No Other Choice [2025]

 Park Chan-wook’s filmography is replete with wickedly feral killers who complement method with madness. No Other Choice’s anti-hero, conversely, was ridiculously inept at murder despite being naturally drawn to it, thus making this an interesting entry in his canon. Adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Axe – previously adapted by Costa-Gavras, and which Park had wanted to make since long – it drips with liberal doses of farce, satire, cutting humour, chaotic violence, and an exceptionally jaundiced view of a broken, hyper-capitalist society. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) – a veteran in the paper industry who’s loyally been with the same organization for twenty-five years – is a model citizen with a beautiful wife (Son Ye-jin), an ancestral home that he’s painstakingly reinstated, and heteronormative ideals. His amusingly bland life comes crashing down when, upon a takeover by Americans relentlessly driven by automation and efficiency, he – along with many others – are summarily “axed”. The new bosses supposedly have no other choice, and in turn Man-su becomes convinced that he too has none but to bump off his competition – former colleagues similarly struggling with crushing unemployment – to secure a prized job opening. In another movie, he would’ve been the wronged guy forced by desperate circumstances; however, in Park’s world of controlled malice and moral dystopia, Man-su – like his bosses – always had other choices that were nullified by his class trappings and “killer instincts”, while “cut-throat” competition conveniently justify murderous ends. Powered by a compelling turn by Lee (reuniting with Park twenty-five years after Joint Security Area), a fine supporting act by Son, and Park’s love for gorgeous and meticulously designed visuals, the film was sad, crazy, grisly, bitter and funny, despite its deliberate silliness and excesses.

Director: Park Chan-wook

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Crime Thriller

Language: Korean

Country: South Korean

The Secret Agent [2025]

 The Secret Agent is intimately linked to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s filmography – fondness for B-movies and old theatres, novelistic approach and meandering conversations underlined by subversive political subtexts, setting in Recife – while its ambitious narrative construct and period backdrop provided fascinating departures. This roguish, genre-bending and engrossing political thriller – crafted with aplomb and mischief, alternately devilish and melancholic, and interjected with deadpan humour and hilarious schlock – is situated in 1977, during Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship. Armando (Wagner Moura), widower and academic blacklisted for his political leanings, returns to his hometown using an alias to reunite with his young son and emigrate. He’s hosted by the vivacious, diminutive, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a retired anarcho-communist and antifascist partisan who provides refuge to political dissidents in her lively apartment building; he finds employment at an archival centre, for cover and hoping to find his vanished mother; and he’s aided by a resistance network who he meets at a movie theatre run by his kindly father-in-law, while a vengeful industrialist has engaged lethal father-son hitman pair – who in turn subcontract it to a vicious lumpen – to kill him. Meanwhile, an oafish cop (Robério Diógenes) harasses people for fun; sleazy newspaper stories about a “murderous hairy leg” have sparked public hysteria; revelries at the ongoing carnival provide an ominous counterpoint to the atmosphere of dread, paranoia and terror; and a young history student (Laura Lufési) in the present day is moved by Armando’s story while piecing together archival material on the dictatorship. Gorgeously mounted in sunny visuals and anchored by Moura’s magnificent turn, this unfolded into a smouldering and multi-layered meditation on political and cultural memory, pointlessness of violence, and passage of time.

Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

Miroirs No. 3 [2025]

