Accident [1967]

 Four years after exiled American filmmaker Joseph Losey had joined hands with British playwright Harold Pinter for the explosive The Servant, they teamed up for Accident, the second of their renowned trilogy of collaborations (they’d work together again on the marvellous The Go-Between). A barbed, smouldering and formally rigorous examination of brittle masculinity, sexual rivalry, abuse of power and dysfunctional bourgeois relationships, this was Losey’s distinctive turn to the “arthouse” aesthetics associated with continental European filmmakers like Antonioni, Resnais and Chabrol. The duo constructed this adaptation of Nicholas Mosley’s novel through delicate interplay between formal exactitude and freewheeling progression, and between minimalist expressions and emotional tumult, while depicting midlife crises, repressed desires, simmering jealousies, and the way that these shockingly unfold (reminding me of Roeg and Saura). It begins with a fatal car accident, and the screenplay – clinically pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle – reveals what preceded that through intricate flashback sequences. Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) is an eerily composed Oxford tutor, living in an idyllic country house with his wife (Vivien Merchant), who’s pregnant with their third child. All’s not well, unfortunately, beneath their seemingly banal and contented life, as he’s become infatuated with his ravishing Austrian student Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), who’s being romantically pursued by a fellow student while having a furtive affair with Stephen’s colleague Charley (Stanley Baker). He’s envious of Charley’s adulterous fling as well as his TV appearances, that leads him to a former lover (Delphine Seyrig) and an ugly transgression after the said accident. This brilliantly photographed film, accompanied by a jazz score, carried a discomfiting “life-imitating-art” subtext as Merchant was then in a disintegrating marriage to Pinter on account of his open infidelity.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

The Servant [1963]

 The Servant bruises its viewers like red-hot iron with its trenchant and subversive dissection of class and power, its electrifying blend of flamboyantly baroque aesthetics and coolly modernist form, its unsettling homoerotic undertones, and the way it tantalizingly occupied the subliminal space between tar black satire and psychological terror. The first of three remarkable collaborations between Joseph Losey – the great American exile who’d been blacklisted from Hollywood for his left-wing politics – and Harold Pinter – an exciting young British playwright then, in his first tryst with screenwriting – this remains the most acclaimed directorial venture of Losey (even if his greatest film was Monsieur Klein) and screenplay by Pinter. If the former’s simmering and spectacularly caustic evocation of barely contained hysteria, anarchy and violence, and the latter’s virtuoso script (adapted from Robin Maugham's novella) – filled as much with complex confrontations as with precision, silences, inflections and wry asides – were two stunning sides of this meticulously balanced triangle, undoubtedly the anchoring third side was Dirk Bogarde’s deliciously unfolding and implosive turn as the titular manservant Hugo – at once slippery, scheming and sinister – who cannily usurps the role of his employer Tony (James Fox), a callow and dandy man-child; incidentally, he’d also played a role in getting Losey and Pinter connected. Interestingly, aside from the servant turning the tables on his master, Hugo – over the course of the film – also seems to represent Tony’s nagging wife, jilted mistress and possessive mother; no wonder, both women in their lives – Tony’s snobbish fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) and Hugo’s coquettish “sister” – are eventually pushed out of their claustrophobic house, magnificently photographed in expressionist B/W, and accompanied by a haunting bluesy melody and gloriously discordant jazz score.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Thriller/Black Comedy/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Marx Can Wait [2021]

