Homework [1989]

 Kiarostami’s meditation on what it means to be a child in an adult’s world, and in how behavioural dynamics of kids – demonstrable even by something as seemingly ordinary as school homework – are moulded and shaped by both familial contexts and political forces, achieved multi-hued dimensions in this bravura documentary. Furthermore, its nuanced, ironic and disarmingly radical elucidation of the form’s fluidity – achieved through manipulation of the camera’s gaze and inducing of fictive elements that undermine the truth-seeking role that documentaries are expected to play – magnificently presaged his dazzling form-smashing masterpiece Close-Up. It also capped a sublime triptych on pedagogy along with the terrific docu First Graders, which recorded a teacher’s incessant instilling of behavioural traits in a school, and the timeless film Where Is the Friend’s Home?, which portrayed how homework can elicit heroic camaraderie. Influenced by the difficulty that he himself faced while helping his son, he ostensibly formulated this “visual study” and “research project” to comprehend this ubiquitous phenomenon. However, by training his disarmingly equanimous lens on first graders at a working-class boys’ school, he crafted something that transcended the said premise. What emerged through the “interviews” of his adorable subjects is a society driven by punitive culture and fear of reprisals – the kids innately associate “punishment” with belts, aren’t aware of what praise means, and promptly rate their love for doing homework over watching cartoons, even though that’s manifestly untrue – as well as how they’re oftentimes helped by their elder sisters as their parents are either illiterate or too busy or both, and the regrettable seeping in of political narratives even in the “safe” space of schools, as evidenced by references to then ongoing Iraq-Iran War.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

First Graders [1984]

 Made under the auspices of ‘Kanun’ (local parlance for the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults) – as were most of Kiarostami’s films during the 1970s and 80s, in keeping with the fact that he himself had set up its filmmaking department in 1970 – First Graders was a remarkable early work in the Iranian giant’s canon. It reiterated his impressive ability to evoke nuanced renderings from children that he’d already demonstrated until then, exquisitely presaged the two magnificent films that he made subsequently which arguably remain among the greatest works involving children (Where Is the Friend’s House? and Homework), and provided glimpses of his adroitness in complementing wry social observations with bold modernist impulses. This simultaneously deadpan and playful documentary – it impishly subverted the form through recording of seemingly spontaneous interactions that must’ve been subtly coloured by the presence of a camera in the periphery, albeit a hidden one – was set completely within the confines of a school for boys from lower economic backgrounds and located at a working-class neighbourhood in Tehran. Filmed alternatively among chaotic outdoor gatherings and in intimate indoor spaces, differential focus was accorded to how the school’s surprisingly patient and ostensibly even-handed principal – manifesting the paternalistic and moralist tendencies of the larger society – spends an inordinate amount of time disciplining, chiding, instructing and counselling kids at his chamber, for a variety of childish infarctions that were as deeply revelatory of their social contexts as the carefree worlds that they inhabit. Though mostly tight in scope and framing, Kiarostami at times delectably cut loose by amusingly observing kids in candid group settings, and even through something as digressive as a euphorically floating plastic bag.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

First Case, Second Case [1979]

 Banned upon its release and largely buried for next three decades, Kiarostami’s discursive, loosely structured and deceptively piercing essay First Case, Second Case was, primarily, an astute pedagogic examination. Made for Kanun – the filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults that he helmed – it presented two alternative outcomes to seven students being thrown out of the class by their teacher, as one was creating disturbances, with all suspended for a week unless they reveal the miscreant. In the first scenario, one of the students eventually divulges the perpetrator to be able to get back in, while in the second, they refuse to budge and continue to remain outside for the entire stretch. Kiarostami used this as springboards for inducing reflections and opinions from an extraordinarily diverse group of people, ranging from parents, teachers and education board members to intellectuals, artists, political activists and religious leaders. What unfolds is a fascinating debate on informing on one’s comrades vis-à-vis demonstration of collective solidarity, along with underlying structural critiques, and thereby a fascinating Rorschach test on the experiment’s self-consciously serious participants. The work, incidentally, got interlaced with sharp political undercurrents and topicality as the Iranian Revolution was transpiring when it was in production. He made shrewd changes in his contributors to underscore that tumultuous moment in time, which moulded it into an allegorical document on children of the revolution and foreshadowed an inevitable cycle wherein calls for solidarity during a popular uprising oftentimes regresses into informing on others once the new status quo has set in. On a wry note, the picture that the teacher is seen drawing, viz. an ear, was an allusion to surveillance.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

