A glance at the lineups of the major film festivals reveals how strong a year 2013 was for cinema, though the most important films, as is usually the case, wouldn’t see the light of day until about a year or two later. Personally, even more than it did in 2012, cinema took a back seat for various reasons and I could see only a fraction of what I wanted to this year. (Favorite discoveries this year include Douglas Sirk, Harun Farocki, Ernst Lubitsch and Samuel Fuller.) This post lists my favorite films that premiered in 2013. Other films I really liked were Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra and Andrzej Wajda’s Walesa: Man of Hope. Hope that 2014 will be a much better year on all fronts.
1. The Wolf Of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, USA)
“Religion is the opium of the people” wrote Karl Marx. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Wall Street evangelist and stock market prophet, Jordan Belfort, might just agree, even though the kingdom of heaven he promises is very much of this world. Martin Scorsese’s loud, unhinged and debauched portrait of the rise, fall and resurrection of the loud, unhinged and debauched Belfort is the anti-Christ story of our age: a man who lets others suffer for his sake and for whom every object, experience and sensation in the world is worth commodifying. Scorsese’s presents late capitalism in all its rapaciousness and vulgarity, as a force which appropriates pretty much everything in its way, including criticism, to gain momentum, as a psychosexual space in which the id is given free rein and libido finds an outlet in the act of moneymaking and as a state of perpetual sensory stimulation where wealth accumulation for the sake of it becomes as addictive as sex and drugs. Rife with film references and genre games, The Wolf of Wall Street is as much a duet between Scorsese’s spiritual concerns and the topicality of Terence Winter’s adaptation as it is a soaring, endlessly fascinating example of commercial filmmaking that witnesses a veteran craftsman at the top of his game.
2. Stranger By The Lake (Alain Guiraudie, France)
Irrationality is also at the heart of Alain Guiraudie’s simmering Stranger by the Lake, in which the object of fear is also the object of desire and where death and sex– la mort et la petite mort – are inseparably intertwined. Like Tsai Ming Liang’s quasi-phantom protagonists and their deserted habitats, the ghost-like characters in Guiraudie’s film haunt the lake by the day and vanish by night. And like Tsai’s cinema, Stranger employs a repetition of similar shots, spaces, movements and perspectives that both imparts it a structural simplicity and makes the gradual deviations from them even more pronounced. Marked by three distinct spaces – the woods, the beach and the parking lot – that trace the Freudian topology of the human psyche, the film presents a homo-normative world in which heterosexual presence is literally pushed to the margins, resulting in a level playing field divested of the problems of male gaze. More importantly, Stranger is perhaps the most visually accomplished film of the year and its handling of the interaction between Caucasian bodies and sunlight, foliage, twilight sky and water surface recalls the finest Impressionist works, especially those of Pierre-Auguste and Jean Renoir.
3. Stoker (Park Chan-wook, USA)
An extremely inspired piece of filmmaking, Park Chan-wook’s brilliant Stoker contains some of the most exciting cinematography, editing, sound and production design seen this year. Like Polanski’s movies, Park’s film is about the gradual induction and eventual decimation of Good by Evil. As in Stranger by the Lake, what is most seductive is also the most frightful. Fear and desire are enlaced together and embodied by the figure of Uncle Charlie, who is both an instrument of death and object of sexual desire. Stoker is evidently the result of synergy between a strongly authorial filmmaker who thinks primarily in terms of images and a rich, meaty script that draws as much from horror cinema and literature as it does from Hitchcock’s body of work. Park’s erotic, alluring economy of expression distinguishes itself from the self-congratulatory shorthand of ad filmmaking in the way it establishes subtler association between images and sounds in the film. Strikingly directed with strongly vertical compositional elements and an eerily accentuated sound palette, Stoker is a glorious return to form for Park, who is among the most remarkable visual stylists working today.
4. Shield Of Straw (Takashi Miike, Japan)
Takashi Miike’s juggernaut of a film, the proto-dystopian Shield of Straw, works off a premise familiar to Western movie audience: a group of cops have to transfer a pedophilic killer from the city of Fukuoka to the police headquarters in Tokyo. But there’s a problem. A multi-billionaire has announced a bounty on the guy so massive that it overshadows any fear of imprisonment. What’s more, the killer is such a despicable figure that any residual moral compunction about knocking him off is eliminated. The cops, as a result, have to protect him from not only the entire Japanese population but also themselves. A distant cousin to Scorsese’s film, Shield of Straw imagines a society where both moral and legal obstacles – the superegoist constructs of sin and crime – to Darwinian social-climbing are eliminated or, worse, justified. More impressive than the demonstration of how such an economic system becomes a perfect incubating ground for greed is its central existential dilemma, in which the obligation is on the individual not only to do the right thing, but to understand what the right thing is.
5. The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, Cambodia)
How do you represent history on film that was never documented visually? This is the question that to which Rithy Panh’s highly original, challenging and affecting work responds. Seeking primarily to be a document of life in the Khmer Rouge concentration camps, the film uses neither fictional recreation, which might end up graphic and exploitative, nor animation, which lacks the material presence that photographs offer, but hundreds of meticulously hand-made clay dolls that stand in for people who are to be represented, the concept being that clay would symbolically contain the remains of the camp victims. The resulting film places the audience at a distance from the horrors being described while always retaining a space for empathy. A densely detailed voiceover , on the other hand, recounts Panh’s personal experience at the camps, his lament about images that should or should not have been made, the way cinema had become a tool for totalitarian oppression and reflections on the wacky “Marx meets Rousseau” ideology of the Khmer Rouge that justified the camps. The outcome is a thoroughly thought-provoking essay film that has both the simplicity of a historical document and the ambitiousness of a deconstruction project.
6. In Bloom (Nana Ekvtimishvili/Simon Groß, Georgia)
One of the regrettable things about Nana Ekvtimishvili’s and Simon Gross’ absolutely heartbreaking debut In Bloom is that it is being promoted and received merely as a coming-of-age film set against Soviet collapse. Though the film is certainly that, it is grossly unfair to pigeonhole a wrenching portrayal of female camaraderie on par with anything that Pedro Almodóvar has made into a convenient marketing category. Two 14-year old ‘women’ Eka and Natia, superbly played by debutants Lika Babulani and Mariam Bokeria, in the process of transitioning to adulthood, negotiate the social and cultural problems that plague a country in transition and quietly break patriarchal norms. Dysfunctional families, street violence and the war with Abkhazia are all definitely forces that shape the young women’s lives, but they reside on the periphery of the narrative, which, like the finest Italian Neorealist films, does not underestimate the power of individual agency while acknowledging social constructivism. There is as much truth in Natia acceding to be married to a guy she does not like as there is in Eka tossing the Chekhovian pistol into a lake.
7. Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, France)
Trust a wild music video director like Michel Gondry to come up with the zaniest, trippiest, most imaginative film of the year. Adapted from Boris Vian’s (apparently unfilmable) book L’écume des jours, Mood Indigo is escapist cinema in the truest sense of the term and presents a universe free from the laws of physics and logic. So you have the Pianocktail which concocts a drink based on the notes you play, a rubbery dance form where legs wobble and sway with the woozy jazz soundtrack, split-screen weather conditions, a doorbell that needs to be squashed every time it is set off, a star philosopher named Jean-Sol Partre discoursing from inside a gigantic pipe and a floor full of stenographers writing in chorus the film they are in. Mood Indigo’s gently satirical tale of downward mobility embodies the spirit of the best musicals, producing a strange, unwieldy yet alluring film that combines levity of form with the somberness of its story. Rivaling Terry Gilliam at his surreal best, Gondry’s ceaselessly inventive film is something of a descendant to Georges Méliès’ and Émile Cohl’s cinema of dreams.
8. A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (Ben Rivers/Ben Russell, Estonia)
Ben Rivers’ and Ben Russell’s hypnotic tripartite work presents a single nameless character, played by musician Robert A A Lowe, living in three different social setups: as a part of a commune in Estonia, as a loner in the Finnish woods and as a member of a Norwegian Black Metal group. Specifically, the film shows the character in three states of being, in which the identity of the individual is subordinated to larger ones – the New Ageist assimilation of individual into the community, the Tarkovskian oneness with nature and the Black Metallic transcendence into the realm of the occult. These, on a more general level, are also the three avenues through which men create meaning in their lives – purposeful communal living, Thoreau-esque simple life in harmony with nature and creation of art. Although Spell’s significance arises from the interaction between its three parts, the individual segments themselves contain enthralling passages, especially the trancelike last section, made almost entirely out of the close-ups of performers’ faces and the discordant soundscape, transports the viewer to an experiential plane far removed from his mundane corporeality. It reinforces what André Bazin said of cinema: the Real can be arrived at only through artifice.
9. Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)
A decidedly worn-out premise is at the origin of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son: two babies are swapped at the hospital at the time of birth and end up in different social strata. What could have been an exercise in broad comedy or, even worse, class stereotyping – though the film is a comedy and does double as a fine comedy of class-bound manners – is instead transformed into a piercing examination of parenthood, in which bringing up a child becomes a process of coming to terms with one’s own flaws and insecurities. Through turn of events the film undermines the perspective that men look at their offspring as a continuation of bloodline and women view them as the recipients of their care and affection, While, on the surface, the film seems to be merely a cautionary tale about the perils of spending too little time with your kid, on careful unraveling, it reveals itself as a much more delicate look at the tradeoffs one has to make in bringing up a child, at the question of where to interfere and where to let go.
10. Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg, USA)
With Drinking Buddies, the insanely prolific Joe Swanberg, who wrote and directed a modest three films in 2013 and acted in five, has made a work that might well situate him in the line of filmmakers like Eric Rohmer, Richard Linklater and Hong Sang-soo in both its structural simplicity – marked by numerous small symmetries – and its fine observations on human relationships. The terrific ensemble is as much an author as Swanberg is and the actors evidently draw from personal experience. A naturalistic depiction of the lives of two friends at a brewery, the film treads the ever fuzzy boundary between friendship and romance. Like in the equally excellent Mexican comedy Club Sandwich (2013), Swanberg and his actors host a playful game of smudging the boundaries of sexual propriety by employing ambiguous actor positions, dialogue and physical interaction that fudges the accepted movie conventions about on-screen friendship and romance. If not anything else, Drinking Buddies is an embodiment of the shortcomings and apprehensions of the ‘millennial’ generation, for which the line between friendship and romance has become porous and tricky to negotiate.
January 6, 2014 at 7:05 am
I hope all is well with you my friend. It has admittedly been a very long time since I checked in here, but I realize you have been busy with real life for much of the time, like so many other once active bloggers. But I can always rely on you for a stupendous end-of-the-year presentation, and have been annually inspired by this post, often having some of the same films on my own list. You are a good man, and you are missed, but you still are keeping the candle burning for great cinema, and your list here shows yet again that you are traveling the globe in a figurative sense exploring all the possibilities. Again I salute you. As to this year, ah well. This is one of those rare time where our tastes have seriously diverged.
For one, though I liked THE WOLF ON WALL STREET and adore Martin Scorsese I did not have the film in my Top 10, and though exhilarating and a roller coaster ride I don’t really see the art or lasting value. But I can certainly understand why you would feel otherwise. Leonardo Di Caprio did deliver an electrifying performance, that much is certain.
Though a lifetime chess player, I was no fan at all of COMPUTER CHESS (as if chess really had much to do with the film. ha!) and I am also among a sizable minority who has expressed disdain for UPSTREAM COLOR. Likewise I could never see the good vibes for STOKER, and gave it a low star rating earlier this year at my site. I am wait (im) patiently for the Kore-Eda to open in NYC, and just this past week saw a trailer for STRANGER BY THE LAKE and simply cannot wait for it to open. The wait will not be long, though–maybe a week or two more. Still my rules (USA theatrical opening) would preclude it from inclusion on a 2013 list, but would qualify it for 2014. A few others here on your list (IN BLOOM, A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS and THE MISSING PICTURE) I have not yet seen.
My own Top 10 (though it is actually 12 with a three-way tie for #10):
1. 12 Years A Slave
2. Short Term 12
3. Her
4. La Grande Bellezza (Italy)
5. Blue is the Warmest Color (France)
6. The Past (Iran)
7. Wadjda (Saudi Arabia)
8. Nebraska
9. To the Wonder
10. The Hunt (Denmark)
Frances Ha
Mud
Again, great seeing you in print my friend. I wish you the best year ever in 2014!
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January 7, 2014 at 12:04 am
Greetings, Sam, and thank you so much for the typically generous and detailed comment as well as your list.
You are right. 2013 was a pretty rough year for me and movies were certainly pushed to the sidelines. Equally sad is that I wanted to get back to reading on cinema – blogs, reviews, journals – which did not even start to happen. A bad year indeed, in that sense.
That’s a very eclectic list you have here, with films from three continents. I was not big on SHORT TERM 12, BLUE or THE GREAT BEAUTY, though I thought there were some terrific passages in all of them.
Thank you for your indefatigable support and the unwavering enthusiasm for good cinema from around the world, Sam. That is the one thing that has not changed with years. Not a bit.
