100 Films of the Decade - Part 3

The Life Aquatic…With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson – USA, 2004)

People either love or hate Wes Anderson, though I find I have a foot in either camp. I initially detested The Royal Tennenbaums before a second viewing revealed it to be not quite as irritating as I first thought. I then joined the anti-Wes backlash when I found the hipster impassivity of The Darjeeling Express nigh unwatchable. But occasionally Anderson does it right, even if his films, for all their notional subtexts of failing fathers, are frivolous things. Along with Rushmore, The Life Aquatic… is his best film. For no reason other than it is funny. Very funny. One of the few performances by Bill Murray in recent years that doesn’t feel like it has been faxed in, a string of great sight gags, and as usual, a great soundtrack, with Scott Walker and Iggy interspersed with Seu Jorge’s Bowie covers. It stays just the right side of quirky.


Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira – Portugal, 2009)

Filmmakers don’t come any more amazingly redoubtable than Manoel de Oliveira. The Portuguese director turned 101 last week, and this decade he turned out a film per year, as well as a handful of shorts, in both Portuguese and French. He even starred in one of them, Christopher Columbus – the Enigma along with his wife of sixty-nine years. Almost any of the ten films would deserve a place here but I’ll go for a personal favourite, this year’s Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, a charming adaptation of an Eça de Queiroz short story, scarcely an hour long but bewildering in its pacing and its wilful anachronism, which nonetheless works perfectly. The film is like palimpsests layered on top of one another, each one gradually becoming visible, much like the faded charm of Lisbon itself. De Oliveira is the only currently active filmmaker whose career goes back to the silent era (he even worked on Portugal’s second sound film in 1932) and his continued vitality and intelligence puts to shame dozens of cineastes decades younger than him.



What Time is it There? and The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang – France/Taiwan, 2002 and Taiwan, 2005)

Tsai Ming-Liang is not an easy director and he has become increasingly experimental since he first came to international prominence in the early 90s. What Time is it There? was his first sortie outside his adopted homeland of Taiwan (he’s originally from Malaysia), a touching tale of loneliness and disaffection experienced by a young Taiwanese woman visiting Paris. It’s a convincing portrait of timidity in the face of culture shock. Tsai renewed his relationship with Paris with this year’s almost impenetrable Visage but a little more accessible is his 2005 film The Wayward Cloud which combines watermelons, a Taipei heatwave, an impromptu porn film and the high-camp song-and-dance numbers already glimpsed in his earlier surreal drama, The Hole. Tsai can be hard work at times (there always seems to be at least one walk-out during a screening) but his films are also often fun and in the hangdog, perpetually mute Lee Kang-Sheng he has one of the great comic actors of our time.


We Own the Night (James Gray – USA, 2007)

I suppose I shouldn’t go on knocking Martin Scorsese all the time but it was striking, following the hugely successful but overrated The Departed, how a younger New York director was able to mount much the same film a few months later with far greater élan, economy of style and theme and with far less pretentiousness. Until this film I was not particularly taken by Gray but his tale of family cops, played by Robert Duvall as the father and Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix as his sons, battling the emerging Russian mafia in Brighton Beach in 1988 was irresistible. Gray followed it up with the even more stunning Two Lovers, of which more later. Phoenix and Wahlberg also produced as well as turning in great performances, a doubly great contribution to contemporary American cinema sorely missing intelligent dramas like this.


The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan – UK/Ireland, 2002)

Though actor Peter Mullan’s directorial debut Orphans was promising, I wasn’t sure that his account of women condemned to the hell of the Irish Magdalene laundries would amount to much. You could sense the playbook well in advance. And though the film pulls no punches in its polemical accusations towards the Church, the film is intelligent, subtle agitprop rather than a crude tirade. The reason it works so well is Mullan implicates the viewer in the onscreen crime. For an Irish viewer of even my generation, the society on display is uncomfortably familiar, and while the Catholic Church is clearly villainous and rotten to the core, there is also a searing indictment of a society and a people that let them get away with it all. And judging by the official responses to the Ryan and Murphy reports, intends to continue to do so.

Capote (Bennett Miller – USA, 2005)

Biopics out of Hollywood are usually godawful, full of pious platitudes about journeys through harrowing adversity and the horrors overcome by people with the right can-do spirit. Bennett Miller's portrayal of Truman Capote's descent into terminal depression while writing In Cold Blood is a marvel however, beautifully shot and edited, perfectly scripted and a fine performance, just on the right side of mannered, by one of the finest American actors alive, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who deservedly picked up an Oscar for this. Mercifully a literary film that is neither vulgarly inane nor tweedy.


Black Book (Paul Verhoeven – Netherlands, 2006)

After years of making brash thrillers in Hollywood that were always too clever for their own good and built of ambitions far exceeding their execution, Verhoeven returned to his native Holland where he made some of his greatest films in the seventies and early eighties. Black Book is a virtuoso old-fashioned thriller, set during the Nazi occupation of Holland and based on a true story, about a young Jewish woman named Rachael Stein who joins the Resistance in The Hague and goes undercover to seduce the local SS Captain. The film is a masterpiece of detail - cosmetic, historical and political - and it has a splendid twist about half and hour from the end that nobody will see coming. Best of all though, it is a refreshingly unsentimental and clear-headed drama about both the Holocaust and the local Resistance to Nazism.

Control (Anton Corbijn – UK, 2007)

Photographer to the stars Corbijn's first feature is a moving portrait of one of his earlier collaborators Ian Curtis. While many complained of the film not focussing enough on Joy Division and their music, Control excelled for this very reason, fleshing Curtis out (thanks to Sam Riley's fine performance) and putting his epilepsy and his legendary demise in a human context. As you would expect from such an accomplished photographer, it looks great and it's also unexpectedly funny.


Night and Day (Hong Sang-Soo – South Korea/France, 2008)

I’ve been a fan of Hong’s unassuming intimiste dramas for a few years but Night and Day took me by surprise. Going to Paris to make a film has by now become almost an obligation for Asia’s top directors and Hong follows the lead of Tsai Ming-Liang, Nobuhiro Suwa and Hou Hsiao-Hsien with this tale of a Korean artist, Kim Sung-Nam, who flees to France having been ratted out to the police by an American backpacker for sharing a joint. That starting point is representative of the film as a whole, which is a succession of brilliantly filmed episodes, most of which could themselves pass as self-contained stories. Kim loafs about Paris in the cocoon of its tiny Korean immigrant community, meets a former girlfriend by accident, has a falling-out with a North Korean over an unguarded comment about Kim Jong-Il, develops an ill-advised infatuation for a young, narcissistic art student and pines for his wife back home. The film’s tagline is ‘everything is as it seems’, which puts it fairly well. Not only a fine film in its own right but also one of the few that offers a foreign perspective on Paris without falling into clichéd and banal observations.


Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood – USA, 2008)

You never really know what you’re going to get from Clint. The quality of his films varies as widely as his subject matter, but you have to hand it to him for the frequency with which he turns them out. His finest film of recent years may well be the one the older Clint is remembered for. A film that veers close to clumsiness in its examination of racism in blue-collar Detroit, it had particular timeliness for being released just as the US auto industry began to endure its death pangs. Walt Kowalski is a hateful old racist crank who is bitter at everyone in his life, including his two sons, who have even gone so far as to betray his life’s legacy by driving Japanese cars. Walt treats the arrival next door of an Asian immigrant family with predictable disdain, which is reciprocated by many of the family. Things change though when he runs off some thuggish relatives, and the grateful Hmong family and Clint gradually warn to one another. The film has the potential to be very hokey indeed and on first appearance does seem a little simplistic but the overlying simplicity masks a robust moral purpose, worthy of a studio-era classic (the film is, quite suitably, a Warners production). Eastwood has forged an unlikely but genuine humanism in his films over the past twenty years and even when he doesn’t get it right, to see someone from the very mainstream of American popular culture exercise such principled free thinking is stirring.


Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín – Chile, 2008)

Tony Manero is the tale of Raúl, a 52-year-old ne'er-do-well obsessed with Saturday Night Fever in the dark days of the military dictatorship in Chile in the late 70s. His dream is to appear in a TV talent contest as a John Travolta clone. So far, so-Full Monty. But Tony Manero is a far more scabrous, disobliging work, an ill-mannered riposte to the idea that popular culture (especially American pop culture) can provide redemption in the face of political repression. In this film, pop music is, at best a malign distraction from the evil within, at worst a vector for the rotten state of a country whose ruling élite has placed its consumer concerns above human ones. It reminds me of the lines parrotted by Pinochet supporters as the old bastard was held under house arrest in London ten years ago: "Before the General came to power, you couldn't even get blue jeans in Chile. He saved our country."

