Dear USE readers,
I haven’t seen very many films this year but I have endeavoured to watch films that I believed – or was led to believe – to be challenging or at the very least intriguing. In this regard, perhaps the most interesting (if not necessarily the best) films I saw included J Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”, a dramatisation of the life of Rudolf Höss who, with his wife, strove to create a personal and family paradise in their home right next door to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex during World War II; Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”, a satire on Western society’s obsession with beauty and appearances, and the psychological damage and self-loathing that many experience as a result, with devastating consequences; and Sean Baker’s “Anora”, another film that also sends up the class divide between rich elites and marginalised poor, with a focus on how the behaviour of rich people can ruin the lives of the poor they encounter. Special mentions include M Kordofani’s “Goodbye Julia”, yet another film on the class divide, this time between two women from the northern and southern Sudanese communities, which notes the irony of the wealthy woman actually having less freedom than the poor woman; and JH Jang’s “Exhuma” which explores a past family history of betrayal and collaboration with a colonial power, and how such betrayal and collaboration combine to plague the family’s descendants until a shaman and other intermediaries are able to exorcise the demons linked to the family’s treacherous ancestor. In their own way, all of these films confront important social or historical issues through characters who experience major transformations and whose lives are never the same as a result.
The major disappointment was Ellen Kuras’s “Lee” which managed to reduce a photojournalist’s life and traumas to a level of sheer boredom and earnest woke-culture sanctimony. The film made shallow attempts to put the life of Lee Miller into its historical context, presenting Lee as something worthy simply because she was a woman in a man’s world, and neglecting to show how her experiences as a wartime journalist affected her life and her relationships with others, especially with her husband and son.
I hope you are all looking forward to a brighter and better world in 2025, and that you will all find films worthy of your time, money and efforts to find. Happy New Year to everyone in 2025!
Nausika.