The Ten Best Films of 2010

2010 was the year Apichatpong Weerasethakul received the Palme d’Or at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a masterwork that finds the Thai director at the peak of his powers. Uncle Boonmee also heads our list of the ten best films for the year, featuring works from Thailand, China, Mexico, France, Turkey, South Korea, and Estonia. See our full list after the jump.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives — dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand)

“My past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.” These are the words on the very first frame of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The pleasant surprise in this “Joe” Apichatpong Weerasethakul film (which features everything from Chewbacca-looking ghost monkeys to a lascivious catfish) is the fact that simply being mindful of those very words can help with the process of understanding it.  But is this work literally about the Buddhist concept of reincarnation as its title might lead you to believe? Or is Joe having a little fun at our expense by throwing at us a playful mishmash of magical realism? The truth is that not even Apichatpong himself may have the answer.

Because the film is centered on a protagonist who is dying of kidney failure, the theme of death permeates its atmosphere. Yet the film avoids giving us the usual mournful drama associated with dying and instead offers exhilarating glimpses into what can only be described as the cycle of life and death. As Boonmee prepares for his death, he is led by the ghost of his dead wife and accompanied by his sister-in-law and nephew on a trip to a cave. In an extraordinary sequence shot by a handheld camera, Apichatpong takes the four characters and the audience on a journey into what may be the collective unconscious. Boonmee himself describes the cave as a womb, and the womb turns out not only to incubate human beings but all other life forms as well.

As in all of his other works — especially Tropical Malady — Apichatpong infuses this film with his musings on the relationship between nature and human beings. If cinema is a mystical art form which at its finest can provide the guiding myths once given to us by religion and folklore, then Joe remains one of its most enchanting shamans.

– Blue Un Sok Kim

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Oxhide II — dir. Jiayin Lu (China)

Jiayin Lu’s first film, Oxhide (2005), signaled the endurance of the “documentary realism” wave of filmmaking in China  — a style that uses real settings and real people in real-time situations to distort the boundaries that conventionally divide fiction from documentary. Neither one nor the other, Oxhide penetrates into the sacraments of domesticity that occur in a small apartment shared by Lu and her mother and father. It is a portrait of a working class family vitally connected to the rhythmic motions that predicate their lives.

Oxhide was directed by Lu when she was only 23 years old; only 4 years later, Lu manages to improve on the first film with her second, a “sequel” that dissects the poetics of real-time through a meditation on the art of making dumplings. The entire duration of Oxhide II (133 minutes to be precise) is devoted to documenting the process of making dumplings from scratch in real time. From the very beginning of the film, in which we find the father monkishly setting to work on sewing and eventually clearing the work table for dumpling preparation, to the final frame, in which we witness — not without a certain awe — the family finally sitting down to enjoy the fruit of their labor, Oxhide II gazes hypnotically into the materiality of process.

If film itself is a mechanical process that sublimates the ordinary to the serendipitous, then Lu’s version of concrete cinema unearths a wealth of images in the simplest domestic gestures, in sounds and materials made alive through handling and touching; a cinema as much about human intimacy as it is about the wondrous personality of dull objects being used, handled, raised, brought down, and put to work. The sound of mouths masticating on tender steamed dumplings, or of slippers softly clacking and sliding on the hard floor, and the sight of hands gently, methodically, cutting meat or chopping chives on a thick wooden table assemble together to restore the documentarian vision to its rightful place: to the cinema of ordinary miracles.

– Jose-Luis Moctezuma

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The Temptation of St. Tony — dir. Veiko Õunpuu (Estonia)

The male midlife crisis has always been rich fodder for comedy. And now this particular theme has a contemporary gem from — of all places — Estonia. The Temptation of St. Tony starts by quoting the first words from Dante’s Inferno: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” Middle is the operative word here. Tony is not only middle-aged, he’s also in middle-management. But an absurd car accident at the scene of his father’s funeral procession sets off a surreal set of events that makes Tony second-guess all of his pedestrian assumptions about life. That Estonia’s immediate northerly neighbor is Finland seems to be more than mere coincidence; the deadpan black comedy employed by director Veiko Õunpuu is highly reminiscent of the Finnish master Aki Kaurismaki’s works. But Õunpuu is no mere lightweight copycat. His style does indeed show easily discernible influences from the auteurs of the coldest regions of Europe — Bela Tarr, Roy Andersson, and Sharunas Bartas are all touchstones, along with the aforementioned Kaurismaki. But Õunpuu expertly mixes all of his influences together into a unique style of his own. And just when we might think that Õunpuu may have exhausted his bag of tricks, he surprises us with a cameo appearance by Denis Levant sporting a miniature accordion, and stuns us with a denouement certain to make Peter Greenaway proud.

– Blue Un Sok Kim

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Enter the Void — dir. Gaspar Noe (France)

Welcome to your techno-afterlife. Gaspar Noe, the enfant terrible of modern French cinema, returns in a deliriously prophetic mode nearly 8 years after making Irreversible, hellbent on wrecking your sensorium and immersing you into the “alterverse of cinema” or what looks like the curious byproduct of a video-game-saturated meta-consciousness. Hydra’s Michael Krimper has already written a review on what is undoubtedly Noe’s masterpiece to date: “Enter the Void is a wild thriller that rips apart the spindled threads of consciousness and throws its fat ringed guts, all vacuous and raw, across a quixotic landscape of guarded desire and furtive escape. The film tears open the doors of perception, at least for a strobe light of shimmering moments, as we drift through the incredible camerawork over a Western never world fantasy of Tokyo, through walls, and occasionally, into the minds of deranged pulp characters trapped in a modality hovering between two spheres of carnality: crime and sex.” Beware: enter the void at your own risk.

– Jose-Luis Moctezuma

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Honey — dir. Semih Kaplanoğlu (Turkey)

Every culture reserves one of the harshest words in its language to describe a child whose father is missing for whatever reason. But what happens when a child’s missing father also happens to be his best friend? Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Honey, the final installment of his Yusuf trilogy and the winner of this year’s Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, examines that dilemma closely. Yusuf, an earnest but academically challenged boy with a stutter, counts his beekeeper father as his closest confidante. Kaplanoğlu establishes the intimacy of their relationship with sparse but effective dialogue, and Bora Atlas, the prodigious child actor who plays Yusuf, effortlessly shifts from diffidence at school to effusiveness around his father. When the honey dries up in their home area and the father does not return from a trip to collect honey from elsewhere, Yusuf’s stutter turns into aphasia. Some have compared this film and the trilogy to Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy. But Kaplanoğlu eschews any overtly intellectualized, self-reflexive tendencies and instead focuses on the inner workings of a child whose development lies in danger. The resulting effort is quiet, perceptive, and sympathetic, not unlike its child protagonist.

– Blue Un Sok Kim

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Film Socialisme — dir. Jean-Luc Godard (France/Switzerland)

Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew blends interviews of historical figures, archival footage from Chinese cinema, and snippets of mostly non-dialogic fictional drama to tell the story of Shanghai.  But Jia no longer seems obsessed with the dichotomy of past versus future as he had been in his previous films. In Still Life, a building in the background suddenly launches off like a spaceship. In The World, audiences are startled by abrupt animated sequences featuring cell phones. Contrastingly, in this film, Jia regular Zhao Tao focuses only on the past. Dressed all in white, Zhao haunts the various nooks and crannies of the ancient port city, wistfully and silently walking around like a phantom. Jia has said, “Chinese society is moving so doggedly forward, I need to gather evidence of the way we’ve been in the past.” And true to his word, Jia has chosen the genre of the historical martial arts epic as his next project. With I Wish I Knew (a film whose aesthetics fall in line with the genre he has referred to as “documentary realism”), Jia has once again shown why many regard him as the preeminent practitioner of China’s digital cinema movement.

