Seconds [1966]

 Seconds – the nightmarish final chapter in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ – wasn’t an overly political film, unlike the two that preceded it, viz. The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. It was, instead, a bleak and discordant foray into mid-life crisis and existential disillusionment, along with an unsettling study on the malleability of identity – through the dystopian premise of “rebirth” via next-gen plastic surgery – that recalled Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another; this latter facet, incidentally, would keep recuring in both future arthouse films (e.g. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In) and mainstream movies (e.g. John Woo’s Face/Off). However, that said, it wasn’t without political undertones thanks to its sharp critique of the American Dream that’s supported by conventional suburban family, corporate job, material wealth, consumerist desires and heteronormative existence. This was clearly a work of two halves. In the brilliantly constructed first half, middle-aged, well-off and deeply dissatisfied New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is lured by a shady company – through hilariously sleazy salesmanship (by Jeff Corey), spurious smooth-talking (by Will Greer) and wicked entrapment – into agreeing to shed his current identity and transform into bohemian Malibu-residing artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), in lieu of a steep price that they exact in return. In the rather formless second half, Tony struggles to adjust in his new persona and life – finding it equally empty and meaningless – and faces a horrific destiny in the memorably macabre closing sequence. The film’s visceral mood was amplified by the expressionistic B/W cinematography and jazzy score which, along with its free-flowing Kafkaesque segments, made it feel closer to a European than an American film.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: US

Seven Days in May [1964]

 The Cold War, a period marked by paranoia and political conspiracy, saw the US playing a particularly fiendish role in “spreading democracy” to other countries, while undermining it internally in the name of battling “red terror”. American filmmakers memorably responded to this anxiety-ridden atmosphere with multiple fine movies, with three in 1964 alone by Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Lumet and John Frankenheimer. The latter filmmaker, who’d made the baroque and unsettling political thriller The Manchurian Candidate two years back, took that ahead with Seven Days in May – the middle chapter in his ‘Paranoia Trilogy’, which he’d conclude with Seconds – that refocussed from McCarthy-era hysteria to murky machinations during the nuclear age. When pacifist US President Lyman (Fredric March), in a courageous but unpopular decision, signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the highly decorated, megalomaniacal and right-wing zealot Air Force General James Scott (Burt Lancaster) plots a nefarious coup d'état to replace the elected government with a military junta, as he believes that the President is undermining America’s strength and power by going soft on Communism. Colonel “Jiggs” (Kirk Douglas), who reports to Scott, uncovers the ploy from a series of suspicious clues, and takes the difficult call of choosing insubordination over allowing constitutional principles to be trampled. Though tad heavy on verbal exchanges at times, it wasn’t short of crackerjack thrills and intrigue, and was propelled by a menacing turn by Lancaster that was reminiscent of the chilling masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success. The storyline bore additional self-reflexive irony given how the United States frequently enabled military coups during the 20^th century, while Lancaster would star in another similar conspiracy thriller a decade later with Executive Action.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

The Train [1964]

 Watching The Sorrow and the Pity and The Train within a few days of each other was rather ironic, given how the former demythologized the idea of widespread French resistance during the German occupation while the latter emphatically celebrated it. John Frankenheimer, who took charge after Burt Lancaster got Arthur Penn fired, dramatically altered Penn’s script – which was more character-driven and primarily focussed on the value of art – into a kinetic, action-packed movie foregrounded on the titular locomotives. Along the lines of John Sturges’ The Great Escape from a year back, this too was fiction spun around facts – or “faction”, as one might call it – set during WW2, and was a similarly rip-roaring war film that nevertheless retained tangible character developments and political stances. It’s August 1944 and Colonel Waldheim (Paul Scofield), an “aesthete Nazi” who loves “degenerate” modern art, decides to take the crème de la crème of artworks housed in Jeu de Paume to Berlin – at any costs necessary – upon sensing Paris’ imminent liberation by the Allies. The museum’s desperate curator appeals to the French Resistance to prevent this given their incalculable cultural significance. Labiche (Lancaster), a railway inspector at the station from which this prized cargo will depart and leader of the local Resistance cell down to its last three men, reluctantly agrees to sabotage Waldheim’s plans despite not caring much for art. Stunningly photographed in B/W – deploying a mix of wide-angles, deep focus, and ingenious single takes – the battle of wits between the two men, manically driven by contrasting objectives, was matched by thrilling set-pieces involving authentic trains. The fine support cast included the striking Jeanne Moreau as a brusque inn-keeper forced into chooses sides.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Action/Thriller/War

Language: English

Country: US

El Sur (The South) [1983]

 El Sur, Victor Erice’s first film in a decade since his unforgettable debut with The Spirit of the Beehive – his next narrative feature, Close Your Eyes, would come half a century later – is that rare cinematic gem that succeeded in becoming one despite being an unfinished film… or maybe, because it was one. Adapted by Erice from the novella of the same name by his wife Adelaida García Morales, this sublime exploration of memories, disillusionment, loss and the inescapable ravages of time – awash in painterly beauty and profound melancholy – was supposed to have a runtime of 2-½ hours, but was stopped short at roughly the two-third mark by its producer Elías Querejeta citing that funds had extinguished, but real reasons never fully disclosed. The film as it stood, however, turned into a particularly haunting longing for the mythical “south” of the title as the final part – that was supposed to finally take us there – never got made. Life the earlier work, this too was a coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of a young, lonely and imaginative girl, and was underscored with the desolate remnants of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s totalitarian regime. Estrella (marvellously played by Sonsoles Aranguren and Icíar Bollaín as the initial 8-year-old and the later 15-year-old, respectively), who stays in a remote house in northern Spain with her parents Agustín (Omero Antonutti) and Julia (Lola Cardona) – they were both anti-Francoists and never seen speaking to each other now – is fascinated by her taciturn dad and entranced by the magical “sur”. Hypnotically photographed by José Luis Alcaine, the film’s standout central moment featured a rapturous single-take dance between father and daughter to paso doble music.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

One or Two Questions [2018]

 The wave of military dictatorships that spread through Latin America during the 20^th century, competed with one another on state-sponsored repression, human rights abuses, extra-judicial punishments, and most notably, enforced disappearances. The one that ruled Uruguay for over a decade – it began with the 1973 coup d'état and brutal crackdown on the Marxist-Leninist Tapamaros, and finally ended in 1985 following massive demonstrations and strikes – was no less draconian. Hence, when an amnesty law was passed by the government in 1986, shielding the armed forces from prosecutions, it inevitably led to widespread protests by the civil society and human rights groups against it, which ultimately paved the way for a country-wide referendum in 1989. This remarkable 4-hour-long documentary – shot between 1987 and 1989 on the streets of Montevideo and neighbouring towns and villages; and finally released nearly 3 decades later – provided a rare glimpse of the wheels of democracy and the voice of journalism in action as the event, and associated political forces, unfolded. Two journalists, María Barhoum and Graciela Salsamendi, interviewed multiple everyday folks for Swiss television – both those favouring the amnesty, for reasons ranging from fascist beliefs, apologia and apathy to underlying fear of fresh retributions, and those steadfastly opposing it – and the recorded footage was edited by globetrotting Swiss documentarian Kristina Konrad into this 4-hour-long reportage on the shifting meanings of “peace” and “justice”, and a nuanced investigation into political trauma, anger and amnesia. The interviews were interspersed with electoral television commercials from that period, which added ironic qualities to the engrossing audio-visual collage. The docu remains part of an ever-growing pantheon of powerful Latin American political documentaries and films connected by their shared refusal to forget.

Director: Kristina Konrad

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: Spanish

Country: Uruguay

Man of Iron [1981]

 Andrzej Wajda stumbled upon the idea for Man of Iron – the remarkable sequel to Man of Marble, thus concluding his ‘Solidarity Films’ diptych – when a worker at the Lenin Gdańsk Shipyard, the birthplace of the Polish ‘Solidarity’ trade union movement in 1980, asked him to make a film about them. Leveraging a brief thaw in censorships – it would subsequently be banned and forced the filmmaker into exile – Wajda painted a simultaneously vivid, thrilling and solemn picture of the movement’s genesis through the life of Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), the son of the previous film’s protagonist Birkut (Radziwiłowicz). Modelled on Lech Wałęsa, Tomczyk was a former student activist and a worker at the shipyard who – upon his father’s death during the December 1970 protests and his dismissal from the job later – plays a leading role in the 1980 shipyard strike that founded the Solidarity movement. Like Birkut, his story of his life is also constructed through multiple perspectives – in particular, his old college friend (Bogusław Linda), and Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), who left filmmaking for political activism upon marrying Tomczyk – but this time by Winkel (Marian Opania), a once radical radio journalist who’s now an alcoholic and a lackey for the authorities. He’s ordered to dig out compromising information about the firebrand leader, for slandering his reputation, but starts regaining his lost dissidence as he learns more about the man’s defiant political journey. Rippling with apitprop, insolence, vitality and a throbbing zeitgeist, the gripping political mosaic unfolded through alternations of a framing narrative, multiple flashbacks and archival footage, and comprised of two haunting protest songs, viz. the elegiac unofficial anthem of the striking workers and a furious ballad performed by Janda herself.

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docu Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Polish

Country: Poland

Man of Marble [1977]

 Man of Marble – the first chapter in Andrzej Wajda’s electrifying diptych of ‘Solidarity Films’ along with Man of Iron – was a dazzling assemblage of political critique, formal audacity, and deconstructive meta-narration, making it both a vivid historical document and thrilling investigative reportage. Both films recalled Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Francesco Rosi’s Mattei Affair in that they constructed their eponymous individuals’ lives through subjective memories and objective evidences. The individual in question here is Birkut (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), a simple bricklayer who shot to stardom as a Stakhanovite symbol upon accomplishing a superlative feat of labour during the Stalinist era, but over the years fell out of political favour, became a persona non grata, and slipped into obscurity. Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), a brash young film school student, has defiantly selected this enigmatic man for her graduation project, and goes about making that by interviewing people who knew him in the past – a festival-hopping director who’d once made state propaganda films on Birkut; a former state security agent who tailed Birkut when he became increasingly outspoken and disillusioned; his oldest comrade (Michał Tarkowski) who was arrested during the purges and has become a dodgy bureaucrat post his rehabilitation; and Birkut’s estranged, self-hating wife – as well as archival news and film footage to piece together the jigsaw puzzle about this now forgotten socialist hero of unknown whereabouts. Flamboyantly shot through a mix of wide-angles, low-angles, close-ups, dynamic hand-held cameras and vivid colours, which complemented the wan backdrops and flat B/W reels, and accompanied by a pulsating, idiosyncratic score interspersed with old socialist songs, the film – aside from its stylistic bravura and edgy political commentaries – remains a fascinating depiction of subversive, guerilla filmmaking.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Polish

Country: Poland