Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 29/12/2011) (From The Oxford Times)

Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 29/12/2011)

8:15am Thursday 29th December 2011 in Cinema/TV By Parky at the Pictures

The past year will not go down among the most distinguished in cinema history. The blockbusters were mediocre and mired in the 3-D debate and even arthouse cinema failed to produce its customary crop of richest. French film, in particular, was curiously lacklustre in 2011, with the obvious exception of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, which would make screen history if it became only the second silent to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

While Hollywood struggled with its technological obsessions, the recession and a growing inability to produce innovative movies that were not connected to a franchise or a pre-sold property, the indie sector had a more than decent time, with Kelly Reichhardt's anti-Western Meek's Cutoff, Lance Hammer's sombre slice of social realism Ballast, Matt Bissonnette's droll bonding brothers saga Passenger Side and Aaron Katz's mumblecore noit Cold Weather all being worthy of attention. Bearing in mind the disappointing stiffness of Terence Davies's adaptation of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea and the faux naturalism of Andrea Arnold's take on Wuthering Heights, the other standout English-language features were Lynne Ramsay's version of Lionel Shriver's prize-winning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (in which the director's audiovisual ingenuity surpassed the intensity of Tilda Swinton's somewhat over-praised performance) and Justin Kurzel's Snowtown, in which Daniel Henshall excelled as the bigoted Australian serial killer who used his charm to dupe deprived outsiders into doing his evil bidding.

The Americas produced three of the near-misses for this year's Parky at the Pictures Top 10, with Christopher Ruíz-Esparza catching the eye as the nine year-old who begins assuming his absentee father's personality in Mexican actor Diego Luna's directorial debut, Abel, and Stephanie Sigman contributing a poignant display of naive vulnerability as the beauty queen abducted by gangster Noe Hernandez in Gerardo Naranjo's satisfyingly stylised drama, Miss Bala. In stark contrast, Xavier Dolan and Monia Chokri forged a photogenic and amusingly catty combination, as they competed for the affections of new-in-town hunk Niels Schneider in the 21 year-old Dolan's sophomore outing, Heartbeats, while Sergei Puskepalis and Grigory Dobrygin made a far less communicative couple as they manned a meteorological station on a remote island inside the Arctic Circle in Alexei Popogrebsky's How I Ended This Summer.

But the only fictional films worth talking about in 2011 are: 10) LOVE LIKE POISON Mia Hansen-Løve and Isabelle Czajka have recently followed Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis in presenting acute insights into the pangs of female adolescence. But, while Father of My Children and Living on Love Alone were both sensitively staged and superbly played, they lacked the intimacy, intensity and audacity of Katell Quillévéré's exceptional debut, Love Like Poison. The winner of the prestigious Jean Vigo Prize for best first feature, this is both a poignant coming-of-age saga and a considered treatise on the role of such institutions as marriage and religion in a world that is not only increasingly secular, but also more impulsive and impenitent.

Arriving at grandfather Michel Galabru's Breton home for a welcome break from her detested boarding school, 14 year-old Clara Augarde discovers that parents Lio and Thierry Neuvic have finally separated after years of bickering. Following his father's lead, Neuvic is a committed atheist and Augarde has her own doubts ahead of her forthcoming confirmation, even though her devoutly Catholic mother has arranged for special instruction sessions with Italian priest Stefano Cassetti.

Resisting the urging of parents François Bernard and Françoise Navarro to leave her ailing father-in-law to his own family, Lio insists on trying to coerce him into keeping a hospital appointment. However, Galabru is more interested in his record collection and revisiting the temptations of his youth. Indeed, he even hints to his granddaughter that he would like a final glimpse of the place from whence he came and it's only after she arouses him during a bed bath that she realises he doesn't mean his home village.

Augarde, however, has started to have erotic longings of her own and she confusedly dotes on a holy picture of Christ and the cherubic face of choirboy Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil. However, the more aware and poised she becomes, the more Lio comes to resent the prospect of her happiness and the failure of her own relationship and the likelihood that she will never experience passion again. She confides her fears in Cassetti, who is enduring his own crisis of faith, as he finds Lio's vulnerability stimulating and begins taking long walks and joining in football matches with the local kids to keep his mind occupied.

Amidst such fervent feelings, it's hardly surprising that Augarde faints while attending her first requiem and allows Leboulanger-Gourvil to kiss her clumsily during a trek through the woods. However, he is anything but a typically lusty teen and, when she finally consents to come back to his bedroom, he shyly sings her a song with his guitar. But he is not to be the recipient of her first sexual favours and her determination to follow her own head and heart further manifests itself as she approaches bishop Philippe Duclos on the high altar and, later, as she reads an explicit poem at Galabru's funeral.

Taking its title from a Serge Gainsbourg song and scripted by Quillévéré and Marie Désert with a compassion, restraint and sapience that also extend to the perfectly judged performances, this is one of the most accomplished debuts of recent times. The shifts between Tom Harari's graceful tracking shots and more intrusive handheld close-ups are impeccable, as is the selection of soundtrack music (right down to the fascinating choral rendition of Radiohead's `Creep'). Quillévéré, who had previously made three acclaimed shorts, also leavens the candid drama with wisps of acerbic wit. But it's the direction of the exquisitely dauntless Augarde that most impresses, as Quillévéré not only succeeds in capturing both her curiosity and growing confidence, but also her increasing awareness of her physical beauty, sexual potency and intellectual independence.

9) POETRY South Korean cinema has found an increasingly receptive audience in this country over the last two decades. Emerging from the `hallyu' new wave, directors like Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Hong Sang-soo and Kim Jee-woon have used dark humour and often shocking imagery to expose the societal flaws that are rooted in the constant state of tension brought about by the nation's relationship with its unpredictable neighbour to the north. Despite acclaim for the little-seen Green Fish (1996), Peppermint Candy (1999), Oasis (2002) and Secret Sunshine (2007), former teacher, novelist and Minister of Culture and Tourism, Lee Chang-dong has never been considered one of Korea's major film-makers. But, with Poetry, he finally merits his place among the elite.

