Nelly & Nadine [2022]

 Swedish documentarian Magnus Gertten’s remarkable found footage film Nelly & Nadine didn’t just tell an extraordinary story of queer love, social defiance, resilience in the face of dehumanizing persecutions, and preservation of memory, it had a fascinating backstory too. He’d been obsessed, since 2007, with a grainy reel of women Holocaust survivors arriving in Sweden on 28^th April, 1945 – where, among a gang of joyous and cheerful faces, there’s a lady bearing a solemn, perplexed expression – and which featured in two of his prior works. While he’d been able to identify most of the people in it, the last remaining puzzle finally fell into place during a screening of his previous film that was serendipitously attended by a middle-aged French women called Sylvie Bianchi. As it turned out, Bianchi’s late grandma – Nelly Mousset-Vos, Belgian opera singer and former member of the French Resistance – had been in a passionate relationship with that enigmatic woman, who, as it emerged, was Nadine Hwang, the daughter of a Chinese diplomat and iconoclastic gay feminist Natalie Barney’s lover before the War. The two met and fell in love in the ghastliest place imaginable – the Ravensbrück concentration camp – and, upon liberation, they reconnected couple of years later and emigrated to Venezuela where they lived together in sublime bliss for many years. Gertten stitched the canvas with delicacy and through a disarmingly complex polyphonic form – Nelly’s profoundly intimate diary entries, infectious Super 8 home videos shot by Nadine, personal reminiscences of Nelly’s genial granddaughter (with whom the archive had remained unopened for many years), and other historical artefacts and interviews. Aesthetic sparseness, lyrical narration, and evocative score splashed this haunting docu with warmth, depth and melancholy.

Director: Magnus Gertten

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Holocaust Film/Biopic

Language: Swedish/French/English/Spanish

Country: Sweden

Triangle of Sadness [2022]

 Triangle of Sadness – the third instalment in Östlund’s ‘Anti-Capitalist Trilogy’, having been preceded by Force Majeure and The Square, and which won him a second consecutive Palm d’Or – was made with the incisive sharpness of a scalpel and the thudding blow of a sledgehammer. The resultant work, consequently, was filled in equal parts with cutting satire and unrestrained farce, in the Swedish provocateur’s outrageously unhinged assault on the shallow, vacuous, self-centred, hypocrisy-laden world of the über-wealthy. The film is structured into three disjointed episodes – the tantalizing first segment, made with barbed tonal precision, focused on a mutually corrosive battle of sexes, amidst the artifice of fashionistas and social media darlings; the superb second segment, set on an ultra-luxury yacht populated with grotesque affluence, traversed the highbrow farce of Buñuel and the lowbrow humour of Pasolini; the deadpan third segment, situated in a barren island, was a parodic variant, albeit with a class spin thrown in, to reality TV where celebs must “survive” for a grand prize. A model with a fragile male ego (Harris Dickinson) and a self-obsessed Insta influencer (Charlbi Dean) were the high-flying couple of the first chapter. The second chapter saw them aboard the exclusive cruise where they hobnob with dubious business magnates, smug aristocrats and repugnant weapons dealers; and featured a hilarious, alcohol-fuelled diatribe between the ship’s Marxist, world-weary American captain (Woody Harrelson) and a pompous Russian oligarch who worships Reagan and Thatcher (Zlatko Burić), and – arguably the film’s showpiece sequence – a truly cataclysmic dinner. Upon being stranded in the post-apocalyptic final chapter, the social order is spectacularly reversed as an Asian cleaning-woman (Dolly de Leon) lords over everyone as a stern but benevolent matriarch.

Director: Ruben Ostlund

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: Sweden

About Endlessness [2019]

Melancholy, existential despair, crisis of faith and the cycles of devastation wrought upon through human folly are some of the themes in Roy Andersson’s bleak, haunting, absurdist and darkly funny About Endlessness. It also forms – aesthetically, thematically, tonally and structurally – a fabulous extension to his unique vision of cinema that he’d crafted with ‘Grandeur of Existence Trilogy’ (which comprised of Songs from the Second Floor, You the Living and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence), marked by hyper-minimalism, wan-faced middle-aged people, punctiliously constructed urbanscapes reminiscent of Playtime’s Tativille. The narrative was perhaps even more episodic here than in the preceding three films (the quartet have been made over a staggering 20 years). And, it comprises of a series of fleeting, mournful, tragicomic tableaux connected by a pensive voice observing the lonely hearts and the lost souls, that ranged from the banal and commonplace to the appalling and momentous – a priest plagued with nightmares upon losing his faith; a husband who loses his cool on his wife who might be cheating on him; a guilt-stricken father who might have killed his daughter; a man who keeps his money under his mattress as he doesn’t trust the banks; another man experiencing pathos on being ignored by a former schoolmate; forlorn men and women drinking in silence; a couple out of Mark Chagall’s Over the Town hovering over a ravaged Dresden; grieving parents mourning over his son’s grave who died in war; a legless man playing a desolate dirge for passersby; Hitler’s warmongering military leaders faced with certain defeat; a swarm of POWs walking towards a harsh Siberian exile; a captive possibly left to die by the army; etc.

