My only blogpost of 2020. This has been a “writing with the door closed” kind of a year for me. No regrets.
Once upon a time, this sceptered isle was disparaged as a “nation of shopkeepers” (and, despite ardent Googling, the precise provenance and etymology of that phrase eludes me). In 2020, under the tightening pincer attack of Brexit and COVID, we have rapidly mutated into a nation of delivery drivers. Absolutely no-one needs me to tell them that this has been a helluva year.
But we still had the movies to get us through the rollercoaster of lockdowns and ever-shifting tiers, even if we didn’t always have cinemas open in which to view them. To paraphrase Norma Desmond: the pictures got small. An unintended consequence of our Plague Year was the hibernation of the studio tentpoles and blockbusters, which allowed some more interesting films to creep out of the margins. In 2020, it was worth holding the words of Henri Matisse close by: “Il y a des fleurs partout pour qui veut bien les voir.” There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
So let’s grab a colourful bouquet of the year’s most fragrant blooms, as I unveil my Top Ten favourite films of 2020. The first two films listed are my absolute favourites of the year, from way back in those halcyon days of January. The rest are in No Particular Order. Here we go!
Parasite (Gisaengchung) (Bong Joon Ho)
Representing two of my favourite shared cultural experiences of the year: the film itself and Director Bong’s generous, heart-swelling Oscar acceptance speech.
Uncut Gems (Benny Safdie / Josh Safdie)
135 minutes of exhilarating defibrillation that hurt so good. Sandler was robbed!
About Endlessness (Om det oändliga) (Roy Andersson)
Precise, deadpan, sensitive and melancholy, Andersson’s humanistic gallows humour implored us to “be content about being alive” whilst emphatically declaring that “everything is fantastic!”. If this really is his swansong, then he’s going out on a high.
Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles / Kleber Mendonça Filho)
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller)
A film that has continued to grow in my estimation and affection as I’ve navigated the treacherous terrain of 2020. A quiet and powerful paean to kindness, both to ourselves and others. “Anything mentionable is manageable.”
Being A Human Person (Fred Scott)
A companion piece to About Endlessness, Scott’s documentary follows twinkly-eyed septuagenarian Roy Andersson over a three-year period and captures his bons mots about the value and importance of art. Roy proclaims that “We should be grateful that art exists”. And I am. “Art is defending the human being.” We are fortunate that we have a human being like Roy Andersson around to defend art in a world where it feels increasingly under siege.
The Hunt (Craig Zobel)
Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)
The entirety of McQueen’s Small Axe quintet is an astonishing, evocative achievement, but was there a more deliriously joyous ten minutes of film this year than the Silly Games sequence of Lovers Rock?
My parents and grandparents came over to the UK on a boat in the 1950s looking to build a better life and settled in North-West London. But they weren’t West Indian. My lot came over from Cyprus, and assimilation is somewhat easier if your skin tone more closely matches that of the locals. And yet we were fellow travelers. My grandparents had a café similar to the Mangrove not that far away. (They weren’t subjected to the same levels of abuse and harassment as Frank Crichlow and his patrons.) The Small Axe films aren’t about my family, but they are about my neighbours. My grandparents lived in Harlesden. I grew up on the blurry line between Wembley and Harrow. I could pick up the pirate radio stations coming out of Harlesden and Willesden - they came and went all the time. Little explosions of static that resolved into beautiful, crackly transmissions of soul and reggae into my young ears. Janet Kay’s Silly Games was a staple of my childhood. It is and always has been a certified banger. Lovers Rock is a Proustian madeleine that I'll be revisiting again and again in 2021 and beyond.
Rocks (Sarah Gavron)
Saint Maud (Rose Glass)
As always, there’s more. Here’s another killer selection of the “just as good”s and the “not quite”s:
Close But No Cigar
#Alive (#Saraitda) (Il Cho)
Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Cathy Yan)
Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)
Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi)
Little Women (Greta Gerwig)
Mangrove (Steve McQueen)
Moffie (Oliver Hermanus)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (Céline Sciamma)
Soul (Peter Docter)
Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)
And that’s me done for another year. I wish the most Happy New Year to all of us. Like Wile E. Coyote, we take a licking, then get back up, brush off the burnt hair and gunpowder residue, and start plotting how to catch that pesky Road Runner all over again. Whatever 2021 brings, we got this.
