The Crown [2016-2023]

 The journey from being decidedly sceptical about watching The Crown to being left mesmerized by it was an exhilarating one. Though not an exceptionally long series per se, it achieves a formidable colour when one takes into account that it intricately covered six decades of British history, complex political forces and social happenings, and a staggering multitude of events and people. Hence, instead of a conventional summation, it’s perhaps more prudent to highlight few aspects that made this a TV phenomenon. First, and foremost, this was anything but a hagiography or a simple history lesson; rather, it was charged, edgy and turbulent on one hand, and delicate, layered and nuanced on the other, while boldly diving into moral turpitudes and quandaries. Second, it was a gripping portrayal of the “royal family” as a dysfunctional, bickering, self-centred and over-privileged group of people with skeletons in their closets and nasty machinations up their sleeves, while also evolving with the years – both willingly and otherwise. Third, the show’s creator went for a crazy gamble by casting different actors for the same characters at different times, given the narrative’s stunning temporal arc, and that played off superbly; each actor brought in something remarkable while also ensuring continuity. Fourth, it was packed with magnificent performances; the seven actors who I found most shattering were Claire Foy as Elizabeth (Seasons 1-2), Vanessa Kirby as Margaret (S1-2), Alex Jennings as Edward (S2, S5), Josh O’Connor as Charles (S3-4), Emma Corrin as Diana (S4), Lesley Manville as Margaret (S5-6), and Salim Daw as Mohamed Al-Fayed (S5). Fifth, and definitely not the last, the larger tapestry was exquisitely interwoven through meticulously mounted episodes, many of which were extraordinarily powerful; “Fagan” (S4), which recalled the bleak Thatcherite dystopia in Leigh’s Meantime, “Fairytale” (S4), where Diana roller-skates in Buckingham Palace and jives to ‘Edge of Seventeen’, ‘Tywysog Cymru’, where Charles is drawn into Welsh history, “Aberfan” (S3), centred on a colliery disaster, and ‘Vergangenheit’ (S2), that delved into the monarch’s Nazi links, were my personal favourites (in that order).

Created By: Peter Morgan

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Family Drama/Marital Drama/Biopic/Epic

Language: English

Country: UK

Section Spéciale (Special Section) [1975]

 Cost-Gavras’ Section Spéciale bore the attributes that powerfully resonated in his stunning trilogy that preceded it and had made him among the most thrilling political filmmakers in the world – his pulsating masterpiece Z, the intensely unsettling The Confession, and the smashing gem State of Siege – in that it too portrayed a dystopian historical chapter from the 20^th century, did that using a progressive Marxist gaze that considered acts of abuse anywhere and against anyone as a personal affront, and on an ambitious narrative canvas smartly enmeshed with agit-prop elements. Made with the objective of uncovering the rotten core of “Vichy France” – the collaborationist regime that was formed under German Occupation during WW2 – it chronicled a sham trial that was held by it to appease its Nazi masters, and thereby underscored the power of corruption and the corruption of power. When a Nazi officer is assassinated by the Resistance in Paris, the Minister of Justice Joseph Barthélémy (Louis Seigner) – with active complicity of the government – quickly drafts a draconian legislation, sets up a kangaroo court, and retrospectively tries Communists, socialists and Jews – who’ve already been sentenced for petty offenses – in order to execute them, and thereby avert retaliations. Though lacking the visceral power and gripping dynamism of the said trilogy, and missing the charismatic presence of Yves Montand, it nevertheless categorically conveyed the state-sponsored abomination of foundational legal principles. A sequence near the beginning, where a peaceful protest is violently broken up by the cops, highlighted Costa-Gavras’ ability to create exciting outdoor set-pieces. Its depiction of the Vichy regime’s use of the guillotine as a brutal political device, incidentally, would have a companion piece in Chabrol’s damning Story of Women.

