incoherence, what golden inroad to convention remains for the man to infiltrate? For your answer, look no further than Mulholland Drive, a grand, operatic dreamscape that once and for all sustains a beautiful equipoise between the material at hand and the methods by which Lynch so deftly quashes its significance. To describe the film as nothing more than a high-wired trip would be easier, and perhaps a bit more accurate, than anything one could illuminate with critical evaluation. But the film holds water as what some would term a masterpiece not just because of the brilliant senselessness it unveils, but also because of the carefully orchestrated moods, ideas, and emotions it introduces along the way. By building on a scheme of serious pith and resonance and then undermining his own foundation, Lynch effectively kills two birds with one stone before revealing that it was only one bird all along. But I'm leaping ahead of myself. "The language of film is, or can be, abstract and non-linear. Understanding is intuitive. It becomes more like music." So said Lynch himself, and there may be no better way to summarize the weird, incomprehensible allure surrounding a motion picture that so brazenly defies explication. For one matter, Mulholland Drive is perhaps the first motion picture to ever truly actualize the suggestions posed by Kurt Vonnegut's enigmatic Tralfamadorian literature of Slaughterhouse-Five, in which "there isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep." Lynch's narrative, if it can even be called that, sometimes plays more like a disarrayed photo album of "moments" than an actual story, and when studied altogether as one unified experience, the arrangement appears to function as little more than a cacophonous symphony of various and sundry sights and sounds, with Lynch using our expectations as his instruments. That said, it seems that any sort of analytic deconstruction must remain beside the point, unless one wishes to dissect the mechanisms by which Lynch so slyly lures us into his own fabricated universe. But as one would only naturally expect from any breed of musical composition, Mulholland Drive boasts of real cadence in the way it introduces and manipulates its twisted, fractured vignettes of human experience. Superficially, though, its scene-by-scene chronology appears terribly slapdash and amorphous, and by the time its perplexing denouement rolls around (it's almost useless to pigeonhole any sort of real climax), one might be tempted to dismiss the production as, say, a bundle of frivolous imagery with an "ART" label slapped on its veneer. In this case, however, such a response must be deemed the consequence of deflated conventional anticipations, which here would be grossly misapplied to such an overtly iconoclastic piece of filmmaking as this one is. Lynch's imposing a pattern or destination on his premise would be tantamount to his imposing a pat explication on the meaning of his very own dreams. Mulholland Drive is, sweetly and simply, a nightmare of a motion picture, and its capacity to mimic the erratic nature of semi-conscious human thought -- as it glides between images and ideas (often of inexplicable origin), probes them to varying degrees, and then allows the impulse of their emotional charge to propel the mind to other random, curious capsules of experience that may or may not bear any relation to that which has gone before -- stands as a landmark achievement on its own, all notions of "underlying significance" aside. (Salvador Dalí would be proud of this innovative utilization of automatist theory.) As far as Lynch's obligations as a storyteller are concerned, the somewhat dubious drawbacks stemming from his achievement will likely disappoint those who invest too much trusting concern in an initially "promising" neonoir plot, one involving a typical noir broad suffering from a sudden loss of memory -- to detail any series of incidents beyond this would be a wasted effort. But for anyone who's encountered Lynch in his customarily bizarre posturing before (The Straight Story remaining the singular anomaly in his entire ouevre), the potential for some shameless rug-pulling scandals should be plainly accepted as a given. Any viewer courageous enough to attempt this daunting leap of faith will be sooner or later rewarded with the realization, optimistic or not, that Mulholland Drive is at its core a goldmine of sensation in which almost everyone will discover his or her own unique truths buried beneath the surface. While this remains the case with any film designed to provoke some fashion of thought, Lynch's picture's myriad effects on its audiences -- ranging from the terrifying to the inundating to the sheerly amusing and, no matter what, the uncompromisingly baffling -- actually serve to amplify the potency of the notion, truistic though some may consider it, that humans' differences in perception comprise the basis for their varying approaches to the overwhelming chaos of life in general. To navigate the oceans of interpretations surrounding this film is to recognize the true solipsistic appeal of real art. |
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André Lyon’s Top Ten Films of 2001 |
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2001 in Review |