 Miroirs No. 3, with its beguiling set-up, eerily tranquil tone with an underlying disquietude that gently builds, disarming and economical narrative that defies complex people and themes, and exploration of identity and memory, was immediately recognizable as a Christian Petzold film. The recurrence of automobile accidents in his filmography, and his sparing use of haunting, off-kilter music, were also present. It channelled two of his films in particular – the sunny, rustic setting and an understated human story that evolves through stray, low-key interactions reminded me heavily of his ravishing last film Afire; however, the one that it formed the closest companion piece to was his unnerving earlier film Yella, as both featured what can perhaps be called “hyperreal/quasi ghost stories”. Like the latter film, this too begun with a shocking road accident; while her partner, with whom her relationship was already faltering, instantly dies, Laura (Paula Beer), the emotionally drifting heroine and music student, emerges largely unscathed from it. She’s provided accommodation by Betty (Barbara Auer), a kindly older woman with whom Laura had fleeting eye contacts earlier and whose house is located adjacent to the accident site, and they promptly settle into a peaceful domestic routine – cooking, painting fences, grocery shopping, having coffee, etc. Betty, unbeknownst to Laura, harbours a past trauma, and that – along with what catalysed this bond – starts surfacing when Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), both expert car mechanics and seemingly estranged from her, arrive in the scene. Classical and pop tracks delightfully featured in the diagetic score of this work marked by a lovely interplay between being restrained and emotionally charged. The performances, led by the two women, were particularly remarkable.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

The Conversation [1974]

 Right from its bravura opening sequence – shot in grainy analogue and single-take using a telephoto lens which slowly zooms in from high-up, starting with a crowded scene bursting with activities and ending by focussing on Gene Hackman’s central protagonist – The Conversation announced itself as a thrilling work of its time. Much-sought-after surveillance expert and professional eavesdropper Harry Caul, ironically contrary to his vocation, is fiercely protective of his anonymity and privacy, while his drab and banal existence – he lives alone in a stripped-down apartment, spends his free time playing on the sax to jazz music, and never lets off his emotional guard – sharply contrasted his professional brilliance, adroitness with state-of-the-art technology and bespoke innovations. His latest assignment – employed by the Director of a shady organization and his sinister assistant (Harrison Ford) – involves snooping on a couple, through intricate planning and triangulations, while they amble around San Francisco’s Union Square. While extracting their conversation from the ambient noise, he becomes convinced that their lives are in danger, and his extreme anxieties, catalyzed by his severe guilt from a past job and repressed childhood memories, precipitate his devastating psychological meltdown. Made between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola crafted this riveting, low-key, chilling and magnificent exploration of seething paranoia, personal demons, and moral conflicts – and an exercise in melancholy in a minor key – that remains a high watermark for political conspiracy thrillers. Hackman was electrifying in conveying Harry’s complex contradictions, obsessions and unravelling, while the surveillance trade fair that he attends – followed by vulgar one-upmanship by a jealous professional rival and a rare night of hedonism, intimacy and betrayal – amplified the film’s caustic commentaries and haunting prescience.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

I… for Icarus [1979]

 JFK’s assassination has formed a recurring thread within political conspiracy thrillers, while among French left-wing political cinema in particular, films starring Yves Montand represented a sub-genre in itself. Directed by Henri Verneuil, best known internationally for the stylistic crime movie The Sicilian Clan, I… for Icarus ticked both boxes. Beginning with the cheekily framed disclaimer, “this story is entirely true since I’ve imagined it from start to finish”, this captivating, fatalist and irony-laden interpretation of the intrigue behind the American President’s death provided a delectably cynical expression of how, in modern nation-states, “truth” is diffused under convenient falsehoods, and that curiosity can have fatal consequences. Set in an unnamed country, a fearless, non-conformist President keen on challenging the status quo is shot dead, and the commission investigating into it returns with the verdict that it was the act of a lone assassin. Senior prosecutor Henri Volney (Montand), however, dissents the commission’s finding, and as a result is given the responsibility for leading a fresh inquiry. As he starts digging along with his team, he finds a continuously repeating pattern of ignoring, suppressing, bending and tampering with evidences, the disturbing discovery that multiple witnesses have been liquidated, and the growing realization that shadowy forces and senior state operatives are behind the conspiracy. Montand brought in his customary blend of charisma, intelligence and weariness in this film laced with distinctive French sensibilities and accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s riveting, self-reflexively used score. In an unsettling aside, the “Milgram obedience experience” is recreated, underscoring how, as Volney summarizes, “even in a country that’s civilized, democratic and liberal, two-thirds of the population are capable of carrying out any order coming from a higher authority.”

