China Is Near [1967]

 Marco Bellocchio’s second film China Is Near retained the wild farce and blasphemy of his astounding debut feature Fists in the Pocket. If it was slightly less feverish and feral, it was as unapologetically offensive and risqué, and upped the satirical ante and ribald buffoonery while delivering a Molotov cocktail aimed at political, social, religious and sexual mores. In a fascinating coincidence, Godard’s dazzling gem La Chinoise and this – which released in the same year – didn’t just share zany humour, anti-bourgeoise filmmaking, Maoist references and impudent nonconformity, they even shared the Special Jury Prize in that year’s Venice Film Festival. Its principle targets are three siblings belonging to a hideously funny family of affluence and aristocracy in a provincial Italian town – Vittorio (Glauco Mauri), the rotund eldest brother, has tried his hands with various centre-left political options and has presently settled for the Socialist party to escape his guilt, look progressive and attain power; Elena (co-writer Elda Tattoli), the middle-aged, promiscuous and still glamourous sister, loves taking young partners from lower social classes, while ensuring that they never stake claim to her wealth; and Camillo (Pierluigi Aprà), the repressed and unhinged youngest of the lot, has started a three-man hardline Maoist cell to combat his dilemmas with aristocracy and Catholicism. Meanwhile, Carlo (Paolo Graziosi) and Giovanna (Daniela Surina), former lovers and belonging to the working-class, begin a scheming journey up the class chain, as the former seduces Elena while the latter decides to succumb to Vittorio’s ogling, hoping to marry rich. Splendidly shot by Tonino Delli Colli in baroque B/W and idiosyncratically scored by Ennio Morricone, it featured public brawl, fratricidal assassination attempt, failed abortion and other assorted craziness.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Color of Lies [1999]

 A sleepy, closely-knit provincial town in Brittany – a place that Chabrol has returned to multiple times across his career – is a bubbling hotbed of secrets, suspicions, deceit, intrigue and criminal tendencies in Chabrol’s smouldering, deftly underplayed and excellent thriller The Colour of Lies. The deliberately paced narrative is bookended by two violent events – the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl, and a death by falling that could either be accidental or not – while there’re other misdemeanours that’re underway in parallel. The film’s languid atmosphere, however, belied these, as Chabrol was more interested in portraying the moral rot, the societal malaise and the psychological repercussions as opposed to making a regular crime and mystery movie. When the body of the girl is discovered, the cops – led by the new, young and gently tenacious chief of police Frédérique (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who’s also an outsider – immediately consider the embittered painter and art teacher René (Jacques Gamblin) as the primary suspect, as he was the last person to see her alive. Once a promising artist whose career crashed upon being wounded in the 1980s, he earns a pittance by teaching local kids and is largely dependent on the earnings from his vivacious wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire), who’s a professional physiotherapist. While she loves him and defends him against the growing rumours, she gets drawn into a sly affair with Desmot (Antoine de Caulnes), a slick, shady and highly successful writer who glibly collaborates with both left and right-wing establishments. Beautifully chiselled turns by the actors led by Gamblin and Bonnaire, the sultry restraint of its images, the gossipy amoral community, and the understated finale all added to the film’s sordid charm.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: French

Country: France

La Rupture (The Breach) [1970]

