The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December (and now on into January). Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few days for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they choose.” – Karl Marx
On July 6 1971, home from a series of state visits to the People’s Republic of China, North Vietnam, North Korea and Mongolia, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu made a speech called the July Theses, outlining a new direction for the then openly liberal nation. Having grown enamored with the hard line Maoism and Stalinism he found in Asia, Ceauşescu laid down a new series of cultural and political restrictions, each designed to bring Romanian culture (and his regime) into line with the most extreme versions of totalitarian rule; books were banned, state propaganda was reinforced and the communist party (and the dictator himself as figurehead) was placed at the center of cultural life. “The man who does not write for his entire people is not a poet”, Ceauşescu said. Soon after, Romanian universities were placed under the watchful eye of the Party, which began destroying their intellectual freedom and, with it, their credibility.
Ceauşescu’s regime would fall eighteen years later when the people, tired of the constant rationing and repression and emboldened by political upheaval throughout the Eastern Bloc, took over what is now called Revolution Square in Bucharest to face down the dictator. In late December of 1989, thousands of Romanians gathered for a mass meeting and, as Ceauşescu spoke, began the revolution by booing his speech:
See that look on his face? That is the look of a disbelieving despot who instantly realizes his time is up.
And so, a hard line shift that began by dismantling the cultural freedom of a nation ended with one of the greatest acts of public cultural criticism in the history of politics; first a public display of discontent in the public square and then, after Ceauşescu’s fall, a very public demise:
Graphic Images Herein:
Maybe it should come as no surprise then that, after decades of repression and a revolution comprised of unforgettable, televised images, cinema would come to flower in Romania. Still, I can think of no greater proof of cinema’s incredible power that the unlikely rise of Romania as one of the decade’s great cinematic communities. On November 1, 2001, the Romanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs founded The National Center of Cinematography (CNC) by “emergency decree of the Government nr. 9” for “the encouragement and protection of the national film production, the stimulation of realizing and broadcasting highly artistic films and the revaluation of the national film patrimony”. It was a masterstroke in the modern history of cinema and the NCC gave birth to a series of films that would define the decade in world cinema.
After a few years of training and organizing, the CNC began to show the signs of becoming one of the most important film institutions in the world, offering support and guidance to young Romanian filmmakers as they undertook the serious task of creating a national cinema. They started, it seems almost exclusively, by looking backward and redressing the history of propaganda that was the nation’s legacy; they started by taking apart the Ceauşescu regime, one film at a time.
The film that comes to mind immediately for me as the herald of the new Romanian cinema is Cristi Puiu’s staggering The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu from 2005, a film that addresses the legacy of socialism in medicine* by highlighting the passivity of Romanian culture and industry. Shot in 45 days and edited in 38, The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu became a sensation at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Un Certain Regard prize, seemingly from nowhere. I saw the film at the 2005 New York Film Festival and it literally changed my perception of Romanian cinema from whole cloth:
“The film follows our Dante on a single night from the moment he begins to feel sick until his ultimate death at the hands of an indifferent health care system. Puiu has created as naturalistic and realistic a fiction as I have ever seen; the slow, perfectly modulated decline of Lazarescu’s health is one of the most infuriatingly comic and tragically accurate depictions of the state of modern medicine as one is likely to ever see. At the heart of this film is Fiscuteanu’s performance as Lazarescu; a performance so gripping that it creates a tangible, slowly mounting sense of anxiety as Lazarescu fades away to the chorus of insulting, bickering medical professionals who are supposed to be saving his life but instead spend their time flirting, arguing, and attacking each other’s enormous egos. Every Dante must have a Virgil (a name which we hear throughout the film), and this Dante is guided through the health care hell by an EMT named Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu), a woman on the fringes of the health care system who, albeit reluctantly, is the only person who empathizes with Lazarescu’s constant dismissal and the only one who takes professional and personal responsibility for him. When she leaves his side at the end of the film, we know that no good will come of it; his guardian angel gone, Lazarescu has nothing left to do but to die…I’m going to have a hard time getting Fiscuteanu’s face out of my head as experiencing the loss of this character was such a traumatizing experience, I know I won’t recover from losing him any time soon.”
And I still haven’t.
Two years later, Cristian Mungiu arrived at Cannes with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days the story of two friends living under the dying days of the Ceauşescu regime who collaborate to find and receive an illegal abortion for one of them. Two weeks later, Mungiu walked away from Cannes in one of the most deserving, incontrovertible Palme D’Or victories of all time. It only took the CNC six years to create a masterpiece, and Mungiu’s film stands as one of the decade’s towering achievements, a thrilling black comedy that, much like The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu before it, tackles the machinations of social restrictions as they foment human suffering. Only this time, the target is absolutely, clearly Ceauşescu.
In 1966, Ceauşescu banned abortion in Romania in order to raise the nation’s low birth rate and create a larger population. At the same time, the dictator also banned contraception and levied a tax on all childless people (single people, married people, sterile people) over the age of 25. Mothers of five or more children were venerated, ten or more children made you a heroine of the state. The effect on Romanian society was devastating; not only did a huge population of children end up abandoned and living in miserable conditions in state run orphanages, but abortion was driven underground, where many women died or were maimed due to unsafe medical procedures.
That a film like 4 Months, a black comedy that mines Ceauşescu’s mad policies for every drop of tension and humor, could be made in the 2000’s not only showcases the massive changes afoot these past twenty years, but also tells us more than a little about the spirit of the CNC, a government agency which produced a film that not only lambastes previous government policy, but which features as its centerpiece an aborted fetus lying on a bathroom floor. It is easy for Americans to crow about their freedoms and the magnanimity of our government, but as this nation continues to politicize and disembowel arts funding, we might take a moment to ponder the fruits of a truly free state institution like the CNC, one which puts to shame the models of film production in this country.
4 Months will go down for me as one of the great films of all time:
“Mungiu brilliantly sets the table for all types of terrible violence and tragedy; Otilia discovers a pocket knife among the abortion provider’s personal effects (filling the entire film with dread), we hear the man describe the possible (and seemingly inevitable) complications that could arise from the procedure itself (hemorrhaging, hours and days of potential suffering) and we soon discover that he left his identification behind, throwing his identity into doubt while simultaneously worrying us that he may actually return to collect his identification. And then, Otilia leaves for a rendezvous with her boyfriend and his snobby parents, closing the door on the hotel room and leaving our imaginations to run wild as the clock ticks behind the locked door.
It is no surprise at all that the tensions of a Dardenne-style social realism and the MacGuffins and unseen horrors of Hitchcock’s brand of thriller would work so well together, but Mungiu makes certain by leaving no anxiety unexposed, no outrage unspoken. What heightens the life and death stakes of the film into the cinematic stratosphere is, of course, the outrageousness of the situation from the get-go; Without access to benefits of reproductive freedoms, an operation that should be performed safely and cleanly by a medical professional becomes a horror show. Anxiety is bad enough, but coupled with the outrage and anger at the situation (an anger that Mungiu clearly expresses through Otilia’s point of view), the tension is at times unbearably brilliant. The women in the film make some costly mistakes (Gabita’s casual approach to the details of her agreement proves especially frustrating), but one can’t help wondering why they should have had to experience this at all. As the right to choose an abortion is continually evaluated in the political context of a world where feminism’s hard-won victories seem commonplace, the film provides a painful reminder of the indignities suffered when politics and morality are imposed on the private decisions of individuals. Gabita’s decision to not become a mother, as late as it arrives in the process, is as difficult and painful a choice as could be made, but it is Otilia’s experience, that of a woman forced into the role of a criminal for facilitating that choice, that allows the film to escape the clichés of a cautionary tale and transcend as great drama.”
Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 days
There is no doubt in my mind that, facing down my 50th birthday at the end of 2019, we will all be looking back on the great Romanian cinema of the 2010’s, trying to figure out how we could possibly rank and organize this vibrant national cinema into a coherent list. That this gift comes from the ashes of a totalitarian regime may be surprising, but that it exists at all is a small miracle. We should count our blessings and marvel at the resiliency of art in the face of human folly.
