A Leap in the Dark [1980]

 The complex, sordid and unsettling dynamics of a family bordering on catastrophic, self-destructive dysfunction in A Leap in the Dark, and its bristling disdain for bourgeois morality and hypocrisies, sharply mirrored Marco Bellocchio’s stunning debut feature Fists in the Pocket from two decades back. The striking expressionism and formal audacity of the latter were replaced with a more controlled ferocity and muted visual palette here; the filmmaker’s radical and subversive lens, and his script’s gleeful grotesquerie and dark irony, however, hadn’t clearly mellowed in these preceding years, despite the evolution in his authorial voice. The film’s two central characters – Mauro (Michel Piccoli), a middle-aged bachelor and wealthy judge filled with complex neuroses, insecurities and repressed childhood memories, and Marta (Anouk Aimée), his similarly middle-aged and unmarried elder sister, who’s plagued with mental health afflictions and recurrent suicidal impulses – have been living together for many years in their sprawling and decadent apartment in Rome. Mauro’s intense possessiveness of and continuous obsession with his beautiful and fragile sister added disconcerting incestuous undertones to their relationship, as well as indications of underlying madness which will become increasingly revealed as Marta’s insanity subsides. This ironic switchover is precipitated by Giovanni (Michele Placido), a young anarchic actor in underground theatre and with delinquent tendencies, who Mauro introduces Marta to in order to push her over the edge, but becomes fiercely jealous of when he finds them developing a sensual relationship leading to improvements in her disposition. Piccoli was devastatingly brilliant, while Aimée and Placido were excellent too, as the non-conjugal couple’s cocooned, meticulously organized and oppressively sedate lives – and in a manic and blazing climactic sequence, their apartment too – experience a complete meltdown.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Family Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Fists in the Pocket [1965]

 Marco Bellocchio’s sensational debut feature Fists in the Pocket – which immediately catapulted him into the highest echelons of Italian cinema and made him a flagbearer of sociocultural subversion – landed with the explosive fury of raining embers. Younger viewers hailed it as a radical, groundbreaking work for its gallows humour, scorching ferocity, fiendish audacity, blasphemous impishness, and stunning obliteration of conventional familial values and Catholic morality. Made a couple of years before the 1968 student protests, it particularly resonated with those seething at bourgeois traditions and on the verge of revolutionary outburst; older and conservative audience, including the church, were outraged by it for the same reasons. Buñuel, incidentally, also took offence by it, which was especially ironic coming from the subversive Spanish giant, and more so given its Buñuelesque tone. With a coolly modernist palette that mirrored the ongoing Nouvelle Vague in France, it revolved around the unhinged man-child and punk loose cannon Alessandro (played with understated rage and deadpan malevolence by Lou Castel), who’s hell-bent on annihilating his family – once aristocratic but now languishing in dysfunctional torpor – to free his handsome eldest brother Augusto (Marino Masè) of the financial burden of their blind, religious mother and dim, epileptic brother. Meanwhile, he’s also grotesquely desirous of his beautiful elder sister Giulia (Paola Pitagora), who in turn is infatuated with Augusto. One, therefore, experiences a torrid deluge of repressed desires, shocking violence and sardonic irreverence in this superbly shot tour de force that, unsurprisingly, ended in an electrifying burst of theatricality. Ennio Morricone’s manic and haunting score provided the feverish icing on this macabre cake that, paradoxically, was filmed in Bellocchio’s mother’s country villa and partly financed by his brothers.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Religious Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

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