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January 6, 2014 at 9:09 am
JAFB, great to read you once again. As always one of the best compiled lists of the internet, and while not seeing all of the movies, you always seem to come out and have some original elements here because of that. My list is less original, but I hope that it gets attention. I adore your first position, and the movie itself managed to get into my list.
Have a great year and hoping that you get a much better one in 2014.
My list of 2013 so far:
1. The Grandmaster
2. Computer Chess
3. The World’s End
4. Stoker
5. Top of the Lake
6. The Dirties
7. Only Lovers Left Alive
8. The Wolf of Wall Street
9. Inside Llewyn Davis
10. Blue Jasmine
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January 7, 2014 at 12:10 am
Hello there, Jaime. A very happy new year to you too. As usual, your list makes me part thrilled, part piqued and part jealous really, that you saw the films I’ve been really keen to see. Where every did you see the Jarmusch? That’s one of the handful of films of 2014 I regret not having been able to see.
And the Jane Campion film simply fell off my radar. Really heartening to see it on the list. Had not heard of THE DIRTIES so far and it sounds good.
THE GRANDMASTER on top, that’s something. I think I’ll revisit the film down the line some day. Excited about the Coens, which I hope I will see the coming week.
Thanks again for your comment, and here’s to a superb year ahead for you!
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January 7, 2014 at 8:58 am
The Santiago Film Festival actually had some really good films! Only Lovers was one and Nebraska the other. A chance in a million I’d say.
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January 7, 2014 at 9:02 am
You can say that again!
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January 22, 2014 at 4:01 pm
It’s been four years since I’ve been here and seeing all the new reviews and features you have posted, I have decided to initiate kick-self-in-the-head mechanism. Nice to have rediscovered this space, old friend (if in case you remember)
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January 22, 2014 at 4:06 pm
Hey buddy!
A really long time indeed. So much has changed since. Time surely has some strange tricks under its sleeve.
Hope all’s great.
Cheers!
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January 23, 2014 at 10:52 am
It certainly has, comrade. Tis great to see that Seventh Art remains a living beast. and not bejeweled residue! Great list, by the way. The description of “Shield Of Straw” is brilliant!
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January 27, 2014 at 1:42 pm
Merci, mon ami.
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February 24, 2014 at 5:16 pm
Hey Srikkanth aka JAFB. How’ve you been? Its been a long time since my days of regularly checking out the latest posts & updates at my favourite movie sites & blogs around the web, with yours being one – paucity of time is the sole reason for not being able to continue that habit anymore. Anyway, noticed at my blogroll that you’ve posted list of your favourite 2013 films, and so decided to quickly hop in.
Great to see that you’ve rated both the Scorsese & the Park so highly. Though Wolf of Wall Street has mostly garnered positive reviews (despite this being, to use the much-maligned tern, a largely “mainstream” film), Stoker has garnered lukewarm responses from most, which is unfortunate methinks. I completely agree with your assessment that Park is one of the foremost visual stylists working today, and that the film is a fabulous concoction of sight & sounds, with great editing to boost. However, I was tad surprised to note that you’ve included the Miike in your list as well – watched the film at last year’s Calcutta Film Festival, and I was left disappointed after a really strong opening (the premise was darn interesting but the film didn’t live up to it in my opinion).
Though I’m yet to see quite a few 2013 films worth seeing, my list for the year looks somewhat like this as of now:
1. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang-ke)
2. Le Passe (Asghar Farhadi)
3. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
4. Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche)
5. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino)
6. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai)
7. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen bros.)
9. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
10. 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen), Stoker (Park Chan-wook), Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi) [TIE]
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February 28, 2014 at 10:18 pm
Hey Shubhajit,
Good to hear from you. I completely understand the paucity of time and the inability to keep up with online reading. Tell me about it! Been going through that phase for some time now.
Congratulations to you, once more, and here’s to a wonderful life ahead.
That’s a strong list you have there, with some very commendable titles. I have missed out on INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, hope to catch it some day. (I was certainly let down by BLUE and A TOUCH OF SIN though). Hope 2014 is a much better year at the movies!
Cheers!
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July 3, 2014 at 7:03 am
I re-read this post today because of how much I miss your writing!
Hope all is well, JAFB!
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July 7, 2014 at 11:33 am
It’s so nice of you to say that, Lee! Really heart-warming.
Yes, all is well, except the writing of course! Hope I can get back to it soon…
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