(My) Best of 09: Picture.

10. Where the Wild Things Are (read my review)

You can be the biggest cynic on earth and you will still let out a big "aww" the second Karen O's enchanting score appears accompanying the studio logos which Max (Max Records) has scratched and made his own.
When seconds later we meet the hyperactive child we can't help but fall in love with his ambition to make the world his own. As he travels to the island of monsters unaware of the creatures he will meet we're reminded of times in our childhood when nothing made us afraid and life was an adventure waiting to be conquered.
How Spike Jonze made a film that penetrates the armor of childhood while examining the bittersweetness we carry on to adulthood is a wonder upon itself.
An exercise in nostalgia that still manages to refresh our days in unimaginable ways.


9. Police, Adjective (read my review)

Like Steve McQueen's "Hunger", this Romanian film might become known for a bold setpiece that has the camera fixed while three characters talk inside an office.
Police officers Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and Nelu (Ion Stoica) sit in opposing chairs while Captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) questions them about the ongoing case they've been working on.
Up to that point in the film Anghelache has only been a ghost who Cristi tries to avoid and when we meet him we understand why.
With a single sentence Anghelache shatters Cristi's idealistic methods and questions Nelu's stoicism, then in the film's most controversial moment dedicates more than ten minutes to a dictionary entry!
But then and there director Corneliu Porumboiu establishes that his film is not the pretentious nod at academia it often seems to be but a dark comedy that mocks the power language has obtained in our societies.
Its examining of the absurd however has utterly terrifying repercussions.


8. Antichrist (read my review)

Despite Lars von Trier's efforts to make "Antichrist" something everybody would squirm, cry and complain about, the film might very well be the most moving and personal work he has done to date.
Those willing to see beyond the mutilation, bloodied genitals, talking foxes, poetic deaths and medieval allegories will find themselves peeking at the psyche of a man who likes to call himself the greatest director in the world but is filled with as many doubts, insecurities and problems as the rest of us.
The obvious facade of "Antichrist" perhaps is saying that he might be all bark and no bite, but take the time to peel its layers and you will see a courageous attempt at dialogue with the divine.


7. Bright Star (read my review)

Watch how Jane Campion turns this...

"I almost wish we were butterflies
and lived but three summer days
three such days with you
I could fill with more delight
than fifty common years
could ever contain"

...into cinema.


6. The Hurt Locker (read my review)

Before it became an awards juggernaut and the center of ridiculous claims, "The Hurt Locker", like some of the best films of 2009, was a small picture that reminded us of the power that lies in genre.
Action flick expert Kathryn Bigelow refreshed our notions of the war action film as something that can be profound without losing its thrills.
In the process proving Michael Bay, Clint Eastwood, chauvinism and war mongers were all wrong.


5. Broken Embraces (read my review)

Who knew Michelangelo Antonioni's infamous tennis ball could take on the shape of Penélope Cruz? Apparently Pedro Almodóvar did and in "Broken Embraces" he uses his muse to break our hearts and open our mind's eyes to the notions of what's real and what's not.
Unlike the cold Antonioni, Pedro proves that intellectual stimulation can also be warm and affective as he frames his theories in a melodramatic plot that recalls "Notorious" and "Voyage to Italy".
The film's title is an homage to neorealism but its structure and reach couldn't be more postmodernist if they tried.


4. Vincere (read my review)

What's the best way to tell a story that deals with rumors about the life of a historical figure? To answer this question Marco Bellocchio looked back at art history and came up with three influential movements that used aesthetics to dig into larger truths.
"Vincere" therefore is a romantic melodrama inspired by silent films, expressionist opera and Eisensten-ian editing.
Bellocchio is able to keep these currents from clashing and succumbing to their own grandiosity, like a masterful conductor using a storm to make music he makes "Vincere" thunderous and big but keeps it from sinking under its own weight.


3. A Prophet (read my review)

Speaking of genre as a way to connect to more profound subjects, Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet" may look like a gritty gangster flick at first glance-and it sure works like one-but the underlying themes of racial empowerment, spiritual search and criminal coming-of-age at its center are worthy of discussing with your shrink your social worker and your priest.
But the movie is never as "Officer Krupke" specific as that description, Audiard makes the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim) mean something different to whoever's watching and while some will be inspired to call it the best thing since "The Godfather" others will be more intrigued with figuring out the theological meaning of the title cards Audiard inserts throughout the film.


2. Up (read my review)

An adventure film in the very essence of the word, Pete Docter's "Up" is another winning entry in the Pixar canon that makes the studio the most consistently brilliant factory in Hollywood or a good luck streak waiting to crash.
The creativity in this film makes it seem more like the former though, especially in the way the screenwriters and director make the oddest elements work like magic.
Beyond its obvious homages to classic cinema, Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones, "Up" owes its most precious moments to the machinations of old studio Hollywood where people seemed to sit around a desk, throw things inside a giant pot and come out with a film that had romance, drama, comedy, adventure and even room for various analytical readings.
"Up" is the rare kind of movie that still happens to have it all.


