Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) [1997]

 Pedro Almodóvar – who’d pivoted from campy, lowbrow farce with his fabulous preceding film The Flower of My Secret – did a free adaptation of British writer Ruth Rendell’s crime novel with this sexy and absorbing tale of pathological obsessions and jealousies setting off violent crimes. Balancing hot-blooded passions with barely controlled restraint – and demonstrating that style IS substance in his films, and thereby the indistinguishability between the two – the Spanish filmmaker mixed the proceedings with romantic and marital complexities, outrageous coincidences, lush melodrama, and sardonic commentaries on Spain’s Francoist past, for a feverishly imagined ménage à cinq. Naïve 20-year-old Victor (Liberto Rabal), who’s become besotted with the ravishing Elena (Francesca Neri) in her 30s after a one-night-stand, inadvertently triggers a catastrophic shoot-out that perennially changes their lives as well as two cops – the saner David (Javier Bardem) and the more volatile Sancho (Pepe Sancho) – and Sancho’s wife Clara (Ángela Molina) who Sancho is insanely suspicious of for her supposed infidelity. That baroque sequence puts Victor in jail and turns David paraplegic. Fast-forward few years later, and a now-hardened Victor is craving for a saucy revenge upon finding out that David has become a star basketball player at the Paralympics and married to Elena, but gets embroiled into a fervent clandestine affair with the much-older Clara instead, who’s desperate to leave Sancho. David, meanwhile, is convinced that David plans to seduce Elena, who’s toned down from his drug-addled past, and this unapologetically contrived setup accelerates rearrangement of equations and reckless flareups. Filled with voluptuous emotions, bold colour palettes, sumptuous soundtrack, and teasing Buñuel references, the film was bookended by trippy “nativity” sequences, with the former featuring Penélope Cruz in a cameo.

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

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

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

Taste of Cherry [1997]

 While Abbas Kiarostami’s films evolved over two broad phases –exuberant early films centred on gently rebellious kids and teenagers living in the margins, and engrossing subsequent ones revolving around cerebral middle-aged outsiders – three facets remained largely intact. His protagonists were nearly always moving, fiction and non-fiction elements would frequently bleed into each other, and his impish love for formal subversions. All were on display in Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or. The entire length of this minimalist, melancholic and quietly moving work involved Mr. Badii (portrayed with stoic restraint by Homayoun Ershadi, who was discovered by Kiarostami at a traffic jam) driving his Range Rover through alternately grubby and ravishing landscapes outside Tehran over a single day. With no backstory on offer, all we know is that he’s suffering from a great despair and wants to commit suicide; however, as that’s forbidden by Islam, he’s looking at paying for someone’s services to check if his act has been successful, and to then bury him at his chosen spot. Over the course of the meandering roads and discursive narrative, he converses with three individuals who provide very different responses to his ask – a Kurdish teenager, who’s just joined the army, flees in fear; an Afghan seminarist tries reasoning, before declining; and a ageing Turkish taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri), who understands Badii’s existential crisis and reluctantly accepts the job, but tries dissuading him through a blend of philosophical reflections and storytelling. Stunningly shot with a mix of wide-angled shots and close-ups, and bereft of non-diagetic sounds, the film ended with a remarkable rupture of the fourth wall, with low-fi camcorder accompanied by a Louis Armstrong score.

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

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Philosophical Drama/Road Movie

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [1992]