Apparently at its Cannes screening 18 months ago, several Hollywood studio executives left violently angry, incredulous anyone could envisage their product used for dark ends. Job well done, Pablo Larraín, whose second film this is. It’s a work that cares too much about the history of Chile to blindly do the bidding of entertainment. Not that it isn’t entertaining either, mind.



12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Poromboiu – Romania, 2006)

Corneliu Poromboiu put his experience as a cameraman on a local television station to good use in this incredibly funny political comedy which attempts to establish, sixteen years on from the fall of Ceausescu, if there was any revolutionary impetus in a provincial Romanian town before the dictator, abdicated, at 12.08pm on the 22nd of December 1989. Tiberiu Manescu, alcoholic college professor, claims there was, and he was part of it. Conflicting testimonies on a phone-in show say otherwise, that he was part of a group of drunken revellers who seized their moment of revolutionary glory when it was safe to do so. The film is by turns gentle good-natured and cynically sinister, not least when a former Securitate officer, now a successful businessman, ‘persuades’ Tiberiu to withdraw allegations made on air. The film drags a little towards the end but it has a sharp comic spirit and Ion Sapdaru, who seems to pop up in every Romanian film these days, is great as the poor, pathetic Tiberiu. And Poromboiu, a young talent to watch, directs with a lyrical touch.



Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Thailand, 2004)

Thai cinema gained a new international prominence this decade, and Weerasethakul was probably the most successful director, with a string of films appearing at the big festivals. Tropical Malady is a strange beast, a diptych of two films that seem to have little in common, the first a gay love story between two Thai soldiers and the second a pursuit through the jungle of a mysterious tiger spirit. The film is a masterpiece of sensual cinema, with almost no dialogue at all in the second part, with the narrative relying on only the basic of dramatic hooks. It is also fantastically shot, the screen bursting with lush colour. A visual treat.


Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages and Caché (Michael Haneke – France, 2000 & 2005)

Austrian moralist Haneke upped sticks and moved to France to work at the start of the decade, extending his themes to absorb the ills and fears of modern French, and European society. Juliette Binoche starts in each of these films, the first a gripping, open-ended series of fragments in which she plays an actress married to a war photographer and whose fugitive brother sets in train a series of events that result in the expulsion of a Romanian asylum seekers. In Caché, a much tighter film, she is married to Daniel Auteuil, a TV arts presenter who is being harassed by a figure from his distant past. Both films have the customary iciness one expects from Haneke and each manage to avoid the more deterministic scenarios of his weaker work. And, as ever, the films are a perfect blend of style and substance.


Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson – Sweden, 2000)

The flop of Andersson’s second film Giliap in 1975 was so chastening an experience he was unable to get funding for a feature for another 25 years. Instead he made some of the most inventive commercials ever and when he came back it was with a bang. Songs from the Second Floor is a surreally apocalyptic deadpan masterpiece that uses the same elaborately choreographed single takes as the commercials. It is both hilarious and nightmarish and the glumness of the décor and the ugliness of the characters make Aki Käurismäki look like Vincente Minelli. Andersson took a mere seven years to follow it up with the equally bizarre You, the Living.



Oxhide (Liu Jia-Yin – China, 2005)

I don't expect that many people will rush out to watch this, a two-hour docudrama shot on low-resolution DV, entirely in a tanner's workshop in Beijing, in long static takes, using the director's family (including herself) as cast. It looks gloopy green and the camera never moves once but it is completely entrancing. The director Liu was only 25 at the time and she did practically everything on this film in an astounding piece of DIY filmmaking; as ever with prodigies of the sort, it has an incredible maturity and the performances she draws out of her cranky family's quotidian life are marvellous. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to marshall cinematic output there is still good stuff being made and the freshness of the work never lets up.


Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter – Austria, 2005), We Feed the World and Let’s Make Money (Erwin Wagehofer – Austria, 2005 & 2008)


Food documentaries came into vogue this decade; the films were of varying quality but most had a bien pensant streak in common. Two of the better ones came from Austria and were both released within months of one another. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread was the more experimental of the two, being a non-narrative look at food production across Europe, going from salt mines in Poland to slaughterhouses in Austria to greenhouses in Almería. The film is a hypnotic, if sometimes unsettling passage through the various production cycles, portrayed via lengthy, geometrically precise tableaux. More overtly polemical is Erwin Waghofer’s We Feed the World, which takes its title from the motto of the German agri-giant Pioneer. There are more accusatory interviews, particularly with Swiss sociologist and UN Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler, and Nestlé chief executive Peter Brabeck steps in to defend his company, in much the same vaguely sinister way as the Mondavi family in Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino. The film’s focus is more on the cost and waste, both humanitarian and ecological, of an industry that is wildly skewed in favour of Europeans in search of cheap food. The film may strike some as preachy but Wagehofer has a fine visual sensibility for a journalist. He then pulled the same trick a second time three years later on the financial services industry with Let’s Make Money. In production long before the crisis, by the time it came out it was fully vindicated.


Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki – Japan, 2001)

Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning animated gem won him wide recognition in the West. Lonely 10-year-old Chihiro is left friendless when her family moves to a new town; one day when walking in the woods with her parents she disappears down a tunnel and is befriended by a number of mysterious spirits. In order to save her parents, who have been turned into pigs for the dinner table of the gods, she takes a job in the gods’ bathhouse. The film, like most of the best tales for children is dark and admonitory, a parable that teaches the virtues of self-responsibility and loyalty to friends and family. It might be said that Miyazaki makes the same film every time but his clean, old-fashioned cell animation, and his formal inventiveness, not to mention his first-class story-telling make Spirited Away a kids’ film to watch again and again.


In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai – Hong Kong, 2000)

Perhaps even more so than Chungking Express, this is the distillation of the entire career of Wong Kar-Wai. Wong revisits the Hong Kong of the 1960s he treated in Days of Being Wild for this gorgeously atmospheric tale of adultery between neighbours played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, sparked by their common suspicion that their spouses are themselves engaged in an affair with one another. It’s a film of modest ambition that’s all the more impressive for this. Wong’s flimsy English-language debut My Blueberry Nights later suggested that buried beneath all the Cantonese dialogue was whimsy all along, but In the Mood for Love rings true, as was the unorthodox ‘sequel’ 2046, released four years later.



Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze – USA, 1999)

Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s bizzaroid comedy was one of the original thing to come out of Hollywood this decade and it took a rare genius to take a personality as imposing – and at times unpleasant – as Malkovich and send him up. And Malkovich went for it too, though who wouldn’t want to be immortalized, however ridiculously, in a cult film? It’s a film that is actually as clever as all that and the pair pulled off the trick again three years later with the equally left-field Adaptation. And judging by their respective films since then, they need one another badly.


Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch – USA/France, 2001)

Lynch’s failed TV pilot was salvaged to provide one of the most enduring American films of the noughties. Not quite as indecipherable as the later Inland Empire, the film nonetheless stumped many viewers and Lynch even published five clues in newspaper advertisements that worked brilliantly to entice people back to watch it multiple times. Lynch can be maddening at times, not least the Zen Buddhist nonsense he comes out with, but he is one of those artists that articulates himself far better through his work. And even when you don’t have a clue what’s going on, it’s engrossing stuff trying to figure it out.


The President’s Last Bang (Im Sang-Soo – South Korea, 2005)

Im’s darkly comic account of the murder of Korean president Park Chung-Hee at the hands of his bodyguards, not surprisingly caused some controversy in his home country. Park’s son secured a court injunction forcing Im to make cuts, which resulted in the film strangely carrying three-and-a-half minutes of a black screen, until the injunction was reversed a year later. The portrayal of the former President is none too complimentary with him viewed largely as a lascivious alcoholic buffoon with suspiciously Japanophile tendencies. Having already survived two assassination attempts, a web of intrigue surrounding his handling of student protests finally put paid to him. The film is stylishly mounted and well paced, with most of the action taking place in the days preceding Park’s murder. And in case anyone had any doubts about where Im’s sympathies lay, he followed it up a year later with The Old Garden, an account of a former dissident’s release after decades in prison for his part in the 1979 protests.

