Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) [1997]

 Pedro Almodóvar – who’d pivoted from campy, lowbrow farce with his fabulous preceding film The Flower of My Secret – did a free adaptation of British writer Ruth Rendell’s crime novel with this sexy and absorbing tale of pathological obsessions and jealousies setting off violent crimes. Balancing hot-blooded passions with barely controlled restraint – and demonstrating that style IS substance in his films, and thereby the indistinguishability between the two – the Spanish filmmaker mixed the proceedings with romantic and marital complexities, outrageous coincidences, lush melodrama, and sardonic commentaries on Spain’s Francoist past, for a feverishly imagined ménage à cinq. Naïve 20-year-old Victor (Liberto Rabal), who’s become besotted with the ravishing Elena (Francesca Neri) in her 30s after a one-night-stand, inadvertently triggers a catastrophic shoot-out that perennially changes their lives as well as two cops – the saner David (Javier Bardem) and the more volatile Sancho (Pepe Sancho) – and Sancho’s wife Clara (Ángela Molina) who Sancho is insanely suspicious of for her supposed infidelity. That baroque sequence puts Victor in jail and turns David paraplegic. Fast-forward few years later, and a now-hardened Victor is craving for a saucy revenge upon finding out that David has become a star basketball player at the Paralympics and married to Elena, but gets embroiled into a fervent clandestine affair with the much-older Clara instead, who’s desperate to leave Sancho. David, meanwhile, is convinced that David plans to seduce Elena, who’s toned down from his drug-addled past, and this unapologetically contrived setup accelerates rearrangement of equations and reckless flareups. Filled with voluptuous emotions, bold colour palettes, sumptuous soundtrack, and teasing Buñuel references, the film was bookended by trippy “nativity” sequences, with the former featuring Penélope Cruz in a cameo.

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) [2025]

Marathi filmmaker Rohan Kanawade’s tender and assured feature debut Sabar Bonda – weaved with intimate semi-autobiographical elements, memories and reflections – was an intensely muted expression of barely contained emotions. A contrapuntal evocation of grief and desire, two supposedly antithetical emotions, it also captured with subtlety what could’ve easily made for acrid parody, viz. the very Indian habit of family elders and “well-wishers” freely encroaching into private spaces and imparting unsolicited advices on life choices and marital decisions. Informed and shaped by the director’s own experiences upon his father’s demise a decade back, which necessitated a rather uncomfortable trip back from Bombay to his village that he hadn’t visited in many years, the film too opened with a similarly reluctant “homecoming” of Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a 30-something gay man employed in a middle-income job in Bombay, to his ancestral village for performing his father’s last rites. Though he’d “come out” to his parents long back, his extended family members aren’t explicitly aware of his sexuality – though not fully unaware either – and consequently, along with instructions on how he should mourn, also doggedly badger him on marriage. However, contrary to societal expectations, he rekindles his intimacy with Balya (Suraaj Suman), an old friend who’s similarly single and a farmer who’s craving to escape from his rural environs. Naturalistically shot in soft colours, lyrical exteriors and framed in rounded edges like old photographs, Kanawade’s understated depiction of the fraught situation – and toned-down evocation of the homophobic atmosphere – was laced with undercurrents of defiance and a wish for the mundane. Alongside the two male leads, competently played by theatre actors who’ve known each other for long, Jayshri Jagtap was also memorable as Anand’s mother.

Director: Rohan Kanawade

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Slice-of-Life

Language: Marathi

Country: India

The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station / Berlin Hero [2025]