Ever since her daughter left to work in Pusan, sixtysomething Yoon Jung-hee has raised grandson Lee David on welfare in a small apartment in a town outside Seoul. He's a sullen, ungrateful youth who expects to be waited on and left to his own devices. Yet Yoon dotes on him and feels guilty at asking him to play badminton with her when the doctor suggests some gentle exercise might alleviate the tingling in her right arm. However, Yoon also tends to live in her own little world, even though she has a job as a part-time carer to stroke victim Kim Hee-ra, who lives above daughter-in-law Kim Gye-seon's convenience store. Thus, she almost surprises herself when she signs up for Kim Yong-taek's poetry class at the local community centre and soon finds herself striving to tap into the creativity he insists that everyone possesses.

Deciding against telling her daughter that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Yoon begins contemplating apples and trees in search of inspiration. She amuses her classmates with her naive questions and proves equally willing to speak her mind when she starts attending readings with accomplished woman poet Kim Hye-jeong and the lewd Kim Jong-goo, a police detective who is recovering from a car crash that occurred shortly after he was demoted for uncovering corruption among his colleagues in the capital. But the law threatens to intrude closer to home when Yoon learns that David and his five pals have driven Kim Hera to suicide by serially raping her at school.

Led by Ahn Nae-sang, the fathers of the other culprits act quickly with school principal Choi Moon-soon to suppress the story and arrange a compensation payment to the victim's widowed mother, Park Myeong-sin. However, Yoon can't afford her share of the 30 million won and is reluctant to ask her daughter to pay as she doesn't want her to think she's incapable of caring for David. Consequently, she throws herself into her poetry in a desperate bid to find beauty and consolation in the chaos raging around her and even bungles a visit to appease Park by becoming distracted by the taste of the apricots she grows on her humble farm.

Yoon is admonished by Ahn for discussing the case with prying journalist Hong Seong-beom and attracts Kim Jong-goo's sympathy after crying during a drunken poetry session. But, even though David has expressed no remorse for his crime, she knows she has to protect his future and asks Kim Hee-ra for a loan in return for the sexual favours she had granted him during his bath-times. However, there is one last twist in the tale before Kim Yong-taek reads out Yoon's poem on the last day of term.

Bookended by ominous shots of the Han River, this is a quietly devastating study of Korean mores and the casual attitude to violence shared with Japanese society. Yet, while Lee focuses on Yoon's quixotic quest for lyricism and significance, he never lets her escape the gnawing knowledge of grandson's barbarism or her own proclivity for eccentric behaviour. She may dress smartly in floral jackets and cute hats, but the demure Yoon consistently withholds the truth, delays making inconvenient decisions and even strips naked with a Viagra-fuelled lech. Thus, even though Lee reveals nothing of her past, one is left with the suspicion she once had plenty of admirers and knew how to manipulate them to her advantage.

Returning to the screen after an absence of over 15 years and intimately captured by Kim Hyun-seok's fluid camera, Yoon is exceptional, whether she's struggling to understand the complex poetic process or coping with the mounting problems of being an elderly lady in a patronisingly patriarchal milieu. But it's her eschewal of easy sentiment that makes her character so credible and her somewhat contrived situation seem more natural. The callously uncommunicative David also impresses, as he reacts more effusively to being told to turn down his music or clear up his mess than he does to being confronted with his grievous misdemeanour. Yet Lee avoids inter-generational platitudes and explores the recurring theme of militant masculinity with more subtlety than the debuting Yoon Sung-hyun managed in another story sparked by a suicide, Bleak Night (2010).

Nevertheless, Lee doesn't always succeed in accommodating the eponymous poetics into the action, with the open-mike sessions and the direct-to-camera student descriptions of moments that made them happy adding little to the Sirkian narrative until Yoon recalls a cosy childhood incident that exposes how vulnerable and alone she now feels as she faces losing her reasons for living. However, Lee redeems himself with an elegantly poignant coda that makes neat use of montage to illustrate Yoon's parting verses and reinforce the bond she feels with the dead girl whose photograph she stole from the church porch during her funeral service.

8) THE SILENCE The police procedural is a venerable screen format and few film-makers manage to invest it with much imagination, let alone a novelty that eschews contrivance or gimmicry. However, in adapting German novelist Jan Costin Wagner's bestselling thriller, The Silence, Swiss director Baran Bo Odar not only succeeds in telling his tale with the utmost tension and artless concealment, but he also achieves a psychological depth that makes this one of the most compelling crime dramas of the year.

On 8 July 1986, caretaker Ulrich Thomsen and college student Wotan Wilke Möhring watch a pornographic film before driving off in the former's red Audi. They veer down a country lane in pursuit of 11 year-old cyclist Melina Fabian and Thomsen bludgeons her to death as she struggles after he finishes raping her. Möhring witnesses the entire incident from the passenger seat and is so appalled by what he sees that he leaves town on the first bus.

Twenty-three years later, on exactly the same date, 13 year-old Anna Lena Klenke storms out after an argument with parents Karoline Eichhorn and Roeland Wiesnekker and arranges to meet her friends at a visiting funfair. They fail to show up and she is abducted as she cycles home. Next morning, Klenke's bike is found in a field near the cross marking the spot where Fabian had disappeared (before her decomposed corpse was discovered in a lake many months later).

Fabian's mother, Katrin Sass, is out jogging when the police arrive and she barricades herself into her home, as the press come seeking a comment on the copycat crime. She reluctantly opens the door, however, to Burghart Klaussner, the cop who had handled the case and had retired the night before after a boozy party and a confrontation with his smug successor Oliver Stokowski. He is now in charge of the inquiry and refuses to listen to Klaussner's theories and instructs underlings Sebastian Blomberg and the heavily pregnant Jule Böwe to keep him out of the loop.

Unfortunately, Stokowski also fails to keep Eichhorn and Wiesnekker fully informed and the strain prompts the former to leave the latter after he causes a scene at the police station. Meanwhile, Sass has started a fling with Klaussner to help her cope with the feelings of loss that are shared by Blomberg, whose wife died of cancer just five months before and his need to immerse himself in the case to numb the pain causes him to fall foul of his incompetent superior.