 Marco Bellocchio has used cinema as a weapon for political and psychological investigations throughout his formidable career. In his intensely personal documentary essay Marx Can Wait, he used it as a therapeutic and confessional vehicle instead; the latter aspect, incidentally, came laced with irony as unlike his mom, who was zealously Catholic, he’s been a firebrand apostate since his youth. In 1968, he was one of the most exciting young Italian directors, having already made two films, including his celebrated debut feature Fists in the Pocket, and was ferociously engaged with left-wing politics which mirrored the revolutionary fervour of that period. It was also the year when his fraternal twin brother Camillo committed suicide at the young age of 29. While he has tried delving into this guilt and trauma, and the broader familial underpinnings, through his movies – as evidenced by the footages that he interspersed the talking head interviews with – the octogenarian filmmaker decided to finally confront that tragic memory more than half a century later, including the realization that Camillo had tried reaching out to him for help in futility. He made use of a gathering of his surviving siblings – who’re all older to him – to re-live, understand, and hopefully reconcile with what continues to remain a gaping wound, and which they never discussed openly, rather allowed it to be quietly buried in the sands of time. Camillo was incessantly plagued by deep existential crisis and a catastrophic sense of directionless, leading to growing depression and which ultimately precipitated in disaster. The film’s evocative title, incidentally, was something that Camillo had quietly remarked in response to Marco’s political pronouncements, and which has remained with him ever since.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Z [1969]

 The most fascinating thing about Z is how Costa-Gavras effortlessly counterpoised heft with panache. Being based on the 1963 assassination of pacifist left-wing Greek leader Grigoris Lambrakis by reactionary state forces, and the advent of military dictatorship in the country, it was radical cinema at its purest – unambiguously anti-fascist; scathing in its uncovering of the military and police’s rotten mindsets and their underhanded use of far-right factions and lumpen-proletariat for their dirty deeds; crafting it with a left-wing cast and crew comprising of celebrated French actor Yves Montand, renowned Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, legendary Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, etc.; and filming it mostly in Algiers, which was then a haven for international left-wing fugitives. Despite its incendiary fury, it was also stunningly hip, cool and thrilling, being filled with riveting set-pieces, kinetic sequences, glorious colour photography by Raoul Coutard, a pulsating score defiantly lent by Theodorakis (who was in house arrest at that time), and counterpointing of Kafkaesque undercurrents and solemn moments with gripping genre elements, subversive humour and pulpy depictions. No wonder, it remains such an extraordinary political thriller that marvellously captured the 1960s zeitgeist while transcending both place and time in its frightening relevance. Adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’s book, it chronicled the public murder of a prominent politician (Montand) – while on a visit to give a speech advocating nuclear disarmament – by two sleazy henchmen (Marcel Bozzuffi and Renato Salvatori) and engineered by the virulently anti-communist military; and, thereafter, the investigation into it by an unflappable magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant), with assistance from a relentless photojournalist (Jacques Perrin). The complex sifting of objective truth from contradictory accounts, precipitated by subterfuge and witness manipulations, imbued it with compelling procedural elements.

p.s. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Costa-Gavras

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Film a Clef

Language: French

Country: France/Algeria

Marathon Man [1976]

 Coming on the back of a string of highly reckoned films, The Marathon Man unsurprisingly gets somewhat lost in John Schlesinger’s filmography. A taut, tense and ominous exercise in political paranoia and conspiracy, and adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, the film combined a number of topics in its storyline – from the dark legacies of the Holocaust and McCarthyism to the CIA’s notorious love for sharing their bed with monsters as part of its murky Machiavellian realpolitik, and even the rise of climate activism – that made it a bristling political film, beyond its moody atmosphere and thriller elements. “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a shy and lonely PhD student and an aspiring long-distance runner – which is established at the outset as he’s seen training hard in Central Park – who’s haunted by the memories of his dad’s suicide during the witch hunts. Unbeknownst to him, his elder brother “Doc” (Roy Scheider) is an undercover agent, acting as a diamond courier for fugitive Nazi war criminal Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier). When Szell’s brother gets killed in a random road rage incident, energetically shot in the New York streets, a chain of ugly incidents get sparked involving violence and murders, and before long Babe gets unwittingly drawn into this nefarious setup despite being completely oblivious of what his brother is mired in. The film featured a deftly paced narrative that slowly builds the tempo leading to a nightmarish run through the city’s nocturnal streets, a chilling turn by Olivier, a nerve-racking dental torture sequence, and some fine on-location shoots in NYC and Paris that captured the 70s zeitgeist, leading to a rewarding watch despite some of its erratic plot developments.

