Fetishism is the original language of the film

After the last Art, in which films were ranked from tenth to sixth place, today you will find the top part of the list of the best films in 2022 according to the opinion of writer and film critic Aleksandar Bečanović

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Scene from the movie France, Photo: Screenshot Youtube
Scene from the movie France, Photo: Screenshot Youtube
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

5. The Wonder - Sebastián Lelio

Leliov The Wonder it begins and ends - after an almost impossible happy ending has been arranged - with shots of a film set: the fiction is clearly situated within the Brechtian design, the mimetic intonation is permanently undermined, the illusion is immediately lost. The majority critic's opinion is that these 'violent' procedures of departure and analytical distance are unnecessary, that they aimlessly 'sabotage' the main story, they are thought to be a meaningless addition. What is the symptom of such a wrong reading of Lelio's precise mise-en-scène?

The point of the director's gray hair is precisely to emphasize the double meta dimension The Wonder. On the first, narrative level, the miracle of the girl's extreme fasting is explored (Kila Lord Cassidy) whose veracity should be convinced - with her scientific approach - by the nurse (Florence Pugh): in order to describe reality, a greater or lesser amount of faith is always necessary, whether it is of a religious or scientific nature. The question of interpretation is the question of accepting the miracle, or rather the narrative that aims to turn the world into a coherent narrative, for us and others.

On the second, more important, 'internal', formal level, the story about the conflict between religious and scientific truth grows into a congenial, metapoetic explanation about the persuasiveness of the film itself, about its ability to accept obvious fiction as a specific form of reality in which we emotionally (co)participate . Lelio's 'flaw' was solely that his primary, 'external' story was told so skilfully and convincingly that the meditative 'surplus' it emits The Wonder - without overthinking - declared it to be a nascent diversion of attention, instead of stating that it is, in fact, a perfect structure or a perfect analogy in which the very functioning of the cinematographic apparatus is mirrored.

Because watching a movie is a kind of act of alienation: if it is mise-en-scène effective, then we have enough reasons or arguments to still believe in what happens on the big screen or screen. The viewer must always, one way or another, be gullible. To the director The Wonder was, in short, just objected to the strategic reminder of this fact, which has been revealed ever since the Parisian audience ran away from the projection in 1895 when they saw the train entering the station.

4. Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood (Apollo 10 ½: Childhood in the Space Age) - Richard Linklater

Continuing the director's impressive streak of (psychedelic) animations (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly) and thematic focus on (autobiographical) stories about growing up (B), Apollo 10½ confirms that it is Linklater still one of the key names in recent American cinema, author in the most complete meaning of that term, which is decisive for the theoretical and value determination of the aesthetic hierarchy in the seventh art.

It is, namely, another Linklater essentially experimental work with a strong novelistic charge, with a stylization that is, in an intriguing sense, almost anti-filmic, but in turn expands the capacities mise-en-scène.

Nostalgia in the film is active, but unusual, the narration is standardized, but also avant-garde at the same time, the melodrama is immediately touching, and yet distant (because it does not contain any traces of sexual subtext), which is why in Apollo 10½ dream, reality and reminiscence mix in an unusual and certainly atypical relationship.

3. Speak No Evil - Christian Tafdrup

Hardly any European horror film in recent times possessed such sharp political resonance and authentic nightmarish quality as the Danish Speak No Evil. Tafdrupova rhetoric is extremely precise, painful in revealing the neuralgic points of (Western) European civilization, extremely effective in activating deep layers of anxiety that still have a tremendous potential to shake and disrupt contemporary existence from the roots. Speak No Evil it combines a Hanekeian sense of marking metaphysical chills with traditionally orchestrated suspense.

When they are Hitchcock asked 'what' it was about The Birds - that most elusive, most enigmatic film of the Master - he said: about 'self-satisfaction'. With complacency, one loses the power to detect and linguistically fix Evil - as is literally emphasized in the very title of the film - to predict and explain its eruption that permanently changes the configuration of everyday life, the impression that life is stable and orderly (especially if, as in in this case, supported by liberal ideological postulates).