100 Films of the Decade - Part 2

Man on the Moon (Milos Forman – USA, 2000)
Milos Forman followed up his Larry Flynt biopic with one of another American curio, comedian Andy Kaufman. You don’t have to think Kaufman was an undisputed comic genius (I certainly don’t) to be both tickled and moved by this film, which features Jim Carrey’s finest performance as the late comedian, who was best known for playing Laika in Taxi. Carrey had only recently proven himself as a serious actor in The Truman Show and this film cemented his reputation, earning him a Golden Globe and he was incredibly overlooked for an Oscar nomination. The film is especially impressive in that it manages to relay at second hand how funny Kaufman could (sometimes) be and the stand-up scenes are masterfully staged. Forman, being both an outsider (Czech by birth) and contemporary witness (he rose to Hollywood fame at the same time as Kaufman), was uniquely placed to impart a sense of wonder in the film and the sharp script is by the Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewki, writers of the finest biopic of the 90s, Ed Wood. Man on the Moon is an equally fitting portrait of an unsung hero of American pop culture.

This is England (Shane Meadows – UK, 2007)
Nottingham autodidact Shane Meadows is a one-man film industry, having risen from making camcorder shorts on the cheap to arthouse auteur. His films all benefit from his clear affection for his characters and a complete lack of pretentiousness. After a brief blip using name British actors in the uninspired Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, Meadows went back to working with lesser lights, including his old friend Paddy Considine, whom he, ironically helped turn into one of Britain’s most sought-after young character actors. The disturbing Dead Man’s Shoes was followed by This is England, a semi-autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy getting sucked in by the National Front in 1982 Scarborough. Shaun is recently arrived in town following the death of his father in the Falklands War. Some friendly skinheads take him under their wing only for the sinister fascist Combo to muscle in on things on his release from prison. Shaun falls for Combo’s tough-guy charisma and is soon abusing Pakistani shopkeepers and attending far-right rallies. The film is a clear-eyed, non-moralising view of the menacing embrace of racism closing in on a vulnerable person. Meadows is one of the rare talents in British cinema who can combine a superb skill with actors with a visual sensibility that is almost European in its lyricism. Thrilling stuff.

The Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr – Hungary, 2000)
I first heard of Béla Tarr ten years ago in a eulogy penned by Gus Van Sant and published in Le Monde. As well as being proof that Van Sant still had a stirring of adventurousness in him it was a tantalising glimpse of the sort of director you see so rarely in contemporary cinema. The Werckmeister Harmonies is a relatively straightforward work compared to Tarr’s earlier seven-hour long Satantango, but it nonetheless demands attention and patience, running to 160 minutes and being comprised of no more than 38 shots, and shot entirely in claustrophobic monochrome. Tarr is not terribly interested in plot or story and his pre-apocalyptic tale set in a village on the frozen Hungarian plains has only frail scrimpings of either. But when it comes to atmosphere, mood and character, he has few betters. And, like all his films, The Werckmeister Harmonies leaves you with a murky uneasy sensation, rather similar to a dog’s distant howl on a dark night.

Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Turkey, 2002)
Turkish photographer and filmmaker Ceylan made an international name for himself with this beautiful film about the gradual falling out between an enthusiastic young provincial freshly disembarked in Istanbul and his successful photographer cousin whom he stays with. The cousin is a man who feels he has outgrown family obligations and his gauche relative quickly becomes an unwelcome imposition. As one would expect from an accomplished photographer the film is wonderfully shot right from the lengthy opening scene of the young hero leaving his snowbound Anatolian village. The film is also rich in dramatic detail, with the heartbreaking final rupture cruelly hinging on an incident of petty crime. It also has one fantastic gag, where the photographer tries to watch a porno, but is forced to switch on Tarkovsky’s Stalker to discourage his cousin when he intrudes.

Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier – Denmark/Sweden, 2000)
Von Trier finally won the Palme d’Or for this maddeningly provocative film and secured a lifetime of brickbats for his alleged misogyny and anti-Americanism (neither of which is true). Taking the Dogme strictures he conceived more or less for his own benefit to another level, LVT fashioned a roughly-hewn masterpiece that, like Björk’s acting, gets better and better as it progresses. Unusually for an established artist, the film inspires the exact type of thrill you get when you discover brilliance in a complete unknown. There’s an army of Von Trier haters out there to rival his admirers, and that’s exactly the way he wants it.

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf – Iran, 2000)
Made when she was only 22, Makhmalbaf’s tale of itinerant schoolmasters in Iranian Kurdistan is an impressive but bleak interrogation of the value of culture and learning amidst the most adverse human suffering. Using, like so many Iranian directors, non-professional actors, Makhmalbaf has a steady, unsentimental eye and her social questioning has an echo of early Pasolini about it. She’s a resolutely unglamorous filmmaker, who has since concentrated on Afghanistan for her films, with varying degrees of success. But there should be more like Blackboards to come.

The Free Will (Matthias Glasner – Germany, 2006)
The German cinema renaissance is one of the most inspiring things to have happened in recent years. The country has a chequered film history, with its glory Ufa days ending when the Nazi’s rise to power sent the talent fleeing to Hollywood. There then followed the golden age of the New German Cinema in the 1970s which faded out with the deaths of Fassbinder and Syberberg , the decline of Schlöndorff and the self-enforced irrelevance of Wim Wenders. Until a few years ago there had been little to get excited about in the film production of Europe’s biggest country but now the quality of output is such that almost every German release is worth seeing nowadays.

Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will was one of the better German films this decade. Jürgen Vogel (who also co-wrote the screenplay) plays a sex offender released from prison at the beginning of the film who moves into a halfway house with hopes of rehabilitating himself and settling back into society. Things, as you can imagine, don’t work out as his brutal urges resurface, overcoming even the possibility of a relationship with the young student he develops a normal relationship with. It’s a frank, disturbing film that is a rare dramatic portrait of an everyday monster.


Hunger (Steve McQueen – UK/Ireland, 2008)

When I first heard about Hunger, I couldn’t have been less interested. Did we really need another film about the hunger strikes? And, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a visual artist notwithstanding, I was worried that the result might be an over-aestheticization with most of the politics sucked out of it. So I’m glad I was proved wrong. Hunger is a fascinating, unflinching look at the strength of a principle and people’s determinations to stand by them. Previous H-Block films such as Some Mother’s Son and H3 were typically void of either a visual sense or ideas like many British or Irish films but McQueen dissects the historical incident with economy and aplomb. Michael Fassbender is great as Bobby Sands, with the 20-minute-long colloquy with Liam Cunningham that lies at the centre of the film a masterclass in dramatic writing. More remarkably, though McQueen’s sympathies are clearly with the hunger strikers, there is no facile endorsement of the IRA forthcoming. The Republicans are shown to be every bit as brutal as their captors and you don’t need to be a supporter of the men of violence to be affected by this film.


Je veux voir (Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas – Lebanon/France, 2008)

The Lebanese video artist pairing of Hadjithomas and Joreige came to international attention a couple of years back with the Antonioni-esque Perfect Day, the tale of a narcoleptic young Lebanese haunted by the disappearance of his father who was kidnapped during the Civil War and now about to be declared officially dead. It was a film I should have liked but I found it stultifyingly languid and ironically, for a film about a narcoleptic, put me to sleep.

Perfect Day came out before the 2006 Israeli bombing, the results of which form the basis for their second oblique film. Catherine Deneuve, attending a film festival in Beirut, announces she wants to see the damage done to the country. Hadjithomas and Joreige go with her and film her. It’s a strange film, where Deneuve plays herself in what appears to be a documentary but of course is a scripted film. Ill at ease, she slowly develops a rapport with her driver Rabieh Mroue; they chat about the effect of decades of war on Lebanon and view the rubble in the Lebanese capital and the southern towns, shattered by the bombings. Very little happens in this short, 75-minute film, but few other films have managed to make a country come to life on screen so well with such modest means. Just sit back and watch.


Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg – UK/Canada, 2007)

Cronenberg went off the boil a bit in the 1990s (though without ever really descending into irrelevance in the way that his contemporaries Scorsese, de Palma and Coppola did), and his resurgence over the past few years has been one of the most gratifying things in contemporary cinema. Eastern Promises is, like his previous two films Spider and A History of Violence, a hyper-realist jaunt through a range of subjects such as guilt, violence, broken trust and the audience's capacity to be outraged or shocked by the most unexpected things in a film. Shot and styled like a piece of banal direct-to-video fodder, the film is deceptively simple, masking an ingenious network of provocations that question our attitudes to the very film itself. And, best of all, it is damn scary.


Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas – Mexico/France, 2007)

Reygadas' first two films, Japón and Batalla en el ciélo were arresting and often shamelessly provocative examinations of the mundane existential struggles of ordinary people in testing situations. For this story of infidelity and forgiveness among German-speaking Mennonite farmers in Chiahuahua, Reygadas once again uses non-professional actors though the tone and the methods are more restrained than in the previous two films. Lovingly rendered landscapes and a punctilious attention to sound detail make the two-and-a-half-hour film one of the most enthralling of the year. While many people will hate it, Reygadas has no problem with that; he has stated in interviews that he has no interest in entertaining his audience. Demanding his films might be but the pay-off rewards the attentiveness.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Philippe Parrano and Douglas Gordon – France/UK, 2006)

The prospect of a documentary filmed in real-time on one of the greatest footballers ever by two video artists renowned for their endurance-testing installations was not instantly appealing and, when I saw this in Paris just before the 2006 World Cup, half the audience walked out, probably a mix of arty types and football fans expecting something different. But Gordon and Parrano's film of Zidane playing for Real Madrid in a 2-1 win over Villareal in April 2005 is riveting stuff for the insight it gives both into the work of a modern footballer and the movements of the human anatomy. Sixteen cameras were trained on Zidane for the duration of the game, and the result is intriguing and boring in turns but one of the few great art/film crossovers. Zidane's surprisingly gnomic pronouncements about the game are interlaced with a soundtrack by Mogwai, and there is even drama, prophetic of the great man's eventual exit from the game: he gets sent off in the last minute after a mass brawl. Along with the efforts of Steve McQueen and Khalil Joreige and Joanna Hadjithomas, Zidane suggests video artists moving up to the big screen is not such a bad thing at all.


Close to Home (Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hager – Israel, 2005)

One of the big cinematic success stories of the decade is Israel. An influx of funding from television and a flowering of a talented generation of filmmakers have resulted in a string of great films, many of which give a glimpse of Israeli society to Westerners that is more nuanced than the rigidly heroic or villainous tone taken by either sides in the Israel/Palestine debate. Close to Home is one of the lesser known of those films but it’s a little gem. Two Israeli girls doing their national service patrolling West Jerusalem, hassling Arabs at random, and doing their utmost to shirk their duties, all the while maintaining a breezy indifference to the war on their doorstep. A cool examination of the demeaning nature of Israeli checkpoints that also manages to be funny and touchingly human.


To Get to Heaven, First You Have to Die (Jamshed Usmonov – Tajikistan, 2006)

The world is not overrun with films from Tajikistan but Jamshed Usmonov has managed to carve out an international reputation with his understated, grimly comic cinema. Here he follows up the acclaimed The Angel on the Right with the tale of a teenage husband unable to consummate his marriage but, who, it appears is not any the less horny for all that. He takes a trip to the capital Dushanbe, tries his hand at following the city women around, with little success, only to fall in with a small-time hood, who inveigles him into a dodgy heist. The film is one gripping episode after another, all imbued with a wonderful dramatic ambiguity, bestowed as much by the passivity of the actors as by Usmonov's clockwork-precise direction.


Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog – USA/Germany, 2007)

Werner Herzog continues to give the best value of those German filmmakers that sprung to prominence in the 1970s. Now focusing mainly on documentaries, Herzog persuaded the National Science Foundation to fund his Antarctic film but declared that he would not be making another film about penguins. Herzog joins the research teams at the McMurdo research station and interviews those there about their motivations for going there, he meets a Russian philosopher, a Canadian linguist who specializes in dying languages, a Czech former refugee who has a 20kilo pack ready for a quick getaway at all times and vulcanologists studying one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Herzog’s mordantly deadpan narration is wildly funny and he has an admirable distrust of pseudo-spiritual cant and a love of scientific enquiry. The film is beautifully shot, both above and under the ice, and a lone, deranged penguin, despite Herzog’s initial intentions, ends up giving the film its best known scene. One of the most entertaining documentaries of the decade.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino – USA, 2009)

Like many, I had given up on Quentin Tarantino. Kill Bill was too big and too unwieldy for such a flimsy theme, Deathproof was a return to form but you still felt Tarantino could stretch himself more. The news that he was doing a film about Jewish Nazi-hunters during World War II wasn’t encouraging; I doubted the subject matter would survive the exposure to Tarantino irony. And I have to admit it’s still a mystery why his scattershot approach to history is so successful. I think it might be due to the fact that Tarantino understands the spirit of the second World War better than most. Not for him a slavish reconstruction of the facts but, better than almost any American filmmaker before him he understands how vital a role language played in the occupation by the Nazis. The tour-de-force opening scene plays on this as does another scene where Melanie Laurent’s Jewish escapee listens to a conversation in German, on which the camera lingers and which is, crucially, left unsubtitled. This is a brilliant distillation of the alienating effect of occupation, something that French critics – who almost universally acclaimed the film – recognised better than their Anglophone counterparts. Many would quibble at the counter-factual nature of much of the film but this was a common theme in popular culture of the time (Michael Chabon already touched upon it in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay) and it also contains a kernel of truth, with an echo of the infamous Ratlines that helped thousands of Nazis escape justice at the end of the war. The film is not perfect, with some of the acting and the plotting quite mangled but you certainly don’t feel cheated at the end of it. Quite how Tarantino pulled it off, I don’t know.


Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone – Italy, 2008)

The young Italian writer Roberto Saviano was already in hiding before the release of this film version of his best-selling non-fiction book but the film’s success can hardly have helped his security situation. The film examines the Comorra, the Neapolitan mafia, and its tentacular reach into all sectors of Italian business and society. The film departs from the book by dispensing with the narrative voice, which was Saviano himself, who occupied a recklessly central role in his tale. What we are left with are six distinct tales told in a sober, dispassionate manner, similar to Alan Clarke’s Elephant or Gus Van Sant’s of the same name. Tim Parks has complained that the film lacks an oppositional force, a crusader that might represent resistance to the thuggery of the Naples mob. But this misses the point of the film, which is to resurrect the mob film from the relativistic morass and the dubious glamour it has been mired in for near on thirty years now. It is significant that the two young numskulls that try to muscle their way onto the turf of much more formidable men should be beholden to Brian de Palma’s Scarface. But Gomorrah has little truck with the mythologizing of that film – its gangsters are brutal thugs that bully their way around any situation, fascists in shellsuits.

The film is bleak in that it declines to offer a way out for anyone, the only characters that manage to opt out do so at the expense of their career. But it’s a timely film for its frankness in tackling the canker of organised crime from a left-wing point of view without making facile, shopworn observations about how it’s simply another extension of mainstream capitalism. The Comorra is deeply embedded in mainstream capital but the film makes no attempt to exonerate the organisation because of its unorthodox status.



24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom – UK, 2002)

The incredibly prolific Winterbottom, like Steven Soderberg, can be a bit hit and miss but he’s always worth a look, his subject matter ranging from adaptations of Hardy and Tristram Shandy to tales of Afghan refugees and internees of Guantanamo Bay. And sometimes he completely surprises you with a film like 24 Hour Party People, a hugely enjoyable account of the rise and fall of Factory Records, told through the eyes of its mercurial founder Anthony H. Wilson, played by Steve Coogan. Unlike Anton Corbijn’s Control, the tone is light, even the sequences covering Ian Curtis’ last days, but it never feels frivolous. While the film’s subject matter obviously limits its appeal, for those in the know there is a pleasure to be had spotting the personalities from the various Manchester scenes in both their real and onscreen incarnations (Howard Devoto of Magazine, for example, pops up as a toilet cleaner while The Stone Roses’ Mani plays a sound engineer). The music’s good, it doesn’t take itself seriously and it gives a rare chance for Manchester to appear on the big screen. One of the better films about music.



The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev – Russia, 2003)

Andrei Zvyagintsev came from nowhere to win the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003 with this bleak but stylish film about the return of an alcoholic father to his family. He insists on spending some quality time with his two young sons who know him only from an old photograph, and it soon becomes apparent that the reunion is going to be an uneasy one. In one respect the film might be considered the epitome of the Russian miserablist family drama and there are times when it veers close to cliché. But the overall tone rings true, with superb acting, particularly from the two children. Zvyagintsev returned at Cannes four years later with the similarly dark The Banishment, which most critics hated. But that too is worth a look.


Rois et reine (Arnaud Desplechin – France, 2004)

Desplechin made his international breakthrough with this compelling ensemble drama about two ex-lovers (Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric). Devos is coping with the impending death of her father, having previously lost a husband, while Amalric’s musician is trying to break free from a mental asylum. Like in his later Un conte de Noël (also excellent) Desplechin paints human relationship with punctilious, novelistic detail. A talky film in the best sense of French cinema but one mercifully devoid of pretention.