30 Favourite Films from 2023

1. The Zone of Interest | Jonathan Glazer | UK/Poland
2. The Mother of All Lies | Asmae El Moudir | Morocco
3. Occupied City | Steve McQueen | The Netherlands
4. Bad Living / Mal Viver | Joao Canijo | Portugal
5. The Battle | Vera Egito | Brazil
6. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World | Radu Jude | Romania
7. El Juicio / The Trial | Ulises de la Orden | Argentina
8. Our Body / Notre Corps | Claire Simon | France
9. Afire / Roter Himmel | Christian Petzold | Germany
10. Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan | US
11. About Dry Grasses | Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Turkey
12. Youth (Spring) | Wang Bing | China
13. Living Bad / Viver Mal | Joao Canijo | Portugal
14. The Old Oak | Ken Loach | UK
15. And, Towards Happy Alleys | Sreemoyee Singh | India
16. Killers of the Flower Moon | Martin Scorsese | US
17. Four Daughters | Kaouther Ben Hania | Tunisia
18. Kayo Kayo Colour? / Which Colour? | Shahrukhkhan Chavada | India
19. Green Border | Agnieszka Holland | Poland
20. 20,000 Species of Bees | Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren | Spain
21. Yannick | Quentin Dupieux | France
22. The Delinquents | Rodrigo Moreno | Argentina
23. Against the Tide | Sarvnik Kaur | India
24. Aattam / The Play | Anand Ekarshi | India
25. Anatomy of a Fall | Justine Triet | France
26. The Teachers' Lounge | Ilker Çatak | Germany
27. The Plough / Le Grand Chariot | Philippe Garrel | France
28. Fallen Leaves | Aki Kaurismaki | Finland
29. Terrestrial Verses | Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami | Iran
30. La Chimera | Alice Rohrwacher | Italy

Music [2023]

 It’s rare for a filmmaker to remain steadfastly committed to their politics or form or both over the entire stretch of their career, and to defiantly walk a rigorously crystalized path unconcerned with what’s considered de rigueur for the times. Angela Schanelec – co-founder of the “Berlin School” – belongs to the dwindling group of such outmoded giants as Ken Loach, Patricio Guzmán, Philippe Garrel, Hong Sang-soo et al. Music – the sexagenarian’s 10^th feature – is a spare, elliptical, elusive, experimental and characteristically Bressonian exercise exactly along the lines of her abstruse filmography. In other words, it definitely isn’t a film that one should approach either uninformed or expecting conventional storytelling. On paper, it’s an interpretative modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; however, it’s defined as much by its references to the Greek play as its departures from it. As a reviewer pithily remarked, it’s “a postmodern expression of a premodern text”. In its barest essence, it’s a tale of tragic union between Jon (Aliocha Schneider), an orphaned guy who serves a prison sentence upon inadvertently killing a man, and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a guard in that same prison where they get acquainted. Their seemingly contented marital life is short-lived as he starts losing his vision, though that’s partly compensated through his passionate vocation for singing. Their union, unfortunately, is based on a dark coincidence unbeknownst to either, which eventually and inevitably leads to suicide when that gets uncovered. Composed of sparse, austere and muted tableaux, and with long stretches of dialogue-free sequences interspersed with evocative classical diegetic music, this fleeting, exacting and stripped-to-bones work obliquely elucidates how a terrible price can be extracted by both knowing too much and too little.

Director: Angela Schanelec

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: German/Greek

Country: Germany

All of Us Strangers [2023]

 Adam (Andrew Scott), the protagonist in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, is a man shaped, bound and defined by internalized trauma – on account of his parents’ death when he was just 12, and growing up as an alienated orphan on account of his homosexuality – and the consequent rootlessness, social estrangement and deep-rooted feelings of otherness. He, as a result, exists in a liminal space haunted by past ghosts, detached present and formless future. His loneliness and melancholy are complemented by his sense of being stuck and intensely secluded life. A drifting television screenwriter, he lives alone in a swanky but thoroughly deserted upscale high-rise in London. Two parallel – and ostensibly unconnected – threads suddenly unfold that throw his ennui-filled life into an emotional whirlpool. On one hand he finds his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) at the suburban house he grew up in – exactly as they were just before they died, thus making the film seem an intriguing mix of magic realism, ghost story and a schizophrenic mirage induced by the subconscious – and starts reconnecting with them and bringing them up to speed about his life, including his being gay. On the other, he befriends and gets sucked into an intense relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), an enigmatic, volatile, borderline self-destructive younger guy – and seemingly the only other resident in that building – who exudes a troubled vulnerability. Led by powerhouse turns by Scott, Mescal and Foy, suffused with rippling emotionality, comprising of a glorious disco-era soundtrack, and adapted from the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, this achingly intimate exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and being queer boldly walked a delicate line between passionate melodrama and sentimental contrivances.

