30 Best Films of the 2000s (Part Two)

Part Two of the 30 Best Films of the Decade:

20. The Return – dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev (2003, Russia) / Times and Winds -- dir. Reha Erdem (2006, Turkey)

Films about the problems of children are always of an order more difficult than films about the problems of adults. When children are children, dreamy and infantile, directors with money will select to make an animated film, or an adaptation of a Roald Dahl book, or yet another Alice in Wonderland version. Here are two films set in real locations that are about children who are no longer children, who are enjoined to grow up, in a way that is prematurely violent, and in a way that defies their own comprehension. The Return, the first film by a promising new voice (nearly every ‘promising new voice’ coming out of Russia is obnoxiously likened to Tarkovsky), describes the trouble two young brothers have with the abrupt return of their father, who had abandoned them and their  mother when they were too young to remember him. They go on a trip out into the countryside with the father (sans their mother), whose motives in returning are never disclosed, and the boys are forced to come to terms with the father’s presence, and with their own sense of encroaching manhood. Andrei Zvyagintsev’s direction is lyrical without the use of lyricism; his cinematic sentences are concise and punctual, and the impact of the climax is enhanced by the director’s clarity of  prose. Times and Winds, the fourth film by Reha Erdem, explores the burden fathers have on children, in a manner that reduces the overarching socio-political scheme of Ivan Turgenev‘s novel into the minor sphere of a rustic village in Turkey. The film constructs a friction between the resentment children feel toward their parents and the tradition the parents enforce on them. If the film opens with a gap that seems initially unbridgeable, it liberates the children through an interaction with the world that lies behind their parents, within their culture and religion, and which, like the call to prayer, runs through the village town walls and out into the landscape of the Turkish countryside. The film boasts a score by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and shots reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami‘s work in the 90s.

19. Memento – dir. Christopher Nolan (2000, USA/Britain)

The laws of film noir, if one wishes to be strict about it, are familiar: the villains are kept in shadows, or they are masked in a way psychological, and their identity, made more fearsome, is kept a secret until the climax rings out like a gunshot; much of the action that happens in the story, happens at night, or in corners darkened by daylight shadows; the film noir, bluntly put, must be noirish. Christopher Nolan’s Memento is the greatest film noir of the decade, and it is also the greatest film noir that happens in broad daylight. Its originality stems from the conversion it makes of the exterior villain (‘the heavy’) and the shadows and deception the villain by nature inhabits, into an interior villain and the shadowy slippery memory the unknown assailant constructs. We learn of course (like in so many noirs) that the killer was right under our noses all along, or should I say, right inside our heads; we find that memory was the villain and not the man. But also, that the structuralist conception of film, which had paradoxically originated the film noir only to kill it off, no longer applies to the way films are now made, like this one, independently, abstractly, subversively. The soul of the neo-noir, as Orson Welles demonstrated in the films by which he is known for all time, lies not in its content, but in the character of its editing.

18. Time Out – dir. Laurent Cantet (2001, France)

For the average American filmgoer, an ‘adult film’ will mean either an erotic movie, or a gently didactic film that is sometimes boring, sometimes illuminating, but one which should, nonetheless, carry the slightest weight of action, suspense, or intrigue to keep one tuned in. Something like Crash (not the J.G. Ballard/Cronenberg one) or In the Bedroom comes to mind; the former handles the alternately sensitive and strong subject of racism, while the latter deals with murder and familial retribution. In both cases, a modicum of spectacle, like the salt one sprinkles on soup, is required to make the adult issues palatable. In both cases, as in a thriller or in an action movie, there is always the need to resolve everything with a tremendous oedipal climax involving an act of violence or a screaming contest. Laurent Cantet’s Time Out is a thoroughly adult film, in which little to no action or an ultimate violent resolution occurs. The story is quite simple: a middle-aged man who has just lost his corporate job doesn’t tell his wife or children about it. Instead, the man (named Vincent) pretends that he is still employed and continues to go through the daily ritual of waking up, dressing, eating breakfast, and going out for another 8-hour day. But instead of work, he goes out for long drives or loiters in hotel lobbies; we are unsure what exactly runs through Vincent’s head. Eventually the pretend-job becomes a job itself, and Vincent is forced to concoct schemes to stay ‘employed’ and keep his family content and oblivious of the truth.

