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BEST OF THE DECADE By Mark Gross

I was a little nonplused when Roy Frumkes, the editor of Films In Review, asked me to contribute a list of my favorite ten films from the first decade of the 21st Century, seeing as cinematically, my consciousness lies resolutely in the first few decades of the 20th. Right now my favorite film is the Garbo vehicle FLESH AND THE DEVIL from 1927, which I’m watching over and over. I think it’s sublimely beautiful and mysterious, in a way that doesn’t necessarily connect with the somewhat melodramatic story, along with some of the Warner pre-codes, such as FEMALE staring Ruth Chatterton – when’s the last time you heard that name in a conversation? – being a close runner-up. Nonetheless, I managed to put together a list of thirty films from the past decade, which I have finally winnowed down to eleven; I can’t seem to get away from asymmetry. My method here is strictly personal, as these are films that have simply stayed in my mind, ultimately merging their images with my own memories and feelings. Over the past decade, my favorite films have come from Asia, especially Hong Kong and Taiwan, which I feel are now producing films that are both immeasurably personal yet able to connect with a popular audience in the manner of American films from years past. Many of the best directors in the world today are working there, such as Wong-Kar Wei, Edward Yang (now sadly deceased), Ang Lee, and Johnnie To, a director, while little known here, has been making a series of gangster films that are elegantly innovative and viscerally engaging in a manner that seems to combine the Shakespearean flourishes of Francis Ford Coppola with the no-nonsense approach of Raoul Walsh. I would also like to point out that the order of my list does not imply excellence, but is simply a reflection of the manner in which these films appeared in my mind.

1. 2046 (2006) by Wong Kar-Wei.

2046 is my favorite film of the past decade. The film is so intimately romantic while infinitely entrancing visually that I’m simply overwhelmed every time I look at it. One might consider 2046 the follow-up to Mr. Kar-Wei’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE from 2000, but whereas IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is very pared down in its sense of character and place, 2046 is deliriously expansive, filling the screen with characters, exotic locations and delicious romantic couplings that boggle the eye. 2046 stands for the number of a hotel room in Hong Kong, and also the title of a science-fiction novel. 2046 – the film – could be seen as a reverie that, by imagining a future time, is trying to make sense out of the past, specifically the loves of this one writer (played by Tony Leung, who as an actor has developed a fascinating mixture of the hair-trigger physicality of Jean-Paul Belmondo with the matinee idol presence of Clark Gable) where his sense of loss loops through the visage of every woman he meets. The film itself, replete with beaded glass doors, mirrors and seductively deep corridors that resembles shots from a distantly remembered silent movie, looks like a Von Sternberg film edited by Chris Marker. In other words, a romantic fever dream, set during the Hong Kong political uprisings of the late 60’s, that is continually standing back and asking questions, while creating some of the most visually beautiful and extraordinarily sensual sequences I’ve ever seen, to the point I feel I’ve actually lived through the various personal stories set forth in the film. Simply put, 2046 is one of the most pleasurable two hours I’ve ever spent in the cinema. (I should also point out that the director has discovered an incredibly sultry version of the Latin standard “Siboney” by Connie Francis that manages to infuse a sense of simultaneous longing and reserve into the circular narrative of the film.)

2. YI YI (2000) by Edward Yang

We now come to YI YI, a Taiwanese film that seemed to usher in the new century with a surprising sense of freshness and intimacy, not to mention a strange infusion – especially unexpected in a film set amidst the glass and steel enclosures of upper-middle class Taipei – of enchantment. While Edward Yang often stated in interviews his admiration for Antonioni (whose influence is certainly palpable in Mr. Yang’s earlier films), what I think of most while watching YI YI, in particular the remarkable opening scenes shot from a child’s perspective where the camera itself seems simultaneously shy and inquisitive, is the Truffaut of THE 400 BLOWS. Although filtered through panes of glass in an almost completely artificial urban landscape, in this film the light itself seems filled with possibility. This child-like sense of innocence is also present in the storyline, for instance, the sequence where the father (played with remarkable sympathy by Nien-Jen Wu) meets his high school sweetheart at a large family wedding and in the fake-bucolic setting of a formal garden reenacts their first kiss. Throughout the film, Mr. Yang’s direction is precise in the delineation of character yet unapologetically passionate. Unfortunately, this was Mr. Yang’s final film, so what at first seemed like the heralding of a new cinematic sensibility has instead become a lasting testament to the ever-expanding vision of possibly the most talented contemporary Asian director.