 David Lynch’s arresting prequel to Twin Peaks – greenlighted after the show was cancelled, and which massively polarized everyone upon its release – couldn’t have been more radically different from the television series. While the first two seasons were splashed with cute Americana, despite the outrageous events that unfolded, the film was edgy, visceral, grungy, nightmarish and enthralling. The two together, consequently, reminded me of three of his films – Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – in how they’d juxtaposed idyllic exteriors with grotesque underbellies. The film, which evoked a suburban purgatory through disturbing depictions of abuse behind closed doors and monsters inside the closets, took the viewers into the turbulent life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) leading to her vicious murder that the series began with. It, incidentally, kicked-off with a MacGuffin involving two FBI Agents – Chester (songwriter Chris Isaak) and Sam (Kiefer Sutherland) – investigating Teresa Banks’ brutal murder that the show had referred to. The narrative, subsequently, dove into the final seven days of Laura – a beautiful high-school student who everyone admires, but whose secret double life is spiralling out of control, exacerbated by the assaults she’s been facing at the hands of her obsessive father Leland (Ray Wise) who’s possessed by the malevolent spirit of Bob, cocaine addiction, wilful prostitution, self-destructiveness and intense trauma – leading ultimately to her tragic end. The film’s most gripping sequence took place in a grimy underground pub – accompanied by a loud, jangling and addictive score – where the tortured heroine, along with her best friend Dona (Moira Kelly, replacing Lara Flynn Boyle who didn’t reprise her role) are swept into a netherworld where three leery middle-aged men take advantage of the two underaged girls.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Horror/Psychological Thriller/Crime/Mystery

Language: English

Country: US

Twin Peaks [1990-91, 2017]

 Twin Peaks – the surrealist, grisly, horror, mystery, campy and goofy soap opera that David Lynch co-created with Mark Frost – was a surprise hit when it premiered in 1990, and became a pop-culture phenomenon with a cult following despite its eccentric, outlandish and bizarre plot elements. The first season – arguably the highest-point in the series – opened with the murdered body of the beautiful but troubled high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the tranquil town of Twin Peaks. It followed, on one hand, the murder investigation led by the incorrigibly optimistic and doggedly persuasive FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) supported by the local Sheriff, and on the other, the private affairs, sly ploys and nefarious machinations of the town’s offbeat residents which included corrupt businessmen, impassive cops, mad psychiatrists, punks, drifters, and striking damsels (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Joan Chen), along with teasing forays into alternate realms. The longer second season concluded the investigation, and then took the plot forward. With the broader narrative scope, it succeeded in being more playful, madcap and adventurous, while also stepping the gas too much on occasions on silly humour and psychedelic excesses. Though the second season ended on a cliffhanger note, and Lynch followed it immediately with the gripping prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it was a whopping 2 ½ decades before a much-awaited third season finally arrived. Largely bereft of the campy Americana and soap opera elements of the earlier seasons, this alternately arresting, ingenious and exasperating season – filled with multiple parallel plots, interludes and detours, alongside both returning and new cast members – took the narrative forward, backwards and sideways into a bonkers, mind-bending trip.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Series/Crime/Mystery/Comedy/Horror/Thriller/Drama

Language: English

Country: US

Lessons of Darkness [1992]

 Werner Herzog’s hypnotic essay Lessons of Darkness was an assemblage of two strikingly contrasting facets. It was an intensely grim and fatalistic meditation on warfare, carnage, the abyss of human folly and madness, and their infinite capacities for cruelty. This bleak meditation was accompanied by spectacular aerial photography of the ecological disaster wrought upon by the 1991 Gulf War, and these were made even more viscerally arresting through slow-mo shots, long takes, Herzog’s distinctively clipped style of speaking, and grand Wagnerian score. This, therefore, was akin to an apocalyptic tone poem on derangement and destruction by a filmmaker who’s been classified as a “poet of doom”. No wonder, some viewers were offended by it upon its release – alleging that this was akin to aestheticization of wars – and which Herzog angrily countered by quoting examples of Hieronymous Bosch and Goya who’d also made breathtaking artistic works foregrounded on violence and grotesquerie. Broken into thirteen short chapters, the moody docu shows us scarred and damaged landscapes, and in particular nightmarish images of the Kuwaiti oil fires, albeit largely without any political or geographical contexts. In his typically ironic tone, he even shows us how the expert fire extinguishing team reignited the fires – by throwing torches into the gushing oil flows – so that they have something more to extinguish. These flamboyant, widescreen and “obscenely beautiful” vistas were briefly interspersed with sobering chronicles of torture and trauma experienced by the locals, and shared by a couple of women. The film’s ominous undercurrents, vivid abstractions, and counterpointing of sparse and lurid expressions made it a fitting member of the German filmmaker’s oeuvre that’s filled with similar exercises across both narrative fictions and essayistic nonfictions.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: German/Arabic