 Like his much-loved 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker crafted a playful tragicomedy – recalling East Germany, which disappeared from the map upon reunification with West Germany, using an absurdist and gently satirical lens – with The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station. However, while the former was set as the wall was coming down, Becker’s final, posthumously released film – adapted from Maxim Leo’s novel – looks into that thirty years later through the porous devices of memory and history. The film’s middle-aged Berliner protagonist Micha (Charly Hübner), who runs a struggling video store, is “discovered” by an opportunist journalist (Leon Ullrich) – looking to write a career-defining article while commemorating the 30^th anniversary of the Wall’s fall – as the mastermind behind a “mass escape” from the erstwhile GDR in 1984. No matter that it was an honest mistake by the then callow railway worker in East Berlin that’d inadvertently rerouted an S-Bahn carrying 127 passengers to West Berlin, and that everyone barring 2 had returned, as who’d want truth to come in the way of a great story – especially one that goes well with how the former Communist country is remembered today in mass media and popular cultural memory. Though uncomfortable with the half-truths and lies that get spun, he starts enjoying being a media sensation. Things, however, are complicated when he finds himself falling for a woman (Christiane Paul) who happened to be one of the 2 people who’d stayed, and former dissident Herald (Thorsten Merten) starts digging into the story. The endearing and vibrantly composed film had moments of ironic humour, as when Herald subverts expectations by praising aspects of East German life that today’s consumerist Germany finds impossible to accept.

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Genre: Comedy/Political Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: German

Country: Germany

Brief Encounters [1967]

 Kira Muratova, best known for Asthenic Syndrome, made her solo directorial debut with Brief Encounters, after a couple of films co-directed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov. Made at Odessa Film Studio during the “Khrushchev thaw”, this freewheeling, idiosyncratic and loosely-strung work exhibited her love for the French Nouvelle Vague and its radical figurehead Jean-Luc Godard. Like her dazzling next film The Long Farewell – which was even more avant-garde and formally eccentric – this earned the displeasure of the state censors for being too individualistic, and remained suppressed for the next two decades. Its delicately weaved love triangle – between pragmatic, unsentimental and bourgeoise city council planner Valentina (played by Muratova herself with deadpan poise); her free-spirited, vagabond husband Maxim (played by legendary Soviet folk singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotskiy), a traveling geologist who loves strumming his guitar; and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman from the countryside who Maxim met at a roadside café, and who’s incidentally now hired by Valentina as a domestic help at her sprawling apartment – is told through a mosaic of impressionistic perspectives, flashbacks and digressive allusions. The diffused B/W images, along with music splashes and fragmentary conversations, imbued the film with poetic-realism and a meditative air. These, in turn, were complemented by sardonic moments, like when Valentina is coaxed into attending a conference bearing no relevance to her work, or when she muses “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? – turning the grand Macbethian dilemma into comically banal – or when she adamantly ignores the pleas of families to classify the newly constructed public housing buildings as hospitable. Most interestingly, Muratova impishly subverted expectations by never having the two women find out about their shared love interest.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

World on a Wire [1973]

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2-part 206-minutes-long television miniseries World On A Wire – the German wunderkind’s sole foray into science-fiction, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3, and recently restored after years of obscurity – was a gloriously trippy, luscious, paranoid and prescient work where the dystopian future is here and now. Flamboyantly blending the sci-fi genre with noir, melodrama, conspiracy, philosophical meditations, existential anxieties, and distinctive Euro-arthouse sensibilities, and with cold, sleek, metallic and modernist décor complemented with disco-tinged sensuality, it recalled Godard’s magnificent Alphaville in its evocation of one non-compliant individual’s battle against a supra-national techno-totalitarian society, and presaged the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in positing that we might be trapped inside a simulated, hyper-real, virtual reality environment. The film’s protagonist, cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), succeeds as the technical director of a powerful government-corporate mainframe program called Simulacron which has created an artificial world with thousands of “identity units” and has the ability to predict industry trends well into the future, when his boss, Professor Vollmer, dies under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to sense and uncover a massive corporate conspiracy with monomaniac zeal, and before long becomes a hunted fugitive as he gets into loggerheads with the institute’s malicious CEO Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau). Along the way he gets close to two duplicitous women – Stiller’s personal assistant Gloria (Barbara Valentin) who’s essentially been plugged in to spy on him, and the deceased super-scientist’s sultry daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) who Stiller becomes enamoured with. Co-written by Fassbinder, this deliciously ominous and tantalizingly foxy film – photographed in lush, grainy 16-mm by Michael Ballhaus, and featuring a rich soundtrack, including Fleetwood Mac’s hypnotic ‘Albatross’ – was populated with RWF’s regular gang of actors.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Romance

Language: German

Country: Germany

Aranyer Din Ratri [1970]