 Claude Chabrol’s stunning ‘Hélène cycle’ – La Femme Infidèle, Que la Bête Meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture and Juste Avant la Nuit – delivered barbed interrogations into the bourgeoisie through chilling crime thrillers, with all featuring the luminous Stéphane Audran as the eponymous heroine. The series’ penultimate film was among the darkest and definitely the most bonkers of the lot, operating simultaneously as fiendish psychological thriller, exploration into the rotten core of social entitlement, and black comedy veering towards absurdism and even surrealism. Its violent opening – Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), the drug-addled and mentally disturbed husband of Hélène (Audran), injuring their kid son Michel in a moment of frenzy, which makes her retaliate by beating Charles with a frying pan – set the tone for what followed. She leaves home with Michel, admits him in a hospital, takes refuge at a nearby boarding house, and files for divorce. Her affluent father-in-law Ludovic (Michel Bouquet), insidiously drunk in his power and privilege, had always despised her for her “disreputable” past as former strip dancer; and now, intent on seizing custody of his prized “male heir”, he employs the sleazy Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel) to tarnish her image. With no ploy – howsoever vile or grotesque – beneath him, he goes about doing just that with the help of his deliriously raunchy girlfriend (Catherine Rouvel). Audran was sublime as the unflappably moral and quietly defiant woman who refuses to bow down; Bouquet, Cassel and Rouvel were captivating in their varying shades of villainy; and the vividly bright photography accentuated the nasty undercurrents, in this nightmarish adaptation of Charlotte Armstrong’s novel, who he’d adapt again 3 decades later for the terrific Merci pour le Chocolat.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Les Biches [1968]

 Claude Chabrol decided to take inspiration from Patricia Highsmith’s legendary and fabulous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley for Les Biches. He, however, went for a saucy gender reversal and delectably ambiguous interpretation of the book, and using it as a launchpad instead for his caustic examinations of existential ennui, class and sexual power games, and mutually destructive ménage à trois among the bourgeoisie, while retaining the book’s languid atmosphere and amorality. Stéphane Audran was captivating as Frédérique, a bored, wealthy, attractive and therefore the archetypal Chabrol woman. She picks up the oddly named Why (Jacqueline Sassard), a young street artist and hustler, in Paris, and they embark on a casual affair. Frédérique brings Why along to her villa in Saint Tropez, and the story’s delicious amorality takes full bloom in the enchanting, lazy environs of the Riviera. Both, incidentally, are bisexual, as the young Why first has a short fling with the handsome architect Paul (Jean Louis Trintignant), and the older Frédérique then swoops down on him and they begin a steadier relationship. That sparks the unravelling of Why’s repressed jealousies and vengeful sociopathy, and she starts reimagining herself as her mistress’s doppelgänger; before long, she wants to usurp the latter’s place. There were clear parallels that Chabrol drew with Bergman’s Persona in how the two women engage in a dangerous game of interchangeability and one-upmanship, reminiscent of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in the celebrated Bergman classic. Shot in muted colours, and with a dash of silly irreverence thrown in thanks to the two goofy gay friends housed by Frédérique (Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi), this remains a strangely fascinating if decidedly weird entry in Chabrol’s rebellious canon.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Psychological Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

La Cérémonie [1995]

 Claude Chabrol had impishly quipped that La Cérémonie – one of his greatest accomplishments, and which I’d been craving to revisit ever since I read A Judgement in Stone, the terrific source novel by Ruth Rendell – that it’s a “Marxist film”. This deliciously insidious tour de force work wasn’t just a cutting dissection of class structures, dynamics and conflicts, it literally culminated into a violent class war. He transplanted the novel from the British to the French countryside, retaining the unnerving interplay between a provincial locale’s overly tranquil environs and its sordid undercurrents with sinister possibilities, while replacing the author’s faux-reportage prose with a venomously ironic tone that made this an icily controlled domestic thriller. The malevolent tale is spearheaded with stunning aplomb by two of the most fabulous French actresses – Sandrine Bonnaire, as the taciturn, eerily withdrawn and inscrutable Sophie who’s pathologically ashamed of her illiteracy, and Isabelle Huppert, as the chirpy, eccentric, borderline unhinged and devilishly volatile Jeanne. A ticking bomb is planted the day the wealthy, cultured and deeply snobbish Lelièvres – comprising of the ravishingly beautiful Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), her quietly arrogant second husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), his gently condescending college-going daughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen), and her gauche adolescent son – hire Sophie as resident maid in their isolated mansion, and the fuse gets lit when the latter ends up befriending Jeanne, an impetuous postmistress who loves prying into people’s secrets and holds a smouldering grudge against the family for their privilege and indifference. Further, the feral pair are subconsciously craving for delayed vendetta against the social order for their disreputable pasts, and their roiling resentments erupt into a shockingly manic climax that Chabrol must’ve especially relished filming.

