Thursday 18 April 2024

The Zone of Interest [2023]

 Jonathan Glazer’s chilling examination of the co-existence of mundane and monstrous – and shattering manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s powerful phrase from her seminal reportage Eichmann in Jerusalem – was as much a meditation on the Holocaust where industrialized extermination was perpetuated by white-collar bureaucrats zealously committed to overachieving their quotas and targets, as a devastating indictment of the complicity of the rest through wilful denial of genocide. The film’s title, aside from its reference to the coinage by the Nazi forces to describe the areas surrounding the Auschwitz camps, therefore also sardonically demonstrated people’s propensity for being oblivious to and even being apologists for the killings of those not belonging to their “zones of interest”. The latter aspect was emphasized by Glazer’s moral courage in expressing solidarity with Palestinians and “Not in My Name” campaign. Loosely based on Martin Amis’ novel, it depicted – through electrifying and formally rigorous scene compositions, virtuoso sound design, and a meticulously shaped script developed through a decade’s research – the unsettling domesticity and ordinariness of Rudolph Höss (an eerily unassuming Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (a frighteningly brilliant Sandra Hüller) who with their kids reside in an idyllic home adjacent to the death camp. Consequently, while the camera never looks beyond the walls, what’s happening there is obliquely and viscerally indicated through discomfiting minutiae, which made it an especially clinical and disturbing evocation of malevolent apathy. Glazer found the premise – demystification of evil by situating the film as “a story of here and now”, rather than “as something safely in the past” – so relentlessly dark that he interspersed it with stirring acts of resistance by 12-year-old Polish girl Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, who he’d met shortly before her death.







Director: Jonathan Glazer

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Family Drama

Language: German/Polish/Yiddish

Country: UK

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Tuesday 16 April 2024

Afire (Roter Himmel) [2023]


 Afire, Christian Petzold’s smouldering and mesmeric exploration of artistic aspirations/inadequacies, creative process and self-discovery, might well be his most beguiling film to date. The Rohmeresque conversational style, languid intimacy of its setting, and unfolding relationships that’re charged yet mellow – attributes which likened it to a dry comedy of manners meets lazy hangout film, and therefore decidedly removed from his prior films – stunningly pivoted into a more melancholic, moody and elusive work by its end with hints of ecological commentary, splashes of bittersweet unrequited yearning and dazzling metafictional elements that infused new meanings into the proceedings thus far. The second chapter in his planned trilogy on mythical elements transposed into contemporaneous settings – Undine had water as its motif, while it’s fire here – and his third collaboration with the effortlessly effervescent Paula Beer (their first film together was Transit, an exquisite interpretation of Anna Seghers’ extraordinary novel of the same name), it’s centred on grumpy, irascible and self-centred writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) who’s come over to a summer holiday lodge on the Baltic Sea, along with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), for an artists’ retreat of sorts where he plans to complete his second novel before meeting his editor while Felix works on his photography portfolio. With a nature alternating between edgy and pompous, he becomes subliminally conflicted upon finding himself in the company of the vivacious and nonchalant Nadja (Beer), who sells ice creams, has noisy romping sessions in the night, and harbours a hidden literary side; meanwhile, the ominous foreshadowing of forest fires looms in the backdrop. Buoyed by sun-kissed photography and a sparingly used score, this is a deceptively electrifying work by a filmmaker breaking new artistic grounds.







Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

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Saturday 13 April 2024

Green Border [2023]

