I have created a video with all the best romance movies to watch while in lockdown this Valentine's Day. There’s classic romances, French gems such as the always charming Amelie and one of the most tragic love stories I have ever watched.
Let me know in the comments section what your favourite romance movies are.
In a year of unparalleled weirdness and chaos, at least we had movies. I find that films are the best kind of distraction and while I didn’t get to see many films in the Cinema I did still get to watch a few new releases thanks to services like Mubi, BFI Player and of course Netflix. So here are my top films of 2020.
Yes, I am fully aware that this film came out in 2019 for most people, but here in the UK, we got Parasite in cinemas at the beginning of 2020 before the world went to shit. And it’s literally a masterpiece. Hilariously dark and with a biting social commentary Parasite is Bong at his best. If you haven’t seen this film yet you most definitely should, it broke records and has made people think twice about subtitle prejudice finally! Look out for a full review on here soon.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire may be the most beautiful and heartfelt love story I have seen in ages, I was sobbing throughout the last 20 or so minutes, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I even wrote a gushing review earlier this year because I loved it so much. Read the full review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire Review
Stylish, aesthetic and thoroughly good fun Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. is a delight to behold. I found myself just utterly enamoured by this whole film, and I think a rewatch may be on the horizon as it’s buoyancy and frivolity would be the most welcome distraction from lockdown 3.0.
Hong Sang-soo's latest film is a smart and witty look at female relationships and troublesome men. The thing I absolutely love about Hong’s films is that they always feel like the lives on display exist in reality, that if the camera weren’t rolling, everything would happen that way regardless. Read the full film review: The Woman Who Ran Review.
DNA explores the void left by losing a loved one and how grief can bring out the worst in you or bring you back in touch with your roots. Neige clings to her grandfather through the things he left behind and her connection to Algeria through him. Filled with drama and some necessary injection of humour, this is a compelling film that will leave you questioning the fabric of your own familial bonds.
Honourable mentions: Swallow, Little Joe, The Lighthouse.
I love Steve McQueen’s work, but his films are emotionally brutal. Small Axe is an anthology series that focuses on Black lives in moments in modern British history and looks to be some of his most powerful work yet. I will be watching these important films imminently.
I missed this film at the 2019 London East Asian Film Festival to my annoyance, and then the film became available on MUBI, and I missed it again. I really should have watched it when I had the chance.
I am learning French, love social realism films, and films loosely inspired by literary works…don’t even get me started! As to why I haven’t watched this film yet, I don’t know the answer. I keep going to put it on, and then I decide to watch something else, I think it’s because there is just too much choice. Also, on some platforms like Mubi or All4, you only have a limited time to watch certain movies, whereas Netflix seems to keep titles in its library for much longer. But as I am trying to get fluent in French by the end of 2020, I will most definitely be watching this one ASAP!
I was so excited about this film, the trailers looked great, the cast is phenomenal, and normally, Nolan delivers a smart and intelligent blockbuster. But with Tenet I think Nolan tried to be clever for the sake of being clever. If you strip away all the time stuff then it’s a just another spy movie, complete with a bad caricature villain and the usual underdeveloped female character. But what made this film the most infuriating to watch was the sound engineering! I like to hear what characters say, especially in a film when 90% of the dialogue is exposition! For anyone in a non-English speaking country, they undoubtedly benefited from the inclusion of subtitles so perhaps after a re-watch (with subtitles) I might go a little easier on this film. But then again probably not.
It’s safe to say that if a Hong Sang-soo film becomes available to watch in the UK I will jump at the chance to see it. Thankfully the London Korea Film Festival went digital this year as I was seriously weighing up whether it was worth risking a trip to the cinema to see his latest film.
The Woman Who Ran stars Hong’s long time muse Kim Min-hee who once again gives a fantastically understated performance as Gam-hee a woman we follow through three encounters with three different friends. Something I absolutely love about Hong’s films is that they always feel like the lives on display exist in reality, that if the camera wasn’t rolling everything would happen that way regardless.
In the first segment, Gam-hee visits a friend at their semi-rural apartment complex. Here the characters discuss a variety of topics which randomly involve animals, from the prettiness of cow’s eyes that cause the two women to consider becoming vegetarian briefly (while eating meat) to the aggressive dominance a Cockerel has over the neighbour’s chickens and another neighbour who ardently wants the apartments stray cat community to be cut off from being fed, dubbing them ‘robber cats’.
What struck me with these conversations is that there is always more to them than what meets the eye, especially with the conversation about the Cockerel, which could easily be a metaphor for sexual harassment and abuse women face when a man aggressively expresses his dominance.
The Cat Man, on the other hand, can be seen as a symbol of the human ego; he declares that the people of the apartment complex are more important than the stray cats, while Young-soon’s roommate insists that the cats have every right to survive. Is Hong weaving a conversation on the climate crisis into the film? Perhaps, that’s the impression I got anyway.
It soon becomes apparent that conversations with men are shot from behind; why does Hong make the men mainly faceless? Exposing them just for a few mere moments as they arrive or depart the destination of the conversation.
Another thing to consider is that each man is causing problems for the women they are conversing with. Cat Man tells Gam-hee’s hosts that they need to stop feeding stray cats, a young poet stalks Gam-hee’s second friend after a drunken one-night stand and Gam-hee herself is confronted by her self-important ex.
