"Our insistent, perennial question is, "And then what happened?" But "what" only matters if we care about "who," and how they react and respond to what happens. The characters who stuck with me this year were on singular, propulsive journeys. They may have boarded a ship or hopped a train or ridden a spaceship, or stayed home and picked up a camera or a Ping-Pong paddle."
"Mary Bronstein's desperate portrait of a struggling mother (and therapist) on her own begins with an extreme close-up of Linda (Rose Byrne) not-so-calmly listening to her therapist and young daughter. This intimate, uncomfortable sequence is the whole movie in a nutshell: The camera never strays far from Linda's face, immersing us in the cascading pressures that threaten to submerge her. Linda's trajectory is a downward spiral (physician, heal thyself!), but my therapist tells me it's always darkest just before the dawn."
"That made the cocky auteur slightly insecure, yet he made zero concessions to his radical approach or compromises to his unique vision. Richard Linklater's marvelous French-language, black-and-white recreation of the making of Breathless in Paris in 1959 chronicles the many ways the artist willfully risked a fall. Like provoking a mid-day café brawl with his producer, a physical manifestation of the philosophical tensions between art and commerce, improvisation and script, inspiration and pragmatism. Vive la révolution du cinéma!"
The imperative of narrative films and all storytelling is forward movement. The insistent question is "And then what happened?" "What" matters only if "who" matters, and how they react. Characters undertake singular, propulsive journeys—boarding ships, trains, spaceships, or staying home, picking up cameras or Ping-Pong paddles—and make unexpected, valuable discoveries. Mary Bronstein's portrait of a struggling mother begins with an extreme close-up of Linda and keeps the camera close to immerse viewers in cascading pressures. Linda's trajectory is a downward spiral but hints at dawn. Richard Linklater's recreation of Breathless chronicles an artist willing to risk a fall, exposing tensions between art and commerce.
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