Country: Germany

Videograms of a Revolution [1992]

 Prolific experimental German documentarian Harun Farocki’s dazzling masterpiece Videograms of a Revolution, which he co-directed with Romanian documentarian and scholar Andrei Ujică, was both a riveting historical reconstruction of the 1989 Romanian Revolution and a powerful analytical thesis on the role of formal and informal media in both revealing and shaping political history. On the former aspect, its post-facto documentation of one revolution – one that, in around 5 days, witnessed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu from getting ready to deliver what turned out to be his final public speech (the thrilling climatic moment in Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came) to being executed after a summary trial – made it a fascinating companion piece to, on one hand, Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile and My Imaginary Country, which were immersive reportages of mass uprisings, and on the other Chris Marker’s A Grin Without A Cat, which was an expansive essay that navigated through multiple global revolts. As for the latter aspect, it underscored the role of cameras and images in mobilizing public actions and as sources for historiography. It accomplished that by meticulously piecing together those 5 days from a myriad sources which included state television broadcasts, which transitioned from Ceaușescu’s lackeys to those seizing control, and ‘found footage’ secretly shot by citizen journalists that Ujică had unearthed through his contacts. Accompanied by a narration analysing and interpreting these images, thus creating a distancing effect from the immediacy of the upheaval, this magnetic work strikingly elucidated how mass and alternative media had been both observers and participants in recording and constructing epochal political changes far before the advent of 24/7 television channels, mobile phone cameras and social media.

Director: Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: German/Romanian

Country: Germany

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 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

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

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 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

Land and Freedom [1995]

 Loach’s deeply underrated gem Land and Freedom remains a singular work in his oeuvre, for his rare foray into historical epic – thus presaging the excellent The Wind that Shakes the Barley – and into a setting far removed from his preferred milieu of working-class Britain. Yet, it was also profoundly linked to the political inquiries, meditations and dissents that he’s pursued throughout his career. This rousing ode to the collective spirit of resistance – albeit, one tampered with bleak setbacks and heartbreaking defeats – opens with the death of the aged Liverpudlian Dave Carne, upon which his granddaughter (Suzanne Maddock) delves into his mementoes at his flat – newspaper cuttings, letters, photographs, and earth wrapped in a red cloth, the immensely moving significance of which will emerge later – and thereby pieces together an extraordinarily eventful chapter from his younger days. Unfolding in 1936 over flashbacks, David (Ian Hart), an unemployed Communist, travels to Spain to enlist with the International Brigade and fight with the Republicans against Franco. However, he ends up joining the Marxist Revolutionary and unwaveringly anti-fascist group POUM. There he experiences the thrill of fighting fascists, seeing a freed village opting for collectivization, befriending comrades, and having a tender romance with a fiery Catalan fighter (Rosana Pastor), as well as facing terrible losses, witnessing the appropriation of the left by Stalinists, and most devastatingly, the collapse of shared dreams. Marvellously shot on location that lent it both poetic and gritty textures, this electrifying collaboration between Loach and playwright Jim Allen recalled Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s unforgettable memoir from his days of walking with POUM revolutionaries during the Spanish Civil War, and ended on a stirring display of solidarity during David’s funeral.

