Luchino Visconti 1960 Italy
It’s always said that the good, the bad and the unlucky come in threes, I disagree. For me four seems much more suitable. After all there were four members of Pantera, four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, four good Tom Cruise performances, and in Italian neo-realism four of the most beloved directors in all of ‘world cinema’ - Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti. Each had their own quirks (some more than others) but all were supremely talented. Rocco is one of Visconti's best-known works and is arguably his best, although I'm sure many would disagree with me. In it Alain Delon leads an amazing cast but is practically acted off the screen by real-life couple Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot. Everyone is really, and that's not an insult. Salvatori's raw, towering performance and Girardot's powerful emotion are just that good, even protecting the film when it threatens to descend into melodrama and making the harrowing scene in which Salvatori's Simone beats his brother (Delon) and rapes his former lover a classic. Everyone's quality here, even the debuting 7 year old Rocco Vidolazzi, who never acted again. There's also Nino Rota on music and Suso Cecchi d'Amico screenwriting, both of whom are people whose work should be better known. Rereading this post I feel kind of bad because this is a really poorly written review but I just can't think of a better way to say that this is fucking extraordinary. Apologies.
The Patience Stone
Atiq Rahimi 2012 Afghanistan
A film featuring the actress Golshifteh Farahani getting a cinematic release is always a special occasion as far as I'm concerned, one that I celebrated this time with gin and a near-empty cinema. For anyone who has never heard of her Farahani was previously a leading light of the Iranian film industry but, due to her choice of roles, she has now officially been exiled from her home country. She's also one of my favourite actresses of the moment, having given wonderful performances in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin and Asghar Farhadi's About Elly amongst others,
but it's not a stretch to say that this is her best ever. It's also almost a one-woman show with Farahani's unnamed wife playing opposite her comatose war hero husband for 90% of the film and using the time to unburden herself of all the things she hasn't been able to say in their 10 years of marriage. For such a minimalist set-up it's a really complex role with 'the woman' desperately trying to keep her silent husband alive in a warzone while simultaneously wishing him dead and covering topics from his distant and unloving behaviour towards her before his accident to traditional Islamic arranged-marriage and treatment of women to revelations about their children yet never for a minute renouncing her love for him. The result is an otherworldly, beguiling atmosphere that only continues with 'the woman's' relationship with a stuttering, abused young soldier, one that graduates from threat to a quiet kinship and that she describes graphically to her husband not as a punishment but because she can now talk to him as she would like to be able to talk to a husband, as a companion, lover and friend. To say that this is the best film I've seen this year is a ludicrous statement considering that it's still January but I'll be genuinely surprised if it isn't in my top 5 come December. It's magnificent.
Big Bad Wolves
Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado 2013 Israel
The words 'blackly comic Israeli horror movie' somehow don't exactly cling together and I think it would be a safe guess to state that, even to hardened cinephiles, that description is not going to be one they've heard very often, so it was with a mixture of interest and trepidation that I bought a ticket this morning for Big Bad Wolves, an ultra-stylish, ultraviolent bullet wound of a film dark enough to have a torturer bake a cake laced with sedatives in time to the tune of Buddy Holly's 'Everyday' while his victim languishes in the basement two toenails short of a full set, and funny enough to have said torturer interrupted mid-maiming by a haranguing phone call from his elderly mother who, in the space of under a minute, regresses him about 40 years. And yet this is relatively serious subject matter, a suspected paedophile being kidnapped by an aggressive policeman and the father of one of the victims, and one that could so easily become torture porn but instead one that is often played for tongue-in-cheek laughs while still being horribly brutal. There's also a scene-stealing performance from Kais Nashif as an unnamed local on a horse who basically saunters into the film for a couple of minutes, gets all the best lines and then buggers off again, altogether unrelated to the story but welcome all the same. Early Tarantino is an obvious reference point even if this isn't quite as wordy. It has however inherited his unfortunate habit of eschewing a proper ending in favour of 'clever' trickery. It's a shame because it really takes the bloom off of what's otherwise a entertaining, fast-talking production that takes in eccentricity, cruelty and idiocy in equal measure.
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