With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on
my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively
uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had
a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers entries five and four.
#5: THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI (Dir: Martin McDonagh, 2017)
Three Billboards is a film which came along at the right time for everyone to completely miss the truth in what it had to say. It's a film of our times both in what it depicts and the critical reaction to it. In the film, a grieving mother, Mildred, erects three billboards attacking the local police chief for failing to make arrests following the rape and murder of her daughter. The reaction to these billboards exposes and deepens existing prejudices in Mildred's small town, with misplaced good intentions and vengeful self-righteousness ultimately turning one tragedy into a series of violent and bloody encounters.
The film plants itself in the middle of the battleground between the Trump right and the MeToo left, holistically observing their shared fondness for dehumanising others and reducing complex ethical and social dynamics to easy answers as fuel for sanctimonious anger. Mildred is driven by profound grief, but uses her billboard campaign more as an excuse for revenge and pushing her guilt onto others than to do right by her daughter. The town and its local police force are parochial and racist, choosing to see the billboards as an affront to their self-image rather than reflecting on the horror of a terrible crime going unsolved and their own shortcomings as individuals and a community.
Three Billboards is a film which came along at the right time for everyone to completely miss the truth in what it had to say. It's a film of our times both in what it depicts and the critical reaction to it. In the film, a grieving mother, Mildred, erects three billboards attacking the local police chief for failing to make arrests following the rape and murder of her daughter. The reaction to these billboards exposes and deepens existing prejudices in Mildred's small town, with misplaced good intentions and vengeful self-righteousness ultimately turning one tragedy into a series of violent and bloody encounters.
The film plants itself in the middle of the battleground between the Trump right and the MeToo left, holistically observing their shared fondness for dehumanising others and reducing complex ethical and social dynamics to easy answers as fuel for sanctimonious anger. Mildred is driven by profound grief, but uses her billboard campaign more as an excuse for revenge and pushing her guilt onto others than to do right by her daughter. The town and its local police force are parochial and racist, choosing to see the billboards as an affront to their self-image rather than reflecting on the horror of a terrible crime going unsolved and their own shortcomings as individuals and a community.
McDonagh's previous films have dealt with criminals struggling to match
their cool self-image with the reality and consequences of their actual
incompetence. Three Billboards turns that focus away from those who
commit crime and onto those expected to deal with the outcome of crime,
whether a local police force trying to piece together a hopeless lack of
evidence or a grieving mother unable to handle a storm of conflicting
emotions in the aftermath of her daughter's death.
Despite
these grave concerns, where the film finds its humanity is in how
consistently, guiltily hilarious it is. Being Irish, McDonagh has a keen
sense of how quickly tragedy turns into comedy, particularly among
people who take everything personally because they're not quite
intelligent enough to comprehend a bigger, messier picture. Naturally,
the film has come in for criticism from those on both sides of the
political aisle for mocking their concerns and not taking the
monstrosity of the other side seriously enough. In doing so, McDonagh's
critics inadvertently revealed how perceptively his film captured the
human farce at the heart of a paranoid, vengeful time.
#4: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR (Dir: Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
That Blue Is The Warmest Colour seems destined to be remembered first
and foremost for sex scenes criticized for being overly lascivious and,
per Julie Maroh, the creator of the comic on which the movie is based,
'a straight person's fantasy of gay love', is a travesty, diminishing
the value of an extraordinarily passionate and heartbreaking love story
to a question over whether its depiction of sex went too far. It speaks
to an increasing trend of puritanical censoriousness that a debate over
the merit or demerit of a sex scene can cancel out everything
surrounding it.
I don't know what 'real' lesbian sex is like -
and unless something very strange happens, never will - or if it is
sufficiently uniform to be held to one standard of presentation. It's
certainly true that Blue's sex scenes are presented in a breathy,
heightened way, emphasizing pleasure and contact. Does that make it
'pornographic'? Depending on your definition, perhaps. It certainly goes
beyond the loveless shadow puppetry that is the depiction of sex - if
depicted at all - in English-language movies. You'd feel short-changed
if it turned up on Pornhub, though. Is it a 'straight fantasy'? The
director is straight and certainly shoots his female leads in coital
close-up with a degree of aestheticised pleasure. Perhaps the criticism
is justified, or perhaps it's that mainstream culture doesn't present
its viewers with intimacy and closeness very often and the only frame of
reference people have for anything beyond sterile suggestion is
pornography at the opposite extreme. One way or the other, it is only a
small part of the picture.
What matters is that across its three
hours, Blue Is The Warmest Colour is a story about the messy humanity
that floods the spaces between the first love and first heartbreak. It
is about growth experienced through unification and then destruction:
first becoming someone new through another person becoming an
inseparable part of your life, then becoming someone new again by having
to heal the wound of their absence. At over three hours long,
Kechiche's film has no shortage of incident, but is really about the
moments in-between: the conversations about nothing and everything, the
unspoken dynamics of family dinners, the longing, the confusion, the
small but intractable gains and losses, the changes in each other that
are invisible until they compound into becoming unavoidable, then the
explosion and the fallout.
From Léa Seydoux and especially Adèle
Exarchopoulos, the film has two of the most naturalistic and emotionally
untethered performances in living memory. It would be nothing without
them. Depicting the more experienced of the pair, Emma, Seydoux has the
slightly easier role, her character having acquired enough cynicism and
self-sufficiency to protect against the ravages of separation. She
nevertheless finds the subtle pains and desires in the fractures in
Emma's guarded front. It's Exarchopoulos whose performance is the real
tour-de-force, though, wordlessly capturing the emotional extremes of a
young woman dragged into maturity through feelings too formidable for
her to rationalise or control. She is a reservoir of unbridled feeling
heading inexorably for collapse. When the dam finally breaks,
Exarchopoulos unleashes emotional annihilation in body and soul for both
her character and her audience.
To reduce such an enormous film,
in both length and depth, to a question over the appropriateness of its
sex scenes is perhaps a story in itself of the disappearance of love as
a feeling and its substitution by love as a concept. This is not to
suggest that any part of the film, sex or otherwise, should be beyond
criticism, but that the 'pornography' accusation seems to say more about
the accuser than the accused. The vast majority of films show sex only
as a function, rather than allowing it to be expressive and meaningful
in itself. Blue's sex scenes are not beyond reproach, but are an
irreplaceable part of the story and its characters' being to a degree
that shouldn't be as groundbreaking as it is. Those who complain of such
scenes straying into fantasy miss that the collision between the
innocent fantasy of love and the painful reality of human change and
growth is at the core of these characters' life together. Sex and
eroticism should be as essential a part of storytelling as it is real
life. In Blue, it is - but despite the hollering of its critics, it is
also so much more.
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Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Three
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Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 10 - 8
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Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Three
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Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 10 - 8