The Draw

The thing most notable every time a World Cup draw is made is how adrift most of us are as to the actual ability of all but a handful of teams. As William Goldman famously said about Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.” Few of us have watched a wide range of qualifying games in Europe, never mind South America, Africa or the other confederations, and our assessment of the capabilities of teams is based largely on the players they have playing in either the Premiership or the Champions League.

And so we have a few misdiagnoses of the groups. Everyone agrees that Group D, which sees Germany, Australia, Ghana and Serbia square off, is the Group of Death; these are four teams of broadly similar ability, the Germans would be reasonably considered the favourites but none of the other three will be overawed by them. But there is also too much respect being paid to Group G, where Brazil, Portugal and the Ivory Coast will slug it out for the top two spots. The group, however, is likely to be hellish only for the latter two; Brazil, motoring along efficiently if inelegantly with Dunga’s brand of pragmatic football, will probably take the group – and I fear, the tournament – comfortably. So it’s up to the Ivorians and the Portuguese to fight for the second spot. Many, watching the tournament in their Premiership-refracted haze will bill it as Drogba v Ronaldo, but there'll be more than that. And I suspect, the Portuguese, wary of being muscled out of it by an Ivorian team unfazed following their fine performances in the Group of Death last time round, are probably the more worried.

Other highly competitive groups are likely to be Group B, with Argentina, Nigeria and Greece – all of whom met each other in USA 94 – all in the running, with South Korea possibly being the bystanding kingmaker. It may not be dazzling football though, especially with the Greeks involved. That may come in Group E where the Danes play their footballing mentors the Dutch, with Cameroon also capable of excitement providing excitement. And though European Champions Spain are likely to win Group H at a canter, Honduras, Chile and Switzerland are all capable of fighting for second place.

France and England both got draws that, though favourable enough, could prove to be harder than they first appear. Nobody fears France these days, as Ireland showed in Paris last month, and both Mexico and Uruguay will fancy their chances, even if the Mexicans have never yet beaten France in international football. Particularly perilous for France is the fact that their easiest match, against hosts South Africa comes last, by which time dropped points in the first two encounters could put them under pressure. And, with the notorious benevolence often shown to host countries by referees, the karmic wheel could swing right round in an unpleasant manner for the French. My hunch is that France’s collective lack of backbone (which cannot be entirely blamed on the hapless Raymond Domenech) could see them on an early flight home.

England should be able to finish top of their group but the sort of complacency the English do best could give them a few jolts. The US are a tough side for anyone to beat, and should provide stiffer resistance to England than in last year’s friendly at Wembley. Slovenia will be similarly undaunted having given England a decent game in another friendly last November. A young Algerian team may be four years short of gelling into a formidable side but they will, like all the other African teams bar the hosts, have the advantage of playing in January’s African Cup of Nations in Angola. Algeria shocked the world in 1982 before being disgracefully shafted by West Germany and Austria, and now they are arguably better, with many of their players having come through the French national youth team system. A technically gifted side who showed immense character to come through a torrid tie with Egypt, they can cause anyone trouble. That said, I expect England to finish top, which they will want to do, presuming Germany finish top of Group D. The Germans are now back to the level of composure where they can unnerve the English and were the two to meet in the second round, England’s World Cup would end there. If they avoid each other, England can reach the quarter-finals and, with some extra discipline, the semi-final. That’s really as far as they’ll go, with suspect goalkeeping, an occasionally febrile defence and a glaring lack of strength in depth to be their undoing when up against the big boys.

And who are the big boys? Spain, Brazil, Germany, Italy. The winners will come from one of those four. Argentina probably could do it if freed from the mania of Maradona’s management and an African side might benefit from a tournament held on the continent. The Ivory Coast look like the only side strong enough to put up an ultimate fight but they too will probably have to hope for semi-finals at best. And the winners? My head rather than my heart, says Brazil, who these days are eschewing the jogo bonito in the same way they did in 1994 and 2002. And we know what happened then…

100 Films of the Decade - Part 1

The past decade presented cinema with both new challenges and new opportunities. While on the one hand new technology freed filmmakers from the shackles of financing, a greater homogenisation of taste and lack of adventure among distributors and producers has made it harder to get interesting films seen. The internet has made it possible for films to bypass traditional media outlets but it is still far from a renumerative means of publicity. In the United States, with a few exceptions, mainstream cinema has reached a cul-de-sac of sterile, self-congratulatory mediocrity. Hence there is a notable dearth of Oscar-winning or nominated fare here. Hollywood has surrendered excellence to American TV, which often produces far superior work in the fields of both comedy and drama. For this reason, casual cinemagoers are convinced the quality of cinema overall is on the slide. Of course this is not true, with countries as diverse as Portugal, France, Taiwan, Korea, Argentina, Israel, Iran, Germany and Romania regularly producing great films.

The 100 films I have picked are broadly those I have been most impressed by over the past ten years. It is not however exhaustive – some are there despite the fact they have a number of major flaws, others have been left out perhaps unfairly and deserve a second viewing, and there are a number of candidates that I contrived to miss when they came out. There are a number of big names absent, some of them rightly (Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma are two I have no qualms about overlooking) and others perhaps unfairly (the Coen brothers, the Dardennes, Ken Loach, Christophe Honoré, Nanni Moretti among others). There are also a few films that will have passed even the keenest eyes by, and some that others might consider modest works of promising talent rather than among the best produced this decade. But I stand by the films selected and though any reader will be doing well to have seen all 100 of those on the list, I think a list that offers a few surprises is more useful than one than one that recycles the familiar, more obvious suspects. Here’s the first batch of the 100, in no particular order. When I get to the top-10 I’ll introduce a more ruthless system of classification. Until then, consider these all films equally worthy of one’s attention.

PS You might notice 1999 appended to a number of films. This is the date of their original release in their country of origin. I have however taken films that were released after January 2000 in either of the countries I’ve lived in since then – Ireland and France.

M/Other (Nobuhiro Suwa – Japan, 1999)

Nobuhiro Suwa won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1999 for this beautifully observed tale of a six-year-old boy’s efforts to adapt to a new stepmother. Two and a half hours long and shot almost entirely with static cameras, the film combines the intensity of Cassavetes with the formal exactitude of Ozu. Suwa, incredibly, remains unknown outside Japan and France, where he has been making films for the past few years.

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson – USA, 1999)

There’s a good case for saying Magnolia is not as good a film as either Punch-Drunk Love or There Will Be Blood, but Anderson’s sprawling third feature makes up for its many flaws with its many long sequences of brilliance. Audacious, funny and immensely entertaining, it makes great use of a fantastic ensemble cast in a way only Robert Altman could better. Visually and dramatically, it’s a splendid feat, studded with memorable characters and possessed of an energy generated by an almost decadent lack of discipline. The guilty pleasure of the decade.

Pingpong (Matthias Luthardt – Germany, 2006)

Young German director Matthias Luthardt expanded his film school graduation piece to make this icy cuckoo-in-the-nest drama. Teenage malcontent Paul shows up at his rich uncle’s country home and insinuates his way into every relationship to be had. It’s a simple straightforward film and there are no big surprises. But the film is a gripping look at an uncomfortable situation. Luthardt is a great talent for the future.

The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman – Palestine, 2009)

Suleiman is a quiet resistant, choosing to mount his family drama spanning 60 years of a Nazareth family beginning with the 1948 nakba, as a deceptively whimsical burlesque. Suleiman plays his alter ego ES, with his usual Buster Keaton hangdog look, uttering not a single word, like his younger selfs, as an anti-imperialist schoolboy and a naïve young revolutionary. The tragedy of 20th-century Palestinian history is given an absurd twinge, with tabbouleh being searched for explosives, Suleiman pole-vaulting the Israeli apartheid wall and the Suleimans’ elderly neighbour continually failing to put an end to it all through public self-immolation. But though it’s a funny, wondrous piece Suleiman’s impassive humour is the vector for a troubling, potentially savage anger.


The Circle and Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi – Iran, 2000 & 2003)

Crusading filmmaking in the west takes on a rather worthy tinge but when you live in a society with rather precarious freedoms such as Iran, taking on the mantle of political cinema is something a good deal more dangerous. Panahi famously wrote to the master Abbas Kiarostami back in the 1980s asking for a job. He eventually passed on to directing himself, winning the Caméra d’Or for The White Balloon in 1995. There then followed The Circle, a dark feminist thriller that follows fugitive women across the Tehran cityscape as they attempt to escape the morals police after them for what is most likely prostitution. Panahi went out of his way to beat the drum for Iranian women in his 2007 film Offside, an absurdist drama about women trying to get into an international football match. And there was also Crimson Gold, a sympathetic portrait of an Iran-Iraq war veteran turned pizza-delivery man caught adrift amidst the Iranian nouveau riche pizza-eating classes. It was no surprise that when the anti-government protests sparked off last June Panahi was to the fore of the protestors. He’s a man whose work attests to the value of dissent.