Director: Costa-Gavras

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Historical Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Christ Stopped at Eboli [1979]

 Christ Stopped at Eboli, Francesco Rosi’s sublime adaptation of Carlo Levi’s celebrated memoir, was composed as much as elegiac memories of enforced exile, as it was crafted as probing field notes on people existing in the margins. Through these parallel routes – informed by Levi’s personal impressions, political consciousness, and ethnographic meditations borne out of curiosity and empathy, and that unfolded through a series of loosely strung vignettes and anecdotes – it emerged as a document both specific in its context and timeless in its eloquence. Levi, a qualified doctor, left-wing intellectual and anti-fascist activist based in Turin, used his passion for painting as a front for his political resistance against Mussolini. Upon being arrested for his dissidence, he was banished to a remote town in remote southern Italy. While residing there from 1935 to 1936 – his exile was cut short upon the country’s successful invasion of Ethiopia – he witnessed impoverishment, disenfranchisement, diseases, superstitions and ancient customs. Despite the arid, desolate and alienating environs – poetically captured in washed-out colours – he got enmeshed into the community, participated in discussions, renewed his long-severed tryst with medicine, captured the place through his paintings, and even developed a sensuous relationship with a promiscuous cleaning woman (Irene Papas), leading to a rich understanding of the irreconcilable North-South divide. Rosi’s observational style provided the perfect counterfoil to Gian Maria Volontè’s immersive turn as the soft-spoken yet fiercely perceptive Levi, in this eloquent, essayistic study. The opening sequence, languidly cataloguing Levi’s gigantic journey via multiple transportation modes, during which he befriends an abandoned dog, was particularly memorable. The locale, premise and overarching theme, incidentally, heavily reminded me of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, their tonal departures notwithstanding.

Director: Francesco Levi

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Biopic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

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

The Gospel According to St. Matthew [1964]

 The Gospel According to St. Matthew was a great conundrum as much for the inherently contradictory context surrounding it, as it was for the fierce work that it was. The towering Italian poet, filmmaker and intellectual Pasolini was an avowed Marxist and steadfast atheist; he’d received a suspended prison sentence for his short La Ricotta from the previous year – part of the omnibus Ro.Go.Pa.G. – as it was deemed “blasphemous”; and, one would be hard placed to find something more outrageously ribald, sacrilegious and subversive than his extraordinary Trilogy of Life. It’s therefore astonishing that he made such a faithful, and almost reverential, adaptation of a religious text and unironic inquiry into Jesus’ life and myth. Furthermore, the film’s unflinching neorealism, visceral force, bleak austerity and spare minimalism – and the political readings into Jesus’ radical humanism – placed it at singular odds to the bombastic genuflection in conventional cinematic representations of the Bible, thus drawing parallels to Caravaggio’s blazing, unsettling and violent Biblical paintings. Heading its non-professional cast was Enrique Irazoqui – 19-year-old Economics student and Communist activist from Spain who’d go on to become a computer chess expert – whose searingly intense enactment of Jesus reminds one of El Greco’s paintings, while such intellectuals like Natalia Ginzburg, Enzo Siciliano, Alfonso Gatto, etc. played various supporting roles. Made with the rigorous touch of cinéma verité, shot in grainy and unsparing monochromes, filmed in gritty Southern Italian towns to mimic Palestine and Galilee, comprising of an incredibly eclectic soundtrack that ranged from Western Classical to African-American gospel blues and Congolese hymns, and evoking Renaissance-era paintings, it covered the preacher’s life – right from his birth, through meteoric rise, till death – with cutting and desolate ferocity.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Drama/Religious Drama/Historical Epic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Senso [1954]