Director: Henri Verneuil

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Umberto D. [1952]

 Umberto D. – Italian Neorealist movement’s final definitive film and Vittorio De Sica’s personal favourite – alternated between extreme desolation and sentimentalist tendencies. The former led to it being attacked by the then conservative government for demeaning Italy’s image abroad, and was rejected by domestic viewers who wanted to ignore their plights for rosier images. The latter, conversely, has slightly diluted the film’s standing today in some quarters. To the remarkable credit of De Sica and his frequent collaborator, the great screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, it continues to remain a revered classic for its eloquent invocation of their conception of “collective actions” – viz. how “no story is ever truly individual” – as the primary lens for neorealism. Tellingly, therefore, it begins with a street demonstration – strikingly shot by G. R. Aldo as if straight out of a newsreel – of retired elderly men, demanding a raise in their pensions. As their protest gets broken with utter apathy by the cops, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (septuagenarian Carlo Battisti in his first and only role), emerges from the crowd of bitter, hapless men as one out of many. A former civil servant having to live a life of penury and indignity on account of his measly pension and mounting debts, he’s on the verge of being evicted from his accommodation by his cold-hearted landlady for overdue rent. Umberto is profoundly attached to his dog Flike, and makes a rare human connect with a sympathetic maid (Maria-Pia Casilio), in a world that has discarded compassion, empathy and human decency as meaningless liabilities. Despite the occasional propensity for titillating the tear-buds, the film tackled its bleak themes – societal indifference, loneliness, suicidal impulses – with equanimity, immediacy, irony and deep humanism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette) [1948]

 Visconti pioneered neorealist cinema and Rossellini took it to exalted heights; but it was Vittorio De Sica who gave this profoundly influential movement – that redefined a filmmaker’s gaze by foregrounding it on gritty, authentic stories of working-class struggles, shorn of artifice and embellishments – arguably its most emblematic monument with Bicycle Thieves. It was remarkable when it was made in 1948, for its vivid portrayal of post-war Italian society – plagued by poverty, unemployment, corruption and disillusionment – through understated and deceptively unassuming brushstrokes; that it has retained its modernity and impact even seven decades later reconfirms its enduring legacy. This was the quietly devastating story of Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), a simple and impoverished man, whose life takes a hopeful turn when he lands the job of pasting advertisement bills, and his wife (Lianella Carell) gets his bicycle – a prerequisite for the profession – released from the pawnshop. His luck, however, promptly takes a nosedive when the cycle gets stolen while he’s busy affixing the poster of a Rita Hayworth movie. The remaining film captured his desperate and futile search, with his son Bruno in tow. During his Roman odyssey, co-written by Cesare Zavattini from a Luigi Bartolini novel, he visits the city’s black market, finds himself in a church as well as a brothel, ambles through thoroughfares and alleys, walks by piazzas and the riverfront, visits a fancy restaurant, and ends up in a rough neighbourhood; shot on location with throbbing immediacy, this was, consequently, a great city symphony too. Along the way he encounters camaraderie and empathy, hostility and hopelessness, and a society in a complex state of flux, with Antonio’s existence both persuasively standing out and eloquently representing the collective.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988]

 British filmmaker Terence Davies’ feature-length debut, Distant Voices, Still Lives, continuously switched between bitter, mournful memories and gregarious displays of life in the here and now, and between private and public spaces. These intersecting aspects, along with Davies’ decision to replace linear recounting with a heavily impressionistic approach, instilled this heavily autobiographical film with formal rigour and poetic realism that were curiously at odds with its mythologizing of war-time and post-war working-class Britain and splashes of melodrama. Incidentally, this was two shorts rolled into one considering that its two interconnected halves “Distant Voices” and “Still Lives” were filmed two years apart and made with different crews, albeit with the same set of actors. It’s foregrounded on a Liverpudlian family – a stoic mother (Freda Dowie), two daughters (Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne) and son (Dean Williams) – that lived under the scarring shadows of an abusive and violent patriarch (Pete Postlethwaite), and continues to bear that trauma even after his death, which formed a pivotal juncture for them and divided their lives into a before and an after. Their oppressive interiority within their dreary, cramped home was frequently alternated with moments spent with friends and family in taverns and public houses, drinking beer and breaking into popular songs of that time. The communal power of music, in fact, formed a key theme. The cinematography, with its washed-out and desaturated colours, exquisitely evoked a lost time and space that exists through the subjective prism of memories, while the long, gently panning shots captured the calm and the chaos. The mannered acting and lack of any redeeming qualities of the brutish father, fleeting displays of gentleness notwithstanding, marginally dampened this deeply personal work.