 Aranyer Din Ratri marked a pivotal shift for Satyajit Ray. While he’d already made a terrific transition to contemporary Calcutta settings earlier, and had tackled defiant topics already – from religious dogmatism and quackery to tyranny and war hysteria to crumbling feudalism and gender roles – he embarked on a more overtly political cinema with its cutting critiques on class entitlements, fragile masculinity, sexual tensions, exploitative attitudes, urban privileges, and brewing social conflicts. It, consequently, served as a fascinating segue to his radical masterpiece Pratidwandi that he immediately followed this with; both films, incidentally, were adaptations of feral novels by Sunil Ganguly. The tale’s premise – viz. the weekend getaway of four close friends and the women they meet there – was indicative of a light-hearted comedy; however, despite its loose-limbed structure, it was anything but one. The four friends – the haughty, fast-rising corporate executive Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee); erudite, reserved labour welfare officer Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee); brash, petulant cricketer Hari (Samit Bhanja) fresh of a heartbreak; self-effacing, unemployed Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) who’s the group’s unintentional comedian – find their shallow, self-centred and vulgar self-confidences shattered by the intelligent, self-assured Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) who Sanjoy becomes besotted with, her widowed sister-in-law (Kaberi Bose) who challenges Sanjoy’s “bhadralok” sensibilities, and impoverished Santhal woman Duli (Simi Garewal) who the egotistic Hari seduces leading to a violent comeuppance. Ray underscored the jaunty tone with sharp undercurrents of cynicism and irony, while Soumendu Roy’s terrific B/W cinematography – along with ingenuous inter-cutting that, accompanied with shots of Santhal dance, took the narrative to an edgy crescendo – gave the film a compelling audio-visual language. Ghosh’s turn was arguably the best of the lot in this funny, provocative, tense and cynical work.

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

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Buddy Film/Romantic Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Death in Venice [1971]

 Luchino Visconti adapted Death in Venice from Thomas Mann’s novella – the vaunted central chapter in his ‘German Trilogy’, sandwiched between The Damned’s pungent provocations and Ludwig’s sprawling ambitions – with meticulous rigour and controlled audacity. He both accentuated the book’s sensual and disconcerting queer undercurrents borne out of a middle-aged man’s forbidden infatuation with a teenage boy, and tampered that with solemnity of tone, a pervading air of melancholy, the anxiety of a choleric outbreak, and Venice’s decaying grandeur gorgeously photographed by Pasqualino De Santis, for a bristling meditation on art, beauty, self-destructive longings and mortality. Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), an allusion to Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, has come over to Venice for rest and self-exile in order to recover from debilitating health concerns and a dreadful concert. While staying in the luxurious Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice Lido, he notices the pubescent Polish boy Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), who comes to embody for him the epitome of physical beauty, and becomes obsessed with him to the detriment of his own wellbeing. The fastidious composer, ironically, had earlier preferred form over aesthetics, as indicated through the flashbacks, which were a tad jarring vis-à-vis the “present” captured through limpid, deliberately-paced and exceptionally composed mise-en-scène. He silently follows Tadzio, as if hypnotized, in the hotel’s dining room, at the adjacent beach, and through the city’s winding alleys, who in turn starts subtly responding to the attention. Accompanied by Mahler’s music, this film was led by Bograde’s magnificent turn – the muted passions and tragic vulnerability that he brought in reminded me heavily of Gian Maria Volonté in Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli – and closed with one of cinema’s bleakest on-screen deaths.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: English

Country: Italy

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis [1970]