 Luchino Visconti’s celebrated fourth feature Senso served as a pivotal milestone for the “Red Count”, as it marked his decisive turn from a pioneering neorealist filmmaker to a practitioner of grand and ambitious historical melodramas. This visually sumptuous, emotionally feverish, vividly operatic and lavishly mounted epic – that exultantly combined Visconti’s love of cinema, theatre, opera and the fine arts – formed a precursor to and therefore one half of a diptych with his gargantuan masterpiece The Leopard, in that both were extraordinarily lush, formally meticulous, and were set against the turbulent backdrop of the radical social and political transformations that swept through the country during the Risorgimento. At its heart is a torrid, outrageously reckless and thoroughly self-destructive love affair that Livia (Alida Valli), a beautiful countess unhappily married to an older aristocrat with a chameleonic ability to shift his allegiances in sync with changing landscapes, gets embroiled in with a much younger, roguish and self-serving Austrian Lieutenant (Farley Granger), which leads her to betray her patriotic principles – viz. the causes of Italian Nationalists who’re battling for independence from the Austrian Occupation – and takes her to complete moral and existential doom. The resplendently designed and crafted film magnificently evoked the arresting architectural and locational splendour of Venice, Rome, Veneto and Verona – rapturously amplified by luscious art décor, ornate costumes and actual artworks; ravishingly shot in muted, fading colours by three different cinematographers (G.R. Aldo died midway, upon which Robert Krasker came in, but conflicts with Visconti’s vision led to Giuseppe Rotunno being asked to step in); and accompanied by a classical score – comprised of a spectacularly orchestrated and filmed battle scenes at par with what Visconti staged in The Leopard.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Romantic Drama/Epic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Killers of the Flower Moon [2023]

 Martin Scorsese’s bravura adaptation of the acclaimed nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann – for the 44^th feature-length film of his storied career – is a bleak, brooding, engrossing and sprawling meditation on evil, greed and the capitalist excesses. It simultaneously delved into the rotten core of settler-colonialism, and specifically, the genocidal “birth” of a nation-state at the bloody-soaked expense of indigenous populations. This ambitious work – that freely worked in equal measures as revisionist Western, slow-burn crime, black comedy, existential horror and historical epic – delivered a macabre retelling of the serial killings – bordering on extermination – of the Osage people, who’d discovered oil in Oklahoma and became incredibly wealthy upon their forced relocation there, by white supremacists who wanted to seize control of the massive oil money. That Native Americans were patronized as sub-humans, made it easier to carry out the massacre with impunity, braggadocio and untroubled conscience. In a remarkable reworking of the book, which had primarily chronicled the proto-FBI’s investigations into the crimes, Scorsese focused instead on the perpetrators – specifically, the calcified and slimy William Hale (Robert De Niro), an affluent cattle rancher whose seemingly genial attitude towards the Osage community masks his monstrous heart, and his dim-witted and easily manipulated nephew Ernest Bucharest (Leonardo DiCaprio) who enters into a “poisonous” marriage to Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) as part of his uncle’s elaborate nefarious and murderous scheme. Both Scorsese regulars were outstanding in their embodiment of the grotesque underbelly of American history. In a formally blazing and politically audacious finale, the tragic saga is transformed into a lurid radio opera, thus providing a cutting commentary on how popular media cynically repurposes historical injustices into kitschy consumerist fodder.

Director: Martin Scorsese

Genre: Revisionist Western/Crime Drama/Docufiction/Historical Epic

Language: English

Country: US

Oppenheimer [2023]

 Oppenheimer – contrary to my apprehensions of muscular and/or hagiographic account of a man who’d helped engineer war crimes and precipitate global arms race – was a thematically dense, formally dazzling and deeply bleak film which was antithetical to a conventional biopic, deconstructive of a dark chapter in 20^th century history, and riveting political thriller with a surprisingly level-headed portrayal of leftism in America alongside feverish examination of individual and collective hubris. Nolan demonstrated his fascination with temporal fluidity in cinema by crafting a work at once monumental and intimate, through a Cubist structure – Picasso’s Guernica, incidentally, is eloquently referenced near its beginning – that kept zooming in and out, and rigorously progressed along interlocking timelines. It was a bold audiovisual exercise too, in its experimentations with colour and monochrome, aspect ratios, depths of field, and interplay of diagetic/non-diagetic sounds. The film’s stylistic bravura boldly complemented the multifaceted decomposition of its complex protagonist, enacted with searing intensity by Cillian Murphy. He was leftist and antifascist – his brother Frank, wife Katherine (Emily Blunt) and troubled former girlfriend Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) were card-carrying Communists; many of his Manhattan Project colleagues had left-wing affiliations; he’d contributed to Spanish Civil War causes through Communist channels, etc. – and yet collaborated with the American military and industrial machineries that were fervidly conservative; further, he became “father of the atomic bomb”, the concentration and proliferation of which he subsequently dissuaded. The parallel narratives chronicled his university days, Los Alamos, McCarthy witch-hunts orchestrated by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.)., and guilt. He’d crossed paths with the who’s-who of scientific giants of his time, which the film mirrored through an all-star cast, comprising also of Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh, etc.

Director: Christopher Nolan

Genre: Biopic/Political Drama/Political Thriller/Historical Drama/Psychological Drama/Epic

Language: English

Country: US

The Leopard [1963]

 Luchino “Red Count” Visconti was defined by complex contradictions. On one hand he was an aristocrat, the son of a Duke and a Catholic, while on the other he was a Communist, member of the antifascist Resistance during Mussolini’s reign, a pathbreaker and a homosexual. He, in other words, represented the establishment and also defiantly rebelled against it. The Leopard – the lush, resplendent, sweeping, deeply ponderous tour de force and magnificently mounted 3-hour+ epic that’s considered as his greatest masterpiece – too beautifully evoked powerful opposing forces by portraying a proud nobleman’s reluctant acceptance of a new dawn upon realizing that “the times they’re a-changin’”, while lamenting the irrevocable passage of an era. The tumultuous and epochal transformations that Italy underwent during the Risorgimento around the 1860s was captured through Don Fabrizio (Burt Lancastar, in a display of commanding screen presence and majestic performance), an ageing Sicilian patriarch who epitomizes the old social order. Sensing that change is inevitable, he provides his blessings to his dashing nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) – who he loves like his own son – when he joins Garibaldi’s Red Shirts and thereafter pursues political ambitions, though he doesn’t formally join this change himself. Rapturously cinematographed by Giuseppe Rotunno in vivid colours and marvellously scored by Nino Rota, this melancholic meditation on radical social upheavals and generational transformations boasted of two extraordinary set-pieces – a spectacularly staged battle scene, and an absolutely unforgettable 45-minute ballroom sequence orchestrated through breathtaking mise-en-scène, fastidious art decor and enthralling choreography. In an interesting anecdote, Lancastar, Delon and Claudio Cardinale, who played Tancredi’s gorgeous nouveau riche fiancée, couldn’t communicate with each other on the sets, and acted throughout in English, French and Italian, respectively.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Epic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

United Red Army [2007]

 Kōji Wakamatsu’s epic, operatic and ambitious magnum opus United Red Army – which was such a passion project for the maverick filmmaker that he didn’t just mortgage his house for financing it, he even destroyed it at the end of its climactic sequence – was crafted through intermingling of documentation and dramatization. And, this bold interweaving of the objective and the subjective – wherein, the news reel footage were accompanied by a meditative voiceover, while the enacted parts were kept deadpan to retain flavours of poetic realism – made this such a fascinating work. Clocking at over 3 hours and covering a broad temporal arc, this thrilling work chronicled in incredible details the rise and fall of the titular militant Marxist-Lenist-Maoist organization – formed through the merger of the Red Army Faction and the Japanese Communist Party – with considerable formal elan. Wakamatsu, on one hand, captured the idealism, revolutionary fervor and utopian dream borne out of student political movements, desire for societal reformation, fearless defiance of the authorities and staunch opposition of Japanese and American imperialism; while, on the other, he also covered the despotic attitudes among the power centers in the group, their acts of dogmatic violence, the growing disillusionment and paranoia, and their eventual collapse. The hyperkinetic first act made terrific use of archival footage – interspersed with short enacted bursts – that established the context and depicted the group’s formation; the middle section, set in makeshift training camps in the Japanese Alps, focused on the brutal heavy-handedness of its leaders that broke the group’s backbone; and the elaborate final episode followed the last-ditch escape attempt of 5 of its members which ended with the Asama-Sansō incident and an infamous media circus.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Koji Wakamatsu