Director: Andrew Haigh

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Fantasy

Language: English

Country: UK

May December [2023]

 As Todd Haynes’ May December opens, we see a warm social gathering, on a sunny day, at the charming house of Gracie (Julianne Moore), genially hosting her guests, and her husband Joe (Charles Melton), operating a barbecue grill. Something, however, is clearly off, as Gracie seems overly effusive, while Joe appears withdrawn. And, if their massive age difference doesn’t mean anything in itself, it gains disturbing ramifications when it's eventually revealed that 23 years back, the then 36-year-old Gracie was caught being intimate with 13-year-old Joe. Loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, this had created a massive public scandal, evoked media frenzy, and led to her arrest and prison sentence during which she ended up giving birth to Joe’s child; most bizarrely, she resumed this paedophilic affair upon release, left her husband and son, and married Joe; furthermore, they had more kids, and even ended up staying together since then. The film’s opening added an intriguing parallel dimension in the form of acclaimed actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) joining them to initiate her preparedness for portraying Gracie for an “independent film” in the making, thus cheekily alluding to greater nuance and respectability vis-à-vis lurid tabloids and exploitative telenovelas. Elizabeth walks a fine line between detached observations and sly manipulations, as her voyeuristic curiosity and saviour complex get simultaneously stoked while embedding herself into their lives. Meanwhile, in parallel, we see Gracie’s conniving relationship with the thoroughly lost Joe, who she bullies, stonewalls and weepily manipulates depending on what the situation demands. Shot in overexposed images resembling soap operas and led by the two solid lead turns, it captured the double manipulations and fraught relationships with cool rigour and parodic self-awareness.

Director: Todd Haynes

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: US

Living Bad (Viver Mal) [2023]

 In Living Bad – João Canijo’s riveting reverse shot to the magnificent Bad Living – the Portuguese filmmaker shifted his gaze from the women running the decadent, crumbling hotel in Ofir to the guests visiting it over the same weekend. While it had interesting departures – three episodes in place of a single thread, the tone more cutting, and the colour palettes tad brasher – it too centred on feral, mutually lacerating relationships with manipulative matriarchs. Further, like its companion piece, the same exchanges between the hotel’s proprietors and guests reappear here, albeit foregrounded on the latter POVs this time, while conversations from the other side continue bleeding in; and this formal ingenuity added playful layers to the abrasive tales. These, alongside the choice of often filming the charged interactions from outside glass panes and through reflections – the sumptuous visual compositions were orchestrated in both films by cinematographer Leonor Teles – reiterated the diptych’s decidedly voyeuristic overtones. Canijo adapted motifs for the vignettes, each featuring toxic three-way relationships, from three plays by August Strindberg. In ‘Playing with Fire’ – tad reminiscent of Östlund's wickedly funny Triangle of Sadness – a photographer (Nuno Lopes) is intensely jealous of his alluring, successful, narcissistic and possibly cheating wife, and their marriage is further strained by his mom’s incessant phone calls. In ‘The Pelican’, a self-serving woman (Leonor Silveira) is having a secret affair with the opportunistic husband of her anxiety-ridden daughter (Lia Carvalho). And in ‘Motherly Love’ – the best of the three – a possessive, elitist mother (Beatriz Batarda) is clinically undermining her fragile daughter’s (Leonor Vasconcelos) intimate relationship with another woman (Carolina Amaral), because she can’t accept losing the “apple of her eyes” to someone from a lower class.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama/Omnibus Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Bad Living (Mal Viver) [2023]