 Giorgio Bassini’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece The Garden of Finzi-Continis was as much a haunting Holocaust novel as a stirring ode to unrequited love, and through the titular Finzi-Continis – a wealthy, aristocratic and intellectual family who lived a life of cultured seclusion and went to their deaths without any resistance – a lamentation on the passage of a certain way of life. Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation echoed, with a touch at once tender and wistful, the book’s understated tone, melancholy, personal heartbreak, collective loss and doomed atmosphere. The narrative began in 1938, just as Mussolini’s fascist government starts enacting oppressive and restrictive laws against Jewish-Italian citizens, and ended in 1943 when the Jews started getting rounded up and herded to death camps. That fateful stretch was evoked through the Finzi-Continis family – with their huge mansion, refined manners, sprawling gardens, and cloistered existence within large walls – and especially the enigmatic Micòl (Dominique Sanda). They’re portrayed through the eyes of Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a studious middle-class guy, who’s hopelessly in love with the strikingly beautiful Micòl and enamoured with the family. When Jews are banned from the local tennis club, the family’s private tennis court is opened to them – though the ones who join include non-Jews too, like the left-wing Malnate (Fabio Testi) – and when the public library becomes off-limit, Giorgio finds refuge in the family’s huge personal library. Things, unfortunately, go further downhill rapidly, as he finds Micòl becoming ever more aloof and beyond reach, and the Jewish community in Ferrara being pushed towards annihilation. Beautifully photographed in soft-focus and washed-out colours, the film – initially supposed to be directed by Valerio Zurlini – became a late-career revival for the once pioneer of Italian neorealism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/War Drama/Romantic Drama/Holocaust Movie

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Il Posto [1961]

 Ermanno Olmi’s tender, low-key, delicately strung and achingly beautiful masterpiece Il Posto – shaped from his personal experiences – remains such an acutely evocative and vividly realized work despite hardly much happening during its runtime. Though it carried the legacy of neorealism – with its humanist story, on-location filming and non-actors – its exploration of urban loneliness in the backdrop of a rapid post-war societal shifts towards giant corporations and social mobility possibly placed it closer to similar examinations by Antonioni, Godard and Tati, even if this stood apart on account of its hushed, understated and bittersweet tone. I, instead, found it profoundly reminiscent of two Jiří Menzel masterworks – Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a String – in their shared poetic restraints while dwelling on mundane moments, blend of wry humour and absurdist irony with pathos, critiques of conformism, and muted comings-of-age of gauche, soft-spoken young guys. The said protagonist is Domenico (Sandro Panseri, whose perplexed demeanour, in turn, mirrored Václav Neckář from the two Menzel films), who follows his parents’ advice for a job at a big nameless organization. He travels from his cramped apartment in the outskirts to Milan, becomes besotted with the ethereal Antonietta (Loredana Detto, Olmi’s future wife), gets hired, is initially posted as a messenger and finally becomes a junior clerk in this vast bureaucratic setup. Gorgeously shot in grainy B/W – imbued with intimacy and melancholy – the film’s two most unforgettable segments featured the fleeting relationship between the two youngsters during the job interview, and a New Year’s Eve office event that transitioned from pensive to exuberant through droll humour and staging, and which reminded me of another Czech New Wave jewel, viz. Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball.

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Genre: Comedy-Drama/Coming-of-Age/Romantic Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) [2010]

 With Certified Copy, the great Abbas Kiarostami joined an exclusive group of non-francophone filmmakers like Buñuel, Kieślowski and Losey who made cinematic masterpieces in French. At once deliciously beguiling, seductively beautiful and disarmingly ingenious, this breathtaking exercise subtly channelled Rosellini’s Journey to Italy, the distinctive flavours of archetypal European arthouse cinema and his own marital disintegration, and echoed the futility of authenticity and originality, while ironically being a ravishingly original piece of work. It began like a dry essay – a form that Kiarostami had extensively partook in since his earliest days – with British writer James Miller (English opera singer William Shimell in a fine acting debut) introducing, at a gathering in Tuscany, the Italian translation of his eponymously titled book which posits the relevance of reproductions. After the lecture he meets the unnamed “Elle” (Juliette Binoche in an effortlessly triumphant turn) – a French woman and single mom who runs an antiques store selling replicas – and the two strangers decide to chat while exploring the charming locales. They initially drive and then stroll around, with their freewheeling and intelligent conversations bearing edgy undertones. The gently ambling narrative underwent a stunning pivot at a trattoria where they’ve stopped for coffee. The café’s matronly owner assumes that they’re a married couple, and they seemingly decide to participate in this charade. However, one soon starts wondering if they’re playacting or they’re indeed an estranged couple carrying years of differences, disappointments and bitterness. Magnificently shot in fluid long takes – a sequence where they’re driving with the gorgeous surroundings reflected on the windshield was especially captivating – this enigmatic and richly textured film delivered sharp reflections on both art and relationships over one sumptuous Tuscan afternoon.

