Films of the Year 2013

2013 turned out to be a good year for film, with a wide and varied range of excellent movies, from pretty much everywhere, covering the mainstream, art house and documentaries. Two things I found striking this year – many of the best films I saw were of the sort that are usually done so ineptly on screen, be it the historical drama of Heimat, the quirky comedy of Frances Ha or the 'fan' documentary of Fifi Howls from Happiness. I also noticed how long many of the films listed here are: five are three hours or longer while another few are not far off that. That comes as a surprise to someone who never tires of complaining that most films are too long and drag on inexorably. Length need not be a problem though if the director has a sufficient command of the pace and the material to keep the audience's interest.

The rules for inclusion, as ever, are: a French cinema release before the third week of December this year. Hence there are some films that will have appeared elsewhere in 2012 or have yet to; conversely some films are missing here that are in other lists, such as Nebraska, 12 Years a Slave and Like Father, Like Son. They may make an appearance in this same list in twelve months' time.

1. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke – China/Japan)
  
Jia Zhangke continues to be a man interested in just about every facet of Chinese society. A Touch of Sin has fallen foul of the Communist Party on account of the violence and social discontent it portrays so sparely. It is a compelling crime film, with brilliantly mounted set pieces and an almost documentary-style take on a China one rarely sees on screen. Jia also frames his four stories (and epilogue) in such a way that you want to see it again as soon as possible to see how it works and what you missed. In an exceptionally tough year at Cannes, A Touch of Sin came away with the screenplay prize. Many would argue it was the best film on show there.

Full review



2. Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland – UK)

Few British directors roll like Peter Strickland. After a low-budget debut filmed in Hungarian and Romanian, he came up with this ingenious film that is a homage to Italian giallo horror films from the 1970s, a comic account of British resistance to continental culture and a genuinely creepy Kafkaesque thriller. Toby Jones plays a mild-mannered Foley artist missioned to the shady Berberian Sound Studio in Rome to provide sound effects for a low-budget slasher film, in spite of being incapable of watching what is on screen. There are inevitable echoes of The Conversation and Blow Out but Berberian Sound Studio is very much its own film, as cerebral as it is hair-raising.

Full review



3. Blancanieves (Pablo Berger – Spain/France)

The silent film revival is unlikely to be an enduring phenomenon but Pablo Berger’s Snow White adaptation shows how silent cinema might be made in this day and age without recourse to gimmickry. Blancanieves is an inspired conflation of the famous fairy tale and another (‘Sleeping Beauty’) and Sevilleano bullfighting lore. It looks gorgeous too with beautiful high-contrast photography from Kiko de la Rica and Seville, a city too rarely seen on screen, looks resplendent. Far more than a pastiche or a homage, Berger’s film is a great literary adaptation.

Full review





4. Heimat: Chronicle of a Vision (Edgar Reitz – Germany/France)

You don’t have to have seen Edgar Reitz’s legendary TV series (I haven’t) to appreciate this prequel of sorts set in the Rhineland in the early 1840s. A four-hour black and white glimpse into rural poverty against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of German nationalism, this ‘other Heimat' is masterful historical cinema. It faithfully reproduces the period trappings yet integrates them into the physical drama, unlike many other such films. And as an unexpected bonus, there's a wonderful cameo from Werner Herzog as the great geographer Alexander von Humboldt.
 
Full review





5. Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche – France/Belgium/Spain)

Adbellatif Kechiche’s brilliant lesbian love story had barely won the Palme d’Or at Cannes when he was accused of mistreatment by his crew, manipulation by his leading ladies and inauthentic sex scenes by lesbians (one wonders what ‘authentic’ sex is and who sets the standard). The film - Kechiche’s fifth - will long outlive the petty controversies though. In the manner of his previous masterwork, La graine et le mulet, this adaptation of Julie Maroh’s comic book is a long and unflinching look at love in a way the movies rarely have the patience or heart to do. Adèle Exarchopolous and Léa Seydoux are fantastic in the two lead roles, however unpleasant the experience might have been. Blue Is the Warmest Colour will leave you as drained as the characters themselves but it’s exhilarating stuff.

Full review





6. It’s the Earth, not the Moon (Gonçalo Tocha – Portugal)

This three-hour documentary about life on Corvo, the smallest island in the Azores, is both a marvellous piece of anthropological filmmaking and also the most likeable film of the year. Gonçalo Tocha sprinkles his narrative with wry self-deprecating asides as his camera captures the everyday of a tiny community and he constructs as best he can a narrative history of this most westerly point of Europe. There is an air of Father Ted about it but only in an amiable way. Tocha, for all the justness of his detached observation, clearly loves the people he films and there is no condescension on display. Yet another film that shows the gently thoughtful Portuguese cinema to be sui generis.

Full review





7. In the Land of the Head Hunters (Edward S. Curtis – USA)

A re-released film from 1914 gets a spot on this list because it didn’t benefit from a general release back then (though it has hardly been widely seen this time round either). Edward S. Curtis, famous for his photographs of North American Indians, made this, his only feature, in collaboration with the warlike Kwakwaka’wakw tribe of British Columbia. As well as being a priceless historical document, In the Land of the Head Hunters tells its tale of pursuit and revenge with gusto. It also has a bracingly modern air to it, with costumes and dances that the Western world has only recently started to catch up with.


Full review




8. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón – USA)
Cuarón's tight space drama was one of the most hyped films of the year and, for once, it lived up to the advance noise. The circumstances of the plot reduce things (and onscreen personnel) down to a bare minimum early on and not even the distractions of some corny dialogue and cursory backstory can lessen the impact of the film's sole concern: survival. Technically masterful and terrifying in an almost tactile way, Gravity is not the sort of film you get from Hollywood too often, but it makes you wish the studios would use the means at their disposal to make more films of such graceful simplicity as this.

Full review





9. Once I Entered a Garden (Avi Mograbi – Israel/Germany/France)
 
Avi Mograbi, who, for my money, made the best documentary of the past decade, ventures a more personal effort this time - a series of conversations with his Palestinian Arabic teacher, Ali Al-Azhari, interspersed with a number of outings to the sea and to Al-Azhari’s childhood home that he is now effectively barred from. There are also Sebaldian episodes where actress Hiam Abbass reads from the diaries of a relative of Mograbi’s written from his European exile. It’s part My Dinner with André, part Vladimir and Estragon, and is effortlessly watchable. Mograbi is a free-wheeling formalist who once again shows that the best stories often lie outside of fiction.

Full review





10. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie – France)

Heretofore little known outside of France, Alain Guiraudie was one of the revelations of Cannes this year with his fifth feature. A tense thriller set entirely on a gay-cruising lakeside spot, Stranger by the Lake is both a theoretical essay on group codes and conventions as well as an icy interrogation of the risks gay men run. The frustrated hero Franck is drawn to a handsome stranger, only to witness the latter kill another bather late one evening. An initially unassuming chamber piece, it grows into something monstrous and devilishly smart.

Full review





11. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg – USA)

You'd be forgiven for not expecting much from Spielberg's Lincoln but Tony Kushner's screenplay helps steer Spielberg away from worthiness and the film is true to the historical moment. There is little complacency about the historical gains made by the abolition of slavery, even though due respect is paid. Buoyed by stirring performances, most notably Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader, Lincoln is a fine political film, anchored by a healthy dose of pragmatism. One of Spielberg's finest.

Full review




12. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-soo – South Korea)

The prolific Korean Hong Sang-soo offers up a film that retreads his familiar concerns: the capacity of sad-sack men for petty betrayal and the gentle alienation of youth. Haewon is a young student being finally abandoned by a mother that rarely cared for her. Her lover, one of her teachers, is feckless and unresponsive and Haewon has burned her bridges with her friends after a failed relationship. It all sounds underwhelming but, like Éric Rohmer, the filmmaker Hong most resembles, there is a lot going on in this languid comedy of manners.

Full review




13. Story of my Death (Albert Serra – Spain/France)

Albert Serra is the standard-bearer for challenging European cinema and his lo-fi digital explorations of figures of fiction and history will seem like watching paint dry to some. Story of My Death yokes together the biographies of Casanova and Dracula for what is a highly unconventional historical dialogue. Despite being made with few resources, the film is luminous like a grand old tableau. It imparts a clear sense of importance while striking a note of playful levity throughout. It's difficult cinema but sometimes the difficult can be beautiful and charming too.

Full review




14. In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa – Germany/Netherlands/Belarus/Russia/Latvia)

After his highly regarded feature debut My Joy, Loznitsa attempts an ambitious adaptation of Belarusian author Vasil’ Bykaw's novel In the Fog. The book may not be well known in the West but it's a landmark 20th-century text in the Russian-speaking world. A tale of a railwayman's despair at being accused of collaboration with the Nazis during the war and the two Soviet soldiers charged with carrying out his execution, it is both intensely bleak and atmospheric. Loznitsa captures the existential terror of both the period and the source novel, and Oleg Mutu, cinematographer of the New Romanian Cinema makes it all shimmer on screen.

Full review





15. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel – USA)

Castaing-Taylor, a Harvard anthropologist and director of the 2009 film Sweetgrass and Paravel, who herself made the New York documentary Chop Shop, team up for this mesmerising film about New Bedford fishermen. The film is mostly shot at night so the images take on an uncanny abstraction as birds wheel around the vessel and tiny cameras bob about amid the captured fish, making it a film as much about the captured prey as it about the men that catch them. It's fashionable these days to call such a film a 'tone poem' but Leviathan is more visceral than simply photogenic. A film without any dialogue that roars.

