A decade in the
making and having a staggering runtime of 13 ½ hours, Argentine filmmaker Mariano
Llinás’ playful, episodic, unpredictable, eccentric and wildly ambitious La Flor is a work of unbridled love and gargantuan
audacity. Straddling across genres, formally adventurous, and comprising of a
freewheeling structure – which the director explains with a deadpan demeanour –
this was also a fascinating canvas for its four lead actresses (Elisa Carricajo,
Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, Laura Paredes) who aged over the film’s duration
while enacting diverse characters, including flummoxed researchers, jealous musicians,
turncoat spies, medieval seductresses, irritable actresses and aimless
wanderers. The narrative is split into six chapters of unequal lengths that
either begin or end in medias res –
the truncated 1st episode, made in the mould of a B-movie, is about a
cursed mummy unearthed by archeologists; the 2nd episode, a boldly
passionate melodrama, is part musical on an emotionally ravaged pop diva and
part mystery involving scorpions, and comprises of stunning songs; the extraordinary
3rd episode and pièce de
résistance, is a murky, melancholic, existentialist, multi-linear and breathtaking
5 ½ hour spy thriller concerning four triple agents on the run with a kidnapped
scientist, interspersed with their ravishingly delineated backstories; the confounding
and meta-infused 4th episode starts with a parody of the film
itself, and evolves into a befuddling film and film within the film; the 5th
episode, a silent B/W short, is a revisit of Renoir’s A Day in the Country; and the moody 6th episode, hauntingly
shot using camera obscura, is a diary on a group of women who’ve just escaped
captivity. And the final cheeky coup de grâce? – the 40 minute long end
credits, accompanied with the lilting melody of an improvisational song.
Director: Mariano Llinas
Genre: Drama/Thriller/Spy Thriller/Musical/Avant-Garde Film
Language: Spanish/French/Catalan/German/Russian
Country: Argentina
The Dardenne
brothers’ brand of social realist cinema is at once an expression of deep
empathy and compassion for the working class and the underprivileged, simmering
statements of defiance and anger aimed at the status quo, and layered portrayals
of human relationships and frailties through a form that’s restrained and expressly
unsentimental. The Kid with a Bike,
with its theme of parental abandonment, disenchantment and social readjustments,
is yet another fine elucidation of that. 12-year old Cyril (Thomas Doret) was
taken into a Liège children's home upon being left in the lurch a month back by
his irresponsible single father Guy (Jérémie Renier), a cook at a small
restaurant struggling to make ends meet. Despite all indications suggesting
that Guy has no intentions of taking him back – he’s in fact decided to sever
all ties by making himself as unreachable to Cyril as possible – the young boy
refuses to accept this harsh rejection, and keeps making one frantic attempt
after another at establishing contact. Only when he’s befriended by Samantha (Cécile
de France) – a lovely, patient and warmhearted coiffeuses, who even accepts him
into her home – does this troubled, vulnerable and emotionally fraught kid finally
start coming to terms with his painful rejection and new reality. Filmed in
their quintessentially spare and rigorous cinema
verité style, and comprising of naturalistic turns by both Doret and
France, it’s a film that’s poignant yet hopeful, and dismal yet redemptive. Incidentally,
in a choice laced with dark irony, Renier had played the pitiful dad in the
Dardennes’ marvelous and tragic earlier film L’Enfant as well where he’d made the disastrous decision of ridding
his baby as means to escape financial distress.
Director: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Urban Drama
Language: French
Country: Belgium
White Terror, through
anti-communist genocides by fascist governments and repressive military juntas,
have happened across the globe over the 20th century, from Spain and
Greece to Chile and Argentina to Korea and Taiwan, and elsewhere. However, Nazi
Germany aside, few countries have perhaps experienced the kind of grisly mass
killings that happened in Indonesia upon the Suharto military dictatorship’s
1965 coup d'état. With The Act of Killing,
Joshua Oppenheimer had made an intensely disturbing and provocative documentary
on the killing squads, who still roam the streets with elan, proudly reliving
and even enacting their ghastly massacres. It formed a daring diptych with its powerful
companion piece The Look of Silence
in their eerily complementary themes, styles and tones – the focus here was on
the victims as opposed to the perpetrators, and hence, in place of the lurid
portrayals and narrative flamboyance of the former, this was restrained,
brutally straightforward and exuded deep suffering. Therefore, while it
might’ve been shadowed by the former’s formal ingenuity, it was ethically less
troubling and more profoundly affecting for me. The docu’s principle subject is
Adi Rukum, a proletarian optometrist in his 40s, whose elder brother Ramli was
barbarously tortured and murdered by death squad members, many of whom were
their neighbours and some have even become high-ranking officials. Hoping,
albeit in futility, to sense a shred of guilt and regret in those men, and
hence perhaps get some sort of closure, he engages in candid interactions with
them and their families. The quiet power, silent courage and pained conviction
that this mild-mannered man displays, along with the sobering reiteration of
man’s infinite capacity for evil, is bound to leave one shaken and haunted.
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Genre: Documentary/Political Documentary
Language: Indonesian
Country: Denmark
The most beguiling
aspect of Lee Chang-dong’s delicately structured and profoundly evocative work Poetry is that it could’ve gone in
diverse directions from its haunting opening sequence – darkly funny satire,
somber crime drama, portrait of familial dysfunction, meditative character
study, or quietly devastating exploration of ennui, loneliness and grief; it’s
a proof of Lee’s prowess, therefore, that the film’s heartbreaking emotional
core is laced with all these facets. It begins with the tranquil panoramic shot
of a gently ebbing river, which seamlessly turns harrowing as the dead body of
a girl is seen floating by. The narrative then shifts to the film’s protagonist
Yang Mi-ja (Yoon Jeong-hee) – a 66-year old lady with a meagre income and
diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s, who lives in a small town with her
aloof and potentially delinquent teenage grandson Jong-wook (Lee David), and
takes care of an aged and partially paralyzed wealthy man craving for his lost
manhood. In order to escape her boredom and provide an outlet to her long
suppressed creative side, she enrolls in a poetry course for adults, which
opens a new vista for her dour existence. However, when the above mentioned
girl’s tragic death – she was repeatedly raped and driven to suicide – is
linked to her grandson and his batch-mates, and that the parents, in collusion
with the school, are arranging funds to bury the case by paying the girl’s
impoverished mother, this scathing depiction of gender violence, patriarchy and
smug class bigotry formed a compelling and painful parallel strand to the Yang’s
fleeting quest for freedom and self-expression. Yoon came back from retirement
and gave a subtle yet magnificent turn in this richly layered and deeply
melancholic film.
Director: Lee Chang-dong
Genre: Drama/Crime Drama
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea
Loss, grief and
internal reconciliations formed the dominant themes in François Ozon’s
meditative anti-war melodrama Frantz –
loosely adapted from Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby
and structured along the classical form of a three-act play. The themes,
therefore, might remind one of his magnificent Under the Sand; however, in place of the gutting and implosive
ferocity of the latter, what we have here is a sedate, gently affecting and heavily
underplayed quietude – which, in fact, might even leave one tad underwhelmed
despite the emotionally dense context. In the excellent first act which is set
in the ancient German town of Quedlinburg just after the end of the Great War, Anna
(Paula Beer), who’s in mourning for her fiancé Frantz who’s fallen on the
battlefield, and Frantz’s grief-stricken parents – the seemingly gruff father (Ernst
Stötzner) who despises war and hatred, and the warm and caring mother (Marie
Gruber) – develop a deeply affecting relationship with Adrien (Pierre Niney), a
mild-mannered Frenchman who was apparently Frantz’s friend when the latter was
in Paris; meanwhile, rabid nationalism is brewing around them in a precursor to
the eventual rise of Nazism. The desolate middle act portrayed Anna’s visit to war
ravaged Paris in search for Adrien, despite a dark secret that he’d confided to
her while leaving Germany. And, in the rather placid final act their brief
reconnect ends on a dour anti-climactic note. Hence, as may be guessed, each
act was stronger than the one following it; and, while the elegant B/W
photography added a layer of melancholy to the proceedings, interjection of
splashes of colour felt avoidable. Manet’s bleak painting Le Suicidé, by the way, served as a manifestation of the
curtailed emotions.
Director: Francois Ozon
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/War Drama
Language: French/German
Country: France