Director: Terence Davies

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

Language: English

Country: UK

The Long Farewell [1971]

 Iconoclastic feminist filmmaker Kira Muratova’s second solo directorial endeavour, The Long Farewell, was a daring, dazzling, hypnotic and radically experimental work that was informed as much by the Soviet montage theory of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as Godard’s love for playfully shattering the conventional inter-relationships between audio and visual grammars. Thus, while her previous film Brief Encounters – the two often considered as companion pieces – earned the displeasure of the censors, this was treated by them as a downright expression of mutiny; consequently, not only was it shelved and released only with the advent of ‘Perestroika’ in 1987, Muratova’s directorial career too was impacted for years, forcing her to shift from Odessa to Leningrad and work outside the industry until her rehabilitation; the parallels with between her and avant-garde Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová are unavoidable. Yevgenia (played by renowned theatre actress Zinaida Sharko) is a well-off, vivacious middle-aged woman admired by her colleagues and friends. She’s also a domineering single-mom who dotes on her teenage son Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) to the point of extreme emotional dependence and exasperation. Hence, when he decides to move in with his dad in Novosibirsk upon experiencing a growing sense of estrangement with his mother, she begins to unravel. Her discontentment and Sasha’s disconnectedness were portrayed through splendid impressionistic bursts, interspersed with moments of quiet candour, and made particularly haunting by Muratova’s use of off-kilter formal choices – elliptical editing, repetitions, syncopated dialogues – along with stunning camerawork, moody B/W photography and a jangling, brilliant piano-based score. Yevgenia’s escalating inability to communicate with her son, ironically, stood at odds with her vocation as a successful translator, while the film’s freeform style underlined the duo’s unnerving push-pull relationship.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

Brief Encounters [1967]

 Kira Muratova, best known for Asthenic Syndrome, made her solo directorial debut with Brief Encounters, after a couple of films co-directed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov. Made at Odessa Film Studio during the “Khrushchev thaw”, this freewheeling, idiosyncratic and loosely-strung work exhibited her love for the French Nouvelle Vague and its radical figurehead Jean-Luc Godard. Like her dazzling next film The Long Farewell – which was even more avant-garde and formally eccentric – this earned the displeasure of the state censors for being too individualistic, and remained suppressed for the next two decades. Its delicately weaved love triangle – between pragmatic, unsentimental and bourgeoise city council planner Valentina (played by Muratova herself with deadpan poise); her free-spirited, vagabond husband Maxim (played by legendary Soviet folk singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotskiy), a traveling geologist who loves strumming his guitar; and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman from the countryside who Maxim met at a roadside café, and who’s incidentally now hired by Valentina as a domestic help at her sprawling apartment – is told through a mosaic of impressionistic perspectives, flashbacks and digressive allusions. The diffused B/W images, along with music splashes and fragmentary conversations, imbued the film with poetic-realism and a meditative air. These, in turn, were complemented by sardonic moments, like when Valentina is coaxed into attending a conference bearing no relevance to her work, or when she muses “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? – turning the grand Macbethian dilemma into comically banal – or when she adamantly ignores the pleas of families to classify the newly constructed public housing buildings as hospitable. Most interestingly, Muratova impishly subverted expectations by never having the two women find out about their shared love interest.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

The Getaway [1972]