As the TV news coverage intensifies over the weekend, Möhring - now a wealthy architect and the father of two children in a far away town with trusting wife Claudia Michelsen - suspects that Thomsen might be behind the killing and travels to see him. He finds him tending the same apartment complex and is surprised by the warmth of his welcome. However, he feels too uncomfortable to remain in his dingy flat and retreats rapidly to his hotel room, where he is unable to resist watching his favourite child porn film, which Thomsen had given him on DVD.

The remorse at succumbing to urges he had sought to suppress force Möhring to pay a guilty visit to Sass on the pretext of looking for a new house in the area. However, Klaussner has warned her that the killer would make himself known and she hands his business card to Blomberg, who pays Michelsen a visit to make a shocking discover on her husband's computer. This development leads to Böwe being called away from interviewing Thomsen as part of check on local men who had owned a red car back in 1986. But, even though Möhring's lake-plunge suicide convinces Stokowski that he has found his culprit, Blomberg is not convinced.

Adroitly structured and assuredly paced, this represents an impressive sophomore outing by Bo Odar after his 2006 debut with Under the Sun. He maybe overdoes the top shots and helicopter swoops that accompany the captions counting down the days of the investigation, but he and cinematographer Nikolaus Summerer make evocative use of colour to suggest both the seasonal heat and the rising emotional temperature, while sound designer Christoph Ulbich creates a sonic mood that reinforces the growing sense of disconcertion generated by Robert Rzesacz's slick editing.

Moreover, Bo Odar sustains interest in the numerous storylines with unforced ease and draws fine performances out of an estimable ensemble. Möhring is particularly impressive and his excruciating encounters with Thomsen and Sass are matched only by Blomberg's desperate search for clues and solace and Thomsen's icy impassivity, most notably in the flashbacks that reveal how his seedy friendship with Möhring and his terrifying meeting with Böwe that encapsulates the entire film's masterly mix of melancholy and malevolence.

7) POST MORTEM Pablo Larraín's third feature Post Mortem reveals some disturbing facts about Chile in the September week in 1973 when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Socialist Party government of Salvador Allende. Staged with a troubling deliberateness that is reinforced by Sergio Armstrong's disorienting widescreen framing, this macabrely mesmerising drama is dominated by a deadpan display by Alfredo Castro that contrasts sharply with his murderous turn as the John Travolta obsessive in Larraín's much-admired Tony Manero (2008).

The lank-haired Castro lives in a quiet Santiago street opposite union activist Ernesto Malbran and his children Antonia Zegers and Santiago Grafigna. The younger boy helps Castro type up the morgue reports he has to produce for coroner Jaime Vadell, while Zegers dances in a downmarket burlesque run by the charmless Luis Gnecco. Despite a past fling with medical assistant Amparo Noguera, Castro is obsessed with Zegers and slips backstage during an afternoon performance to see her being fired for losing her allure to anorexia.

Seizing upon her vulnerability, Castro invites her for a drink and Zegers seems quaintly amused by his respectful earnestness as they drive through the city. However, he is powerless to protect her when their route is blocked by a Communist youth rally and Zegers is hauled out to join the throng by her father's radical friend, Marcelo Alonso. However, she eventually makes it home safely and seeks sanctuary in Castro's shabbily cosy abode to avoid the meeting taking place in her own. She bursts into tears over a simple supper and Castro bawls with her and is rewarded for his empathy by joyless intercourse that clearly means more to him that his self-obsessed guest.

Determined to impress Zegers, Casto takes her to a Chinese restaurant and proposes marriage. Humiliated by her incredulity, he tries to reel back to a suggestion they become an item. But the damage is done and, even though he gives Gnecco his car to have Zegers reinstated in the show, he only sees her again after her father and brother are abducted by troops during the coup that takes place while Castro is distracted in the shower. He willingly agrees to protect Zegers and even patches up her wounded dog. But his workload has increased enormously at the hospital, as captain Marcial Tagle orders him and Noguera to abandon their usually meticulous procedures and simply label the dead and count their bullet holes.

After a day of wheeling corpses through narrow corridors to the morgue, Castro is exhausted and wholly unprepared to be bundled into an army truck with Vadell and Noguera to perform an autopsy on Allende in front of the military brass. Unused to operating an electric typewriter, Castro has to be replaced by a more competent soldier, while Noguera proves unable to open the dead president's abdomen, leaving Vadell hurriedly to cover his corpse and pronounce him a suicide.

Although Castro seems happy to go along with the verdict (which was proved correct in July 2011), Noguera is convinced that Allende was murdered and, thus, readily conspires with Castro to spirit a badly wounded survivor of the reprisals into the main ward. However, when he is found among the pile of bodies next day - along with the nurse who tried to help him - Noguera launches into a bitter diatribe that is only halted by a trooper firing his weapon repeatedly into the victims at her feet.

Castro and Vadell look on impotently. But when he discovers that Zegers has been sleeping with Alonso while under his protection, Castro proves himself to be as vindictive as the new regime and remorselessly piles furniture in front of the shed in which Zegers is hiding to barricade the door and bring about the death by malnutrition that had earlier been signposted by a provocative flash forward.

From the opening shot taken from the undercarriage of an armoured patrol vehicle rumbling through a debris-strewn street, this is as bleak as the desaturated palette that suggests the cadaverous decolorisation of an entire country. Larraín has stated the film is dedicated to the silent majority of Chileans who tolerated a genocidal policy of disappearances in order to avoid falling prey to it. However, this is the most back-handed of tributes, even though Larraín ensures that no one is wholly sympathetic in this sorry situation, with even revolutionaries like Alonso and such respectably bourgeois as Noguera having decidedly dubious morals.

The performances are outstanding, with Zegers and Noguera respectively conveying a selfishness and a selflessness that attract the opposite (and, thus, wrong) responses from Castro, who is too naive to recognise his error. Yet, while his refusal (or inability) to register emotion causes his romantic problems, it also enables him to survive the brutal transition to military dictatorship and Larraín leaves the viewer in little doubt that he will always know which direction to jump when pushed.

Such subtlety makes Post Mortem so chillingly dark. But it would be only half as accomplished aesthetically without Matías Valdés's sound mix (which comes brilliantly to the fore as the shower all-but drowns out the cacophony of the coup) and Sergio Armstrong's 16mm widescreen imagery, which, thanks to Larraín's compositional audacity, always manages to suggest that something is occurring or lurking beyond the edges of the frame in a tangible and very dangerous reality.