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docufiction/Historical Epic

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Once Upon a Time There Was One Country [1995]

 Kusturica’s riotously allegorical, unhinged, extravagant, sweeping, farcical, bitingly satirical and darkly ironic retelling of contemporary history of Yugoslavia – a country that, as the title so poignantly makes it clear, doesn’t exist anymore – was 5 ½ hours of dazzling anarchy, exhilarating madness, subversive exuberance and trippy fever dream like few others. This grandiose work, interestingly, had two versions – the 3 ½ hour theatrical cut, released as Underground, which won Kusturica his 2^nd Palm d’Or, and this expansive long-cut that was shown on Serbian television; while the former was a fabulous achievement in itself, the filmmaker’s epic, delirious and incendiary vision arguably realized its full potential in the broader miniseries canvas. Set over half a century from 1941 till around 1992, it covered three crucial chapters in the country’s turbulent past – the Nazi occupation during the WW2, the Tito years during the Cold War era, and the devastating Yugoslav Wars that tore the country apart – through a complex ménage à trois between Blacky (Lazar Ristovski), a gregarious, anti-fascist, fearless Communist resistance leader; Marko (Miki Manojlović), a self-serving, duplicitous and slimy antagonist, and Natalija (Mirjana Joković), a stunningly beautiful, popular and opportunistic theatre actress who both men are in love with. While they start out as inseparable friends and fellow guerilla partisans, Marko tricks Blacky into an underground shelter and concocts an elaborate ruse in order to keep him there, while he steal his girlfriend, becomes an arms trafficker and gets wealthy, until all hell breaks loose. Filled with outstanding set-pieces, surreal splashes, lively ensemble cast, jaundiced world-views, carnivalesque atmosphere, unpredictable narrative arc, extraordinarily foot-tapping brass score and a profoundly heartbreaking finale, this was filmmaking at its most bravura, hyperbolic and unforgettable.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Emir Kusturica

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/War/Historical Epic/Miniseries

Language: Serbian

Country: Serbia

Alexander the Great [1980]

 Alexander the Great, with its sprawling tapestry and intricate thematic examinations – beautiful but fragile dream of utopia, transition of a mythic and heroic revolutionary into an authoritarian corrupted by personality cult, contemporary Greek history rife with repressive regimes and foreign interventions – made it, alongwith The Travelling Players and The Hunters, among the most complex, searingly leftist, provocative and densely structured films in Angelopoulos’ storied career. And yet, interestingly, its historical evocations and allusions were relatively more obtuse, elusive and metaphorical. These facets, therefore, made this an interesting point of intersection between his extraordinary ‘Trilogy of History’ (which also comprised of Days of ’36) and equally sublime ‘Trilogy of Silence’ (Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist). It opens with the kidnap of pompous English nobility in Athens by a group of rebel freedom fighters spearheaded by an enigmatic, charismatic, staunchly dissident leader who calls himself Alexander the Great. The ransom demand to the puppet Greek government is simple – amnesty for his gang and write-off of debts of small peasants at the mercy of feudal landlords. They take refuge at a small village where he was revered and which has radically transitioned into socialist governance – using the short-lived Paris Commune as model, under the aegis of an idealist Communist teacher and Italian anarchists – where no one owns any property and everyone is responsible for everyone else. Things, though, take a troublesome turn when Alexander turn into an oppressor, while in turn being increasingly cornered by ruthless government forces bullied by the English. The exquisitely atmospheric narrative was filled with audaciously conceived and choreographed long takes, an infectious theme score, lively folk songs and a profound sense of fatalism.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Theo Angelopoulos

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Political Drama/Epic

Language: Greek/English

Country: Greece