1. The White Ribbon (read my review)

If "The White Ribbon" is the year's coldest film, it-ironically- might also be the most inviting. Long gone are the days when going to the cinema was an interactive experience in which the filmmakers and the audience made the movie together.
We have grown used to sitting in the dark, munching on our pop corn and leaving all the problem solving and idea digesting to the people up on the screen and behind the camera.
Leave it to Michael Haneke to bring this sort of event back with a film that might seem like an over analytical allegory at first but also happens to be the most delicious mystery of the year.
One which we're invited to participate in because it reaches beyond the film.
The strange crimes occurring in the German village are enough to keep our brain working throughout the movie looking for clues and suspects but Haneke makes sure we also have fun on the way back home from the theater and makes us see that despite our universe being in true color, it might just be an extension of the black and white world we've just left.
The burning of that barn we saw might be that mysterious explosive that just blew an Afghan building halfway across the world and the bullying of a young disabled child might explain why certain kids grow into violent adults that solve everything with violence.
"The White Ribbon" might work as a prequel to every movie Michael Haneke has ever made but it also works as warning to the world we've yet to see.

(My) Best of 09: Director.

5. Marco Bellocchio for "Vincere" (read my review)

Italian director Marco Bellocchio has confessed he had never heard about Ida Dalser's (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) story before he embarked on writing and directing "Vincere". Watching the movie however, you get the sensation that he has always been an expert on the subject.
The way he takes Dalser's tragic story and transforms it into a metaphor for the fate of his country under fascism is an enterprise that recalls Pasolini's "Saló" and perfects what Eastwood failed to do so miserably in "Changeling".
The mastery of combining history with intimacy is rarely achieved to such levels of sublimity and the performances Bellocchio gets from his lead actors are electrifying.


4. Lars von Trier for "Antichrist" (read my review)

Whether you liked "Antichrist" or not, the one thing you can not say is that Lars von Trier doesn't know what he's doing.
From its operatic opening to its Bosch-ian interludes, the movie is defined by the overpowering visions of its creator. The mad Dane has always specialized in polarizing audiences and this might be his most controversial movie in that aspect.
Some are enthralled by his medieval horror techniques, others are disgusted by his alleged misogyny and in my case I was moved by his raw self examination.
If few people acknowledge the existence of a god through their art, less of them would hold a public quarrel with this being like von Trier.


3. Jane Campion for "Bright Star" (read my review)

Poetry is not meant to be understood, it's meant to be felt. I had read that before a million times and even tried to reason it using Edward de Bono's lateral thinking techniques.
I never truly got it until I saw "Bright Star". In the same way you burden your mind trying to crack the codes of a poem, Jane Campion probably wondered how to transport John Keats' (Ben Whishaw) life to the silver screen in a manner that would defy all biopic conventions.
She chose to do it as a visual poem. How "Bright Star" is able to tell and make us feel is owed to Campion's subtly magnificent work.
Every scene in the movie works like a verse. That they were extracted from the prose of her screenplay are only small proofs of her ability to transform the intellectual into the emotional.


2. Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker" (read my review)

Whether it's your third or second time watching "The Hurt Locker" your heart will still race and your pulse will still accelerate in the same scenes.
That is Kathryn Bigelow's extraordinary gift. She is able to encode visceral feelings into scenes we've seen a million times and as much as we deconstruct them we never know what is it exactly that she does to maintain eternal suspense.
And that's only in the action sequences! She also observes her characters and creates fascinating worlds for them which they bring into the larger universe of the movie.
Like a master juggler, Bigelow knows when to deliver exactly what we need and she's able to maintain an enigmatic mood that make the movie mean something different to whoever's watching it.


1. Michael Haneke for "The White Ribbon" (read my review)

When strange events start occurring in a small German village, the locals panic and then slowly overcome the unsolved tragedy, until a new one occurs. Then they repeat the process.
Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke once again explores the nature of violence as he's done in some of his best works like "Funny Games" and "Benny's Video".
In Palm d'Or winner "The White Ribbon" one would think he achieves some sort of epiphany but the truth is he still comes up with what might be just an hypothesis about the source of brutality in our world.
As darkly playful as ever, he is represented by a schoolteacher during one key scene in which he comes up with an unexpected suspect regarding the crimes.
"You have a sick imagination" replies another character disgusted by the repercussions the teacher's theories might have on the quiet village life.
Regardless of the not so subtle Freudian fact that Haneke is represented by a scholar, it can't be denied that few working directors muster the courage to make the kind of statements he does.
Not many artists are as fascinated by the human intellect and even less stimulate it as often as he does.