6) MYSTERIES OF LISBON Raul Ruíz died in August at the age of 70, leaving La Noche de enfrente unfinished in post-production. Consequently, Mysteries of Lisbon - which was filmed while Ruíz battled liver cancer - will be the last completed work by the prolific and scandalously underrated Chilean maverick and this lavishly mounted and typically labyrinthine 272-minute adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's 1854 novel is a worthy last testament. This `diary of suffering' requires several narrators to chart its sweep from the Portuguese capital through Spain, France and Italy to post-colonial Brazil in order to reveal how a `frivolous game' became a `sordid bourgeois drama'. But such is Ruíz's mastery of both cinematic and storytelling techniques that this Dickensian saga quickly becomes utterly engrossing.

With so many characters appearing in so many guises in so many times and places, it's best to restrict plot summaries to the basics. Nobleman Pedro da Silva (José Afonso Pimentel) starts the tale by recalling his unhappy childhood as a bullied stray (João Arrais) in the Catholic boarding school run by the kindly Father Dinis (Adriano Luz). However, the 14 year-old's situation changes when he learns following a bullying incident that his mother Ângela (Maria João Bastos) is the Countess of Santa Barbara and, shortly after their reunion, he learns how she was parted from his father, Don Pedro da Silva (João Baptista), because her father, the Marquess of Montezelos (Rui Morrison), disapproved of her consorting with a man of aristocratic birth but limited means.

Thanks to the scheming of her maid, Deolinda (Ana Das Chagas), Ângela steals time alone with Don Pedro. However, the Marquess hires a ruffian known as The Knife Thrower (Ricardo Pereira) to assassinate him and the besotted youth dies while seeking sanctuary with Fr Dinis. Learning the Marquess has instructed The Knife Thrower to murder the child at birth, Dinis assumes the disguise of horse thief Sabino Cabra and purchases the child for 40 coins and rears him at the orphanage, while Ângela endures a miserable marriage to the Count of Santa Bárbara (Albano Jerónimo), who confines his wife to her room and lives openly with her maid, Eugenia (Joana de Verona).

Having discovered that Ângela has escaped from his mansion with the help of his valet Barnardo (José Airosa), Santa Barbara accuses her of adultery and Fr Dinis travels to an inn where the count is recuperating from an illness to demand a retraction. Suitably penitent, Santa Barbara tells the priest how he fell in love with Ângela at first sight during a society soirée. However, she spurned his advances and it was only when her father ordered her to be more civil that he began to press his suit. On learning that she had a son, Santa Barbara had been consumed with envious rage and had imprisoned her in revenge for his sense of betrayal.

The count dies soon after making these revelations and Ângela decides to take the veil in the same convent as Fr Dinis's sister, Antónia (Vânia Rodrigues). Pedro is crestfallen by his mother's vocation, but his mentor is distracted from consoling him by the arrival of Friar Baltazar da Encarnação (José Manuel Mendes), who had been Santa Barbara's confessor. He invites Dinis to his cell, where he informs him that he had once been known as Don Álvaro de Albuquerque (Carloto Cotta), who attended the fashionable salons of Lisbon with his cousin, Paulo (Filipe Vargas).

Álvaro had been bewitched by Silvana, the Countess of Viso (Maria João Pinho), whose jealous and short-tempered husband (Marco D'Almeida) was a sworn enemy of King João I's feared and detested first minister, the Marquess of Pombal. Yet, instead of noticing Álvaro's passion for his spouse, Viso encourages him to escort her to social occasions while he plots against the government that had executed Álvaro's father for treason. Thus, when Viso rushes to court after Pombal falls in 1777, Álvaro and Silvana become lovers and flee to Venice when their affair is betrayed by prying servants. However, Silvana dies in childbirth and Álvaro asks Paulo to raise their son, while he retreats to a monastery.

Returning home by coach, carrying his mother Silvana's skull in a reliquary, Fr Dinis witnesses a duel between Don Martinho de Almeida (Paulo Pinto) and Alberto de Magalhães (Ricardo Pereira) and learns from more interlinking yarns that the latter is The Knife Thrower, who has gone up in the world and appears to have used several aliases across Europe since making his fortune (according to rumour through slavery and piracy) with the ransom that Dinis had paid to spare young Pedro's life.

In trying to ascertain the reason for the duel, Dinis discovers that Alberto (who is now married to Eugenia and living in Lisbon) is being pursued by Elisa de Montfort (Clotilde Hesme), a French heiress who had resisted his attentions before being driven by a shortage of funds to prostitute herself to him over several nights until her twin brother challenged Alberto and died of gunshot wounds following a struggle in the street. Elisa has since sought to return the money she received from Alberto (just as he is keen to return Pedro's blood money to Fr Dinis) and even pays Eugenia a visit to urge her to accept the bag of coins. But, with each refusal, Elisa becomes more determined to avenge her brother's demise and dupes social gadfly Baron Sá (André Gomes) into finding a man to fight on her behalf.

Sá persuades Martinho to do the deed, but his failure prompts Dinis to visit Elisa in the hope she will drop her vendetta. She is surprised to learn that Dinis knows more about her than she suspects, as he was brought up in France following Paulo's death. Having survived when his protector was guillotined during the Revolution, he served in Napoleon's Grand Army with Benoit (Julien Alluguette), with whom he shared a devotion of Blanche (Léa Seydoux). However, having rescued Ernesto Lacroze (Melvil Poupaud) from a Portuguese firing squad during the Peninsular War, Benoit became enraged by his friendship with Blanche and hid his rival's letters after he returned to the colours. Eventually, Ernesto was killed and Blanche married Benoit. But, having borne him twins - Elisa and Arthur - she withdrew to the hunting lodge on his estate, where she died in a fire, despite Dinis's efforts to save her.