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

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

Nada [1974]

 Nada, the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-Gavras; the case for that appears especially stronger when one realizes that the Greek-French director made the magnificent State of Siege – which too featured the abduction and assassination of an American official by a left-wing guerrilla outfit, albeit in Uruguay instead of France – a year prior to the book’s publication. Though Chabrol was also a political filmmaker with strong leftist affiliations and made multiple subversive thrillers over his fecund career, his political expressions were often aimed at the bourgeoisie rather than the state, while his thrillers were distinctive for their sultry inaction and comeuppances that may never arrive. He was, therefore, an uncharacteristic person to adapt a violent and explosive book like this. However, he possibly sensed the cool, the cynicism and the dark irony underlying the tale of a ragtag group of anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador in France, even while the reader/viewer knows from get-go that this is a spectacularly suicidal mission. It ends in an ugly massacre as the vicious and reactionary cop tasked with hunting them down, and the ham-fisted governmental machinery backing him, don’t want it to end in any other way. The ensuing work, consequently, possessed the filmmaker’s sardonic and seditious jabs – and an arresting showdown that mirrored the book’s deep nihilism – while also appearing rough and uneven on various occasions. The eponymous Nada groupuscule comprised of a Catalonian partisan (Fabio Testi), a weary middle-aged revolutionary-for-hire (Maurice Garrel) and a dipsomaniac (Lou Castel) among others, while the carnage against them is spearheaded by a ruthless cop (Michel Aumont) and a Machiavellian Interior Minister (André Falcon).

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

20 Favourite Films from 2024

1. The New Year That Never Came | Bogdan Muresanu | Romania
2. Caught by the Tides | Jia Zhangke | China
3. Dying | Matthias Glasner | Germany
4. No Other Land | Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal | Palestine
5. The Brutalist | Brady Corbet | US
6. I'm Still Here | Walter Salles | Brazil
7. Grand Tour | Miguel Gomes | Portugal
8. April | Dea Kulumbegashvili | Georgia
9. The Seed of the Sacred Fig | Mohammad Rasoulof | Iran
10. Carnival Is Over | Fernando Coimbra | Brazil
11. Matt and Mara | Kazik Radwanski | Canada
12. A Traveler's Needs | Hong Sang-soo | South Korea
13. Santosh | Sandhya Suri | India
14. The Shrouds | David Cronenberg | Canada
15. La Casa | Alex Montoya | Spain
16. Miséricorde | Alain Guiraudie | France
17. On Falling | Laura Carreira | UK
18. All We Imagine as Light | Payal Kapadia | France/India
19. The Other Way Around | Jonas Trueba | Spain
20. Black Dog | Guan Hu | China

On Falling [2024]

 It’s only appropriate that Laura Carreira’s exceptionally assured debut film On Falling was produced by ‘Sixteen Films’ – which was co-founded by Ken Loach – given how closely it mirrored the British giant’s profound empathy for the working-class and the disenfranchised, and, in particular, for its intimate and nuanced portrayal of the human cost of gig economy workers, a topic that Loach had delved into in Sorry We Missed You. This delicate, understated and quietly heartbreaking work was steadfastly centred on Aurora (Joana Santos), a Portuguese woman working at a massive e-commerce warehouse in Scotland. Her existence is a dreary combination of dehumanized labour – she works long-hours in a job of crushing monotony, for a pittance, under patronizing micro-management and constant passive-aggressive supervision – and her nights at a crowded co-living space occupied by immigrant workers like her, upon returning exhausted. It’s a life, therefore, of ennui, isolation, loneliness, alienation and despair. Her only human connections are the stray conversations during lunch hours, her rides back home with a Portuguese colleague – discussing their desire to switch into a marginally more meaningful job – and the fleeting bond that she develops with Polish trucker Kris (Piotr Sikora) who’s recently moved in as flatmate; her only other distractions are her mobile phone, which she gets lost into whenever she’s in a break or off work, and binging on chocolates. Set over the course of a week, this luminously shot film is marvellously led by Santos; her boredom, anxieties and hints of edginess are ensconced within her placid surface; it was, consequently, particularly affecting when she lets her emotions out – as in the pub where she gets invited by Kris or during the desolate job interview.

Director: Laura Carreira

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: English/Portuguese

Country: UK

The Other Way Around [2024]

 The Other Way Around is a break-up dramedy with an idiosyncratic twist. The striking and assured Ale (Itsaso Arana), an indie filmmaker, and Alex (Vito Sanz), an easy-going actor of middling success who’s collaborated regularly with Ale, have decided to end their relationship, for reasons not shared, after having been a long-standing couple. Not only do they continue to be on amicable terms, barring the odd disagreements, while planning their separation – scouting apartments for one of them to shift, dividing up their books and DVDs, informing their friends, colleagues, neighbour, English tutor and even plumber, etc. – they even decide to throw a party to celebrate their break-up, which was once jocularly suggested by Ale’s philosophically-inclined father (played with deadpan touch by director Jonás Trueba’s real-life father Fernando Trueba). As they go about inviting people, they’re met with varying degrees of befuddled reactions, all the while convinced that they’ll eventually get back together. While a carefree, light-hearted, droll and low-key work in every sense, it had a few quirky elements at play underneath the surface. For one, it’s impishly self-reflexive as it obliquely cited Classic Hollywood movies about divorced couples getting back together, while also cheekily referencing Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre and his complicated relationship with Liv Ullmann. Further, it’s also a casually understated exercise in postmodernism as, amusingly, Ale has just completed an offbeat film on a similar subject starring Alex. Shot with a breezy air in Madrid, and featuring engaging turns by the two leads, its most self-consciously funny moment involved intellectuals debating whether Ale has made a “linear” or “circular” film – i.e. a plot-driven work or one of ideas – which could easily be extended to Trueba’s work too.

Director: Jonas Trueba

Genre: Comedy/Marital Comedy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Matt and Mara [2024]

 Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s indie film Matt and Mara was distinctively Rohmersque thanks to its playful, conversational, charming and understated qualities, with its controlled messiness, nuanced peek into romantic conundrums, ambling script and improv air. Should one be in any doubts, he gave a very direct nod to the French master towards the end. The beautiful Mara (Deragh Campbell) teaches creative writing at a university in Toronto, while deeply wanting to get back to her love for writing. Meanwhile, while her marriage to a musician (Mounir Al Shami) is fine on paper, she’s experiencing undercurrents of malaise. She’s possibly even inching towards existential crisis, though she doesn’t let it out on account of her reserved nature. In walks the dashing Matt (Matt Johnson), a funny, carefree, self-assured and successful writer settled in New York, whose second novel has been recently published to considerable acclaim. While in town for a few days, he pays a visit to Mara – they were once best friends in college – and that begins a renewed relationship that’s difficult to categorize. They hang out at a café, walk along the streets of Toronto, discuss about art and life, go on a road trip, act along when mistaken as a couple and share some tender as well as vulnerable moments. The chemistry between these two individuals, who couldn’t be more different, was delightfully done, thanks in large parts to the endearing turns by both actors – with Campbell being particularly striking in capturing her growing emotional conflicts – and the thoughtfully crafted script that belied its slender length. That the film doesn’t end with any neat conclusions and left their relationship teasingly nondescript, made it all the more infectious.

Director: Kazik Radwanski

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Urban Drama/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: Canada

Dying (Sterben) [2024]

 Matthias Glasner, in his first theatrical release in 12 years, made his two key influences amply clear through a poster of Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and clippings from Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, alongside a wry quip on the latter masterwork’s questionable suitability for Christmas viewings. Dying, therefore, was a movie awash as much with bleak meditations on mortality and troubled familial dynamics as with ironic and darkly funny portrayals of these weighty issues. The film’s seemingly depressive title, consequently, was a demonstration of the director’s sardonic sense of humour. Further, while the 3-hour runtime might appear a daunting proposition, it’s narrative brilliance, marvellously etched characters, nuanced depictions of messy complications, and meticulous balancing between crushing seriousness and deadpan levity made this a sharply observed, brutally unsentimental and thoroughly engrossing watch. The exceptionally dysfunctional Lunies family was at the heart of this grand soap opera, and it comprised of Tom (Lars Eidinger) – a composed but heavily stressed conductor who’s rehearsing the titular musical composition by his volatile friend Bernard (Robert Gwisdek) and playing surrogate dad to his ex-wife Liv’s (Anna Bederke) infant daughter –; his emotionally wrecked siter Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) – a full-blown alcoholic who loves singing and is having an injurious affair with a married colleague ((Ronald Zehrfeld) –; and their aged parents, viz. Lissy (Corinna Harfouch), the cancer-afflicted and music-loving mother, and Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), whose disintegration on account of Parkinson’s disease was heartbreaking to watch. All actors were terrific in this work set over five loosely overlapping episodes with shifting POVs, and two of its scenes – a catastrophic orchestral performance and a searingly candid mother-son conversation – underscored the film’s glorious interplay between high tragedy and low comedy.

Director: Matthias Glasner

Genre: Family Drama/Black Comedy/Ensemble Film

Language: German

Country: Germany

Juror #2 [2024]

 Juror #2, 94-year-old Clint Eastwood’s 40^th directorial feature, is a legal thriller that intrigues with its ethical conundrums and pulpy plot contrivances, while also leaving one unsatiated on account of its rather staid script and convenient resolution. In other words, it’s akin to a taut and eventful, if absurdly implausible, airport novel that one probably won’t leave mid-air. In this cheeky spin to Lumet’s classic 12 Angry Men, the protagonist who’s resolutely trying to sway the opinions of his fellow jurors while debating their verdict on what seems to be an open and shut case, is motivated less by moral considerations and more by guilt. Justin (Nicholas Hould), a troubled former alcoholic with a heavily pregnant wife, is called for jury duty on a trial against a man suspected of murdering his girlfriend. They had a volatile relationship, they had a nasty public argument just prior to her death and he was seen chasing her in his car in a foul mood. Circumstantial evidences, therefore, make it a seemingly easy verdict for the jury, as does the suspect’s problematic past; the public prosecutor (Toni Collette), who harbours a political career on the issue of going tough against crime, is also blindly convinced of his culpability. However, unbeknownst to all, Justin believes that the guy is innocent of this particular crime and that he himself might’ve been responsible for the death instead; and while he wants to avoid getting caught, his gnawing guilt makes him try and save the guy too. Though it holds attention, there’s no missing the shaky, coincidence-driven plot. What’s actually interesting, however, is seeing a heavily conservative person like Eastwood making a film that’s anything but.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Genre: Drama/Legal Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Santosh [2024]

 British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s gripping, smouldering and impressive debut feature Santosh operated in the grim intersectionality of class, caste, religion and gender, and the foul cesspit of disenfranchisement, bigotry, caste violence, Islamophobia, misogyny and police brutality. That may seem like a lot is going on for one movie. It’s therefore to Suri’s credit – aided perhaps by her background as a documentarian – that these themes were organically interlaced into the script, thereby ensuring that they’re integral to this police procedural involving the investigations into the rape and murder of a young Dalit girl in the ironically named north Indian state of “Chirag Pradesh”. The clincher was that these subterranean realities were evoked through the gaze of a woman protagonist – privileged by her caste and religion, but not so much by her class and gender – in an inversion to this otherwise “masculine” genre and the heavily male-dominated police force. Shahana Goswami was terrific – in a turn marked by seething fury and restraint – as the eponymous Santosh, a recently widowed woman who decides to inherit her husband’s job of a police constable, and therefore his salary and accommodation, in order to secure her social and financial independence. There, she immediately encounters an environment reeking of patriarchy, prejudices, sexism and apathy, and soon after finds herself amidst an increasingly vile morass on account of the afore-mentioned crime. The scenario was suffused with additional nuance upon the arrival of a seasoned senior inspector (Sunita Rajwar) to lead this politically volatile case, as on hand she treats Santosh with courtesy and even protectiveness – albeit, coloured with sensual undertones on occasions – while, on the other, she has a murky past of custodial torture and cynical expediency.

