2021 in film: What are movies for?
From 11A
always explored the lonely, but in 2021 that loneliness felt more fraught. By the end of “The Power of the Dog” the loneliness still feels pervasive even if a potential threat is excised. But Campion wants us to be haunted by what comes after. It’s the same ellipsis that marks the final frames of Maria Schrader’s excellent “I’m Your Man” where an archaeologist contemplates the possibility of algorithmic love with an AI. Anything to avoid our loneliness, right? But to what end?
In “The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino’s avatar walks through the streets of Naples after a tragedy, loses his virginity and remains aimless. And yet that film is so moving for the way Sorrentino gets the peculiarities of the human spirit. “I want to think about happiness, don’t you?” a character declares. Yes. Because it’s so fleeting. The first joyful half of the film distracts us from the expectant tragedy, based on Sorrentino’s own life. So that the journalists telling stories, eulogising their boss, in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” keep trying to find some happiness but everything feels bathed in melancholy. Yes, this is Anderson in his wheelhouse but the aesthetic rigour of Anderson’s work has always been a window into human frailty. At the end of the film when one asks, “Is this true?” of a story, the reply is “Sort of.” In that moment we realise the inexactness of veracity anyway. We’re connecting with the feelings rather than the truth. “Sort of” is enough.
And in the depth of that connection, three films found something searing about the women at their centre, not just women but women battling with society and motherhood. “Parallel Mothers” reflects on the bones of the past, while “Passing” recognises how race and gender and sexuality all became ensconced, with a line from a character, “Being a mother is the cruellest thing.” It’s that cruelty that gives “Quo Vadis Aida” its verve, its nerve and its emotion as a woman wrestles with her role as an interpreter in Bosnia as her children become potential targets of genocide. In the wake of all that cruelty we can only return to a face staring out at us and be moved by the naked honesty of the mundane. And so, in “Quo Vadis Aids”, something as mundane as a tear falling down a face as the camera closes in on Jasna Đuričić’s feels like the best of cinema. There is little that is unusual in a tearstained face. But still we connect. Like the women in “The Worst Person in the World” and “Parallel Mothers” taking pictures, as memories, of their loved ones. Or, the journalists in “The French Dispatch” making memories through their words.
I’ve been thinking of various moments in the uncle/nephew duo of “C’mon C’mon” for weeks, although it’s value I think is summed up in the fact that it cannot be whittled down to a plot-point, or even a summary. Yes, this is a film about an estranged uncle reconnecting with his nephew. But it’s also a film about a brother and sister learning to love each other again. It’s a film about healing, but also not healing, from tragedy. It’s a film about the ways that children are clinging desperately to some meaning in a world that feels so random. It is about happiness and it is also about sadness, and it’s moving and explicit because of the way it gently tugs rather than shouts. Moment after moment unspools like a skein, so that everything connects and few things seem to work completely on your own. But isn’t that the beauty of movies? Any movie? Isn’t that kind of fragility a welcome gift? A warm hug? Mills offers no clever solution for our loneliness and malaise; he recognises the worst of our sensibilities in the underlying anger, shame and embarrassment but he also recognises the hope and the possibilities. And that’s the movies. In movies we are possible.
I’m not sure that I learned anything new in the best of the year’s movies. I wasn’t watching them so they could magically make be better, or smarter, or wiser or more informed. I was watching them to be touched, to see human emotion laid bare. I watched them to feel, my own open heart meeting the open hearts, and scars, of these characters and saying, “Yes, this will do.” Isn’t that what movies are for? To connect?