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

Eva [1962]

In Eva, Joseph Losey had one foot into the underpinnings of American genre movies from his past and the other in the vocabulary of European arthouse cinema which he was headed to. These parallel facets strikingly informed his decision to adapt James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve – a compulsive, racy and gleefully lurid tale – into an unabashedly European film, with the setting transplanted from LA to Venice, and the story’s bleak and seedy fatalism – which it mirrored – counterpointed with a style that was modernist, baroque and dazzling. The latter aspect thereby flamboyantly foreshadowed the expressionistic palette of The Servant which he made next year. The resulting film, which was cut by the producers without Losey’s permission, was as manic, delirious and exhilarating a work as Michel Legrand’s thrilling jazz score that flamboyantly accompanied nearly its entire length. At its core, of course, was Jeanne Moreau – at the pinnacle of her beauty, glamour and fame, and at her most irresistible and magnetic – as the titular Eva, a bewitching, coldly seductive and unapologetically promiscuous femme fatale who’s addicted in equal measures to money, gambling and Billie Holiday. Tyvian (Stanley Baker), an embittered Welsh author from working-class background, who’s suddenly become rich and famous with his bestselling first novel – albeit one harbouring a shameful secret – is attracted to her like a suicidal moth to a blazing fire. In the process, he alienates his loving fiancée (Virna Lisi), squanders his wealth, and irrevocably damages his shaky reputation. Venice, with its decadence and dilapidation, provided a poetic setting, and which – along with the self-destructive tale – was stunningly photographed in B/W by Gianni Di Venanzo through a mix of compelling single-takes and bold Dutch angle shots.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Noir

Language: English/Italian

Country: France

The Go-Between [1971]

 The three films that Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter made together – The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between – were all piercing examinations of class, adapted from literary texts (in this case, from L.P. Hartley’s renowned novel), and amalgamations of formal and narrative bravura. The common grounds aside, however, they strikingly diverged in tones, styles, settings and structures, thereby underlining the duo’s artistic ambitions. Unlike the pitch-dark satire and dizzying expressionism of the first film, and the unsettling modernism of the second, this had the most overly classical palette, with its lush period setting, sprawling cast, lyricism and melancholy. Further, while the events take place in the past, they’re informed by a framing device set in the present, thus making it a quietly devastating exploration of memory and time. The story unfolds from the perspective of 12-year-old Leo (Dominic Guard) – and in turn his much older self, reminiscing about a fateful summer that continues to haunt him – who’s been invited to spend his vacation at the palatial country house of his wealthy school friend Marcus. That he’s from a lower social and economic class is readily apparent, which makes him a bemused outsider. He finds himself besotted with Marcus’ ravishing older sister Marian (Julie Christie), who’s engaged to a man of her social standing (Edward Fox) but is in a forbidden relationship with a raffish local farmer (Alan Bates). Upon being enlisted as secret messenger by the covert lovers, Leo transitions from tacit observer to active participant. Sumptuously mounted and photographed, the exterior sections were a series of sublimely lit, composed and framed images resembling French impressionist paintings, while the stirring score enveloped them with longing, lost innocence and blazing emotions.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: English

Country: UK

The Third Lover [1962]

 Chabrol’s renowned ‘Hélène Cycle’ of films – murky, morally complex and spellbinding investigations into bourgeois social structures and familial setups, made between 1968-72, and with Stéphane Audran starring in most of them as the icy and ambiguous Hélène – is considered to have started with the brilliant examination of fractured relationships in La Femme Infidele. The Third Lover – made 6 years before that – could however be considered as a compelling precursor. Shot in brooding B/W by Chabrol’s frequent collaborator Jean Rabier – which provided an aesthetic departure from the afore-mentioned cycle made in lusty colours – it zoomed in on a ménage à trois involving an eerily happy couple and a shifty stranger who gets himself inserted into their private space, and which eventually progresses into darker impulses and rips everything apart. Albin (Jacques Charrier, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Alain Delon’s devious personification in the riveting Plein Soleil) is a mediocre, frustrated and self-destructive French journalist who’s been sent to Germany by the newspaper he’s employed with. While stationed at a small village near Munich, he befriends Andreas (Walther Reyer), a wealthy and respected German novelist, and his beautiful French wife Hélène (Audran, in a role that she’d make her own during her extraordinary tryst as muse for Chabrol, who she’d get married to a couple of years later). As Albin starts getting invited to their luxurious villa quite frequently, he becomes increasingly besotted with their contented conjugal life in general and with Hélène in particular. Before long he’s mired with sexual jealousy and murderous obsessions, especially when he realizes she’s uninterested in responding to his infatuated overtures, and starts following her like a manic prowler intending to blackmail her into acquiescence.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Marital Thriller/Romantic Noir

Language: French

Country: France

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

Poor Things [2023]

