It’s appropriate that the peculiar worldview of Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto should be communicated most unabashedly through the appearance of his fuzzy, humanoid caricatures. Hopelessly gawky, if generally well-meaning, they seem all too aware of themselves, as though perpetually and trepidly balancing mixed feelings toward a silent creator who fashioned them lovingly but lazily into quasi-entities of asymmetrical buffoonery. Bozzetto’s geometrically plump, neckless drawings (the middle-aged moral-seeker Mr. Rossi being perhaps the most iconic), often cloned ad nauseam to represent crumbling empires and misled, crusading races, are exemplars of off-kilter, misshapen samehood; their fumetti-inspired schnozzolas, globosely Cro-Magnon foreheads and bristly, calligraphic moustaches devilishly suggest that corporeal blemishes may define human form more crucially than any pulchritudinous ideal. And by vibrantly conflating Saul Bass’s pithy paeans to manmade progress with Jan Svankmajer’s bleakly comic illustrations of the numbingly cyclical futility of society, Bozzetto arrives at a baroque, hand-inked philosophy that’s simultaneously cynical and humanistic.

Naught-eur Davis mythologizes her own rise to sub-fame in Finding Bliss, about a love-luckless twentysomething named Jody (Leelee Sobieski) who finds herself splicing together cum shots post-film school out of necessity while she nurses her own rom-com script. The film tiptoes confusedly around Davis’s de facto frigidity, desperately attempting to avoid judging the sexually gawky, but instead appearing hopelessly out of touch with its cracker-thin characters; Jody’s discomfort with nudity makes her simply seem socially skittish, but when she reacts to a purple dildo as though she’s never even deigned to hold a showerhead to her quivering self, we feel the film cheating out on its Valley milieu. And naturally, all the denizens of the adult entertainment company that employs Jody have hearts of pure gold and heads of pure fluff: office nebbish Gary (P.J. Byrne) offers perpetual apologies for the industry’s unflappable crassness; faux-cynical director Jeff Drake (Matthew Davis) eventually reveals his extant mainstream aspirations; and producer Irene (Kristen Johnston) displays unlikely lenience toward Jody’s clandestine theft of afterhours studio time and “film stock” (has there been a garden variety erotica feature shot on celluloid since the mid-’80s?). The only character worth sympathizing with is air-brained, pretty-boy porn star Dick Harder (Jamie Kennedy), primarily because he, too, fails to laugh at the ossified comic inanity of Davis’s script (voluminous stretches of anguished silenced are broken only for a half-second chuckle at a punning Gladiator/Glad He Ate Her title).

Unlike the similarly bucolic and gesture-driven milieu of French films such as Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette or Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, Stéphane Brizé’s Mademoiselle Chambon is more fascinated by how an individual can become entrapped by his or her singular essence. At its most gently successful, the movie is a character study with intensely baroque observations; at its more noticeable nadir, however, it’s a trite and partially incomprehensible ersatz-tragedy.

The film’s protagonist, Jean (Vincent Lindon), is a middle-class mason who falls for his grade school-aged son’s teacher, the mademoiselle of the title (Sandrine Kiberlain), after she inspires within him a passion his more pragmatic wife (Aure Atika) fails to incite within the deadened restrictions of child-centric domesticity. What’s crucially inventive about director Stéphane Brizé’s exploration of this franc-a-dozen premise is that Jean’s life before Mlle. Chambon never seems stifling or even particularly unfulfilling. We see Jean happily fumbling over his son’s language homework and tenderly caring for his sickly father; these scenes establish a false sense of propriety that the movie desperately needs for its central love story to feel star-crossed, but they also provocatively suggest a man who interprets masculine nobility, at least in part, as genetic stewardship. And Lindon renders the manual intelligence of his wood-working, house-building everyman with peculiar sensuality: His large hands never seem leathery or worn, but kinetic and mystical, expressing even while stationary all the muddied feelings that never quite reach his brain.

The cinema of Stan Brakhage has been interpreted as abstract, mythopoeic, philological, and lyrical, but it’s his hyper-auteurist approach that might be most instructive. It’s surely an ironic stroke to associate the filmmaker with auteurism, a critical theory developed to celebratorily grant Hollywood directors ownership of the art they subtly baked into their cookie-cutter money-makers and crowd-pleasers; so draconian were Brakhage’s ideals that he once denounced all studio-produced movies as futilely inartistic. But engaging with Brakhage’s meditative, kaleidoscopic canon often requires doubting, scrutinizing, and—finally—redefining the tools with which one observes and processes art. And when the issue of authorship arises elsewhere, it’s hard to resist envisioning Mothlight or The Deadspringing directly and pugnaciously from their creator’s forehead in ebullient shafts of light, gawkily twirling about the nearest film projector to stun a small, unsuspecting audience, and eventually coming to rest with a defiant clang in a cylindrical encasing more akin to Aladdin’s lamp than a 16mm canister.

Set chiefly in the needly Australian outback, where even red clay dirt appears angrily lysergic, the movie acts more like a daring career denouement than a functional transition for a crewmember-turned-auteur. Technically aimed between the fractured passion of Richard Lester’sPetulia and the similarly fissured masculinity of Roeg’s masterpiece Bad Timing, the curious, aquiline-eyed zooms and nature-fixated askance angles of Walkabout concatenate into bold statements about the relationship between photography and man’s off-balance, modern lifecycle. It’s as though Roeg is subliminally scolding us for the fetishism of National Geographic magazine and the hegemony it facilitates with his despondently moonlit mountainsides, though his criticisms never congeal into cohesively glib arguments abut race or ecology. Instead, he keeps his camera at a cold distance from the sweaty, scorched on-screen action and, along with the affecting naturalism of the underage and indigenous performances, achieves an aesthetic that remarkably feels human and mechanical at the same time (dare we call it nobly savage?).

The well-known love/hate relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut emits an irresistibly folklorish aura, and as such it’s hard not to pore over a detail-rich article like Richard Brody’s “Auteur Wars” with the imaginative humility typically inspired by Bulfinch’s Mythology. Never mind that Rohmer and Chabrol technically produced the first shorts and features: Godard and Truffaut were the Romulus and Remus of the Nouvelle Vague, precocious aesthetic malcontents who suckled greedily at the royal teat of Cahiers and clawed their way up the smooth precipice of international cinematic renown in tandem. As evinced by the era’s correspondence and testimony, the Godard-Truffaut story appropriates the Cain and Abel motif as well, or even—to draw a parallel with more cultural resonance to the duo—the bloody dynamic between equally impassioned but ever-so-slightly disjunctive visionaries like Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat. But the many, busy, self-contradictory layers of their relationship may additionally reveal what appeared so provocatively fresh in films like The 400 Blows or Breathless—the progenitors of these works were operating in an environment that needn’t, or couldn’t, distinguish between the personal, professional, political, or traditional.

The protagonist of Looking for Eric, Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), is a familiar face in the Loach canon despite the actor’s freshness, but his trajectory represents a unique and resolute act of experimental generosity on the director’s part: It’s as though Loach is gauging how much of the idealism with which he’s always endowed his characters can be converted to surface-level optimism sans contrivance. And, indeed, Eric is an appropriately humble guinea pig. His lanky, curly-haired body is a wiry dearth of confidence made flesh and blood; he looks like a thin, icy conduit for tense hardship without room for the passage of warmth. Attempting to navigate multiple filial relationships from two failed marriages in a small, ever-cluttered flat, he wears the thankless caps of harried parent to teenage recalcitrance and perpetual fuck-up to his circle of co-postal workers, friends, and fellow sports fanatics. But Loach provides him with a spectral safe harbor in the form of soccer deity Eric Cantona, whose imagined presence cajoles and tutors Eric when he’s most desperate a la the ghost-Bogie of Play It Again, Sam, and through Cantona’s nearly behavioral therapist-like interactions, Eric begins to reluctantly tap the romantic roots of his social anxieties.

