Theo’s Top Ten Films of 2021
“Did you avoid the temptation to be obvious?”
If 2020 was the year of watching movies at home, 2021 was – after a few months of further closures – the year of the movie theatre. For me, it meant a return to two cinemas I particularly adore, the BFI Southbank and the Prince Charles in London, which provided a chance to catch up with favorites old (After Life, Inherent Vice) and new (Nashville, Chungking Express, alongside films by Kurosawa, Reichardt, Cronenberg, Riggs, Tarkovsky and many more). The highlight of my year in film remains the first trip I made to a cinema after months of lockdown, to see Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn – though I also loved the raucous audience response to the astounding array of bad Italian accents in House of Gucci.
As the year drew to a close with COVID-19 cases again on the rise in the UK, the bizarre question of whether I should be going to the cinema again weighed on my mind. (I gave The Power of the Dog and The Card Counter a miss, but did follow the crowds to Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was fairly awful.) And so, it was another weird year for movies and moviegoers – but far from a bad one. The difficulty I had in putting this list together is testament to the fantastic quality of films released in the period; any year in which sublimely sweet works from Paul Thomas Anderson and Céline Sciamma didn’t make my top ten is surely a good one.
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Honorable Mentions
Dune (Denis Villeneuve), The Green Knight (David Lowery), Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson), Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma), Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman)
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10. Flee
In Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee, the filmmaker interviews his teenage friend Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym); the pair had met when Amin had recently arrived to Denmark as a refugee from Afghanistan. Now an academic living in Copenhagen with his boyfriend, Amin tentatively opens up for the first time about his early life. Wading through decades worth of painful memories, he relates how a happy childhood in 1980s Kabul was upended by civil war, forcing the family to flee the country first to Soviet-era Moscow, then to Scandinavia with the “help” of impossibly cruel human traffickers.
The animation, sparse yet expressive, is striking, especially when hurtful or traumatic memories are rendered literally sketchy, in charcoal-style lines. Just as powerful as the extensive flashbacks are the intimate moments shown of Amin’s home life with his partner – which not only suggest that the pain of the past lingers in the present, but also that telling his story might be a way to move forward. There’s no doubting that Flee is often a difficult watch – made all the harder by recent developments in Afghanistan – but it’s a rewarding one that ends on a note of cautious optimism.
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9. C’Mon C’Mon
C’mon C’mon is kicked off by a phone call: radio journalist Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) decides to ring his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) on the one-year anniversary of their mother’s death; the pair have barely talked since. Viv mentions that she hasn’t yet found someone to look after her nine-year-old son Jesse (Woody Norman) while she’s away dealing with some difficult family business, and soon enough Johnny finds himself in Los Angeles looking after a precocious and unusual kid he barely knows. Like a lot of children, Jesse demands explanations for everything. Unlike most children, he spends Saturday mornings blasting Mozart, and his bedtime routine involves pretending to be an orphan.
That Joaquin Phoenix can act will surprise precisely nobody, but it’s first-time film actor Woody Norman who really impresses in a role that he makes feel totally improvised; the effortlessness of his performance often gives the drama an air of documentary. Indeed, writer-director Mike Mills inserts actual documentary material into his film – which here act as Johnny’s current radio project, for which he travels the country interviewing young people of various backgrounds about their hopes and fears for the future. Though technically these interviews stay on the periphery of the narrative, they motivate and deepen the film, reinforcing – in ways that, miraculously, never feel trite – Mills’ earnest engagement with young people and what they might teach us about the world.
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8. Great Freedom
Here’s a fact that constitutes a shocking indictment of the supposedly liberal democracies of post-war Europe: many of the gay men “freed” from concentration camps were immediately thrown back into prisons in West Germany. In fact, the Nazi-era form of Paragraph 175, which criminalized male homosexual acts, was only amended in 1969, and was not fully repealed until 1994. This startling injustice provides the context for Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom, in which concentration camp survivor Hans (Franz Rogowski) endures prison spells in 1945, 1957, 1968 for pursuing his desires.
