In a thoroughbred year for film, here are our must-see picks from 2017.
Faces Places
Directed by Agnes Varda and JR (Opening in Thailand Jan 21)
A joy of a movie, Faces Places is a nonfiction film about artmaking and how art -- the word conjures up feelings of aloofness and inaccessibility in a world where the priciest painting costs as much as a small country's GDP -- can be as mundane as it is sophisticated, as everyday as it is enchanting. Veteran French filmmaker Agnes Varda, 89, teams up with hipsterish street artist JR, 34, and together they travel rural France in a photo-booth van to meet people -- farmers, miners, fishermen, dockworkers, etc -- and create wall art from their faces and stories. The result is a celebration of small beauty and small people, at the crossroads where life and art intersect in the most disarming way.
Call Me By Your Name
Directed by Luca Guadanigno (Currently showing at House RCA)
This film is sun-splashed and succulent (shall we say juicy, like a ripe peach?). Its moving, poignant charm revolves around the bliss and pain of growing up, of being intelligent but also sensitive, of being bold in the head but utterly untrained in the heart. Timothee Chalamet, in a performance hailed as a revelation, plays Elio, a teenage son of Greek history scholars. When a handsome doctoral student (Armi Hammer) spends the summer at their house, Elio goes through an awakening of desire that leaves him ecstatic and giddy, transformed and sad (as it inevitably is). The film was shot by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Call Me By Your Name is often described as "a gay movie", but the story transcends that convenient label into something refreshingly uncomplicated: a love story.
The Florida Project
Directed by Sean Baker (Opening in Thailand Jan 18)
Sean Baker shot his first film Tangerine with an iPhone. In his second, he used 35mm film camera to capture the urban wilderness of lurid cheap motels and half-ruined housing estates on the outskirts of Florida -- right next door to Disneyland. The film follows a cast of children living on the outer edge of American prosperity, while their parents improvise every means of earning just enough to pay the weekly room rent. In short, this is a film about poverty -- and also of the indefatigable spirit of the people, told in a near-spontaneous and totally unsentimental way through the eyes of a ragtag band of children. It's a pleasant surprise the film is opening here.
The Square
Directed by Ruben Ostlund (Opening in Thailand Jan 11)
The Palme d'Or winner from Swedish director Ruben Ostlund is a blithe satire of the art world and the intellectual hypocrisy that defines its mechanisms. Set mostly in a modern art gallery, the film's most famous scene toys with our confusion in how creativity is separated from brutalism, or artmaking from primitivism: in that scene, a performance artist imitates the savagery of an ape at a black-tie dinner party, which quickly escalates into physical harassment and chaos, while we're not sure when art ends and violence begins -- or if they're in fact the same thing from the start.
Chalat Games Geong (Bad Genius)
Directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya (Already released)
The Thai film of the year (bar those that haven't yet been released), Bad Genius is whip-smart and breakneck, a blockbuster caper made with supreme confidence and from an unlikely premise: a trans-continent exam cheating ring. In the story about a maths prodigy who cooks up an elaborate plot to rig an international standard test to make money, the film takes an uppercut at the Thai (and Asian) education system: if schools can take "tea money" without anyone batting an eyelid, why can't smart students treat schools as a casino where winners take all, too?
Dunkirk
Directed by Christopher Nolan (Already released)
Christopher Nolan's evacuation drama is a rarefied ode to old-school sky fighting and an elegiac tale of survival. While his diehard fans still can't stop gushing about the so-so Interstellar and the delightful Inception, Nolan's mastery and confidence as an artist is in full display in this World War II story: in the three-part, time-warped structure that frames and expands our temporal perception as experienced by different characters, and in the supple heft of the narrative, at once abstract and emotional, at once tense and moving. The 70mm IMAX cinematography is rapt, all-encompassing and a pure joy.
Get Out
Directed by Jordan Peele (Already released)
This sleeper-hit thriller plays up racial tensions in the US through a wacky, oddball set-up. A black man visits his white girlfriend's parents in an all-white town amid an escalation of weird occurrences, inside his own head as well as in the basement of that posh property. If Quentin Tarantino's gleeful exaggeration of black revenge is cool and satisfying, Jordan Peele's film pushes black comedy (no pun intended) towards the tipping of pure horror.
Good Time
Directed by Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie (Open in Thailand next year)
As if on a speed pill -- or on Martin Scorsese's cinematic covenant regarding pace -- Good Time races head-on into the dark night of New York with breathtaking velocity. Robert Pattinson plays a small-time thief who tries to bust his autistic brother out of jail, and his half-cooked plan to achieve that just keeps spinning out of control, requiring him to improvise another and yet another madcap scheme. Between the chase and the burglary and the bungling, the film has its warm heart on brotherly bond -- and the struggle of the desperate on the bottom rung of the city.
Zama
Directed by Lucrecia Martel (Unlikely to open here)
Lucrecia Martel's new film is an absurdist comedy so eccentric and evocative that it mesmerises some and frustrates others. It's hard, however, to take your eyes off it. The story, adapted from a modernist novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, follows Don Zama, a white magistrate in a South American outpost who awaits his transfer to a more respectable position and finds his life suspended in existential anxiety, haunted by wounded pride and tormenting lust. It's a story of colonial ennui, told in Martel's cubist approach, augmented by the shrill of strange birds and fevered fantasies.
The Day After
Directed by Hong Sang-soo (Unlikely to open here)
The Korean filmmaker once again spins a comedy out of seduction, desire, deception, male arrogance and female uncertainty. As Woody Allen fades, Hong's brand of socially awkward characters -- always confused, always drunk, always chasing love -- should become a permanent fixture in our study of relationships. And of course, he does this with a budget of maybe 5,000 baht: the bare-boned production, the narrative driven by conversation fuelled by an endless supply of soju, and the simple (and formally austere) cinematography that captures the modulation of voice, expression, happiness and most of all, insecurity.
Western
Directed by Valeska Grisebach (It may come to one of the film festivals)
A group of German construction workers set up a project camp in a Bulgarian village, and their relationships with the locals are fraught with a complex sense of superiority and mistrust. They fly the German flag from their camp, chase local beauties, compete for a limited water supply with the villagers, and the bubbling tension somehow explains the state of the European Union at a time when Germany is seen as the de facto leader of the continent and maybe the world.
Special Mention
- The Great Buddha+ (Huang Hsin-yao): A Taiwanese black comedy about poor workers and their rich, religious and corrupt boss.
- The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda): A Japanese courtroom drama that delves into the issues of justice, guilt and punishment.
- Dragonfly Eyes (Xu Bing): A Chinese experimental film which constructs its narrative about identity from surveillance camera footage.
- No Date No Signature (Vahid Jalilvand): An Iranian drama about a doctor whose sense of guilt is gnawing at him.
- You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay): Joaquin Phoenix plays a violent detective who tries to rescue a missing girl.
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson): An exciting, superbly-made blockbuster. What more do you want?