Director: Roy Andersson
Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence [2014]

The beautifully titled A Pigeon Sat on the Branch Reflecting on Existence brought to close Roy Andersson’s droll, poignant, episodic and highly ambitious ‘Grandeur of Existence Trilogy’, which comprised of Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, and made 7 years apart from each other. Mordant humour, deadpan observations on the perils of modern existence, melancholic undertones, stylized production designs, static camerawork, multiple tableaus stringed around a central narrative, and meditations on such themes as mortality, unemployment, loneliness, socio-economic oppression, and so forth, imbued the trilogy with the feel of one continuous show shot as three different films. The central tale dealt with the woes, frustrations and existential crises of Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holger Andersson), two travelling salesmen striving in futility to sell novelty items intended to make people laugh – ironically, sight of the two glum, ageing and down-on-luck men, with no companions but each other, and living in claustrophobic apartments, was anything but smile-inducing. Various vignettes were woven around this – the bitingly funny sequence where the sons of a dying lady try to get hold of valuables clutched by her as she’s convinced she can carry them to afterlife; an enthralling and deeply tragic musical interlude where a partially crippled waitress at a bar rouses emotions among a group of young, sad-faced war drafts many years back; Charles XII, the glibly callous Swedish king, making a stop at a diner in order to make a trip to the loo; et al. Despite the been-there-seen-that feel that is bound to emanate having watched the earlier two films, on its own this once again managed in being a simultaneously playful and bleak work filled with striking visual signatures and a running sense of pathos.

Director: Roy Andersson
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden

Force Majeure (Turist) [2014]

The aptly titled Swedish psychological drama Force Majeure provided a pointed jab on the social construct and presumptions that form the basis of the conventional definition of a family. The split-second choice that results out of a sudden and unavoidable catastrophe was used by the director Ruben Östlund to launch a potent commentary on the patriarchal nature of our social fabric, with husbands and fathers playing the traditional role of protectors and saviours, thus making this both an effective marriage drama and a sly social satire. Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), a wealthy Swedish businessman, while on a 5-day skiing vacation in the incredibly scenic and tranquil French Alps with his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two kids, panics, in a disastrous choice, flees, when a controlled avalanche goes awry. Even though, eventually, the moment of panic seems ill-founded, the very fact that his survival instincts had gotten the better of his judgement start slowly eating away the very foundation of their marriage – it starts with little itches and gradually evolves into a full-blown crisis which takes them dangerously close to marital collapse until, in another unanticipated, but in this case fortuitous development, an act of masculinity and courage restores his place of honour in the family. In one brilliantly staged sequence, the relationship between their friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and his young girlfriend (Fanni Metelius), experience a mini-crisis when they become inadvertent witnesses to Tomas and Ebba’s growing marital breakdown. Heavily recalling Haneke’s cinematic style, the stark, blinding white visuals marvelously captured the film’s wry and cold tonal palette, and its unsettling critique of bourgeois banality, hypocrisy and conflict.

Director: Ruben Ostlund
Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: Swedish/English
Country: Sweden

Songs from the Second Floor [2000]

Songs from the Second Floor, made after a staggering gap of 25 years after his previous feature Giliap, kick-started ‘Grandeur of Existence’ trilogy, Andersson’s darkly funny, quietly melancholic and deeply existential meditation. Though this too was an episodic film like Du Levande, the central story focused on Kalle (Lars Nordh), a rotund, middle-aged furniture seller, depressed that his shop has been gutted by fire, even though, as is eventually revealed, it was a deliberate case of arson for collecting the insurance money; he’s distressed by the mental breakdown of his elder son and is being constantly haunted by the ghost of a man he’d once borrowed money from. The narrative comprised of various other vignettes – a depressive man, who refuses to take a day off for his wife, finds upon arriving at office that he’s been fired; a magic sequence gone horribly wrong when the portly magician ends up accidentally severing the stomach of a volunteer; a young blindfolded girl being thrown off a cliff as part of a religious carnival; a businessman finds his ingenious idea of selling Christ’s idols not taking off; a wealthy but senile former General celebrating his 100^th birthday. Meanwhile a massive traffic jam, reminiscent of the Tati masterpiece Playtime, has gripped the city. Andersson covered such diverse themes as religious bigotry, cold-heartedness of corporates, varying repercussions of economic meltdown, frenzy and hysteria surrounding the new millennium, the cruelty of ageing, etc., through the idiosyncratic array of tableaus, for this artistically ambitious film that was simultaneously, hilarious, witty, grim, farcical, surrealistic, poignant, satirical, bitter and mordant, having minimal dialogues, composed by former ABBA member Benny Andersson, and marvelously shot using long, static takes.

Director: Roy Andersson
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Religious Satire
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden

You, the Living (Du Levande) [2007]

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson produced something incredibly unique with his ‘Grandeur of Existence’ trilogy. On first glance they might seem Scandinavian cousins of Wes Anderson’s works on account of the dazzling visual style, quirky humour, serio-comic tone and idiosyncratic characters; but the deep undercurrents of melancholia, existential gloom and mordant take on what it means to be alive, truly set them apart. Du Levande, the highly episodic second chapter in the trilogy (sandwiched between Songs from the Second Floor and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence – released 7 years apart on either side), provided whimsical and darkly hilarious, but essentially tragic, portrayals on quotidian life. The loosely connected vignettes, fabulously played by its ensemble cast, chronicled disparate tableaus – a depressed, obese woman (Elisabeth Helender) lamenting to her placid boyfriend on how no one cares for her; a man slyly stealing the wallet of a gregarious and wealthy man, and buying a nice dress with the money; a lonely young lady (Jessika Lundberg), hopelessly in love with a rock musician, dreaming of their marriage post which they reside in a traveling house; a cynical, misanthropic psychiatrist (Håkan Angser) who prescribes pills as opposed to providing therapy to his patients; a xenophobic white collar man who gets a raw deal while getting a haircut from a Muslim barber; a man (Leif Larsson) who has a nightmare about being executed by the state for having destroyed expensive dinner-set at a party. The characters' miseries, bitterness, crises and failures were accentuated by the misty, radiant cinematography using long takes and static, wide-angle shots, a deliberately jumbled narrative that regularly switched between real and surreal, and an upbeat score.

Director: Roy Andersson
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden