Films in a Decade (2010-2019)

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

On the one hand, I've generally grown far less inclined towards lists and rankings when it comes to highlighting films I've enjoyed, preferring instead to give them the more in-depth treatments they deserve. On the other hand, since a decade does only come around every once in a while, here is a gathering, in alphabetical order, of films I saw over the past decade that made a strong impression on me. And in a related note, I'm included in MUBI Notebook's critics poll of the images that defined the decade in cinema!

Thanks for reading, and happy new year!

Aqérat (We, the Dead) (Edmund Yeo, 2017)
Casting Blossoms to the Sky (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2012)
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)
Centro Histórico (Pedro Costa, Manoel de Oliveira, Víctor Erice, Aki Kaurismäki, 2013)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)
Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira, 2012)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
Halley (Sebastián Hofmann, 2012)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)
It Felt Like Love (Eliza Hittman, 2013)
Life of Riley (Alain Resnais, 2014)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)
The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)
Modern Love (Takuya Fukushima, 2018)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)
The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)
Our Homeland (Yonghi Yang, 2012)
The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones, 2014)
Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2018)
Postcard (Kaneto Shindo, 2010)
The Second Life of Thieves (Woo Ming Jin, 2014)
Ship of Theseus (Anand Gandhi, 2013)
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)
Starlet (Sean Baker, 2012)
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013)
Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)
The Tiger Factory (Woo Ming Jin, 2010)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
Visages Villages (Agnès Varda and JR, 2017)
The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher, 2014)
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais, 2012)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

Blondin Miguel in Le Havre

The Great Escape: Larisa Shepitko’s WINGS

Maya Bulgakova in Wings

The visions are brief, but when they come to her they offer something so sweet and pure that one might imagine them belonging to the world of daydreams and fantasy. But they come from reality - Nadezhda Petrukhina’s reality, as she lived it many years ago when she flew as a fighter pilot for Stalin’s air force. Through her eyes and memories, we are sent soaring high up, slicing between layers of clouds as the ground below, vast yet minuscule, tilts and turns. But these moments, sweet as they are, are also cruelly brief, allowing us just a few seconds of flight at a time before the present literally comes back into focus, returning us to the drab confines of Nadezhda’s current life as a civilian, teacher, and respected public servant. Over the course of Wings (1966), the first feature film she made after graduating from the All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), Larisa Shepitko follows her heroine through the quotidian labyrinth in which she now lives out her days, seeing to chores and duties with rigorous diligence. Nadezhda is surrounded by an eclectic gallery of faces - colleagues and students, assistants and acquaintances, housekeepers and merchants, nearly all of whom seeming to know her, looking to her with an instinctive sense of respect. It’s easy to see why: with her iron-firm demeanor and sharp, hawk-like features, she right away makes a striking impression as a woman not to be crossed. The great character actress Maya Bulgakova plays her beautifully, incorporating doubt, regret, anxiety about time and age, self-awareness, and a keen sense of humour beneath the surface devotion to protocol and responsibility. Nadezhda - many warmly call her Nadezhda Stepanovna - is so much more than the decorated war hero and exemplary citizen she appears to be, carrying with her the memories and experiences of another chapter in her life that still linger within her with haunting potency in the postwar present, commingling with her anxiety about where she now finds herself and where she is headed.

Of all the things that weigh upon Nadezhda Stepanovna regarding the place she has reached in her life, two in particular cast the longest shadows upon her sense of contentment. The first of them is the roguish student Vostriakov (Sergei Bystryakov), whose expressions of disdain towards the school, his annoying classmates, and authority figures curdle into a simmering hatred he directs squarely at Nadezhda, triggered once she disciplines and humiliates him for some rude horseplay early in the film. She later spots him in a crowded beer hall, smirking and drinking defiantly once he sees her, shortly before he runs away from school and home altogether, delivering an additional knot of gnawing guilt upon her conscience. There is also Nadezhda’s frayed relationship with her adult daughter Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova), who is so embarrassed by her mother that she avoids introducing her to her fiancé Igor (Vladimir Gorelov), prompting Nadezhda to pay a visit on her own initiative, leading to a cringingly awkward encounter. She is so tormented by Tanya’s icy attitude towards her that she in turn holds back from disclosing that she is not actually her biological mother.