However, as the story jumps forwards several years, the adult Pedro returns from his studies in France to become entranced by Elisa and she talks him into challenging Alberto de Magalhães to a duel. Although he had always refused to give opponents satisfaction, Alberto agrees and they meet with swords at dawn. However, he is too quick for his youthful adversary and disarms him before cajoling him into accepting an olive branch rather than continue with pistols. But, the humiliation of failing to vanquish Elisa's foe proves too much for Pedro and he spends the remainder of his life travelling in Africa and South America, where he begins dictating this sprawling saga to a hotel servant.

As the plot touches upon war, treachery, spiritual anguish, prostitution, honour, faith and social duplicity, chameleonic characters come and go at a dizzying rate that seems to spur Ruíz on to take the increasingly convoluted events at an even more breakneck lick. Ably abetted by a superb cast and an intricate, if occasionally operatic script by Carlos Saboga, Ruíz keeps André Szankowski's HD camera gliding through Isabel Branco's glorious sets to the accompaniment of Jorge Arriagada's swooningly romantic score. He even makes charming use of the toy theatre that Ângela bought Pedro for scenic transitions and to emphasise the dramatic gravitas of key scenes. Moreover, he also delights in leaving on mystery unsolved, as Fr Dinis avoids satisfying Ângela's curiosity about the non-fraternal relationship between Sister Antónia and his high society alter ego, Sebastião de Melo.

Many will compare this supremely controlled, but irresistibly accessible and engrossing picture with Ruíz's majestic Proust adaptation, Time Regained (1999). But he seems more intent on paying tribute to Manuel De Oliveira - who adapted Castelo Branco's Ill-Fated Love in 1979 - than referencing his own oeuvre. Yet the asides on memory, status, duty, hypocrisy, caprice and coincidence have a familiar ring and the ever-mischievous Ruíz appears to revel in gently lampooning the conventions of the heritage movie by allowing the temperature occasionally to come close to telenovelettish fever pitch. There's no question that this makes enormous demands on the audience. But those willing to pay close attention will be handsomely rewarded by the magisterial swan song of an under-appreciated master.

5) A SEPARATION Following the failure of the Green Revolution, the strict codes dictating life in Iran have been quietly reinforced while the world has been distracted by the Arab Spring. Asghar Farhadi examines their use and abuse in A Separation, the first feature from the Islamic republic to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Sparked by a divorce plea, a dereliction of care and a miscarriage, this densely plotted and morally complex drama exposes fissures on several levels of Iranian society.

When bank clerk Peyman Moadi refuses to emigrate, wife Leila Hatami moves back with mother Shirin Yazdanbakhsh and begins proceedings for a divorce and custody of their 10 year-old daughter, Sarina Farhadi. Frustrated by losing control in his own household, Moadi hires Sareh Bayat to look after his father, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, whose advancing Alzheimer's means that he requires constant supervision.

Unknown to Moadi, the devout Bayat is pregnant and has to bring four year-old daughter Kimia Hosseini to the apartment, as she has not told conservative husband Shahab Hosseini that she is working alone with a man who is not a relative. However, he finds out about the arrangement after Bayat is rushed to hospital after Moadi pushes her into the corridor after discovering that she allowed Shahbazi to escape on to the street. Moadi is sufficiently concerned to come to the emergency room. But the unemployed Hosseini takes this as a sign of bourgeois guilt and, when Bayat loses her baby, he presses charges of manslaughter and Moadi counters with accusations of wilful neglect.

All now turns on whether Moadi knew that Bayat was pregnant. He insists that her chador had hidden any physical manifestations and denies overhearing a conversation about gynaecologists between Bayat and Farhadi's teacher, Merila Zare'i. But, as judge Babak Karimi tries to ascertain the truth, it becomes increasingly clear that lies are being told on both sides.

Using Mahmood Kalari's restless camera to place equal emphasis on what is and isn't said, Farhadi reveals the envy and suspicion that pervades a nation that is nowhere near as united as its leaders would have the wider world believe. He also considers notions of justice, honour, truth and duty and how patriarchal predominance in both the domestic and judicial spheres affects the status of the wives and daughters caught up in the show of strength between males divided by class, cultural inclination and attitude to religion.

The performances are excellent - with Moadi and Hosseini and Hatami and Bayat sharing the Berlin acting awards. The director's daughter also impresses as the intelligent tweenager whose loyalties lie with her father until she realises that he has lied to her and the glance she exchanges with Kimia Hosseini in the courthouse corridor sums up the sorry situation. But Bayat stands out, as the clash between piety and poverty prompts her to deceive her husband and bring a law suit she suspects may be false. Indeed, the godliness that persuades her to call a helpline to seek advice about washing Shahbazi after he soils himself ultimately prevails when Hatami asks her to swear on the Qu'ran before making a blood money payment.

Some may find the plotline a touch melodramatic. But those familiar with documentaries like Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini's Divorce Iranian Style (1998) will recognise the authenticity of what might seem legal contrivances, while Farhadi's insights into the invidious position occupied by the secular middle-class reaffirm those in such trenchant earlier outings as Fireworks Wednesday (2006) and About Elly (2009). Consequently, this is both a compelling piece of storytelling and an astute assessment of the problems that ordinary people are forced to deal with on a daily basis while the theocratic hierarchy continues to deny they even exist.

4) THE PORTUGUESE NUN There's always something exciting about finding a new film-maker. In the last couple of years, arthouse audiences in this country have become better acquainted with the likes of José Guerin, Lisandro Alonso and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who were celebrated on the festival circuit before finally securing a theatrical release. However, few of the current crop of directors awaiting discovery are as intriguing as Eugène Green, a 63 year-old maverick whose fourth feature, The Portuguese Nun, is an absolute gem.

Born in New York in 1947, Green quit what he now calls `Barbaria' to live in West Germany and Czechoslovakia before settling in Paris in 1969. Fluent in French, German, Czech and Catalan (and he's learning Basque), he devoted himself to the study of Baroque literature and began writing his own novels (many of which went unpublished) plays. In 1977, he founded the Théâtre de la Sapience to renew contemporary drama by rediscovering the modernity of the 17th-century aesthetic.

