Favorite (four), sixty-seven

Just like in my other sixty-six posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing.  Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me.  This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.

Abdellatif Kechiche's L'esquive

Kechiche, an actor himself, has a tremendous ability for achieving vital, piercingly plausible performances.  The other two films I have seen of his, The Secret of the Grain and Blue Is the Warmest Colour, are stylistically bolder, employing long takes and complex mise-en-scene but all of his work features extraordinary acting.  What I admire about Kechiche, perhaps above all, is as daring as his cinema can be, he also understands restraint.  Here there is hardly any music at all and although mostly composed of tight, handheld shots, Kechiche sticks to this one approach rather than combining many different styles and approaches.  I put Kechiche in a small group of the greatest filmmakers working today, and this film only deepened that feeling for me.  

Robert Bresson's Le diable probablement

One of the remaining Bresson features I had yet to see.  Once again, Bresson impresses with his rigor and rhythm.  Not a movement out of place and every cut in sync with some atypical metronomic beat that is deeply his own.  Bresson grapples with action, love, enjoyment and life in what might be a world without meaning or purpose.  The strong blacks in almost every frame suggest a darkness that potentially threatens all existence while its bleakness brings forth memories of Carax's Boy Meets Girl.

Nanni Moretti's Ecce bombo

Moretti's first feature already has many of the elements he would become known for - his great feel for music, his quick, playful wit, his political engagement and a structural looseness that is as much a part of his appeal as it is a weakness.  Not too far from the zany, episodic nature of Woody's early features.    

Hong Sang-soo's Yourself and Yours

One of my favorite Hong films, alongside Right Now, Wrong Then, In Another Country and Woman Is the Future of Man.  Has there ever been anyone in the medium as successful at being so minimal?  Hong shrinks the world (few actors, one piece of music, only a handful of locations) but burrows in so well that his shrunken world still feels universal and relevant.