Last time I counted down my favourite new films of 2020. Below are the films that were new to me this year. Coming shortly, other bits of ‘media’ I’ve enjoyed this year.
The type of birdwatcher who keeps lists talk about ‘a big year’, one where they will dedicate themselves to shuttling from one end of the country to the other, in search of creating as exhaustive and rarefied a list of sightings as possible. 2020 forced ‘a big year’ of film watching upon me. To date, I’ve watched 366 feature films this year, more than any year on record by about a third. An excess of free time – I was furloughed for many months of this year – balanced out an inability to concentrate properly on most things, including films. A luxury turned into a chore, I kept watching even through long periods of wondering if I even liked films any more. I chipped away at my project to watch all of Sight & Sound’s Top 250 films (38 to go before the new list comes out next year); rewatched a lot of favourites to write the pieces from this newsletter earlier in the year; formed a ‘pure cinema’ watch club with an equally pretentious friend; got schooled in ’90s popular cinema by my girlfriend (thank you for The Firm, The Pelican Brief, Philadelphia, Sleepless in Seattle, A Few Good Men, Basic Instinct… my parents were far too conscious of showing us age-appropriate material at the time, it seems); and failed to watch a lot of more ambitious, mind-expanding work. Looking at the list below, most of what I’ve held dearest this year is from that category, but it’s been the hardest to turn myself towards. The cinema is usually the space I can rely on to help me push through this resistance to uncertain or dubious pleasure (and one of the reasons that the overall lack of creativity in London’s rep scene is a shame). Despite that, there was more than enough to keep my spirits for film alive from films that were ‘new to me’ rather than new to the world. I’ve laid out eleven ‘very special’ films below and then another thirty-one(!) other strong recommendations from a year on the brink, on the sofa.
Ticket of No Return: A woman walks into a Berlin bar, wearing an absurdly good outfit, piles up downed cognac glasses in front of her, listens to meretricious madams indirectly scold her for her ways, is asked to leave by the proprietor, stumbles out, smashing every glass on exit. One would think this would pall across a feature-length film, but no, this was one of my real revelations this year. With the small sumptuousness of Kenneth Anger and the riotous indulgence of Daisies, it made me excited to see more of Ulrike Ottinger’s work in 2021. Thanks to Metrograph in NYC and Arsenal in Berlin for being such good advocates for what she does.
Ang Lee’s ‘Father Knows Best’ Trilogy: I was urged towards this loose trilogy – comprising Ang Lee’s debut Pushing Hands (1988), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) – after watching The Farewell. With no shade to Lulu Wang’s film, Lee is operating on another level, giving imaginative space to all members of the family rather than just its wayward child. Deeply funny while full of quiet devastation, his three tales of generational tension and cross-cultural confusion are full of sophisticated turns without easy answers. In a year where families were either living on top of each other more than ever or painfully distanced, it was a delight to see others struggle with how to cope with what can and cannot be said among our most intimate connections. Sihung Lung for president. (Eat Drink Man Woman is streaming on MUBI; The Wedding Banquet is on VOD; Pushing Hands is on VOD or Altitude have a DVD box set of all three with serviceable transfers).
Another Decade (VOD via LUX): Subscribers to this newsletter will know how affected I was by Jemma Desai’s ‘This Work Isn’t for Us’. Morgan Quiantance’s brilliant archive collage tells the same depressing story as Desai’s piece: that the white liberal illusion of multiculturalism and racial parity is a dream that cyclically rises and dies, only to be rediscovered by every generation, with no real gains for the people it purports to ‘assist’. Like Mark Leckey’s ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’, but replacing dancefloor utopianism with artist-led anti-colonialism.
Taipei Story (streaming on Criterion Channel): One of my first columns was about Edward Yang’s Yi Yi and it was beautiful to catch up with his second feature. Another tightly wound story of alienation, it justified its place on this list just by Chin Tsai’s flowing hair and sunglasses (the Monica Vitti in L’Avventura Memorial Award).
The Age of Innocence (VOD): One of the great sadnesses of Martin Scorsese having been claimed by the filmbros is that the many other shades to his filmmaking beyond gangsters get short shrift (wither Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in the rankings of his great works?). Like Small Axe, it reminded me of a time when period dramas sought to do more than wow you with costume design (though it does that too). As good as Phantom Thread? Only my repeated rewatches (hopefully in a cinema next time) will tell!
The Go-Between (VOD): Despite Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter’s other collaboration The Servant ranking as an all-time favourite AND this being set very near where I grew up, I didn’t make time to watch it until this year. Swoonsome throughout, it has the febrile glamour of Schelsinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, but told from a child’s perspective. Like the best films about children acquiring knowledge too soon (Pixote, Summer 1993, L’Enfance Nue) it manages to convey the child’s emotions at what they are barely able to process. Also, another strong entry into the ‘Alan Bates phwoar’ cinematic canon.
