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Wednesday, March 5, 2003
Top 10 Films of 2002
By Kevin John
2002 was a rather unorthodox film-going year for me. Living in
Milwaukee for the first half, I caught on to a 2001 fave like "Donnie
Darko" well after the start of the new year. Living in
Montréal later on, I caught several films that have barely
played elsewhere but would definitely have made my top 10:
"11'09"01," "De L'autre Côté" and "Ten." So, as with all
lists, only more so this time out, do not take the entries below as
etched in stone.
9. "Far From Heaven" and "8 Women" (tie): The placement
of these two together at the bottom of the list is obviously a
polemical gesture. Against critical orthodoxy, I still feel "8 Women"
is the richer film. When I wrote of the former in a previous
"Continuity Error" column, saying that "Haynes ensures the narrative
leaves nothing incommunicable," it was against my instincts as a
budding intellectual who knows that communication is never absolute.
Just as we should ask "ironic for whom?" of Douglas Sirk's 1950s
masterpieces, we should ask "communicable to whom?" of "Far From
Heaven." In any event, Haynes has found a way to pastiche with his
eyes wide open. His imitation of Sirk oozes with intention and
ulterior motive, but with nary a satirical impulse in sight. So the
real conundrum for mental laborers like critics and budding
intellectuals, at least, may be that it leaves us with no work to do.
8. "8 Mile": Who says they don't make musicals anymore?
7. "About Schmidt": Who says they don't make Westerns anymore?
6. "Absolut Warhola": If you thought Warhol had no use for
aura, his relatives in the village of Miková have even less.
Which means that Stanislaw Mucha's fascinating documentary tracing
the artist's Eastern European ancestry may prove the most useful and
thought-provoking document we have on this crucial 20th century
figure. Especially given how Warhol's homosexuality is such a
non-subject for his relatives, who apparently didn't glimpse his fame
until after his death, we can see the melancholy behind "Blow Job"
and those rows of Marilyns starting to seep through the surface of
his assembly-line production techniques. Somewhat by default, then,
the film allows us to meditate on the relationship between urbanity
and identity. But whither that wandering Warhol lookalike who
populates the edges of the frame, if not Eastern Europe itself?
5. "The Lady and the Duke": Eric Rohmer channels his hypnotic,
chatty energy into the memoirs of Grace Elliott, a Scottish royalist
living in France during the French Revolution who was understandably
horrified by the dismantling of the monarchy. In the era of Chirac,
this is indeed an itchy endeavor to undertake. But it certainly
didn't prevent Rohmer from transforming Elliott's plight into a
phantasmagoria of digital video, painted backdrops and pop-up-book
sets.
4. "La Cienaga": Not since Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing"
have locale and temperature radiated such an nerve-wracking fatalism.
Lucrecia Martel's remarkable feature traces the slow, dreary
deterioration of the married-with-kids middle-class dream under the
Argentinean sun. The energy here is entirely implosive — one
character takes a shower only to wind up even muddier. But Martel
carves out myriad facets from the stalled story. A rough-cut diamond,
to be sure, but one to forever marvel at in all its labyrinthine
brilliance.
3. "Y Tu Mamá También": Houston, we have context.
2. "Russian Ark": Alexander Sokurov's 95-minute shot would
probably place at the top if I felt I could ever get a grasp of it.
For now I'll just say that like Rohmer above, Sokurov posits his
formidable technical grasp (if it's not the longest single-take in
cinema history, it's certainly the first feature of any renown
recorded directly onto hard-disk rather than film), provocatively at
odds with his content. For instance, when the Marquis de Custine, our
host throughout 33 rooms of the Hermitage museum in Russia, says he
will not go forward into the night with the mazurka-mad revelers on
the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, his reticence suggests a longing
to get off the treadmill of progression so endemic to Western
thought. A perfect segue into...
1. "Time Out": In a 1925 essay called "The Hotel Lobby," the
great cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer examined how thoroughly
industrial rationalization had bled into every facet of existence.
Laurent Cantet's corrosive follow-up to "Human Resources" resembles
Kracauer's essay so uncannily that the thing practically serves as a
screenplay. It's all there in this tale about a man who won't tell
his family about his new job, even the hotel lobby itself with its
clandestine activities (both legal and illegal) and its opportunities
for a radical boredom to escape capitalist subjectivity. It doesn't
work out, as the devastating end confirms. But that the possibility
is even laid out is the most liberating cinema experience I had all
year.
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