 Celebrated Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s powerful and harrowing film Green Border riled up her country’s ruling right-wing polity to the point that that they launched a poisonous campaign to vilify its filmmaker for her fearless political convictions. This, of course, wasn’t surprising, even if its magnitude was shocking. The film is a ferocious battle cry highlighting the plight of immigrants fleeing their homes with tenuous hopes and scant means at their disposal, and therefore advocating infinite empathy towards this vulnerable community, as opposed to dehumanizing them, inflicting violence and turning them into political pawns; the ruling coalition government, unfortunately, is fervid in its anti-immigrant stance and their border military forces have been treating the refugees with exactly the kind of brutality that the film unflinchingly depicted. Shot in stunning B/W which permeated urgency and authenticity to the proceedings, this epic work captured a flurry of perspectives through interlocking narrative strands. It began by focusing on a Syrian family and an Afghan woman arriving in Belarus with the objective of crossing over to Poland, and therefore EU, only to realize that, like other Middle-Eastern and African refugees, they’ve become fodder for a nightmarish ping-pong between the antagonistic border forces who’re competing with each other on savagery. The focus then goes on to encompass a conflicted Polish guard, a defiant humanitarian team spearheaded by two courageous sisters, and a feisty psychiatrist who decides to take radical action. The film, that ended with glimpses of Ukrainian refugees being welcome into the country by thousands – as they should be, thus ruefully underscoring the ironic and hypocritical underpinnings to this tragic issue – tempered its scorching dissent with electrifying solidarity and a sliver of hope.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Agnieszka Holland

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Arabic/Polish/English

Country: Poland

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Thursday 11 April 2024

Terrestrial Verses [2023]

 The personal couldn’t have been more political, and vice versa, in director-writer duo Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari’s dry, sardonic and deceptively unassuming film Terrestrial Verses. Through a deadpan mix of episodic form, sparse storytelling, the distinctive flavour of documentary reportage, and biting straight-faced satire, it provided kaleidoscopic glimpses into a society where ordinary and everyday folks must constantly grapple with authoritarianism, lopsided power structures, inexorable patriarchy, religious dogmatism, moral policing, casual misogyny, ham-handed censorship and crushing bureaucracy. Comprising of ten short vignettes shot in static square frames along the lines of talking head interviews, wherein those in positions of authority and/or power are off camera while regular citizens – subjected to the former’s decidedly absurdist brunt – are facing the screen during their one-on-one interactions, we see an obstinate parent of a newborn baby, a carefree little girl, a defiant female school student, an aged woman who’s lost her dog, an infuriated woman cab driver with cropped hair, a perplexed man with Rumi’s poetry tattooed on his body, a harassed female interviewee, a diffident job-seeker, an exasperated filmmaker striving to get his script cleared – which added a mordant self-reflexive touch as both filmmakers, like many of their subversive contemporaries, have faced such a scenario – and an antiquated man who finally witnesses the societal foundations literally crumbling. Made and distributed using subterfuge in order to evade the country’s restrictive censorship laws, the film used dry and bleak humour to demonstrate the lives of people shorn of personal agency and being governed from birth till date with iron-fisted control. The film, therefore, can be considered as reflective of the theocratic modern-day Iran as of any Kafkaesque totalitarian regime across geographies and eras.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Directors: Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

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Tuesday 9 April 2024

Beyond the Sight & Sound Canon

"They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" (shortened, TPSDT) - one of the most referenced film websites out there - had approached a number of film critics & cinephiles in Aug 2023, incl. yours truly, with a truly ambitious objective. They wanted to create a list of essential/greatest feature-length films that hadn't received even a single vote in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.

Their final list - compiling which must have been a monster task - was published yesterday, and it can be seen, savoured & referenced at their here. Furthermore, out of the overall 839 individual ballots that they received, they've published 273, which they've labelled as "critics' ballots.

Glad & humbled to share that the list which I had shared with them features among those 273 (which includes only 6 individuals from India), and my submission can be seen here. I've also posted them below, along with links to my reviews where available.

As someone who loves exploring & savouring films that're "beyond the canon", I didn't really think twice before expressing my willingness to participate in this exciting adventure. I'd participated in a similar "Beyond the Canon" exercise (conducted by Iain Stott) a few years back, and memories of that were revived in the process.

However, only once I sat down to chalk out my list in Dec of last year, did I realize the daunting task that lay ahead of me. The reason being, a staggering 4,366 films were ruled out from being included in one's submission. The next challenge, of course, was to limit the count of films in one's list to no more than 100.

p.s. On hindsight I'm realizing that there are a few key omissions in my list - either because they skipped my mind or I missed assigning the required importance to them or saw them subsequently. But then, that's part of the fun for a crazy endeavour such as this, and hence that's okay.