Director: Sandhya Suri

Genre: Crime Thriller/Police Procedural

Language: Hindi

Country: India/UK

No Other Land [2024]

 State-sponsored brutalities and oppression can manifest in diverse forms, as can defiance and resistance against them. Acts of micro-activism and citizen journalism are eloquent illustrations of the latter, oftentimes taking particularly haunting qualities and power through their rugged authenticity, unfiltered vérité and defiant resolve. This was unforgettably evidenced by the crushing documentary essay 5 Broken Cameras 14 years back, as is by No Other Land that’s directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective spearheaded by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham. Adra, a Palestinian residing in occupied West Bank and life-long activist, has been fearlessly recording the plight of his impoverished fellow villagers – residents of a tiny hamlet called Masafer Yatta – who’ve been facing forced displacement and cruelties, since as long as he can remember, at the hands of the Israeli military who want to ostensibly setup training grounds for the soldiers, and scheming Israeli settlers who then plan to seize the vacated lands for territorial expansion. His tireless documentation of these brazen acts of state-sponsored crimes, including the bulldozing of homes and schools, and violence against protesters, counterpointed the villagers’ refusal to surrender despite the dispossessions, hardships and abject helplessness. His footage – shot over many years leading to the inception of the ongoing genocide in Gaza – speaks truth to power and bears witness with simmering fury and striking urgency. These were, in parallel, coupled with the stirring solidarity that’s established with Abraham, an Israeli journalist who highlights the harrowing injustices in national and international media. The dramatic difference in the situations of these two comrades – in terms of relative rights, freedom and privileges – are vaporized by their shared battles against repression with a remarkable sense of lucidity, equanimity and even humour.

Directors: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic/Hebrew

Country: Palestine

The Shrouds [2024]

 The complex, tangled and murky ways in which body, mind and technology feed into each another has been a recurring thematic preoccupation for the nonconformist Canadian prophet David Cronenberg. That informed The Shrouds too, the unsettling and morbidly fascinating latest by the veteran provocateur. It’s also an intensely personal work, as he made it to process his grief upon losing his wife to cancer in 2017. The film, therefore, was steeped in pain and melancholy, albeit metastasized by twisted desires, problematic technological overreach, political paranoia and psychosomatic disintegration. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) – imagined as the director’s stand-in with his white back-brushed hair – is a technocrat who’s unable to recover from the loss of his ravishingly beautiful wife Becky (Diane Kruger) who died of cancer and who he continues to have lurid dreams about. He’s channelled his grief into an outré entrepreneurial venture called “GraveTech” wherein one can see – through voyeuristic 3D images – the decomposing corpses of one’s deceased loved ones. The mind-bending tale is provided additional fillip through three other troubled individuals – Becca’s twin sister Terry (Kruger) who’s turned on by conspiracies, her pathologically jealous ex-husband (Guy Pierce) who’s a techie and sees global machinations everywhere, and the sultry blind wife (Sandrine Holt) of a potential billionaire investor – and spiralling, nightmarish developments that’re underplayed by the film’s relaxed editing style and chamber settings, viz. the vandalizing of the company’s showpiece Toronto site, including Becky’s grave, by unknown assailants; Karsh’s virtual assistant (voiced by Kruger) displaying sinister undercurrents; and the blurring of the real with Karsh’s disturbed psyche. Kruger was particularly striking in her evocation of three separate personas in this radical late-career piece that alternated between dark, cautionary and tender.

