Rounding up a year of film is pretty de rigeur these days. Film lists are like end-of-year school reports for the common-or-garden film journalist. They offer a document of who’s behaving badly, who got the gold stars, and show us the most popular kid in the classroom. They’re also as much about an individual’s viewing habits as they are accounts of the state of cinema over the course of one year. There are those films you haven’t seen, the ones you wish you hadn’t seen, and the ones you absolutely refuse to see. And they tend to get people inexplicably fired up. A good round up, however, might offer interesting parallels and unlikely links with the benefit of a year of hindsight. With that in mind, we look at some common threads in the year’s big releases and independent success stories.
Strong female characters
2014 was a strong year for the Bechdel test both here and across the pond. The Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night was a beautifully executed realist drama featuring Marillon Cotillard in the leading role as working mother Sandra, a woman put in an impossible role after stringent cuts put her precious job in danger. Carol Morley’s The Falling, set in a girls’ school in 1969, stars Maisie Williams as a young girl who becomes obsessed with her best friend, while an epidemic of fainting rages across the school. Starring commanding British acting talent including Florence Pugh and Maxine Peake, the film was visually far more exciting than her powerful docu-drama Dreams of a Life. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour took as its central focus the character of Shirin, a twenty-something bisexual American-Iranian after a messy break-up. What does she do? Run back to her conservative parent’s household, with a strap-on. Akhavan has already gained recognition with her web series The Slope and has a guest spot on the new season of Girls.
A host of fresh, new female film directors
Of the 248 features at the BFI London Film Festival programme, 53 were directed by women. Not bad, but let’s not get carried away: women are still notoriously under-represented in the industry. A crop of exciting new directors, and new initiatives and projects including Underwire and the Bechdel film festival, and the film journal cleo suggest that the winds of change are blowing. American film director Josephine Decker had not one, but two, films out at the LFF: Butter on the Latch was a loose and experimental exploration of female friendship set against the evocative backdrop of a Balkan music festival, while Thou Wast Mild and Lovely held a heady, terrifying sway as an unusual psychosexual thriller in which sexuality takes on new forms: including an insight into the mind of a cow. Asia Argento’s new film Incompresa (2014) still hasn’t landed on our shores, but got a positive write-up in Cahiers Du Cinema. And while Mia Hansen-Love isn’t new to the circuit, her latest film Eden was a fresh and engaging look at the 90’s French house scene. After the powerful Father of My Children and the moody coming-of-age story Goodbye First Love, she shows she can lend her hand to a wide scope of topics.
Visualising Neurological Disorders
In Electricity (2014), Agyness Deyn plays Lilly, a ballsy young woman struggling to cope with her epilepsy as she moves to London to find her lost brother. Described as an “Alice in Wonderland” for the modern age, the film combines avant-garde touches with mainstream social realism. Whether in nightclubs or seaside fairground rides, Lilly’s hallucinations are always in danger of taking everything away from her. Another very different film explored the process of re-establishing memory, in James Hall and Edward Lovelace’s The Possibilities are Endless (2014). It follows Orange Juice’s frontman Edwyn Collins as he tries to regain his creative life and musical career after a stroke. After suffering from a stroke, Collins wakes up unable to remember anything, only two phrases: ‘Grace Maxwell’ and ‘The Possibilities Are Endless.’ The film follows Collins battles as he struggles to find his voice, his memory and his old life.
Unconventional road movies
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) was the big hit at last year’s LFF, and had a popular run this year. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novitiate nun in early 1960s Poland. Abandoned as an orphan after the Holocaust, she’s grown up in a convent since childhood. Anna learns of an unknown relative she has to meet before taking her vows: it’s her mother’s sister Wanda (Agata Kulesza). Pawlikowski’s third feature follows these two very different women on a road journey to find what remains of their family. They uncover a dark family past suffered under Nazi occupation. Other unlikely road movies included Ruizpalacios Mexican road movie (with little of the open road) Gueros and the music documentaries The 78 Music Project and Austin to Boston.
All things scatological…
First, Matthew Barney’s operatic epic River of Fundament used Detroit as a backdrop for a scatological reinterpretation of Egyptian mythology. Then Jean-Luc Godard showed us a man shitting in 3D in Goodbye to Language. The latter proved to be a film entirely of its own genre, a dizzying, nausea-inducing fairground ride of a film in which sight is pushed to new levels. You can forgive him for the poo then.
Music documentaries that pushed boundaries
Two hybrid concert film/music documentaries made a strong impact this year. Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard fictionally recreated a day-in-the-life of the Australian post-punk rocker Nick Cave in 20,000 Days on Earth, wile another British film-making team, Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland made Biophilia: Live, a document of a concert that provides a gateway into Bjork’s multimedia musicology project.
The Slower the Better…
Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja was a quiet hit of the London Film Festival. In his fourth feature, and first attempt at a period drama, Alonso takes a notoriously bloody period in Argentine history, the ruthless 1882 campaign to eliminate the indigenous population from Patagonia, and turns it into a slow-burning, quasi-mythological hallucinatory Western with a final, unexpected turn. Out in the wilderness, sexuality switches into something far more threatening. Masturbatory stabs in a mossy lake are not enough to pacify the predatory, hungry eyes of a Captain with a taste for young girls.
Interstellar/ Psychedelic Science Fiction
The year opened with Jonathan Glazer’s beguiling Under the Skin, about a “woman who fell to earth” in the shape of a jean-clad space alien played by Scarlett Johansson with a voracious appetite for aimless men. It culminated with Nolan’s Interstellar. And sandwiched in the middle was the BFI’s excellent Sci-Fi season, one of the highlights of which was its Afro-futurism event. Screenings of the Sun Ra film Space is the Place, as well as the excellent intersectional feminist sci-fi film Born in Flames, worked alongside an enticing Q+A with the endlessly genre-bending Afrika Bambaataa.
Religion
Religion weighed in heavily, and ambiguously, across the year’s film offerings. Ida followed a doubting soon-to-be-nun, while Stations of the Cross told the story of 14 year old Maria, whose family are members of a fundamentalist Catholic community. Maria’s profound commitment to Jesus takes unexpected turns. One of the year’s best film offerings, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, followed the tragic downfall of a man and his family in a remote Russian town as he tries to defeat a corrupt system of power. Religious salvation proves impossible.
Boyhood vs. Girlhood
Another two stand-out hits of the year proved a battle of boys against girls. Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood followed shy Marieme (an excellent Karidja Touré), a teenage girl from a difficult Parisian neighbourhood, who joins a girl gang. When a group of local girls ask her to join their hang with the promise of cute boys, Marieme is soon cruising shopping malls as they exert a reign of terror. And finally Boyhood took the film world by storm, boasting the unlikely position of being both Empire and Sight and Sound’s film of the year. A cinematic feat that documented the life of a young man filmed over twelve years, it was lauded by some, and fell flat on its back to others. As always, the choice is yours.
Credits
Text Sophia Satchell Baeza
Photography Scott Trindle
Styling Caroline Newell
Agyness wears top Prada. Shorts Paige.
[The Lights, Camera, Action Issue, No. 319, Summer 12]