Film Feature: The 10 Best Overlooked Films of 2011

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5.) “Certified Copy”

Certified Copy

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is certainly among the most playful of auteurs. He’s obsessed with exploring the precarious line separating reality from fiction, as he did in his extraordinary 1990 landmark, “Close-Up.” Yet the director’s first film made outside of Iran was slyly marketed as a straightforward romance in the tradition of Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise.” The trailers may lead one to believe that the plot follows two strangers as they slowly fall in love while strolling along the exotic yet strangely evocative streets of a small Tuscan village. Such a succinct summation would be completely correct and woefully wrong. As in every Kiarostami film, there’s far more going on here than initially meets the eye. It’s easy to imagine the film becoming a coldly clever essay without the emotional anchor provided by Juliette Binoche, who deservedly won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of Elle, the French owner of an art gallery in Arezzo. As she drives British author James Miller (played by opera star William Shimell in his film debut) through the streets of her town, their polite and friendly chatter carries ominous undertones of tension and repressed pain. The key turning point in the picture takes place in a café, where James recounts his observations of a mother and her son, causing Elle to burst into tears. It’s precisely at this moment that the audience begins to wonder whether these two have an unspoken history. As the story unfolds and then folds upon itself, Kiarostami keeps the viewer actively engaged in the central mystery with results that are haunting, confounding and absolutely spellbinding.

4.) “Rebirth”

Rebirth

Aired on Showtime and released on DVD by Oscilloscope Studios, this profoundly moving documentary by Jim Whitaker is unlike any other film set in the aftermath of 9/11. It centers on five human subjects whose lives were shattered by the terrorist attacks in New York City, and follows them through the first ten years of their grieving process. Tanya Villanueva Tepper lost her fiancee in the tragedy, while Nick Chirls lost his mother. Ling Young was horribly burned and is left to deal with the permanent scars on her body and mind. Construction worker Bryan Lyons and firefighter Tim Brown remain haunted by the faces of people forever lost in the tower debris. Like Herzog, Whitaker has an unwavering gaze and allows his subjects to open up entirely about their despair, rage, confusion and memories of joy that they hope to recapture. There’s also some immensely effective uses of archival footage, such as the moment when a bird lands upon Chirls’s head as he eulogizes his mother at her funeral. It’s striking to see how comforting such a seemingly random coincidence can be to someone desperate to experience the presence of a lost loved one. Just as Michael Apted’s “Up” series chronicles the unpredictable progression of a human life, Whitaker’s film shows how the human spirit can achieve resilience even under the most devastating of circumstances, yet not before enduring a series of volatile, sometimes paralyzing emotions. This is a resoundingly hopeful film about the rebuilding of a country and the rebirth of the human soul.

3.) “Trust”

Trust

Though many young actresses have delivered breakout performances this year, only one of them actually made me cry. As a fourteen-year-old girl targeted by an online predator, Liana Liberato takes the audience on an emotional journey that may prove to be richly rewarding for mature family audiences everywhere. What a remarkable achievement for David Schwimmer, whose only other directorial efforts include a handful of TV movies, as well as 2008’s comedy, “Run Fatboy Run.” It’s clear that Schwimmer has mastered the difficult task of creating an atmosphere onset that gives his actors the necessary comfort to deliver intense performances of unflinching honesty. He refuses to accompany the work of his cast with an obtrusive score, trusting them instead to hit the right notes. There are few things more viscerally affecting than watching an actor go through an emotional transformation, as the camera captures every nuance with such meticulous detail that the audience begins to feel as if they are going through it themselves. For the first third of the picture, we share in the mounting excitement and uncertainty experienced by Annie (Liberato), as she corresponds with her viral boyfriend “Charlie,” a man far older than his professed age. After an in-person encounter leads “Charlie” to steal Annie’s virginity, the film could’ve easily devolved into a routine revenge drama. Yet the script by Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger (co-writer of “In the Bedroom”) goes in a much more thoughtful direction, focusing instead on the deception between family members, and the potentially dangerous ways in which we deceive ourselves. The scenes between Liberato and her father (a wrenching Clive Owen) are more powerful than anything witnessed in the vast majority of this year’s Oscar bait.

2.) “Life in a Day”

Life in a Day

YouTube is hardly a reliable source for cinematic masterworks, but documentarian Kevin Macdonald (“One Day in September”) utilized the site’s video uploads as tools to create something truly extraordinary. Olympian editor Joe Walker selected fragments from 80,000 submitted clips to create a sprawling 95-minute panorama of the world viewed on a single day, July 24, 2010. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Edward Steichen’s photography exhibition-turned-book, “The Family of Man,” which also aimed to link the world through the universality of shared experiences. Unburdened by a contrived “plot,” Macdonald and Walker allow the power of their found imagery to give the audience a series of vivid glimpses, while providing a glimpse of the world through a wide variety of perspectives. We see skydivers sailing through the clouds, elderly couples renewing their vows, families grieving the loss of a loved one and rejoicing in the survival of another. In each of them, we see ourselves. I was astonished by just how miraculously well Macdonald’s gamble paid off. “Life in a Day” is nearly as affirming a picture as Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”

1.) “Tomboy”

Tomboy

Out of the hundreds and hundreds of new films I’ve seen in 2011, no film captured my heart quite like Céline Sciamma’s “Tomboy.” It screened this year at the Chicago International and Reeling film festivals, but won’t officially open until January 2012 at the Music Box. Believe me, the film is more than worth the wait. Sciamma’s 2007 debut effort, “Water Lillies,” took a startlingly raw look at the awkwardness of adolescence, as three fifteen-year-old women make their first fumbling advances into the adult world of love, lust and unbridled confusion. The performances Sciamma elicited from her young actresses were stunningly candid, yet the younger ensemble of “Tomboy” proves to be even more revelatory. Zoé Héran delivers one of the best child performances in recent memory as Laure, a 10-year-old girl mistaken by her playmates for a boy. The feelings she develops for Lisa (Jeanne Disson) only increases Laure’s motivation to keep up the charade, but it’s only a matter of time before her contrived identity will prove unsustainable. As Laure’s six-year-old sister Jeanne, Malonn Lévana proves to be a natural born crowd-pleaser, and received a rapturous response from audiences at the screening I attended at Reeling. After her initial shock upon discovering Laure’s secret, she decides to help Laure out by spreading stories about “her brother” to the local kids. While some directors treat their pint-sized performers as if they were trained animals, forcing them to recite dialogue with over-enunciated precision, Sciamma has proven in just two pictures that she is a one-of-a-kind master at coaxing naturalistic, meticulously textured portrayals from her young actors. Her sensitivity in tackling such challenging material is a marvel to behold. I encourage all cinephiles in Chicago to mark their calendars for January 27 of next year to see one of the very best films of 2011.

By MATT FAGERHOLM Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com [email protected]