A few years ago, world cinema received a shot in the arm from so-called glasnost movies from the former Soviet Union–pictures that had been shelved due to various forms of censorship, mostly political, and were finally seeing the light of day thanks to the relaxation or near dissolution of state pressures.
For the first time since I started making these annual lists for the Reader five years ago, not one of the pictures was made in Hollywood; significantly, the three Hollywood pictures that came closest are valuable precisely because they attack the lies, distortions, and perversions of the mainstream media. Unforgiven tackles the abusive rhetoric of the western, Bob Roberts treats the impostures of political campaigning and coverage, and Deep Cover delves into the underside of Bush’s hypocritical “war on drugs.” To my mind they’re slightly less effective than the more thoroughgoing Rock Hudson’s Home Movies–a film shot on video by Mark Rappaport, and the only U.S. movie on my list–but they’re certainly on the right track. Not coincidentally, all three movies exceeded industry expectations, holding on much longer in theaters than anticipated–largely, I would argue, because they said things other Hollywood movies weren’t saying and that needed saying. (For me, the major weakness of Unforgiven, the strongest of this trio, is that it asks us to “reconsider” a romantic cult of macho behavior, including homicide, on which Clint Eastwood founded his own successful career of many years. It’s a cult I never much liked to begin with, and while I’m certainly pleased to discover Eastwood’s belated enlightenment and admire his artistry in expressing it, I don’t see any repudiation of the earlier movies that occasioned this critique, either by Eastwood or by the critics who consider this the year’s best movie.)
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At the edges of this dazzling kaleidoscope are video interviews with a few surviving witnesses of Ruan’s brief reign and conversations between Kwan and Cheung about who this unknowable figure might have been. At the vibrant center is Cheung’s exquisite performance; a last-minute replacement for the more “serious” Hong Kong actress Anita Mui, Cheung makes the part completely and indelibly her own. Why Ruan committed suicide is only one of the questions the film chooses to leave partially open; but in the course of asking such questions, Kwan’s talented cowriters, Chiao Hsiung-ping and Qiu Gangjian, open up the past to vast reaches of historical speculation, while Kwan paradoxically encloses that speculation in tight, elegant labyrinths of period decor. Though Actress has a running time of 146 minutes, no film of the past year afforded me more unbridled and continuous pleasure, even after three viewings.
The Famine Within. This Canadian feminist documentary by Katherine Gilday concerns the ideological implications of the ideal of feminine beauty that rules our culture; it’s the purest example on my list of the essay film, although properly speaking A Tale of the Wind, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, As You See, and even (to a limited extent) Actress can and should be regarded as examples too. The essay writer Philip Lopate has cogently argued that essay films should have some of the informal, personal quality of written essays–one reason he prefers Orson Welles’s Filming “Othello,” for instance, to his F for Fake. But my own bias is to admit a much wider range of nonfiction films to the form. True, The Famine Within has a talking-head format like that of conventional documentaries–focusing much of the time on victims of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. But this shouldn’t lead one to underestimate the intellectual and polemical force of this meditation on the ideology of beauty; as the film is organized and developed, it’s about quite a bit more than eating disorders. It played at the Music Box in March and attracted a sizable audience.
La belle noiseuse. Jacques Rivette’s four-hour look at painterly process, which ran at the Music Box last January and February, has been decried–with some justice–as irrelevant to the way artists actually work and a prurient excuse for an extended peep show. I liked it for its uses of duration (a Rivette specialty), vastly more interesting than Victor Erice’s approach to painting in Dream of Light; for its reflections on artistic creation generally (again, a Rivette specialty if one includes his earlier, metaphorical uses of theater in film); for the performances of Michel Piccoli and Jane Birkin; and, not least, for the power and precision of Rivette’s mise en scene.
