Film - Jonathan Romney on how good (and bad) it can get
It dawned on me the other day that I've spent the past decade locked in a dark room: technically, this is called being a film critic, but isn't it also what we normally consider a wasted life? Leafing through ten years' worth of Sight and Sound reviews, what terrified me was not the number of films I remember watching, but the number that seem to have erased themselves from my mind the second the end credits rolled. Did I just imagine Cool World? Schtonk? Salute of the Jugger?
The nineties are best defined as the digital decade, but I recently suffered a bizarre flashback watching the new Arnold Schwarzenegger film End of Days, in which Satan emerges from a Manhattan manhole as a wobbly mass of transparent ectoplasm. For the first time, I suddenly felt I was watching an example of "retro" computer-generated imagery. The wobbly bundle of air seemed remarkably close to the wobbly strand of water in James Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss, one of the first digital effects to make jaws drop in wonder. Since then, digitals have advanced from Terminator 2 through Jurassic Park and Mars Attacks! to The Matrix - one of the few films not only to use the technology as a shiny sci-fi effect, but also to speculate intelligently about their position in the current state of cinematic illusion. Yet, all of a sudden, here we are back with wobbly air again - as if digitals, apparently so clean and weightless, had at last turned out to be as date-tied as lava lamps.
Digitals may have consistently fuelled the decade's most vapid films, yet the technology poses the central dilemma of nineties cinema, bringing about what is best described as a reality war. If any image can now be created or modified digitally, then how can we ever again be certain that what we see on screen retains any traces of the real? As a film-maker, do you try to recoup and protect those vestiges of reality or commit yourself to illusion (the oldest debate in film history)? Hence, at the end of the nineties, a strange anti- illusionist backlash, an assertion of what-you-see-is-what-you-get values, best exemplified by Kirby Dick's documentary Sick, about the S-M performance artist Bob Flanagan, where the close-up of a nail rammed through the subject's penis is the ne plus ultra of confrontational realism. Hence, too, the vote at Cannes this year for the old-fashioned (but nonetheless brilliant) Belgian slice-of-lifer Rosetta; the enthusiastic discovery of Iran's unvarnished cinema; and the puritan polemics of the Dogme 95 movement.
I'm somewhat aggrieved at Dogme for hogging the limelight, for making a questionable rhetorical position look like the future of film, when in fact there's so much out in world cinema that plays with reality more inventively yet has been sidelined. The most exciting seeds of new film languages lie in (for example) work by Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang (whose absurdist musical The Hole remains unreleased here); the Russian veteran Alexei Guerman, whose crazed tableau of Stalinism, Khroustaliov, My Car! (also unseen here) is the only recent film to revive and replenish the Fellini tradition of dream overkill; and intimate realists such as France's Sandrine Veysset or Britain's Lynne Ramsay. But as to the likelihood of our ever seeing the full breadth of what's new and challenging in world cinema, the major tragedy of the nineties in Britain was the collapse of the independent repertory cinema circuit, leaving the more imaginative distributors of foreign-language cinema high and dry.
What consistently irked me during the decade was the twinkling smirk of Robin Williams, who has untiringly toiled to heal the world's sorrows: enough already! Less a human being than a renegade Care Bear, Williams with his wasted talent sums up all that's most sanctimonious about Hollywood's pretension to address the human condition. Nothing he's done, however, can beat the sheer repugnance of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, about which I can say only that Williams's own recent Holocaust comedy, Jakob the Liar, wasn't nearly as bad.
Anyway, having compiled nineties "best" and "most underrated" lists recently, then suffering sleepless nights over the titles I'd forgotten, here are my amended picks, with the proviso that I'll have changed my mind again in five minutes. My choice of best and most underrated film of the decade has to be Martin Scorsese's sublime, misunderstood Casino - a sprawling, overreaching mess in some ways, but the nearest that recent US cinema has come to producing a "how-we-live-today" statement of the Zola school.
As for the rest, these are some that made the decade worth living through: The Adjuster (Atom Egoyan), After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda), A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang), Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami), Safe (Todd Haynes), Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (Aki Kaurismaki), Toy Story (John Lasseter) and Ulysses' Gaze (Theo Angelopoulos). Among the great underrated: Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski), Circus Boys (Kaizo Hayashi), Contact (Robert Zemeckis), Haut Bas Fragile (Jacques Rivette), Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe), Journey to the Beginning of the World (Manoel de Oliveira), Suture (Scott McGehee/David Siegel) and Tierra (Julio Medem).
And some newish names that might just conceivably make it worth going back in that dark room in the next decade: Russia's Alexei Balabanov; a few French names such as Gaspar Noe, Laurent Bouhnik and Helene Angel; Britain's Christopher Nolan; German hard-core miserablist Fred Kelemen; and American whizz-kid Spike Jonze, whose extraordinary Being John Malkovich (coming in March) suggests that Hollywood may be about to start sinking money into some very strange films indeed. My dream for the 2000s would be to see the British repertory cinema circuit rise again, but for that to happen, cinema-going would have to become as hip as clubbing, and perhaps the drugs aren't right for that. In some pharmaceuticals lab somewhere, they're working on a tab that enables you to sit fresh and alert through Godard all-nighters: put me down for a handful.
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