Bergman Island [2021]

 Mia Hansen-Løve considerably expanded on her form and themes, while still retaining her delightfully distinctive tones and palettes, in Bergman Island. Made completely outside France and with an international cast – a trend she’d begun with Maya – it saw her handling an ambitious cinematic premise with its film-within-film narrative, interweaving of real and fiction, self-reflexive look at the creative process of a filmmaking couple – the older, renowned husband, and younger wife with a very different voice trying to find her footing, mirrored Hansen-Løve’s former relationship with Olivier Assayas, thus adding autofiction to the proceedings – and, above all, surprisingly nuanced and beguiling peek into the towering giant of the seventh art, Ingmar Bergman. That she expressed her admiration without placing him on a pedestal – including, not shying away from references to some problematic sides of his personal life – made it a refreshing watch despite the many pitfalls it had to smartly sidestep. That it was also tender, intimate and emotionally rich, firmly placed it within her oeuvre. In its primary strand, the said couple – Bergman devotee Tony (Tim Roth), and Chris (Vicky Krieps), an enthusiast but with conflicting feelings – move in to Fårö – the beautiful island where Bergman lived and made many of his gothic, gut-wrenching masterpieces – to both re-explore the Swedish maestro and work on their own screenplays. The parallel strand, which dramatized Chris’ deceptively personal screenplay, covered the rekindling of old passions when a young American filmmaker (Mia Wasikowska) finds herself in company of her former lover (Anders Danielsen Lie) while in Fårö to attend a wedding. The film – buoyed by terrific performances and lively soundtrack – was filled with joy, fragility, melancholy and unspoken disaffection both personal and professional.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Mia Hansen-Love

Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: English

Country: France

The French Dispatch [2021]

 While most auteurs have their own cinematic styles – in terms of compositions, palettes, tones, moods, formal devices, etc. – that serve as distinctive signatures, few are as unmistakably identifiable as Wes Anderson’s quintessential visual aesthetic and mise-en-scène. And his manic obsessive brio – characterized by, as a reviewer so aptly mused, paradoxical co-existence of “extreme orderliness of… compositions” with “equally outsized flexibility in structure” – were on full display in his maximalist work, The French Dispatch. Riotously vibrant, chaotic, quirky, irreverent and funny – and packed with eccentric characters, pop-art bursts and farcical tableaux – while rigorously contained within fastidiously designed and punctiliously delineated schemas, this was a loving homage to journalism in general and The New Yorker in particular. The anthology film’s title referred to the French foreign bureau of a fictitious newspaper – edited by its neurotic founder (Bill Murray) – and dramatized certain articles republished in its farewell edition. A hilarious prologue, by its travel writer (Own Wilson), painted idiosyncratic vignettes of the French town it’s based out of. The brilliant first chapter, chronicled by its arts and culture columnist (Tilda Swinton), featured an incarcerated abstract painter (Benicio Del Toro), his stunning muse (Léa Seydoux), and a slimy impresario (Adrien Brody). The impudent second chapter comprised of a love triangle between the paper’s middle-aged political columnist (Frances McDormand), a naïve student leader (Timothée Chalamet) and a feminist revolutionary, on the backdrop of an anti-establishment protest movement. And the tad doltish third chapter from the paper’s food section, covered a police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric), his personal chef, and anarchic criminals (Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe). The paper’s amusing office building, interestingly, was a straight reference to Monsieur Hulot’s delightful residence in Tati’s unforgettable Mon Oncle.

 

 

 

Director: Wes Anderson

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Romance

Language: English

Country: US

Introduction [2021]

Hong Sang-soo’s wistful, seriocomic and episodic film Introduction was a typically droll evocation of quotidian quirks, wry encounters and confused aimlessness of existence. This summation, of course, can be easily applied to most of his filmography. That it was also a minimalist low-budget work, ephemeral in its plotting, understated, irredeemably voluble, populated with his regular actors, and made in low-key B/W – facets that might liken it to a straight-faced student film for those not sufficiently into the indefatigable Korean auteur’s oeuvre – further placed it in HSS’ eminently identifiable cinematic universe. And, as its title enigmatically alluded to, it played out as a series of uneasy, off-kilter introductions of placid youngsters to reluctant parental figures, and of nonplussed neophytes to imposed ideas and weary veterans. That said – despite the structural interconnectedness, moments of poignancy and one of the most hilarious drunken interludes in all of his filmography – it was otherwise a relatively lighter fare that lacked the formal bravura and breezy brilliance of his finest gems. The sketchily drawn characters within the short, curiously overlapping vignettes – that began in media res and ended inconclusively – included a young guy called Youngho (Shin Seokho) who impulsively dabbled in acting, his placid girlfriend Juwon (Park Miso) who’s joined a course in fashion in Berlin, Youngho’s acupuncturist father suffering from spiritual crisis, the latter’s middle-aged receptionist who Youngho had a crush on, a famous theatre actor (Ki Joo-bong) who Youngho’s mom is dating, Juwon’s protective mother (Seo Young-hwa), the latter’s friend who’s a famous artist (Kim Min-hee), and Youngho’s doting friend. Among its various episodes, the most memorable one involved a hilarious diatribe on the vocative sanctity of acting, over copious rounds of soju.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Slice of Life

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea