Paris, Texas [1984]

 Good road movies are often less about reaching a specific destination; rather, they’re more around where the characters are ostensibly headed to, even if they never end up reaching there, and what they’re escaping from. Wim Wenders, who’d already made the acclaimed ‘Road Movie Trilogy’ with Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move and Kings of the Road (the 1^st and 3^rd films, in particular, were exceptional New German Cinema gems), magnificently blended his European arthouse aesthetics, understated voice and love for loners trying to get somewhere (or nowhere), with the quintessential, taciturn and weather-beaten texture of the “American Road” – the mythic vastness, desolate structures, endless freeways, neon-lit billboards, solitary motels, and the underlying existentialism, loneliness and ennui that they physically manifest and which was powerfully evoked by towering American playwright Sam Shepard’s script – in his moving and melancholic masterpiece Paris, Texas. At its core is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who was lost for four years, and has become an aimless near-mute drifter shorn of home and identity upon his scarring marital collapse with his beautiful estranged wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who presently works at a seedy peepshow in Houston. Upon being fortuitously located by his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) and brought back to Los Angeles, he attempts to reconnect with his young son Hunter – being brought up by Walt and his wife (Aurore Clément) – and find his wife whose memories and absence – and the reasons that led to their devastating separation – continue to profoundly haunt him. In Robby Müller’s moody lens and accompanied by Ry Cooder’s plaintive score, the film took a fatalist tenor that was a mix of meditative Western, Edward Hopper paintings and Charles Bukowski’s poetry.

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

Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: Germany

Festen (The Celebration) [1998]

 In the annals of excellent depictions of dysfunctional families, and how veneers of civility and respectability come undone during a fateful get-together – of which there are many incredible examples in cinema – there aren’t many that’re as scalding, portraying a family that’s as damaged, and which unravels as spectacularly on a celebratory occasion, as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, thereby underlining the title’s fiendish irony. The first “Dogme 95” film movement, it boldly wrapped an intensely bleak and sardonic chamber piece, and an elaborate melodrama, in the aggressive purism, low-fi aesthetics and anti-realism that were chartered by this avant-garde collective’s manifesto co-founded by Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. The occasion is the lavish 60^th birthday celebration of Helge (Henning Moritzen), a wealthy hotelier and domineering patriarch, at an opulent hotel in the country. He’s joined by his flattering wife (Birthe Neumann), three children – the unassuming Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) carrying a dark trauma, the brutish Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), and the temperamental Helene (Paprika Steen) – and his fawning circle of white, wealthy, middle-aged friends. The uncomfortable family dynamics, which is established at the outset, immediately indicated that things will end badly; but no one could’ve anticipated what a horrendous trainwreck it’d be. Disturbing revelations of sexual abuse, brooding memories of a tragic suicide, entrenched patriarchal mindsets, casual misogyny, pungently racist songs, emotional manipulations by a colluding mother, violent outbursts, and a shallow bourgeoisie ever ready to start feasting, dancing and turning a blind eye to inconvenient truths as the dinner party devolves into a Buñuelesque farce – and all of these feverishly captured through grainy film, handheld camera, diagetic sounds and shattering performances – demonstrated how brashly transgressive this film was both thematically and technically.

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Family Drama

Language: Danish

Country: Denmark

All We Imagine as Light [2024]

 Payal Kapadia’s training in filmmaking, her love for cinema (and slow cinema in particular), her feminist perspectives, and her bent towards political dissent are known. It wasn’t, therefore, surprising that her first fiction feature was inextricably shaped by these facets. All We Imagine as Light is equal parts slow, feminist and political cinema. Furthermore, its expressions of female friendships, solidarity and defiance – foregrounded on the teeming and chaotic metropolis of Mumbai that couldn’t give two hoots for them and countless others surviving similarly in its grubby margins – made this delicately weaved tapestry an evocative city symphony too, especially in its subversion of shallow cliches about the city’s supposedly embracing nature. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a senior nurse at a hospital, and her young colleague Anu (Divya Prabha), share a small apartment with their cat. While the former is solemn and lonely, having been largely abandoned by her husband, the latter is ebullient and mischievous, but also confused, having secretly fallen in love with a Muslim boy (Hridhu Haroon), as interfaith relationships are a societal taboo. Additionally, their Malayali backgrounds have as much made them outsiders, as their gender, relationship woes/choices and economic hardships. Completing this troika is Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widowed and middle-aged wage worker in the hospital, who’s being forcibly evicted by nefarious builders as she doesn’t possess the necessary papers. Their individual stories and evolving bonds – exquisitely brought to life by the three actors – reached an achingly resonant coda upon a trip that they take to an idyllic coastal village. The dreamlike narrative was frequently juxtaposed with immigrants’ voices, and was enriched by the film’s formal rigour, ravishing photography, lilting bluesy score, silences, absences and melancholy.

Director: Payal Kapadia

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Romantic Drama/Buddy Film

Language: Malayalam/Hindi/Marathi

Country: India

The Prowler [1951]

 The aspect that one realizes immediately about The Prowler is that three key people associated with it were irreparably affected by McCarthy’s notorious Witch-Hunts. Its screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who’d already been blacklisted, and consequently wrote it using the name of his friend Hugo Butler, who himself got blacklisted soon after; Losey too had to flee the country in the same year, and found himself blacklisted and thereby unemployable upon his return a year later, forcing him into exile thereafter. This bleak and cynical B-noir – with its politically loaded motifs that touched upon class envy, abuse of power by those in uniform, sexual misconduct, and running references to ghost towns and Indian burial grounds – were imbued with darker connotations by the above context. When Susan (Evelyn Keyes), a married woman who stays alone for long stretches as her husband is often away for his work as radio host, calls the police upon sensing being pried upon by a peeping tom, a nastier bad news inadvertently starts unfolding for her in the form of disgruntled beat cop Webb (Van Heflin). His role, ironically, is to provide protection, but soon tries to force himself upon her, and then hatches a dirty ploy to entrap her. While the plot’s progression was considerably dependent on contrivances, one senses bitter and nihilist undercurrents in it, that’re embodied by Heflin’s creepy and sinister turn. The desolate ghost town of Calico that it culminated in – a former mining town that witnessed an economic nosedive – emphasised the underlying themes of human corruption, greed and fatalism. The titular prowler, incidentally, was a classic red herring, with its purpose restricted to putting this sordid tale in motion.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Film Noir

Language: English

Country: US

The Trout (La Truite) [1982]

 Joseph Losey’s penultimate film, The Trout, was a more ambiguous, formalist and “arthouse” – but no less amoral or outré – revisiting of his terrific earlier film Eva. Like the latter, it was boldly invested in the provocative yet ambivalent sexuality of women raring to burst out of their social classes but without giving themselves in, and besotted men taking self-destructive plunges in the futile hopes of possessing them; both were visually exquisite; and, incidentally, both remain underrated in his filmography. Furthermore, this too starred Jeanne Moreau – the irresistible femme fatale from the earlier film – in a supporting role, who, as Lou, is now older, entrenched in her enhanced social class, and ostensibly settled in a lavish house through her marriage to a philandering businessman (Jean-Pierre Cassel). She therefore demonstrates suspicion and hostility towards Frédérique (Isabelle Huppert), seeing how her husband and his business associate (Daniel Olbrychski) are immediately entranced by her, while also detecting a younger version of herself in her. Frédérique, who’s grown up in a trout firm in a small Swiss village, is married to a closet homosexual, is well aware of the electrifying effects that she has on men (while harbouring a profound disdain for them), and loves luring them just enough to fulfil her desires. Tokyo – with its neon lights, high-rises, bustling streets, decadent interiors and traditions – formed the playground for the ploys that this ravishing and inscrutable seductress saucily indulges in, portrayed by Huppert with customary brilliance, teasing enticements, magnetic allure, and feral ruthlessness. Losey’s love for games – from hide-and-seek in The Servant to cricket in The Go-Between – was expressed here in a memorable bowling alley sequence that deliciously established the film’s tone and dynamics.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: French

Country: France

Eva [1962]

In Eva, Joseph Losey had one foot into the underpinnings of American genre movies from his past and the other in the vocabulary of European arthouse cinema which he was headed to. These parallel facets strikingly informed his decision to adapt James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve – a compulsive, racy and gleefully lurid tale – into an unabashedly European film, with the setting transplanted from LA to Venice, and the story’s bleak and seedy fatalism – which it mirrored – counterpointed with a style that was modernist, baroque and dazzling. The latter aspect thereby flamboyantly foreshadowed the expressionistic palette of The Servant which he made next year. The resulting film, which was cut by the producers without Losey’s permission, was as manic, delirious and exhilarating a work as Michel Legrand’s thrilling jazz score that flamboyantly accompanied nearly its entire length. At its core, of course, was Jeanne Moreau – at the pinnacle of her beauty, glamour and fame, and at her most irresistible and magnetic – as the titular Eva, a bewitching, coldly seductive and unapologetically promiscuous femme fatale who’s addicted in equal measures to money, gambling and Billie Holiday. Tyvian (Stanley Baker), an embittered Welsh author from working-class background, who’s suddenly become rich and famous with his bestselling first novel – albeit one harbouring a shameful secret – is attracted to her like a suicidal moth to a blazing fire. In the process, he alienates his loving fiancée (Virna Lisi), squanders his wealth, and irrevocably damages his shaky reputation. Venice, with its decadence and dilapidation, provided a poetic setting, and which – along with the self-destructive tale – was stunningly photographed in B/W by Gianni Di Venanzo through a mix of compelling single-takes and bold Dutch angle shots.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Noir

Language: English/Italian

Country: France

The Go-Between [1971]

 The three films that Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter made together – The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between – were all piercing examinations of class, adapted from literary texts (in this case, from L.P. Hartley’s renowned novel), and amalgamations of formal and narrative bravura. The common grounds aside, however, they strikingly diverged in tones, styles, settings and structures, thereby underlining the duo’s artistic ambitions. Unlike the pitch-dark satire and dizzying expressionism of the first film, and the unsettling modernism of the second, this had the most overly classical palette, with its lush period setting, sprawling cast, lyricism and melancholy. Further, while the events take place in the past, they’re informed by a framing device set in the present, thus making it a quietly devastating exploration of memory and time. The story unfolds from the perspective of 12-year-old Leo (Dominic Guard) – and in turn his much older self, reminiscing about a fateful summer that continues to haunt him – who’s been invited to spend his vacation at the palatial country house of his wealthy school friend Marcus. That he’s from a lower social and economic class is readily apparent, which makes him a bemused outsider. He finds himself besotted with Marcus’ ravishing older sister Marian (Julie Christie), who’s engaged to a man of her social standing (Edward Fox) but is in a forbidden relationship with a raffish local farmer (Alan Bates). Upon being enlisted as secret messenger by the covert lovers, Leo transitions from tacit observer to active participant. Sumptuously mounted and photographed, the exterior sections were a series of sublimely lit, composed and framed images resembling French impressionist paintings, while the stirring score enveloped them with longing, lost innocence and blazing emotions.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: English

Country: UK

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