*A greater advertisement against socialized medicine could not be made, and we can only be thankful that no one on the right watches foreign movies (which tend to blame America first… *Ha*), lest the film become a tool in the American healthcare debate. If only cinema were taken so seriously…*whew*
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December (and now on into January). Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few days for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
The final four…
Fifteen years into his career as a director of television films, 1989 saw Michael Haneke announce himself to the world of cinema; his feature debut as a director, The Seventh Continent, marked the arrival of a new voice, one that would spend the next decade making German language films that explored the responsibility of the individual as it relates to the suffering of others. In 1990, in the wake of his brutal and often misunderstood Funny Games, Haneke made a major shift in his work, abandoning not only the German language (for the time being, anyway) but also the specificity of bourgeois Austro-Germans in favor of a new European sensibility. Haneke shifted his concerns to France in 1990’s Code Unknown and moved to the front lines of a rapidly changing European identity as it came into conflict with post-colonial migration and its history of racial homogeneity. Code Unknown remains a seminal European film of this decade (a confrontation between Juliette Binoche and a young man on a metro says more about the race and class tensions in Paris than anything else I saw) but, sandwiched between it and Haneke’s subsequent The Time Of The Wolf and his huge breakthrough Caché, Haneke made a masterpiece, the one film that ignores many of his traditional concerns and tells instead the classic tale of a Freudian collapse in the throes of sexual desire.
It is difficult to watch The Piano Teacher in the context of Haneke’s work and not feel as if he was operating in a whole new place, one that eschewed the moralizing of his typical degradations in favor of a far more humanizing approach to his character’s suffering. And while he would return to the grandeur of his pet social themes in his subsequent works, any relationship between the broken-hearted longing of Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert, in the performance of the decade) and some vague judgment about the social conditions of wealthy, art loving European “bo-bos” (bohemian bourgeoisie) completely misses the mark. For the first, and, as a fan of Haneke’s work, I think the only time, the issue of a culturally specific identity is cast aside in favor of literary depth and the exploration of a character that has yet to be rivaled in his work. Gone is the narrative leapfrogging across stories and time, gone are the social conditions that drive individuals to acts of external cruelty, gone are the sometimes aloof judgments about the guilt of societies handing down punishments upon unsuspecting protagonists, all of it replaced with the painful exploration of a masochistic soul that only wants to escape from the domination of her mother and give everything of herself to her reluctant lover.
Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher
Isabelle Huppert is brilliant in the title role, and it is this performance, arriving some 30 years into her now 40 year career, that will prove to be her definitive role. I recently wrote about my thoughts on Huppert’s screen presence, one that dominated the decade in international cinema and promises years of greatness to come:
“Huppert seems to me the perfect embodiment of…a stubborn (French) tradition; she is an actress that can drive you away with the upward tilt of her head and the subtle twist of her jaw, only to draw you back in the moment her eyes flash an ounce of the pain that seems to flow like mercury beneath her skin. Huppert uses her diminutive stature like no other performer; her fragility, those tiny arms and legs, only deepen the confusion over the fact that she dominates every frame she occupies. There is no performer more brave than she (I truly believe she would do anything at all in service of the truth in a character) Huppert (uses her) innate tension, this frail threat, to great effect. (She) longs for a normalcy that evaporates before her very eyes, a normalcy that also includes nonchalant exploitation. And yet, despite the knowledge that you’re watching a pushy rich French woman act incredulous,… you know that (she) is suffering, too; Huppert moves you to tears and scares the absolute shit out of you all at once.”
There is no greater example of Huppert’s genius than The Piano Teacher; the film literally reads like a litany of brilliant set-pieces for the actress to do her thing: A sequence in a pornography shop (remember those?) where, seeking a connection to her own repressed sexual desire, she lifts a soiled tissue to her nose with a tiny gloved hand, the moment when she finally allows the man who proclaims his love for her know the depths to which she would go to fulfill her need to be dominated by him, the moment that immediately follows when he beats her and attacks her mother, the moment when, her need for sensation and release at a breaking point, she commits an act of genital self-mutilation on the edge of a bathtub (take that, Charlotte Gainsbourg), the film’s final moment when, broken-hearted at the concert hall, she takes measures to break her own heart for good. I could go on and on and on; this film is one of the rare cases when material, performer and Director all coalesce into absolute perfection and, not surprisingly, it is all in the service of a great character, a broken soul unlike any in Haneke’s body of work.