 Sam Peckinpah delivered a gripping genre exercise with The Getaway – arguably the most straight-up actioner in his incendiary career – and an archetypal, albeit lesser-known, early entry in the pantheon of gritty 1970s American crime cinema. It was a substantial hit too, despite stretching mainstream sensibilities with its nihilism, violence and cynical amorality, facing considerable behind-the-scenes turbulence, and receiving negative critical reviews (which has fortunately reversed with time). The credit for its appeal goes as much to Peckinpah’s high-throttle direction and leading man Steve McQueen’s “King of Cool” on-screen persona, as the enormously cinematic source novel by Jim Thompson – with its blend of heist gone awry, sociopathic outlaws, on-the-road thrills and brooding violence – and the crackerjack script by Walter Hill, who rewrote the original adaptation by Thompson, including completely doing away with the novel’s final third and its pungently surreal finale. The film’s rakish stylistic flourishes were evident at the outset during the ingenious opening montage – capturing overlapping moments in times while introducing incarcerated career criminal “Doc” McCoy (McQueen) who’s up for parole – which was accompanied by flamboyant freeze frames and terrific sound design by Quincy Jones. Upon securing his release, he’s arm-twisted into immediately planning a bank robbery, which starts unravelling from the get-go thanks to a sleazy, rotten partner (Al Lettieri) who intends to double cross Doc at the first opportunity, and an alarming escalation in unplanned body counts. He’s consequently forced to go on the lam along with his wife (Ali MacGraw) – who doubles as a driver with fine get-away skills, thereby potentially serving as a prototype for Hill’s protagonist in The Driver – and partake in spectacular shoot-outs that stretch plausibility, while planning an escape to Mexico.

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Genre: Action/Crime Thriller/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

World on a Wire [1973]

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2-part 206-minutes-long television miniseries World On A Wire – the German wunderkind’s sole foray into science-fiction, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3, and recently restored after years of obscurity – was a gloriously trippy, luscious, paranoid and prescient work where the dystopian future is here and now. Flamboyantly blending the sci-fi genre with noir, melodrama, conspiracy, philosophical meditations, existential anxieties, and distinctive Euro-arthouse sensibilities, and with cold, sleek, metallic and modernist décor complemented with disco-tinged sensuality, it recalled Godard’s magnificent Alphaville in its evocation of one non-compliant individual’s battle against a supra-national techno-totalitarian society, and presaged the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in positing that we might be trapped inside a simulated, hyper-real, virtual reality environment. The film’s protagonist, cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), succeeds as the technical director of a powerful government-corporate mainframe program called Simulacron which has created an artificial world with thousands of “identity units” and has the ability to predict industry trends well into the future, when his boss, Professor Vollmer, dies under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to sense and uncover a massive corporate conspiracy with monomaniac zeal, and before long becomes a hunted fugitive as he gets into loggerheads with the institute’s malicious CEO Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau). Along the way he gets close to two duplicitous women – Stiller’s personal assistant Gloria (Barbara Valentin) who’s essentially been plugged in to spy on him, and the deceased super-scientist’s sultry daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) who Stiller becomes enamoured with. Co-written by Fassbinder, this deliciously ominous and tantalizingly foxy film – photographed in lush, grainy 16-mm by Michael Ballhaus, and featuring a rich soundtrack, including Fleetwood Mac’s hypnotic ‘Albatross’ – was populated with RWF’s regular gang of actors.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Romance

Language: German

Country: Germany

Aranyer Din Ratri [1970]

 Aranyer Din Ratri marked a pivotal shift for Satyajit Ray. While he’d already made a terrific transition to contemporary Calcutta settings earlier, and had tackled defiant topics already – from religious dogmatism and quackery to tyranny and war hysteria to crumbling feudalism and gender roles – he embarked on a more overtly political cinema with its cutting critiques on class entitlements, fragile masculinity, sexual tensions, exploitative attitudes, urban privileges, and brewing social conflicts. It, consequently, served as a fascinating segue to his radical masterpiece Pratidwandi that he immediately followed this with; both films, incidentally, were adaptations of feral novels by Sunil Ganguly. The tale’s premise – viz. the weekend getaway of four close friends and the women they meet there – was indicative of a light-hearted comedy; however, despite its loose-limbed structure, it was anything but one. The four friends – the haughty, fast-rising corporate executive Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee); erudite, reserved labour welfare officer Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee); brash, petulant cricketer Hari (Samit Bhanja) fresh of a heartbreak; self-effacing, unemployed Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) who’s the group’s unintentional comedian – find their shallow, self-centred and vulgar self-confidences shattered by the intelligent, self-assured Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) who Sanjoy becomes besotted with, her widowed sister-in-law (Kaberi Bose) who challenges Sanjoy’s “bhadralok” sensibilities, and impoverished Santhal woman Duli (Simi Garewal) who the egotistic Hari seduces leading to a violent comeuppance. Ray underscored the jaunty tone with sharp undercurrents of cynicism and irony, while Soumendu Roy’s terrific B/W cinematography – along with ingenuous inter-cutting that, accompanied with shots of Santhal dance, took the narrative to an edgy crescendo – gave the film a compelling audio-visual language. Ghosh’s turn was arguably the best of the lot in this funny, provocative, tense and cynical work.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Buddy Film/Romantic Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Seconds [1966]

 Seconds – the nightmarish final chapter in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ – wasn’t an overly political film, unlike the two that preceded it, viz. The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. It was, instead, a bleak and discordant foray into mid-life crisis and existential disillusionment, along with an unsettling study on the malleability of identity – through the dystopian premise of “rebirth” via next-gen plastic surgery – that recalled Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another; this latter facet, incidentally, would keep recuring in both future arthouse films (e.g. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In) and mainstream movies (e.g. John Woo’s Face/Off). However, that said, it wasn’t without political undertones thanks to its sharp critique of the American Dream that’s supported by conventional suburban family, corporate job, material wealth, consumerist desires and heteronormative existence. This was clearly a work of two halves. In the brilliantly constructed first half, middle-aged, well-off and deeply dissatisfied New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is lured by a shady company – through hilariously sleazy salesmanship (by Jeff Corey), spurious smooth-talking (by Will Greer) and wicked entrapment – into agreeing to shed his current identity and transform into bohemian Malibu-residing artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), in lieu of a steep price that they exact in return. In the rather formless second half, Tony struggles to adjust in his new persona and life – finding it equally empty and meaningless – and faces a horrific destiny in the memorably macabre closing sequence. The film’s visceral mood was amplified by the expressionistic B/W cinematography and jazzy score which, along with its free-flowing Kafkaesque segments, made it feel closer to a European than an American film.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: US

Seven Days in May [1964]

 The Cold War, a period marked by paranoia and political conspiracy, saw the US playing a particularly fiendish role in “spreading democracy” to other countries, while undermining it internally in the name of battling “red terror”. American filmmakers memorably responded to this anxiety-ridden atmosphere with multiple fine movies, with three in 1964 alone by Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Lumet and John Frankenheimer. The latter filmmaker, who’d made the baroque and unsettling political thriller The Manchurian Candidate two years back, took that ahead with Seven Days in May – the middle chapter in his ‘Paranoia Trilogy’, which he’d conclude with Seconds – that refocussed from McCarthy-era hysteria to murky machinations during the nuclear age. When pacifist US President Lyman (Fredric March), in a courageous but unpopular decision, signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the highly decorated, megalomaniacal and right-wing zealot Air Force General James Scott (Burt Lancaster) plots a nefarious coup d'état to replace the elected government with a military junta, as he believes that the President is undermining America’s strength and power by going soft on Communism. Colonel “Jiggs” (Kirk Douglas), who reports to Scott, uncovers the ploy from a series of suspicious clues, and takes the difficult call of choosing insubordination over allowing constitutional principles to be trampled. Though tad heavy on verbal exchanges at times, it wasn’t short of crackerjack thrills and intrigue, and was propelled by a menacing turn by Lancaster that was reminiscent of the chilling masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success. The storyline bore additional self-reflexive irony given how the United States frequently enabled military coups during the 20^th century, while Lancaster would star in another similar conspiracy thriller a decade later with Executive Action.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

The Train [1964]

 Watching The Sorrow and the Pity and The Train within a few days of each other was rather ironic, given how the former demythologized the idea of widespread French resistance during the German occupation while the latter emphatically celebrated it. John Frankenheimer, who took charge after Burt Lancaster got Arthur Penn fired, dramatically altered Penn’s script – which was more character-driven and primarily focussed on the value of art – into a kinetic, action-packed movie foregrounded on the titular locomotives. Along the lines of John Sturges’ The Great Escape from a year back, this too was fiction spun around facts – or “faction”, as one might call it – set during WW2, and was a similarly rip-roaring war film that nevertheless retained tangible character developments and political stances. It’s August 1944 and Colonel Waldheim (Paul Scofield), an “aesthete Nazi” who loves “degenerate” modern art, decides to take the crème de la crème of artworks housed in Jeu de Paume to Berlin – at any costs necessary – upon sensing Paris’ imminent liberation by the Allies. The museum’s desperate curator appeals to the French Resistance to prevent this given their incalculable cultural significance. Labiche (Lancaster), a railway inspector at the station from which this prized cargo will depart and leader of the local Resistance cell down to its last three men, reluctantly agrees to sabotage Waldheim’s plans despite not caring much for art. Stunningly photographed in B/W – deploying a mix of wide-angles, deep focus, and ingenious single takes – the battle of wits between the two men, manically driven by contrasting objectives, was matched by thrilling set-pieces involving authentic trains. The fine support cast included the striking Jeanne Moreau as a brusque inn-keeper forced into chooses sides.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Action/Thriller/War

Language: English

Country: US

El Sur (The South) [1983]

 El Sur, Victor Erice’s first film in a decade since his unforgettable debut with The Spirit of the Beehive – his next narrative feature, Close Your Eyes, would come half a century later – is that rare cinematic gem that succeeded in becoming one despite being an unfinished film… or maybe, because it was one. Adapted by Erice from the novella of the same name by his wife Adelaida García Morales, this sublime exploration of memories, disillusionment, loss and the inescapable ravages of time – awash in painterly beauty and profound melancholy – was supposed to have a runtime of 2-½ hours, but was stopped short at roughly the two-third mark by its producer Elías Querejeta citing that funds had extinguished, but real reasons never fully disclosed. The film as it stood, however, turned into a particularly haunting longing for the mythical “south” of the title as the final part – that was supposed to finally take us there – never got made. Life the earlier work, this too was a coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of a young, lonely and imaginative girl, and was underscored with the desolate remnants of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s totalitarian regime. Estrella (marvellously played by Sonsoles Aranguren and Icíar Bollaín as the initial 8-year-old and the later 15-year-old, respectively), who stays in a remote house in northern Spain with her parents Agustín (Omero Antonutti) and Julia (Lola Cardona) – they were both anti-Francoists and never seen speaking to each other now – is fascinated by her taciturn dad and entranced by the magical “sur”. Hypnotically photographed by José Luis Alcaine, the film’s standout central moment featured a rapturous single-take dance between father and daughter to paso doble music.

Director: Victor Erice

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

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

One or Two Questions [2018]

 The wave of military dictatorships that spread through Latin America during the 20^th century, competed with one another on state-sponsored repression, human rights abuses, extra-judicial punishments, and most notably, enforced disappearances. The one that ruled Uruguay for over a decade – it began with the 1973 coup d'état and brutal crackdown on the Marxist-Leninist Tapamaros, and finally ended in 1985 following massive demonstrations and strikes – was no less draconian. Hence, when an amnesty law was passed by the government in 1986, shielding the armed forces from prosecutions, it inevitably led to widespread protests by the civil society and human rights groups against it, which ultimately paved the way for a country-wide referendum in 1989. This remarkable 4-hour-long documentary – shot between 1987 and 1989 on the streets of Montevideo and neighbouring towns and villages; and finally released nearly 3 decades later – provided a rare glimpse of the wheels of democracy and the voice of journalism in action as the event, and associated political forces, unfolded. Two journalists, María Barhoum and Graciela Salsamendi, interviewed multiple everyday folks for Swiss television – both those favouring the amnesty, for reasons ranging from fascist beliefs, apologia and apathy to underlying fear of fresh retributions, and those steadfastly opposing it – and the recorded footage was edited by globetrotting Swiss documentarian Kristina Konrad into this 4-hour-long reportage on the shifting meanings of “peace” and “justice”, and a nuanced investigation into political trauma, anger and amnesia. The interviews were interspersed with electoral television commercials from that period, which added ironic qualities to the engrossing audio-visual collage. The docu remains part of an ever-growing pantheon of powerful Latin American political documentaries and films connected by their shared refusal to forget.

Director: Kristina Konrad

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: Spanish

Country: Uruguay

Man of Iron [1981]

 Andrzej Wajda stumbled upon the idea for Man of Iron – the remarkable sequel to Man of Marble, thus concluding his ‘Solidarity Films’ diptych – when a worker at the Lenin Gdańsk Shipyard, the birthplace of the Polish ‘Solidarity’ trade union movement in 1980, asked him to make a film about them. Leveraging a brief thaw in censorships – it would subsequently be banned and forced the filmmaker into exile – Wajda painted a simultaneously vivid, thrilling and solemn picture of the movement’s genesis through the life of Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), the son of the previous film’s protagonist Birkut (Radziwiłowicz). Modelled on Lech Wałęsa, Tomczyk was a former student activist and a worker at the shipyard who – upon his father’s death during the December 1970 protests and his dismissal from the job later – plays a leading role in the 1980 shipyard strike that founded the Solidarity movement. Like Birkut, his story of his life is also constructed through multiple perspectives – in particular, his old college friend (Bogusław Linda), and Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), who left filmmaking for political activism upon marrying Tomczyk – but this time by Winkel (Marian Opania), a once radical radio journalist who’s now an alcoholic and a lackey for the authorities. He’s ordered to dig out compromising information about the firebrand leader, for slandering his reputation, but starts regaining his lost dissidence as he learns more about the man’s defiant political journey. Rippling with apitprop, insolence, vitality and a throbbing zeitgeist, the gripping political mosaic unfolded through alternations of a framing narrative, multiple flashbacks and archival footage, and comprised of two haunting protest songs, viz. the elegiac unofficial anthem of the striking workers and a furious ballad performed by Janda herself.

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docu Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Polish

Country: Poland

Man of Marble [1977]

 Man of Marble – the first chapter in Andrzej Wajda’s electrifying diptych of ‘Solidarity Films’ along with Man of Iron – was a dazzling assemblage of political critique, formal audacity, and deconstructive meta-narration, making it both a vivid historical document and thrilling investigative reportage. Both films recalled Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Francesco Rosi’s Mattei Affair in that they constructed their eponymous individuals’ lives through subjective memories and objective evidences. The individual in question here is Birkut (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), a simple bricklayer who shot to stardom as a Stakhanovite symbol upon accomplishing a superlative feat of labour during the Stalinist era, but over the years fell out of political favour, became a persona non grata, and slipped into obscurity. Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), a brash young film school student, has defiantly selected this enigmatic man for her graduation project, and goes about making that by interviewing people who knew him in the past – a festival-hopping director who’d once made state propaganda films on Birkut; a former state security agent who tailed Birkut when he became increasingly outspoken and disillusioned; his oldest comrade (Michał Tarkowski) who was arrested during the purges and has become a dodgy bureaucrat post his rehabilitation; and Birkut’s estranged, self-hating wife – as well as archival news and film footage to piece together the jigsaw puzzle about this now forgotten socialist hero of unknown whereabouts. Flamboyantly shot through a mix of wide-angles, low-angles, close-ups, dynamic hand-held cameras and vivid colours, which complemented the wan backdrops and flat B/W reels, and accompanied by a pulsating, idiosyncratic score interspersed with old socialist songs, the film – aside from its stylistic bravura and edgy political commentaries – remains a fascinating depiction of subversive, guerilla filmmaking.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Polish

Country: Poland