3. MULHOLLAND DR. (2001) by David Lynch

While I confess to having been a TWIN PEAKS fanatic (to the point of seeing the show in a TWIN PEAKS themed restaurant on 10th Avenue with Laura Palmer’s body-bag encased corpse hung in effigy over the bar) I’ve never been all that enthusiastic about David Lynch’s feature films. There are always amazing moments, such as the severed ear in the flower garden from BLUE VELVET, or Robert Blake’s creepy cell-phone caper in LOST HIGHWAY, but great moments, no matter how poignant or visually compelling, do not make a good movie, even though I’d like to think otherwise. In a way, Lynch could be seen as a creator of imagistic fragments that reside within the context of a movie. Often, as in LOST HIGHWAY, the entire plot and character structure seems to be put together after the fact, fairly haphazardly, so that these images, which often have little to do with the film as a whole, can exist. Not that I have a problem with open-form essay films masquerading as thrillers; in fact, I love this sort of thing, but in Lynch’s work there is often very little connection or for that matter, simple visual energy within the structure as a whole. One often sits there waiting for the next beautifully enigmatic image, which appears about once or twice an hour amidst an extraordinary amount of filler and fairly unfocused improvisations. MULHOLLAND DR., on the other hand, is in many ways an old fashioned, full-bodied entertainment (in the best sense of those words) filled with deliriously intersecting plots of melodrama and mystery, characters that one can completely identify with (even when they transform gender) an amazing ensemble cast at the top of their game, and entrancing, dream-like imagery by Mr. Lynch that for once increases one’s sense of involvement and enjoyment. Also, fairly unusual for this director’s work, Mr. Lynch clearly loves all these characters, and while watching the film, one begins to love them as well. For this viewer, MULHOLLAND DR. is far and away the best American film of the decade.

4. FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002) by Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes has thus far had a bracing, yet simultaneously self-effacing career. Possibly this is the fate of a strikingly original talent attempting to work within the American commercial cinema, even outside of the strict controls of a large corporate studio. Nonetheless, Mr. Haynes films, even when they don’t completely gel, as in I’M NOT THERE, are still one of the more positive signs of life in recent movies. After debuting with a brilliant meditation on Karen Carpenter featuring Barbie dolls, Mr. Haynes’ work has retained a strong sense of the conceptual along with a sympathy for characters whose presence, not to mention their true feelings, have often been excised from mainstream movies. FAR FROM HEAVEN is his most successful achievement to date. While the plot re-creates the ambience – both cinematic and emotional – of a mid-fifties back lot Universal melodrama, the actors, especially Julianne Moore as a heart-broken suburban housewife dealing with problems of sexual identity and conjugal intimacy that were kept strictly segregated both in films as well as the real lives of people 50 years ago, imbue the characters with an extraordinary sense of interiority and everyday feeling. As in certain films of Fassbinder (such as THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN) this stylistic conflict between an exaggerated visual setting that evokes the glamour and fantasy aspects of past Hollywood films against a very informal acting style (as well as a documentary like sense of personal history) can be initially off-putting. Still, the compelling humanity of the cast goes a long way to integrate the formal exercise of Ed Lachman’s chiaroscuro-drenched cinematography with the realistic concerns of contemporary characters hidden within the 50’s fashions. (I must also point out that in the film Ms. Moore drives the same Chevy aqua station wagon my father drove when I was a child, which of course is beyond criticism.) To label FAR FROM HEAVEN a slavish copy of a Douglas Sirk movie (as many critics have done) is to ignore the incredible reservoir of feeling that unfolds as the film unreels, which still touches me today in retrospect almost a decade later. Then again, perhaps it’s that very humanity underneath the dazzling style these critics are objecting to.

