The Damned [1969]

 The Damned was a scintillating outlier in Luchino Visconti’s oeuvre. Daringly provocative and subversive, packed with outré plot developments, shot in lurid colours, and driven by the unholy tussle between decadence and depravity, it bore the undercurrents of an exploitation movie, and was therefore radically removed from the Italian trailblazer’s customary stately forms and elegant compositions. The first chapter in his acclaimed “German Trilogy” – it was followed by Death in Venice and Ludwig – told the contrapuntal story of the disintegration of the aristocratic von Essenbeck family that owns a massive steel corporation, and Hitler’s consolidation of power. The family patriarch Joachim (Albrecht Schönhals) hates the Nazis, as does Herbert (Umberto Orsini) who’s married to Joachim’s niece (Charlotte Rampling). Not surprisingly, the former is murdered and the latter falsely framed over the course of an elaborately staged opening segment featuring a family gathering during Joachim’s birthday. Those present, a microcosm of the country, include the brutish Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff), a member of the SA that enabled Hitler’s rise but would soon fall out of his favour; Joachim’s crafty and cunning daughter-in-law Sophie (Ingrid Thulin); her slimy social climber fiancé Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde); his cold and ruthless friend Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), who’s part of the SS and pits one family faction against another; Sophie’s paedophilic, incestuous and easily manipulated viper of a son Martin (Helmut Berger); and Konstantin’s artistically-inclined son. Over the course of the turbulent narrative that unfolds, the violent machinations within the family paralleled the corruption, moral rot and grotesquerie that the Nazis embodied, while its showpiece segment – that divided the film into two halves – graphically recreated ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ when the SS massacred the “Brownshirts”.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Political Drama/Family Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

La Terra Trema [1948]

 Luchino Visconti, whose superb debut film Ossessione launched Italian Neorealism, made perhaps that movement’s purest expression with his second film La Terra Trema. Intending to adapt Giovanni Verga's novel I Malavoglia, he travelled to the impoverished Sicilian coastal village of Aci Trezza, and shot, over a staggering seven months in company of cinematographer G. R. Aldo, a slightly reworked version of the book. What made this desolate and exceedingly moving film an especially rare expression of authenticity and empathy was that, Visconti cast real fishermen in this story examining their daily struggles and their terrible exploitation by price-gouging wholesalers. That also made this the “Red Count’s” most enduring expression of his Marxist sympathies and therefore a eloquent political manifesto. Initially planned as the first chapter of a trilogy on the plight of the rural working-class – the next two would’ve focussed on peasants and miners, but unfortunately never got made – it portrayed their life through the story of a courageous, but ultimately crushed, rebellion led by Ntoni (Antonio Arcidiacono), the Valastro family’s firebrand eldest son, who wants to break free of the wholesalers and rouse his comrades from the fishing community. His journey back to down south, after his war duties, counterpointed the Parondi family’s journey up north in the masterful Rocco and His Brothers twelve years later, as well as that of Ntoni’s younger brother who, upon the family’s plunge into utter despair after a brief sliver of hope, joins a shady gang and moves out. The fabulously shot wide-angled B/W images took the viewers right into the gritty life of the defeated hero that ended on a tragic note of resignation while carrying memories of what could’ve been.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Rural Drama

Language: Italian/Sicilian

Country: Italy

Secret Défense [1998]

 Jacques Rivette, in a rare foray into genre cinema with Secret Défense, made the narrative both freer and more expansive while also retaining the brooding atmosphere that one associates with slow-burn crime movies. The resulting work was a compelling exercise in psychological suspense that succeeded, over a generous runtime of nearly three hours, in being a taut thriller as well as a meditation on secrets, obsessions, modernity and solitude. Rivette’s smouldering emphasis on the moments and spaces between actions made the film particularly intriguing, and that was exhibited through the near-real-time sequences involving Paris metro rides, and – in perhaps the film’s most riveting segment – an anxiety-ridden 20-minute train ride sequence. Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a research scientist still getting over her father’s death five years back, gets an unanticipated visit from her troubled younger brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) – they haven’t spoken since the funeral – who tells her that their dad’s death wasn’t accidental; he’s convinced their dad’s former business partner Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who’s taken over his company, stays in the sprawling mansion where they’d grown up, and maintains a discomfiting proximity with their mother (Françoise Fabian), has murdered their dad, and he therefore intends to exact a bloody revenge. Sylvie isn’t fully convinced but jolted enough, and decides to do the job herself so that Paul is spared the agony. Things, however, become messy when she accidentally kills Walser’s stunning young secretary/lover (Laure Marsac), only for her sister (also played by Marsac) to start looking for her missing sister. The formally rigorous work was marked by visual interplay between technological modernity of life in Paris vis-à-vis ominous serenity of the country, and excellent turns by both Bonnaire and Radziwilowicz.