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

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marital Drama/Avant-Garde

Language: French/English/Italian

Country: France

Wolfsburg [2003]

 Christian Petzold’s spare and chilling psychological thriller Wolfsberg carried the weight of Germany’s political history, even if that wasn’t explicitly laid out; the titular city’s past is intertwined with the Nazi era as, founded by Hitler in 1938 as the seat for Volkswagen’s massive automotive factory, it became a military-industrial complex during WW2 during which it produced armaments and freely utilized slave labour. Car as a symbol of modernity, class hierarchy and commodity capitalism, unsurprisingly, played a pivotal role, and the film’s themes of grief, guilt and moral crisis hinged around it. Additionally, like The State I Am In which preceded it and Yella couple of films later, it also culminated with a shattering car crash. The film began with an unsettling hit-and-run incident as Philipp (Benno Fürmann), an auto salesman having an argument with his fiancée over the phone while driving his luxury car, accidentally hits a kid on a bicycle. He leads an entitled life, but at the cost of tolerating his domineering boss – the owner of the auto dealership where he works – and his self-obsessed girlfriend who’s his boss’ pampered sister. The kid’s mother Laura (Nina Hoss), meanwhile, is a single mom and exploited supermarket worker. While Philipp is silently racked with contrition upon being unable to confess – more so when the kid dies – Laura is crushed to the point of contemplating suicide as well as seeking vengeance. Guilt, grief, secrecy and wrath make for a messy cocktail; consequently, when these two lost souls get drawn into a tender romantic relationship, it’s bound to lead to damaging repercussions. Hoss and Fürmann were both magnetic in Petzold’s icy portrayal of dread, three-way class conflict and societal alienation.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

China Is Near [1967]

 Marco Bellocchio’s second film China Is Near retained the wild farce and blasphemy of his astounding debut feature Fists in the Pocket. If it was slightly less feverish and feral, it was as unapologetically offensive and risqué, and upped the satirical ante and ribald buffoonery while delivering a Molotov cocktail aimed at political, social, religious and sexual mores. In a fascinating coincidence, Godard’s dazzling gem La Chinoise and this – which released in the same year – didn’t just share zany humour, anti-bourgeoise filmmaking, Maoist references and impudent nonconformity, they even shared the Special Jury Prize in that year’s Venice Film Festival. Its principle targets are three siblings belonging to a hideously funny family of affluence and aristocracy in a provincial Italian town – Vittorio (Glauco Mauri), the rotund eldest brother, has tried his hands with various centre-left political options and has presently settled for the Socialist party to escape his guilt, look progressive and attain power; Elena (co-writer Elda Tattoli), the middle-aged, promiscuous and still glamourous sister, loves taking young partners from lower social classes, while ensuring that they never stake claim to her wealth; and Camillo (Pierluigi Aprà), the repressed and unhinged youngest of the lot, has started a three-man hardline Maoist cell to combat his dilemmas with aristocracy and Catholicism. Meanwhile, Carlo (Paolo Graziosi) and Giovanna (Daniela Surina), former lovers and belonging to the working-class, begin a scheming journey up the class chain, as the former seduces Elena while the latter decides to succumb to Vittorio’s ogling, hoping to marry rich. Splendidly shot by Tonino Delli Colli in baroque B/W and idiosyncratically scored by Ennio Morricone, it featured public brawl, fratricidal assassination attempt, failed abortion and other assorted craziness.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Les Biches [1968]