Director: John Schlesinger

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Executive Action [1973]

 1970s weren’t just a fertile period for arresting and topical political paranoia/conspiracy thrillers, but also those that centred on political assassinations. However, rarely did they delve into an actual one, like Executive Action did with an intriguing mix of political impudence and deadpan storytelling. Co-written by Dalton Trumbo, the renowned American scriptwriter who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy Witch Hunts, Mark Lane, civil rights activist and leading researcher into conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s assassination, and Donald Freed, decorated playwright and investigative journalist – and thereby providing an apposite context to the film’s political lens – it concocted a sinister deep state that coldly hatched and clinically executed American President John F. Kennedy’s murder a decade back. The conspiracy is masterminded and funded by Robert Foster (Rober Ryan, in his final screen performance), an archetypal robber baron who pulls strings from the shadows, while the plot is orchestrated by veteran black ops specialist James Farrington (Burt Lancaster). The film starts with a cabal of men who’ve assembled in Foster’s plush ranch to align on the need to liquidate Kennedy, discuss the actions that they’ve put in motion, and to get the seemingly all-important go-ahead from powerful oil magnate Harold Ferguson (Will Greer), who eventually accedes when all three “catastrophic” predictions by Farrington about Kennedy are proven right – viz. his support for the ongoing civil rights movement, adoption of NTBT, and withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Interspersing cynical conversations and spare dramatic recreations with gritty documentary footage, we thereafter see the preparations and operationalization of their murky ploy – including setting up of Lee Harvey Oswald as the fall guy – which managed to be captivating despite being aware of how it’ll all end.

Director: David Miller

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

The Crown [2016-2023]

 The journey from being decidedly sceptical about watching The Crown to being left mesmerized by it was an exhilarating one. Though not an exceptionally long series per se, it achieves a formidable colour when one takes into account that it intricately covered six decades of British history, complex political forces and social happenings, and a staggering multitude of events and people. Hence, instead of a conventional summation, it’s perhaps more prudent to highlight few aspects that made this a TV phenomenon. First, and foremost, this was anything but a hagiography or a simple history lesson; rather, it was charged, edgy and turbulent on one hand, and delicate, layered and nuanced on the other, while boldly diving into moral turpitudes and quandaries. Second, it was a gripping portrayal of the “royal family” as a dysfunctional, bickering, self-centred and over-privileged group of people with skeletons in their closets and nasty machinations up their sleeves, while also evolving with the years – both willingly and otherwise. Third, the show’s creator went for a crazy gamble by casting different actors for the same characters at different times, given the narrative’s stunning temporal arc, and that played off superbly; each actor brought in something remarkable while also ensuring continuity. Fourth, it was packed with magnificent performances; the seven actors who I found most shattering were Claire Foy as Elizabeth (Seasons 1-2), Vanessa Kirby as Margaret (S1-2), Alex Jennings as Edward (S2, S5), Josh O’Connor as Charles (S3-4), Emma Corrin as Diana (S4), Lesley Manville as Margaret (S5-6), and Salim Daw as Mohamed Al-Fayed (S5). Fifth, and definitely not the last, the larger tapestry was exquisitely interwoven through meticulously mounted episodes, many of which were extraordinarily powerful; “Fagan” (S4), which recalled the bleak Thatcherite dystopia in Leigh’s Meantime, “Fairytale” (S4), where Diana roller-skates in Buckingham Palace and jives to ‘Edge of Seventeen’, ‘Tywysog Cymru’, where Charles is drawn into Welsh history, “Aberfan” (S3), centred on a colliery disaster, and ‘Vergangenheit’ (S2), that delved into the monarch’s Nazi links, were my personal favourites (in that order).

Created By: Peter Morgan

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Family Drama/Marital Drama/Biopic/Epic

Language: English

Country: UK

All or Nothing [2002]

 In All or Nothing, Mike Leigh constructed a multilayered, kaleidoscopic and Dickensian slice-of-life on working-class Brits residing in a sprawling but dreary London council estate. With its nuanced and compassionate portrayal of the desolate, hardscrabble lives of the proletarian apartment complex’s residents, who’re shorn of any silver lining in their grey horizons, it provided a trenchant depiction of Thatcher’s damaging legacy, and thereby vividly recalled Leigh’s remarkable earlier Thatcher-era films like Meantime, Four Days in July, High Hopes and Life Is Sweet. Yet, despite the overarching bleakness, Leigh never basked in miserabilism; rather, he developed his characters and their stories from a place of deep empathy for the human condition, and infused his script with touches of levity, camaraderie and warmth; the film, consequently, was absorbing and lyrical amidst the melancholy and hopelessness. The  exceptional ensemble’s primary focus was on Phil (Timothy Spall), a lost, soft-spoken taxi driver; his common law wife Penny (Lesley Manville), who’s become inwardly bitter for having to hold together their family both economically – the wages from her job as a departmental store cashier is their primary source of sustenance – and through her housework; their cranky, obese son; and their withdrawn, lonely daughter (Alison Garland) who buries herself in books when she’s not working at a home for the elderly. Their neighbours comprise of Maureen (Ruth Sheen), an effervescent single mother; her troubled teenage daughter Donna who’s in an abusive relationship; temperamental taxi driver Ron (Paul Jesson); his dazed, alcoholic wife; and their conflicted teenage daughter (Sally Hawkins), who’s smitten with Donna’s boyfriend and craved by a hapless stalker. Marvellous performances abound, as do immaculately conceived moments, in this delicately strung tapestry on everyday survival.

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Urban Drama/Slice-of-Life/Ensemble Film

Language: English

Country: UK

Career Girls [1997]

 Similar to how the scorching Naked was a radical volte face for Mike Leigh after the bittersweet Life Is Sweet, and the cathartic Secrets & Lies a stunning switch after that, Career Girls – with its parodic humour and quirky satire, and reflective moments thrown in – presented another considerable tonal shift. One, nevertheless, finds in it the pointed sociocultural observations, dry political jabs and affecting female friendships which’ve been recurring elements in the sardonic British humanist’s oeuvre, while the themes that it espoused – viz. the transformed demeanours and outlooks of two women from the 80s to the 90s mirroring the tectonic changes in London during these two points in time – infused wry undertones into the proceedings. It was, otherwise, a relatively slight and patchy work, and its humour was tad alienating at times, while still being engaging and perceptive. We see the two protagonists, viz. Annie (Lynda Steadman) and Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), through interlocking narratives. Set in 1996, the former has come over to London to spend a weekend at the latter’s charming apartment. Meeting after 6 years, they renew their past bond, revisit their old localities many of which are now heavily gentrified, admire facets about each other, and of course reminisce. As may therefore be surmised, there’re multiple flashback episodes, starting in 1986 when a then neurotic Annie – afflicted with dermatitis and besieged with tics – joins the then bohemian, mercurial and caustic Hannah in the latter’s grubby and chaotic flat, and progressing through various seriocomic experiences over the next four years. Steadman and Cartlidge were both interesting to watch, as they displayed complementary behaviours in the past, and significant evolutions thereafter into more self-assured, conformed and mellowed individuals.

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Buddy Film

Language: English

Country: UK

Naked [1993]

 Mike Leigh has regularly interspersed seriocomic films – the tonal palette that he perhaps was most comfortable with – with those that were bleaker and more downbeat. In either case, though, one can always locate humanism, tenderness and empathy suffused in them. Naked, therefore, stands out as a stunning departure in his canon, with its fury, fierceness and ferocity. Drenched in edgy humour, scalding bitterness, smouldering violence and bottomless nihilism, the film – with its lost, unhinged, outsider, motor-mouth anti-hero Johnny (David Thewlis), who’s a searing cocktail of rage, alienation, malevolence, misanthropy, misogyny, pungent cynicism, self-destructiveness and uncouth behaviour – provokes one through the collision between its cutting brilliance and alienating sordidness. Led by a blazing, virtuoso performance by Thewlis, and superbly shot in grainy, desaturated colours by Leigh regular Richard Pope – the bled-out aesthetics complemented Leigh’s apocalyptic and angst-filled expression of a grungy, rat-eaten, post-Thatcherite England – the film follows Johnny, a northerner, who flees to London upon sexually violating a prostitute, and holes up at the apartment of his lovesick ex (Lesley Sharp), where he promptly seduces her vulnerable, drug-addict roommate (Katrin Cartlidge), before going on an aimless, nightmarish and nocturnal odyssey through the city. During that he meets a troubled Scottish guy (Ewen Bremner) whose girlfriend is missing, a “lonely hearts” security guard (Peter Wight) at an empty office building who spies on a woman across the road, and a sad-faced café waitress (Gina McKee), among others. Johnny, incidentally, is educated, well-read and articulate, and his existence outside the margins and bad behaviour reflect his sociopolitical alienation. Thus, the more hideous individual is a cold, noxious, wealthy guy (Greg Cruttwell) who exists within, and uses his privilege to rape and exploit.

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Urban Drama

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

Les Bonnes Femmes [1960]

 The most striking quality of Les Bonnes Femmes – Chabrol’s fourth feature and one of his personal favourites – is the way it so fluidly segued from bouncy and vibrant to sardonic and astringent to menacing and nihilistic. These, combined with Chabrol’s clinical dismantling of bourgeois, paternalistic and heteronormative tendencies that the society is so inherently filled with, and bitter lamentations on how naïve and sentimental dreams are casually exploited and quashed, made this a surprisingly pessimistic work. The film’s jaundiced themes, nevertheless, were counterpointed with a freewheeling style, jazzy score, sparkling B/W photography, exuberant splashes and love letter to Paris – it was shot on location in a mix of public and private spaces – which made it such a vivacious work, despite its caustic undercurrents. These contrasting flavours, in turn, made it a key Nouvelle Vague film on hindsight, despite being largely unsuccessful during its release. It’s a remarkably zeitgeisty portrait of four young Parisian women who’re co-workers at a store – the flirtatious Jane (Bernadette Lafont), who loves unrestraint abandon and one-night-stands; the reserved Ginette (Stéphane Audran, in her first major role and second of her twenty-five film collaboration with Chabrol), who copes with the drudgery of her job by secretly singing at a decrepit cabaret during the night; the hopeful Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon), who’s engaged with a guy patronizingly moulding her into his social class; and the naive and starry-eyed Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano), the most heartbreakingly tragic of the lot, who becomes enamoured with a mysterious man obsessively stalking her, which eventually takes an ominous turn. The men in the film were either predatory or lecherous or uncouth or tiresome, which unambiguously indicated who the filmmaker’s radical empathies were with.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Comedy/Buddy Film

Language: French

Country: France

Comedy of Power [2006]

 Comedy of Power opens with a virtuoso tracking shot. Over the course of 2 ½ minutes, a deliciously fluid camera follows Michel Humeau (François Berléand), the powerful head of a major state-owned French company, as he interacts with his assistants, walks through the office corridor, travels down by an elevator, and then, upon exiting the building, gets arrested.  The man, who simply can’t fathom that someone in his position can get so easily arrested and thrown into jail without any prior warnings, eventually finds himself face-to-face with powerful magistrate Jeanne Charmant-Killman in her tiny office. Isabelle Huppert – in her seventh and final collaboration with Chabrol, making this one of the most incredible director-actor partnerships in world cinema – was captivating as this fearless, wily, defiant and self-assured prosecutor, who’s arrested Humeau on charges of fraudulence and using state funds for personal gratification, and uses that as springboard to aggressively go after other corrupt honchos and dealmakers. As she becomes ever more obsessed in her quest that shakes up the French system, she finds her marriage collapsing, her boss trying to derail her, and facing attacks to scare her into submission, only for every personal and professional hurdle further fortifying her resolve to ruthlessly pursue her valiant crusade. The wry cynicism and relaxed nature of her nephew, with whom she shares a close camaraderie, provided an interesting counterpoint to Jeanne’s obstinacy, workaholism and fearless belligerence. While it didn’t possess the sardonic undercurrents distinctive to Chabrol’s filmography, it spotlighted on his derision for power and capital in this reworking of the real-life financial scandal involving former French oil company Elf Aquitaine and the investigations into it by anti-corruption judicial activist Eva Joly.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Film a Clef