5. TALK TO HER (2002) by Pedro Almodovar

Almodovar’s films during the past decade have taken on the mysterious quality of transformation and altered perception found in a series of Chinese boxes. In his narratives, Almodovar has focused on a deep sense of personal tragedy, exposing feelings of bereavement, estrangement, and loss, combined with a wry, often ribald sense of humor that is continually surprising. Like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, Almodovar’s plot lines do not so much converge as merge unexpectedly in ways that are completely unanticipated, yet in the end are revealed to be completely in balance from the beginning, altering our perception both of the characters’ plight and of ourselves as well. Almodovar has also developed into a major visual stylist, creating, through a sensitivity to depth of field and color, images that evoke the Rococo contours of Boucher and Fragonard. TALK TO HER is by far my favorite. I saw the movie without any knowledge of the story beforehand, and enjoyed it enormously. I’ll simply say, for those who have not yet seen the film, that TALK TO HER is about the unexpected depth of male friendship, the beautiful implausibility of romance, and the often stunning reversals that make up these two categories. Then again, for all the Strum and Drang the main characters go through, watching TALK TO HER is a bit like consuming an especially tasty box of Belgian truffles.

6. TWILIGHT SAMURAI (2002) by Yoji Yamada

TWILIGHT SAMURAI (set at the end of Japan’s Tokugawa era, roughly 1860, when the Shogunate was losing power and the country was being transformed from a feudal society into a modern one) may be many things, but it is most definitely NOT a Samurai film, especially the kind we’ve come to expect since Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO, with a lone stranger slashing up the landscape in a blaze of steel and macho posturing. TASOGARE SEIBEI, the original Japanese title of Yoji Yamada’s spare yet visually lyrical film, roughly translates as “Sir Twilight,” the name the main character’s fellow clan members have bestowed upon him because he rushes home at twilight and shuns socializing. Though Seibei, the main character, is from the samurai class, he has very little money and dresses in rags, creating a severe rift of social reality between himself and his contemporaries. While there are a number of breathtaking martial arts sequences in the film (especially one featuring Min Tanaka, the improvisational Butoh dancer) TWILIGHT SAMURAI focuses on the transformation of a society seen through the prism of one man’s determination and practical sense of being. There is also a love story, but this is a love that is tempered by the characters’ consciousness of their own social position as well as the immeasurable changes taking place around them. When I met Mr. Yamada in New York during his retrospective at MOMA, I asked him what his favorite American film was, and was a little taken aback when he answered ROCKY. However, unlike the high octane schmaltz content of Stallone’s magnum opus, Yamada’s films explore the real lives of working people with a sentiment that is authentic as well as inherently cinematic. While breathtakingly beautiful, putting one in mind of the mid-60’s collaboration between cinematographer Freddie Young and director David Lean, the images of TWILIGHT SAMURAI also reflect the steadfastness and humble mind set of its hero, while imbuing the story with an almost Tolstoy-like presence (think The Death Of Ivan Illyich) concerning the material aspects of everyday life, until the film grain itself seems to pulse with that which is left unspoken by the main characters.

7. THE NEW WORLD (2005) by Terrence Malick

I saw THE NEW WORLD, Terrence Malick’s serene yet enormously affecting re-telling of the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, at a packed screening. In an attempt to drum up interest for the movie by emphasizing the teen age love angle, hundreds of high school students had been invited. Soon after the movie started, they began throwing popcorn at each other, creating cryptic shadows offset by the film’s majestic images of cypresses and ungainly roots evoking pre-Colonial America which are still present on the Virginia coast today. As in Malick’s DAYS AND HEAVEN (1978), this love story is told through the visual contrast and brazen beauty of unpopulated landscapes. Although I haven’t seen the film in four years, those gigantic roots washed by yellowish foam still haunt my dreams. Terrence Malick’s films occupy an unique place in the contemporary American cinema where fate and nature intersect, as in the language-dense fiction of Cormac McCarthy or the late paintings of Winslow Homer. I understand that a director’s cut of THE NEW WORLD has been released on Blu-ray, comprised of longer takes of the same images of roots and foliage. Not having seen this version I can’t really comment, but meditating on THE NEW WORLD’s primordial imagery is the key to understanding the power of Malick’s vision, so for me more would be all the better. In many ways, THE NEW WORLD is a film of the 70’s, like the multilayered works of Robert Altman that create multiple universes within the context of a single narrative. By this, I mean a movie that is less a neat character arc than a series of images that intrude into our watching, creating a feeling and a sense of place that transcends story, meaning, and even the time spent in a theater. This is not to take away from the many moving performances in the film, especially Q’orianka Kilchor as Pocahontas and Christian Bale. What Malick has achieved with his actors is a similar kind of meditative stance also present in the film’s imagery. We don’t so much watch these characters’ interactions as dream them in a kind of slow motion manner that comes across as pure emotion.

8. SPIDER (2002) by David Cronenberg

Back in 2002, SPIDER opened at the Angelika Cinemas in Soho to total disinterest and vanished within a few weeks. Like Malick’s THE NEW WORLD, SPIDER has retrospectively gained a strong reputation on DVD. Based on the novel by Patrick McGrath and written in a deceptively straightforward style that blends a Gothic tale of terror with a Samuel Beckett-like interior monologue, the film tells the story of Spider (Ralph Fiennes), a slightly sinister former mental patient living in a halfway house in a poor section of London. The rooming house is a few blocks away from where Spider grew up, and as he spends his days roaming through the narrow, dilapidated streets, his childhood memories, especially the murder of his father, seep into his perceptions of the present, at first coloring them, and then taking over completely. Soon he can no longer tell the difference between the people he deals with everyday, and these phantoms that haunt his dreams. While the film is from Spider’s point of view, the performances as well as the individual images are pitched at different rhythms, enabling a viewer to differentiate between objective reality and Spider’s own psychosis. This method, which is present in the novel through the different uses of language and narration, brings into focus not only this particular tale of madness, but questions what perception is, and how it is often linked with social and economic reality. SPIDER is also one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen. Cronenberg explicitly shows how these haunted images of an unstable mind have direct ramifications in the world of ordinary human interaction. Never before has a dull street corner bathed in sunlight seemed so frightening. While Cronenberg has long been considered the prime filmmaker of unfilmable novels (such as NAKED LUNCH and J.G. Ballard’s CRASH), SPIDER is in many ways his most challenging and cinematically most successful film.

9. SUMMER HOURS (2008) by Olivier Assayas

Back in 1994, during the French Film Week at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theatre, I saw my first film directed by Olivier Assayas, COLD WATER, originally commissioned by French tv for a series about the teenage reminiscences of film directors. Assayas’ film was an unprecedented vision of provincial French life from the early seventies that had an amazing directness in spite of the experimental form, combining a Bressonian rigor with a swiftly moving camera that seemed to change a viewer’s perception about the events one was watching even while the actors (through the somnambulistic acting and use of backlighting) were being transformed into shadows. Ever since, I’ve been following the director’s work, albeit generally unhappily as his films have verged more into a kind of stiff post-modernism, alleviated only by the marvelous performances of Maggie Cheung in IRMA VEP(1996) and CLEAN (2004). SUMMER HOURS, on the other hand, is simply remarkable, combining Assayas’ sense of visual analysis with a deep feeling for the mysterious interaction between people, especially those who grow up together. (The plot concerns what happens among the family of a deceased artist.) Both the actors and the cherished objects that once belonged to the departed mother are bathed in an autumnal glow that expresses their uniqueness even while this moment of being is quickly passing before our very eyes. One might call the style of SUMMER HOURS, set in a rambling country house surrounded by overgrown trees and meadows, a fascinating mix of Jean Renoir’s lyricism with the clinically passionate eye of Georges Franju, but ultimately the film is an unique cinematic expression that simply must be seen, completely fulfilling the promise of Assayas’ early films, and I recommend it highly to anyone who hasn’t yet caught up with it.