Spoiler Alert: The Final Scene Of The Film…
I was surprised to see Haneke’s fine new film The White Ribbon make its way onto so many lists of the best of the decade; despite the approbation of the Cannes Jury (presided over by, surprise surprise, Isabelle Huppert) in awarding it the Palme D’or, it is not, for my money, the greatest of Haneke’s films. Guilt and audience culpability lay at the center of everything Haneke makes, and yet, despite his great Erika Kohut, he often forsakes the complexities of individual characters, the idea of a sole protagonist, so that he may spread the blame around, indicting not an individual but society itself. What separates The Piano Teacher, what makes it really special, is that the Director finally gains proximity to the individual soul, the stuff of great fiction, and uses his talents in the service of her desires. And while Haneke remains one of the most vital voices in modern film, all of that winking and beard stroking doesn’t amount to much in the face of his former triumph; while I would never prescribe that an artist repeat himself, audiences may wish to revisit his greatest film in order to see what might yet be if the finger stops wagging long enough to let us back into the hearts and minds of great characters.
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December (and now on into January). Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few days for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
We’ve hit the Top 5. Time to get a little personal, to explain this impossibly difficult task of list making… This list will be completed on Monday…
Love stories are perhaps the most clichéd form in cinema; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back. Happiness, crisis, resolution; despite being a sturdy enough form to encapsulate the particulars of literally thousands of narratives, from Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers through to the recent development of man-child bromances, the way in which love is depicted on the screen is too often boiled down to romantic ideals. What is the real texture of love? How does losing a lover feel? It is not a meeting at the top of the Empire State Building, or a kiss just as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, it is not a knock on the door in a rainstorm after a long absence with all being forgiven. Love, like all human affairs, is messy and ugly, full of ego, jealousy, argument and requires a constant assessment of the self as it moves between opposition and harmony with the concerns and desires of another person.
The reason why Nuri Blge Ceylan’s devastatingly great Climates rates as one of the top movies of this decade for me is directly linked to the film’s staggeringly honest portrayal of love and loss, choice and desire, self-sacrifice and need. And that, all of it, is, as it is in all great fiction, embodied in one of the great characters that graced the screen over the past ten years; Ebru Ceylan’s Bahar, a young women in love with a cad and someone who, despite loving him and remembering better, happier times, can’t escape her own need to leave him.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates
The fact that Nuri Bilge Ceylan was able to convey that need in an almost wordless, gorgeously photographed opening 30 minutes is an achievement in and of itself, and watching this relationship slowly fracture and disintegrate before our eyes, beat by beat, feeling by feeling, remains one of the most impressive and moving feats of filmmaking I can remember. It may be revealing too much, but I will say, I know how both of these lovers feel, how badly the ego is bruised by recognizing your inability to give a lover what they need and how much it hurts to need more and be denied. That said, whereas most love stories look for ways to reconcile those tensions by falsely imposing the ideas of bad timing or circumstance or fate or misunderstanding between two characters we are supposed to like, Climates refuses to bullshit, exposing the reality of an irreconcilable romantic situation, warts and all.
Of course, Bahar’s dilemma and hurt is set in opposition to the callous, sexually destructive Isa, played by Bilge Ceylan himself, and it is Isa’s male perspective, especially in a controversial scene in which he has very rough sex with another woman, that not only calls the film’s sexual politics into question, but therein realizes one of the great truths absent from most romances; an honest portrayal of fucked up male desire. Romantic dramas and break-up films have almost exclusively been geared toward women or toward a middle ground between male and female fantasy that watching male sexual aggression and female pleasure in that physicality seems almost transgressive, and one of the most difficult and powerful aspects of Climates is trying to reconcile Isa and Bahar, both of them as complicated and often unlikable as anyone you might overhear breaking up at the table next to you in a small café.
Of course, none of this heartache would amount to much had Bilge Ceylan not made an exquisitely beautiful film. The landscapes of Turkey, the grey clouds, falling snow, searing sunlight and muddy roads, combine to lend something ancient, eternal to the film, the lives of a pair of messed up lovers crashing against the rocks of history and nature. There are some moments of amazing levity, as when Isa and Bahar sit in the back of TV production van while he proposes a reconciliation, and devastating poetry, as a few hours later Bahar rises from bed, regretting a momentary weakness, the light from a single window illuminating the room. Like all great art, the detail of the performances, narrative photography and tone combine in perfect harmony, creating as masterpiece of broken hearted longing, a wish to move on to something happier as you doubt it might ever arrive.
