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