Golden Eighties (streaming on Criterion Channel): Despite also offering one of less than five films I started but couldn’t make it through this year (you can tell me another time why News From Home is worth watching), Chantal Akerman pulled me back from the brink with this joyful story of crossed love affairs in a shopping centre. Full of glossy looks, lovely musical turns and cryptic messages about capital, this was a delicious treat.
Will It Snow for Christmas? (available on excellent BFI disc): Like the dreamy Peppermint Soda, this is a supremely evocative story of French childhood. Sandrine Veysset’s autobiographical telling of her farmhouse childhood mixes the bucolic and the brutal. Deserves to be better known.
Nenette et Boni (VOD): Every time watching a Claire Denis film for the first time is an event, but it surprised me how little this woozily sensuous dream is mentioned among her best. Throwing some of the major plot points away to concentrate on the bubbling of a coffee maker or the texture of a jumper, this is a good pairing with her 35 Shots of Rum (which makes the purchase of a rice cooker a hammer blow). Also it consigns Trump-supporting fuck weasel Vincent Gallo to an angry boulanger bit part, swearing at croissants, and I can’t imagine a better place for him to be in limbo.
This Magnificent Cake! (VOD): A felted stop-motion film about the worst excesses of the Scamble for Africa, this Belgian medium-length could have been veered into cutesy gothic. Instead, it cracks open an imaginative space into the unthinkable, capturing the venality of the colonial mindset. Without pretending to understand the experiences of the Congolese (who faced some of the worst ravages of African colonialism), its five incidents leave a heavy brand on the memory, often with gossamer fine means.
The Colour of Pomegranates (streaming on BFI Player): it takes a lot these days for me to have Homer’s reaction to Twin Peaks, but this was peak ‘Brilliant… I have no idea what is going on’ cinema. Essentially a series of tableau vivant that relate to the life of poet Sayat Nova, it’s hard to classify and seems to be wrought from an entirely different cinematic grammar, as though world cinema history had continued along Dziga Vertov’s line of thought rather than Hollywood’s. A lazarus taxon you can hold to your breast, full of queer undercurrents and visual delights that don’t require literal explanation.
Thirty-one strong recommendations from this year’s watching
Moolaadé: Ousmane Sembène righteous attack on Female Genital Mutilation shows the difference between a story made by an insider and an outsider. Sembène – who toured the film to help change hearts and minds on the practice – creates a joyous, ambivalent panorama of life in a small village in Burkina Faso. Without this broader context – which an outsider might have excised – his argument would have been hollow.
L’Argent (streaming on Criterion Channel): colder than ice Bresson, but somehow all the blood draining makes it all the more heartbreaking.
All that Jazz (VOD): Megalomania side by side with the genius that (almost) justifies its excesses.
The Chambermaid (streaming on BFI Player and on VOD): Superficially similar to Roma, there’s more interrogation of the lived experience of a Mexican maid in five minutes of this than in the whole of Cuarón’s diorama with human models.
High Heels: One of the biggest fights this year (mercifully few and mercifully small) between me and my girlfriend was her infecting this perfect fantasia to tell me Paul Dacre was being made head of OfCom. Like being kicked in the back of the head during a massage.
Loves of a Blonde (on Blu-Ray from Second Run): The rare ’60s film that treats a young female protagonist as more than an ornament, with stunning cinematography and some winning slices of life (the end scene in the crowded bed is a classic).
The Hot Rock (VOD) Robert Redford joyfully bopping along the street at the end of this underseen heist gem gave me a rare lightness.
Stella Dallas (streaming on Amazon Prime): The 1937 version with Barbara Stanwyck, that is. It’d been a long time since I had such a strong emotional reaction to a melodrama, but this gave me Sirk-level catharsis.
Mississippi Masala: A bit of a joke that this warm-hearted, unclichéd story of cross-cultural romance isn’t available on disc or VOD. Mira Nair makes broad-appeal films about ‘niche’ experiences, and we could do more of that kind of thing.
Blue Collar (on VOD but I watched the lovely Indicator Blu-Ray): suffered a bit in my first viewing from jumping between genres (heist, broad comedy, hardscrabble slice of life, agitprop social realism), but Schaeder’s directorial debut makes a merit of its restlessness. Yaphet Kotto is a king.
Dekalog (on Arrow Blu-Ray): For some reason, Kieślowski never gets mentioned in ‘best directors’ conversations. Perhaps too fanciful for realists and too honest and unsparing for those seeking fantasy, Dekalog is nonetheless full of transcendent moments that expanded my vision when life felt very small and narrow.