What makes the film exceptionally relevant to the complexes of our adulthood and careerism is how it indirectly comments on the modern adult’s drastic need to identify, almost as a kind of neurosis, with the mere routine of routine, the business of ‘business.’ To wear a suit and look busy, to walk around with an empty suitcase, to be going somewhere, anywhere, so long as it seems urgent or important: these are the symptoms Cantet diagnoses in the vacant eyes of a quietly desperate man seeking purpose in life. Rather than enforce a bloody climax, Cantet punctuates the film with Arvo Pärt’s haunting Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.

17. Silent Light – Carlos Reygadas (2007, Mexico)

The best Mexican film of the decade, more so than Amores perros or Y tu mamá también, was one in which not many visibly mexican Mexicans appear. The language we hear in Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light is not Spanish but Plattdeutsch, the Low German idiom spoken by Mennonites. The Mennonites who populate the film, who look and speak German, are in fact Mexicans, and they live in a part of Mexico that appears to us almost Edenic, otherworldly. It is a Mexico unknown to those who prefigure dry deserts, tropical forests, or sultry beaches, but to me it is also my mother’s homeland, the northern farming state of Chihuahua, where a great many Mennonite colonies have resided since the 1930s. Silent Light in a way is a profoundly Christian film without seeming so: it is the story of creation, of Adam and Eve and the temptation of Man, and also the story of the Resurrection.  But at bottom, it is the story of a man’s duty to his wife, in conflict with the pleasures of love he cannot escape in another woman. I previously wrote on how the restriction on past cinematic indulgences has reformed Reygadas’ vision and improved it for the better; I also mentioned the significance Carl Dreyer’s Ordet had on the film; but the film is most important for containing perhaps the best opening and closing shots of the decade: the dawn and sunset of all time, and of one family’s humble circumference.

16. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days – dir. Cristian Mungiu (Romania, 2007)

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is known to us for two reasons: it is a Romanian film about a young woman who helps her friend get an illegal abortion (or, more crudely, it is known as the ‘abortion film’); and it is famous for having won the Palme d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. From the opening scene we are instantly compelled to pay attention; the constant dialogic information that swarms through the strata of relationships, social layers, and personalities that make up the fabric of 1987 Communist Romania (the time during which the film is set) commands our concentration; the people, the clothes they wear, the manner in which they speak and act, the minor everyday concerns they reveal in a few words, the visceral motion of the camera as we follow lead character Otilia help and struggle with 4-month pregnant friend Gabita’s vulnerability and heedlessness;  all these situations unfold with alarming authenticity. The entire film moves through a span of something less than 24 hours: but its realism, immediate and painfully quotidian, exhausts us with the same emotional ferocity Otilia feels at the conclusion of a brutal day. She gazes at us, in the final scene, with a look of bitter recognition.

15. 2046 – dir. Wong Kar-wai (2004, China)

2046 is by some reports the sequel to Wong Kar-wai’s other masterpiece, In the Mood for Love. Themes and references that occurred in the latter film (such as the act of burying a secret by whispering it into a hole) recur in the former. In my eyes, however, 2046 can more poignantly be considered a remake of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. The anachronic tramp and aestheticist ambiguity that characterized Resnais’ film are manifest in Wong’s: the lead (and peripheral characters) may or may not have met last year, in the none-too-distant past, or their romance, happening in the present, may formulate an archetype for every romance which will happen in the future, only to be recollected again from the perspective of the past. In place of the hotel château in Marienbad, we visit by CG speed-train the oxymoronic archaic-futurist Oriental Hotel, in which cyborgs and 1940s-chic merge and frolic. The lushness and exquisite formalism with which Resnais constructs Marienbad are transfused into a luxuriant virtual-reality Hong Kong by Wong’s intoxicant technique of syncopation. “All memories are traces of tears.” That tears dry and evaporate is the non-tragedy of the one who forgets and the simulation of tragedy that the one who remembers chooses to remake. Wong, in remembering to reconfigure and intertwine the plots of the trilogy that began with Days of Being Wild, has fortuitously remade the new century’s Marienbad.