Language: French

Country: France

Mahanagar (The Big City) [1963]

 While Mahanagar wasn’t Satyajit Ray’s first film set in Calcutta, it was the first where the metropolis formed an essential character, right from the arresting title sequence focussed on a moving tram’s trolley head. That, along with its stirring feminist subtext, eloquent portrayal of female solidarity, progressive expression of gender roles in contemporary society and compelling reflection of women’s experience from a female protagonist’s POV, made this a sublime example of films on women and the city. The first of his three remarkable back-to-back collaborations with Madhabi Mukherjee – this would be followed by Charulata, their most iconic collab, and the striking romantic noir Kapurush (part of his double bill Kapurush O Mahapurush) – follows the transformative journey of Arati (made unforgettable by the lead actress’ fluid interplay between restraint and vitality), who must overcome personal inhibitions, familial restrictions and social boundaries in her transition from housewife to working woman. While her conservative father-in-law is adamant in his refusal to support, her genial husband Subrata (Anil Chatterjee) wavers between reluctant encouragement on account of their precarious financial position, insecurity upon seeing her growing independence and success, and petulant objections triggered by his social conditioning. These are accompanied by Arati’s growing camaraderie with her Anglo-Indian colleague Edith (Vicky Redwood), who couldn’t be more dramatically different in her assertiveness and femininity, and which in turn gives her the moral courage to surmount professional expediency. The Nehruvian backdrop wasn’t just informed through the radio broadcasts that intermittently bled into the diagetic soundscape, it was also underscored by the underlying hopefulness despite the disappointments and setbacks. Ray’s outlook would take an edgier and more cynical turn by the time he made his blazing ‘Calcutta Trilogy’.

Note: My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Marital Drama/Feminist Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

The Swindle [1997]

 The Swindle, despite being a seemingly lighter work in Chabrol’s filmography – relatively speaking, that is –, grabs one’s attention with its amoral protagonists, slippery motivations, sly asides, and a narrative laced with ambiguous identities and deception. However, what made it particularly enticing, were its two central performances. Isabelle Huppert – in a more playful collab with Chabrol, coming in between her more diabolical turns in La Cérémonie and Merci pour le Chocolat – was enchanting as Betty, a woman assured of her powers as a seductress, while Michel Serrault mellowed his character Viktor’s underlying cunning with endearing self-effacement. Together they’re professional con-artists, who expertly plan and coolly execute their jobs while avoiding suspicions, and pursue opportunities in a manner that caution and prudence always take precedence over reckless greed and immediate returns. We’re never sure of their individual and shared backstories, nor do we get a clarity on their relationship – father-daughter, platonic lovers or purely “business partners” – which added layers of ambivalence to the proceedings. The film began by jumping straight into action, as we see the pair smoothly pulling off their latest job at a business conference in a Swiss hotel, with Betty first seducing a hapless man into her sultry charms, and Viktor then robbing him just enough to avoid scrutiny. Their decision to remain under the radar, however, is undone when Viktor gets drawn by Betty – despite his reservations – into a high-stakes scheme involving a shady courier (François Cluzet) working for a dangerous money-launderer. Though the film lost some of its fun and sauciness towards the last third, the wry equation between the two leads and deadpan celebration of their unscrupulous chicanery made it amusing, mischievous and entertaining.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Comedy/Heist Film

Language: French

Country: France

Merci pour le Chocolat (Nightcap) [2000]