Together (Lukas Moodysson – Sweden, 2000)

Moodysson is an unlikely sort in the field of international cinema, a man raised by Marxist parents – like Lars Von Trier – but professing a very different robust Christian humanism. He has also gone from bubbly, purposeful feel-good comedies to hellish visions of human evil and the fortitude of the wretched, such as Lilja 4-Ever. But it is his second feature, Together, a semi-autobographical account of life in a left-wing commune in Stockholm in the 1970s, that is the most memorable. Moodysson weaves wife-beating, closet homosexuality and sexually precocious teenagers into the narrative and over it he pastes a soundtrack of Abba songs, songs that he gleefully admits the communards would have readily scorned. It’s a strange but fantastic piece and one of the best pieces of popular cinema of the decade.


Gerry and Elephant (Gus Van Sant – USA, 2002 and 2003)

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago Gus Van Sant was mired down in sentimental Hollywood productions such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, films that, though they bore his recognisable imprint, reeked too much of a sad compromise. Van Sant used some time out with two of his mainstream buddies Matt Damon and Casey Affleck to make Gerry, a bleak minimalist chamber piece in Death Valley. Van Sant films both faces and landscapes with an unerring eye, and the exercise in experimental rigour reinvigorated him, helping him win the Palme d’Or the following year with the Columbine reconstruction Elephant. After a string of fine counter-cultural films, Van Sant went back to the mainstream with Milk and this time he had Hollywood on his own terms.


Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter – USA/France, 2004)

I had never been impressed by Nossiter’s rambling, pretentious fiction films but it was a real pleasure when he brought his day job as a wine importer to bear on this monumental documentary on the wine trade. You may not buy his arguments such as planting the Mondovani family, the titan of wine critics Robert Parker and wine consultant par excellence Michel Rolland in the camp of villains, but the film is gripping drama. Pitted against the above are pluckily genial Bourgonnais viticulteurs whose own daughter has crossed over to the dark side, a Jewish wine importer in New York who bemoans the increasing homogenisation of the global wine trade and pernickety European left-wing politicians unimpressed by the new wine gospel. The film is about more than wine though; it’s a study of the trade-offs, wilful self-abnegation and fierce resistance induced among people by the pensées uniques of globalisation. The mouthpiece of the latter is the exemplary ‘quiet American’ Parker, who might be construed as an oenological equivalent of the belligerent liberals who have found creative new ways of waging war in our overly-comfortable times. Also released in a 10-hour version for French television.


La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel – Argentina, 2001)

Martel says that she does not make political films but it was hard to watch La Ciénaga, released in the wake of Argentina’s economic collapse, without thinking of it as a stern corrective to a culture of fiscal irresponsibility and avarice. This is a film where all the responsible characters are children; from the very opening scene – one of the finest of the decade – we see the adults as drink-sodden zombies, edging catatonically towards an inevitable crisis. The film has a fetid air, suitably unclean for one whose title is the Spanish for ‘swamp’.


Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing and Vera Drake (Mike Leigh – UK, 1999, 2002 and 2004)

While most of his American contemporaries have wandered up avenues of critically acclaimed irrelevance, Mike Leigh just gets on with making films and he rarely misses a note. You have to go back to 1997’s Career Girls to find a poor film by Leigh. His best this decade was his first effort, the unexpectedly entertaining Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy. Leigh’s first period piece was a breath of fresh air amid the stuffy academicism of British costume drama; he didn’t stint on the detail, nor on the historical context and best of all the film had its flashes of autobiography in the scenes where the light operatistes put their actors through rehearsals. There then followed the darkly tough urban drama All or Nothing and another period piece, Vera Drake, with Imelda Staunton a star turn as a 1950s back-street abortionist. Special mention too to Happy-Go-Lucky, not on this list, but one of the more sophisticated comedies of the noughties.


Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki – USA, 2003)

It started off as a documentary about New York party clowns but Jarecki changed tack when he discovered the story of one of his subjects, David Friedman. David’s family were embroiled in a child abuse scandal in the 1980s, which led to the conviction of his father Arnold and 18-year-old brother Jesse. Most amazingly, the family were willing to talk (though Arnold had, by then, passed away) and even more so they had home movies galore to fill in the gaps. Despite the confessions and convictions of both, questions marks remain over the actual guilt. Both claimed they lied in their confessions, making the film a maelstrom of doubt (its tagline was ‘Who do you believe?’) Though there’s something unseemly about the film’s voyeuristic position, it’s enthralling viewing. The Friedman’s bizarre reaction to their family turmoil is proof that reality TV and Balloonboy were dramas that were only waiting to happen.


Saraband (Ingmar Bergman – Sweden, 2003)

The master’s swansong, made for Swedish TV four years before his death but it got an international theatrical release. A sequel to Scenes from a Marriage (which was also made for the small screen) it reunites Karin and Johan 30 years later, by now a divorced couple and beset with crises involving their various children. It’s an elegant drama, in which little happens, but the depth of characterisation is impressive and the whole thing rings with the pain and cruelty that runs like letters through a stick of rock through the life work of Bergman, a life’s work that ended with this film.


En construcción (José Luis Guerín – Spain, 2001)

Guerín’s ludic cinema was still unknown on the release of this film in 2001, and it was only the international release of Dans la ville de Sylvia seven years later that brought it to the attention of most people. In a similar way to the recent cinema of Jia Zhang-Ke, Guerín deconstructs history through the decline of a building. As the century ends he follows the demolition of an apartment building constructed in 1900, being knocked as part of the gentrification of the barrio chino, Barcelone’s traditional red-light district. Like Jia, he mixes documentary and fiction, following those working on the building and interviewing locals on their memories of a vanishing neighbourhood. He also struck it lucky as during demolition, human remains dating from Roman times were uncovered, adding an unexpected extra layer to the film’s dense texture. A great film about urban history.


Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid – Germany, 2006)

Hans-Christian Schmid's harrowing account of the exorcism of a young German woman in the 1970s is both a masterful piece of kinetic cinema and an angry, if even-handed examination of faith and madness. The young woman, played by the amazing Sandra Hüller, is doomed from the start, as her epilepsy cuts her off from society and hampers her studies and her efforts to live an ordinary life. Her obsession with Catherine of Siena does not help - leading her to believe her illness is a messianic affliction thrust upon her by God. A perfect counterpart to Breaking the Waves and arguably more moving, Requiem is proof of the current rude health of German cinema.

Guernsey (Nanouk Leopold – Netherlands, 2005)

A little-known Dutch film, about a young mother who witnesses the suicide of a colleague while working as an engineer in Egypt and then tells nobody about it, allowing her marriage and her relationship with her widowed father and her desperately embittered sister unravel almost as an existential experiment. Leopold touches all the right buttons in the Antonioni fashion but her film has a bracing individuality and an almost-Protestant rigidity of economy in its editing and mise en scène. There is not a shot wasted and as well as featuring a great, haunting performance as the wife by Maria Kraakman, it has a cast of some of the finest buildings seen on film in many a year.


4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu – Romania, 2007)

The consolidation of Romanian cinema as one of the world's most impressive came in 2007 with the awarding of the Palme d'Or at Cannes to Cristian Mungiu's drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days which told the harrowing account of an illegal abortion in the final years of the Ceausescu regime. The film is a finely calibrated slice of life, shimmering with the squalid discomfort of the Communist-era gloom, brilliantly acted and difficult to sit through. If the clutch of Romanian films that have their way west in recent years is any indicator, the country is, despite its many social and political problems, a formidable repository of stories that will produce many more in years to come.

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Un petit tricheur...

There's been an unusual silence from me in the seven days since the match last week largely because I have followed Virginia Woolf's
injunctive never to write when one is angry. While that anger has only subsided a little, there's little point in poring over the ashes of the
game, to glean either good or bad points - in any case, the whole match is by now, dominated by one bad point of monumental size. FIFA, though
they may be an organ of such corruption and rancidness capable of being matched only by a planeload of Third World kleptocrats touching down at Geneva International Airport, are correct not to order the match to be replayed. As egregious a wrong as Henry's handball was, FIFA cannot overrule referees, even if sometimes they wish they could have.