14. Che, Parts 1 & 2 – dir. Steven Soderbergh (2008, USA)

The common complaint about Che (its parts taken together) is that in being as long as it is (4 hours and 48 minutes to be exact) we seemingly learn nothing about its titular hero, or at least, we learn very little we didn’t already know. The presumption which had awaited Steven Soderbergh’s version was that it would uncover, beyond the scope of The Motorcycle Diaries, the more astringent nature in Guevara’s rationale for revolution by any means necessary. The Motorcycle Diaries restricted itself to those preludes to a heroic life which Guevara – a man who was aware of his literary dimension – hinted at in the titular diaries. The sources for Che, Parts 1 & 2 are also literary, deriving from two works that Guevara wrote later in his life: Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and the Bolivian diary he kept during his last fateful campaign. Taking these into account as the two sides that reveal, respectively, Guevara’s victory in Cuba and his failure in Bolivia, the large-scale film assumed the form of a diptych which increased in length (one can infer) the more studiously the filmmakers adapted the literature to its cinematic counterparts. Guevara’s meticulous attention to the practice of the revolutionary medium insisted on an accuracy of cinematic capture in proportion to its hero’s dogmatism and assiduity.

Guevara’s ‘character’ thus came to represent a practiced singlemindedness, a relentless piety that Soderbergh, and a magisterial Benicio del Toro in the title role, were compelled to mimic and bring to life. Where critics and moviegoers were expecting to find the inner (emotional) core of an intriguing but enigmatic historical personage, they were instead given the painstaking and exhausting delineation of a life lived in complete devotion to an ideal of universal justice. By making a film of commitment to a committed, self-mastered personality, Steven Soderbergh, a director of sometimes glib fashioning, completely rubbishes the stock of banter and irony he is known for. Far beyond the graphic textuality of Traffic, the complete Che is a work of demanding sincerity, sensational hand-held technique, and unmitigated intensity. Its parts should be watched together to feel the extent of its focus and impact.

13. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – dir. Ang Lee (2000, Taiwan/China)

The proverb implied by the film’s title registers that the mastery of strength lies in its concealment. Ang Lee is a director of confounding skill; the Taiwanese director has accomplished a bewildering array of genre films that range from the Taiwan-based drama Eat, Drink, Man, Woman to an adaptation of Jane Austen’s early 19^th century novel Sense and Sensibility; from an old-school American Western (Ride with the Devil) to a new-school superhero blockbuster (Hulk). It was Ang Lee’s rendition of the classic Wuxia genre however that most cogently demonstrated the director’s brand of muscular spring and subtlety. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is exactly that kind of film which takes one by surprise: its moments of peace and decorum are punctured by an always graceful eruption of action; the action is always followed, with smooth transition, by sudden revels of meditation. The synthesis at play here, of pause and kinetics, is one that directly engages Lee’s particular strengths; his other films have either been on the side of mannered pause (The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain) or on the side of fleeting action (Ride with the Devil, Hulk). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has all the sweeping magnitude of Gone with the Wind, coupled with the incidental compaction of Drunken Master; in other words, it is a film that hearkens back to the art of the immortal King Hu.

12. Beau Travail – dir. Claire Denis (2000, France)

I can’t help but introduce this film with a personal anecdote: one year ago, while attending the 2008 Jeonju Film Festival in South Korea, I bumped into a small crater-faced man who briskly walked past me and disappeared into the crowd. What struck me about the man was that he wore a thick black autumn-coat (he was wearing only dark colors and a scarf beneath) in the middle of what was a sweltering late-spring day. His face looked familiar, in the way that odd-looking people always give you the sense you’ve seen them before. Fortuitously enough, only 30 minutes later on the bus, I caught sight of the man again, who this time had taken off his coat and had walked, it seemed, more than a mile from where we first bumped, up an incline toward God knows where.  Turning around as the bus lurched past him, I recognized who it was: Denis Lavant, the French actor who came to international prominence in Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang, and who stars in Claire Denis’ brilliant Beau travail. It seemed strange to me that an actor as well-known (to cineastes anyway) as Denis Lavant would be walking by himself, without a guide, translator, or companion to lead him, toward a destination that was conspicuously apart from the festival area. Lavant struck me then as a man as odd-thinking as he was odd-looking. If Lavant is a solitary type, then his body of work has only accented the fact; hence the character he plays in Beau travail – Sergeant Galoup – may hypothetically stand for the personality of the actor himself: aloof, abstract, aberrant. Lavant’s rhythmic voiceover, led by Denis’ supple direction, and the episodic use of Benjamin Britten’s opera music for Billy Bud (on which the film is loosely based) convene to voice a paean to masculinity and the chivalric psyche.

Denis crafts a film that respects the viewer’s intelligence; rather than mock the viewer by filling the plot with scenes of played-out descriptions and overwrought explanations, the director weaves delicate subtexts through the use of a few well-placed shots and many in media res kinetics. Her control over the mechanics of a disciplined life (the characters and the plot revolve around the French Foreign Legion and their martial way of life) is systematized through a cadenced physicality. The final scene, unpredictable and indescribably giddy and absurd, subverts our expectations of the standard Sisyphean resolution. Instead, we are left astonished at having bumped into a truly strange, ultimately fascinating man.

11. Still Life – dir. Jia Zhangke (2006, China)

The Three Gorges Dam, begun in 1994 and its dam-body completed in 2006 (it’s expected to be fully operational by 2011), is the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. Its erection at the heart of the Yangtze River fulfilled Mao Zedong’s poem-dream and made concrete his vision of “walls of stone” to the west holding back “Wushan’s clouds and rain” in the east. It has caused, as all massive monuments to progress do, the deaths of many and the relocation of millions of farmers, laborers, and families in the townships that grew along the Three Gorges region for generations. Still Life takes place in the crumbling city of Fengjie and it centers on the desolation and disorder the Three Gorges Dam project causes for the city’s inhabitants. Yet the film never makes any direct political or class-conscious statements (however much may be inferred from the sight of signs declaring, on a street in which poor people still live and work, that the water level is to inundate a whole block of decrepit buildings). Still Life lays its subjects out raw, as plainly as the buildings that are demolished, as serenely as the landscape of the Qutang Gorge; no connotations are implied, and no second-hand smoke is inhaled; the film is a complete world, the living atmosphere of a place in China that symbolizes (like in all Jia Zangke’s films) the spiritual state of China as a whole, and yet, is a place as far from the neighboring  townships and cities up the Yangtze as it is from Turkey, from Europe, from the United States.

Rarely do films breathe as this one does: the film opens and closes with the drafts that blow into a room whose door swings open, it walks through the wreckage of neighborhoods, it shambles along the riverside in search of husband or wife, in love not with love but with the aching urgency of survival that love really is; and we are caught up not with still life, nor with dead painterly objects, but with life arrested by time, caught helplessly in the drift and  impassable flow of the Yangtze River. The people who are poor, the bike-taxis, the coal miners, the demolition crew, the cooks, and the people who are bureaucrats, archaeologists, scientists, designers; they are unaware of their differences, if those differences exist. The poor and the lowly and the prosperous and the educated converge at the Three Gorges, live together in spite of their pride or ambitions or misery; they persist in their inviolable culture, united by the same wealth of history which the construction of the dam cannot inundate, and which increases with the rising water and lifts up with the canyons and mountains that peer down on their lives. On a life as fragile as that of a construction worker, of a lost spouse, of the tightrope walker who negotiates the tremors of the changing earth beneath, and the stillness of the open sky above.

Go to PART THREE