The Village Voice's Best of 2005 film series demonstrated -- again -- that innovative, risky cinema still exists. And we can only be grateful that venues like Brooklyn's BAMcinématek are still willing to show it. Many of the directors featured in this year's series are just now getting DVD and repertory distribution in the U.S., and some will remain on the festival circuit for the foreseeable future. It's a curious injustice. Selected by Village Voice's Dennis Lim and BAM curator Florence Almozini from the Take 7 Critics Poll, this year's series included not only career high points from acknowledged masters Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Claire Denis, but also promising work by up-and-comer Andrew Bujalski.
 Café Lumière (2003)
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Known for imbuing austere master-shot formalism with an unusual lightness and empathy, Hou Hsiao-Hsien presents a contemplative vision of everyday life interwoven with larger historical and social issues. 2003's Café Lumière (Kôhî jikô) takes us into Tokyo, an homage of sorts to one of his chief influences, Yasujiro Ozu. We follow young writer Yoko (Yo Hitoto) as she explores the city's outskirts, researching a Taiwanese composer, visiting her family, and meeting with local audiophile Hajime (Tadanobu Asano). Her casual revelation of her pregnancy and unorthodox decision to raise the child herself threaten Japanese familial propriety. But like everything else in the film, such conflicts between tradition and modernity are passing, as if seen from the window of one of Tokyo's many trains.
Three Times (Zui hao de shi guan 2005) is more straightforward, consisting of three love stories, two set during pivotal moments in Taiwan's history and one set in its present. Each couple is played by Chang Chen and Shu Qi, joining the stories together. Hou wisely keeps the occasional melodrama (which peaks in the last episode's denouement) at arm's length, tracing links among history, love, society, and memory.
 The Wayward Cloud (2005)
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Tsai Ming-Liang is like Hou Hsia-Hsien's evil twin. While they share a preference for sparse dialogue, long takes, and the subtle realities of human behavior, Tsai tends to focus on the awkward rather than the poetic. Social ritual is his focus in The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun 2005). A weird semi-sequel to What Time Is It There? (Ni neibian jidian 2001), it actually echoes the disaster scenario and delirious musical numbers of an earlier film, The Hole (Dong 1998).
Shiang Chyi (Shiang-chyi Chen) and Hsiao Kang (Kang-sheng Lee) meet after spending some time apart. Unbeknownst to either, they are both working in the porn industry: Shiang runs a basement video store and Hsiao is an actor. Scenes of their mostly chaste, nonverbal romance are intercut with the "reality" of porn production in all its hilarious and horrifying glory, emphasizing their persistent separations, despite efforts to conenct. The musical sequences present the characters' only opportunities to express themselves. When Shiang and Hsiao finally consummate their relationship over the body of an unconscious porn starlet, they're left with possibility of unmediated interaction, even in love.
Discomfort of a more insidious sort haunts Claire Denis' The Intruder (L'Intrus 2004). The loose narrative concerns a grave old man (Michel Subor) with a mysterious, possibly criminal history and a transplanted heart, as he searches for his son. His cryptic (some emotional, some violent) interactions with people and places from his past are set in France, Switzerland, Korea, and Polynesia, but transitions between places are muted, almost subliminal. What makes The Intruder so overwhelming are its seductively concrete images. But whether we're looking at vivid island vistas or a bloody heart devoured by dogs, our attention is relentlessly directed inward, to the alien inherent in all life.
Taking the absurd to stratospheric heights has become a specialty among Japanese filmmakers, and the venerable Seijun Suzuki has a go at it in his East Asian fable-cum-musical Princess Raccoon (Operetta tanuki goten 2005). It works if you're willing to let it, but anyone raised on Suzuki's classic yakuza extravaganzas of the '60s and '70s may feel a little put out. Still, any film that combines kabuki opera, Gilbert & Sullivan theatrics, rap, and cutesy kids' club chants, before giving the end solo to a golden frog statue, can't be entirely without interest.
Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun (Solntse 2005) presents a more sobering take on Japan. The third in his proposed quartet of films depicting the most infamous dictators of the 20th century, it focuses on the last days of the Japanese empire from the perspective of Emperor Hirohito (played wonderfully by Issei Ogata). Sokurov has been criticized for treating Hirohito with too much sympathy, to the point of eliding the man's crimes. But the movie actually celebrates Hirohito's surrender of his godhood (a literal ornament of his office), a sacrifice Sokurov's prior subjects (Hitler and Lenin) were unwilling to make. Though weakened by some mediocre performances (Robert Dawson's MacArthur comes off especially flat), The Sun deftly transforms a ruler's public unraveling into a story of hope for the future.
 Memories of Murder (2003)
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Perhaps the most straightforwardly entertaining film of the series, Joon-ho Bong's Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok 2003) examplifies how inventive Korean genre cinema can be. Based on a real life serial killer case from the late '80s (when South Korea was under military dictatorship), this thriller follows a manhunt conducted by three cops in a rural town, combining slapstick humor, character drama, and political commentary.
History repeats itself yet again in The Proposition (2005), a Western from Australian director John Hillcoat and writer/musician Nick Cave. Guy Pearce plays an outlaw blackmailed into murdering his psychotic brother (Danny Huston) by a desperate militia captain (Ray Winstone). Subverting the old Ned Kelley, rugged individualist myths with stylistic references to the bloodier, grimier U.S. and Italian westerns of the 1970s, the film treats the military as a sadly necessary check against outlaws, showing the brutality inflicted by both sides, especially against Aborigine tribes. One might spot a few nods to the contemporary situation in the Middle East in this colonial fable, but its main accomplishments are breathtaking cinematography and sound quality, which immerse the viewer in the desolate Australian outback and an even more desolate worldview, where the pull of violence is resisted only at great cost.
 Funny Ha-Ha (2002)
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Two brilliant pieces by Boston resident Andrew Bujalski, Funny Ha-Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), seem the most likely of the series to attain the dubious honor of "cult" favorites. They offer pitch-perfect representations of the directionless, post-collegiate 20somethings that other "indie" directors like Zach Braff and Richard Linklater depict through a filter of post-ironic quirk. Bujalski's work is emotionally honest, yet manages a disarmingly subtle self-reflexivity in scenes that resemble like you're watching your friends. Other low-budget filmmakers have attempted the same, but Bujalski, with a small crew and a talented cast of non-professional actors (most are, in fact, his friends), absolutely nails it.
Near the beginning of Funny-Ha-Ha, Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) has a run-in with current crush Alex (Christian Rudder). Their first stutteringly evasive conversation about nothing introduces a style of dialogue (much of it improvised) that seems designed to deflect responsibility. Like the elaborate wit of Jane Austen's social climbers, fumbling for words is the social strategy of its time. Both the bleak Funny Ha-Ha and the more optimistic (but still acute) Mutual Appreciation capture those small shifts in tone and language when characters are able to transcend their day-to-day performances and communicate, to others and themselves, what they mean to say.
The other American films, a pair of double-billed zombie movies, are at once the clunkiest and the most politically direct of the series. This makes sense when one considers the population's supposed inability to grasp political reality except in the guise of obvious fantasy. George Romero's Land of the Dead and Joe Dante's Masters of Horror short, Homecoming, are proudly anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-"taste." Hardly the best films of 2005, their polemical rage makes them among the most startling, a pair of vulgar howls directed at one of the most repressed U.S. cultural mainstreams in recent history.
After the series ended, I had a brief conversation with Dennis Lim about the state of independent and art cinema in the U.S. and abroad. "The foreign/indie films that are the most heavily promoted tend to be the safest and blandest imaginable," he said. "Audiences who don't go out of their way to see films at festivals aren't exactly spoiled for choice." He went on to suggest that even international support for such films is in "a sad state of affairs. Looking at it globally, I'd say we have as many great filmmakers working today as we did in the so-called art film heyday of the '60s and '70s. But their films are having a harder time than ever reaching the American art house, and probably art houses anywhere, except maybe Paris."
While Lim did note the possibilities presented by new modes of production, it's difficult to see massive support coming for any defiantly noncommercial efforts. But when "festival films," even exciting pieces that are deemed too long or too "foreign," languish undistributed for their so-called elitism, one wonders how much higher the price of free speech will climb.
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