Full review




16. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach – USA)

Credit must go to Noah Baumbach for making the sort of film that US filmmakers give up on as soon as they get a foothold in Sundance, but it is Greta Gerwig who owns Frances Ha. She has it all locked down. Her Frances is a shambling Manhattan Candide, determined to succeed as a dancer even as her maladroitness seems to distance her further and further from the big break. This is a touching tale of thwarted ambition that shows a New York that is all but excluded to anyone without a trust fund behind them. It's all the better for being very funny. One of the best comedies of recent years and if there is any justice, Gerwig will win an Oscar (even if I know, deep down, she won't).

Full review




17. The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann – France/Austria)
 
Lanzmann revisits Shoah and makes a long film with some of the material he couldn't fit in the original film. The Last of the Unjust is based on interviews he made with Benjamin Murmelstein, former Chief Rabbi of Vienna and head of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt under the Nazis. It is in the same mould as Shoah though lacks that film's insistent edge – Lanzmann is almost forty years older now and has easier access to a budget than he did back then, so there is less improvisation. It is a scholarly yet thoroughly cinematic film that offers a firm apologia for a man scorned by international jewry.

Full review





18. Clip (Maja Miloš – Serbia)

It's tricky making a shocking film about contemporary teenagers while maintaing a clear sympathy for the people you are portraying but 29-year-old Maja Miloš pulls it off. Clip is a warts-and-all portrayal of a working-class Serbian teenager and her hedonistic, selfy-obsessed friends. There's very little left to the imagination in it and, were it made in English, you can be guaranteed it would have roused more moral outrage than it has. Miloš's film can be questionably amoral at times but its characters' motivations, however venal they might be, are perfectly believable. Miloš knocks the puerile exploitationism of Larry Clark into a cocked hat.

Full review




19. Shokuzai (Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Japan)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa ended a few years of production nightmares with this TV mini-series that got a cinema release outside of Japan. Shokuzai (meaning 'penance') centres on four former schoolfriends who witnessed the murder of a classmate when they were only seven-years-old and the child's mother who never forgives them for their inability to help police find the killer. Each of the girls brings a weighty burden with them into adulthood, and each is tracked down by the obsessive mother Asako (Kyôko Koizumi). Shokuzai is a horror film without any supernatural presence and a pyschological thriller without any clear adversary. Though adapted from a pulpy bestseller, Kurosawa's film is one of the most sophisticated onscreen treatments of guilt and repentance.

Full review





20. Fifi Howls from Happiness (Mitra Farahani – USA/France/Iran)


Young Iranian director Mitra Farahani tracks down elderly (and largely forgotten) Iranian artist Bahman Mohasses to his Rome hotel suite and gets him to agree to a fly-on-the-wall documentary in return for securing him a commission. Fifi Howls from Happiness (named after one of Mohasses' paintings) is more than just a simple homage thanks to Mohasses' rebarbative nature and mordant sense of humour and also because of Farahani's skill at weaving narrative out of lived (and filmed) experience. A fine tribute to the painter, who died in 2010, during filming.

Full review





Also worth a look

Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong - Thailand)

Home for the Weekend  (Hans Christian Schmid - Germany)

Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon - USA)

The German Doctor (Lucía Puenzo – Argentina/Spain/France/Norway)

Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour - Saudi Arabia/Germany)

Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza — USA/Mexico)/Spain)

No (Pablo Larraín — Chile/USA/France)

5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat/Guy Davidi –  Palestine/Israel/France/Netherlands)

Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont - France)

The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai – Hong Kong/China)

What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson – Ireland)

The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige – Lebanon/France/Qatar)

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas – Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino – Italy/France)

The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard – UK)

A Simple Life (Ann Hui – Hong Kong)

Meteora (Spiros Stathoulopoulos – Germany/Greece)

Grigris (Mahamet-Saleh Haroun – France/Chad)

Michael Kohlhaas (Arnaud des Pallières – France/Germany)

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen – USA)

Omar (Hany Abu Al-Assad – Palestine)

Films many others loved but left me a bit underwhelmed

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson – USA)

Mud (Jeff Nichols – USA)

A Hijacking (Tobias Lindholm – Denmark)

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer – Denmark/Norway/UK)

The Immigrant (James Gray – USA)

Bastards (Claire Denis – France)

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen – USA)

