by
Julien Faddoul
10. After Yang (Kogonada, USA)
Pacified, tender science-fiction drama about a family of four: Father Jake (Colin Farrell), mother Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), their Chinese adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and their android Yang (Justin H. Min), who was purchased as a means to educate Mika on her Chinese heritage. This is accomplished film video-essayist Kogonada’s second feature and like his first, Columbus (2017), it explores the fragility of human interactions in an architected environment. Some viewers may have a hard time being stirred beyond polite attentiveness, for the film is deliberate and tranquil, but Kogonada’s Ozuian configuration on the underlying mood sets him apart from less visual directors.
9. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, France)
This is documentarian Alice Diop’s first narrative film, and she employs a rhythm and editorial structure that derives unconditionally from that of the investigative observer. The majority of the film’s dramatic power essentially comes from the audience knowing we are observing someone who is observing someone else. Critically, the film’s reception seems to have fallen into two camps, those who find this method riveting and those who have found it stultifying. I see both sides. But my placement of the film on this list obviously affirms where I ended up emotionally (and this is despite the last 10 minutes or so, which regrettably fall hard into flagrant sentimentality). A pregnant French novelist (Kayije Kagame) attends the trial of a Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of murdering her 15-month-old child by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide. The plot itself is based on the French court case of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of the same crime (she received 20 years in prison), a trial which Diop attended in 2016. Diop presents the scenes of the trial more or less as they would play in real life, and it ultimately matters less whether we can comprehend the defendant’s actions, and more that such events occur in the first place with such alarming commonality.
8. In Front of Your Face (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Describing the films of Hong Sang-soo is a task that many critics find difficult to those who are wholly unfamiliar with him. He is often compared to French master Eric Rohmer and sometimes to Woody Allen, but the comparison I often glom onto first is Steven Soderbergh in low-budget autoschediastic mode (movies like Bubble (2006) or The Girlfriend Experience (2009)). He writes, directs, produces, photographs, edits and even composes the music for his movies. Characters are usually seen simply walking around a city, drinking soju, and sleeping with one another. The main characters in his films are often movie directors or actors, and scenes typically consist of a single shot with spontaneous zoom-ins and zoom-outs, with often unscripted dialogue. This time, a former actress with a secret returns to Seoul from the United States to visit her sister and meet with a director to discuss her possibly returning to acting. I began this by broadcasting on the filmmaker’s creative personality because I feel that In Front of Your Face is probably the best place for first timers to start, not only because it evades slightly from some of his regular tropes (it’s certainly evident that there is less improvisation this time) but because it is one of his most emotionally naked. Make of it what you will.
7. The Cathedral (Ricky D’Ambrose, USA)
The year’s biggest surprise for me. 35-year-old director Ricky D’Ambrose’s semi-autobiographical account of growing up in a rather tense and bitter Long Island family received a mixed reception when it had its North American premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival (it had had its official premiere a few months prior in Venice, something D’Ambrose was obligated to do due to receiving a grant for the film from the Venice Biennale College Workshop). The film is 87 minutes long and covers a little over 2 decades. Jesse, played by a series of young actors at different ages, deals with his parents’ divorce (Brian D’Arcy James and Monica Barbaro, both excellent) as well as trying to interpret cryptic secrets from the histories of both sides of his family. The film unfolds sequence by sequence through a juxtaposition of precisely framed shots, often focusing on random household items or aspects of interior decoration that show the world as a collage of childhood memory. The film also uses extensive narration and period-specific archival footage. Some have compared these rhythms to those of the great Chantal Akerman. The period detail is impressively distinct (and correct), as are the sad emotions on display. Although this is his second film (I somehow missed his first, Notes on an Appearance (2018)), this is a major new voice in contemporary cinema, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
6. Paris, 13th District (Jacques Audiard, France)
The year’s most underrated film, Jacques Audaird’s sex drama about four inhabitants in their 30s of the Parisian arrondissement of the title (Les Olympiades, in French) was unfairly dismissed when it played at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival as a mere trifle entry amongst the celebrated director’s more robust and substantial serious works. Émilie (Lucie Zhang, in one of the year’s best performances) meets Camille (Makita Samba) who is attracted to Nora (Noémie Merlant), who crosses paths with Amber (Jehnny Beth). Audiard wrote the film in collaboration with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, both celebrated directors in their own right, based on three graphic novels by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine. The conversations are frank, the sex scenes are graphic and the situations and personality-types we encounter prove witty and enchanting.
