The 'Nique reviews films of 2006

Judging from the recent Golden Globes and Screen Actors' Guild Awards, this has not been a spectacular year for film, but one could dredge up that same miserable statement about many previous years in the not-so-distant past. Luckily, there were a few great films littered throughout the year, culminating in a recent influx of truly superior work. This, ironically-named "End of '06 Surge" in film climaxed with the release of two very different films-my most highly recommended films of 2006, Children of Men and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón crafts Children of Men through a vast series of extremely long cuts coupled with a disembodied camera that never seems to float too closely to its characters. The camera, and therefore the audience, remains at arms length from this realistic future world, as if we are Clive Owen's steady companion in his dangerous journey across England to save the only pregnant woman on the planet.

Children of Men ranks, by far, as Cuarón's best work to date, exploring the present danger of European extreme nationalism and its precarious position in today's world. Owen serves as a perfect audience surrogate, with his pragmatism and simmering passion pushing the film into the darker corners of human embattlement with one another. Cuarón recognizes the need to separate the audience from this world, using the lens as a human eye to curiously explore this warped existence.

The "money shots" in the film are simply fantastic, unmatched by most entire films. One involves a continuous shot inside a small car where our pivoting camera catches the car moving frantically backwards while a camera in the car is suddenly shot and another violently swings out a door, catapulting a menacing motorcyclist over the hood of the moving car, slamming him to the pavement and sending his bike hurtling through the air.

The other marvelous shot is the much-publicized "long cut" that spans approximately nine minutes without a single edit. And this isn't a steady holding shot; it's an extremely intricate tracking sequence that Cuarón's friend and fellow filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan's Labyrinth) still marvels at in their interview on Charlie Rose's program.

It seems Mexican cinema is experiencing a rebirth with Cuarón, del Toro and Alejandro Iñárritu, (director of Babel) leading the pack. Finally plowing into the American mainstream, these three are quickly making a name for themselves in the elite of modern cinema.

German director Tom Tykwer leaves his imprint on Perfume, a movie that is based on an extremely popular German book of the same name. Anyone familiar with the director will know that he is nowhere near a novice; his previous film Heaven elicited so much transcendence that it is difficult to tear away from the rolling credits.

Tykwer explores what it means to depict the sense of smell indirectly through the senses of sight and sound. He uses quick edits of voluptuous images, overlaid with gushes of unique sounds to depict the acute sense of smell that the protagonist has acquired.

In this instance, the protagonist slowly becomes a serial killer in his quest for the ultimate scent: that of a woman. Yet Tykwer stages these killings in a manner such that they seem to be the most benign aspect of the film. And indeed, the protagonist sees the murders as simply a necessary step in capturing each woman's scent, as before he began his killing spree, he had attempted to get the women to volunteer for his bizarre scent capturing routine to no avail.

The film toys with the notion of grand power in the sense of smell. Just as the audience is manipulated by emotive imagery and swelling orchestral music, Tykwer attempts the same using a spectacular and, ultimately, hypnotizing smell.

The audience sees a huge mass of characters manipulated and controlled by this scent in what one could call one of the most bizarre film climaxes ever committed to celluloid.

And if one is removed from the film for a moment from the sheer shock of the climax, the film reveals how easily both film characters and audience members are manipulated by their senses. Just as Haneke's Funny Games reveals how we're manipulated by screen violence, this too broadens the scope of manipulation to all sensory experiences. The narrative simply serves as an entertaining tablet on which to scratch and sniff.

These two films, while vastly different, both utilize a unique film language in which to explore the depths of how we experience film and how the medium manipulates our thoughts and ideas.

If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing these two films yet, put them on your list right away. You won't be disappointed.