In lieu of a Top 10 list, which essentially invites you to put your picks against mine in an ego-fueled contest of “whose is bigger,” here’s a selection of worthwhile films that likely slipped past you during their brief stopover in Bay Area theaters. They might not be the “best” films of 2007, but they’re all movies I could watch again in five years, or 25 years.
1. Heddy Honigmann’s breathtaking documentary Forever, which uses Paris’s famed Pere-Lachaise Cemetery as its hub, screened once at the S.F. International Film Festival when the director was honored with the Persistence of Vision Award. A beautiful and profound work, the film provides a visceral experience of the immortality of great art, and the continuing influence of deceased artists on the living. Forever had a brief theatrical run in New York, but there’s no sign of a DVD release on the horizon. Its placement at the top of my list is not intended as a frustrating tease, though, but as an imperative to add it to your must-do-some-day list.
2. There was a period when the best films in the world were coming out of Paris, then Hong Kong, then Tehran. Now Bucharest is the hot spot, with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu making critics’ lists in 2006 and Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (opening here Feb. 1) primed to cut a swath. 12:08 East of Bucharest screened at the Roxie in September with little fanfare, but this no-frills tale of a day in the life of three men who convene on a TV panel to wax nostalgic about the day of the revolution is well worth a look. Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu provides a caustic reminder that people invent and forget recent history as it suits them -— a Stalinist technique that the Bush Administration has appropriated (but I digress). The film dares to point out that a lot of people aren’t happy about the death of communism, whether they’re closet fascists or simply preferred that nightmare to the evil of cold-hearted capitalism.
3. Mafioso, Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 satire of Italy’s postwar economic miracle, was the revival of the year (along with Rules of the Game, which was wondrously restored to gorgeous perfection). The great Alberto Sordi plays a bright young Milan factory manager who takes his sophisticated, big-city trophy wife and kids back to his village in Sicily. Lattuada wrings sly chuckles out of the culture shock, then takes the story in darker, deeper directions.
4. Gypsy Caravan is a concert film, road movie and social-issue documentary rolled into one musical feast. Jasmine Dellal’s opus premiered at S.F. IndieFest and earned a run at the Roxie, and should really be seen on the big screen. But if you can pump up the volume on your home theater system, you’ll want to check out the DVD when it’s released in 2008.