Director: Ken Loach

Genre: Drama/Historical Epic/War

Language: English/Catalan

Country: UK

Aprile (April) [1998]

 Nanni Moretti’s delightfully eccentric, endlessly amusing and disarmingly accomplished Aprile was made in a similar vein as his magnificent previous film Dear Diary – viz. as an idiosyncratic, episodic and heavily self-reflexive diary film; albeit, more political, and crazier too. It wryly manifested opposites – private and professional spaces, high and low art, artifice and authenticity, infantilism and adulthood, fiction and reportage, etc. – and, in turn, blurred the intersections between the personal and the political with self-effacing humour and deadpan irony. Starring the filmmaker as his neurotic, tad snobbish, politically engaged and chatterbox onscreen persona, it criss-crossed through three interlocking strands over a particularly eventful 3-4 years in his life. Italy’s operatic political developments played out in the background, starting with the 1994 elections won by the right coalition headed by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi – that made a terribly disillusioned Moretti light up a joint – and the victory of the Left 2 years later that thrilled him as much as the birth of his son in the same year; various events, in parallel, shaped that era, be it the drowning of a boat full of Albanian immigrants by the Italian coastal guard or an attempted secession. He decides to make a documentary chronicling the Italian polity, while harbouring an on-off desire to direct an outré musical about a Trotskyist pastry chef, and struggling with both creative block and personal distractions. The latter aspect was amplified by his anxiety and hysteria leading to parenthood and beyond. Filled with hilarious visual gags, farcical exchanges, satiric depictions and ample autobiographical components, including featuring both his wife and mother as themselves, the film wasn’t just a formally adventurous work, but an emotionally resonant one too.

Director: Nanni Moretti

Genre: Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire/Diary Film/Film a Clef

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Raining Stones [1993]

 Raining Stones, like the best of Ken Loach’s working-class films, was interlaced with political angst, social realism, profound empathy, solid old-fashioned storytelling, and a terrific ear for local dialects. The film, that progressively transitioned from being funny and picaresque to poignant and desolate to tense and furious, presented a deftly realized look at the lives of the marginalized in post-Thatcher England under the grips of a crushing economic depression, thus making it a fitting companion piece to his brilliant previous film Riff-Raff.  Bob (Bruce Jones) is an unemployed Irish Catholic man living on dole, which isn’t enough for the sustenance of his family that comprises of his wife Anne (Julie Brown) and little daughter. Hence, he, along with his gregarious unemployed buddy Tommy (Ricky Tomlinson), keeps exploring ways to hustle some extra money – pilfering sheep from the countryside, stealing turf from a private club, cleaning drains, working as a bouncer, etc. – to make ends meet. However, his struggle gets amplified when his van gets stolen, and more so when he – against the sensible advices of Anne, his atheist father-in-law, and even the surprisingly atypical Father Barry (Tom Hickey) – decides to purchase an expensive dress for her daughter’s Communion. Things become especially awry when he borrows from a vicious loan shark (Jonathan James). Loach infused humour, warmth and unanticipated hope into the otherwise bleak storyline, and smartly deviated in his characterizations and narrative arc to avoid stereotypes and predictability, thus adding nuance and depth into the mix. The script by socialist playwright Jim Allen balanced the film’s political and emotional cores, while exquisite turns by Jones, Tomlinson and Brown, and gritty photography of actual Manchester locales, enhanced its rich authenticity.

Director: Ken Loach

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Social Drama/Family Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Riff-Raff [1991]

 After a difficult time in the 1980s when he struggled to have his works broadcast and distributed, Ken Loach begun blending ferocious political commentaries with narrative storytelling in the 90s, thus making them more palatable. He started with Hidden Agenda, a terrific political conspiracy thriller foregrounded on the Northern Ireland “Troubles”. Riff-Raff, his marvellous next film, set the tone for many of his subsequent anti-establishmentarian dramas centred on regular working-class people at the receiving end of governmental apathy. And, like the preceding movie, it too presented a lashing critique of Thatcher’s damaging reign. The film, interlacing infectious seriocomic tone with bleak social realism and bold left-wing politics, progressed from funny and boisterous to tender and poignant to furious and blazing in its depiction of a crew of construction labourers working without any physical or financial safety nets. They’re hired without background checks – thus enabling them to continue receiving benefits – and in lieu of that they’re forced to work in hazardous conditions, manage their own insurances and fired without any notice. Lending profound authenticity, it was written by Bill Jesse based on his personal experiences, while actors Robert Carlyle – in a smashing turn as Glaswegian jailbird Stevie attempting to walk the straight and narrow path – and Ricky Tomlinson – former union activist who gave a memorably gregarious turn while also serving as the film’s political conscience – too had experiences in this line. Ironically, the derelict North London hospital where work is shown happening to convert it into luxury apartments, anticipated what actually transpired. The raucous camaraderie and stirring class solidarity between the culturally diverse blue-collar workers was counterpointed with Stevie’s heartbreaking romance with fragile girl-woman and wannabe singer Susan (Emer McCourt).