Nadezhda thankfully has a loyal friend in Pasha (Panteleymon Krymov), a kind fellow teacher to whom she confides her doubts and worries. But that is not enough to keep her memories from trickling into the present-tense stream of babysitting, kitchen chores, student theatrical productions, proofreading, and other mundane responsibilities that now take up the bulk of her time and attention. It isn’t all drudgery and banality though: through instinct and expertise, Shepitko and her cinematographer Igor Slabnevich capture quotidian scenes of urban life that belong in the rich tradition of stark, monochrome, modernist images of postwar Europe found in the works of Left Bank filmmakers like Alain Resnais and Chris Marker and key contemporaneous directors like Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ermanno Olmi. One vivid passage finds Nadezhda out for a walk encountering a beguiling bounty of scenes: a platoon of firemen carrying out drill exercises in the street in their bulky uniforms; a man precariously doing handstands at the edge of a diving board high above choppy waters as a companion sits close by, watching; a crowd of people packed into a rickety streetcar all turning their heads at the same time to catch a glimpse of a dog outside. Nadezhda pays a visit to the beer hall where she previously spotted Vostriakov, now empty save for the proprietress Shura (Rimma Markova), with whom she shares a frank, friendly chat over beer and launches into a spirited burst of singing and dancing that is interrupted by a gathering of silent, curious men peering in through the windows at the two women.

Wings

Afterwards, while walking and carrying berries from a street vendor in her cupped hands, Nadezhda is caught in a sudden rain shower that sends everyone else running for shelter. But not her; as water droplets accumulate in her hair and clothes, she uses the opportunity to rinse the berries, then peer out at the emptying streets, her gaze (and Shepitko’s camera) drifting upwards, above streetcar wires and rooftops into the sky and the past, into her memories - once again shown from her point of view - of Mitya (Leonid Dyachkov), her former lover and fellow pilot during World War II. In a sequence that finds the pair exploring crumbling stone ruins, abandoned wells, and cracked ancient roads etched into the earth like gashes, these long-vanished scenes of the past crystalize in a series of freeze frames that seem to lock Mitya’s face and frail, shadow-like form into the firmament of memory (this passage, among the strongest in the film, easily fits alongside the similarly unforgettable past sequences in Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Marker’s La Jetée (1963)). The final images in the sequence tragically underline the loss of Mitya to the maws of death and history: the smoking, flame-strewn remains of his fighter; the ominous stone form of a cathedral looming in the distance.

While Larisa Shepitko’s gripping war film The Ascent (1977) is the one many today regard as her masterpiece, Wings is no less remarkable an achievement. It is a work of great power, beauty, and nuance, open and alive to the rhythms of everyday life and the past’s lingering hold on a busy, layered present. Among the film’s most impressive achievements are the ways it explores with sensitivity and depth the life, thoughts, and feelings of one woman; her previous experiences and present situation; the scope of her achievements’ continuing influence over other people’s impressions of her and her longing to be free of this burden, evident in her interactions with strangers and supportive friends; the demands of her profession and the friction it creates against her innermost regrets and desires; and her ever-constant passion: flight. By the end of the film, compelled to regain control of her story, Nadezhda makes another trip out to her old airfield, where, as always, she is greeted by her old flying comrades. Left alone for a moment, she manages to find an empty plane. She hops and crawls until she has climbed onto one of the wings, then lowers herself into the cockpit. Though quiet and still, she visibly savors the moment. Then the men come back and begin pushing the aircraft along the grass, laughing and cheering as they gain speed. Their light-hearted game is amusing and makes Nadezhda smile, but it is also sad in its pathetic imitation of true flight. But Nadezhda has had enough of imitations and memories: without warning and to everyone’s shock, the plane’s engine suddenly roars to life, its propeller whirring into motion. The men scatter away from the plane, which begins to direct itself towards a nearby runway. Others come running, but it’s no use: Nadezhda Stepanovna is finally ready to return to the bright white skies that have so often beckoned to her. Her disappointments and regrets can stay on the ground; the clouds await, and nothing can hold her back now.