 João Canijo’s Bad Living – which formed an ingeniously imagined and magnificently shaped diptych with Living Bad, where the two counterpointed and bled into each other like reflections on a shattered mirror – is a work of such dazzling formal exactitude, simmering emotional ferocity and hypnotic visual compositions that it leaves one crushed and exhilarated in parallel. It, incidentally, eloquently recalled the supercharged undercurrents of Bergman and the unsettlingly visceral palettes of Martel, while retaining a distinctive perspective and texture. Set in a hotel in the coastal town of Ofir – its retro décor, forlorn atmosphere, and interplay of spaciousness and claustrophobia made it a brooding character, in the same way as the sublimely beguiling and instinctively unnerving Saint-Tropez villa in Deray’s mesmeric La Piscine was – the deceptively fluid narrative is structured akin to a fiendish voyeur gliding along the different spaces in order to snoop at what’s transpiring, and weaving those intensely private conversations into an impression of complex intergenerational fault-lines that’re coloured by unresolved past contexts, memories, blames, wounds and deep-set misunderstandings. Over the course of a weekend, we witness the devastatingly fateful unravelling of the dysfunctional relationship between four troubled women – the abrasive matriarch Sara (Rita Blanco) who owns the failing property, her irrevocably crumbling elder daughter Piedade (Anabela Moreira) and volatile younger daughter Raquel (Cleia Almeida) who manage operations, and Piedade’s ravishing, estranged, grief-stricken daughter Salomé (Madalena Almeida) – who’re craving for their respective mother’s love, but continuously scarring each other in the process. Rapturously shot in arrestingly framed long, static shots – with the vibrant colours beautifully juxtaposing the moody, lonely atmosphere – the astonishingly enacted film substantiated Tolstoy’s hypothesis that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Youth (Spring) [2023]

 Shot over 6 years (between 2014 and 2019), and condensed from a staggering 2600 hours of footage into an immersive and observational 3 ½ hour documentary essay – which, incidentally, made this a relatively concise work in Wang Bing’s formidable canon – Youth (Spring) is composed on a canvas that’s simultaneously expansive and intimate, rigorous and free-flowing, focussed and digressive. The first chapter in his planned ‘Youth Trilogy’, it comprises of vignettes stitched into a long-form impressionist reflection on the textile hub of Zhilli – the town, located close to Shanghai, has over 18,000 privately-run workshops catering mostly to the domestic market – where around 300,000 migrant youngsters work. With thematic preoccupations, understated tone and unassuming aesthetics that reminded me of Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary masterwork Still Life, the film painted a picture of grind, compounded by the gritty complex and claustrophobic spaces where they both slog and stay. Yet – and this is what made it such a gently affective exercise – it was never oppressively dreary or pedantic, despite the undertones of melancholy and urban desolation. Rather, it’s easy, organic, lively, jaunty and even hopeful at times, as we see kids in late teens and early 20s horsing around, flirting, indulging in silly and carefree frolic, acting like cool hipsters, lip-syncing to bouncy pop music (played at the shop-floors to alleviate monotony), creating pipe dreams, having relationships, and building camaraderie, despite the grimy environs and exhausting labour. Yes, they also recognize the exploitation and participate in collective wage negotiations with their stuffy bosses, even if these end in futility. What emerged through Bing’s empathetic gaze on a slew of individuals, was a vivid, kaleidoscopic and eloquently real portrayal of community and life in action.

Director: Wang Bing

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Yannick [2023]

 Yannick, Quentin Dupieux’s sharp and subversive cultural satire – and one of two films that he made this year alongside the surrealist farce Daaaaaalí! – packed considerable punch despite its unassuming setup and narrative brevity. It touched upon the relationship between art/artistes and the audience – especially the unsaid and sacrosanct social contract that one enters into while partaking in that relationship – and the exponential rise of boorish trolls, who’d like nothing more than to heckle, disrupt and even cancel anything that offends their sensibilities. This darkly funny, impishly acrid and brilliantly staged work, therefore, also emerged as remarkably topical. The compact chamber-piece, ensconced nearly completely within a small Parisian theatre, starts off with a play in progress – a domestic dramedy called “Le Cocu”, featuring a self-effacing ménage à trois and being performed by three actors (Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin and Sébastien Chassagne) – watched by a spattering of audience. The show, however, is brought to an awkward halt by the eponymous Yannick (Raphaël Quenard), a watchman at a night parking, who’s taken a rare day off and travelled a fair bit in order to catch it. He’d come expecting to forget his personal woes and be entertained; however, upon finding it despairing instead of uplifting, he interrupts the play to express his indignation, unbothered by the mix of bemusement, irritation and anger that it elicits. And, upon realizing that his outrage isn’t being taken seriously, he decides to take control of the situation in the most unexpectedly absurdist manner. Led by an incredible turn by Quenard as the neurotic working-class anti-hero – ridiculous, exasperating, amusing and vulnerable in turns – this irreverent little gem certainly doesn’t run the risk of not being enjoyable enough.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France