 Liszt’s rapturous classical composition ‘Funerailles’ attained edgy and sinister undertones in Chabrol’s Merci pour le Chocolat. Music, therefore, was simultaneously ravishing and unsettling, with extended passages devoted to it as a means for both organically progressing the narrative and marvellously shaping the mood, and thereby playing a sensuous role in defining the film’s tone and atmosphere. Isabelle Huppert, in her penultimate collaboration with Chabrol, made it even more enticing and delicious with a stunningly slippery performance laced with just the right mix of sweetness, sharpness, straight-faced sinfulness and impish layers of delightful perversity of a well-made Swiss chocolate. This being a quintessential French noir, it was draped in sunshine and laced with understated elegance; and, being a quintessential Chabrol, it savoured the slow unravelling of the fractured underbelly of an upper-class bourgeois family. The film begins with the rebound marriage between Mika (Huppert), the well-off owner of a chocolate company, and André (Jacques Dutronc), a virtuoso pianist. They were married 18 years back – André’s second wife, with whom he’s had a son, died under mysterious circumstances – and they live in Mika’s stately mansion in Lausanne. When Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), a talented young pianist who might be André’s daughter, makes an impulse visit to their place and forms a deep bond with him, Mika’s underlying sociopathic tendencies get ruffled, despite receiving Jeanne with outward effusiveness. Huppert’s striking turn as a treacherous person – the kind that she’s made her own over her illustrious career – was meticulously synchronized with the film’s musical crescendo and complemented the sardonic themes of control, obsession and dysfunction. The interplay between music and menace, incidentally, was re-invoked the following year by Huppert in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Drama/Psychological Thriller/Marital Drama/Post-Noir

Language: French

Country: France

The Birds, the Bees and the Italians [1966]

 The ingeniously named The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (the direct translation of its Italian title, interestingly, was simply “Ladies and Gentlemen”) – the concluding chapter in Pietro Germi’s “commedia all'italiana” classic ‘Honour Trilogy’ – distinctively stood out vis-à-vis both its precursors, viz. Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned.  For one, this was an episodic film with hyperlinked stories wherein the POV shifted between the same group of men; for another, it was set in the north-eastern region of Veneto, as opposed to the southern Sicilian towns in the preceding films. Germi’s preoccupations with moral codes seeped in provincial expressions of marriage, family, machismo, sexuality and infidelity, using satiric and farcical brushstrokes, were nevertheless there throughout. In the hilarious first story, a garrulous doctor (Gigi Ballista) can’t control his mirth and tongue upon being confided by a womanizer friend of his impotency; this lowering of guard was exactly what his buddy needed to seduce the doctor’s ravishing wife (Beba Lončar). In the middle segment, a morose bank employee (Gastone Moschin), who’s living through hellish marital life on account of his nagging wife, falls for a beautiful cashier (Virna Lisi) at the café frequented by him and his gregarious friends; the trouble starts when, instead of having an affair on the side, which would’ve been more socially acceptable, he decides to elope with his girlfriend. In the final episode, the lecherous men seduce a young girl from the country; upon realizing the legal implications as she’s still a minor, they must jointly suppress the matter. An alcohol-fuelled private party in the first tale, with the camera dizzyingly roving across multiple characters, was this ironic and irreverent film’s most bravura sequence.

Director: Pietro Germi

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Omnibus Film/Ensemble Film

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Seduced and Abandoned [1964]

 Seduced and Abandoned, the uproarious middle chapter in Pietro Germi’s subversive ‘Honour Trilogy’ – sandwiched between his rollicking masterpiece Divorce Italian Style, and the amusing The Birds, the Bees and the Italians – was a work of manic brilliance. The satire here was so pungent and acidic that a bout of heartburn is unavoidable, even while laughing uncontrollably – and uncomfortably – at its madcap, farcical and outré humour aimed at medieval mindsets and ways of life. The film was intimately linked to the delicious preceding film, which itself was scalding and grotesque, in that this too was centred on the primitive social mores of “custom”, “tradition” and “honour” in a Sicilian town seeped in patriarchy, machismo, gossip-mongering and shallow veneer; just that, it was nastier, crazier and even more baroque, and Germi wildly cut loose in his narrative design. When her family gets to know that the young and nubile Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) has been seduced by, and in the process lost her precious virginity to, Peppini (Aldo Puglisi), her elder sister’s shifty and lecherous fiancé, all hell breaks loose. Her father Don Vincenzo (Saro Urzì) tries every trick in the book to “save” his family’s honour and image – from deceit, browbeating and emotional blackmailing, to kidnapping, shotgun wedding and attempted murder. The film was made even zanier by noteworthy turns led by a stellar Urzi; string of oddball characters – a suicidal and penurious aristocrat, a cop who wishes Sicily’s erasure from Italy’s map, etc. –; idiosyncratic score with a mix of sardonic dirges and sassy jazz; and gorgeous B/W cinematography that alternated between wide-angled framing and the kind of oblique close-ups of gleefully sweaty and sleazy faces straight out of Buñuel.