As the film flits between these three time periods, the narrative is chiefly interested in the bond that develops between Hans and Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a cold, initially homophobic man serving a much longer sentence. It’s not hard to imagine the moralistic, triumphant Hollywoodized version of this film – or indeed the outright miserable European arthouse one – but Great Freedom is neither of those; this is a sensitive, restrained and organically moving film exploring the strange conditions that lead these men to feel that freedom can only exist in confinement.
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7. West Side Story
To be completely honest, West Side Story was my least anticipated film of the year. Why bother adapting a musical that already has a classic film version? Why now? As it turns out, my if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it mentality had foolishly overlooked one crucial component: director Stephen Spielberg. The story and setting remain the same – lovers Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) are still hopelessly fighting to be together against a backdrop of racially-charged gang warfare on the streets of ’50s New York – but the details are thrillingly different. Every scene is a showcase for Spielberg to show his total formal mastery, with electrifying effects – it’s impossible to choose a favorite musical number, because all of them dazzle.
Of course, you can never go too wrong with this musical: Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are as witty, cutting and poignant as ever, and Leonard Bernstein’s unforgettable score makes all other musicals feel like they’re hardly trying. But I was still struck by the fact that every choice in Spielberg’s version is a good one, from the casting to Tony Kushner’s more nuanced script to the production design, which situates the action in an uncanny space that perfectly complements Spielberg’s vision for a movie that is at once more realistic and more stylized than its predecessor. The result is something almost overwhelmingly emotional.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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6. Annette
Another musical, another doomed love affair, and another entry I’m as surprised to find on this list as any – especially given that upon first watch I wasn’t sure whether I loved or hated it. The truth is, Annette, a bonkers rock opera directed by Leos Carax and with music by the band Sparks, is a lot to take in. The story follows a celebrity couple: bad-boy comedian Henry McHenry (an astonishing Adam Driver) and opera singer Ann Desfranoux (Marion Cottillard). That their baby Annette – played by a series of animatronic puppets – is not nearly the weirdest thing about the film gives some clue as to what you’re in for.
At first glance, Annette couldn’t be more different to West Side Story. Its tunes aren’t designed to be catchy, and their lyrics are brazenly alienating – and often designed to parody the formulas of the musical itself. Thematically, there’s a ton of stuff going on relating to fame, spectatorship, the architecture of the fourth wall and the porous membrane separating art(ifice) and reality – making it a dense watch, more rewarding on further watches. But even taken at face value Annette is a startling, funny, operatically emotional work that demands feeling before thought. Perhaps not so different to Spielberg after all.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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5. Drive My Car
It’s been a brilliant year for writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, also released this year, could easily have made this list in another year. Based on short stories by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car stars the excellent Hidetoshi Nishijima as middle-aged theatre director Yusuke. Still coming to terms with a one-two punch of betrayal and tragedy, he travels to Hiroshima to rehearse a multilingual production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. The relationships he forms there – especially with the enigmatic young woman assigned as his driver (Tōko Miura) – allow him to slowly start untangling his grief.
With lengthy conversational scenes making up much of the film, many of which take place in Yusuke’s beloved old red Saab, Drive My Car might appear deceptively straightforward. But look closer and there’s so many links to be made across scenes, especially concerning the nature of performance – both on-stage and off – as a way of discovering something true about oneself. The staging of Uncle Vanya proves to be an arduous but hugely cathartic process for its cast, and for us as well.
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4. Bergman Island
Bergman Island is not, as its title suggests, about Ingmar Bergman, nor really is it an homage to Bergman – though it does take place on Fårö, the island where the Swedish master lived and shot several of his most celebrated works. It’s here that filmmaker couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) come in search of inspiration – he being a celebrated genre director, she a little less successful and sure of herself. What is initially a very funny film about how insufferable cinephiles are (the “Bergman Safari” proves particularly hilarious) reveals itself as study of a relationship not exactly in crisis, but unsettled, defined by low-level bickering and unspoken dissatisfactions.