Much was made upon the film’s release of Bilge Ceylan’s debt to the great Michelangelo Antonioni, and while Climates does indeed wear its debt to films like L’avventura and L’Ecclise as a badge of honor, it also uniquely and thoroughly original in its handling of love, loss, aesthetics and masculinity. Climates is breathtakingly honest and beautiful, a love story about the end of love that felt tied directly to my own experiences. Utilizing a genre that constantly fails to find true feeling in its projection of our collective romantic fantasies, Nuri Bilge Ceylan broke my heart into a thousand pieces. And I loved it.
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
“I was all right for a while, I could smile for a while/ But I saw you last night, you held my hand so tight/ As you stopped to say “Hello”/ Aww you wished me well, you couldn’t tell/ That I’d been cry-i-i-i-ng over you, cry-i-i-i-ng over you/ Then you said “so long”. left me standing all alone/ Alone and crying, crying, crying cry-i-ing/ It’s hard to understand but the touch of your hand/ Can start me crying.”—Roy Orbison, Crying
Hollywood is an imaginary space. Taking a single step onto Hollywood Boulevard itself is bound to fill you with disappointment about the way in which the iconography of the movie business is realized in the flesh; tawdry, cheap, a strip mall on wheels for people who dream of the symbolic meaning of celebrity. We should all know by now that Hollywood, the actual industry that makes movies, is cloistered on studio lots, behind private gates and guards, homes high in the hills beyond dead end roads, inaccessible to the outside world. That catch phrase on American Idol, you know the one, “You’re going to Hollywood, baby!” perfectly encapsulates the dilemma; there are gatekeepers standing at the doors, pointing and choosing as to which of the hordes of the hopeful will be given the support of a multi-billion dollar industry and launched into the stratosphere of cash, glamour, bling and fame. The dream persists, despite its tenuous link to reality, inspiring people from all over the world to try and ascend the ranks of the chosen, to become famous. It has always been this way; petty and small, a community of images, brands and big business driven to continue to evolve and sell the dream, each mutation creating a newly polished idea of a place that doesn’t exist.
This idea, created and manufactured by publicists, studios and the industry’s media machine, also explains Hollywood’s tenuous relationship to realism. Hollywood’s biographies are often star-studded hagiographies, their “socially conscious” fictions strident and unbelievable, driving people to manufacture conspiracy theories about the industry’s liberalism as being condescending; how do you sell the dream of an imaginary idea and still tether your work to the everyday experiences of your audiences? How to bring realism and escapism together?
One of the reasons that foreign and independent films hold sway over my own imagination is that I do not care much for the particulars of the modern Hollywood fantasy; If I want to escape my own time and condition, I don’t often imagine myself as a super hero or science fiction protagonist, but more a time traveller, using the illusions of Hollywood past—John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder—or the realism of international cinema from Europe and Asia in particular, to get away from the ever-mutating Hollywood dream. It is ironic that my own dreaming is tied to the past or to a cinema made by people from other cultures; I feel more connected to their concerns and, while they often take on the tropes of Hollywood’s storytelling, the result can only end up being ironic and far more powerful than the literalism of the Hollywood movie (more on this when we discuss a certain Romanian masterpiece in the coming days).
So, when an American filmmaker takes down the mythology of Hollywood, whether it be Robert Altman in his terrific The Player or Curtis Hanson in the excellent L.A. Confidential, they end up drawing dark lines under the morality of the business of movies and unsettling our fantasies of the polish and sheen that Hollywood projects. But it is David Lynch, unsurprisingly, and his film Mulholland Dr., that provides the greatest Hollywood takedown of all. It is, simply, one of the greatest movies ever made about the illusory nature of the Hollywood myth.
Mulholland Dr. towers over the decade, both in its prescient understanding of the oncoming tidal-wave of American “aww-shucks” reality celebrity and for the way it parallels the illusions of the Hollywood dream to the act of dreaming itself. Like our dreams, the film is something of a matryoshka doll, a series of boxes within boxes (literally) that unfold in and out of one another, constantly changing the meaning of what came before and shifting the ground beneath what is coming next. Lynch uses the dual images of an amnesiac brunette named Camilla who becomes convinced she is an actress named Rita (Laura Elena Harring) and a bifurcated blonde named Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts, in the breakthrough performance of a lifetime) who spends half the movie fantasizing about her dream of Hollywood as a star-struck tyro named Betty, to play with the Hollywood iconography of beauty and celebrity, of fame and humiliation, all the while using the narrative structure of the movie to undermine our understanding and sympathies.
David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.
The pleasure of watching Mulholland Dr. is not only found in the game of trying to assemble a narrative path through the film (a second viewing should do the trick there), but in exploring the texture and depth of Lynch’s filmmaking. The devil is in the details (and at the Diner); just look at the badge on the waitress, watch as it oscillates between the names Diane and Betty. No one loads the frame with more meaning than Lynch, and each shot carries not only a narrative purpose but a clue to Lynch’s intent; the layers of relationships and meanings inherent in dreaming, often unexplained but always understood. Watching him unravel Diane’s mind, her dreams of celebrity and love, is shattering; it is akin to watching someone weave a tapestry in reverse, layer by layer, line by line, peeling away illusions until we’re all left in tatters, wondering how the artist has unmade everything, including the cinema itself. Hollywood, you never stood a chance.
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
Before we begin, I encourage you to take a moment and click on over to the website of any small town newspaper and peruse the local news section; crime, poverty, housing collapse, unemployment and various other indicators of the dire economic situation in this country are front page news, day in, day out, for the overwhelming majority of American communities. Now, turn to the business section; stocks are up, movie box office just went through the roof, consumer spending is up, America continues to work through its long, national state of denial by opening its wallet and pretending the bill will never come due. We are a nation that has spent the past decade in a self-created state of illusion, moving through imagined political threats into entire economies based upon a fantasy of never-ending growth. We have lived and continue to live a big lie. We aspire to the things just beyond our means, never content, creating cycles of existence and consumption simply by believing.
While Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood draws on the politics of our fantasy to manufacture a new American mythology of greed, no movie understands the personal cost and shame of a personal economic crisis like Laurent Cantet’s Time Out. Cantet’s film is a fictionalized re-telling of the true story of Jean-Claude Romand, an unemployed French man whose pride stands in the way of him telling his family that he has, in fact, never been the person he says he is. That pride always inspired Romand, fearing that his lie would be exposed, to murder his entire family. Romand’s story served many films over the course of the decade, from Tokyo Sonata to Nobody’s Life to The Adversary, but Cantet’s film on the subject transcends every other; Time Out is a masterpiece not only for its prescient understanding the pain of unemployed alienation, a herald of our present condition, but for its tonal and compositional beauty and Cantet’s brilliant decision to keep us closely in the company of his heartbreaking protagonist, Vincent (Aurélien Recoing).
Laurent Cantet’s Time Out
Vincent’s days are spent traveling to his non-existent job with the United Nations in Switzerland, avoiding cell phone calls from home and studying up on the programs he has told everyone he is working on. Recoing’s performance is one for the ages, a man terrified by the choices he has made, rendered inert by his inability to publically confront reality. Instead, Recoing captures Vincent’s personal torment in the dissonance between the submission in his eyes and the need to always keep moving and busy, and the performance is absolutely devastating. Cantet also utilizes a brilliant score by the English composer Jocelyn Pook to set a minimalist mood and the cinematography of Pierre Milon is breathtaking in its use of blank winter landscapes and pensive close-ups, all of which tie us directly into Vincent’s state of mind, none of it proscriptive, all of it compounding our astonishment at the film’s devastating finale.
THINKFilm, one of the companies we lost this decade, brought Time Out to theaters in America in 2001, and the film went on to near universal acclaim and minimal box office. This was a growing trend and problem at the movies and as the decade wore on, Time Out’s $500K in U.S. box office would look downright gaudy next to some of the films on this list. The fact that so few people have seen this film is the source of major heartbreak for me, and while I cannot recommend it highly enough, I could only hope that today’s audiences would seek out this gem of a film and give it a fair hearing next to something like Up In The Air, which mines the shame of unemployment for decidedly different purposes. Time Out remains as relevant a document of the big lie as any film made this decade, towering proof of subtlety and patience yielding great rewards.
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