 Poor Things is possibly Lanthimos’ most unreservedly ambitious film to date – ribald, outré and gleefully grotesque – while also being situated in his distinctively weird aesthetic palettes and expressions. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, it conjured a wildly imaginative blend of period setting and punk-dystopia, and thereby a mix of black humour, body horror, sci-fi fantasy, existential inquiries and feminist fable. Yet, for all its absurdist splashes, it was also ultimately an exercise in humanism and morality, and therefore bereft of the wickedly savage and deadpan nihilism that he’d pursued so far. Consequently, for all its fantastical imagery, extravaganza and provocations, it demonstrated that he’s either mellowing with age or attempting an expanded audience (or both). Set in cartoonish Victorian England – flamboyantly evoked through zany cinematography, garish backdrops and discordant scores – it’s centred on Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of a child in the body of a woman. This freakish contradiction is the result of the handiwork of mad scientist Godwin (Willem Defoe) – who she unironically calls “God” – as he revived a woman who’s committed suicide by transplanting an unborn child’s brain into her. Unapologetically gauche, outrageously libidinous and infinitely curious, she embarks on a wild adventure of self-learning, first with the gloriously louche Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) – their romps represented the film’s most enjoyable sections – and then as a prostitute at a Parisian brothel where she’s drawn to socialist ideas. The drab final segment and some self-consciously serious set-pieces, unfortunately, were dampeners. Excellent performances aside – Stone was particularly fearless and nuanced – the film comprised of a charming cameo by Hanna Schygulla and droll inter-species hybrids reminiscent of Sukumar Ray’s unforgettable nonsense poem ‘Khichuri’ (“Hodgepodge”).

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Sci-Fi/Black Comedy/Fantasy/Romantic Comedy/Existentialist Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Last Summer [2023]

 Catherine Breillat proves with Last Summer that, even in her mid-70s, she hasn’t lost either her propensity or her appetite to defy norms and push the envelope in matters involving uncomfortable, unorthodox and amoral expressions of women’s private desires. Made a decade after her previous film Abuse of Weakness, this remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts marked an intriguing overlap between prestige cinema aesthetics and dangerously salacious themes. Its central crux – viz. a forbidden affair between a middle-aged woman and her teenage stepson – might’ve been tailormade for an exercise in saucy softcore in most other filmmakers’ hands; but, not in Breillat’s, as her objective was a non-exploitative and non-judgemental dive into a queasy and murky quagmire that a problematic relationship such as this constitutes, alongside the associated elements of sexual politics and power, and made in the kind of measured, unsentimental and analytic style that’s – in absence of a suitable term – oh-so French. In the narrative’s sharpest irony, Anne (Léa Drucker) is a capable and committed attorney who represents victims of sexual abuse, which therefore underscored how transgressions can often defy easy pigeonholing. Furthermore, the way her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), with whom her marriage has long entered a stage of convenient stasis, decides to believe her over his moody and rebellious son Théo (Samuel Kircher) – when he decides to reveal the secret liaison on account of the angst he experiences upon Anne’s decision to break-off – disconcertingly presaged the devastating revelations concerning Alice Munro. The film was at its strongest in the first and last thirds, separated by a relatively staid middle section when the affair actually unfolds, and was led by a courageous turn by Drucker.

Director: Catherine Breillat

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marital Drama

Language: French

Country: France

La Chimera [2023]

 Time and history are fluid, elusive and mysterious in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, an oddball mix of whimsy, irony and melancholy, with burlesque splashes reminiscent of Fellini and Pasolini thrown in. The film’s roguish and eccentric anti-hero Arthur (Josh O'Connor) – an alternately disreputable and righteous British archaeologist of unknown backstory who’s involved with a group of boisterous tombaroli (grave robbers) who’re into scavenging antique artefacts that the Italian lands teem with, while being haunted by memories of a lost love – formed a sardonic embodiment of its seriocomic tone and temporal themes, as he’s continually switching between ancient and near pasts. As the film starts, he’s just been released from prison, and despite moral pangs, he rejoins the colourful gang and leads them using his preternatural abilities in locating the right spots to dig, while dodging the suspicious cops on their tails and scandalizing the locals through their sacrilegious defiling of sacred traditions. Shot by Hélène Louvart – who sumptuously captured the landscapes’ rough beauty, and made playful use of multiple formats and speeds – and accompanied by an earthy and bawdy texture that complemented the script’s sensuous undercurrents and magic realism, the film served as irreverent satire and elegiac meditation on human’s insatiable lust and profane greed. The arresting O’Connor spearheaded a fine cast comprising of Carol Duarte as the alluring Italia who’s drawn towards Arthur and hilariously teaches him Italian hand signals, Isabella Rossellini as the tough yet sentimental mother of Arthur’s lost lover, Vincenzo Nemolato as a gangly scoundrel, and Alba Rohrwacher as a smooth-talking shark. One of the film’s most captivating treasures was a rueful folkloric ballad that added wispy, offbeat and metatextual layers to the quixotic proceedings.

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Adventure/Romance/Magic Realism

Language: Italian/English

Country: Italy