Three films that offered hope to believers in the power of the seventh art

Lately we seem to be feeling that every year is more challenging, insane and chaotic than its predecessor. Perhaps it’s the job of future historians, looking back with the benefit of hindsight to work out which of the last few years stands out as our annus horribilis but the argument can certainly be made that for the world and SA in particular, 2022 was a stinker of a year.

As we greet the new year, there is some relief to be had from cinema in 2022, where all was not lost, even if many of the year’s best offerings failed to make it to local cinema screens.

Three films stood out and offered hope to believers in the power of the seventh art that in spite of the bombast and relentless churning out of reboots, sequels and superhero yawns all is not quite lost yet — great films can still leave us with questions rather than offering easily digestible answers to life’s eternal big questions.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths — Netflix

Two-time best director Oscar winner Alejandro Iñárritu has certainly earned his right to make films about whatever takes his fancy. His latest, a sprawling, technically marvellous and hypersurreal black comedy offers perhaps his most challenging exploration of the self-doubt of the artist as middle-aged man. It is a decidedly inward-looking and self-centred affair that pays plenty of homage to Italian master Federico Fellini’s 1963 classic of the genre,  8 ½. Over the decades that film has spawned countless imitators, from Woody Allen to Paulo Sorrentino, but none of them has been so fully committed to throwing audience expectation and demands to the winds as Iñárritu’s rambling, magical and visually impressive three-hour psychological trip through the director’s thinly veiled personal life and the troubled history of his native Mexico.

Majestically photographed by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji, Bardo is the story of a few madly introspective weeks in the life of its protagonist, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) a journalist turned documentary filmmaker who has returned to Mexico from his longtime base of Los Angeles to be celebrated by his homeland in the lead-up to a prestigious award in the US. As Silverio’s dreams, inner conflict and hallucinations, filled with self-doubt, increasingly impede his reality, it becomes harder for him and us to tell apart what is real and what is imagined and whether any of it means anything.

That’s a decision viewers will have to make and while the film may be too self-indulgent, frustrating and exhausting for many tastes, a pretty good case can also be made that the film’s visual spectacle, impressive vignettes and barrage of ideas about identity, history and memory offer an ultimately rewarding demonstration of the struggle to make meaning in art in a time when there seems to be so little meaning to be had from reality.

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THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

The Northman – Rent or buy from Apple TV +

On the surface, recent cinema’s gothic master Robert Eggers’s new film may appear to be just another bloody, gory 21st-century version of the Hollywood staple “swords and shields” historical epic that looks to cash in on the recent popularity of all things Viking in pop culture.

Drawing on the Norse legend that inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet, this revenge tale follows the determination of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) to avenge the killing of his beloved father, king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) who carried away Amleth’s mother Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman). Twenty years after being left for dead, Amleth is now a lean, mean, killing machine hell-bent on achieving one purpose — to avenge his father by killing his uncle and rescuing his mother.

This being a Robert Eggers film, though, things are decidedly more than they might seem and far more psychologically and emotionally intriguing than any run-of-the-mill sword and shields film.

Eggers is typically fascinated by the story’s supernatural and ritualistic aspects and his dark vision aims to place Amleth in a far greyer moral quandary than his initially righteously black-and-white mission might have led him to believe.

Primal, bloody, gruesome and dark it’s a tragic tale of one man’s determination to rectify a terrible wrong and the terrible ways in which his journey is both feted and doomed as it culminates in one of the most memorably noirish mystical stand-offs between good and evil you’re likely to see in a long time.

A fairytale that’s also a critique of the follies of machismo heroics and asks pertinent questions about the relationship between moral rectitude and lived reality that leaves the viewer, like its hero, battered, bloodied and exhausted by its end.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Blonde – Netflix

No film was as misunderstood and ignorantly maligned as the Australian director’s many-years-in-the-making, much-anticipated adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ groundbreaking 2001 fictional tome inspired by the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Dominik’s film is not and was never intended as a biopic about one of the most mythologised pop culture icons of the 20th century. Rather, like its source material, the film is a speculative imagination inspired by and including incidents from Monroe’s real life that serves to viscerally deconstruct the Hollywood machine and pop culture obsessions that made her into mythical figure for the projection of desire, by imagining her finally unknowable inner life and torments.

Anchored by an outstanding performance from Ana de Armas, Dominik’s interpretation of Oates’ novel uses the same “inspired by” device to take the idea into bold, new and daringly audacious cinematic territory.

Confrontational, ambitious, stylistically dazzling, omnivorous and intensely inquisitive it’s ultimately a brilliant leap forward in the genre of films about famous characters. It offers a devastating critique of how the public and history’s obsession with Monroe finally devoured her and left the world feeling decidedly dirty about its treatment of her and its inability to find answers for her tragic suicide in the surface details of her life history. 

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