There aren't many films listed here, but that's only because I've already written about a lot of my favorites. In fact, I saw several films last year that I absolutely loved. Compensation was the best. It was my favorite film I'd seen since Letter from an Unknown Woman back in 2021; I'd vote for it in a Sight and Sound-type poll. And Ludwig, First Cow, The Boy and the Heron, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore stand beside Compensation as films I found to be really new experiences that made me see things in a different light. The films listed below are the remaining movies I saw in 2023 which I can say the same about.
Macario (1960)
Macario is a man who lives in poverty. When he sits down for dinner with his family, each person at the table gets only a small portion. Macario always gives part of his to his many children. He goes to bed hungry every night. Eventually, he finds himself resenting his children and wishing for a meal he could keep all to himself. In a fit of guilt over these thoughts and rage at his own situation, he swears he'll never eat again unless he can eat a whole turkey by himself, just once. When his wife steals a turkey and prepares it for him, he's ecstatic, not just because he gets to eat his fill, but because it serves as a reminder that at least one person really does understand him and care about him.
When he goes into the woods to find a private place to eat the turkey, he meets the Devil and God. The Devil tries to bribe Macario into sharing the turkey, and he refuses. It gets interesting when God asks him to share the turkey. Macario considers that there's no way God could be asking for the turkey due to hunger. He realizes that what God is asking for is a gesture of selflessness. And again, he refuses. He's made such gestures before, we've seen it. But he just can't take any more demands.
Then Death approaches and asks for some of the turkey. Macario gives Death exactly half the turkey. He explains: the demands of God and the Devil were ones he could choose to accept or not, but the only thing you can do in the face of Death is buy time. Macario refuses God's demand to be selfless, but can't resist the demand he senses just from the presence of Death.
The way the film proceeds from there, Macario tries to do good, but to no avail. He's betrayed, persecuted, and finally judged for seemingly unfair and arbitrary reasons. Near the end of the film, Death claims he was trying to teach Macario a lesson and that Macario has failed to learn it. If there was a lesson, I still don't really know what it was. But this final twist of the knife emphasizes the mental burden Macario bears from the dilemmas of living in severe privation: he aches to have more for himself but always feels guilty about his appetites not leaving enough for everyone else.
Macario doesn't exactly feel like a horror film, but it is a ghost story, and the imagery it concludes with is haunting. It hints at a world beyond comprehension, where any salvific power that might exist doesn't care about starvation or cruelty.
One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977)
I would probably say now that this is my favorite of Varda's films. It follows two women, Pomme and Suzanne, from a young age until they both have livelihoods and families of their own. Pomme is the younger and brasher of the two main characters. She starts out as "Pauline", the child of an affluent family, and goes on to make several radical changes in her life, eventually changing her name after becoming a member of a nomadic feminist folk music group. Suzanne starts out in a loveless and financially precarious relationship; she eventually scrapes together a stable, relatively conventional livelihood.
Pomme ends up in debates with other women about differing ideas of womanhood. No one wins these debates; that's not the point. The point is that womanhood doesn't need to be defined any one way for all these people to share a struggle in common. And this film illustrates that it's worth it for them to struggle together, and not just to protect themselves or because it's the right thing to do. It's because just that little bit in common is enough to give rise to the kind of friendship Pomme and Suzanne have: it's emotionally profound, lasts for years, and materially enables them both to do more with their lives.
The struggle is, of course, still terribly costly. Soon after their first meeting, Pomme and Suzanne both have their lives derailed. The path to them finally finding their footing is uncertain and never goes in only one direction. So, the film's final images of their two unconventional families enjoying a day out together becomes one of Varda's most powerful.
The Spongers (1978)
This is the premiere feature of a blacklisted theater director. No surprise then, that this film works mainly on the strength of its performances and dialogue, and uses them to look into bureaucracy and poverty. The central character, Pauline, is a single mother who cares for her daughter Paula. Pauline is about to have her possessions taken from her due to the the hair-splitting restrictions and tests imposed on her attempts to feed, house, and clothe her family. Paula, meanwhile, has been in a care home providing services for Down's Syndrome; the City Council plans to move her to an old folks' home, flatly denying that any harm will come of this, despite protests from Pauline and from doctors. Pauline spends the whole film trying to fix this situation. The people she meets speak in clichés and red tape.
There's an even deeper frustration in how this film sets Pauline's problems alongside the citywide preparations for Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee. There are Union Jacks everywhere. The film opens with the construction of a huge display of Elizabeth's face. Near the end, the film returns to this display, lit up at night, a celebratory icon of all the indifference and sneering contempt Pauline encounters throughout the film. In The Spongers, it seems perverse to call the celebration of the monarchy a "jubilee," a word that originates in a tradition of forgiving debts and freeing slaves.
Despite everything, Pauline and Paula are still drawn in by the festivities. Paula reenacts Elizabeth's coronation in her care home. Children gather in the streets. Like Jia Zhangke's Platform, this is partly a film about people's capacity to share their feelings with each other through objects and practices, and how easily it can be trivialized. Interestingly, The Spongers's ending is similar to that of another of Jia's films.
And even though most of the film is infuriating, there's still a possibility for humor and joy in its world. As repulsive as the symbols of the monarchy are, what comes through above all when Paula is reenacting the coronation is how happy she is when she's at play. One of the film's best scenes features Pauline's aunt Gertie having a night out at a local club. She gets up on stage for an impromptu comedy-music routine. I laughed harder at this than almost anything else I watched last year even though the film as a whole is so upsetting.
I watched this due to the influence of a friend of mine who recovers and shares episodes of "Play for Today", the BBC TV program The Spongers came from, as did the superb film Penda's Fen and a film once intended as a sequel to The Spongers. As he notes, this is a criminally underseen film. It deserves better.
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