MEEKS CUTOFF

(Kelly Reichert, 2010)

Deliberate and confident in its pacing, Reichert's film is a Western like they used to make them in the 1970s; not just revisionist but challenging the genre's most basic assumptions and markers. Following three families who have broken off from a Wagon Train in the Great Plains of Oregon, led by a grizzled, almost self-consciously mythic Scout named Steven Meek, it's rhythms are suggestive more of art cinema than the Western. Slow pans and extremely gradual dissolves establish the visual scheme of the film, and Reichert repeatedly captures figures isolated against vast landscapes and immense skies as they plod relentlessly across the country.
The characters are indicated through observation, their various dynamics sketched beautifully in the films first act as their situation worsens and they are stretched and tested as people. They are lost and beginning to doubt their guides ability to lead them competently, and tensions grow between the couples, especially when they capture a lone Indian and Meek wants to kill him.
The Indian is an unknowable, implacable presence in their midst and a big element of the mysterious quality that makes the film such a fascinating and occasionally demanding watch. The excellent cast - in which Michelle Williams and Bruce Greenwood are the standouts - combat that difficulty, as does Reichert's sure hand with her regular collaborator Jonathan Raymond's excellent script, always ensuring that the problem at the heart of the plot is foregrounded and expressed through the interplay of her vividly drawn characters.
The feminist angle is obvious but never overstated. This is a film that wants to show what it was like to be a woman on the frontier; not a whore or a female gunslinger, but a married woman in search of a future with her husband and family. The part Williams' character plays in the story is a subtle criticism of how the genre usually ignores the female perspective entirely, and yet the film integrates that into its ensemble portrayal of these pioneers and a sustained study in landscape cinematography.

BLUE VALENTINE

(Derek Cianfrance, 2010)

Cianfrance's brutally honest relationship drama gets it's details right, and it captures emotional tones with painterly precision. Falling in love; an experience hopelessly fudged by so many romantic comedies, here beautifully captured in a few short, telling scenes. The agony and frustration of a toxic relationship, all repetitive arguments and stubborn misunderstanding, here portrayed with awful, microscopic perception.
The structure is so simple and yet undeniably effective: alternating between the end of a relationship and the beginning, Blue Valentine offers us a glimpse of how these two people might be happy together, before crushingly revealing - never obviously, always subtly, through character and behaviour - how their choices and decisions have made them so miserable together.
Cianfrance shoots the contemporary scenes in claustrophobic close-ups so that we're right there in the tight gap between these people, the backgrounds a haze of colour and abstraction. The flashback scenes are grainier but the mise-en-scene is looser, more accessibly attuned to environment, giving audience and characters room to breathe.
Some of the many ironies are a little too on the nose - calling the motel room where much key action occurs "the Future", for instance - but the script is impressively crafted in its ear for the rhythms of casual speech. Particularly great is the perfect capture of the way conversations can get away from people, from banter to a supernova of an argument in a few Ill-thought phrases, and how these things acquire their own momentum.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both extraordinary, capturing the contrast between their earlier youthful promise and joy and the weariness of later real life, and more besides, with beautiful naturalism. Grizzly Bear's music is a fine fit for the material, and Cianfrance proves he has a great eye and a feel for working with actors.
Finally, its quite emotionally devastating, and quite possibly the worst date movie ever.