Some Overlooked Films from 2023

Passages, Origin, Fremont, and More

It’s odd how magazines start releasing “Best of the Year” lists in November (well before many films have even set a U.S. release date). Was there ever a time when commemorating the end of the year happened after the year’s end, or have press outlets always aimed to stay ahead of the calendar for better reasons than click-through-rates? 

I suppose one upside to this trend is that the public gets a heads up about a handful of good movies before they hit theaters alongside fifty other mediocre ones. But, as an independent critic, I’m not very fond of this tradition. The posting feels premature and makes those of us outside the press circuit feel late to the year-in-review party. It staggers the conversation.

With that in mind, I'm not inclined to provide a conventional end of year list here. There are so many out there already that endorsing a gem like The Boy and the Heron feels superfluous at this point. So, instead of a “top films” list, I’m opting for a list of 2023 films that I feel deserve more attention than they got on those November lists (not to mention during awards season thus far) due to their independent nature. 

These films expanded my notion of what a movie could be, offered up proof that there is more out there for filmmakers to explore than tired biopics, quippy IP remakes, and instagram-friendly indies. (For thoughts on films of the latter varieties, and other 2023 releases, check out my new Letterboxd profile.)

Passages

In his review, Richard Brody says of the film’s protagonist Tomas, "he embodies the freedom of thought and action on which the very notion of art is based." While I agree with this observation, I’m inclined to point out how the film does not portray this freedom kindly. Rather, director Ira Sachs seems more interested in showing how Tomas’s freedom yields an entitlement that infringes on the emotional well-being of those closest to him.

The film opens with a scene that introduces Tomas as the exacting artistic force he is: a film director cutting an actor down to size when he feels his posture does not communicate the sense of ease required of his character. This scene frames the rest of the movie as Sachs shifts gears toward a portrait of Tomas after the production wraps. 

Thus, instead of retreading the familiar territory of an obsessive artist at work, we see who Tomas becomes when he doesn’t have a project to channel his authority into, and what we find, to the detriment of everyone around him, is that all his anxious and manipulative energy simply gets allocated elsewhere.

I found this depiction of Tomas's personality compelling because it did not – as many films about artists are wont to do – seek to glorify the genius of the director, but instead focused on the dark and obsessive pathology that can – and often does – motivate the art of directing. 

And what happens when Tomas's compulsion to shape the world around his desire exhausts itself? He's set adrift. Everytime his lies or seductions fail him, he reenters the same state: biking aimlessly through the streets of Paris, his thoughts racing, likely locating the inspiration for his next movie.

Origin

Is there another film from the past year that achieves similarly dramatic highs whilst sublimating its protagonist’s personal struggles to a higher social goal? More often, films lean on the assumption that the political is often in conflict with the personal. Frequently this trope suggests personal dilemmas overshadow the quest for systemic justice, but in Ava DuVernay’s film we see something resembling a symbiosis between the individual and the society at-large. 

While I’ve read some thoughtful criticism about the argument at the center of the film, I can’t help admiring its bold originality anyway. The adaptation itself is radical. Based on Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction book, the film tracks both the book's argument and Wilkerson’s process of researching and writing it during a time of incredible personal turmoil. 

As a creative enterprise, I’m inclined to study it, to pick-up Wilkerson’s book and consume every interview I can find with the author, just to get a sense of how DuVernay grounded the personal and political elements of her material in such an inventive and uncompromising way. But to intellectualize the film like this feels reductive because of the emotional depths DuVernay reaches in between Wilkerson’s moments of intellectual labor: poignant images of grief and empathic renderings of sequences of devastating cruelty.

At times, it is a heavy handed film, but the subject matter is heavy. I could feel the transformation our audience underwent while watching it, deeply engaged with the ideas on screen and the emotional struggles its protagonist endured whilst formulating them. DuVernay uses that emotion to an ultimately just end – against caste, racism, and bigotry of all kinds – while opening up the scope of material film adaptations can absorb.

Fremont

It was hard not to think about Parul Sehgal’s New Yorker article on the trauma plot while watching Fremont. After all, a lot of the film’s power comes from the way it challenges the voyeuristic impulse in its audience to know more about Donya’s (Anaita Wali Zada) backstory. Babak Jalali’s script even satirizes this tendency with a therapist played by Gregg Turkington who, during his sessions with Donya, reads aloud passages from his favorite immigrant story, White Fang. 

What information we do get about Donya’s past as a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and the impact it had on her, is communicated in present tense fragments: quiet moments of insomnia, conversations about loneliness, and droll bits of wisdom from her boss at the fortune cookie factory where she works. It’s in these quiet and withholding moments that the film explodes with personality, humor, and longing. 

I was fortunate enough to attend a Q&A screening of the film at the Nuart with Turkington, Zada, and Jalali where I learned that Zada – a journalist who (like Donya) left her home in Afghanistan when the Taliban took control of the government – had no acting experience prior to the film, which is remarkable given the film stakes so much of its success on her performance. Turns out, she’s a natural. 

But, as Zada noted in the Q&A, her participation in the film was about more than acting. Her greater hope was that the film would start new conversations about Afghanistan. If a film as powerful as this one can’t do that, I’m not sure what will. Here is as good a place to start as any: https://evergreenreview.com/read/sharbat-gula-is-not-lost/ 

P.S. There are other films I thought to include here – The Taste of Things, Showing Up, Rotting in the Sun, Afire – and there are likely other equally praiseworthy films out there that I have yet to see. But they aren’t paying me to do this (not yet anyway) so please do yourselves a favor and check all of those out as well – even though I haven’t made as much a fuss about them as I’d like to – and keep an ear out for the other less buzzed about gems of 2023 . (And if you’re looking for more end-of-year list fun, check out David Ehrlich’s Top 25 of 2023 remix. Lots of great picks in there as well, not to mention a pretty hype way to relive the year in movies.)