Vectors of Desire: Lucrecia Martel's ZAMA

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Look at him, the poor man. This poor, proud, ridiculous man. When we first see him, he is standing on a beach at the edge of the water in his boots, tricorn hat, and crimson uniform of the Spanish crown, a sword hanging from his belt in its sheath. A man whose appearance and stature suggest a figure of power, of authority and control. Leaving the beach, his attention is drawn to the sounds of a group of indigenous women bathing themselves in mud in the shallow waters. The man crawls to a spot above them where he tries to sneak a look at their nude bodies, but is almost immediately thwarted. “Voyeur! Voyeur!” they call, laughing at this clownish intruder. Embarrassed and exposed, he tries to flee, stopping only to thrash one of the women who chases after him. Thus, in the opening moments of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), the great Argentine filmmaker’s adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel and her first feature in nine years, the dynamics of power so familiar from previous, male-centric colonialist period pieces are challenged, sabotaged. The man, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, the Mexican actor perhaps best known for playing the womanizing Tomás Tomás in Alfonso Cuarón's Sólo con tu pareja (1991)) the main character of this story and a man ostensibly equipped with power and a roving, insatiable, infallible male gaze, is right away revealed to instead be weak and inept, openly called out for his impulses by those whose own gazes and voices shame and disarm him with comical ease. 

Zama is an Argentine-born subject of the Spanish Empire stationed in the riverside outpost of Asunción, Paraguay, in the late 18th century. Separated from a wife and children whom he hasn’t seen in years, he longs for a transfer that will finally take him away from the humid backwater. But time passes, no transfer arrives, and Zama finds himself sinking even deeper into a Kafkaesque stasis of bureaucracy, boredom, yearning, and desperation that pushes him beyond the limits of his endurance. The film, a brilliantly executed revisionist take on those familiar tales of imperial rule, adventure, and conquest in faraway, “untamed” lands, is perfectly in keeping with Martel’s previous three films, all of which favoring a lingering, non-linear approach to their unsettling studies of middle- and upper-class characters trapped in suffocating settings, entirely at the mercy of their own nervous energies. La ciénaga (2001), Martel’s extraordinary feature debut, is situated almost entirely on and around the grounds of a decrepit house, La Mandrágora, in which the loathsome, self-absorbed adults slowly rot away in an alcoholic stupor around a putrid swimming pool while their children, caught in the grip of simmering hormones and destructive impulses, go on sweaty excursions into town or roam the surrounding wilderness with rifles and machetes. Portents of death and injury abound: a dead rabbit on a kitchen counter, a water buffalo trapped in mud, the sight of children with missing eyes and bleeding cuts. There is the Buñuelian sense of primal instincts upsetting and overriding the surface-level social order of proper etiquette and acceptable behavior, of nature either reclaiming or lashing out against the toxic world of humans. In Martel’s cryptically constructed follow-up, The Holy Girl (2004), a hotel hosting a medical convention serves as a site of sexual tension and spiritual fervor when an act of abuse perversely motivates a young woman to pursue and bring about the salvation of the unsuspecting perpetrator. And in 2008’s The Headless Woman, the vain, middle-aged protagonist falls into a psychological maelstrom of guilt and denial after a hit-and-run incident in which she may or may not have struck a child. All three films are distinguished by their scathing indictments of the idle, entitled bourgeoisie; cutting critiques of patriarchal social orders and systems of power (women play significant roles in all of Martel’s films, occupying the central roles in her first three); and clear allegiance with typically marginalized characters such as servants, non-whites, and indigenous peoples, all of which are further pursued and explored in intriguing new ways in Zama.