Tafdrup's film starts from the indicated premise to develop devastating points. In such a chosen context, petty realist remarks concerning the plausibility of certain episodes (why Melanie 'unmotivated' goes to the attic with the birds in The Birds, here why the Danish family 'despite all logic' returns to the house), give way to much stronger and more potent allegorical, mythic and philosophical connotations that more accurately describe the intrusion of Evil into existential space than any mimetic intention would. Speak No Evil it makes the most of the disturbing potential of those insights.

2. Pearl - Ti West

Intrigued by the different possibilities that opened up after completing it X, West i Mia Goth have spectacularly and semantically realized their ideas even more radically in an exceptional prequel, Pearl.

If in X found the source of fear in aberrant sexuality, then Pearl it 'reconstructs' how such a pathological displacement occurred. Both films 'supplement' the horror frame with a complementary generic context with strong metatextual implications: X uses pornographic topos, doc Pearl he uses melodramatic styles in an inspiring way, with which the genre game is carried out in a range from consistent orthodoxy to darkly humorous irony.

Pearl (brilliant Goth) is a girl who wants to escape from a rural environment and an oppressive family atmosphere through film: this escapist setting is a stereotypical narrative line for countless melodramatic plots about the fulfillment of the 'American dream', about the redemptive power of film to change and ennoble the banal life. But West thoughtfully relies on the Sircian aesthetics of Technicolor melodrama from the fifties, to emphasize not only the sarcastic gap between reality and fantasy, but also to interpret the ending as a satirical version of a happy ending. And all for the sake of unfettered movie-loving pleasure.

1. France - Bruno Dumont

As well as Pearl, the France is a one-woman show. But while West in Pearl and how it relies on the narrative structure, so far Dumont u France there's simply no excessive need for narrative elaboration, since the focus is triumphantly and unreservedly placed on the visual level: this is a film that's totally committed, totally focused, totally enthralled Léom Seydoux which is - as the title of the film suggests - a French icon.

Of course, France is a film that thematically can be reduced to a media critique of today's journalism, but essentially the director is interested in the glacial 'surface': the beauty of his star, currently the most charismatic young French actress. Dumont, an author known for his obscure Bressonian, somewhat "ugly" films, suddenly found an iconographic passion for portraying mythological and secular goddesses, worthy of the best tradition of French painting, Boucher, Fragonard i Login. (Dumont describes his as 'academic', i.e. conventionally done, but this can also be connected to the treatment of the female figure in French academic painting, especially in cabana, Gérôme i Bouguereau.)

There is something particularly satisfying (sic!) about this way of being treated mise-en-scène, in this kind of artistic rhapsody. Because the effect is, among other things, undeniably filmophile: female beauty and the cinematographic apparatus from the very beginnings of film - since Griffith 'made up' close up to fascinatingly show the face of his actress - they are in an inextricable connection. Whatever the aesthetic criteria, female beauty is one of the most signifier-wise fruitful and stylistically challenging motives for activation. mise-en-scène and its profiling. Fetishism is the original, authentic language of the film.

In today's time, where visual representation is often lightly problematized through the lens of gender politics, this fetishistic poetics - which should be understood as an autonomous cinematic process - seems to be becoming an eminently French thing. It seems that only French directors still have the courage and knowledge to follow the lessons left by Hitchcock and von Sternberg, especially when the depiction of beauty possesses both a 'puritanical' delight in form and a decadent glamor of perversion. Kechiche's masterpiece The Life of Adele (2013) with Seydoux and A, Bessonova totally misunderstood Anna (2019) with Sasha Luss and now France, again with Seydoux - three films with female names in the title that function as three images - are the expression of one, in fact, flawless aesthetic that valorizes the fascination with the iconographic sign more than anything else.

Truffaut said that the main motivation for making the film Le dernier metro (1980) was his female star, that is, that her appearance alone was enough to solve all dramaturgical problems:Catherine Deneuve is so beautiful that any film she stars in can almost dispense with telling a story'. France convincingly testifies to us that Léa Seydoux could also approach that privileged iconic status.

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