5. Benediction (Terence Davies, United Kingdom)
If you were to ask me to name my favourite living filmmakers, Terence Davies would be one of the first names I would offer up. Openly gay and imposingly well-educated, he is now in his late 70s, and famous mostly for his autobiographical works (Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992)) and his literary adaptations (The House of Mirth (2000) and Sunset Song (2015)). His last two films however have been biopics, 2017’s A Quiet Passion (which made my list that year) starred Cynthia Nixon as American poet Emily Dickinson and this film, a biographical romantic drama on the harrowing life of British war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Unlike Dickinson, I must admit I was not that familiar with Sassoon’s writing, let alone his unconventional life. Jack Lowden plays the young Sassoon in what would be my choice as the year’s best performance. Sassoon survived the horrors of World War I and was even decorated, before being sent to a psychiatric facility for his anti-war stance. He had love affairs with several men during the 1920s, married, had a son, and converted to Catholicism. Peter Capaldi plays the older Sassoon. Like all of Davies’ films, everything is meticulously composed, with exacting tracking shots and remarkable bits of technique, laid over some brilliant Wildeian rejoinders (this movie is very bitchy) and, again, Lowden’s phenomenal, heartbreaking performance.
4. Happening (Audrey Diwan, France)
France, 1963. Abortion is illegal, under penalty of prison. Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is a university student at Angoulême, with dreams of being a writer but is quietly badgered by the other girls for her often promiscuous behaviour with local boys. After not feeling particularly well, she visits her local doctor (Fabrizio Rongione) who informs her she is pregnant. At this point in the film, as Anne lies on the examination table hearing this unwelcome news, we might expect our main character in what has so far been a quiet, observant drama to begin contemplating a change in life goals or even to begin crying in a wallow of worry and distress. Instead, she sits straights up, turns to the doctor and sharply whispers “Do something.”
I must say this moment knocked me sideways unlike any other in a movie this year. From that point on, Audrey Diwan’s often terrifying film (which was the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival) captivates one and never lets go. There’s no need for this critic to initiate more discourse on this long analysed socio-political debate. Suffice it to say that Diwan’s perspective concurs with the rhetoric that much of the anti-abortion legislation attempts that have been perpetuated over the last 7 decades CLEARLY derive from sects of power and sects of fundamentalism in the pursuit to convince women everywhere that their desires in life are negligible and that they are somehow horrible miscreants for wanting any kind of life that doesn’t…okay, I should probably shut up now before I alienate anyone. But agreeing with a filmmaker would mean nothing to me were her formative technique not as enthralling as it is here and were her central performer not as exceptional as she is here. Happening is a great movie about what many young women around the world go through, a topic that many filmmakers are unfortunately too timid to tackle.
3. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, South Korea)
Just exemplary filmmaking, through and through. In some measure, this is Korean director Park Chan-wook’s most conventional film – he is mostly known for highly violent melodramas like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Thirst (2009) – but his formal dynamism is utterly exceptional. What begins as a simple cat-and-mouse mystery becomes something akin to an East Asian Vertigo (1958). Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il), a seasoned detective, investigates the suspicious death of a man on a mountaintop. Soon, he begins to suspect Seo-rae (the glorious Tang Wei), the deceased’s wife, while being unsettled by his attraction to her. Park’s compositions and editing style are so invigorating here, doing away with what one might call connective-tissue shots and letting the staging bleed with emotion. One never knows quite where they are or what to think or who is ahead of whom. It’s the most fun I had at the movies in 2022.
2. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, USA)
Were I to excavate a central theme within the 2022 year in film, it would be that the super-rich are destroying any and all attempts at upholding a civilized society. The Menu, Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Confess, Fletch, even The Batman all explore this motif, sometimes with humour and sometimes with an ominous admonitory. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does neither because documentarian Laura Poitras doesn’t really need to. None of the actual declarations, affirmations or events that are depicted in this cinematic piece of non-fiction should be news to anyone who has been following the journalism of the last 5 years that focused on the United States Opioid Epidemic.
The film is two documentaries combined into one. The first is an activism chronicle that follows the advocacy organization PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and their participation in the fall of the Sackler Family – the founders and owners of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, accountable as the architects of the opioid epidemic and the press-dubbed “most evil family in America.” The second is a rather different film that concentrates on PAIN’s founder Nan Goldin, one the greatest and most innovative American photographers of the last 40 years, who developed an addiction to Oxycontin, and had a near fatal overdose of Fentanyl.
The film is structured in seven chapters, each of which begins with a photographic sequence or archival footage of a period of Goldin's life. No other film this year is likely to make you angrier. But what makes Poitras’ construction here so commendable is that it might also be this year’s most moving film too. We are privileged with a generous helping of Goldin’s slideshows, that still have the ability to stir wildly different reactions within us as they did when she first premiered them, maybe even more so. The two thematic throughlines of the movie comment on one another so beautifully that one feels they are witnessing something momentous.
1. Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen, Finland/Russia)
To quote a great animated series about an anthropomorphic horse: All we have in this terrifying world are the connections we make.* Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s second feature takes that sentiment and cloaks it inside a somewhat old fashioned romantic-comedy scenario. The theme is a familiar one: A young Finnish woman (Seidi Haarla), living in Moscow as a student and having a rather cooled love affair with her professor, takes a train trip to the arctic port of Murmansk to see some of the rare hieroglyphics she’s been studying. Forced to share the long ride in a tiny sleeping compartment with a gruff and churlish Russian miner (Yuriy Borisov), the unexpected encounter leads the two occupants of Number 6 to discover who they really are and what kind of love connection they are truly seeking.
That’s the basic plotline of Compartment No. 6, and strictly speaking Kuosmanen’s film rarely attempts anything ambitious in its execution. It’s shot almost entirely in handheld, with much of the film confined to the title train compartment, which creates a cramped sense of placement that never leaves the viewer’s mind. Those of you who have ever taken a long train trip over several days will agree that Kuosmanen gets the mood exactly right. But the emotional throughline of the film is something different entirely, and if you could predict where this eloquent little gem was going dramatically, then dear reader you’re a less jaded man than I am. Based on the prize winning book Hytti nro 6 by Rosa Liksom, the film itself was also a prize winner at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it was honoured with the Grand Jury Prize, before receiving it’s US release at the beginning of this year.
So why place the film at the top of this list? Funnily enough its conventional elements are an incendiary for its greatness. The romcom is a film genre that the world adores, and yet Hollywood production companies and distributors have kicked it slowly to its near-death with both hackneyed writing and a general disinterest in its wide exhibition potential. Compartment No. 6, and movies like it, should serve as a nullifier. Both cultural and societal traditions have instilled in us the kind of human relationships we expect to be given in our stories. The couple at the centre of this film (Haarla and Borisov are both magnificent, incidentally) share a form of love that is piercingly tender and strangely profound and I could not stop thinking about it. All that matters in this world are our connections and our experiences, and Compartment No. 6 was an experience I greatly treasured.
*And yes, if you have not seen the Netflix series Bojack Horseman, which played originally for 6 seasons from 2014 to 2020, please do. You will not regret it.