 Claude Chabrol decided to take inspiration from Patricia Highsmith’s legendary and fabulous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley for Les Biches. He, however, went for a saucy gender reversal and delectably ambiguous interpretation of the book, and using it as a launchpad instead for his caustic examinations of existential ennui, class and sexual power games, and mutually destructive ménage à trois among the bourgeoisie, while retaining the book’s languid atmosphere and amorality. Stéphane Audran was captivating as Frédérique, a bored, wealthy, attractive and therefore the archetypal Chabrol woman. She picks up the oddly named Why (Jacqueline Sassard), a young street artist and hustler, in Paris, and they embark on a casual affair. Frédérique brings Why along to her villa in Saint Tropez, and the story’s delicious amorality takes full bloom in the enchanting, lazy environs of the Riviera. Both, incidentally, are bisexual, as the young Why first has a short fling with the handsome architect Paul (Jean Louis Trintignant), and the older Frédérique then swoops down on him and they begin a steadier relationship. That sparks the unravelling of Why’s repressed jealousies and vengeful sociopathy, and she starts reimagining herself as her mistress’s doppelgänger; before long, she wants to usurp the latter’s place. There were clear parallels that Chabrol drew with Bergman’s Persona in how the two women engage in a dangerous game of interchangeability and one-upmanship, reminiscent of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in the celebrated Bergman classic. Shot in muted colours, and with a dash of silly irreverence thrown in thanks to the two goofy gay friends housed by Frédérique (Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi), this remains a strangely fascinating if decidedly weird entry in Chabrol’s rebellious canon.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Psychological Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Matt and Mara [2024]

 Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s indie film Matt and Mara was distinctively Rohmersque thanks to its playful, conversational, charming and understated qualities, with its controlled messiness, nuanced peek into romantic conundrums, ambling script and improv air. Should one be in any doubts, he gave a very direct nod to the French master towards the end. The beautiful Mara (Deragh Campbell) teaches creative writing at a university in Toronto, while deeply wanting to get back to her love for writing. Meanwhile, while her marriage to a musician (Mounir Al Shami) is fine on paper, she’s experiencing undercurrents of malaise. She’s possibly even inching towards existential crisis, though she doesn’t let it out on account of her reserved nature. In walks the dashing Matt (Matt Johnson), a funny, carefree, self-assured and successful writer settled in New York, whose second novel has been recently published to considerable acclaim. While in town for a few days, he pays a visit to Mara – they were once best friends in college – and that begins a renewed relationship that’s difficult to categorize. They hang out at a café, walk along the streets of Toronto, discuss about art and life, go on a road trip, act along when mistaken as a couple and share some tender as well as vulnerable moments. The chemistry between these two individuals, who couldn’t be more different, was delightfully done, thanks in large parts to the endearing turns by both actors – with Campbell being particularly striking in capturing her growing emotional conflicts – and the thoughtfully crafted script that belied its slender length. That the film doesn’t end with any neat conclusions and left their relationship teasingly nondescript, made it all the more infectious.

Director: Kazik Radwanski

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Urban Drama/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: Canada

Grand Tour [2024]

 Diverse elements that constitute cinema – from its technical facets and grammar to its sociocultural roles and historicity – were evoked with joyous abandon in Grand Tour by the virtuoso Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes. Forming a fascinating companion piece to his sublime masterpiece Tabu – in its tapping into colonial-era tapestry where nostalgia is sharply counterpointed by irony; chronicling of an infectious travelogue self-consciously stripped of exoticism; and channelling the palette of classical-era movies while deconstructing that and even celebrating its artifice – this wistful, eccentric, gorgeously composed, feverishly mounted and wildly experimental gem was ingeniously constructed in the form of a diptych. In the first act we follow Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant stationed in Rangoon in 1918 who flees in a fit of existential panic on the prospect of marriage to his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arriving for that purpose; he travels to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and further – initially to escape, but eventually through delirious inertia of motion – only to keep finding cheerful telegrams from Molly informing him that she’s happily in pursuit. In the second act we switchover to the optimistic Molly and follow her indefatigable journey, undeterred by Edward’s abandonment. Gomes, in a playful and idiosyncratic formal choice, alternated the story of the globetrotting lovers – shot in 16-mm on soundstage and accompanied by voiceovers whose languages changed based on the countries they’re in – with essayistic present-day footage of those places, some of which he’d shot before Covid stuck and directed the rest remotely. Further, though set in the past, one often sees them juxtaposed with anachronistic components, and this dazzling collapsing of the past and the present reminded me of Petzold’s engrossing film Transit.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Road Movie/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Burmese/Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese/English

