The 50 best films
of 2015
in the US
No 3
Anomalisa
Continuing our countdown of the best movies released in the US this year, we can’t stop thinking about Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s existential stop-motion romance
Catherine ShoardTuesday 15 December 2015 11.55 GMT
Anomalisa is a perfect film I was lucky enough to first watch it in perfect conditions: alone, abroad, exhausted, before returning to work in a hotel room as pleasantly, depressingly bland as that in which most of the movie unfolds.
Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion masterpiece is set largely in a bedroom at the Fregoli, a moderately upscale Cincinnati hotel, home for the night to Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a customer service guru due to give a keynote speech the next day. Everyone but Michael not only looks the same – the puppets (uncanny enough as it is) have identical heads, save for hair and make-up. They also sound the same (all are voiced, without modulation for age or gender, by Tom Noonan).
Michael suffers, you gradually decipher, from a delusion called Fregoli, in which the sufferer thinks believe everyone is the same person. Anomalisa is about the horror and
isolation of that – but also about a larger loneliness borne of living in increasingly identik world. A world in which connection and communication are muffled by hegemony. In which people blur and smooth into one another, in which everyone has the same purchase on everything: all their experiences, including those that once seemed rare and special.
isolation of that – but also about a larger loneliness borne of living in increasingly identik world. A world in which connection and communication are muffled by hegemony. In which people blur and smooth into one another, in which everyone has the same purchase on everything: all their experiences, including those that once seemed rare and special.
But it is also about what it is like – in the words of its hero – “to be human, to ache”. It gives us the most graphic representation yet of how it feels to fall in love with someone, to sense a connection you can’t explain – and then to witness it crumble in front of your face. For Michael is not the only person he recognises as different from every other member of the human race. Also staying at the hotel is Lisa, who has a different – even disfigured – face, and a voice courtesy not of Noonan but Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Their courtship is the heart of the film, and it takes you into enchantingly unknown territory. The real-time, full-frontal sex scene is both unlike anything you’ve ever seen before and miles more touching, human – and even realistic – than cinema has yet managed.
I saw the film for a second time recently, in more singular settings: in London, at home, not returning to a room full of throw pillows in a manicured mountain village of condo upon condo. Rather than lessening the impact, it reconfirmed for me the movie’s genius. It is a fleeting film (just 90 minutes) filled with richness and humour and endless interest, with breathtakingly-realised conceits and moments I think might haunt me forever. I can’t wait to watch it again.
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