Zama

Just as instrumental to Martel’s unique cinema is her emphasis on the crucial role sound plays in enriching and expanding upon the confining limitations of the image, inviting the larger, more mysterious world beyond the frame to assert itself in the viewer’s experience of the film through an array of surprising, challenging, and creative methods. She demonstrated her mastery of sound design and the tension between on- and off-screen space as early as La ciénaga with its dense sonic tapestry of metal chairs scraping against stone, tinkling glasses and bottles, ringing telephones that go unanswered, rumbling thunder, gunshots, the shouts and shrieks of overexcited children. That film’s sophisticated command of the visual and aural properties of cinema, clever editing, and vivid sensuality amount to a work as rigorous, precise, tactile, and durable as Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983) or Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999). As with Bresson, Martel’s devotion to uncovering the potential of sound is absolute, with each film serving as a testing ground for fresh techniques and concepts that bring the world of each film to life as an accumulation of physical details. For her, each new project starts first and foremost with a sound concept around which the rest of the film takes shape. For Zama, one of her first decisions was to use a Shepard tone - a series of gradually ascending or descending scales - in association with instances of further delay or disappointment for Zama, creating the impression of not only free-falling, as Martel specifically intended, but of an increasingly slippery hold on reality and rational thought, as if the very ground underneath the poor functionary’s feet was melting and sliding away. This sensation of feverish wooziness is further underscored by the inspired use of calypso music, conjuring a comically skewed, dreamily lackadaisical feel to Zama’s trials and tribulations. Martel took a similarly creative, idiosyncratic approach to the actors’ spoken dialogue by borrowing the method Mexican soap operas from the 1970s used to reach a wide Latin American audience, blending together different accents - in Zama’s case, from Argentina and the Spanish-Portuguese hybrid language Portuñol - to create a more unusual variation of Spanish to suit the temporally and geographically removed colony setting (the indigenous languages of qom, pilagá, and mbyá guaraní are also spoken throughout the film). To achieve the eerie pre-modern silence that would have prevailed there and then, untainted by noise pollution from cars and trucks, Martel often had to resort to dubbing her actors’ dialogue to bypass the difficulties of recording direct sound. She also made sure to incorporate the sounds of insects into interior scenes to emphasize the lack of a proper division between indoors and outdoors, as most windows at the time lacked glass, and sought out field recordings of insects, birds, and amphibians that gave off strange, mechanical sounds, “almost like malfunctioning radios.” All of these elements and many more contribute to an enthralling vision of the past quite unlike any other, off-kilter yet immersive, layered with just enough eccentricity to effectively illustrate the unsteady, tragicomic nature of Zama’s situation. Elaborating upon the opening sequence, Martel depicts the frustrated Argentine not as an authority figure who is seen, feared, obeyed, and respected, but rather as a measly, insignificant cog in a machine of empire and commerce, an increasingly diminished creature whose torments and desires seem to be open knowledge among the local population, further contributing to his overall ridiculousness. Despite being a married man and father, he pitifully pursues the local treasury minister’s flirtatious wife (Almodóvar regular Lola Dueñas) within the suffocating confines of her manor, but she only deflects his advances while his amused peers casually lob teasing remarks about Zama’s blatant lust directly to his face. Zama also has an illegitimate child with Emilia (María Etelvina Peredez), one of the native women who makes no disguise of her deep contempt for him. Meanwhile, his hopes for any sign of progress towards his coveted transfer become increasingly futile with each setback and delay, leaving him with little else to do but to just keep waiting - for word from the crown, for delayed ships bearing royal mail and overdue payments in their holds, for a sign of mercy or favor from one of the local governors, even for a message from his wife or children, whose prolonged silence carry much weight. 

