Top 10 of 2014

It is time to let you know my favourite pictures of 2014, dear readers! 
Zazie last year has seen 80 films, coming from every corner of the planet.
Of all of them, she can’t stop thinking about the following ones:

10 - '71 by Yann Demange (UK/Northern Ireland)
A young British soldier left in the middle of the Belfast Catholic enclave in the ‘70s. 
It is breathless, superbly filmed and played by an actor whose name you’ll often hear in the future: 
Jack O’Connell. 

9 - Party Girl by Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq, Claire Burger & Samuel Theis (France/Germany)
Angélique has been a stripper all her life and she had different children from different men. Now she’s old, but this doesn’t mean she is wiser. You can love her or you can hate her, but you can’t forget about her. And, détail qui tue: this is a true story, played by the real Angélique, filmed by one of her sons.
Caméra d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival. You bet!

8 - Nightcrawler by Dan Gilroy (US)
Louis Bloom is looking for a job and he finds one: he patrols LA streets at night searching for accidents, fires, dead people. He films everything without a shadow of emotion.
He is a modern monster, a product of contemporary society, an adept of the "business plans".
Jake Gyllenhaal delivers the performance of his life as this (in)human vulture.

7 -  Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski (Polland)
1962. Anna has never left the Polish convent where she spent all her young life. Before taking the perpetual vows, she visits her only relative, aunt Wanda. Together with her, she will venture into the real world and into their family history, discovering a dark secret. 
Essential, filmed in a magnificent black & white, an incredible portrait of two amazing women.  

6 - Deux Jours, Une Nuit by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne (Belgium)
Sandra, a Belgian mother just recovered from a nervous breakdown, has only two days to convince her colleagues to renounce to a bonus in order to have her re-integrated at work. The Dardenne brothers deal with the economic crisis in their way: a simple but powerful story where the most important thing is people’s solidarity. Marion Cotillard proves once again that she's an actress of a superior kind. 

5 - Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer (UK)
The weirdest cinema object of these last years: a young woman drives in her car through the Glasgow streets. She is looking for men, but sex is not her final purpose. It is very slow, it is very strange, it is maybe going nowhere but you follow Scarlett Johansson in the cold and gloomy Scottish land as there was no tomorrow. So unpredictable that it gets under your skin, as the title promises.   

4 - Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson (US)
Everybody would like to live in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel: it is full of bizarre and fascinating characters, the décor is to die for, the rhythm is frantic and the concierge, M. Gustave, is the classiest and the most reliable man ever. Ralph Fiennes shines brighter than anybody else in this irresistible and glamorous whirligig.  

3 - Boyhood by Richard Linklater (US)
As a modern Antoine Doinel, young Mason is followed by the camera of Richard Linklater from the age of 5 till the age of 18. We see him and his family (divorced father and mother and an older sister) growing up and aging literally in front of our eyes. It is life (and cinema) at its best: true, emotional, intelligent and funny. We are not alone in this world: it is so good to know it! 

2 - Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)
Watching a movie by Nuri Bilge Ceylan means something more than simply watching a movie. You are carried away in a parallel world: it is like reading a Tolstoj novel in the space of 3 hours. The psychological portrait of all the characters is so profound, complex and real, that you are submerged by a new kind of gratitude. The one you feel in front of masterpieces. 
Palme D'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival. You bet (twice!).

1 - Mommy by Xavier Dolan (Québec)
Have a look at the picture here below. This guy is about to do the most revolutionary and jubilant cinematic gesture of 2014. I'm lacking words to describe the effect that this movie has on me. 
Xavier Dolan is a larger-than-life director whose talent will grow in the years to come. 
He's a force of nature, a forerunner, a genius.
Lovers of minimalism in life and movies, please keep off, we're busy crying on a Céline Dion song. 
And, damn, we love it!

And if somebody is curious to know: no, I didn't see Gone Girl by David Fincher, because life is too short to waste time watching movies of film-makers that depresses you. 
I preferred to watch Mommy twice. 
Do you know what I mean?

'71

Have you ever been passionate about a subject that doesn’t have anything to do with your life? 
I confess I was, many times. 
Most probably, though, the worst case of all is my huge interest for the Irish Troubles.
Don’t ask me why, but since a very young age I started reading anything about the long and tiresome internal war between catholic and protestant in Northern Ireland. I believe I read every novel and seen every movie on this subject. I also have my own ideas about the best novel written about it (Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson) and the best movie made about it (Hunger by Steve McQueen). 

A couple of weeks ago, I found out there was a new movie about the Troubles and, of course, I immediately went to see it. I didn’t expect much and so, as it is often the case when expectations are low (isn’t the same in real life?), I liked it very, very much. 
I am talking about the movie ’71 by Yann Demange. 

The movie is about a 24 years old British soldier, Gary Hook, who is sent to Belfast in 1971, together with a bunch of very young comrades, to keep under control the explosive situation between catholic and protestant. Clearly enough, nobody knows, even his superiors, how to deal with this strange war. During his first mission in the earth of the catholic enclave, something goes wrong and Gary and another guy are left in the hands of the “enemies”. The other guy is shot to death, but Gary manages to escape. Alone, scared, injured, the guy can count only on himself and on his lucky star to get out of that awful and nightmarish situation. Will he be able to survive?

Compared to many movies about the Troubles, this is a very original one. First of all, this is not about a catholic guy but about a British soldier (very rare!) and, secondly, it is a real thriller (unique!). Forget about all the movies trying to explain why this war started, or movies about the real story of some catholic “martyr”. This is a pursuit movie, where the guy is chased from the beginning until the end and you, as spectator, jump on your seat every two seconds because you’re too scared or too agitated to watch another scene.
Catholic and protestant are put on the same level, here. The movie is quite smart in elucidating complex situations with simple shortcuts: yes, it is a bad war, yes, there are bastards on both sides, yes, instead of solving it, there were people willing to make it worse, and yes, too many families have been uselessly devastated. I have to say that this approach was very refreshing and at the same time even more powerful in dragging you in this unbelievable hell. 

Yann Demange, the film-maker behind this little gem, is – weirdly enough - a French chap, but he has a very British upbringing (he directed, among other things, the first season of the TV series Criminal Justice with Ben Whishaw). His mise-en-scène is beautiful, and the rhythm of the movie impeccable. The credit for such a great result surely goes also to the actor who plays Gary: British Jack O’Connell, already appreciated in Starred Up by David MacKenzie and now about to enter stardom as the main character of new Angelina Jolie’s movie, Unbroken. O'Connell carries the entire movie on his shoulders in a very convincing way. His desperate face mixed with his stubborn willing to survive win the audience’s attention and create an immediate and total identification. You suffer for him and with him from the beginning till the end, and you want him to be saved, at every cost!
In the distance, Belfast and his fires shine of a new light.
All of a sudden, I have a new film in my top five of best movies about the Irish Troubles!