Country: Portugal

Caught by the Tides [2024]

 Few filmmakers have so masterfully blended profound socio-cultural upheavals with achingly intimate individual stories, and the inexorable flow of time with stasis, melancholy and transience, as Jia Zhangke. Caught by the Tides – with its episodic structure, zooming in on two outsiders drifting and reconciling over three segments across multiple years, inextricably counterpointed with China’s tectonic mutations – immediately recalled his two previous films Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White. Jia, in a remarkable artistic choice, composed the first two segments by sifting through a thousand hours’ outtakes from three films – as well as deliberately shot additional footage with plans of converging them into a future work – viz. Unknown Pleasure from 2002, his sublime masterpiece Still Life from 2006, and Ash… from 2018; the final segment, shot during Covid-19 pandemic, was the only one filmed in present. Astonishing self-reflexivity aside, this radically conceived assemblage imbued it with fascinating additional textures and subtexts – be it the organic ageing of the two lead actors (Zhao Tao, Jia’s partner and muse, and Li Zhubin), or the changing visuals, viz. grungy and energetic low-fi videos in the first segment, bleak and meditative widescreen exteriors in the second, and recently shot digital images in the third. While it did have a skeletal narrative – a dancer (Tao) and her boyfriend (Zhubin) are separated when he leaves Daton to find work elsewhere; she travels to the site of the Three Gorges Dam to find him; and he eventually returns amidst Covid-19 restrictions – it also possessed long observational stretches and interludes like fly-on-the-wall documentaries and travelogue essays. Incidentally, while the mesmeric Tao hardly ever speaks, the film was a kaleidoscopic compilation of folk, pop and disco soundtrack.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Jia Zhangke

Genre: Drama/Romance/Road Movie

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai [1980]

 Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s excellent tapestry Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai opened with an absorbing ride through the streets of Bombay, accompanied by a smooth jazzy score, which immediately made this seem like an intoxicating love letter to the city. Being the gentle, erudite and politically invested filmmaker that he was, Mirza had of course in mind a much more nuanced exploration and complex investigation of the city than that. He accomplished that through interlacing of three fervently political themes – with an infectious mix of satirical chuckle, simmering angst and defiantly Marxist gaze – viz. portrayal of minority experience, depiction of a heretofore “apolitical” working-class protagonist’s furiously evolving class consciousness, and an impassioned probe into the early days of what would erupt into the “Great Bombay Textile Strike” during the early-1980s. His infusion of elements of documentary and reportage into the narrative, and a dialectical reworking of the “angry young man” persona, brought in intriguing additional dimensions to it. The film’s eponymous protagonist, played with insouciance and aplomb by Naseeruddin Shah, is a Christian auto-mechanic who starts off as an aimlessly angry, smug, opinionated and insular guy who’s proud of his wealthy customers, is incorrigibly boorish to his independent-minded girlfriend (Shabana Azmi), and is casually derisive of any protests by workers. However, when his father (Arvind Deshpande), a veteran textile worker, is beaten up by lumpen thugs at the best of the mill owners for participating in strikes, he starts experiencing a remarkable change in his political views and expressing solidarity towards those who he’d been dismissive of. The fine cast also comprised of Smita Patil as Albert’s wry sister and Dilip Dhawan as his disillusioned brother, among others.

Director: Saeed Akhtar Mirza

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Political Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: Hindi

Country: India

Khandhar (The Ruins) [1984]

 Made during the 1980s, his final productive decade, Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar was as much about physical ruins as emotional ones. The interplay between the two, especially how one informs the other, added nuanced undertones to this quietly evocative work. Like many films before and since, it’s around a few urbane and carefree friends going on a short fun getaway out of the city, only to experience something far deeper and more complex than what they’d expected. It begins with Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah), a photographer, reliving a lasting melancholic memory elicited by an old photo of a woman that he’d taken in the past, and that’s followed by a double click into that memory. Dipu (Pankaj Kapoor) had coaxed him into taking a weekend trip to his ruinous ancestral home located far from the madding crowd; Shubhash’s thoughtful nature and Dipu’s matter-of-factness are complemented by the goofy spirit of Anil (Annu Kapoor), who also joins them. Upon arriving at this dilapidated estate – which had once boasted of prosperity but eventually turned into a crumbling wasteland as residents moved out and scattered elsewhere, and which seems to be stuck in a time warp that’s far removed from modern city amenities – they meet Jamini (Shabana Azmi), an intelligent but lonely woman who too is irrevocably stuck. Her blind and dependent mom, obsessed with a guy who’d promised to marry Jamini but never did, starts assuming that he’s finally returned, and that leads to the formation of a fleeting yet profound attachment between Shubhash and Jamini. Elegantly shot by K.K. Mahajan, comprising of a particularly memorable turn by Azmi, and filled with deafening silences, this clearly remains one of Sen’s most low-key works.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: Hindi

Country: India

All We Imagine as Light [2024]

 Payal Kapadia’s training in filmmaking, her love for cinema (and slow cinema in particular), her feminist perspectives, and her bent towards political dissent are known. It wasn’t, therefore, surprising that her first fiction feature was inextricably shaped by these facets. All We Imagine as Light is equal parts slow, feminist and political cinema. Furthermore, its expressions of female friendships, solidarity and defiance – foregrounded on the teeming and chaotic metropolis of Mumbai that couldn’t give two hoots for them and countless others surviving similarly in its grubby margins – made this delicately weaved tapestry an evocative city symphony too, especially in its subversion of shallow cliches about the city’s supposedly embracing nature. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a senior nurse at a hospital, and her young colleague Anu (Divya Prabha), share a small apartment with their cat. While the former is solemn and lonely, having been largely abandoned by her husband, the latter is ebullient and mischievous, but also confused, having secretly fallen in love with a Muslim boy (Hridhu Haroon), as interfaith relationships are a societal taboo. Additionally, their Malayali backgrounds have as much made them outsiders, as their gender, relationship woes/choices and economic hardships. Completing this troika is Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widowed and middle-aged wage worker in the hospital, who’s being forcibly evicted by nefarious builders as she doesn’t possess the necessary papers. Their individual stories and evolving bonds – exquisitely brought to life by the three actors – reached an achingly resonant coda upon a trip that they take to an idyllic coastal village. The dreamlike narrative was frequently juxtaposed with immigrants’ voices, and was enriched by the film’s formal rigour, ravishing photography, lilting bluesy score, silences, absences and melancholy.

Director: Payal Kapadia

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Romantic Drama/Buddy Film

Language: Malayalam/Hindi/Marathi

Country: India

The Trout (La Truite) [1982]

 Joseph Losey’s penultimate film, The Trout, was a more ambiguous, formalist and “arthouse” – but no less amoral or outré – revisiting of his terrific earlier film Eva. Like the latter, it was boldly invested in the provocative yet ambivalent sexuality of women raring to burst out of their social classes but without giving themselves in, and besotted men taking self-destructive plunges in the futile hopes of possessing them; both were visually exquisite; and, incidentally, both remain underrated in his filmography. Furthermore, this too starred Jeanne Moreau – the irresistible femme fatale from the earlier film – in a supporting role, who, as Lou, is now older, entrenched in her enhanced social class, and ostensibly settled in a lavish house through her marriage to a philandering businessman (Jean-Pierre Cassel). She therefore demonstrates suspicion and hostility towards Frédérique (Isabelle Huppert), seeing how her husband and his business associate (Daniel Olbrychski) are immediately entranced by her, while also detecting a younger version of herself in her. Frédérique, who’s grown up in a trout firm in a small Swiss village, is married to a closet homosexual, is well aware of the electrifying effects that she has on men (while harbouring a profound disdain for them), and loves luring them just enough to fulfil her desires. Tokyo – with its neon lights, high-rises, bustling streets, decadent interiors and traditions – formed the playground for the ploys that this ravishing and inscrutable seductress saucily indulges in, portrayed by Huppert with customary brilliance, teasing enticements, magnetic allure, and feral ruthlessness. Losey’s love for games – from hide-and-seek in The Servant to cricket in The Go-Between – was expressed here in a memorable bowling alley sequence that deliciously established the film’s tone and dynamics.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: French

Country: France