| Alternative 2009 Top 10 | |
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Carey Fukunaga's debut feature was a vivid work of intense drama and emotion that made a great case for all directors to be cinematographers before they step up to the directorial plate. The story of several Honduran and Mexican emigrants travelling to the USA conveys all of the magnitude of their situation with none of the politics. It is a deeply human story of love, endeavour and gang violence in South and Central America and ever second of this thrilling film is packed with emotion and action. The story is made all the more special by its back story which involved Fukunaga making his own epic journey from the Honduras to the USA atop a train. A fantastic story behind a... well, fantastic story.
Documentaries are all-too-often overly constructred political diatribes; luckily, in 2009 we had a slew of films that sought only to tell their stories. We praised the more light-hearted Sounds Like Teen Spirit in our collective Top 10 but somehow neglected this almost unbearably real account of the Saffron uprising that occurred in Burma in 2007. But far from being the usual dry account of events from the perspective of the news agencies, Burma VJ is compiled from footage collected by secretly operating video journalists (who are outlawed under themilitary dictatorship) running the risk of imprisonment. Reporting right from the centre of the action, these brave reporters/freedom fighters got right amongst the monks as thy protested, and were brutally repressed by the government. The is even a moment where one VJ has to flee the scene of a shooting, pursued by armed forces, and hides behind a log occasionally poking his camera over the top to work out where his hunters are lurking. It doesn't get more real than that. It's hard to explain exactly what is so special about this film. Perhaps its the knowingly wry appropriation of film noir imagery and devices that always induce a little grin, perhaps its the unflinching desire to portray love at its most extreme: regardless of the consequences, or perhaps its the devilish intricacy with which the plot is pieced together. Regardless of exactly what the reason is, Just Another Love Story is an exhilerating tale of love and obsession centred on a depressed crime-scene photographer, an amnesiac woman who is a victim of a car crash he caused, and the psychotic spurned lover she was fleeing. It's deliciously over-the-top, brilliantly clever and darkly funny. All this is topped off with classic noir cinematography that is so rarely achieved these days. I have no idea how this one slipped by so many people.
We're kind of cheating here by lumping Mesrine: Killer Instinct and its sequel Mesrine:Public Enemy Number 1 together here, but together this biopic of legendary French gangster Jacques Mesrine trumps anything put forward by Michael Mann or anyone else in 2009. The first part is a brain-burstingly stylish action thriller that shows Mesrine returning from military service in Algeria, only to find civilian life mundane and depressing. He turns to the gangster lifestyle and is soon rewarded with money, women, imprisonment, an awesome escape, and more crazy antics. It's a dizzying experience which will leave you reeling, in a very good way. The sequel lacks the heady action of the opening salvo, but what it lacks in energy it more than compensates for with the intriguing depths it plumbs in studying the neurotic idiosyncrasies and delusions of grandeur developed by Mesrine in later life. It's an exciting, dark and heady mix that makes for compez
This superb French drama manages to take you through the trials and tribulations of a normal French family over the decades (up until the present day). What is masterful about the film is that it doesn’t rely on sensationalist twists or unrealistic events but rather turns the mundane into entertaining and involving cinema. There are a plethora of great performances and the director (taking on only his second feature) produces a sense of hope and optimism in even its darkest moments. Belgian actress Déborah François is excellent (as she was in the recent release Unmade Beds) and the rest of the cast, most notably those playing her too warring siblings, deliver well-paced performances allowing the viewer to relate to them no matter what stage in life they find themselves in. A tough but rewarding film from Martin Provost, Seraphine tells the story of famous German art collector Wilhelm Uhde. Set in 1914, Uhde is renting an apartment in the town of Senlis, forty kilometers away from Paris, in order to write and to take a rest from the hectic life he has been living in the capital. The cleaning lady is a rather rough-and-ready forty-year-old woman (after whom the film is named and who is the laughing stock of others). One day, Wilhelm who has been invited by his landlady, notices a small painting lying about in her living room. He is stunned to learn that the artist is none other than Séraphine.
Another slow-burning period drama, Everlasting Moments is a beautiful portrait of a troubled housewife Maria Larsson whose discovery of photography helps her to find an escape from the difficulties of a poor family in early twentieth century Sweden. Underneath this simple, and perhaps somewhat bland-looking, exterior is a detailed, nuanced and utterly mesmerizing portrait of a complex character and the tumultuous times in which she lives. Every incident, every emotion and every twist is intricately bound to Maria's life story in a way that not only justifies and explains them but emotionally invests the audience in the world on screen with a completeness rarely created (one scene of domestic violence caused a mass gasp that measured around 4 on the Richter scale, no mean feat for a Swedish-language period drama).
In a year of revenge stories, it would be easy to sit back and soak up the big names of Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood in their respective efforts at producing meaningful, if still glossy and exciting, social commentary. However, we chose to appreciate the timeless universality of Katalin Varga, in which we accompany the eponymous heroine on a journey to make someone from the past pay for her suffering. The themes, and the narrative, are outwardly very simple. But the real beauty of this film comes from two things: the lofty cinematography and the humanity of those it portrays, which extends above and beyond any contemporaries looking to be edgy.
OK, so having been directed by Park Chan Wook (of Oldboy fame) this film may not have slipped completely under the radar, but it certainly didn't make the splash it was capable of. Whilst it opens into a somewhat confused spin on the vampire myth, the plot soon tracks a priest (turned vampire) his married childhood sweetheart and her buffoonish husband into an increasingly dark and complex moral dilemma that culminates in an epic battle between carnal desire and moral resraint that spills over from the torrid emotional interiors of these characters into a gory, destructive reality. All of which is delivered with the kind of stunning visual excess that has become Park Chan-Wook's trademark. It's chilling, it's warped, it's even funny: how a story can vacillate between such extremes of violence, humour and love is utterly inexplicable.
We're staying with Korean cinema for our final choice, this time though it's director Kim Jee Woon who wowed us with an 'Oriental Western' inspired by 'The Good, The Bad, The Weird, but with a playful and exciting new angle that sees The Ugly (or The Weird, in this instance) drive a chase between three warring bandits fighting over a treasure map unwittingly stolen from Japanese army officials during a train heist in 1930s Manchuria. The ensuing mayhem is brilliantly put together, and encompasses all-out-action, stylish shots and witty plays on the preconceptions inherent in Western. Easily the most fun film of the year, and certainly one of the most overlooked in critics' top ten lists.
Don't forget to check out our list bonanza comprising the MovieVortex 2009 Top 10, Mike's films of the Noughties and Cassam's Top 10 of the Decade.
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After completing the rounds of our beloved contributors and compiling what we feel is a pretty representative Top 10 of 2009, we were left with a nagging feeling that some films had just slipped from people's radars. There's nothing we hate more than that here at MovieVortex and so, admittedly a little belatedly, we've ollected our ten favourite films you may have missed last year but really should make an effort to see... 
2. Burma VJ
3. Just Another Love Story
4. Mesrine 
5. First Day of the Rest of Your Life
6. Seraphine
8. Katalin Varga