Zama, while suffering from terrible loneliness, is far from alone in his private, inescapable purgatory, as Martel ingeniously surrounds him with a wide range of secondary characters mainly consisting of women, children, indigenous natives, and animals. Further elaborating upon the film's fascinatingly inverted power dynamics, she grants the various servant and slave characters surrounding the Spanish overseers their own special measures of presence, autonomy, and even power, prominently featuring them in numerous scenes in key areas of the frame, sometimes in brazenly colorful costumes, their eyes and passive expressions constantly leveling steady, assured looks of defiance and judgment at the petty, pompous intruders. In its own way, Zama is an even more insightful statement on resistance and revenge against institutional captivity and oppression than Django Unchained (2012); without shedding a single drop of blood, Martel's servants silently, undeniably prevail over their buffoonish "masters." A similar assessment can be drawn from the film's free indigenous characters, who navigate the dense jungle terrain with confidence and ease, for the most part possessing an attitude of indifference to the foreigners' cruelties and desperate, greed-driven fumblings, a position comparable to that shown by the many animals that freely inhabit and wander through the Spanish settlements. In one of the film's most memorable (and instantly meme-able) scenes, a llama bobs into and out of the frame as the straight-faced Zama receives yet another blow of bad news from a governor, hilariously underlining his ever-plummeting irrelevance as only a llama can. 
 

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Martel portrays Zama as a man trapped and tormented by the vector of desire, to borrow the filmmaker's phrasing, that he has constructed for himself, the allure of his transfer lying in wait for him at the end of an ambiguous timeline has constantly has to adjust and expand with each fresh setback - practically ad infinitum, after a certain point. His obedience and eagerness to please his Spanish overseers all go unrecognized or are overridden by the succession of matters that keep arising, demanding his attention: the sudden death of a visiting merchant (Carlos Defeo) and the subsequent burial arrangements that must be made, the hilarious discovery that one of Zama's own men (Nahuel Cano) has been secretly writing a book on the crown's time and want Zama to be his first reader, a property inventory that forces Zama to relocate to a rotting, possibly haunted hut. But the roots of Zama's perpetual torment extend not to the greater forces of circumstance or rotten luck that keep throwing up obstacles between him and his goal, but within him, to the very core of his identity. At one point, Zama's deputy Ventura (Juan Minujín) bluntly tells him, "You're talking to a man astonished by the number of Americans who want to pass for Spaniards instead of being what they are," thus openly addressing both the mission Martel has firmly pursued since La ciénaga to provide a fuller and more accurate representation of Argentine national identity comprised of lower-class, native-born, and indigenous groups rather than those with European backgrounds and sentiments and Zama's misguided attempts to bury his own Argentine origins and curry favor from his Spanish-born colleagues and superiors - a goal doomed from the very start. In one last attempt to please the distant, never-seen king of a faraway country not even his own, a weary, bearded Zama volunteers for a mission to find and kill the elusive bandit known as Vicuña Porto whose violent antics have been wreaking havoc with local trade. This perilous adventure, shot in the wilderness of Argentina's Chaco region, takes up the final third of Zama, in which Martel deftly steers clear of the typical trippy descent into madness so familiar from films like Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Not to say that Zama doesn't make a swerve into the strange, the uncertain, and the existential as Zama and his men experience a disorienting, transformative passage of revelation, captivity, mistrust, betrayal, and greed before arriving in a neutral zone of sand, water, and purest green, reduced to what they were all along: mere men, only now far beyond the trappings of power, class, rank, or wealth. It is here where Zama finally, quite literally learns to let go, freeing himself of all aspirations and pursuits except the one that matters the most: simply, to live and be content, regardless of his place in the world. All there is is the present, and real, lasting happiness is attainable, but only outside the constraints of any vector.