Just as we’re beginning to get to grips with Chris and Tony’s dynamic, the action switches to a hypothetical movie within this one, as Chris relates her story about Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to Fårö and reunites with an old flame who got away (Anders Danielsen Lie). How much Amy’s narrative is drawn from Chris’ own life? And how much of both of these stories belong to writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, whose relationship with the older filmmaker Olivier Assayas ended in 2017? Untangling these questions is just one of the many pleasures of this sharp, candid, and rewarding film.
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3. The Souvenir Part II
2019’s The Souvenir – Joanna Hogg’s captivating, if not wholly satisfying, semi-autobiographical work about her time at film school – did not end with anything as heavy-handed as the words spoken by Zendaya at the end of this year’s Dune Part One: “this is just the beginning.” But The Souvenir has turned out to be every inch as much a two-parter as Denis Villeneuve’s epic; Part II is the rare sequel that illuminates and enriches its predecessor, responding to the asymmetries of the first film and throwing up more questions of what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a human being.
That rather bold claim might seem especially suspicious given that Hogg’s films – always centered on the personal miseries of the upper-middle class – have never been particularly “relatable” to most of us. And while it’s true that The Souvenir Part II, picking up the story of her avatar Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) in the wake of her lover’s death, has much in common with the director’s previous work, this is a wittier, warmer, looser film, climaxing in a stunning movie-within-a-movie sequence of meta magical realism. When a filmmaker has established such a clear voice, it makes it all the more exciting to see them break free from it so defiantly – even if what’s really going on is that Hogg, in lovingly pastiching her own graduation film, has simply come full circle.
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2. Titane
Julia Ducournau’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to the coming-of-age cannibal tale Raw, takes as its subject an erotic dancer and serial killer who, within the film’s first half hour, murders a bunch of people, fucks a car, and then becomes pregnant with the car’s baby – you know, the usual. On the run after a recent set of murders goes wrong, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) decides to disguise herself as the long-missing son of the ageing fire chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a desperate man who accepts her without question.
Titane is one of the year’s queerest films, productively open ended and impressively fluid with respect to gender and genre – a body-horror-inflected drama that manages the seemingly impossible task of being wickedly funny, unwatchably gruesome, and gorgeously tender. There’s not much more to say except that Titane is an absolute riot; see this one with an audience if possible.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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1. The Worst Person in the World
I fell in love with Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World pretty much from the get-go. In its lively prologue of false starts, our loveable, hopeless protagonist Julie (the radiant Renate Reinsve), an Oslo millennial in her late 20s, storms through prospective professions – surgeon, psychologist, photographer – before taking a “temp” job at a local bookstore. She also cycles through boyfriends, eventually setting her sights on older cartoonist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), the celebrated creator of a cult underground comic about a decidedly un-PC feline. “Maybe we should agree to stop seeing each other,” Aksel says in bed one night. “You’re much younger than I am. You’ll start to question who you are.” Predictably, they fall completely in love.
It’s not long after Julie moves in with Aksel that the cracks begin to show: he wants kids, she doesn’t; he’s successful, she feels like she’s floating through life. So we can’t be too judgmental when Julie spontaneously gate-crashes a wedding and meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), with whom she spends the early hours of the morning probing the limits of what “counts” as cheating – they tell each other secrets, smell each other’s armpits, watch each other pee – before vowing not to stay in touch. Naturally, it doesn’t work out like that.
Does this make Julie the worst person in the world? If the title is a nod to the self-deprecation and self-loathing that accompanies just trying to figure your shit out, it’s also a reassuring reminder that, well, the worst person in the world probably isn’t you. As the film moves through months and years of Julie’s quarter-life crisis, anxieties about the future are never far off – what she wants to do, who she wants to be. All the more special, then, that The Worst Person in the World is ultimately a paean to the present tense, as made beautifully clear in a moment of cinematic magic too wonderful to spoil. Brimming with insight and wit, this is a future classic.
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