(My) Best of 2010: Picture.

10. Somewhere

Like Lost in Translation before it, Somewhere is a non-story that evokes beautiful nostalgia. Once again set in the world of Hollywood (stick to what you know, right?) Sofia Coppola delivers a delicate portrait of a movie star (Stephen Dorff) and his down to earth relationship with his young daughter (Elle Fanning).

Dialogs are limited, "actions" are sparse and yet, coming out of it, you can't help but feel that the world has been shown to you for the first time. Coppola's ability to find beauty in the quotidian has made her a true master.

9. Undertow

The year's best love story (sorry Never Let Me Go), had fishermen, photographers and ghosts. As delivered by Javier Fuentes León though, the film is able to avoid extreme quirkiness and/or melodrama, instead becoming a remarkable exercise of how to transport Latin American magical realism, into seamless visual narrative.
Manolo Cardona and Cristian Mercado will break your heart as the star crossed lovers, who must cope with denial, secrecy and death.

Kudos for being a love story between men that doesn't scream "gay movie". Love after all should transcend sexual orientation.

8. The Ghost Writer

Done with gleeful mischief by Roman Polanski, this was the year's most entertaining political thriller. Its layers and secrets more fun, not because of their real life parallels (Tony Blair mostly) but because they transport us to a time and place where movies could be entertaining and smart.

Ewan McGregor and a remarkable Pierce Brosnan take their game to splendid levels but it's Olivia Williams' role, straight out of The Manchurian Candidate, that gives this film its final laugh.

7. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Icy, distant and furiously feminist, this adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel was a stunning throwback to suspense thrillers at their best. Noomi Rapace gives an iconic performance as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander but the movie's best asset is its straightforward approach to its genre.

It's not reinventing the wheel but it never pretends to, instead it throws us sepia flashbacks, newspapers clippings and gasp worthy moments, with full understanding that it's main purpose is to entertain and seduce its audience. Action flicks are rarely this sincere.

6. I Am Love

If Luchino Visconti and Sergei Eisenstein had a baby, it would be I Am Love. Luca Guadagnino's epic work is a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of a collapsing world.

Tilda Swinton plays a Russian immigrant married to an Italian heir. The way in which love falls with violent aplomb onto their lives makes for a subtle political statement that leads us to ask questions cinema hasn't made us since the 1960s.

Is capitalism a force that opposes love? Can personal history be adapted in lieu of social class upgrades? Is there anything Tilda Swinton can't do?

5. Carlos

Olivier Assayas and Edgar Ramírez deliver one of the few biopics that can be called complete. This encompassing study of Carlos "The Jackal" forgoes ridiculous mentions of childhood traumas, facile Freudian diagnosis or unnecessary romanticism to tell the story of the world's most notorious terrorist. Assayas himself begins the film with a disclaimer saying that parts of the film are complete fiction, yet his assured direction and Ramírez's star making performance make us disbelief this. If this isn't the real Jackal, they could've fooled us.

4. Toy Story 3

People who attribute the success of this installment to nostalgia for the first two chapters, might run into a dead end when they bump into my Toy Story experience.

I'm most definitely not a fan of the first two and never held any high regards for Woody, Buzz or company. However nothing prepared me for the emotional punch of this film.

Who would've thought that Ingmar Bergman's explorations of mortality would live, not through Eastern European art cinema, but through computer animated toys?

3. Dogtooth

One of the year's funniest comedies and also one of the best horror films, Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth is a remarkable work of originality that thrives in spite of its tendency to push the level with every minute of its running time.

A morality play, a modern interpretation of Plato, a sexual comedy and much more, this film roots its perverse power in the best and worst of human nature; in our need to protect the ones we love and the fear of never living up to satisfy the universe that created us.

2. The Social Network

The Facebook movie proved to be much more than what anyone expected and delivered the thrills in more than one way.

As a comedy, it recalls some of the bitterest satires put on the stage. As a drama, it's a heartbreaking story of how money and power are never enough when it comes to eradicating loneliness. As a court movie, it's an exemplary work of how to push genres into fresh directions, as auteur work it's an unmistakable masterpiece made only better by David Fincher's ability to turn a great screenplay into an intimate, personal work.

Jesse Eisenberg delivered the best male performance of the year as Mark Zuckerberg and the film's stunt casting made a case for how its characters' values are the sad faces of an entire generation. Those who have compared it to Citizen Kane, are not using hyperbole.

1. Black Swan

In Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky explores the nature of creation while exploiting his very own creative sense. He creates an imperfect world within our own, where high camp, terror, psychological drama and insanity coexist with such balance that they make us wonder about the elements that conform our existence.

Natalie Portman gives the year's greatest performance as ballerina Nina Sayers: a fragile beauty trying to find perfection within chaos. Like the actual black swans, which remained a myth until they were discovered by explorers a few centuries ago, she undergoes a Kafka-esque process in which she discovers that she's becoming that which she once feared and thought impossible.

Her quest for perfection mirrors the film's own search for artistic sublimity, yet as an organism, the film seems to "learn" just in time that in order to achieve perfection, it must compromise with itself.

As Nina surrenders to insanity worthy of the most tragic Catholic saint, the movie takes an alternate path and observes Nina's quest, while it develops its own route. There's a moment in the film, where it stops being Nina (after following her path through most of the running time) and decides that perfection is perhaps too much to aim for.

That the film ends up being perfect in its own sense, makes for an interesting dichotomy between artistic expectations and actual aesthetic realities.

Black Swan was a reminder of why people go to the movies: to be transported to different worlds, to know people they could never meet in real life, to see the world from a different perspective, to bask in the face of the incomprehensible and metaphysical, and sometimes to be shaken to our core so all we are left to say is just "what the fuck?".

I Am Love ***½

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Tilda Swinton
Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Alba Rohrwacher
Pippo Delbono, Maria Paiato, Gabriele Ferzetti, Mattia Zaccaro
Waris Ahluwaia, Marisa Berenson

I Am Love feels like watching an opera on mute. Despite its baroque qualities, strokes of Sirkian melodrama and decadent visuals, its intensity seems muffled, brilliantly contained, so that we're forced to face what we see under a new light.
Anchored by an astonishing lead performance by Tilda Swinton, the film concentrates on the slight downfall of an Italian industrialist family.
The Recchi family is formed by patriarch Edoardo (Ferzetti) and his wife Allegra (Berenson). Their son Tancredi (Delbono), his Russian wife Emma (Swinton) and their children: Edoardo Jr. (Parenti), Elisabetta (Rohrwacher) and Gianluca (Zaccaro).
When we first meet them they are celebrating Edoardo Sr.'s birthday where he announces he's retiring from business and passing the business to his son Tancredi and his grandson Edoardo Jr.
His grandson's inclusion sends the first ripples of change as family and friends begin to wonder why the patriarch would do such a thing, especially considering Edoardo has just come from losing a race earlier that day, to a chef.
When the chef, Antonio (Gabbriellini), arrives at the party that night bringing a cake as a peace offering, or perhaps aware that he has unintentionally imbalanced the Recchi clan, there is a strange feeling of discomfort in the film.
Coming from the lush, long sequences where we saw the family smile and toast over expensive silverware and in even more expensive gowns, we suddenly come to the image of this young man standing outside in the snow with a box.
He opens the box to show the cake to Edoardo and his mother but we never see it and any feelings you might have that this mysterious cake is in fact a bomb about to explode, will be completely justified as the film unfolds.
As Edo takes a liking to Antonio so does his mother and in an exquisite scene we see her realize she might be attracted to the young man as she relishes in a prawn dish.
As they embark on an affair, the film's title begins to make sense as love lands on the Recchis with complete aplomb. Emma who at first had been more of a supporting character suddenly takes prominence (and you have to see how surprisingly easy it becomes for the fantastic Swinton to not steal the show). It's almost as if the film begins to get rid of the layers that concealed who she really was to begin with.
If you thought you had seen all that Tilda Swinton could do, you are in for a real treat with her subdued performance as Emma.
The chamaleonic actress slips into this woman with such ease that you have to wonder where one ended and the other began. Swinton's worldly features take on the quality of someone who know nothing and it's a thing of beauty to see her light up as she begins to discover the world for the first time.
Watch her in scenes with Rohrwacher (a strike of genius mother-daughter casting) as she shifts from flawless mother figure to full blown woman and later in scenes with Gabbriellini as she completely disregards these maternal qualities and turns them into complete sensual surrender.
Despite what the character makes us believe at the beginning, Swinton is in full command in this film; you can feel her love for challenging art in every frame (it helps that she's dressed by Jil Sander and Fendi) as she exploits and bends established genre conventions.
Because in the strictest sense, I Am Love is an efficiently executed melodrama with a straightforward plot we've seen a million times before but its mise-en-scene and planning reveals layers that serve as means to explore European economic history, various artistic movements and metaphysical notions of what is to love.
For example on the surface, Emma's affair comes off as something typical of a romantic novel (she's even named after Madame Bovary) but she's also used to explore the role that Russia came to figure in non-communist Europe.
We realize how Emma had to overcome her entire legacy in order to fit in this wealthy Italian clan. We learn that Emma isn't even her real name (her husband gave it to her) and we can assume she's come to form part of a life that would've been considered the antithesis of what she was before.
Therefore when she begins her affair, besides all the sentimental and carnal connotations, we can detect something else being said. Why is she so attracted to this young man who's so outside her social circle?
It can be no coincidence that Emma becomes attracted to the only character in the movie who is not bourgeois. Is she identifying with him, because like her Antonio didn't receive everything on a silver platter?
Is this affair an actual rebellion towards the forces of capitalism that the Recchis represent? This is particularly striking because in a subplot we see Edoardo Jr.'s refusal to sell the company to a huge industrial group out of loyalty to tradition. Guadagnino doesn't invest too much in this particular story but he is trying to say something about the way in which love subverts the notions we have of materialistic success.
Besides these political strokes, Guadagnino also pays homage to Hitchcock, Malick and especially Visconti (the first part is straight out of The Leopard and it's no coincidence he named one of the characters Tancredi...) as he indulges himself in long takes of these people's lives and surroundings.
Everything about I Am Love can get to be so majestic and pompous that we often are left wondering how it's also able to haunt us so much.

Wasn't I a Dish?