The oldest film festival in the United States packs such a bloated salmagundi of screenings into 14 days that it can feel like cinephiliac punishment, but the necessity of individual choices ensures a singular, specialized experience for every attendee. The San Francisco International Film Festival is nothing if not facilitative of staunch personalization, requiring one to whittle down a surmountable program by gorging on blurbs and scuttlebutt, dismissing titles on capricious whims and educated hunches. It’s something of a vast cinematic sand farm each critical drone ant must dig his path through alone.

And how often it is that our gut reactions to rumors and press pics prove themselves prescient. The films I’ve seen this year have little in common if viewed as a unified program, but remarkably, nearly all of the triumphs I witnessed—by which I mean individual scenes as much as entire movies—have been structurally unexpected and trenchantly subterranean, moments that seemed to undergo a gawky if earthy growth as I witnessed them. The best of international film art is now an industry of softly human moments; even a restored 1970s-era action-themed gem such as Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright simmers masculine tropes down to their molten essence rather than exploding them. And while not all attempts at subtle revelation have stuck with me beyond absorption, SFIFF 2010 has been, and perhaps will be remembered as, a year of successful susurri standing in quiet defiance against elephantine prestige.

The French have it easy. Their secret agent-era vintage thrillers and corresponding spy parodies are collected under a single, post-modernly collapsed franchise. OSS 117, the cryptic code name for agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, was once a slick, if appropriately artificial, francophonic Bond clone, but the revisionist revival Cairo, Nest of Spies, and its sequelLost in Rio, magnify the character’s dustily patriarchal smugness for post-feminist guffaws. Unfortunately, we’ve been “liberated” from Bond chauvinism before; our era is just as post-Austin Powers as it is post-feminist, though the masculine satire of that trilogy floundered so persistently it made the targeted genre seem elusively, if dryly, comedic. But where the Austin Powers brand splintered predictably off into high concept, potty-sketch echolalia, OSS 117 director Michel Hazanavicius, and his condescendingly cuddly star Jean Dujardin, prefer to teeter on the precipice of homage. And, undeniably, Lost in Rio emulates its swinging-’60s targets with far more technical and spiritual fidelity than Mike Myers’s ham-fisted brood (an orgy scene in the middle of the film features an inspired multiple-split screen montage that divides the flat sex gags being performed into kaleidoscopic bubbles). The bulk of the humor, however, unwisely and unrelentingly dotes on 117’s stale sexism and anticipates his third act “feminine” quasi-epiphany; some of the attempted laughs aren’t even jokes, per se, but deadpan yonic fear (“Tell me when you have to carry something heavy,” he snorts at a female spy imperiously).

Perhaps it’s the bald Ben Kingsley, who plays half of the Ashecliff Hospital’s resident doctoral duo (the other member is Max Von Sydow, looking more Aryan and more menacing every day), or maybe it’s Scorsese’s tendency to spill significance about the surface of his films while neglecting their guts, like a chicken laying eggs with yolks on the outside of their empty shells. But I found some quality of Shutter Island sharply reminiscent of phrenology, an obsolete and rather crackpot science founded on the principle that the qualities of an individual’s personality are physically manifested in the lumps and indentations of their cranium. In the mid-19th century, this study was all the rage — it’s referenced cryptically in several of Poe’s short stories, another easy connection to the timbre of Shutter Island — and “doctors” practicing the discipline identified thirty-seven phrenological organs reaching from where the back of the skull meets the neck up to the lower forehead. And among the attributes these organs are said to control are psychological apparati such as eventuality — the memory of events — and philoprogenitiveness — parental love. They read, in other words, like a checklist of Shutter Island’s pet themes, cerebral triumphs, and Psych 101 blunders.