Director: David Cronenberg

Genre: Body Horror/Sci-Fi Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: English

Country: Canada

A Traveler’s Needs [2024]

 A Traveler’s Needs – Hong Sang-soo’s third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert – is a film of spontaneous comings and goings, loopy repetitions, eccentric digressions, and fleeting impressions. This is, furthermore, a droll and idiosyncratic tableau on improbable encounters and oddball language lessons. Huppert, whose fabled career is filled with incongruous, anomalous and unhinged characters, is a delectably strange cat here as Iris (Huppert), a whimsical and coquettish French woman of an unknown past and dubious disposition. Since her arrival in Korea, she’s been drifting in Seoul, earning money by teaching French to well-off locals using a self-devised method that’s hilariously weird, and sharing apartment with a naïve young guy for whom she’s somewhere between an attraction, wise mentor and unlikely mother figure. Over the amusing and playful narrative’s loosely-strung chapters, we see Iris teaching and interacting with a young woman who’s become fond of her quirky tutor; being interviewed by a woman (Lee Hye-young) who wants to employ her but is flabbergasted by her pedagogy, and then bonding with her and her genial husband (Kwon Hae-hyo) over makgeolli – Iris’ beverage of choice – and the poetry of Yun Dong-ju, who was arrested and killed at the age of 28 for his anti-Japanese resistance in occupied Korea during WW2; having meandering conversations with the infatuated Inguk (Ha Seong-guk) with whom she stays; and drinking more makgeolli and listening to bad English translations of Kwon’s poems. In a deadpan aside – the only stretch without Huppert in it – we see Inguk being berated by his passive-aggressive mother (Cho Yun-hee) who’s shocked at his choice of roommate. The minimalist script, consequently, unfolded as a charming and observational take on aimless travels, intercultural companionships and existential ennui.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: English/Korean/French

Country: South Korea

The Substance [2024]

 What happens when you mix a cocktail that’s equal parts grotesque body horror, caustic showbiz satire, deliriously lurid and grisly B-movie, and fierce feminist critique on male gaze, shallow beauty standards and institutionalized ageism? You get a brash, deliciously nasty, wickedly funny and intensely polarizing film like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, that’s unapologetically in-your-face and dripping with chutzpah. However, for the same reasons, it also felt overdone and unwieldy at times, with its lofty ideological ambitions lacking in complex undertones, even if – admittedly – Fargeat was probably never aiming for nuance or subtlety. This, incidentally, is also a rare body horror film directed by a woman, thereby pairing it with fellow French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Titane. The titular “substance” is an experimental black-market drug that spawns a younger and more beautiful self of oneself; the only catch being, the two alternate versions must co-exist symbiotically to avoid horrific repercussions to both. Elisabeth (Demi Morre), once a fabled Hollywood goddess but now leading aerobics shows for the TV, is summarily fired by the network’s boorish and lascivious boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) – a deliberately noxious caricature given the name – as she’s just turned 50. Faced with anonymity and irrelevance, she falls into the trap and takes the sinister drug, and thus emerges – through a literally spine-crushing process – her young, saucy and sexy doppelgänger Sue (Margaret Qualley). Soon enough a mutually destructive battle develops between them, as they spitefully start treating one another as rivals. Moore and Qualley weren’t just excellent in their respective roles, they also complemented each other as psychedelic variants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The garish colours and trippy visuals, meanwhile, were reminiscent of De Palma and Verhoeven.

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Genre: Sci-Fi/Body Horror/Showbiz Satire/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: France

I'm Still Here [2024]

