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The Ten Best Undistributed Films of 2024
Riders This year was a peak travel year for me, mostly festival-enabled, and I was pleased by the number of good films I was privileged to see along the way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. While the globalization of film via the internet has improved access all round, it’s a mistake to think that everything good winds up somewhere legally accessible, even if only as an obscure VOD option. Some films remain unaccounted for, which is both unfortunate and a reminder of how many good films there remain to see. Here are ten of the year’s best, with links to their longer write-ups.
100,000,000,000
My best of fest was Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000 (its onscreen title, spelled out in the festival program as Cent milliard milliard). Where his previous feature, Sophia Antipolis, took place in and around the titular tech park and nearby towns like Antibes, 100,000,000,000,000 leaps to the other side of the French Riviera to capture the inherently tremendous oddity of Christmas in Monaco. The lightly plotted film has sex worker Afine (Zaharia Bouti) spending his holidays alone; while his housemates go off to Dubai, he services clientele who haven’t left the city, hanging out between assignations with Serbian babysitter Vesna (Mina Gajovic) and her pre-teen charge Julia (Victoire Kong). Vernier trains a sharp eye on the trickle-down social economy of those who service the ultra-wealthy and the very precisely graded power gaps between each: the drivers who ferry Afine and his friends are a cut below, the clothing store employee who stands in awkward silence with Afine as their mutual client tries on a new dress subtly conveys discomfort with his obvious form of employment. (Locarno)
A Chronicle in Spirals
Kim Yi-so’s A Chronicle in Spirals begins in obscurity and only becomes more oblique as it goes along. The first shot immediately raises questions about what kind of film we’re watching, as a group of women stands with their backs turned to the camera; off-screen, a voice repeatedly says “Excuse me” until someone finally turns and acknowledges the speaker. Is this unapologetically non-naturalistic allegory or an experimental theater production? It’s eventually clarified as the latter, the first of several productive disorientations in a film presenting the stories of two displaced women, Ungbi and Eubin, before fusing them into one shared dream (?). First is Ungbi, who wakes every morning and tries to work through a low-grade depression in which, as she says, time feels like it’s stopped; she smokes a single cigarette, of the Time brand, to start her day. (The name is a little on-the-nose even if it’s a real brand, albeit an Israeli one unlikely to be found in Korea.) The roar on her apartment terrace is extremely loud despite there being no visible source of noise, a sonic Lynchianism to go along with the visual affinities—e.g., a sequence in which characters walk through a curtain slowly in a shot that gives way, in a really slow dissolve, to a landscape shot—but original in its color palette (50 shades of blown-out white) and political particulars. Some of the confusions introduced have no obvious precedents: Early on, Ungbi’s routine is soundtracked by a sentimental piano score of the kind common to so many Asian films—but then the music stalls as the player (revealed to be Ungbi herself) makes a mistake. More unnervingly, a series of outdoor shots are interrupted by sudden fades to black, as if the camera shutter itself were a blinking human eye nodding off in time to a start-and-stop noise that turns out to be Ungbi’s malfunctioning aquarium lamp. (Jeonju)
The Dells
Dense with waterparks and tourist-baiting American kitsch, The Dells is also a site for foreigners temporarily entering the USA on a J-1 visa to take part in the Summer Work Travel program, which—per official State Department verbiage quoted in the film’s opening titles—“provides foreign students with an opportunity to live and work in the United States during their summer vacation […] to experience and to be exposed to the people and way of life in the United States.” In practice, that means working for dirt wages at Walmart while a supervisor yells that spilled milk isn’t being cleaned up fast enough—truly a representative American experience, if not necessarily as intended. I snorted in grim recognition at the opening shot of a characteristically homogenized American small-town landscape—Taco Bell and Dunkin’ in the foreground, Culver’s mid-depth, Denny’s at the back—and outright laughed when two visiting workers, asked by their taxi driver whether they’d rather stay in the States or return home, say they’d like to remain because, among other things, the US has good health care; they are immediately and correctly informed that the US is the only first-world country to not offer health care as a right. In this context, the German story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, retold at a nearby park via a animatronic clock show, registers as emblematically American: a man is contracted to do a job only to be told that he won’t be paid for it just because. (The clock stopped working during the pandemic and isn’t coming back, which is metaphorically even more depressingly resonant unless we rethink this as an object acting in solidarity with “quiet quitting.”) End credits identify each person by a compact description of their scene and/or key line of quotable dialogue, an solid final associative reminder for a counter-intuitively funny ensemble of people (not least the filmmaker) finding humor in a default hopeless place. (Visions du Réel)
Invention
Though the sole credited director of Invention, Courtney Stephens shares the opening “A Film By” credit with lead performer Callie Hernandez, who won Best Actress for playing “Carrie,” a riff on herself, as does everyone within the film. Hernandez’s dad was an alternative medicine physician of sorts; his death, and the subsequent estate-dissolving fallout, are the starting prompt for a story that’s often unexpectedly close to comedy. It’s a not very funny situation—the sudden death of a father whose legally dubious actions on multiple fronts have left a huge mess for his overwhelmed daughter to clean up—but the opening scene establishes a light touch and fine eye for American eccentricity (division of rural grotesquerie) as a funeral home employee clicks through chintzy automated organ tracks before landing on what (somehow, and with no audible degree of difference from its fellows) is the right one for this occasion. (Locarno)
Lázaro at Night
There were maybe 16 people in the auditorium when I arrived for the P&I screening of Nicolás Pereda’s FIDMarseille premiere Lázaro at Night. Prior to 2020’s Fauna, I’d seen two of his features—2010’s Summer of Goliath and 2015’s Minotaur—so couldn’t speak to how that very disparate pair represent Pereda’s dozen previous overall, as well as numerous shorts he’s made since beginning to release work in 2007. But I can safely say that neither feature was intended as humorous, so something seems to have shifted along the way and for the better; generic festival cinema has become something funnier and more distinct. Lázaro at Night doubles down on Fauna’s self-reflexive and increasingly elliptical cringe comedy while reconfiguring the small acting troupe Pereda’s worked with from the very beginning, a method which presumably adds resonant meta-layers to each subsequent characterization for viewers who’ve kept up. Given that aspect, as well as the fact that much of this film’s plot is about infidelity and a director casting his next film, and that this film itself is a conspicuously low-budget endeavor, it’s fair to say that while I don’t know if Pereda is deliberately courting Hong Sang-soo comparisons, he’s definitely earned them. Both are reasonably prestigious arthouse directors whose films regularly premiere at major world festivals and who work repeatedly with trusted performers on visibly strained budgets, so it’s unlikely that Pereda hasn’t thought about this at all. As a Hong true believer turned disappointed skeptic, I think Pereda’s now lapped him; from thematically comparable and equally technically simple building blocks, he’s created something of greater complexity and impact than Hong’s last five years of work. (Toronto)
Riders
Martín Rejtman’s determinedly strange Riders is the drolly-inclined Argentinian’s second documentary. Where his narrative films are structurally unorthodox comedies still operating within the more familiarly humorous idiom not dissimilar from the Bresson-inflected familiar deadpans of Jarmusch, Kaurismäki et al., at first I wondered if Riderswould end up being the director’s first entirely humorless film, though I gradually found some chuckles. It kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of our comrades lying in the streets”), Rejtman (who I also interviewed about the film) presents a series of locked-off nighttime shots of migrant Venezuelan deliverymen queuing to pick up their orders and handing them over, the distance from restaurant to diner bridged by elegant parallel tracking shots of bicyclists in action. This visual language connects directly back to Rejtman’s first feature, 1992’s Rapado, similarly defined by nocturnal roaming and long sidewalk tracking shots—a distinct vision maintained 30+ years later, now sculpted in the real world. (Visions du Réel)
Sad Jokes
A prolific actor in Germany, this is Stumm’s second feature as writer-director, and his performance has more confidence than what often happens when a director casts themselves in a part to save money. Here he plays Joseph, who is…a writer-director working on his sophomore feature. I have a lot of thoughts about why movies-about-making-movies are an increasing percentage of the festival film economy, which I’ll save for another time; just know that this starting premise doesn’t result in automatic tedium, but does allow an in-character Stumm to define the tone he’s working towards in a meeting with his skeptical producer: “My background is more naturalistic. I’d like to move in a more absurdist direction.” Putting that idea into practice, the next scene has Joseph getting his hand stuck in a vending machine’s grate and trying to extricate himself with the aid of the person you’d least like to be around in this situation—a woman incredibly flustered by his predicament and unable to call the ambulance because she keeps getting distracted—while classical piano music provides an upscale slapstick accompaniment. Throughout, Joseph’s facial expression is more panic-stricken than he realizes; this is a portrait of the director as an inveterate people-pleaser out of financial necessity who’s not actually good at playing that game, and his proposed project gives signs of the more egocentric eccentricity bubbling under. (Toronto)
Teki Cometh
Teki is adapted by writer-director Daihachi from a novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka, whose best-known works (at least those in English translation—this isn’t) were translated into anime form as The Girl Who Traveled Through Time and Paprika. Daihachi has found an equally slippery but much lower-key live-action container for this; the first dream sequence unexpectedly punctuates that low-key facade, but by the third and fourth time it happens, it seems clear Teki is less crossing the imagination/reality line than envisioning something like dementia. Daihachi made clear he’d disagree with that reading at the premiere Q&A: “To me he wasn’t suffering from cognitive impairment, and that was intentional. His imagination had just run wild. I have no personal experience with dementia, but considering how clear his mind was up until that midpoint, I think he intentionally let his mind run amok, re-experiencing events from his past in new ways.” Either way, the simultaneous emotional intensification and narrative disintegration is both unnerving and poignant, aptly landing between a Japanese reference point (Junichiro Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man, whose elderly protagonist’s voyeuristic fascinations seem apposite) and a French one (Alain Resnais’s Providence, whose equally disreputable aging center collapses his family life into the novel he’s working on). A pathos-begging portrait of a more-or-less benignly cuddly old man curdles into something more rounded, accurate and uncomfortable. (Tokyo)
This Life of Mine
My festival kicked off with the Directors’ Fortnight opener, the late Sophie Fillières’ seventh and final film as a writer-director, This Life of Mine. The French actress and filmmaker died last year at age 58, checking into palliative care the day after wrapping production on this, knowledge which inevitably adds extra-textual devastation to dialogue like “Sometimes, in the morning, do you ever wonder, ‘However more fucking showers before I die?’” Poet-turned-advertising-copywriter Barbie Bichette (Agnès Jaoui) is separated from her husband; alienated from her daughter (Angélina Woreth), son (Édouard Suplice) and job; and frustrated with her withholding therapist. “I’m 55 and I still don’t know what my nature is,” she asks him. “Do you know my nature?” He remains stock still, in a fashion that suggests “Yes, and it’s not good,” but doesn’t answer. For its first third, This Life of Mine seems to be an above-average, not-quite-cringe comedy about a prickly person going through a rough patch. But when an encounter with a stranger claiming to be an old friend ends with Barbie lying down, saying she doesn’t feel well and asking that stranger to call her children, she wakes up in the hospital and has to rebuild her life. (Cannes)
The Vessel’s Isle
Vessel’s plot is a skeleton: performers credited as Young Man (Zhu Congran) and Young Woman (Ye Zhaoyue) meet at an obscure rural Chinese hotel in 1999 (where Sanming lurks around the fringes as “Drunk Dumb”), just about get it together to have a tentative affair, go their separate ways. In this kind of film, it would be a shock if people actually did speak more than once every 20 minutes: “Have you always been so quiet?” the woman asks the man in a probably unintentional self-reflexive moment that got a snort out of me. Wang’s iteration is most conspicuously different on two counts: first, that’s there’s not just a score, but a lushly romantic one arranged for an actual string section rather than a synthesizer replicant, with composer Li Jiazheng’s work sometimes reminiscent of the more sumptuous parts of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtracks. Secondly, it’s no accident that the poster credits colorist Xie Yingying as prominently as DP Pu Wei. (I’ve grown very fond of this on-set image of cast and crew thoughtfully smoking away; the director is second from right.) Divided into three cryptically titled parts, the film’s first section locates an unbelievable number of red-and-green pairings in every shot: rusty hotel railings set into relief by the forest behind, the Young Man’s red shirt likewise set into relief by that forest, green Christmas lights framing the red lettering of the hotel’s sign—on and on and on, to an extent that’s potentially gimmicky but undeniably impressive in its on-a-budget ability to keep finding those colors in ways that present as organic to the environment (after all, that forest is right there) while remaining unmissably heightened. The movie heads towards an extended blue-white section before synthesizing its palate in the final shots. Vessel iterates slow cinema structures to new ends the same way Ed Ruscha painted gas stations: to find unexpected majesty in the decrepit and banal, and to use those unexpectedly generative places for perspective and color studies. (Tokyo)