– Blue Un Sok Kim

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All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence — dir. Nicolás Pereda (Mexico)

Nicolás Pereda’s All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence begins in darkness and slowly develops into the smooth lineaments of breaking light. The form of a woman lying on a raised pallet, as if her body were in preparation for a funeral, slowly emerges from the mass of dark surrounding her, while the carefully orchestrated light etches the contours of her face and body. After several minutes of silence and the fussing around with wires and equipment (for we realize that what we are witnessing is the setting up of a scene by a film crew) the woman rises from the bed — as it were, from death — and begins to voice the language of a seventeenth century nun; but if we had not known, as we eventually learn later, that this woman is artist/activist Jesusa Rodríguez and that the figure she is playing is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, we would have mistaken the verses of Primero sueño for the hermetic cadences of a poem from the Symbolist period. Sor Juana was not of her time, and Pereda’s film takes this into account as we watch the film crew collaborate with Rodríguez on the construction in light and shadow of Sor Juana’s mythic intellect set loose in the shadow of the modern day metropolis and reawakened by the camera’s inward gaze into mystic occurrences.

A film less about filmmaking as it is about the eerie self-awareness of the camera, All Things… absorbs those atmospheric pressures and silences that are least visible to the human eye (but which had been frequently glimpsed by Sor Juana in her numerous moments of lucidity). Pereda’s film is one in allegiance with the tenets of the Straub/Huillet method: to let silence seep into your images and darkness serve as the foreground for recapturing hidden smiles and lost gestures. The final scene in which a sudden downpour interrupts a part of an outside night shoot terminates in the ceaseless drone of pattering rain and the slow burn of total eclipse on the camera lens, reminding us of Sor Juana’s verse: that the movement of shadow upon the glass is but a trace of unformed substances “…which had paralyzed her reason, admitting only, of a blurry concept, a hazy embryo, ineptly formed, sketching the disorienting chaos of the confusing images she beheld.”

– Jose-Luis Moctezuma

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Hahaha — dir. Hong Sang-soo (South Korea)

One question dogged my mind during the screening of this seemingly effortless gem: what took filmmaker Hong Sang-soo and actress Moon So-ri so long to work together? When two artists at the peak of their creative powers get together, the resulting collaboration can fit so seamlessly as to make us forget the virtuoso talent involved. Hahaha is one of Hong’s simplest in terms of formal construction — two male friends get together for drinks and discuss their romantic adventures in coincidental flashbacks. Hong’s art of depicting the mundane is so masterfully tuned that it is almost as if he no longer needs a complex narrative format. An artful depiction of the ennui that is life itself turns out not to be ennui. Hong simply finds his inspiration from the countless minutiae that populate our collective memory. And though many accomplished actors have given up guarantees for the privilege of working with Korea’s top auteur, no one else has been able to portray his female characters with the consummate naturalness of Moon So-ri.

– Blue Un Sok Kim

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Disorder — dir. Huang Weikai (China)

Disorder is yet another Chinese film which may qualify as an exponent of the documentary realism wave; but all similarities with the two other Chinese films on our list end there. This phantasmagoria of Chinese metropolitan life is painfully, explicitly, meditatively sampled and parsed in a succession of socio-political set pieces that demonstrate the level of intensity which typifies a day in the life of any present-day Chinese city.

Or rather, a day in the lives: for there are no principal actors or characters in Huang’s film, since the primary focus of the narrative stays on the scattered effects of the wildly tangential radii that course through the circumference of a nameless and densely populated metropolis. Human poles of interest appear merely as symptoms of the cumulative lunacy we call ‘”civilized society”: a shirtless man pantomimes in front of cars on a busy highway; a group of pigs escape from a truck carrier and stop traffic as they roam over an intersection; a baby is found abandoned at a dump site, a bottle of moldy milk left at its side; a woman is apprehended by an aggressive gang of police officers and violently pushed into a police van for no apparent reason; a middle-aged man threatens to dive into the river from a bridge unless he can speak with an official who can explain why his steep medical insurance bills have been ignored by the State.

Rather than provide causes and effects, Huang artfully omits explanations for these people and their griefs; we see only the phenomenon of a city coagulating into a mass of sensations displaced from their origin and preserved in their momentariness. China is brought to us as the vivid here and now, but it is also presented as a locus in psychic communication with the natural disorder of any city in the world, an asymmetry integral to the existence of a profuse consciousness that assumes shape in a trail of kites waving in the wind or in the spectacle of male swimmers participating in a swim race. We learn that the only order that prevails in the life of cities is that of the camera witnessing its perils and strange collocations.

– Jose-Luis Moctezuma