However, it took another two decades before Green was finally able to bring this distinctive sensibility to the screen. He made his debut with Toutes les nuits (2001), which starred Alexis Loret and Adrien Michaux in an reworking of Flaubert's A Sentimental Education that transferred the action from the revolutions of 1848 to the May Days of 1968 and drew heavily on the cinematic influence of Robert Bresson and Manoel De Oliveira. His follow-up couldn't have been more different, however, as Le Monde vivant (2003) cast a fairytale about knights, maidens, an ogre and a lion (that was really a Labrador Retriever) in blue jeans and stylised slang.

Green ventured back into reality for Les Pont des Arts (2004), which follows the contrasting fortunes of conflicted students Adrien Michauz and Camille Carraz and hesitant scholar Alexis Loret and his mezzo-soprano girlfriend Natacha Régnier, who is being courted by sinister impresario Denis Podalydès. This time, however, the customary nods to Bresson and De Oliveira were tempered by a provocative wit that recalled Raul Ruiz, while the music of Monteverdi reinforced the richness of dialogue worthy of Jacques Rivette or Eric Rohmer. And this compelling combination of art, artifice and asceticism recurs in The Portuguese Nun. Ravishingly photographed by Raphael O'Byrne in a mesmerising series of slow pans and abrupt close-ups, this paean to Lisbon is a billet doux to Lusitanic cinema, in which Green not only pays handsome homage to Manoel de Oliveira, but also tests the very limits of self-reflexivity.

French actress Leonor Baldaque checks into a hotel for the location shoot of Green's adaptation of Gabriel de Guilleragues's 17th-century epistolary novel, Letters of a Portuguese Nun. The desk clerk is anything but impressed and even Baldaque's make-up artist thinks the project is a pompous bore aimed solely at preening intellectuals. While acclimatising herself with the city, Baldaque befriends orphan Francisco Mozos, accepts a dinner date from lonely aristocrat Diogo Dória and becomes fascinated by the contemplative stillness of nun Ana Moreira, as she prays through the night in a nearby church. However, she is briefly distracted by a fling with handsome co-star Adrien Michaux, who lures her into bed with protestations that his marriage is a sham.

Sensing Baldaque's fragility after Michaux's departure, Green tries to cheer her up by taking her to a fado bar. But, as he disco dances alone, Baldaque slips back to the candlelit church to engage in an earnest theological debate with Moreira. Next day, she seeks out Mozos's hard-pressed foster mother, Beatriz Batarda, to ask if she would have any objection to her adopting the boy and they strike a deal that's mutually beneficial.

Strewn with long silences and even longer takes, this is an idiosyncratic reverie on love and faith, film and life. Yet it's also mischievously poetic and singularly moving. Searching for personal as well as professional fulfilment, the atheistic Baldaque exudes a wistful aura of psychological and spiritual inadequacy and her seemingly disparate encounters bring her inexorably closer to a deeper understanding of herself and her purpose. Some will bridle at the highly stylised minimalism, the cerebral chapter headings, the meta-cinematic friskiness, the surfeit of literary and filmic references and the extended fado interludes. But this is a deceptively passionate and poignant picture that will enchant those prepared to surrender to its deadpan charm.

3) LAS ACACIAS Argentinian editor and documentarist Pablo Giorgelli made the year's most accomplished debut with Las Acacias, which won the Camera d'or at Cannes for Best First Feature Largely shot inside the cab of a lorry hauling lumber from Asuncion del Paraguay to Buenos Aires, this is a charmingly unconventional romance, as not only does middle-aged trucker Germán de Silva fall for thirtysomething single mother Hebe Duarte during the course of a compellingly uneventful journey, but he also becomes besotted with her five month-old daughter Nayra Calle Mamani, who gives what has to be the most expressive performance by an infant in screen history.

Having loaded up in the depths of a Paraguayan forest, Da Silva sets off on what appears to be a lonely odyssey. He is clearly a man used to his own company and barely notices the scenery beyond his windows. However, having stopped at a service station to freshen up in the toilets, he spots Duarte coming towards him across the car park carrying a baby and a couple of heavy holdalls. He establishes she is the woman he has promised to deliver to her cousins for his boss and climbs into the cab without offering Duarte any assistance as she struggles with her luggage.

At the border, Da Silva again leaves Duarte to her own devices, as he clears his cargo and enjoys a large lunch. Once on the Argentinian side, he collects his passengers and they travel in silence for several miles before he finally asks about the wide-eyed and hugely curious Mamani. Duarte curtly informs him that the girl has no father and he shruggingly reveals that he has a son he hardly ever sees and they say little else before they are pulled over for a random police search.

Suddenly feeling protective of Duarte, as she is asked for her papers and her bags are searched, Da Silva helps her back into the cab and they exchange quietly reassuring smiles until Mamani breaks the mood by crying with hunger pangs. Jolted back into the real world, Da Silva pulls into a café and is asking the waitress about bus times when Duarte returns from changing a nappy and they hurriedly purchase some snacks before resuming their journey in a renewed silence.

After a while, Da Silva asks about Duarte's plans for the future and she says her cousins are going to try and find her work in the city. Offering her a sip of his mate tea, he watches her as she eats and drifts off to sleep with Mamani nestling in her arms. Something about them has touched him, yet, when he makes a detour to deliver an overdue birthday present to his sister, he is slightly nettled by her presumption that he is Mamani's father (even though they looked very much like a family unit as they sat beside a nearby lake stroking a friendly dog who had plonked itself between them).

As the darkness falls, however, Da Silva begins to wonder whether settling down might not be such a bad thing and he playfully prods Mamani in the tummy as her mother dozes and she grabs his finger trustingly. However, driving for several hours has begun to take its toll and Duarte wakes in time to catch Da Silva nodding off and she is still looking at him reproachfully as they pull into the nearest services for the night. She calls her mother from a pay phone and leaves Da Silva holding the baby, who is so delighted at being dandled in mid-air that she sneezes adorably as he pulls faces for her.

Next morning, Da Silva oversleeps, but remains in good humour as he showers and sees Duarte chatting to Mamani in their native Guarani. He asks her to teach him a few words as they hit the road again and timidly confesses he has not seen his son for eight years since giving him a bicycle on his fourth birthday. Duarte gives him a sympathetic look that convinces Da Silva they have made a connection. But, when they stop for lunch, he gets jealous when she strikes up a conversation with a Paraguayan trucker and he remains sulky until they reach the outskirts of the capital.

