The Lost Daughter [2021]

 Elena Ferrante’s writings can roughly be divided into two kinds – those with middle-aged women protagonists, and those with young, teenage girls – and they’re all ferocious, magnetic, discomfiting and bold feminist novels that’ve counterpointed messy, tumultuous exteriors with chaotic, implosive interiority. Maggie Gyllenhaal therefore displayed stunning bravado in adapting The Lost Daughter – a relatively less well-known book, but no less emotionally fraught, with knotty intermingling of present and past through heavy blending of a tranquil “now” and difficult, repressed memories – into a commanding, gripping and vividly realized directorial debut. She transplanted the tale’s Neapolitan backdrop – integral to Ferrante’s bibliography – to a Greek island, but otherwise retained its dynamics, narrative flow, and most crucially, candid and unsettling exploration of motherhood in how it need not be intrinsic to a woman’s natural instincts and preferences despite what the society unequivocally preaches. Leda (Olivia Colman) is a middle-aged comparative literature professor and translator who’s come for a leisurely working holiday. Her plans, however, go haywire from get-go thanks to a brash, noisy Italian-American family – possibly with shady links – and in particular Nina (Dakota Johnson), a sultry, sensuous young mother, who, with her teasing vacillations between her menacing husband, clandestine lover and little girl, triggers troubling, guilt-ridden memories for Lida from her own days as a deeply conflicted young mother (Jessie Buckley). As her plans for a quiet holiday and sense of being spiral out of control, she starts losing her composure, poise and sanity too. Colman’s superlative central turn was marvellously complemented by Johnson, Buckley and Ed Harris as a lonely caretaker, as well as by the luxuriant picturization, haunting score and a thrilling dirty dance to Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: US

France [2021]

 French provocateur Bruno Dumont, in his loftily titled film France, created an unapologetically scabrous and pungent satire on toxic media culture, vapid celebrityhood, and the performative nature of political discourse – and the self-serving attempts at opinion making thereof – on subjects which are otherwise as serious as war, refugee crisis, political populism and domestic violence. And yet, despite the black humour and acerbic irony that pervaded this casually flippant and incendiary film, there were underlying layers of empathy, spiritual crisis and existential dilemma at its core – and the tussle between these contradictory facets made it a bold, saucy and intriguing work. The film’s eponymous heroine (Léa Seydoux) is a brash, cocky and enticing star TV journalist who’s super popular, successful and influential. In one brilliant set-piece after another we see her confronting her subjects – the movie began with a hilarious mock-grilling of Macron at a press conference –, staging debates – commandingly presiding over ostensibly aggressive panellists –, and creating stories – doing multiple retakes and ensuring the right camera angles while in war zones and during rebel interactions, switching between crowded refugee dinghy when on camera and her yacht when off, getting interviewees to open up about intensely personal details through faux empathy, etc. Her carefully calibrated life, and in turn her glib veneer of artificiality, start crumbling upon a minor accident involving an immigrant working-class guy; as a domino effect ensues, her vulnerabilities, insecurities and the sham that defines her existence start getting exposed. Seydoux was at front and center with a stunning performance – alternatively flamboyant, arrogant, tough, manipulative, sly, petulant and fragile – while the classical looking narrative was laced with a slick, hyper-polished exterior and moments of deliberate melodrama.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Bruno Dumont

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

Language: French

Country: France

Babi Yar. Context [2021]

 “The past is never dead” in Sergei Loznitsa’s bleak, deeply unsettling and incredibly powerful documentary Babi Yar. Context. In 1941, Nazi Germany committed the horrific Babi Yar Massacre – so named because it was carried out in the eponymous ravine near the Ukrainian city of Kiev – wherein nearly the entire Jewish populace was clinically wiped out. The Einsatzgruppen death squad, with assistance from local militia and police force – alongside complicity of the residents – murdered 33,371 Jews over a 3-day period, while the overall toll during the Nazi occupation is estimated to be upwards of 100,000. Loznitsa, making extensive use of found amateur footage – immaculately collected from various archives where these were buried for decades, and extraordinarily restored over several months – composed a devastating picture of war, violence, destruction and human suffering borne out of fascism, prejudice and hatred. And, in turn, he took a defiant stance on his country’s culpability then and the convenient act of forgetting subsequent to that; in fact, he’d encountered uncomfortable silences all around him surrounding this massacre right from when he was a kid, and that cemented the need to remember and remind through this film. Structured with chronological linearity and presented with a startling sense of here-and-now that placed its viewers right in Kiev eight decades back, it persuasively covered what preceded the genocide and what followed it, including gut-wrenching shots of helpless men and women being beaten and rounded up, the brutal remnants of the horrors, reminiscences on concealment of the crimes and miraculous escapes, and the trial and public hanging of the SS perpetrators by the Soviet Army. This therefore remains a work laced with bold urgency, stark contextualization and profound remembrance.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine