My Favourite Films at the Moment

  

The Burial of Kojo

A list of this kind, of any art, of any thing, by anyone, for anyone, at any time, for any time, by any means, for any means, is a cursed job. That it is subjective cannot shield the gaffe and guilt of bias. Besides, anybody can hardly make enough time to record all their favourite things in one take or on one list. Still, an attempt shouldn't be solely judged by these. After all, lists can be good for being what they are: lists. A list of things to be bought at the market is definitive. Same for a list of anyone's favourite films. Out of an endless possibilities a small compact set is drawn.

Here, then, are the ten films that I deeply enjoy at the moment. Though definitive, even exemplary of my taste at the moment, these are not my best films of all time. It is funny that not all the top ten films I first wrote down on paper made this list. Mired in the task of writing, I simply forgot about them. So there is for one no Greta Gerwig, Sofia Coppola, Chloé Zhang, Michael Haneke, Ousmane Sembène, Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Luc Goddard, Joran Peele, Steve McQueen, The Coen Brothers, Surreal16? What a mystery.

To make the list rounded a bit, these are ten of those that slipped off or couldn't make the cut due to space: The Worst Person in the World, Lost in Transition, Little Women, Lady Bird, Amour, Nomadland, Breathless, Black Girl, No Country for Old Men, Call Me by Your Name.

1. Manchester by the Sea

Silence can sometimes be the clearest noise. In this writer’s hands, it is the clearest there is. Dialogue is a consummate tool here. Better, in fact, are fillers. Small pauses bomb through people's speech. Smallest of gestures pulse through it. If people speak, how they do, when they do, why they do, what they do, or not, all carry a lot of meaning in this frosty flick. Lee Chandler, a janitor in Boston, incredibly played by Casey Affleck, who could as well be scooping ice off his own heart, is forced to fall back into a broken past when his older brother dies and his nephew is pushed into his care.

This 2016 picture is understated and as clean as emptiness. The script, written by the director, the gifted Kenneth Lonergan, is simply excellent. The smallest of gestures are big, clear statements. The plot is handled like a cracked egg, pulling the past and the future into a single fold. Even without considering any other film of his, we all could agree Kenneth is brilliant.

2. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

A teenager crosses interstate to get an abortion. Not for its proposition, but for its simplistic feel, this statement is false. The 2020 film is more than that. It is too movingly true to be just that. There is sisterhood. There is isolation. There is growth.

Redeploying Autumn (marvellously performed by feature first timer Sydney Finigan) for the indie movie, writer-director Eliza Hittman brings life into statistics. She could as well have done the same for a country's constitution. The picture is authentic, sensuous, affecting, luminous. (It is beautifully cinematographed by Hélène Louvart.) Still, it is soft, measured, understated, naturalistic.

For a film about reproductive rights in the US, the temptation to be polemic is high. Not for the brilliant filmmaker. In her care, a debate becomes life. One test of best of all arts, via Teju Cole, is that, when experienced, they become a permanent part of our lives. I will keep returning to Hittman's.

3. Eyimofe: This Is My Desire

Originality is everything we have seen before but not together. The material in this quintessential film is familiar. It is an interpolated story of two low-class Lagosians surviving Lagos. But the artistic impulses, at least to a typical Nollywood freak, might not. Arie and Chuko Esiri's directorial vision on their 2020 debut is a swath of neo-realism, sweet colourism, unfiltered, understated editing, and delightful long shots and off-centre framing. Even the writing is refreshing. The script is a slow, soft excellence. The unshowily scripted intermingling of Mofe and Rosa's stories is redolent of Kryszystof Kieślowski's Red and the slow but timely pacing Asghar Farhadi's A Separation. In an industry not especially famous for solid scripts, Chuko's screenplay is a standard. 

When at last Mofe and Rosa have attempted to survive the big city, Chuko closes their stories with calm and elegance. The end is poetry. The closing music is a relief.

4. The Burial of Kojo

Beautiful colours wash off each other. Luminous small lives float in an ocean of purple. Clear royal blue light drapes a frustrated wife’s face. Sparkling gold droplets rain on a creamy umbrella. Green leaves blink lemon in a pool of water. A horse-mounted humanoid crow is upside down on pink asphalt. Lush red provides background for two fighting little brothers. Soft green does the same for a newly-wedded couple, first for a laughing bride, a red flower in her afro, then the laughing groom.

Ben Okri could have sworn he wrote the script for Blitz Bazawule's breath-taking first feature. Bazawule did. He also composed and co-produced it. But the cinematographer Michael Fernandez-assisted film reads like an effortless, natural companion piece to Okri's dazzling debut. It especially does this without being conscious of the novel. Exhibiting the magical life of the spirit child narrator, Okri's 1991 Booker-winning The Famished Road has today become an African classic. Same is fated for the 2020 Ghanaian dramatic thriller about a spirit child-like girl bent on finding her lost father. Here is a film that hangs between polar spaces - is at once two polar things: both visually poetic and narratively prosaic, both a magical tale and a social realistic one. 

5. Red

By far, Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of the greatest to ever make a film. If he stopped making movies in 1989, the year he did Dekalog, this claim is true. If he only made the ten-part TV film, this claim is still true. But when he did the last instalment in his Three Colors trilogy in 1994, the claim became truer than ever.

Red is a perfect film. There is no other way around it. For reasons apparent and not, this is a film I will never love enough. In this richly coloured picture, life is an interlocked logic. Not ominous. Not forced. Just graceful. The colour red acquires a sublimity devoid of magical thinking. People become an inseparable network of nature. Relationship is everything. Still, relatedness is no logic for human connection. Someone’s life, habits, secrets, ill-luck, career, pet, doorknobs, sea trip, relationship, is inflected with, and reflected by, others'. Just how could a mind pull that off? Krzysztof, who might be the best to give the question a shot, is now dead. But his work never will.

