A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

And once again, the year just keels over and ends. At least that’s how it feels: ever since history decided that we can’t complete a single orbit around the sun without some major upheaval or crisis, it’s continued in that vein. Or has it always been that way, and I’ve just been too Euro- or phallo- or whatevercentric to notice that that’s just what history is: one kind of crisis after another?

I have to admit that I also don’t feel I’ve got a sense of the shape of 2023 in cultural terms. Sure, there was Barbenheimer (which we got not just one but two podcasts out of, though in the case of the Christmas Special we put our own Damn Fine imprint on the motif), but while I enjoyed both films, I loved neither, and I am not in any special hurry to revisit them.

Other than that, though? We watched a lot of new films, but we watched several times as many older films at the best little cinema in the world: Sidney Poitier’s greatest hits, films starring Delphine Seyrig (including, yes, the greatest epic ever made of peeling potatoes and homicide), the gangster-riddled oeuvre of Jean-Pierre Melville, all about Cate (Blanchett, that is), Wes Anderson’s wonderful dollhouses of all shapes and sizes, and the many, many murders of Patricia Highsmith, to name just a few. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but it makes it more difficult to form an opinion of what cinema was like in 2023. For me, cinema has become more of a flat circle than it has ever been – though what a wonderful flat circle it is nonetheless!

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t new films this year that I enjoyed and/or admired a lot. I wouldn’t necessarily say I loved Tár, but writer-director Todd Field and his star Cate Blanchett, backed up by a more than capable supporting cast, did deliver fantastic work. I have at times felt in the past that Blanchett was prone to too much acting in some of her big dramatic parts, but here she is perfect as the self-serving, narcissistic superstar of conducting big orchestras. (Other Hollywood stars trying to figure out whose baton is bigger simply aren’t in the same league, as far as I’m concerned. Sorry, Mr Cooper.)

I also feel much of the same admiration for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, though I confess that latter-day Scorsese never feels as raw and fresh to me as the best of his earlier films. Still, there is an anger to Killers that I don’t remember seeing in other films by the director about bad men (almost) getting away with doing bad things – and where Scorsese mainstays Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are very good in the film, Lily Gladstone is sublime, making an immensely internalised character whose motivations are sometimes oblique to the point of being incomprehensible stand out as one of the best performances of the year.

Talking of fantastic performances: Greta Lee is so good in Celine Song’s Past Lives, it is impossible not to fall in love with her at least a little bit. I remember watching the trailer for the film and thinking, “Well, I already know what this is going to be, the only question being who she’ll end up with.” There is something to that, as this is not a film to watch for the surprising twists and turns of its plot, but at the same time that’s not what the film is about. It’s been criticised in some circles for not doing much to address the identity politics of its main character, a woman whose family emigrated from South Korea to Canada and who’s ended up in the United States, married to a writer from New York. While I see why someone might be frustrated with what the film didn’t end up being about, I honestly have problems with that school of film criticism: before you slag off a film for what it isn’t, shouldn’t you at least show some willingness to see it for what it is? I found Past Lives affecting, nuanced and immensely engaging, and I could’ve easily spent many more hours in the company of Greta Lee’s Nora.

And finally: Wes Anderson films can go one of two ways with me, by and large. Sometimes I find the artifice too twee, the characters too navel-gazing, the mise-en-scène too stifling. And sometimes all of these come together in some weird Andersonian alchemy. I’ve read similar things from other people – but weirdly enough, about totally different films by the director. I’m no fan of The Royal Tenenbaums but could watch Fantastic Mr. Fox on endless repeat, for instance. From the trailer, I probably asked myself much the same about Asteroid City as most people: is this the most Wes Anderson film yet? I know that many bounced off of Anderson’s latest feature, finding it too meta, too much up its own perfectly symmetrical, scale-model rear end. And yet – for its many-layered, Chinese box structure that could hardly foreground more that we’re watching fictions within fictions within fictions, there is an emotional core there that, when it is fully revealed in a scene that in theory should be a fiction too far, got me right in the pit of my stomach. For all its artifice, I found Asteroid City to be affecting and almost painfully vulnerable at heart. And it’s got the perfect Jeff Goldblum cameos ever, which is nothing to sneeze at.

So, yeah, looking at it like that, 2023 was a good year for films, even without the yin-yang allure of The Pink One and The One with the Bomb. But there was more to 2023 than films, right? And since the year finally wheezes its last breath only tomorrow, this is just the first part of my look back at 2023. Make sure to check out what’s to come tomorrow!