Director: Pietro Germi

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Section Spéciale (Special Section) [1975]

 Cost-Gavras’ Section Spéciale bore the attributes that powerfully resonated in his stunning trilogy that preceded it and had made him among the most thrilling political filmmakers in the world – his pulsating masterpiece Z, the intensely unsettling The Confession, and the smashing gem State of Siege – in that it too portrayed a dystopian historical chapter from the 20^th century, did that using a progressive Marxist gaze that considered acts of abuse anywhere and against anyone as a personal affront, and on an ambitious narrative canvas smartly enmeshed with agit-prop elements. Made with the objective of uncovering the rotten core of “Vichy France” – the collaborationist regime that was formed under German Occupation during WW2 – it chronicled a sham trial that was held by it to appease its Nazi masters, and thereby underscored the power of corruption and the corruption of power. When a Nazi officer is assassinated by the Resistance in Paris, the Minister of Justice Joseph Barthélémy (Louis Seigner) – with active complicity of the government – quickly drafts a draconian legislation, sets up a kangaroo court, and retrospectively tries Communists, socialists and Jews – who’ve already been sentenced for petty offenses – in order to execute them, and thereby avert retaliations. Though lacking the visceral power and gripping dynamism of the said trilogy, and missing the charismatic presence of Yves Montand, it nevertheless categorically conveyed the state-sponsored abomination of foundational legal principles. A sequence near the beginning, where a peaceful protest is violently broken up by the cops, highlighted Costa-Gavras’ ability to create exciting outdoor set-pieces. Its depiction of the Vichy regime’s use of the guillotine as a brutal political device, incidentally, would have a companion piece in Chabrol’s damning Story of Women.

Director: Costa-Gavras

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Historical Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Three Brothers [1981]

 Rosi’s melancholic film Three Brothers is a tale of grief, familial convergence and attempted reconciliations, as well as one of anger, disillusionment and resignation. These made it a quietly meditative exercise that’s alternately brooding and lyrical, and punctuated with flashes of riveting political commentary – through allusions, arguments and anecdotal footage – that contextualized the interlocking personal stories. This was, therefore, closer to his majestic preceding film Christ Stopped at Eboli rather than his blazing prior works, in that politics inherently shaped the elegiac proceedings without foregrounding them. The titular brothers are Raffaele (Philippe Noiret), a well-known, prosaic, middle-aged judge in Rome who’s considering presiding over a high-profile trial involving the Red Brigade that could invite danger for him; Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), a religious and reticent man who works at a correctional facility for troubled youth in Naples; and Nicola (Michele Placido), a shopfloor worker at an auto factory in Turin actively engaged in labour union actions, and facing marital breakdown. Upon their mother’s demise, their father – the elderly Donato (Charles Vanel), who resides in a farm in Southern Italy – summons them for the funeral. While that gives a rare chance for them to revisit a place and reconnect with its inhabitants who they’d left behind long back, it also engenders simmering undercurrents – particularly between Raffaele and Nicola – on account of their diametrically different backgrounds. The opposing forces evoked by their homecoming were alternated with startling flashforward sequences, poignant ruminations by Donato who’s increasingly lost in his memories, and Nicola’s young daughter captivated by the bucolic rhythms of this rustic milieu. Filled with gorgeously framed images, the film served predominantly as an observational portraiture, despite the underlying zeitgeist, politics and violence.

Director: Francesco Rosi

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy