25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #25 - TONY MANERO

25. Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (2008)

I wrote a thorough analysis of the film here, but it bears repeating that Larrain's synthesis of surreal gallows humor, carefully wrought handheld cinematography and an unnerving central performance made it the most harrowing, revelatory film seen on American screens in 2009. The story of a murderous John Travolta impersonator in Pinochet-era Chile, the director's second feature secures his place as one of the decade's most brilliantly perceptive discoveries. Inexcusably absent from most lists of this year's best films, Tony Manero is likely to simmer (or perhaps fester) in the recesses of the arthouse imagination in the years to come, eventually overtaking 2009's relatively pallid contenders for immortality such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up in the Air, Precious and District 9. Larrain is a poet of the shared historical world; by neither pandering to nor betraying his status as an artist, he captures a horrifically familiar hierarchy of art, sexuality and politics while obeying the imperative of his unique sensibilities. Only the great films refuse disloyalty to audiences and themselves equally.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: AN INTRODUCTION

Each year, almost every “Most” or “Best-Of….” round-up begins with a missive in defense of list-making as a critical activity.  Often this precedes a defense of the arrived-at final number of included titles: Is 50 too many? Why not 65 or 33? What’s so ontologically magical about the number 10? For lists concerning decades, what immediately follows is a sheepish acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of decades, centuries, millenia, etc. as useful parameters for discussing the relative merits of artwork, events or persons.  My own belief is that as arbitrary as these numbers may be, we’ve agreed (more or less) that they ought to mean something and they’ve thus come to mean quite a bit.  This is shaky tautology to be sure, but as far as this chronicler is concerned, a decade is a worthwhile chunk of time to look at, largely because we’ve come to believe it so.  If, in the course of life, we think of ourselves as constructing and participating in 10-year increments, then these increments should reflect the value of this intention by virtue of their tendencies and idiosyncrasies.  It’s a suitable, if permeable, temporal boundary that defines our lives and our shared history to a large extent.  Our willful submission makes this possible, and defensiveness on the subject is largely pointless and self-defeating.   

As I haven’t seen a fraction of this year’s important films, I’ll forgo a list of 2009’s best titles.  I am much more familiar with the decade’s key works, and feel justified in posting a list of films made between 2000 and 2009 that might conceivably be considered “the best,” “my favorite,” or, to abandon brevity in favor of description, “the most artistically revelatory and/or profound.” In a word, they are “worthy” films. That is to say they’re worthy of being discussed and remembered as representatives of their time. I stop short of using “significant” as a criterion so that I can indulge the films I love rather than the films I feel I ought to think about or respect or otherwise consider independently from my mind’s pleasure center.  As several critics have claimed, Miami Vice and Avatar heralded separate but equal technical sea changes for Hollywood and are therefore worthy of “best-of” consideration. For me, however, Vice and Avatar are each little more than high-gloss junk and I’d just soon as soon leave them off of a list that feels excruciatingly brief, even at 25 entries.  

The number 25 represents nothing more than a suitably round number for such a list, but one sizable enough to preclude unbearably painful omissions.  Limiting myself to 10 was maddening, resulting in a list far too meager to encapsulate a decade.  Using 100 feels appropriate only when considering a century, the symmetry irresistible.  Even 50 felt excessive or indecisive.  A few critics, especially those publishing on the internet, have, after happily casting off the pretty number mandate, chosen to stop whenever they felt all worthy films had been discussed.  To each his own, but I find the pleasure in these endeavors is the selection and ranking process.  A final tally of 25 ensures both a painful selection process and a spaciousness befitting ten years’ time.

IMAGE 2

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

A significant portion of Kiarostami's 1990 masterpiece Close-Up is dedicated to this image and its variations. The man looking into the camera, Hossain Sabzian, has been arrested for impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbalf and having convinced a well-to-do family that their home and children are ideal subjects for his next picture. Kiarostami documents the trial (the source of this image), interviews all participants, re-stages (using non-actors portraying themselves) portions of the crime and orchestrates a tender encounter between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf himself that poignantly concludes the film.

If Close-Up is essentially about anything, and it's debatable whether or not it can be satisfactorily reduced or encapsulated, it is about Sabzian's performance as Makhmalbaf: his own interpretation of it, its impact on intended and unintended audiences, and the parallel attempts by the court and Kiarostami at discerning its meaning.

Here we are given a close-up of Sabzian in the courtroom as Kiarostami -- his off camera voice registers enough for the filmmaker to be considered another central character -- asks him to recount the ruse's disintegration. The close-up, however, is complicated by the background presence of an observer, a visual approximation/stand-in of the filmmakers, the court (he's clad in official garb, though his precise position is undocumented), and the audience. Throughout the film's last third, this repeated angle features the sober-eyed Sabzian recounting the details of his alleged crime while the figure behind him displays an array of responses, ranging from the pensive to the indifferent. The filmmaker could easily have isolated his ostensible subject and consequently limited his story's focus; instead he lends half of the frame to a mere observer at the proceedings. Despite the film's title, this frame inhabits the no-man's-land between the close-up and the two-shot.  Kiarostami's image presents explicitly the phantom occupants of any film's close-ups: the audience.