There have been many cinematic highlights this year and choosing a top ten selection has been quite the numerical wrestle, with many falling by the wayside to make the final cut. Documentaries as a genre are gaining widespread popular momentum, winning big at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and that is reflected in three of this ten. There are many films I haven’t managed to see that could well have influenced my selection including: The Selfish Giant; Blue is the Warmest Colour; Upstream Colour; Blue Jasmine and All is Lost. Here however is the best of what I did see.
The following films all had a UK release in 2013.
10 – Reality
Matteo Garrone / Italy/France / 2012 / 116 mins
In this Italian drama the well-liked and respected fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena) becomes obsessed with appearing on Big Brother. After attending the auditions, he makes altruistic changes to his lifestyle in case the show’s elusive producers are secretly watching him. These adjustments lead to disruptions with his wife, his friends and his business.
Although Big Brother has faded into near obscurity (in the UK at least), it’s legacy lives on. Matteo Garrone’s film is a tender but pitiful exploration into a culture that holds untalented (as in not famous for any particular talent) individuals in such high and unwarranted regard. With programmes like The Only Way is Essex breeding more reality television stars, Garrone’s film reminds us that people only achieve celebrity status through the unadulterated adoration of “ordinary” citizens.
9 – Broken
Rufus Norris / UK / 2012 / 91 mins
In a close in North London, young girl Skunk (Eloise Laurence) witnesses a violent attack by one of her neighbours on another young man from the area. The film then charts how the local community reacts to it including the attacker’s and the victim’s families. For Skunk, who has already lost her mother, it is an abrupt and shocking baptism into the grim and gritty realities of adult life.
Now Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris’ first feature film is strikingly tender. As a child lead, Laurence gives a laudable performance as Tim Roth’s curious and unabashed daughter. Adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel, the film looks at how people deal with problems they have to live alongside and the different manifestations people’s attitudes can take: disregard, acceptance or confrontation.
Anthony Wonke / UK / 2013 / 94 mins
This documentary retells the horrific events that surround the Piper Alpha disaster, the largest ever off-shore oil catastrophe in UK waters. Using talking heads of survivors and rescuers, dramatic reconstructions, stock footage and computer graphics, Anthony Wonke’s film explains the actions that lead to 167 men losing their lives.
The experiences described by those directly involved in the calamity are extraordinarily upsetting, with the level of detail sometimes painful to listen to. Despite occurring over twenty years ago, the horror of that period can still be seen in the faces of those who talk about it. In a society becoming ever more dependent on oil and with the Gulf of Mexico still reeling from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy of 2010, more incidents like Piper Alpha are still a very real and very scary possibility.
7 – The Great Beauty
Paolo Sorrentino / Italy/France / 2013 / 142 mins
Set in Rome, the film follows the wealthy and elderly socialite Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) as he goes about his daily business. A well-respected journalist and one time novelist, he meanders through dinner parties and grand gatherings discussing art, beauty, life and other such things with a litany of curious Roman individuals.
Paolo Sorrentino’s film is a sumptuous tableau of carefully framed scenes, often with slow tracking shots that feel as if they’re pulling you into the screen. Using the ancient backdrop of Rome’s architecture, Sorrentino deftly blends old and new, (reflected in the soundtrack) his aged characters not showing any signs of senility in their late night soirees. Certain occurrences in the plot provoke existential thoughts, but it’s done with such alluring seduction they’re practically melted away by the visual feast on offer.
6 – Filth
Jon S. Baird / UK / 2013 / 97 mins
James McAvoy plays cock-sure policeman Bruce who has little problem circumventing the laws he’s meant to enforce if it is to his benefit. Outwardly the perfect copper, when the offer of a promotion comes along, he sets about damaging his fellow officers in order to improve his chances. However, the copious amounts of alcohol and narcotics combined with his bipolar medication, begins to affect his grip on reality.
Adapted from Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh’s novel, Jon S. Baird’s second feature film was nearly not made because of the extreme nature of it’s content. While there is an abundance of moral depravity and activities you might expect to see while watching Nigella Lawson playing GTA V, it’s also a very shrewd piece of filmmaking. The degradation of Bruce’s mental state is captured in his fantastical hallucinations with his exaggerated doctor, and the monochrome scenes with his wife and the sullen shots of Bruce’s loneliness balance the more lurid as aspects of the movie.
5 – Klown
Mikkel Nørgaard / Denmark / 2010 / 93 mins
When Frank (Frank Hvam) discovers his pregnant girlfriend doesn’t believe he’ll make a good father, he decides to kidnap her young nephew in order to prove how responsible he can be. However, Frank brings him on the debauched holiday his friend Casper has been planning, a trip that includes alcohol, marijuana and lashings of extra-marital intercourse.
With the smutty and bawdy content of a Carry On film acted with the deadpan delivery of The Office, the outlandish and often unbelievable narrative works because of how the surreal world is set up right from the beginning. Although they paddle through some picturesque Danish countryside, the focus is on the three males and how their relationships develop through the film’s progression. In our stereotyped culture where mothers are still often seen as the lead figure in raising offspring, Mikkel Nørgaard’s film, (somewhat counter intuitively) affirms the importance of a masculine role in rearing a child, for both parties.
4 – Gravity
Alfonso Cuarón / USA / 2013 / 91 mins
When some high-speed debris destroys their space shuttle, Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are catapulted into the inky blackness. With a limited amount of oxygen they try to make their way to the International Space Station and from there, back to Earth.
Although the narrative is fairly basic, the tension is kept heart-thumpingly high due to how the stakes are continually raised; from the initial impact, Stone is constantly berated with a succession of pressing problems. Using mostly CGI, the film is a mesmerizing masterpiece with magnificent vistas of both the gloriously majestic Earth and the ominously twinkling emptiness. Perhaps most affecting is Alfonso Cuarón’s use (or non-use) of sound for the explosions, the silence of them making for particularly eerie viewing.
Joshua Oppenheimer / Denmark/Norway/UK / 2012 / 115 mins
This documentary looks at how the current Indonesian government are celebrating the communist executions of 1965/66 by asking executioners and militia members to re-enact them in the styles of Hollywood films; western, musical, gangster. It looks at how its legacy impacts Indonesia today politically and how poor migrant workers are still extorted.
To see people speak so brazenly about the mass extermination of people is sickening and unnerving. Not only do they casually talk about their past actions as if they were normal occurrences, they relish in the brutality of what they did, constantly justifying their actions as the right thing to do. Most shocking is how the government supports the paramilitary groups. In a region where violence is not uncommon, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film is a stark eye-opener to the possible reactions to it.
2 – Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
Alex Gibney / USA/UK / 2012 / 106 mins
Alex Gibney’s documentary begins by exploring the case of four children who were sexually abused by a Father Lawrence Murphy at the Milwaukee based St John’s School for the Deaf in the 1960s, and depicts how difficult it was for them to persuade the authorities of his guilt. After the repugnant acts have been recounted, Gibney then explores similar stories across the globe.
The revelations of priests and sexual abuse was and continues to be a global issue so the initial facts of Gibney’s film, while deplorable, have lost some of their shock factor. What is shocking however is how the structures within the Vatican not only enable these tragic events, but practically defend those who commit them. For a faith that has more members than most country’s populations, it’s a sobering and unsettling thought of how this supposedly principled institution has just as much corruption and immorality as corporations and governments.
1 – Wadjda
Haifaa Al-Mansour / Saudi Arabia/Germany / 2012 / 98 mins
Wadjda (Waad Mohammed) is a young girl who is jealous of a male friends bicycle and is determined to get one for herself. When her mother won’t buy it for her because of her gender, she begins to save everything she can earn. After her school announces a big cash prize for the annual Koran competition, Wadjda resigns herself into becoming the best Muslim she can.
The fist feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first feature film directed by a Saudi Arabian woman, Wadjda offers a rarely seen insight into how your position in Saudi Arabian society is dictated by your gender. By using a child as the protagonist, Haifaa Al-Mansour is able to challenge the more contentious practices of Islam, not through the traditional Western reactions of violence and aggression, but with innocence. This child narrative however is surrounded by a swirl of culturally revealing subplots: the father’s remarriage, the overbearing headteacher and the mother’s strenuous employment. The film has made such an impact that Saudi Arabia has now loosened its restrictions on women cycling, allowing them to do so in special recreational areas.
Honourable mentions:
Fire in the Blood – Dylan Mohan Gray
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