A Touch of Sin – Jia Zhangke

A Touch of Sin (Tian Zhu Ding) (Jia Zhangke – China/Japan) 133 minutes

If one were to name the most important filmmaker alive today, you’d be hard pushed to look beyond Jia Zhangke. Few directors worldwide are so consistently brilliant and the handful that are rarely provide such an in-depth auscultation of their own society in their work as the 43-year-old Chinese does. Even Iranian directors such as Jafar Panahi and Mohamad Roussolof, both great filmmakers deprived of their freedom because of their work, lack the world-historical angle of Jia Zhangke’s films. Jia is, with China’s exponential growth and breakneck development, living in interesting times. And he has the field largely to himself – China, despite its size and increasing economic growth, has relatively few directors who have made an impact on an international scale. Other Sixth Generation directors such as Wang Bing, Lou Ye, Zhang Yuan, Quan’an Wang and Zou Peng have made a name for themselves on the festival circuit but remain relatively marginal. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s obliquely political films of the 80s and 90s have given way to their own compromises with power. Jia may not be either ineffably mainstream – even in China – nor exceptionally dissident but his films are accessible to popular audiences and he is a chronicler of turbulent social change to rival Dickens, Balzac or Döblin. His work is also possessed of a startling beauty and narrative grace – in a visual, emotional and intellectual sense, his films are big hitters. There is probably no filmmaker alive as complete.

His latest film A Touch of Sin has seen him push the envelope a bit further, portraying violence, corruption, delinquency and discontent in contemporary China, of the sort that usually needs to be expressed in more sublimated ways. The official Chinese reaction has been one of disapproval though the Communist Party has sought not to ban the film but to immobilise it, instructing media not to report on it. Even such a relatively sophisticated means of censure is destined to fail with word of mouth, digital reproduction and the film’s international renown sufficient to earn it a notoriety in the PRC.

The film begins with two briefly interlocking incidents in Jia’s native Shanxi province that will later branch off into two strands of narrative among the four separate episodes, each of which Jia drew from real-life incidents. A bored-looking middle-aged man sits astride a motorcycle beside an overturned lorryload of tomatoes. Not far away, a younger man on another motorcycle is cornered by three young opportunistic hoodlums. The first man, Dahai (Jiang Wu), has just returned to his home village and is appalled at how the chief of the village – a former classmate of his – has enriched himself by selling the local mine off for privatisation. Dahai threatens to denounce the chief to authorities in Beijing but is roughed up by hoodlums and then offered wads of cash to remain silent. The second, San Zhou (Wang Baoqiang) is a shady drifter, who lives far from his young family but who cares enough for them to send them substantial amounts of money and to visit them in Chongqing for Chinese New Year. Wang looks like a menacing version of Joseph Gordon Levitt and he is the malignant force in the film, telling his wife that he is summoning up devils rather than gods when he waves three cigarettes, incense-style, around their house.

Both Dahai and San Zhou are malcontents, each in their own way. The heroine of the third episode meanwhile, Yu Xiao (Jia's wife Zhao Tao) is simply unhappy, a hostess in a massage parlour who is taken advantage of by the married man she has been having a long-time affair with. One day, she decides to say no, refusing to join him on a business trip to Guangdong, and things happen. The fourth and final episode centres on Hui Xiao (Luo Lanshan), a young man from Hunan. After causing the injury of a colleague in an industrial accident and being forced to work off the man’s loss of earnings, he bunks off down the country to Dongguan, where he gets a job in a luxury resort and falls in love with one of the prostitutes working there.

All four episodes are elliptical and self-contained with only brief links to each other. The motivations of each character are sometimes vague and the instances of violence – there is a different one in each episode – are mounted with cool, forensic distance, which makes them all the more unsettling when they happen. A Touch of Sin, like Jia’s previous films, most notably Still Life and 24 City, has an amorphous ontological quality to it. Its scenes and characters shift and reshape themselves in the memory long after the film ends. It also closes with a short, oblique epilogue which has a blackly comic echo of David Lynch or Michael Haneke. The Chinese title is idiomatic and means ‘Divine Destiny’, and is referenced in passing in each of the four episodes, which suggests the episodes are driven by fate rather than social forces; this too, you suspect, is playfulness on Jia’s part as there are too many veiled allusions to contemporary China – the beating meted out to Dahai is very similar to the Chinese police's beating of Ai Weiwei in 2009, a local bigwig and his wife make you think of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, another couple is killed in Chongqing – the city Bo ran till he was toppled – while a Taiwanese-owned factory in the fourth episode is an explicit reference to Foxxconn.

I’m not sure if A Touch of Sin is Jia’s masterpiece or whether he is simply playing formal games with his audience but it is a compelling film that leaves you continually looking for clues (there are also references to animal signs of the Chinese zodiac throughout) and wondering if what you have seen has deeper underlying meanings or is simply an enactment of a society on the brink of cracking. It spans the sort of Chinese human interest stories that populate the sidebars of online news sites and also the industrial discontent that is rather less reported. A Touch of Sin is an intriguing film that will leave you wanting to watch it again to get more from it. The fact that it has clearly bothered China’s rulers makes it all the more valuable a work.