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Sunday 7 April 2024

Perfect Days [2023]

 Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – described by the amusing witticism “Zen and the art of public toilet maintenance” – is a film that both enthralled me and filled me with uneasiness. It’s stunningly crafted, with gorgeous audiovisual designs, understated poetic reflections, gently impressionistic style, simmering emotions that vacillated between wonderment and melancholy, embracing of the mundane, and absorbing remembrance of a time when the world was still analogue. The cyclic routine of Hirayama – a cleaner of fancy toilets in an upscale Tokyo district – is brought to life by Kōji Yakusho’s immersive and near-unspoken turn; he loves his morning coffee, has a prized collection of classic rock and pop audio cassettes that he listens to while driving, takes photos of trees with his old film camera during work breaks, has the same dinner every night, visits his favourite bookstore and bar during the weekends (the latter often ends with impromptu gigs), and lives at a small and minimalist home where he tends to his little garden and voraciously reads esoteric books. Its irresistible splendour, however, stood at unsettling odds with its rather problematic romanticization of a blue-collar man who’s employed in a menial job which surely involves unsavoury tasks, long working hours, miniscule salary, lack of employment benefits, and being compelled to live a dreary existence that’s antithetical to pursuing transcendental and eclectic aesthetic standards. The job of a public toilet cleaner anywhere is anything but cute, which made the film’s idealized gaze patronizing and discomfiting. Its maudlin tone and nostalgic indulgences made it tad kitschy too. This dichotomous viewing experience, therefore, made it a paradoxical work could’ve done with imbuing the “perfect” in the title with edgier and more ironic undercurrents.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Existential Drama

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan/Germany

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Friday 5 April 2024

There's Still Tomorrow [2023]

 There’s Still Tomorrow is centred on toxic patriarchy, machismo and domestic violence, which’ve been embedded into Italian society across class divides. It’s set in post-WW2 working-class Rome, amidst an atmosphere of scarcity, impoverishment and post-War opportunism. And it’s shot in B/W with neorealism weaved into its aesthetic palette, along with generous splashes of melodrama and humour. One could therefore anticipate a courageous film, for its feminist inquiries, period setting and formal boldness; however, none could’ve guessed that it’d become a smash hit and one of the highest grossers in the history of Italian cinema! The directorial debut of Paola Cortellesi – a popular actress and comedian who, after dabbling in screenwriting in the last few years, finally took the plunge into filmmaking hoping to bring her grandmothers’ stories from the 1940s into life – struck a rare emotional chord, and even sparked dialogues and debates aside from its massive box-office success. The murder of 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin by her ex-boyfriend, which happened just after its release and sparked a nation-wide outrage, aided its resonance, along with its jaunty and quirky tone that rounded the edges, and the hopeful note of empowerment and liberation that it ended with. Cortellesi played the role of its beleaguered but resilient heroine Delia, a middle-aged woman who’s physically abused by her boorish husband (Valerio Mastandrea) – the movie, in fact, began with an unforeseeable slap –, patronized by her uncouth father-in-law, ignored by her children, and compelled to take multiple odd-jobs while also managing domestic responsibilities. The year, incidentally, is 1946, when voting rights in Italy were extended to women for the first time while holding a referendum to transform the country from monarchy into a republic.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Paola Cortellesi

Genre: Black Comedy/Marital Drama/Family Drama/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

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Wednesday 3 April 2024

20,000 Species of Bees [2023]

