A moment of silencio, please, for Reverse Shot’s knighted greatest movie of the decade. And not just any decade, but one that’s been cinematically revolutionary (hello, digital video . . . goodbye traditional viewing methods) and polarizing (the democratizing of film culture has either enhanced it for all or picked the last scraps off of its corpse, depending on your point of view). How appropriate that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was voted into the top slot considering that the film remains both revolutionary and polarizing itself. Looking back on this American masterpiece from this 2010 vantage point, we can now see this was a film released on the brink of major change, and that it managed to embody that change while remaining resolutely timeless and true to its maker’s spirit. Who’d have thought that not even ten years later, rewatching Lynch’s magnum opus—which, though tinged with its maker’s usual retro chic, was upon its release so very now—would make us nostalgic for film itself, for glossy, movie-movie celluloid, however mangled and nightmarish it becomes in its director’s hands. Mulholland seems especially poignant considering that Lynch’s follow-up, the equally peculiar, if less aesthetically and emotionally coherent Inland Empire, marked his possibly permanent transition to digital video feature-making.
As much as pining for the magic of film defined the past decade of moviegoing, it’s already a dated endeavor: video is here to stay. What makes Mulholland Drive such a specifically stirring example of what we may now begin to term as a dying medium is that it seems to have unwittingly predicted the coming digital and media revolution in its very construction and being, while at the same time it’s undeniably a product of classic cinematic practice. It’s a film equal parts stream-of-consciousness and cause-and-effect, whose pattern forms a sort of hyperlink crazy quilt—what once seemed like mere dream logic now seems prescient, if even inadvertently so. In 2009, the film’s tendency to jump back and forth between narrative strands feels nearly rational, mirroring as it does our current media experience. Yet its cinematographic and editing tricks and experiments, the richness of its colors and textures, the authority and weight with which its camera swirls and glides and hiccups, are all undeniably specifically filmic.
At the heart of the film critical impulse lies the question, what is cinema for? This is central, even if not asked directly, even if the work at hand seems to hold no loftier ambitions than the avoidance of its own calamitous end. The act of writing on a particular film always points to an alternate work that might have been, one that exists only in the critic’s mind. Imagining a better or different object than the one at hand automatically introduces thorny questions of ideals and quintessentials, which in turn lead to purposes and absolutes. And if such a thing as a definitive “for” in cinema can be defined, captured in a bottle, then we also get closer to explaining that other underlying question of all art criticism: Why do we (critics) do what we do? Why all this watching and writing? If cinema can be said to be for anything, then let it be to offer up transformative experiences like The New World. Because if critics are to be consigned to post-facto sideline analysis of artistic achievements and failures, let us, once in a while witness an audacious, singular triumph. Terrence Malick’s fourth film is a rarity: an end, an absolute, a work of art that can’t be imagined better. Read Jeff Reichert on The New World.
A man and a woman passing each other on a dark stairwell; the same man and woman trapped in a bedroom together, chastely waiting for a marathon canasta game to expire so they can separate without provoking unearned suspicion; the same man and woman walking down a cobblestone street pretending to be another man and woman, pretending to be in love, pretending not to be in love. These are some of the more vivid memories of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love I’ve carried around since first viewing it almost nine years ago. It has remained one of the most shattering moviegoing experiences of my life. In my recollection, and that of many others, the film is the consummate tale of unconsummated love.
But now, revisiting the film after several years, this memory doesn’t fully match with what I see before me. It’s not that In the Mood for Love is any less heartbreaking than I remember it being. I’m as shattered watching it today as I was the first time. Yet the nature of the film’s central relationship is more ambiguous (and perverse) than I’d recalled, and the society within which it suffers doesn’t seem nearly as repressive. Read Eric Hynes on In the Mood for Love.
At the beginning of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke’s Jesse answers questions at a book signing in Paris. He doesn’t realize it, but Celine (Julie Delpy), the radiant Frenchwoman with whom he spent one enchanted evening in Vienna some nine years ago in Sunset’s predecessor Before Sunrise, watches him from a corner. Jesse shares an idea he has for a novel that takes place during the span of a single pop song: A thirtysomething father watches his five-year-old daughter climb onto a table to dance, and he’s transported back to the night he lost his virginity at the age of 16. He sees his girlfriend dance to the same song on the roof of her car and realizes then that “inside every moment is another moment happening simultaneously,” that “time is a lie.”
As Jessie waxes philosophical about the illusion of time, Linklater cuts to images of Hawke and Delpy from the previous film, moving between then and now with seamless elegance. These flashbacks make it clear that Jesse is partly right and partly wrong. This moment in the bookstore does indeed contain the earlier moment inside of it; it is pregnant with the past. Though he’s never been the sort of director to indulge in too much temporal trickery, Linklater’s well aware of the power montage has to twist our perception of time: A series of cuts, fades, and dissolves can compress and extend time or take us forward or backward through it. Despite the flashbacks, Before Sunset mostly unfolds in a series of long, sequential takes that give the impression of real time. Here, the most pointed cutting in the film—and, perhaps, Linklater’s entire oeuvre—doesn’t transport us back to that earlier moment so much as it draws our attention to the nine years that stand between then and now. Hawke’s weathered face and Delpy’s thin, knowing beauty are physical evidence of the time that’s passed. When he finally notices Celine, Jesse becomes distracted, and he seems less sure of himself. Her presence betrays an irrefutable truth: time isn’t a lie after all. Read Chris Wisniewski on Before Sunset.
The English translation of Syndromes and a Century’s Thai title, Sang sattawat, which means “light of the century,” sounds atypically grandiose for humble filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It’s a reference perhaps to the illuminating presence of cinema, which corresponds roughly to the beginning and end of the 20th century, or maybe the medium’s digital successors that cast their own kind of light onto an uncertain 21st. If anyone should carry this torch, there’s none better than Weerasethakul, who, at 39, has already crafted a body of films that easily rank among the most important of recent years, if not decades, and whose own hybridities and seeming contradictions—a Thai sensibility mixed with American film school, a love of syrupy pop ballads combined with an appreciation for experimental film masters like Andy Warhol and Bruce Baillie, and the cache of an international art phenom who returns time and again to his country boy roots—speak to the ever-shifting conditions of a globalized, but in no way homogenized, world. The film’s English title, meanwhile, suggests something different, something more elusive. The word “syndromes” registers as indirect and circular, the wafting effects of a malady rather than its core affliction. In this way Syndromes looks around more than it looks directly at; set in hospitals, the film contains multiple scenes of diagnosis and treatment, with doctors and patients alike tending to each other’s troubles and aches, and trying everything from chakra channeling to talking cures to ease their collective burdens. Syndromes of and for a century: ailments, perhaps, but also a form of cinematic light that brightens a shared condition, a dimming past we leave behind, and a faint glimmer of what lies ahead. Read Genevieve Yue on Syndromes and a Century.
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