Vincere ****

Director: Marco Bellocchio
Cast: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi
Corrado Invernizzi, Michela Cescon, Fausto Russo Alesi

History has a way of forgetting people and events that don't fit into their books. One of these people was Ida Dalser (Mezzogiorno) the woman who married and gave birth to Benito Mussolini's (Timi) first son.
She's the subject of Marco Bellocchio's "Vincere", a rousing operatic masterpiece which narrates the story of a country through a single character.
When the film begins Dalser is the wide eyed ingenue who falls in love with Mussolini's enormous presence. She stares at him full of pride as he defies God in front of a Socialist party assembly and then submits to his powerful sexuality which overcomes her body but remains distant from her heart.
He thrusts into her, perhaps thinking of his Napoleonic dreams, while she moans and softly whispers "I love you".
When Dalser sells all her belongings to get him the money to start a newspaper, she clarifies "it's not a sacrifice, it's a joy...I love you".
He takes the money and declares he will pay back, never returning the affection. It's not a surprise then when he marries Rachele Guidi (Cescon) and disowns both Ida and her child who she named after his father.
The surprise, to Ida at least, might be that he also disowns his leftist past and his marriage and new family are his way to try and please the Catholic church which he once repudiated.
She moves to her hometown where she's kept in practical imprisonment by the Fascists who send her to a mental asylum and take her son away from her.
The movie then turns into this woman's quest to regain her child and the sanity she never lost to begin with, but "the Church is the only mother fascism stills fear" she learns as the years go by and her claims are drowned between wars and political upheaval.
Carlo Crivelli's overpowering score serves to give the film a disquieting, haunting mood. Sometimes you're almost expecting Mezzogiorno to burst into a heartbreaking aria as the emotions accumulate.
Her performance of heartbreak and pride are the film's anchor, watching the way she modulates her emotions feels like a privilege.
History made an effort of erasing most proof of Ida's story, but the actress brings her to urgent life; her passion is evident in erotic scenes and in more quiet moments when she sees her whole world crumble within her.
But Mezzogiorno does more than that; she fully embodies both the woman and the symbol as the film offers various readings.
There's the biopic of impotence and sorrow, but there's also the other one in which the actress embodies Italy throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
With a stunning mastery of his craft, Bellochio-who also wrote the screenplay-makes sure that whichever way we watch the movie we will be witnesses of the specific and the general.
During the first hour or so he let's us see why Ida fell in love with Mussolini (Timi's work is majestic) as he presents himself with the charm and tenacity of a hero.
When he speaks of Napoleon we do not see the eventual insanity of the Emperor, but the nationalist idealism which got him started.
Ida, like the rest of the country, falls for Il Duce (although she later reminds us she came first) only to have him become a monster.
Bellochio cleverly makes Timi disappear from the film's latter half, as Mussolini became a figure of power.
When first we saw him in meetings, street protests and intimate encounters, he's later represented as an icon of epic proportions.
"I saw Mussolini today" says Ida to a surprised listener, but she clarifies "on the movie screen, he looks different, like a giant".
How did the man she loved become like a deity is something she asks herself, but also Bellochio's reminder to us that every political current came from a single tiny point.
During the rest of the movie we only see Il Duce through stock footage (although it's a compliment to Timi's splendid work that we might wonder if it's not him under disguise at times) as he addresses Italians and later Nazis.
Bellochio also provides us with a more benevolent look at the Italy that took in the dictator; he asks us if like Ida, in a latter scene, the country wasn't just lying and going with the current to protect itself from Fascism's tortures and horrors?
This also offers an option for what results one of the film's most profound examinations, which is the role of the media in creating history.
This isn't only obvious from the historical footage the director uses, instead it's what we don't see what lingers the most.
Would Italy have welcomed a man who sent his wife to a mental institution, would Mussolini's pact with the Vatican even have happened if this had become a known fact?
Because Mussolini is on film and Ida never was, Il Duce could make up his own public profile as he wished and we are left only with what Bellocchio offers.
No disservice to the director, because his film provokes the audience to look beyond propaganda. It's certainly ironic, or maybe not so much once you think about it, how the filmmaker recurs to violent, clashing images to edit his work.
"Vincere" is comprised of cuts that recall Eisenstein's most powerful work and can also be used as a compendium of how cinema evolved in its earlier ages (from Monumentalism to Chaplin, Bellocchio shapes his film after known works of the era).
Some of the first scenes occur inside theaters where a single piano accompanies the action on the screen. In one of the most striking scenes, the audience begins to react to what's going on in the movie and the room becomes divided into the two predominant political thoughts.
As they go beyond booing and actually begin to fight, cinematographer Daniele Ciprì shoots them against the light and they too become shadows projected in the movie screen.
Notice how the accompanist never stops playing the piano-establishing there might no difference between the reality on the screen and the reality in the movie we're watching- stating that we can never know for sure what will eventually be deemed important enough to become immortal in the medium.