Olivier Assayas returns to his formative years for the second time with Something in the Air (2012, better French title: Apres Mai). What distinguishes it from his first go-round with the era, Cold Water (1994, maybe his best movie), is first a more direct countenancing of the political situation in France in the aftermath of May '68, kept mainly implicit in the strained relationships between the generations in Water, and second a diffusion of focus. The main thread is the evolution of the Assayas surrogate Gilles (Clément Métayer, a dead ringer for Ziggy from The Wire if there ever was one) from high school radical to politically disengaged artist, but the movie roams promiscuously into the lives of various other characters in Gilles's orbit, and Gilles's own path takes a few detours. If Water is akin to a tightly constructed short story or novella, Air is more like a discursive memoir, and indeed Assayas has also written a memoir of sorts about this period in his life, A Post-May Adolescence. This has led some to complain that Air's second half is too scattered, but the scatter is what Assayas is going for. The movie is very much about how the collective dream of revolution went to pieces and left many of its young proponents chasing individualized dreams of self-actualization. A more legit complaint you could lodge is that Gilles as Metayer plays him is a little too recessive and inward for the movie's own good. Assayas's best films tend to pivot on a great performance, from Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep (1996) to Edgar Ramirez in Carlos (2010) to Virginie Ledoyen in Water; Métayer is just kind of there. But Assayas's ability to pull his viewer into an entirely plausible world, through a combination of dead-on detail, masterful orchestration of space and movement, and brilliant soundtrack cues, is undiminished, nor is his intellect. He's clear-eyed about the failures of his characters, the naivety and arrogance underlying the Marxist rhetoric they routinely spout, yet gazes on them with great tenderness, and in the coda, set to Kevin Ayers's "Decadence," imparts to them a kind of grace.
Pretty much the same deal as '88-'12, in terms of rules/intentions. A few fallow years, but '67, '68, '71, '74, '83, and possibly '84 are among the best years for cinema in the 20th century. '67-'74 is the single most fascinating period in cinema, for me, in that right as Godard peaks and recedes into Mao the impact of his innovations begins to be felt all over the world, with many exciting experiments in self-reflexive and political filmmaking coming out of the US, Britain, Japan, and elsewhere at an astonishingly rapid clip. We also have the flowering of the New Hollywood, which inherits some of the energy of the various New Waves and broadens the range of tones and subject matter available to mainstream movies. What follows this period in the US is, from one perspective, an increasingly precipitous descent into pervasive corporatized spectacle, which descent we seem to have reached a terminal phase of. But for someone like myself whose imagination was colonized as a child by said spectacles, '80s Hollywood at its best remains a richly evocative pop dreamscape.
This is a series of best lists, from 1988 (the year of my birth) to 2012. There would be a tentative 2013 list as well, had I not chosen to group the movies by their year of completion rather than their US release date. The main effect compiling these lists has had on me is to make me newly aware of how many supposedly good movies of the '90s I haven't seen, and what a weird and motley bunch of those I have seen I've found room in my heart for. With the exception of years that are especially replete, my lists' last couple slots often contain movies I have either substantial problems with but can't shake for whatever reason, or a potent but nonspecific memory of, like the way the movie uses light, or its tone. I make no distinction between shorts and features (the movies vary between 2 minutes and 7 hours), and tried to include some TV episodes as well, ones that put the lie to the notion still holding strong in highbrow circles that TV by some handicap intrinsic to the medium cannot function as cinema. I will update these lists sporadically. Follow-ups covering earlier periods are likely. Susan Sontag declared cinephilia dead in the '90s, but I see most of the decade as a long string of firecracker epiphanies. Even if every person who saw and loved Goodfellas or Rushmore or Tarantino's early movies when they came out didn't immediately become feverish, socially defective movie obsessives, the transaction that takes place between receptive audiences and those movies is nothing if not cinephilic. They make cinephiles out of you, even if it's only for their duration. As for the aughts, to me it felt like a richer time for movies than it did for many other people, likely because it was when I became a cinephile. In retrospect, I do see now that what we're basically looking at is several extremely good years ('07 being the pinnacle) with some valleys between them. Where the '90's saw an influx of exciting new independent and studio filmmakers, the aughts mainly featured those same filmmakers doing their thing, often at a high level of achievement, with few new voices joining their ranks. Independent cinema became increasingly bifurcated. Mainstream perception of independent film was largely defined by medium-to-relatively-high budget comedies of quirk and atmospheric actor-driven dramas (often Sundance-approved and corporately subsidized), while spartan low budget productions, where most of the originality in American film was (and is) to be found, received a great deal of critical discussion but weren't given much of a chance, commercially. And for the most part their originality was of a tentative and self-effacing kind. Grand gestures were rare, and no headline-grabbing firebrands like Spike Lee or Tarantino emerged. One great filmmaker (Andrew Bujalski) and several good ones came out of this cycle, but otherwise alleged examinations of generational inarticulacy were oftentimes hard to distinguish from symptoms of same. International cinema was quite a treasure trove, though only a handful of new capital-G Great filmmakers emerged, foremost among them Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
1988
1. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg)
2. Talking to Strangers (Rob Tregenza)
3. Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata)
4. Damnation (Bela Tarr)
5. The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese)
6. They Live (John Carpenter)
7. Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo)
8. Bird (Clint Eastwood)
9. Die Hard (John McTiernan)
10. Chocolat (Claire Denis)
1989
1. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
2. The Killer (John Woo)
3. The Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette)
4. Life Lessons (Martin Scorsese)
5. Black Rain (Shohei Imamura)
6. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto)
7. Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch)
8. The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley)
9. Santa Sangre (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
10. Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (Yong-Kyun Bae)
1990
1. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami)
2. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
3. Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai)
4. Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)
5. Twin Peaks: "Pilot" (David Lynch)
6. Trust (Hal Hartley)
7.No Fear, No Die
(Claire Denis)
8. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton)
9. Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman (Claire Denis)
10. Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne)
11. Wild at Heart (David Lynch)
1991
1. La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette)
2. Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg)
3. The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax)
4. Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley)
5. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
6. Barton Fink (Joel Coen)
7. My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant)
8. Twin Peaks: "Episode 29 (Beyond Life and Death)" (David Lynch)
9. The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)
10. Theory of Achievement (Hal Hartley)
1992
1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch)
2. Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara)
3. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood)
4. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino)
5. Hard Boiled (John Woo)
6. The Player (Robert Altman
7. Orlando (Sally Potter)
8. Simple Men (Hal Hartley)
9. Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang)
10. Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley)
1993
1. Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. Naked (Mike Leigh)
3. The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
4. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater)
5. Carlito’s Way (Brian De Palma)
6. Helas Pour Moi (Jean-Luc Godard)
7. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
8. Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano)
9. Dead Alive (Peter Jackson)
10. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg)
1994
1. Satantango (Bela Tarr)
2. Crumb (Terry Zwigoff)
3. U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis)
4. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)
6. Cold Water (Olivier Assayas)
7. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
8. Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang)
9. Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
10. I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis)
1995
1. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
2. Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii)
3. Heat (Michael Mann)
4. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-Wai)
5. Se7en (David Fincher)
6. The Addiction (Abel Ferrara)
7. Casino (Martin Scorsese)
8. Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam)
9. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven)
10. Maborosi (Hirokazu Koreeda)
1996
1. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas)
2. Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier)
3. My Sex Life (How I Got Into an Argument) (Arnaud
Desplechin)
4. Nenette et Boni (Claire Denis)
5. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (Hong Sang-soo)
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