Director: Jacques Rivette

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: French

Country: France

The Spirit of the Beehive [1973]

 Victor Erice’s celebrated debut feature The Spirit of the Beehive remains both a seminal Spanish film and an exceptional chronicling from a child’s POV. Made during Franco’s fascist regime – which was notorious for suppressing “non-compliant” works of art – Erice was compelled to express his critiques and disillusionment through elliptical, allegorical and allusive means; one therefore must engage in critical readings of the film to interpret its brooding political undertones. What remains unambiguous, however, is that this was a haunting and ethereal masterpiece, and a sublime text on how cinema can be a distillation of magic, poetry, memory, politics and defiance rolled into one. Set in a rundown village in 1940 – with the devastating Civil War having just ended with the Republicans’ defeat – the moody, minimalist and delicately weaved narrative is centred around wide-eyed six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent). Her ageing father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) remains absorbed in beehives, while her mother is lost reminiscing about someone she’s lost in the war. Her closest friend is her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), who loves playing little pranks on her naïveté. When James Whales’ Frankenstein is screened at a rundown theatre which the sisters watch in awe, Ana becomes fixated by the misunderstood monster – more so, when Isabel teasingly convinces her that he exists as a disembodied ghost at an isolated cabin nearby. Consequently, upon encountering a wounded Republican soldier who’s taken refuge there, she helps him assuming he’s the spirit’s manifestation, and is deeply scarred when he’s killed. Torrent, who’d star in Saura’s equally haunting masterpiece Cria Cuervos 3 years later, and Tellería were unforgettable, as was the magnificent, washed-out cinematography by Luis Cuadrado who started losing his eyesight during the filming.

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

p.p.s. This also happens to be my 2000th film review at Cinemascope.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Fantasy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966]

 The Hawks and the Sparrows ingeniously harboured parallel tracks, as it was both informed by the austere aesthetics and social commitment of neorealist cinema that Pier Paolo Pasolini had a strong background in, and was expressive of the radical, modernist, and asinine aspects of his subsequent filmography. This picaresque road movie, Marxist parable, and darkly funny commentary on social inequality demonstrated that pivot. Its farcical, eccentric and subversive whimsy were evident from the get-go as it began with an amusing song, accompanying the opening title credits and introducing the cast and the crew, including how producer Alfredo Bini might’ve “endangered his position and reputation” by backing this work. An idiosyncratic father-son duo – played by the celebrated thespian Totò as the elderly, droopy-eyed, Chaplinesque dad, and Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s lover and frequent collaborator, as the goofy, curly-haired, skirt-chasing son – are on an ambling walk through the gritty countryside of Rome, albeit going nowhere, and meeting oddball characters and having offbeat encounters along the way. They’re joined in their peregrinations by the Crow, a talking raven and left-wing intellectual. He spouts gentle advices, wry reflections, and philosophical musings, and chronicles an allegorical tale involving two monks (also played by Totò and Davoli) who’re asked by St. Francis – presented as a Marxist cleric keenly conscious of class conflicts, and reminiscent of Pasolini’s celebrated preceding narrative feature The Gospel According to St. Matthew – to preach the gospel to the haughty, powerful hawks and the humble, vulnerable sparrows. Filmed in sparkling B/W and irreverently scored by Ennio Moricone, it interplayed between political satire and dialectical analysis, and contained an homage to just-deceased Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti through a stirring montage of news footage.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Road Movie/Fantasy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Close-Up [1990]