The French Football Federation though, had it in their gift to offer a
replay, and they might have felt it incumbent on them to do so, seeing
as so many of their countrymen were mortified at the way they qualified
for South Africa. It appears however Raymond Domenech put a spanner in
the works by refusing a rematch. To be honest, I think Jean-Pierre
Escalettes, the President of the FFF, is every bit as lacking in
backbone as his manager and nobody at 87, boulevard de Grenelle gave
serious thought to killing the golden goose they had almost given up for
dead. It's an ignoble dereliction of fair play but let's not be too
pious about it. France will trot out at the next World Cup in imposture
in the eyes of the world and many of their own supporters. And given
their usual form in tournaments this decade they will hardly do better
than Ally McLeod's Scotland who deprived Wales of a World Cup finals
spot in 1978 thanks to a Joe Jordan handball. The cosmic retribution
will be swift, just and probably underwhelming. A passionless French
team will limp from one uninspired draw to another before being soundly
beaten by a modest enough opponent - Denmark, Slovakia or Cameroon
perhaps. And Raymond Domenech will refuse to take any blame...

But what of the villain of the piece, a man who has, in the past week,
revealed himself to be of less than monumental proportions? Not so much
in the act of cheating he committed, though it was clearly an
intentional double-handball; any schoolboy who has ever juggled soccer
and Gaelic football over a season can train their instinct to wrap their
hand around the ball when playing the foreign game - highly-paid
footballers can do the same, without any excuses.

Since he handled the ball not once but twice before setting up William Gallas to score the goal that put Ireland out of the World Cup, Thierry Henry has done a lot of pleading. It started at the final whistle. By now settled down from his exuberent celebration of Gallas' goal, Henry consoled Richard Dunne and said 'it was handball but I'm not the ref'. One has to admire Richard Dunne's magnanimity that he didn't, as Eric Cantona suggested he should have, socked Henry one there and then. It continued the following day, with Henry sheepishly apologising via his Twitter feed, then he said he was not a cheat and called for the match to be replayed, after FIFA had already put his foot down. It was a communiqué delivered, crucially in English rather than French, aimed at touching up his tarnished image. Henry doesn't want to go down in history as a cheat - though there will be many who have followed his progress over the years who will say his cheating started neither last Wednesday nor the day before - so you have to question his motivation in blatantly cheating last week. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Then Henry said he felt all alone and considered quitting the French team, because the FFF, rather ungratefully did not give him more wholehearted support for his cheating.

Once again, I'm not going to be too pious about cheating. Everyone does it at some point in the game. And most of them are never noticed. Some do it in minor instances, and others, like Henry do it in, ahem, grander ones. Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal is one of those grander instances. But where Diego differs from Thierry is not in the fact that El píbe scored a fantastic goal within moments of his moment of treachery, but because Maradona has never shirked the fact he cheated. From the very moment he coined the immortal phrase to his more recent likening it to 'pick-pocketing Prince Charles', Maradona has brazenly embraced his cheating. He knows it was important enough, and he, unlike Henry is not going to hide behind a referee's call. England fans may not take much comfort from that but Maradona is, in Graham Greene's words 'man enough to be damned'. Thierry Henry, fretful of his reputation having crossed over to the dark side, is not. He is milksop Jonathan Harker to Diego's Count Dracula. And it is this cravenness that makes Henry's behaviour all the more repulsive.

Anyway speaking of 'hiding behind a referee's call', here's the exemplary Thierry Henry in a 2006 Nike ad. Is he still talking to Cantona, I wonder? Or did he bottle out of talking to him that day, too?

The Day of Reckoning

A quick note before I head off to the Stade de France for the second leg of the World Cup final play-off. I have to admit I'm being realistic about the chances for the Boys in Green. France are 65% there. If we play the same way we did in the second half on Saturday we can wave goodbye any chances of going to South Africa. The fact we haven't beaten a major nation away from home in competitive football in so long is also an ill boding. But on the upside, we have nothing to lose and a 1-0 lead is not impossible to overturn if we apply ourselves well.

France were not much better than us on Saturday and, for all their second-half possession, rarely troubled us. There is probably no home ground in international football with such a negligible determination on home advantage as the Stade de France - there are no visiting teams overawed by it and France regularly lose at home. There is also a huge over-confidence in the French public at the moment - former manager Michel Hidalgo told L'Équipe yesterday that he "wouldn't bet sixpence on Ireland". Such an attitude may not reign among the squad, but if the ugly behaviour of Lassana Diarra is anything to go by, there may be a hint of it. The French have a ridiculous sense that playing at the World Cup finals is their birthright. This despite the fact that they have failed to qualify for six finals in the past, as recently as 1994. And also despite the fact that, other than the Zidane-led revolt of 2006, they have brought nothing to any major finals since they won Euro 2000. It is this sense of complacency that could well undo France. And, of course, under Trapattoni, our best performances have been away from home.

But back to reality. There is a huge task ahead and conceding a goal first will probably finish us off. I have a worry that our lack of strength in depth (poor old Leon Best) and overly-negative tactics from the Italian will hamper us. We might have to settle for a valiant 0-0, that will put us out. But we'll still roar on the boys. It should be a great night, if not a great game.

The Year of the French II

Ireland kick off against France at Croke Park tonight in the first leg of the World Cup play-offs. The game takes place against a backdrop of sometimes bizarre fervour, whipped up by both the Irish media and team over the past week. Richard Dunne started the mind games going by saying Raymond Domenech was a man who only seemed to know 'how to mess up' the talent at his disposal. Former Ireland manager Eoin Hand (who was pipped by les Bleus on goal difference for qualification for the 1982 World Cup) said that if Ireland were saddled with Domenech, they wouldn't have reached the play-offs. (I'm not a big fan of Domenech, though I don't really agree with that - even under the hapless Steven Staunton, second spot in an ordinary group was for long within our grasp). Tony Cascarino weighed in in his Times column and this was later relayed to the entire sporting press in France. Cazza had a successful spell in France in the mid-90s with Marseille and Nancy and the French media have an inordinately high opinion of him, no doubt because he scored 31 goals one year in the gentle confines of Ligue 2.

One wonders why the Irish are ganging up on Domenech like this, as it seems likely to only galvanize a French side whose unity is still in question. But the fact that Liam Brady himself said that Domenech doesn't always know what players to play suggests that such an approach has been officially sanctioned by Trapattoni himself. It's a risky approach to take as it deprives Ireland of their underdog status, which has served us so well in the past. But, as my father has suggested, maybe it's a strategy to build an arrogance with the aim not so much to intimidate the French, as to bolster the self-confidence of the Irish players. That doesn't seem unlikely. For all the poor performances in qualifying, coming through the group undefeated has raised the confidence of a mixed group of players. The occasional lapses in defence and some very poor ball retention in midfield fail to reassure those of us watching on the sidelines but if the team at least attacks the game knowing they are the equal of France (I think they are, more of which later), it can only be a good thing.

The French camp, Domenech included, has been rather reticent; the French coach was mouthy in the run-up to the Lansdowne Road game four years ago but he's a more embattled sort these days and imparts only sparse information to the media. He may also be cognisant of the silly furor he inadvertently sparked in Ireland with his 'England B-team' comments (which he never said but were mistranslated by the Irish media). The Irish press continue to breathe life into a non-existent verbal sparring match, with the Indo blowing up Éric Abidal's comments into something more confrontational than they were in an interview with L'Équipe Thursday. The French are relaxed enough; they will enter the game with a wary respect for the Irish but they do not fear them. Nor should they. The French media have, with a few exceptions, been building up the cauldron-like atmosphere their team can expect in Croke Park. Something that will come as a surprise to Irish football fans, as Croker has yet to seriously intimidate any visiting side. The distance of the pitch from the stands and a largely casual public, with many of them rugby fans twiddling their thumbs in indifference, render the atmosphere muted.

And even if the ambience is going to be more electric tonight, that's not going to unduly worry the French. Vikash Dhorasoo, who played in the 1-0 win at Lansdowne four years ago (and whose anti-climactic World Cup provided the basis for the wonderful documentary Substitute) said this week that the atmosphere, though formidable, is not terribly upsetting compared to Greece or Turkey. He's right about that, and a look at the welcome afforded the Algerian national team in Cairo Thursday makes the 'Croker roar' look like centre court at Wimbledon in comparison. Besides, France went to Serbia in September and outplayed the locals in front of a hostile crowd. And the weather, however miserable it might be, will not bother the French. They are professional footballers and they play outdoors all the time.

