I recently submitted a ballot for indieWIRE’s annual Critics’ Poll, which offers respondents a chance to create two separate lists of the best films of the year: one comprised of films which received theatrical distribution (which is described as, at minimum, a one week run in a commercial theater in New York City, essentially the same type of release required for Oscar consideration); and a list of the best films which weren’t distributed commercially in 2008––ie: those which screened only at festivals, and/or in other non-commercial venues, and/or outside of New York. Because I see so many films at festivals, I had a far greater pool of candidates for the latter list than the former. My “true” top ten list would combine films which were made readily available to audiences via studio subsidiaries (such as Synecdoche, NY and Rachel Getting Married), with films that I fell in love with at a festival and may never get a chance to see again, and with films which had the bare minimum New York release, but nevertheless were probably still seen by fewer people than the average distributor-less festival hit (such as Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness). That said, I understand the purpose of making the distinction––even if there was no other benefit to it, there’s always the hope that some smaller theatrical and straight-to-DVD distributors will look to the annual Best Undistributed list as a reference to films they might have missed. After all, 2007’s “winner,” Hong Sang Soo’s Woman on the Beach, was purchased and ended up in theaters barely a week into the new year.

In fact, I think singling out films which are still on the market, and in a perfect world wouldn’t be, is so worth doing, that not only am I revealing here the ten titles I included in the poll, but I’m adding a few bonus films. The following list is presented alphabetically and should be considered unranked, with the exception of the first title mentioned — they all deserve to be seen by wider audiences, but the reception thus far bestowed on the work of one French master in particular is actually a travesty.

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Not to be all Barry Jenkins all the time around here (although, with Medicine For Melancholy having its New York premiere tonight at Independent Film Week, it’s a little hard not to be), but with Claire Denis‘ 35 Rhums coming out of TIFF with a lot of goodwill (see my review here), I just remembered Jenkins’ interview from last summer with Dickon Hinchliffe for ShortEnd Magazine. Hinchliffe, from the Brit band Tindersticks, is Denis’ scorer of choice, having worked on Rhums, Friday Night, and Trouble Every Day (with Tindersticks); he’s also composed music for non-Denis films like 40 Shades of Blue and Married Life. The interview is here, and an example of Hinchcliffe’s work is embedded above.

The new Claire Denis film is a Claire Denis film, and there are certain givens that this entails: nothing is spelled out, behavior is highlighted over action or incident, and we’re asked to spend a decent chunk of time getting to know the characters and observing their typical behavior before the status quo is changed just slightly and the film’s concerns start to come into focus.

But, rather shockingly, the new Claire Denis film is also a bittersweet family movie, and the work you put into it early on is paid back in surprisingly tender dividends.

For the first time, Denis is working here with a virtually all-black cast, and as my companion at the press screening noted, there’s a bit of irony that this film is making its North American debut alongside Medicine For Melancholy, a film about a tentative connection between two racially self-conscious young black people which was not only inspired by Denis’ Friday Night but concieved as a generational update. Though Denis’ characters don’t discuss race as compulsively as Jenkins’, it’s not a matter off their minds. Josephine (Mati Diop), the daughter of widowed train operator Lionel (Alex Descas), seems to be studying it at university.

Rhums takes place in and around the working-class apartment complex where Lionel and Josephine live in quasi-incestuous bliss, though from the start Denis conveys the sense that this arrangement can’t last for much longer. One neighbor, Gabrielle, clearly has a thing for the father, while another, Noe, cautiously courts the daughter. This is apparently how this ad hoc family has functioned for ages, but the film’s centerpiece scene sets a reconfiguration of this unit into motion. A night out that doesn’t go as planned leaves the foursome stranded in a cafe where they drink, flirt and dance to cheesy 70s soft rock. Rebelling against his perceived responsibilities to Josephine and Gabrielle’s need, Lionel leaves the other three watching as he hits on an attractive waitress, and waiting up at home for him to return from his walk of shame. Lionel’s disappearing act pushes father and daughter to reconcile their closeness and the tragedy responsible for it, leading to a surprisingly touching and uncynically romantic conclusion.

Much of the film plays like a mystery, as we slowly piece together the roots of each relationship and figure out along with the characters where they’re going and what kind of change they’ll have to endure to get there. Cinematographer and frequent Denis collaborator Agnes Godard paints urban Northern France in muted colors, a maze of highways and train tracks weaving around towering apartment buildings. These cool, geometric fling cabinets for wage workers are, for Noe and Lionel, imprisoning, but for Josephine and Gabrielle, the walls store memories and promise that can’t be easily discarded. This locus of loneliness and longing is also their only outlet for love.

Above: a video for Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free”, from their Rather Ripped album, shot by French cinema bad girl Claire Denis. Daniel Stuyck writes about this, and the four other videos Denis has made for the band, in the new issue of Film Comment:

The antecedent to these pieces is not so much Denis’s previous films as Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray. Conner’s 1961 short, an essential demonstration of the maxim that pop songs are teenage symphonies to God, reads like a list of chemical ingredients for any of these videos: rock and roll; erotic tension (as P. Adams Sitney is at pains to point out, Cosmic Ray predominantly features the “irreverent dance of a naked woman, which he [Conner] photographed himself”); bland images of daily life and consumer culture (Mickey Mouse, hitchhiking Indians, neon signs, the H-bomb) transformed into something surreal. In other words, a strange alchemy—an area where science and religion meet, not unlike drugs. And that ultimate drug state—ecstasy—is what Conner and Denis are ultimately fixed on: Denis’s unfocused whip pans as Sonic Youth slams into its chorus create the same sensation as Conner’s image of skulls birthing from crotches in an instant between two shots, a revelation of new meanings created by a strange combination of elements.

[Via Vinyl is Heavy]