 Abbas Kiarostami, right from his 1973 debut feature The Experience till the end of 1980s – Homework was his last film of that decade – had been making narrative films with underlying documentary attributes and documentaries with discernible performative elements. With Close-Up, he blurred the already porous boundaries between the two into something indistinguishable. That he also crafted a work that was simultaneously audacious in its formal conception and deceptively simple in its execution, playfully self-conscious and profoundly humane, radically metatextual and deeply moving, made this an extraordinary gem. The film’s unforgettable protagonist is Hossain Sabzian, a poor and unassuming cinephile who impersonated the well-known Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and faced trial and a short jail-term when the Ahankhahs – a well-off Tehran family who he promised to cast in the fictious film that he was supposedly planning to make – caught his fraudulence. Kiarostami cast Sabzian, members of the Ahankhah family and Farazmand – a journalist who too was drawn to the story – as themselves for recreating the interactions and moments that formed the backstory, as well as convinced the compassionate judge to allow him to shoot the trial – which he did using two 16mm cameras and where he casually inserted himself into the cross-examinations. Through this extraordinarily hybrid approach, an absorbing multilayered meditation unfolded on art, cinema, identity, representation, and originality vis-à-vis artifice, and perhaps paved the way for Makhmalbaf’s own similarly hybrid and beguiling masterpiece A Moment of Innocence. The film, interestingly, comprised of impish asides – as in the remarkable opening taxi-ride sequence –, an emotionally naked evocation of Sabzian for whom truth is subjective and art is absolute, and a haunting coda when the fake and real Makhmalbafs finally meet.

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

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Fellow Citizen [1983]

 Fellow Citizen was Abbas Kiarostami’s first full-length work foregrounded on cars, aside from being his first longform documentary. Cars blur the boundaries between the private and the public, representing a liminal space coalescing the two, and that facet became an absorbing motif in his cinema hereon, which made this playful, deadpan, and deceptively observational essay a significant entry for aficionados of his filmography. The Iranian giant had incidentally worked as part-time traffic cop during his student days at the University of Tehran, to support his studies, and that injected a personal connect into this work that was steadfastly focused on traffic officer Reza Mansouri. Owing to traffic woes, the city’s authorities decided in 1980 to impose a limited hours’ ban on private cars in the city centre. Kiarostami, sensing the possibility of drama within the mundane, and the battle of wits between regulation and disorderliness, set up his camera to capture – through close-ups using telephoto lens – the mix of matter-of-fact, amusing, conciliatory, exasperated and argumentative conversations between Mansouri – whose role is being a gatekeeper to the forbidden zone – and a flurry of automobile drivers cajoling, coaxing and convincing him to let them through as an exception. There was, therefore, also this fascinating element of performativity as the citizens try using a variety of techniques – from drawing his sympathy and laying importance to his position of power, even though he’s in essence a simple cop, to impromptu storytelling and even demonstrating their social positions – in order to be allowed into the forbidden zone. The series of impassively recorded interactions, consequently, ended up taking deceptively layered allegories. The documented vignettes, by the way, were edited from over 18 hours of footage!

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Report [1977]

 The Report may well be the frostiest and harshest work of Abbas Kiarostami’s oeuvre, devoid of either the infectious playfulness or philosophic inquiries or wry ironies that one associates with his films. Made during the final days of Iran’s corrupt and hated imperial regime, which was soon to be upended by an oppressive theocratic state, most of its copies were destroyed during the Iranian Revolution and was banned thereafter; this was also a rare foray for him outside “Kanoon”, which he returned to with his fascinating and experimental next film First Case, Second Case. Influenced by his own marital troubles which eventually led to divorce – making it a rather caustic self-portrait – this was an unsentimental and downbeat examination of a miserable middle-class couple stuck in toxic matrimony. The husband, Mahmad (Kurosh Afsharpanah), is an unlikeable civil servant who’s accused of taking bribes, and loves spending his time outside work drinking, gambling and even engaging with prostitutes in company of his two buddies; the wife, Azam (Shohreh Aghdashloo), has come to disdain everything about him – his emotional apathy, avoidance of familial responsibilities, denial, and spending hours away from home – and vacillates between anger and irritation bordering on hysteria, intent of leaving, and suicidal tendencies. The film’s depiction of a fractured marriage, consequently, had a dystopian quality about it, informed as much by Kiarostami’s own personal woes as by the political turmoil brewing outside the frames. He would direct another film centred on marriage 33 years later – viz. the fabulous and beguiling masterpiece Certified Copy – but the two couldn’t be further apart in their tones, forms and structures; this was, instead, a closer precursor to Asghar Farhadi’s compelling film A Separation.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Social Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran