2021, a complicated year. Behind, the pandemic and the difficulty of making movies. In the background, the digital platforms that dissolve, so many times, the characters in endless hours without depth and with images more of commissioned craftsmen than of talented artists. In front, the fear of brand new without an audience in theaters. Suspiciously, many films about cinema, between the elegy and the tribute. And despite everything, we have been able to glean ten titles released this year and especially noted for their spiritual reference. They are not masterpieces for times of transition, but they are witnesses that good cinema can be saved, albeit in another way.
- 1) “Minari. Story of My Family” (2020) by Lee Isaac Chung
It is already suggestive that religious and spiritual themes appear among the films awarded at the Oscars. The 1980s, a Korean family moves from the city to the countryside, the dream of the father is economic success selling Korean vegetables in the US. But the move affects the family. The wife does not understand this fixation on gaining more at the cost of security. The sister tries to adapt, while the little heart patient, who acts as a covered narrator, does not accept the change. The grandmother appears there, foul-mouthed and rude, but her best companion. Her faith is the source of resistance. Like the minari, the Korean grass, by the river, hidden and barely noticeable, continues to grow after the tragedies. Like the old character who drags the cross every Sunday along the roads in a liturgy of strength in weakness. In front of the triumphant heroes, the united resisters.
- 2) Close to you (2020) Uberto Pasolini
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we liked it in “machan” (2007), amazed us in “Never too late” (2013) and now it moves us seven years later. Few films for an experienced producer who likes to make films with a humanistic spirit. A lonely father, he educates and says goodbye to his son. Terminally ill, together with social services, he helps to find a foster family for his little one. The trip consists of visiting families, each one with its possibilities and its defects. Which will be the best for the little one? Nevertheless. the big questions are distilled in the innocence of the next orphan, who attends the visits, less and less as a spectator and more as an intuitive protagonist of his fate. While the father fails to find words to explain the loving survival after his death, close but elliptical. Here the immortality of the soul leaves one foot in this life and one in the hereafter. A trust that the window-cleaning father wants to offer as the only inheritance to his son. A confidence that each of us is also faced with the possibility of receiving.
- 3) The Lives of Others (2020) Mohammad Rasoulof
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Death penalty, failure of humanity. Cinema in the style of the great Iranian filmmakers, paused in everyday life and with depth after patience, and now radically on the brink of the precipice of denunciation. Rasoulof has played it against a regime without freedoms and before an issue that affects dictatorships and democracies: kill others. Four independent stories about the executioners that are linked with the imprecise precipitation of the one who is known to be persecuted. The banality of evil, the courage of the insignificant, the forced executors, the dissolution of humanity and the possibility of transmitting enough value to those who come after. Shot elliptically and choppy, the standalone episodes have the audacity to say half, saying it all. A forceful display in the first story and an alleged display in the other three.
- 4) Maixabel (2021) by Icíar Bollaín
Icíar Bollaín’s cinema had already tried to say more in his films “I give you my eyes” and “Also the rain”, We believe that this occasion takes a new step by confronting the painful history of ETA’s violence in the Basque Country. The starting point is almost documentary, approaching the process of restorative dialogues between the victims and the perpetrators, in this case between Maixabel Lasa, the widow of Juan Mari Jáuregui, and Ibon Etxezarreta, one of her husband’s murderers. Politics and conflicts are born and overcome from people. The sociopolitical resonance is articulated from the meeting of two people, played by Blanco Portillo and Luis Tosar, in emotional contention. She taking the step of showing her pain with confidence in second chances. He walking a hard path to recover as a person, until he understood, affected and hurt, the damage inflicted and asked for forgiveness. An encounter between guilt and overcoming looking to the future. And appearing like a mystery that light that allows inheriting hope. Necessary, disturbing and deeply human.
- 5) Dune (2021) by Denis Villeneuve
“Dreams are good stories, but everything important happens when we’re awake” (Instructor Duncan Idaho). The old novel by Frank Herbert, inspiring hippies, today attracts for its anticipatory power around an ecological messiah. Paul is the heir to the prominent House Atreides, he begins to have strange dreams about a desert planet and its inhabitants. Little by little the protagonist realizes that the dreams are prophetic, but he cannot interpret them because he lacks data, neither his father nor his mother, a member of the powerful Bene Gesserit order, can help him. From the dreams he meets the Fremen, recognizes the value of the planet Arrakis, and begins to learn his sense of mission. An overwhelming audiovisual mechanism deployed in staging, effects, costumes and soundtrack. Excess of forms for a new history of myths in the society of the techno-scientocracy. Something happens when myths slip through the cracks of reasons and special effects.
- 6) Servants (2020) by Ivan Ostrochovský
Harsh film, in its bland black illustrated with intense atonal music, as well as an interesting review of communist regimes and believers in times of trial. A part of the Czechoslovak church accepts the restrictions on freedom and conscience to remain an institution, while renouncing its meaning and becoming an accomplice of the dictatorship. But a group of young and naive seminarians are part of the “Church of the Catacombs”. Michal and Juraj are friends and believers, they seek consistency, but the price to pay seems too high. Surrounded by a world of denunciations and silent violence, they feel how the threat makes them tremble, the oppression made into a filmic atmosphere unfolds with its suffocating mechanism. Resistance consists in not breaking.
- 7) The Card Counter (2021) Paul Schrader
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That Paul Schrader (“Hardcore: A Hidden World”,” Mishima” or “Affliction”) point your camera to the dark side is nothing new. An ex-convict turned professional poker player (exceptional Oscar Isaac) lives a routine life to silence his past, which has to do with the abuse and torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war. But forgetting becomes impossible when a young man (Tye Sheridan) proposes to kill the person he blames for his father’s suicide. Both the suicide and the colonel in question (Willem Dafoe) are old acquaintances of the ex-military protagonist. As was the case with “El reverend” (2017), trying to reverse revenge, he finds a sacrificed path to redemption. Evil is systematized in an evil world forged by evil people, but in the end a way out remains. Filmed as following Robert Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer”, the patient viewer will get his reward.
8) Cry Male (2021) Clint Eastwood
A new stubbornness of Eastwood at 91 years old. He said he would never act again, but barely standing, he plays an old horse tamer and breeder. He is commissioned by his former boss to go look for his son, a Mexican teenager who lives with his alcoholic and violent mother. The old man and the child, the earth and the sky, love and death. Tenacious transcendent, with Protestant faith and stories of Catholic places, he continues to write more and more fragile and bare testaments where there is no longer any realism. Distilling life from his complexity to leave only the ingenuousness of the parable where there is always time to set one’s boots in the stirrups and serenely wait for the afterlife with his gaze lost in infinity.
9) It was the hand of God (2021) Paolo Sorrentino
Sorrentino has been characterized by the surrealist exploration of the relationship between religion and power (“The great beauty” and the miniseriesThe Young Pope”). In this case, he makes a kind of confession about his life from the tragic death of his parents to his vocation as a film director. Under the highlighted inspiration of Fellini and the city of Naples, a young man tries to float in existence, his first love, a great loss and the different influences. Surprisingly, trust in providence emerges, he said “the hand of God”. Maradonian metaphor of how in the unheard of and unexpected there is a hidden presence. Even Christian symbols (the crucifix or the Madonna) are resignified without losing their transcendent scope. A reckoning with life and faith that serves to wish a good trip.
10) One Night in Miami (2020) by Regina King
With “The son of the sun” (2020) by Majid Majidi is a film of interest to learn about the Islamic world. In 1964, after the victory in the world championship of a young and impulsive Cassius Clay, the boxer, hand in hand with his friend the black leader Malcolm X, meets in a motel room with other of his admirers, the singer and producer Sam Cooke and American football player Jim Brown. Performed in a theatrical style that reminds us of “The Big Fish” (2000) by John Swanbeck, focuses on dialogue and performance. The most remarkable thing is to understand their different positions regarding the struggles of the black population for their civil rights and their connection with the Islamic religion. Malcolm X is in full crisis with his departure from the Nation of Islam, his approach to violence and the threat on his life. The naive convert Ali is willing to follow him, but Sam Cooke, especially, is critical of his radicalism and Brown seeks to support the group of friends beyond the disputes.
2021, a complicated year. Behind, the pandemic and the difficulty of making movies. In the background, the platforms