 Memorable films and books hinged around enforced disappearances of political dissidents, which was frequent under military dictatorships in Latin America, interweave the personal and the collective, with one informing the other. I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ haunting and intimate tale of loss, defiance and solidarity, touched upon a brutal national wound through one family’s story. Adapted from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, and imbued with the director’s own memories, it focussed on the well-off, progressive and politically engaged Paiva family on the despairing backdrop of Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship. Rubens (Selton Mello) – civil engineer, former Congressman and secret supporter of left-wing resistance activities – was arrested, tortured and killed by the authorities, though his status remained officially “unknown” until his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who became a lawyer at the age of 47 and an activist championing victims of the dictatorship, secured his death certificate twenty-five years later. The film began on a buoyant note as we see this family – which also comprised of their four lively kids, living in a beach-side house in Rio Janeiro, and regularly visited by friends – with hints to the troubling political situation that turns into a backlash upon a Swiss diplomat’s kidnapping. The narrative, therefore, was broken into a “before” and an “after” as we see Eunice – who herself was illegally detained for 12 days – having to uproot her family and provide for it while doggedly pursuing Rubens’ disappearance. Accompanied by an engrossing soundtrack from the 60s and 70s, and powered by a towering central turn by Torres, this luminously shot and classically framed film reminded me of Cuarón’s Roma, which too was exquisitely foregrounded on a closely-knit family on the backdrop of political tyranny.

Director: Walter Salles

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

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

Grand Tour [2024]

 Diverse elements that constitute cinema – from its technical facets and grammar to its sociocultural roles and historicity – were evoked with joyous abandon in Grand Tour by the virtuoso Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes. Forming a fascinating companion piece to his sublime masterpiece Tabu – in its tapping into colonial-era tapestry where nostalgia is sharply counterpointed by irony; chronicling of an infectious travelogue self-consciously stripped of exoticism; and channelling the palette of classical-era movies while deconstructing that and even celebrating its artifice – this wistful, eccentric, gorgeously composed, feverishly mounted and wildly experimental gem was ingeniously constructed in the form of a diptych. In the first act we follow Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant stationed in Rangoon in 1918 who flees in a fit of existential panic on the prospect of marriage to his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arriving for that purpose; he travels to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and further – initially to escape, but eventually through delirious inertia of motion – only to keep finding cheerful telegrams from Molly informing him that she’s happily in pursuit. In the second act we switchover to the optimistic Molly and follow her indefatigable journey, undeterred by Edward’s abandonment. Gomes, in a playful and idiosyncratic formal choice, alternated the story of the globetrotting lovers – shot in 16-mm on soundstage and accompanied by voiceovers whose languages changed based on the countries they’re in – with essayistic present-day footage of those places, some of which he’d shot before Covid stuck and directed the rest remotely. Further, though set in the past, one often sees them juxtaposed with anachronistic components, and this dazzling collapsing of the past and the present reminded me of Petzold’s engrossing film Transit.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Road Movie/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Burmese/Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese/English

Country: Portugal

Hard Truths [2024]

Mike Leigh reunited with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths nearly 3 decades after they last worked together in the shattering masterpiece Secrets & Lies; further, he also returned to his preferred setting of contemporary, everyday England over a decade since his brilliant film Another Year. This latest from the great British filmmaker, which could’ve repurposed the title of Almodóvar’s hilarious gem Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, may well rank among his most downbeat works; while he’s made movies with bleaker backdrops and drearier settings, this one came largely devoid of any reconciliations, resolutions and catharses, thereby underscoring its bracing cynicism. At the core of this combustible miniature tale of personal and domestic collapse, in post-Covid UK, is Pansy (Jean-Baptiste), a perpetually edgy and cantankerous middle-aged British-Jamaican woman who’s afflicted with anxiety and depression, and is on the brink of an irreversible emotional meltdown. She keeps lashing out at her taciturn, mild-mannered husband (David Webber) and their withdrawn, soft-spoken son (Tuwaine Barrett), as well as whoever she’s compelled to meet, from her doctor to the cashier at the departmental store and even random strangers at the parking lot. She, as well as the desolate atmosphere at their otherwise fastidiously sanitized suburban house, made for dramatic contrast to her jovial and vivacious sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), and the happily chaotic environment of the women’s parlour that this single mum runs as well as the vibrant energy at her small apartment where she lives with her equally lively daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophie Brown). Jean-Baptiste and Austin were both memorable in this alternately tense, exasperating, darkly funny and compassionate kitchen-sink portraiture of working-class diaspora families barely holding it together.

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: English

Country: UK