 A temporary escape by a city-dwelling family to the countryside during the summer holidays is never just that in cinema, and Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s sublime and exquisitely textured debut feature used this framework with nuance and restraint for a richly realized exploration of a kid’s complex tussle with gender identity, alongside the family members’ chaotic reconciliations with it. At one point, the kid’s rugged yet perceptive beekeeper grand-aunt (Ane Gabarain) remarks, to assuage emotional turmoil, that there are 20,000 species of bees and all of them are good; this observation articulated the film’s emphatic advocacy for plurality, diversity and acceptance, conveyed predominantly through women’s gazes and shaped by the director’s extensive interactions with an association of the families of transgender minors. An eight-year-old’s turbulent journey from Aitor, i.e. biological male, via the ambiguous Cocó, to Lucía, thus ultimately establishing her self-expression, unfolded in an absorbingly sunny village in the Basque County, amidst her messy extended family comprising of her loving but harried mother Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) – desperate to convert her passion for sculpting into full-time vocation, while struggling to come out of the shadows of her late father’s problematic legacy –, grandmother (Itziar Lazkano) with whom Ane has a strained relationship, siblings, aunts, cousins, and the afore-mentioned grand-aunt. Suffused with intimacy and fervid undercurrents, the film was particularly noteworthy for its flurry of moments despite its unhurried pacing, lyrical palette, and fine performances by the adults in the cast led by a captivating Arnaiz. But what superseded everything was Sofía Otero’s extraordinary turn as the vulnerable, conflicted and stubborn trans-girl, for which she – at the age of nine – became the youngest recipient of the Silver Bear at Berlinale.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Spanish/Basque

Country: Spain

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Sunday 31 March 2024

The Old Oak [2023]

 The Old Oak is supposedly Loach’s swansong, though – as a profound admirer of the British giant – one ardently hopes not. However, if that’s indeed the case, there couldn’t be a more fitting way for this impassioned chronicler of dreams, defiance and despairs of the working-class to bid adieu, than with this rallying cry of solidarity and resistance, wrapped in radical compassion and empathy. The concluding chapter in his gritty trilogy set in northeastern England – preceded by the magnificent I, Daniel Blake and the grim Sorry We Missed You – this fiercely topical work called to attention the systematic breakdown of a once-thriving mining town through governmental apathy and neoliberal policies, along with the bigotry, derision and xenophobic otherization faced by Syrian refugees forced to leave their war-ravaged country. A pub, the most British of institutes, served as the battleground for these seething, intermeshed topics. The titular tavern – its better days long gone and frequented only by few old-timers – and one of the town’s final public spaces, is run by TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), a lonely, weather-beaten man. He develops a deep bond with Yara (Ebla Mari), a young Syrian woman passionate about photography, and recalling – with a mix of fondness and melancholy – the 1984 miners’ strike where people broke bread together, they, along with a committed local organizer (Claire Rodgerson), start a community kitchen for the immigrants and impoverished locals. Discords inevitably get stoked amongst those who view the new inhabitants with extreme prejudice. Delicately counterpointing tenderness with anger and hope with disillusionment – evoked through authentic experiences of the non-professional actors – it provided a rousing distillation of Loach’s political activism through cinema, and his longstanding partnership with screenwriter Paul Laverty.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Ken Loach

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

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Wednesday 27 March 2024

Evil Does Not Exist [2023]

 Contrary to what its ominously ironic title supposedly suggests, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi asserted otherwise – viz. evil’s malleable forms and arbitrary manifestations – in his moody, shape-shifting and beguiling film Evil Does Not Exist. The evocation of its disquieting atmosphere was established in the overture itself, which comprised of a languorous tracking shot observing a dense canopy of trees, accompanied by Eiko Ishibashi’s rapturous composition, with whom Hamaguchi had previously collaborated in the brilliant Drive My Car. The scene suddenly cuts and the non-diagetic score is abruptly replaced with eerie silence; this unsettling aesthetic shift recurred over the course of the deliberately paced narrative that ambiguously ended in media res, thus amplifying the impact of its shocking finale, while reinstating the densely moulded commentaries of this brooding morality tale and smouldering eco-political thriller. Set in a tranquil hamlet, its delicate ecological balance and the residents’ harmonious co-existence with nature come under direct threat when a rapacious Tokyo organization – sardonically embodying late-stage capitalism multiplied few times over – purchases land there for setting up “glamping”, i.e. a farcical playground for wealthy city dwellers, which is bound to pollute the nearby stream’s pristine water, increase chances of forest fires, and put local lifestyles at dire risk. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a taciturn man who does various odd jobs for villagers and has a profound intimacy with his stunningly photographed surroundings which he’s inculcated into his little daughter, embodies – unbeknownst to the company’s two representatives – the outward placidity and underlying ferocity of the natural world. In a fine display of nuance, these two reps, who elicit strong negative perceptions during a meeting with the residents who display stirring community solidarity, are themselves exasperated by their devious profession.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Mystery

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

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Monday 25 March 2024

Fallen Leaves [2023]

 Aki Kaurismäki had considered quitting filmmaking after The Other Side of Hope, but had left the door ajar about completing what, along with Le Havre, was being referred to as ‘Refugee/Dockyard Trilogy’. To the joy of every cinephile, he returned behind the camera 6 years later with Fallen Leaves; but, in a thoroughly unanticipated volte face, he made it as the delightful fourth chapter in his magnificent ‘Proletariat Trilogy’ instead, which arguably comprised of three of his finest works – viz  Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl – albeit, closest in both storyline and tone to the first film in how it too portrayed in a distinctively Kaurismäkian manner… that is to say, droll, deadpan, understated, melancholic, and with bone dry humour providing piquant accompaniment to sharp social and political awareness, and therefore “a delectable yet quietly poignant romantic comedy on two people who’ve never seen nor aspired for better days” (to reuse my words while reflecting on that seriocomic gem). The two lonely, drifting, financially struggling and kind-hearted working-class protagonists pushing into their middle-ages – reminiscent of the unforgettable duo of Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää – are the mournful Ansa (Alma Pöysti), who’s forced to take up one meagre odd-job after another, and the taciturn Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a dismissed sandblaster slipping into alcoholism. Over the course of the film’s slender length, they shyly meet, develop mutual liking, but keep losing each other for both personal and circumstantial reasons. Filled with an eclectic Finnish soundtrack that asserted Kaurismäki’s terrific ear for music, and shot in vivid yet subdued palettes that distilled poetry and warmth from despair and desolation, this bittersweet film also celebrated cinema through various tongue-in-cheek references.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Aki Kaurismaki

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

Language: Finnish

Country: Finland

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Saturday 23 March 2024

The Battle [2023]

 1968 was a watershed year for rousing anti-government and anti-establishment protest movements across the world, dominated in most cases by progressive students. It represented the peak of resistance in Brazil too which was under military dictatorship since 1964, and the Battle of Maria Antônia in October 1968, which was a conflict between the left-wing students and professors of São Paulo’s esteemed public university – who were fearlessly dissenting and demonstrating against the increasingly repressive dictatorship, and even hosting a referendum against it – and the vicious fascist militia from a private institute across the street who were actively assisted by the police, represented a tragic pivotal moment for the country. Made with the aesthetics of guerilla filmmaking and structured in the form of a lost revolutionary diary, Vera Egito’s The Battle is a scintillating account of the fateful final 24 hours of that clash that ended with state-sponsored crackdown and suspension of the final vestiges of civil liberties in Brazil. Evocatively shot in grainy 16mm B/W, the film chronicled the flurry of happenings – interlaced with poetic undertones and two stirring relationships, viz. a long brewing romance between a married prof and her colleague who she’s known since their student days, and a sudden passionate affair between two dazzling female students – by thrillingly intercutting between those already at the struggle’s forefront and those who’re organically drawn out of their non-committal stances. Egito eloquently recalled the 21 dark years of dictatorship by breaking the film into 21 brilliantly orchestrated sequences, with all of them being bravura single-take tracking shots, wherein the camera glided through parallel and interrelated interactions and actions, across both closed and open spaces, within the course of each shot composition.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)






Director: Vera Egito

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

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Friday 22 March 2024

The Holdovers [2023]

 Narratives featuring two difficult individuals who overcome not just their borderline hostilities, but also gain rare insights into the other and thereby form an unlikely bond, upon being compelled to endure each other’s companies despite mutual differences and dislike, are as old as cinema itself, especially among its popular variants. Alexander Payne, who’s been adept at marrying Indie sensibilities with mainstream storytelling, made smart and captivating use of this otherwise hackneyed strand in The Holdovers; that it was also an outwardly bitter but essentially fuzzy and likeable Christmas movie, added to both its conventionality and charm. Set in an elite boarding school over the course of the winter holidays in 1970, it portrayed the growing camaraderie between an irascible and infuriating professor of the classics (Paul Giamatti) – derided and hated by all, which he reciprocates with undiluted scorn – and an intelligent but troubled teenaged student (Dominic Sessa), who’s been forced to stay back under the former’s guardianship, much to the chagrin of both. Giving them company is an African-American woman (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) who’s the school’s canteen manager and a bereaved mother, with her son having been killed in the Vietnam War. Payne could’ve interlaced striking commentaries on class and race into the film, and therefore taken it beyond just its aesthetic homage to the New American Cinema of the 1970s and instead pushed the cinematic boundaries like them; his thematic intent here, however, was steadfastly hinged around personal redemption. What prevented its devolution into just another conventional fare were Giamatti’s stellar turn as the lonely and caustic man, the script’s edgy tones that kept sentimentality in check, and the shared empathy that develops between the three social outsiders.







Director: Alexander Payne

Genre: Comedy/Drama/Road Movie/Buddy Film

Language: English

Country: US

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Sunday 17 March 2024

The Teachers' Lounge [2023]

 Packed with paranoia, anxiety, angst and outrage, amidst a rapidly escalating scenario and multipolar confrontations, İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge is a rare pulsating thriller that’s set rigorously within the confines of a school. And this dynamic, variegated, ostensibly hallowed and supposedly tightly controlled space, in turn, served as microcosmic representation of the broader society, and a sharp critique of it too. Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a young teacher recently hired at a junior high school, where she teaches math and PE to 7th graders. She’s passionately committed to her pedagogy, idealistic in her world-view, and – given her Polish origin and therefore aware of the challenges at integration faced by foreign-born persons – possesses an innate protectiveness towards social outsiders. The film begins with an uncomfortable scenario wherein, on account of a series of small thefts, Carla witnesses her colleagues manipulating a couple of young students into denouncing their classmates, which soon extends towards false accusations being levelled at a student of Turkish origin. Fuelled by her idealism and intent on getting to the bottom of this issue, she decides to entrap the culprit; however, by doing so, she herself indulges in an ethically dubious act, and inadvertently sets loose an uncontrolled chain reaction that puts her in conflict with many of her fellow teachers, some of the students and nearly all their parents. Benesch put in a stunning performance, rippling with emotional turmoil, arresting intensity, and a growing sense of helplessness, as did Leonard Stettnisch as a gifted but increasingly troubled student, in this taut work that, despite its narrative brevity, touched upon quite a few themes, including bullying, misinformation, systemic racism, privacy rights, censorship and cancel culture.







Director: Ilker Catak

Genre: Drama/Thriller

Language: German

Country: Germany

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Saturday 16 March 2024

Monster [2023]

 Monster – Kore-eda’s first film in Japan since his feral found-family masterpiece Shoplifters, having made The Truth in France and Broker in South Korea since then – is a sensitive and delicately-strung queer coming-of-age film. Though his first exploration of this topic, it felt connected to the rest of his canon as he’s made multiple films on social outsiders and tangled human relationships both centred around kids and featuring them in significant roles. He crafted this like a three-act play, wherein “Rashomon Effect” is resorted to in showing the same chain of incidents from three different perspectives. However, while the celebrated Kurosawa work demonstrated the fallacy of an objective truth and posited the co-existence of multiple variants of it, here the objective was decidedly simpler, viz. to clarify what actually happened through revelation of new information from each subsequent POV. While this intricate plotting device added an air of unfolding mystery to the proceedings, Kore-eda’s inclinations for sentimental flourishes (and contrivances) were detrimental to its cinematic integrity on occasions. The evolving bond between Minato, an emotionally confused fifth-grader, and Yori (played with heartbreaking liveliness by Hinata Hiiragi), a sweet if oddball kid who’s continually targeted for his non-heteronormative behavioural manifestations, is first shown through the eyes of Minato’s single-mother (Sakura Andō) who believes that his son is facing abuse at school. The contexts and meanings, unsurprisingly, dramatically change when we then witness what had transpired from the perspectives of school teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama) and Minato, thus delivering overarching commentaries on pat judgements, bullying, dysfunctional relationships, and conformity. Renowned musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose resplendent piano compositions added emotional resonance to many of the sequences, sadly passed away before the film released.







Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

Genre: Drama/Buddy Film/Coming-of-Age

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

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Friday 15 March 2024

Anatomy of a Fall [2023]

 Riveting, piercingly intelligent and tantalizingly orchestrated, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall had multiple thematic elements woven into its gradually unfolding narrative – marital decay to the point of mutual damage; the penchant for conflating art with the artist; blurring of lines between fact and fiction in autofictions where the former shapes the latter; the glaring pitfalls of confirmation bias, be it in personal spaces or forensic analyses – thus expanding it beyond a courtroom thriller. The captivating opening scene, where Sandra (Sandra Hüller) – a successful German novelist who lives with her French husband (Samuel Theis) and their visually-impaired 11-year-old son (Milo Machado-Graner), at an isolated chalet in the French Alps – gets awkwardly disrupted by the blasting sounds of an edgy and enrapturing instrumental composition by 50 Cent played by her husband in another room, while engaging in a flirtatious banter with a young female interviewer. Shortly after the interview ends, the husband is found dead on the snow. Did he die on account of an accidental fall or was it a suicidal act or was he pushed by Sandra? If the latter, did she do it on an impulse or was it premeditated, and what was the motive for it? A stunning pivotal scene towards the end, wherein a conversation between the couple explodes into a violent confrontation – reminiscent of a similarly explosive sequence in Marriage Story – delivered a clinical dissection on the subjectivity of laying blame, and provided the icing on Hüller’s ferocious turn. Her deliciously enigmatic performance, in fact, made it impossible to assign culpability. The courtroom proceedings were sharply etched too, thanks to an intelligent script co-written by Triet and Arthur Harari, who’re ironically live-in partners.







Director: Justine Triet

Genre: Drama/Legal Drama/Marital Drama

Language: French/English

Country: France

Posted by Shubhajit at 22:39 0 comments
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Wednesday 13 March 2024

Aprile (April) [1998]

 Nanni Moretti’s delightfully eccentric, endlessly amusing and disarmingly accomplished Aprile was made in a similar vein as his magnificent previous film Dear Diary – viz. as an idiosyncratic, episodic and heavily self-reflexive diary film; albeit, more political, and crazier too. It wryly manifested opposites – private and professional spaces, high and low art, artifice and authenticity, infantilism and adulthood, fiction and reportage, etc. – and, in turn, blurred the intersections between the personal and the political with self-effacing humour and deadpan irony. Starring the filmmaker as his neurotic, tad snobbish, politically engaged and chatterbox onscreen persona, it criss-crossed through three interlocking strands over a particularly eventful 3-4 years in his life. Italy’s operatic political developments played out in the background, starting with the 1994 elections won by the right coalition headed by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi – that made a terribly disillusioned Moretti light up a joint – and the victory of the Left 2 years later that thrilled him as much as the birth of his son in the same year; various events, in parallel, shaped that era, be it the drowning of a boat full of Albanian immigrants by the Italian coastal guard or an attempted secession. He decides to make a documentary chronicling the Italian polity, while harbouring an on-off desire to direct an outré musical about a Trotskyist pastry chef, and struggling with both creative block and personal distractions. The latter aspect was amplified by his anxiety and hysteria leading to parenthood and beyond. Filled with hilarious visual gags, farcical exchanges, satiric depictions and ample autobiographical components, including featuring both his wife and mother as themselves, the film wasn’t just a formally adventurous work, but an emotionally resonant one too.







Director: Nanni Moretti

Genre: Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire/Diary Film/Film a Clef

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

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