As Duarte won't let him smoke in the cab, Da Silva pulls over and says he has to think. He is still pensive as she leaves him holding Mamani again so she can call her cousin for directions. But will he summon up the courage to ask her if he can see her again and, even then, will this fiercely independent woman allow herself to be looked after?

Judging the denouement to perfection, Giorgelli teasingly allows the ambiguity to linger, but few will imagine anything other than a happy ending. Indeed, the first-timer hits the right note consistently throughout this delightful road movie, whether he and editor Maria Astrauskas are timing cuts between half glances and tentative expressions or he and cinematographer Diego Poleri are opening out the one-shots inside the claustrophobic cab to suggest the strangers becoming more like a couple by depicting them side by side in a single frame.

Such subtle shifts fully entitle him to the beginner's luck of finding such a photogenic and inquisitive baby as the wonderful Mamani, whose intelligent eyes and infectious smile will melt the hardest hearts. But he is also splendidly served by newcomer Duarte and veteran character actor Da Silva, who make the most of the sparse dialogue while speaking volumes with their body language. Indeed, it's hard to think how this utterly enchanting picture could be improved.

2) OSLO, AUGUST 31ST Norwegian cinema has rarely captured the wider imagination. But it can now boast two fine film-makers in Bent Hamer and Joachim Trier, who follows up his impressive debut, Reprise (2006), with Oslo, August 31st, a riveting study in isolation and despair that has all the audiovisual ingenuity of the early nouvelle vague and a sensitivity in depicting psychological strain that was somewhat lacking in distant cousin Lars von Trier's recent apocalyptic melodrama, Melancholia. Working from the same 1931 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel that inspired Louis Malle's Le Feu follet (1963), Trier has produced a masterpiece that poses the terrifying question is being alive reason enough to keep living?

Waking up in the bed of Swedish pick-up Malin Crepin, thirtysomething Anders Danielsen Lie dresses calmly and walks to a nearby lake and tries to drown himself clutching a giant rock. He fails and returns to the clinic where he is two weeks away from completing a drug rehabilitation programme and, having attended a group session with therapist Aksel Thanke, dresses for a job interview in the city. As he has a couple of hours on his hands, Lie calls in on old party-going pal Hans Olav Brenner, who is now married with two children to Ingrid Olava and is anything but the hellraiser who used to consider excess a reasonable starting point for a night out.

The pair chat over lunch and Lie tells him about the interview with Folio magazine that might relaunch his stalled writing career. Brenner encourages him as they walk in a local park and reminisce about old times. Ignoring Lie's contention that he is nothing more than a spoilt brat who messed up, he even suggests they hook up later in the day at a mutual friend's birthday party and Lie appears to be in good spirits as he sets off for his appointment. Editor Øystein Røger also seems enthusiastic about hiring Lie. But he loses his nerve when asked about the gap in his CV and the admission of being a long-term addict seems to tip him from reluctant acceptance of the need to reintegrate into society into a suicidal despondency from which he will need considerable proof of the validity of existence to extract himself.

Unable to make phone contact with ex-girlfriend Iselin Steiro in New York, Lie sits alone in a café and listens to the conversations at the other tables in a brilliantly constructed sequence reliant on shifts in angle and focus and the amiable banality of the various references to tentative crushes, unfaithful lovers, school waiting lists and dead pop stars. Nothing he hears, however, rouses Lie from his torpor and he traipses the streets with unseeing eyes before arriving at the restaurant where he had arranged to meet his lesbian sister. She fails to show, however, and sends girlfriend Tone Beate Mostraum in her place to explain that she has yet to forgive him for the pain he caused during his wilderness years and refuses to accompany him to the house their parents have been forced to sell to pay off his debts.

As much disgusted with himself as angry with his sibling for failing to give him another chance, Lie storms off and feels sufficiently crushed to visit former dealer Johanne Kjellevik Ledang and purchase a wrap of heroin. He isn't quite ready to give up on himself or his friends, however, and crosses the capital to the party that Brenner had mentioned. Hostess Kjærsti Odden Skjeldal is surprised to see Lie, as he has been out of circulation for so long, but she welcomes him warmly and he breaks a 10-month dry spell by having a glass of champagne. More drinks follow, as he realises Brenner has stood him up and he has to endure the smug teasing about his erstwhile bad behaviour by Skjeldal's boorish husband, Emil Lund.

He bumps into old buddy Petter Width Kristiansen, however, who invites him to go clubbing with a couple of female students. But Lie decides to linger and sits with old flame Skjeldal on the balcony and listens as she bemoans the fact she is bored with Lund and is struggling to conceive a child. Impulsively he kisses her and she scurries off in embarrassment, leaving Lie to seek sanctuary in a bedroom. He calls New York again and leaves a long message imploring Steiro to take him back and build a life together. But the line goes dead and he succumbs to the temptation to steal cash from the coats and bags lying on the bed and hurriedly leaves.

Lie takes a cab to the bar where Kristiansen is carousing and he hits it off with medical student Renate Reinsve. She clearly likes him and persuades him to come clubbing after he has a half-hearted confrontation with Anders Borchgrevink, who had slept with the distraught Steiro after she could no longer cope with Lie's callous antics. Reinsve comes on stronger at the club and Lie not only responds, but also rides on the back of her bicycle to go swimming in a park pool at the last day of August dawns. However, as he watches her skinny dipping with Kristiansen and his girlfriend, Lie suddenly realises what he must do and he walks through the deserted streets to the family home, where he inexpertly plays the piano before fulfilling his destiny.

The picture closes with a poignant sequence of still lifes showing the deserted locations that Lie had visited in the course of his odyssey. But this is surpassed by a brilliant late afternoon montage that showcases the exemplary contributions of co-scenarist Eskil Vogt, cinematographer Jakob Ihre, editor Olivier Bugge Coutte and composers Torgny Amdam and Ola Flottum, as Lie wanders aimlessly through the city centre while ruminating in voice-over about the way he was reared by parents who adopted a curious mix of liberalism and severity that clearly helped shape his psyche, even if it can't necessarily be blamed for his self-destructive tendencies.