6. Moonlight

Through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, in the face of the difficulties encountered because of his sexuality, of his drug-dependent mum, with grace and sensuousness, Chiron makes out what life for him is. Barry Jenkins' is as much at once a luminous visual palette and an emotional one. For the previous, thanks, in no small measure, to cinematographer James Laxton. For the other, thanks, equally in no small measure, to Jenkins and Terrell Alvin McCraney's script, adapted from the latter's unpublished play. But this film is this film because of everyone involved. Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali’s graceful acting has deservedly received universal acclaim. Jenkins is a modern master. All three producers are tasteful. Nicholas Britell’s score is marvellous. The 2016 picture is an instant classic when it dropped. Seven years later, it still is. But it won't cease to be.

7. A Separation

In the beginning, a middleclass Iranian couple go through a divorce hearing, the wife wanting to leave the country, the husband preferring the family stay back, their only daughter’s custody firmly debated. In the end, after requesting her parents excuse her at the hearing, the daughter chooses who she lives with.

I have only seen this movie once. But I am haunted by it every second of my life. In my mind, it is always replaying. Outside of my mind, I can't go back to it yet. Such is the truth in this naturalistic film. It spells every letter of heart-breaking. It is in fact not a film. It is life. It is not a story. It is an experience. There are no camera lights. Only daylight and shadows. There are no characters. Only people. Like a cold reserve of party soft drinks, empathy goes around enough. Everyone has good reasons to do whatever they do. None bears the blame all. Everyone does. 

All these extraordinaire writer-director Asghar Fahardi delicately holds together in his 2011 masterpiece.

8. In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-Wai’s sensibility is artistic to a fault. I came to the Hong Kong auteur’s oeuvre via Chunking Express. With all the colours, the blurs, the music, the truncated narratives, Barry Jenkins has said the 1994 film is a stylistic statement. To say more is to say worse. But In the Mood for Love has unlike any other film lodged something into place within me. The flick is tasteful. The slow motions burn like a wet mosquito coil. The rain pattering is a gushing music. The patterns on the protagonist's mandarin gowns are an old mystic’s most beautiful vision. The painterly colours are a lush, lucid ocean. The music is the sedative sweep of a sweet nap. 

This simple story of unrequited love thrives on understatement. The major characters are few. The male protagonist’s wife and the female protagonist’s husband aren't seen. Only their voices are heard. Still, their persons are felt. The choice dress is the cheongsam gowns for most female characters. Save the spread of bright designs, such elegant fashion choice is almost completely monotonous. Like a garland of a thousand flowers, like a confluence of bright floral patterns on a cheongsam, the tragic romance is overall full of incredibly sensuous moments.

9. Ó Le Kú

From my highly subjective view, this might be the greatest Yorùbá film of all time. The movie is influential for many reasons. Tunde Kelani's is a cultural artefact of not only the specific ethnic group the film is about but of the whole country. It is a compelling exhibition of an African people’s way of life. The ófí party dress on display is named after the film. The Yorùbá language spoken is undiluted. The unavoidable English words are rather Yorubanized. In fact, the 1997 film opens to Ajani and his friends cracking jokes about English words and their similarly-sounding Yorùbá counterparts, claiming the former language borrowed a batch from the latter. It is good educational material for anybody anywhere, novice or advanced, learning the language. Some parts of the movie have even become social media memes. 

Above all, the two-part picture is an excellent piece of art. The long story of a Yorùbá demon – a handsome Yorùbá playboy – is well written. Prof. Akinwumi Ishola adapted his own novel of the same name and did a good job. The unexpected but unassuming humour in this sad-happy love story is sheer delight. The plotting is self-conscious without seeming so. The dialogue is sublime. There is even good ewì (poetry). Yemi Shodimu's Ajani composes sweet but deep poems for his ladies. He is not your typical Yorùbá demon of today.

We may keep debating the end. But this flick is in toto an excellent one, timeless and classic. It should be here for all time.

10. Mother of George

In a slow, dreamy Brooklyn, a newly-wedded Yorùbá couple try to give birth. The best way to describe Andrew Dosunmu’s breath-taking sophomore feature is to use the vaguest of tags: poetry. Worse is to particularly call it a visual poem. But these labels are exact in a vague manner and vague in an exact manner. Such is the indescribable beauty of this work. Cinematographed by Bradford Young, whose work, Teju Cole has written, is cognate with Roy DeCavara's darkened photographs, the black of this fine art blacks, the purple purples, the orange oranges, the blue blues, the green greens. 

If Wong Kar-Wai was African, he would make this kind of films, perhaps labouring to surpass the visuals here. His influences on display are intentional and evident: the intense painterly colours, the ìró and bùbá, of Ankara and lace material, worn by Denike, the slow motions, the thick music, the overall dreaminess, even the medium close ups of a shaded Denike's face in crowded places. Wong might however not chop out storylines like this. Beside the linear progression, the film premise, especially among Yorubahood fans, is familiar fiction. But expectedness doesn't depreciate the show. That, in fact, seems to be the intention: to make a predictable tale a work of art.

For the main characters, the 2013 film is 106 mins of nuanced childbirth trouble. For the viewer, it is one hundred and six of a timeless dream. They will however have to pardon the mispronounced Yorùbá words for such artsy experience. (Of the main characters, only Ma Ayo, played by Bukky Ajayi, a Yorùbá actress, is fluent in the language.)