10. CASINO ROYALE (2006) by Martin Campbell, Barbara Broccoli & Michael G. Wilson

In case you blinked when your eye came upon this item in a list of mostly foreign and indie art films, there is no mistake. CASINO ROYALE may be a bit overblown at times, especially the extended action sequences at the beginning and end, but in general I think the movie is simply wonderful, a highly successful throwback to a time (the 1960’s, to be specific) when big budget movies could be artfully produced and directed as well as accessible to a large audience. Let’s say that the scale as well as theme of the film is essentially human, albeit within the context of the expected Bond glamour and excitement. The film is also a dead-on accurate adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel (much admired by Raymond Chandler), a book based on the reality of character relationships amid the conflicts of feeling between the political and personal. Daniel Craig’s brutal yet tenderly subtle lead performance as Bond goes a long way towards defining the deep emotional range of the film against a fluid and sleekly dazzling production, along with Martin Campbell’s career-defining direction, possibly the sharpest of any Bond film, certainly since Peter Hunt’s ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969). One only need look at the way the camera movements enhance the ensemble acting, incorporating a strong sense of foreshadowing and wry self-consciousness that leads to a closer understanding of Bond’s personal conflicts as the plot works itself towards the tete a tete of the violent conclusion.

11. BATTLE ROYALE (2000) by Kinji Fukasaku

I’ve put off writing about BATTLE ROYALE until last, not so much because I think it’s the least compelling of these films but mostly because I’m not certain what to say about it. BATTLE ROYALE was never released in this country because of the killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and for many years was available only as an import DVD. There’s a quality to both BATTLE ROYALE’s style and subject that induces silence, yet Fukasaku’s passionate stance compels dialogue. (The basic story, derived from a Japanese magna of the same name, is as follows: In a future time, a class of close-knit high school students are forced to kill one another on a nationwide television show.) There is a directness to the way Fukasaku photographs his teenaged actors that recalls Pasolini’s Ragazzi in post-liberation Rome, as well as the teenaged protagonists of CRAZED FRUIT, a Japanese film from the 50’s that in its clear-eyed stance on emotional cruelty and social prejudice influenced Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS. Having lived through the Second World War, the aftermath of which is the subject of the Fukasaku’s best films, such as UNDER THE FLAG OF THE RISING SUN(1972), BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY(1973) and GRAVEYARD OF HONOR(1975), the director took what in other hands might have become a slice of sci-fi camp, and treated the subject with a simplicity and tragic gravity that compels an audience to watch in a manner that is active and emotional. Although the world these students live in is affluent, Fukasaku reveals the desolation of the inner core of their beings in much the same way as Rossellini filmed the children playing among bombed-out landscapes in GERMANY YEAR ZERO. In other words, the futuristic landscapes of BATTLE ROYALE are mostly interior, brought about by Fukasaku’s attention on those idealistic and open faces. Because of Fukasaku’s stark yet intimate focus on his group of talented young actors and the world they inhabit (he photographs them in much the same way as Robert Flaherty photographed Nanook), BATTLE ROYALE receives my nomination as one of the best science-fiction films ever made, head and shoulders above such exercises in directorial ego as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and LORD OF THE FLIES.

Runners-up: DONNIE DARKO (2001) by Richard Kelly; THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (2006) by Ken Loach; THE BEACHES OF AGNES (2008) by Agnes Varda; LUST, CAUTION (2007) by Ang Lee; PTU [POLICE TACTICAL UNIT] (2003) by Johnnie To.

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