Recalling New Wave gems like Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1959) and Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), this compelling combination of character study and city snapshot captures the spirit of Oslo and its people in spite of Lie's suffusing melancholy. Indeed, rarely has the ordinariness of daily life seemed to reassuring and the film's tragedy is not that Lie wants to top himself, but that his Lie's addiction has made him so preoccupied with his own physical and emotional needs that he can no longer find comfort or joy in the contentment of others.

As in Reprise, Lie delivers a quietly devastating performance and he is superbly supported by a solid ensemble, whose failure to recognise the warning signs owes as much to years of Lie abusing their friendship as to their own self-immersion or indifference to his fate. But it's Trier and Ihre's masterly use of location and light that most tellingly conveys the contrast between Lie's existential angst and the unthinking tenacity of those able to find enough in the smallest moments to consider even the most unremarkable life worthwhile.

1) LE QUATTRO VOLTE Surely the first film to be inspired by Pythagorean theory, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is a minimalist meditation on everyday existence that is simply the most beautiful study of the changing seasons since Georges Rouquier's Farrebique (1946). The comparison is doubly apt, as that scandalously little-seen documentary played its part in the evolution of the nouvelle vague alongside the works of Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati and allusions to both auteurs abound in this sublime celebration of the circle of life.

On leaving Greece around 530 BC, Pythagoras took up residence in the Calabrian colony of Croton and the countryside surrounding the picturesque villages of Caulonia and Alessandria del Carretto provides the backdrop to this dissertation on the indivisibility of animal, vegetable and mineral matter. It opens with smoke billowing out of a traditional scarazzo charcoal mound and drifts on to the verdant hillsides before alighting upon an old goatherd (Giusepper Fuda), as he guides his flock over the rough terrain with his faithful dog.

Each night before he goes to bed, the veteran mixes some grey powder into a glass of water to counteract a niggling cough. However, he is running low and, next morning, ventures to the local church where the housekeeper (Iolanda Manno) exchanges a sachet of church dust for a bottle of milk. As the herder returns to his humble home, the priest (Isadoro Chiera) arrives in the road outside to rehearse the woman playing Veronica in the forthcoming re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross. But the wizened peasant has no time to stand and watch, as he has to take his goats to pasture and he passes the afternoon in gathering snails, which he places in a large pot on his kitchen table with the lid weighed down with a stone.

Sustained by his nightly dose of dust, the herdsman makes his milk deliveries the next day, as the charcoal seller parks his truck in the adjoining street. However, in answering a call of nature out on the slopes, he drops his medicine and ants swarm over the magazine page in which it is wrapped with a freneticism that contrasts with the slow progress made by the snails that have escaped from the pan and slithered across the table top.

At bedtime, the old man realises he has lost his tonic and hastens to the church to procure some more. But nobody answers his knocking in the dead of night and the scene shifts to a small truck pulling up outside his cottage the next morning and three charcoal burners dressed as Roman soldiers get out. Veronica arrives soon afterwards on the back of a scooter and the air is filled with the sound of trumpets and drums as the procession passes, followed by a small crowd of worshippers.

Aware that his master is ailing, the goatherd's dog desperately tries to attract attention by barking at the milling throng. But he is chased away by one of the soldiers and hides in the hedgerow until they have gone. Charging back up the dusty road, the dog corners a straggling altar boy (Cesare Ritorto), who throws stones in order to facilitate his getaway. But the creature refuses to give up and pulls away the stone stopping the truck from rolling down the hill, sending it crashing into the paddock gate. The goats disperse, with one getting into the kitchen to knock over the pot of snails, while others congregate in their owner's bedroom, as he takes his last breaths.

The funeral is not as well attended as the procession. But, in the true spirit of Pythagorean transmigration, the sealing of the wall tomb is match cut with the birth of a white kid, who bleats plaintively as it struggles to its feet under its mother's gentle encouragement. As weeks pass, it becomes more confident and frolics around the empty pen with an inquisitive mischievousness that leads it to scare its companions by knocking over a broom and compete for hegemony in a game of `king of the castle' on an upturned tank.

However, when it is finally allowed to join the grown-ups in the great outdoors (after having its nose tied with string), the kid gets stuck in a shallow trench and the rest of the flock has long gone by the time it manages to clamber free. Bleating piteously, it roams the woods and bounds through the tall grass before finally finding shelter for the night beneath a large fir tree.

Having rigorously avoided anthropomorphism, Frammartino refuses to clarify whether the kid is sleeping or deceased in the ensuing dawn shot and cross-cuts to the tree standing proudly in both the winter snow and the spring breeze. But it is also part of the endless cycle and it is cut down to be carried into the nearby village and shaped into a totem to be scaled by competitors at a well-attended festival. However, the pole has yet another purpose and it is chopped into logs which form part of the scarazzo constructed by three carbonari (Nazareno and Bruno Timpano and Artemio Vellone), who cover the intricate wooden framework with straw and earth that they compact with a patting of spades that rings out like a heartbeat across the locality, as the wisps from the fire smouldering at the centre of the pyre are carried away on the wind.

In the closing scene, the charcoal truck passes the goatherd's seemingly abandoned premises as it makes its way into the village. Smoke curls from a chimney over the red rooftops and disseminates the particles that will doubtlessly gather as dust on the church floor. Life does, indeed, go on.

Adopting a quasi-documentary approach that enables him to meld observation with imagination, Frammartino captures the essence of a tightly knit community, while also coaxing the viewer into musing upon faith, folklore, nature, ritual and tradition. Each composition is a pastoral masterpiece, with cinematographer Andrea Locatelli particularly excelling during the Tatiesque Good Friday sequence, which was shot in a meticulously staged single take. However, Daniel Irribarren's sound design is equally impressive, as it combines the noises of nature with silences that suggest both isolation and peace.

The non-professional cast is supremely natural on camera. But it's the goats who steal focus, as Frammartino presents the hircine recalcitrance of their perspective in contrast to the docile humility of the eponymous donkey in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). But, as in György Pálfi's Hukkle (2002), there is also plenty of gentle humour in this captivating hybrid of rural realism and poetic purity that succeeds brilliantly in making complex philosophical concepts seem accessible, while also lauding life and drawing death's sting.