The Worst Person in the World.
SHE SAW
The Bear
At the time of watching, The Bear was the only thing I cared about. I was so invested in the wellbeing of Carmen “Carmy” Berzetto that I ceased to be interested in world events, my children or the lives of any real people. Carmy is a hot-shot fine dining chef who takes over his dead brother’s flailing Chicago sandwich shop in the wake of his brother’s suicide, and attempts to transform it. It’s a scintillatingly high-pressure environment in which to explore grief and relationships and the specificity with which the restaurant industry is depicted and the impeccable casting make it brilliant. I grieved after finishing the final episode and couldn’t imagine ever enjoying anything else again.
The White Lotus, season two
But then there was The White Lotus, season two. We devoured the first season like feral back-alley rats and assumed the second season couldn’t and wouldn’t stand up to it. But oh boy, did it. Set at a luxury hotel in Sicily, like the first series it centres around the mysterious death of a guest. Steeped in the sins of the rich - greed, lust and lies - it’s so juicy it’s verging on being a soap opera but a really, really good one that gets at the nuances of human behaviour and our darkest truths. Luxury yachts, singing prostitutes and stunning Sicilian vistas: yes please.
Petite Maman
More films should be 73 minutes like Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, which made me feel more in its short running time than any three-hour “masterpiece” I’ve ever seen. This beautifully simple and emotionally complex French film is about a young girl who has come to her grandmother’s rural cottage with her parents to clear it out after her grandmother’s death. While there, she befriends another little girl at a nearby cottage who looks almost identical to her. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say there’s a sci-fi element to this story that makes you think wistfully about breaking the space-time continuum for just a day or two.
Cha Cha Real Smooth
I grappled with whether I could include a film that I had completely forgotten about in my top five of the year but because recalling this film made me instantly giddy and increased my hope for humanity by 50 percentage points, it made the cut. While Greg was intoxicated by Dakota Johnson, this film owes its irrefutable charm to writer, director and star Cooper Raiff. He’s effortlessly funny, kind, earnest, fearlessly vulnerable, helplessly smitten and just the sweetest young man you ever did see. It’s an antidote to toxic masculinity, a win for autistic representation and I can’t believe it fell off mine, and seemingly everyone else’s, radar.
Severance
I nearly gave my last spot to the excellent Emma Thompson vehicle Good Luck to you, Leo Grande but that would be a righteous but less honest choice. Severance had the most innovative concept of anything made this year, about a world in which you can completely sever your work life and home life so you have no knowledge of the other’s existence. The show goes far beyond any of the possibilities you might imagine the premise to have and, about halfway through the season, unexpectedly becomes a team-of-motley-underdogs-fights-evil-forces style narrative that has you fervently cheering for them to triumph. I gasped at the final cliffhanger moment and didn’t think I’d make it through the long months between seasons. So far, I’m still here.
HE SAW
Drive My Car
I can appreciate the work of a great craftsperson but I don’t want to watch their movies as much as I want to watch something made by a genius. Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a genius and his multi-Oscar-nominated movie Drive My Car was a work of genius, although it’s possible this belief has been influenced by the delightful answers he gave in the interview I conducted with him at the time of the film’s release. In a three-hour-long movie dominated by long sequences filmed inside a moving car, only once did he choose to turn the camera to look out the car’s rear window. It’s a striking moment that comes at a crucial juncture. When I asked why he’d done it, he said: “To be quite honest, I’m not entirely sure.” Genius.
The Quiet Girl
This Irish-language movie is based on a short story and contains much of the concentrated power and ambiguity inherent to that form. Not much happens in the Hollywood sense, but what does happen is freighted with meaning and emotion. At the movie’s centre are questions about the power and fragility of familial bonds and those questions grow and thicken until we’re eventually choked by them.
The White Lotus, Season two
I didn’t want to write about this series, for two main reasons. One, it’s essentially a sequel and I’m on record as saying I don’t like sequels and will never review one because they’re motivated primarily by economic rather than artistic interests. Two: It’s only just finished, so recency bias is in effect. But this series is so good, so luscious, so gripping and galling and hilarious, who cares?
Nude Tuesday
A total original, a ridiculous concept requiring extraordinary bravery from its actors, both physically and linguistically, and a commercial risk that delivered on its premise to an extent I didn’t believe it could. It was consistently funny but also heartwarming and the climactic scene in which Jemaine Clement’s sex cult leader stands naked in a semi-frozen mountaintop lake, screaming in the film’s invented language for others to join him, can never be erased from my mind.
The Worst Person in the World
This movie contained the entirety of life, from every angle, and displayed it almost entirely through a single character. That Renate Reinsve won best actress at Cannes for playing that character is no surprise; I doubt the judges even required a discussion. In my review of the movie earlier this year, I described her thus: “So luminously watchable, so understated yet so richly expressive, so unusual, such a vast container of emotion overflowing, that it would be worth getting brutally dumped by her, just to experience at first hand the full flowering of her dramatic gift.” At the time, Zanna told me my impression of the movie was unduly affected by the strength of my feelings for Reinsve, to which I responded by telling her not to be ridiculous, but now I’ve re-read my gushing nonsense, I can see she was right. Still, all we have to go on are feelings and, for me at least, those feelings remain.
Unbound Vol 1 weaves together pictures and interviews with NZ surfers.