Khrustaloyov, My Car (on VOD but I watched the Arrow Blu-Ray): I never made it to the end of Hard to Be a God, but this one was just as ambitious, far more propulsive and occasionally poignant.
I Saw the Devil (VOD): Plenty of winces in this one, even for the gore jaded, but somehow less prurient about serial killers than many a more restrained American effort.
Alice in the Cities (VOD and streaming on BFI Player): Having only come of age in cinema when Wenders was a bit of a spent force, it was bracing to discover what made the legend. A wondrous mix of improvisational, meandering narrative and beautiful, carefully composed aesthetic.
Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project and The Grand Bizarre: Jodie Mack’s two musical about material culture are a real treat. Dusty Stacks is a rare thing: a work about something that has had its time (her mother’s gigantic music poster-making business), without tipping into nostalgia. The Grand Bizarre treks across the world with pixelated stop motion fabric, with Mack’s score a symphony that points to the way a nation’s objects expresses its spirit.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (streaming on BFI Player): Its warped time was perfect for the time, while its strange journeys was exactly what I was otherwise lacking, fish sex and all.
Moana (VOD and streaming on Disney+): My mother’s standard Dory-inspired advice to ‘just keep swimming’ was joined by the spirit-lifting arrogance of ‘You’re Welcome’ this year.
Uptight (VOD): A weird insight into a universe where Black-led stories weren’t by hook or crook but had the production scale of West Side Story. Not perfect and full of queasy stereotypes, but worth it for the disturbing hall of mirrors sequence alone.
Irma Vep (streaming on BFI Player): Given that Olivier Assayas also provided one of my worst watches of 2020 (the inexplicable and blank Euro-pudding Demonlover), it was a surprise to find his take on one of my personal allergy subjects (films about filmmaking) was a loose-limbed piece of ‘90s cool.
Vengeance is Mine (available on handsome Eureka DVD): We are with the killer throughout, but never get closer to understanding him. In a year where true crime blistered into an ever greater cultural juggernaut, it’s a relief to watch something that rewards our prurience with the reality.
Kagemusha (VOD): Weirdly not spoken of as highly as some of Kurosawa’s other biggest samurai films, but this takes the outlandishly aestheticised to the next level with acting that is entirely stylistically removed from Western modes. A real treat that I wished I’d had a chance to see on the big screen.
The Burmese Harp (streaming on Criterion Channel) and Fires on the Plain (streaming on Criterion Channel): Watching both of these films by Kon Ichikawa, it’s pretty startling to think about how Britain comparatively dealt with its war record in the 1950s. A generation raised on a thousand adventure stories of global warfare in the UK, versus unflinching (if surprisingly stylish) portrayal of Japan’s atrocities both against the enemy and their own soldiers. Fires on the Plain makes an excellent companion to The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On…
Cure (streaming on BFI Player and MUBI): I could sit and watch this a hundred times and still not fully understand how the uncanny mood of emptiness and ill ease is built. A serial killer film like no other.
Suture (on VOD but I watched the very tidy Arrow Blu-Ray): It’s easy to compare this to Get Out – another cross-racial body swap genre film – but rather than exploiting horror tropes, this is cut from stranger cloth. It’s view on race might be less urgent and more diffuse, but there’s plenty to dig into here, including some stunning black and white cinematography.
Your Ecstatic Self: Rehana Zaman’s film (which – full disclosure – was commissioned through ICO, my day job, but I had nothing to do with) is built upon my favourite thing: a brilliant and unexpected anecdote. The story of the director’s brother’s sexual and spiritual awakening is a stunner, even before Zaman puts its ideas into a broader story of cultural appropriation.
The Legend of the Stardust Brothers (VOD and disc via Third Window Films): If you enjoy Hausu and all its inspired nuttiness, take a slice of this gonzo glam musical about Japan’s finest imaginary rock band.
Trust (on VOD): I watched a lot of ‘by hook or crook’ films this year, but few of them had an ounce of the grace and style of Hal Hartley’s losers’ fantasia. Somewhere between social realism and John Hughes candyfloss, the deadpan covers over a thousand sadnesses.
Mother (streaming on BFI Player and on VOD): Parasite sent me further back into Bong’s back catalogue. I feel like this rebalances some of the tonal issues I have with The Host and Memories of Murder, while also keeping their freewheeling and probing thematic range.
Daddy Longlegs: Goes side by side of The Squid & the Whale in tales of distressed Bohemian New York parenting. Our screening was ratcheted up a notch by playing the ‘war mix’, which added to the Safdie chaotic energy.
Mandabi (new restoration coming to cinemas in 2021): Ousmane Sembène’s story of a Senegalese man trying to cash a money order from his nephew in Paris is as funny as it is cutting about post-colonial Africa.