Gam-hee’s husband is mentioned several times and is actually faceless as he never appears in the film, but his view that ‘people in love should always stick to each other’ dominates Gam-hee’s life (as she is only now away from him after five years of marriage).
In this way, it feels like Hong is showcasing women’s lives with a very obvious #metoo sentiment; he is revealing how some men behave towards women and how things are made far more complicated for them because of the men they encounter.
This is all done with an obvious sense of humour, the women are all smart and engage in varied conversations whereas the men all come off rather foolish. And of course, this wouldn’t be a Hong Sang-soo film if he didn’t manage to weave in his usual musings of art and artists which is always a pleasure to watch.
Directed by Jeon Gye-soo, Vertigo explores Seo-young’s life in corporate Korea. It’s a dizzying world of uncertainty where simply being seen wearing a hearing aid could lose her a contract renewal. Seo-young’s secret affair with her handsome and popular boss is also another risk. Soon her life begins to spiral out of control when her inner ear problem causes her to start experiencing Vertigo in her high-rise office.
I watched this film as part of the London Korean Film Festival, which went digital this year as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a kind of stroke of luck for me as I have wanted to see Vertigo for quite a while, and I wouldn’t have been able to see it at its originally planned screening in London.
Narratively the central focus of the film is on Seo-young, but Vertigo also explores two men and their connection to her. Seo-young is very much in love with her boss Lee Jin-soo (Teo Yoo from the fantastic Russian film Leto!), which is displayed through her looking at him longingly while he religiously works and how she seeks physical contact with him.
His distance and unavailability are perhaps part of the draw, but it is clear she craves something more from the relationship. Kwon-Woo a window cleaner, is a point of fascination for Seo-young, he is literally and metaphorically on the outside looking in. He cleans windows suspended from a rope and can observe corporate meetings and lunchtime rituals, but he is also poor and of different social standing, and his interest in the melancholy Seo-young becomes a focal point in his life.
There is one moment where he writes Cheer Up on the windows in soap suds, which causes Seo-young to cry (and I must admit I did too!). However, one must also note that while Kwon-woo had the best of intentions his behaviour throughout the film was questionable and actually stalking.
Beautifully shot with a minimalistic colour palette Vertigo really stands out when audio and visuals vividly collide to bring Set-young’s vertigo to life. Visually we experience the disorientation, the panic and the off-kilter feeling through the use of a SnorriCam (essentially, the camera is mounted onto the actor, so it appears that they don’t move while everything around them does). The sound engineering in these moments mimics tinnitus with the high pitch ringing and the muffling of voices which I found to be really powerful, and as I have tinnitus myself rather realistic too.
While Vertigo starts off strong towards the end the film becomes rather over the top and a bit too melodramatic for my liking (though it does make for a spectacular cinematographic moment), but overall it was a beautiful film to watch and an interesting portrait of a woman on the brink. There were also some important moments throughout the film that highlighted social issues like sexual harassment and prejudices within the workplace.
Burning is a taut and thrilling adaptation of one of Murakami’s most intriguing short stories, Barn Burning.
Of course Burning is not a literal retelling of Murakami’s story, it has been tweaked and reworked seeing as it is only a 20 page story and the film is over 2 hours long. These tweaks work so well and contribute to a study of Korean society that feels raw and rather brutal. It’s a classic example of class division, of the psychological harm that jealousy incurs and perhaps obsession.
Burning follows a young man called Jong-su, he works several part time jobs in a struggle to survive in Seoul, one day he meets Hae-mi, an old acquaintance from his hometown and they start seeing each other. Hae-mi goes travelling to Africa and asks Jong-su to look after her cat even though he has just moved back to his family farm in Paju. Jong-su performs his task diligently without ever encountering the cat. When Hae-mi returns from Africa she is accompanied by Ben a young successful man. And thus the tension begins between the two males.
Having Jong-su and Hae-mi come from simple means the sudden appearance of Ben a metropolitan man who drives a Porsche and lives in Gangnam is rather jarring and as an audience we never warm to his character. And he only gets more and more suspicious in his smugness and rather disturbing collection in his bathroom and the revelation that he likes to burn greenhouses. Abandoned greenhouses that take less than 10 minutes to completely disappear. At this point you start to think that he is just a rich boy on a power trip, later however when Hae-mi goes missing it becomes apparent that burning greenhouses is just a metaphor for something far more nefarious…or is it?
That’s the best thing about Lee’s direction, we are never really told anything concrete. Can we completely trust Jong-su, is he not just completely overcome with jealousy, Ben seems to have everything, success, fast cars, a beautiful apartment and a loving family. Is Jong-su imagining the scenario or is Ben really a psychopathic murderer of Women?
It’s a shame that Burning didn’t make it into the nominations for best foreign film for the Academy Awards this year as this is a masterfully conducted thriller. The acting especially by Yoo Ah-in and Steven Yeun is electrifying, they fit so well into their respective roles. The soundtrack heightens tension terrifically and the cinematography feels at moments whimsical and then all of a sudden concise and rigid.
Let me know in the comments section what you thought of the film.
