The 2021 Oscar The Grouches

Last year I started off using the cliche 'this year has been unlike any other' except it was actually true, COVID having transformed the everyday, travel, cinema, the world at large and literally everything in between. In 2021 a few things have changed, got better, got worse, repeated, cancelled but we're still under the pandemic's thumb, subject to its movements, its variants. Life has been unpredictable, frightening yet oddly mundane in many ways, utterly depressing in others. In my personal life it has been a year of two halves or more accurately several sections. In a couple I broke down, was signed off work for a total of six weeks, my mental state reaching a point where I couldn't continue. Circumstances changed more than once and the goalposts moved (the only fucking sports reference I'll ever make) but at the end of October I reached both my limit and a ladder out of the rut I had been in for longer than I care to remember. Financially I was ok, COVID having also decimated what small social life or spending patterns I had, and an acquaintance and Twitter poet gave me the phrase "why keep wounding yourself". It made sense. So I made the huge change, leaving my job with nowhere particular to go, no substantial plans in place, just convinced that there must be something better out there, that there had to be. And before I'd worked my notice I found another position, something I'd struggled to imagine as likely and a revelation in so many ways. To be treated more than well, to work sociable (and sensible) hours, to feel a lot less like my brain had too many tabs open was a day of rest and sunshine during monsoon season. It sounds achingly trite but removing one (great) source of stress took me out of the multi-year burnout and has made me feel more capable of dealing with other issues within my life. It hasn't cured it - to again use a banal platitude that doesn't happen overnight - but it's given me hope and made me hopeful. I'm growing and that feels like an achievement, a voice to hold in the dark and I don't think that can be overstated within the present. Due again to the pandemic and cautious upper management that new job has ended and I find myself unsure of what lays ahead, what the path for 2022 is but I'm optimistic. I now know I can make changes and they aren't so insurmountable and that's something to celebrate. In the film world (for that's mostly why I'm speaking and presumably why you're reading) cinemas have closed, reopened with restrictions, stuck to safe sellers, brought back 'anniversary' editions of crowd-pleasers and finally in the third quarter of the year returned to some sense of (ab)normality in showing arthouse and world and my list reflects that. The 100-ish trips of previous years have barely reached double figures and streaming services have saved and frustrated, TV has become more important (and in some cases more profitable, both financially and creatively) so once again I'm accompanying my somewhat compact 2021 list with another for standouts from the beforetimes and also feel obligated to mention Hagai Levi's excoriating Bergman-re-imagining, the mini series Scenes From A Marriage and its captivating, uncomfortable, untamed yet forensically controlled portrait of crisis. What a way to reach January. Cheers

2021
Annette (Leos Carax - France/USA)
This Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman - Palestine/France/Canada/Turkey)
Sound Of Metal (Darius Marder - USA)
Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman - USA/Canada)
All The Dead Ones (Caetano Gotardo/Marco Dutra - Brazil)
Nizhal (Appu N Bhattathiri - India/Malayalam)

Not 2021
The 120 Days Of Bottrop (Christoph Schlingensief - Germany - 1997)
Parting Glances (Bill Sherwood - USA - 1986)
Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo - USA - 1971)
The Congress (Ari Folman - Israel/France/Belgium/Luxembourg - 2013)

I never tried to fulfill my biggest dreams, just to dream them.

Boy Meets Girl
Leos Carax 1984 France
Starring: Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier, Maïté Nahyr, Carroll Brooks


In my opinion the French actor Denis Lavant is one of the most underrated performers of his generation. An unusual leading man, he's short, pockmarked and certainly not beautiful but the circus training of his early years has resulted in a towering but subtle physical presence which sees him swaggering, dancing, dragging himself along endless streets, engaging in slapstick yet never failing to find the gentility behind even his most monstrous roles. If a film were ever to be made of my life (and what a dull prospect that is) he's definitely the person I'd want to play me. Here he plays the first of Leos Carax's alter egos, once again named Alex (Carax's real name) and he attacks, spins, his mouth often open in a silent scream, as outstanding as ever. Carax is on cracking form too, kicking off the proceedings in black and white with a strained, deathly, somehow childlike voiceover before introducing us to Maïté, speeding away from a breakup accompanied by a child called Pimpernel in a car with what looks like a tricycle balanced on the window screen as if she's just mowed down a toddler; to Alex, spurning alcohol for milk (with at the very least a hint of A Clockwork Orange's Alex DeLarge), attempting murder through misunderstanding, throwing coins to a kissing couple as one might a busker, his checkerboard jacket alone in a sea of crisp white shirts; and to Mireille (an exceptional Mireille Perrier), sitting rigid and still as tears appear in her eyes before moving onto tap-dancing, verbal destruction and restlessness to a soundtrack of the Dead Kennedys' Holiday in Cambodia. All are facing ending relationships, one is never seen again and the other two meet up briefly and connect with one another. Honestly that's about as far as the plot goes but the film is no worse for it, instead feeling reminiscent of the wildly inventive, freefalling, free-form early works of Jean-Luc Godard before his political conscious wholeheartedly kicked in, full of whimsy, pop culture references and eminently serious children. As with Godard there are moments of hilarity alongside more sad, poignant ones and others that delight, particularly the extended sequence where Lavant blags his way into a party for the gifted but damaged and tries to entertain a positively baffled baby. I've seen most of Carax's work and I'm a great fan of his but the one thing that really struck me about Boy Meets Girl is that, while it's frequently wonderful, there's not a true authorial voice as there is in his later works. In a way it's understandable being that it was the debut of a then twenty four year old voracious fan of cinema but it still doesn't feel like quite the complete package, largely lacking a genuinely fully-formed personality of its own.