So what are our chances? Fairly high, I would say. Because the two teams are evenly matched. Not of course in terms of individual technique - the French are way ahead in that department. But Ireland are blessed with a stronger defence (with the exception of Kevin Kilbane) and a better goalkeeper than anything France have to offer. We are also better in the air and better at set-pieces. There is also a greater sense of self-belief among the Irish, though the French have been displaying a greater cohesion and team spirit of late. Their five qualifiers since August have seen improved performances even if three were against the exceptionally flimsy Faroe Islands and Austria, while draws were scrabbled impressively against Serbia and alarmingly against Romania. Brian Kerr, who observed them at close quarters in the two games as Faroes manager dismisses any talk of disarray in the French ranks. He should be heeded by the Irish, and I imagine he will be. It's hard to gauge their real level of form but if France put in a display like they did when down to ten men against Serbia, then Ireland could be in trouble. On the other hand, if France get shaken and disoriented early on they may be too mentally brittle to mount a meaningful recovery.

Ireland will be hoping to expose France's vulnerability at set-pieces; it's far from the only means of us scoring but that's where the French look dodgy. The French press are relying on Hugo Lloris, the 22-year-old Lyon keeper to command in the box. He is generally good at that and played well recently in the 2-1 win at Anfield but in a physical game he may be suspect. Added to that his positioning leaves a lot to be desired. That he was responsible for three of the five goals conceded in the 5-5 draw against Marseille last Sunday should give us encouragement. France have already been resigned to the loss of Franck Ribéry, the only player they possess who can win a match on his own - as he did twice against Lithuania - but the loss of Jérémie Toulalan deprives them of a defensive robustness in the middle of the park. They will instead field the two Diarras, formidable enough but unlikely to faze Glenn Whelan and Keith Andrews. Instead it is Yoann Gourcuff who is the real danger man though he has not been his usual dazzling self since returning from injury last month. Interestingly Gourcuff and the entire French back-four are on yellow cards so they will have to be very careful not to further deplete the side for Wednesday's match. Ireland, on the other hand have only Andrews and Shay Given of the starters on a yellow.

I expect the Irish back-four to be exceptionally well-drilled for the game and slips will be few and far between. But the worry is that there will always be a slip, especially where Kilbane is concerned. If we concede a goal, even with a victory, the second leg will be very difficult. If we keep a clean sheet I think we will go through. A worrying thing is that we have kept only two clean sheets so far in the qualifiers, and two of those were against Montenegro. It doesn't bode well.

I'm reasonably optimistic, even if I don't like it that Trapattoni is describing this as 'our World Cup final'; it's not, it's a qualifying play-off. We've been at this stage often enough to expect qualification for a major finals every time they come around. We may have limited resources but so do most other countries, even a team like England, for all their rejuvenation under Fabio Capello, have a glaring lack of strength in depth that will hinder any hopes of lifting the World Cup next July. But by ten o'clock Irish time tonight we'll know what prospects Ireland have for the second leg. Best of luck, boys!

Raymond Domenech and the Irish

Reading in France Football today, I learned that French manager Raymond Domenech made his debut as a player for the national side against none other than Ireland. It was a World Cup qualifier at the Parc des Princes on 19th of May 1973. The match ended 1-1 and both sides failed to qualify for West Germany, the Soviet Union going through. The 21-year-old Domenech was given a torrid time by Miah Dennehy, of all people, though Raymond did get one strike on target late in the game. Ireland manager of the day Liam Tuohy wasn't too impressed, asking L'Équipe, 'was your number 2 picked just to give his best?' What are the chances of Raymond ending his international career against the same opposition he started it against?

French Acting a Bit Irish

The estimable French football magazine So Foot tells me that the French Football Federation, sore at their Irish counterpart doing their own deal with M6, a French TV chain not partnered with the FFF, for the Dublin play-off game, are getting their revenge. They are demanding a minimum €1.5million for the rights from RTÉ (and I presume, TV3, if they're up for it) for the rights to broadcast the second-leg on November 18th. The offer tabled from the Irish side runs to only €600,000. I expect a deal will be hammered out in some fashion in the next couple of weeks but the behaviour of the French is shabby, to say the least. The amount offered by RTÉ is a little more than 10% of that demanded of M6 (the same amount, incidentally, that French broadcaster TF1 pays the FFF for every home match), perfectly fair considering the Irish TV market is approximately 5.5% that of the French one. I can understand how the French Federation were keen to avoid too many Irish fans seeing the match in the flesh on the 18th of November, but are they really determined to prevent them watching it back home too? Here's hoping they get their comeuppance and they'll be forced to undertake sponsorship tours to China next June to drum up revenue.

Yadda Yadda Yadda

I'm of the opinion, like many others, that those at the very top of the football-playing pyramid get paid rather obscenely inflated salaries. And, even if one can defend them on a market-based rationale, as folk like Simon Kuper and Joseph Stiglitz have done, one might expect the well-paid players to at least contribute their fair share in tax. Such is the thinking of the French government, which intends at the end of the season to do away with tax breaks tied to collective image rights, which limits greatly the amount of tax paid by wealthy footballers, basketball players and rugby players in France. The Spanish government has already moved to plug similar tax gaps, unsurprisingly given the shocking rise to 18% unemployment the country has experienced in the past year.

Of course, football clubs are up in arms about it, particularly as hefty salaries being paid by the big clubs are finally making French teams a force to be reckoned with in Europe, with Bordeaux and Lyon both qualified for the second-round of the Champions' League after four games and Marseille are still in with a chance of progressing. Secretary of State for Sport, Rama Yade has voiced her opposition to the measure, backing the clubs up saying it will make French clubs less competitive. Considering her immediate superior Roselyne Bachelot supports the move, it's not a smart move. And it's one that the young Yade made out of enthusiasm for her portfolio (I've read a number of interviews with her in the sporting press recently and she is rather to eager to please) rather than out of any strong point of principle. But she is bound to pay for her gaffe; Sarkozy has had it in for her ever since she refused to stand for the European elections. The junior sports portfolio was widely considered punishment and now even that is likely to be taken away from her. Le Monde says her days in Sarkozy's UMP are numbered, but it seems that the Socialist Party will intervene to save her from the dogs once she is thrown to them. The PS say they will put her at the top of the list in Hauts-de-Seine for next year's regional elections. I presume she would have to soften her opposition to tax cuts for millionaires first.

A French Paradox

Following on the controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival's showcasing Tel-Aviv a couple of months back, the roadshow moves on to Paris. Le Forum des Halles, the excellent municipal-run cinemathèque in the Les Halles shopping centre is hosting 'Tel-Aviv : le paradoxe', a season of films set and filmed in the Israeli city, which celebrates its centenary this year. The season, which started yesterday and runs until the 25th of November, contains a far wider range of films than were shown in Toronto, both contemporary and from the past, such as Ephraim Kishon's Arvinka (1967) and Avi Nesher's Dizengoff 99 (1979). Unlike Toronto it also looks likely to be a more self-critical look at the city (the title alone suggests that) with prominent leftist filmmakers Eytan Fox, Amos Gitaï and Ronit Elkabetz among others appearing as guests, a series of debates on Tel-Aviv's bubble-like status as a tolerant liberal haven strangely free of an Arab population, and there's even place for Hany Abu-Assad's Oscar-winning Palestinian film Paradise Now, which tells of two Palestinians' attempt at a suicide bombing in the city.

But not everyone's happy. There's nothing like the brouhaha that followed John Greyson's protest at Toronto, but prominent pro-Palestinian activist Michèle Sibony (who, for what it matters, is herself Jewish) has written a letter to the cinema directors decrying the decision to showcase Tel-Aviv only ten months after the murderous Gaza invasion. Her letter goes a bit like this:

"You have entitled your homage "Tel-Aviv - the paradox, wishing, no doubt to suggest an ambivalence or a certain ambiguity. Tel-Aviv is not a paradox, it is rather proof: a 'Capital of Segregation and Apartheid'. Constructed on the expulsion and destruction of Palestinian villages, it has completely rid itself of any Palestinian presence since the so-called 'Oslo peace process'. The bubble, as it likes to call it, is a city as white as Cape Town was during the Apartheid years."

Even for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause it's a drearily familiar tread through the verbiage of official letter-writing. Not that Michèle Sibony isn't entitled to her stance but it is curious that the season has failed to stimulate much protest beyond this, and Paris is certainly not lacking militants for the Palestinian cause. Is it the Parisian cinephilia that allows one to dissassociate unpleasant acts and behaviour from enjoyment of good films, or do most people see the season as being far from a whitewash of Tel-Aviv? I suspect it might be the latter. As for  myself, I'll be staying away, less out of conviction, than simply due to the fact I have seen most of the contemporary films showing, including Raphaël Nadjari's excellent Avanim, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's To Take a Wife and Fox's Walk on Water. I have films to watch elsewhere, not to mention fences to tend to before sitting on.