Director: Ken Loach

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Social Drama/Romance

Language: English

Country: UK

Dear Diary (Caro Diario) [1993]

 Nanni Moretti’s delightful, drifting and self-deprecating rendition of his ironic and neurotic protagonist – part actual self, part alter-ego, part satiric depiction – in his wry, idiosyncratic and infectious gem Caro Diario, is bound to remind one of the celebrated self-representations by the likes of Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Woody Allen and João César Monteiro; yet, for all the supposed similarities – even if these were parallels to be proud of – this was a distinctively and uniquely Moretti creation. The loosely structured triptych, filled with deadpan sketches, worked along multiple overlapping forms – an intimate and self-reflective diary film; a disarmingly mordant and subversive satire on vacuous consumerism, market forces and politics (no wonder, there was a stirring nod to Pasolini’s murder); a rich self-referential examination; a freewheeling city symphony and road film; and quirky notes on cinema, pop-culture, friendship and mortality. The 1^st chapter, titled “On My Vespa”, sees an impish Moretti riding through the different quarters of Rome on the iconic scooter, observing diverse architectures, quipping on gentrification, making incongruous conversations, lambasting shallow movie trends, and expressing a goofy love for Flashdance. In the 2^nd chapter, titled “Islands”, a deadpan Moretti and an austere intellectual friend – who deplores television, only to become obsessed with American soap opera – decide to hop from one oddball island to another, including Rossellini’s Stromboli, in the futile hope of working on their art bereft of urban distractions. The final chapter, titled “Doctors”, sees a flummoxed Moretti visiting a series of conventional and alternative “doctors” trying to get an irrepressible itchiness cured, only to learn – fortunately, before it was too late – that he’s become inflicted with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the chemotherapy treatments that he must then endure.

Director: Nanni Moretti

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Film a Clef/Anthology Movie

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

L'Enfer (Hell) [1994]

 Henri-Georges Clouzot – best remembered for his two electrifying thrillers The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques – had written the screenplay for L’Enfer and began its shooting in 1964, but had to leave it unfinished on account of production woes. Three decades later Claude Chabrol – one of the most caustic and brilliant examiners of middle-class artifice, hypocrisy and relationships – resurrected this unfinished project and adapted Clouzot’s script into a deliriously dark, delicious and demented examination of a marriage that turns not just toxic, but diabolical too, on account of extreme jealousy, unhealthy obsessions, crippling paranoia and pathological insanity. The film began in a mood of sunny cheerfulness, but progressively yet decidedly transformed into a hellish atmosphere – buoyed by elements that were alternatively saucy, parodic, unsettling and disorienting – which made it both a chilling depiction of madness and a scathing commentary on the conformist images of bourgeois domesticity. The jaunty opening sequences breezily capture the peppy romance and bucolic marriage of Paul (François Cluzet), a boutique hotelier in a provincial town, and Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) who he’s fallen head over heels for. Things, however, start spiralling downwards when Paul initially suspects his sultry and attractive wife is having an extra-marital affair with a virile young worker, and starts surreptitiously stalking her. Before long, the intensely cuckolded and insecure man starts imagining that she’s sleeping around with every man and obsessing about her supposedly insatiable desires. There’s no going back from here, as he – alternating between self-pity, delusion and violence – propels their marriage into a raging inferno and a chilling climax. Interestingly, Nelly’s supposed infidelity is never clarified, while the nightmarish finale left things unsettlingly ambiguous in this work of surprising ferocity.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Black Comedy/Marital Thriller/Romantic Thriller

Language: French

Country: France