The Mastermind [2025]

 Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist “anti-genre” exercises – subversion of genre trappings, prioritizing inaction over actions, and leaving cine-goers without conventional payoffs – have produced anti-road movies (Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), anti-Westerns (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow), anti-political/legal thrillers (Night Moves, Certain Women), and anti-relationship/domestic dramas (Certain Women, Showing Up). She’s now made an absorbing anti-heist film with the beguiling and captivating The Mastermind. On that note, it recalled two other marvellous recent films – Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents (especially how they glided through mischievous non-sequiturs) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (both starred Josh O’Connor as roguish art thieves, though the similarities in their characters ended there). The protagonist here may well be the world’s worst art thief, giving a deliberately ironic ring to the film’s hyperbolic title. Aimless, unemployed, emotionally stunted, financially dependent on his well-off parents and working wife, and once considered very promising, JB (O’Connor) is the quintessential drifter. The Massachusetts resident hatches a foolhardy plot to steal four paintings – tellingly, by the American abstract painter Arthur Dove, thereby demonstrating his intellectual superiority over his material stupidity – by borrowing money from his mom, employing fellow losers and with no follow-through or backup plans. Significant portions of the film delved into the aftermaths of the robbery, as things go south right-away and JB is forced to go on the lam. The terrific jazz score complemented the improvisational form, and O’Connor embodied his character’s aloof, self-serving, hangdog charm, untouched by the era he’s living in, viz. the 1970s, anti-Vietnam War protests and counter-culture movements. The zeitgeist, incidentally, existed in the edges, bleeding in through the brilliant diagetic soundscape (TV programmes, radio bulletins, people speaking in the backgrounds), until JB inadvertently walks into it.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Genre: Crime Drama/Heist Film/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

Sirāt [2025]

 Óliver Laxe’s existential road movie Sirāt was both an unconventional film and a film made unconventionally. Combining the hellish journey of outsiders with nothing to lose (except their lives) in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear – or perhaps more appropriately, due to their tonal likeness, Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer – and the dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max, with the monomaniac quest of a father for his daughter who’s switched sides with the “philistines”, so to speak, in Ford’s The Searchers, it formed an elemental and sensorial experience. The latter aspect was heightened by its hyper-saturated realism, a visceral audiovisual palette counterpointing a stripped-down narrative, and its embracing of a techno-trance world where music is for dancing rather than listening to. Set in the harsh and visually stunning deserts of southern Morocco – captured through electrifying cinematography and accompanied by a pulsating electronic score – its primal setup followed Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man who, along with his adolescent son Esteban, joins a subaltern group of nomadic misfits residing outside societal boundaries – and whose raison d'être is to reach transcendence through hallucinogenic music and drugs – in search of his missing daughter. They meet at a throbbing rave held in the desert, and when that’s dismantled by the cops, they embark on a crazy ride that evolves from thrilling and immersive to tragic and shocking, to reach another illegal rave – Luis, hoping to locate his daughter, and the eccentric gang for music that never ends. This was, therefore, a story that begins in media res and ends just as abruptly, and the arbitrary violence, meaninglessness and breakdown of civilization that they encounter served as proxy to the third world war that blazes outside the frames.

Director: Oliver Laxe

Genre: Psychological Thriller/Neo-Western/Road Movie/Adventure/Epic

Language: Spanish/French/Arabic

Country: Spain

The Getaway [1972]

 Sam Peckinpah delivered a gripping genre exercise with The Getaway – arguably the most straight-up actioner in his incendiary career – and an archetypal, albeit lesser-known, early entry in the pantheon of gritty 1970s American crime cinema. It was a substantial hit too, despite stretching mainstream sensibilities with its nihilism, violence and cynical amorality, facing considerable behind-the-scenes turbulence, and receiving negative critical reviews (which has fortunately reversed with time). The credit for its appeal goes as much to Peckinpah’s high-throttle direction and leading man Steve McQueen’s “King of Cool” on-screen persona, as the enormously cinematic source novel by Jim Thompson – with its blend of heist gone awry, sociopathic outlaws, on-the-road thrills and brooding violence – and the crackerjack script by Walter Hill, who rewrote the original adaptation by Thompson, including completely doing away with the novel’s final third and its pungently surreal finale. The film’s rakish stylistic flourishes were evident at the outset during the ingenious opening montage – capturing overlapping moments in times while introducing incarcerated career criminal “Doc” McCoy (McQueen) who’s up for parole – which was accompanied by flamboyant freeze frames and terrific sound design by Quincy Jones. Upon securing his release, he’s arm-twisted into immediately planning a bank robbery, which starts unravelling from the get-go thanks to a sleazy, rotten partner (Al Lettieri) who intends to double cross Doc at the first opportunity, and an alarming escalation in unplanned body counts. He’s consequently forced to go on the lam along with his wife (Ali MacGraw) – who doubles as a driver with fine get-away skills, thereby potentially serving as a prototype for Hill’s protagonist in The Driver – and partake in spectacular shoot-outs that stretch plausibility, while planning an escape to Mexico.

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Genre: Action/Crime Thriller/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

Aranyer Din Ratri [1970]

 Aranyer Din Ratri marked a pivotal shift for Satyajit Ray. While he’d already made a terrific transition to contemporary Calcutta settings earlier, and had tackled defiant topics already – from religious dogmatism and quackery to tyranny and war hysteria to crumbling feudalism and gender roles – he embarked on a more overtly political cinema with its cutting critiques on class entitlements, fragile masculinity, sexual tensions, exploitative attitudes, urban privileges, and brewing social conflicts. It, consequently, served as a fascinating segue to his radical masterpiece Pratidwandi that he immediately followed this with; both films, incidentally, were adaptations of feral novels by Sunil Ganguly. The tale’s premise – viz. the weekend getaway of four close friends and the women they meet there – was indicative of a light-hearted comedy; however, despite its loose-limbed structure, it was anything but one. The four friends – the haughty, fast-rising corporate executive Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee); erudite, reserved labour welfare officer Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee); brash, petulant cricketer Hari (Samit Bhanja) fresh of a heartbreak; self-effacing, unemployed Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) who’s the group’s unintentional comedian – find their shallow, self-centred and vulgar self-confidences shattered by the intelligent, self-assured Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) who Sanjoy becomes besotted with, her widowed sister-in-law (Kaberi Bose) who challenges Sanjoy’s “bhadralok” sensibilities, and impoverished Santhal woman Duli (Simi Garewal) who the egotistic Hari seduces leading to a violent comeuppance. Ray underscored the jaunty tone with sharp undercurrents of cynicism and irony, while Soumendu Roy’s terrific B/W cinematography – along with ingenuous inter-cutting that, accompanied with shots of Santhal dance, took the narrative to an edgy crescendo – gave the film a compelling audio-visual language. Ghosh’s turn was arguably the best of the lot in this funny, provocative, tense and cynical work.

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

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Buddy Film/Romantic Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966]

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

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Ten [2002]

 Ten – Abbas Kiarostami’s first film shot entirely in digital – formed a clear companion piece to his much-lauded Taste of Cherry from a structural standpoint, as both films comprised only of conversations inside a moving car between a person driving the vehicle and various people joining in the front passenger’s seat, and eschewed conventional narrative arcs in favour of fly-on-the-wall approaches. However, while the earlier film was a sombre dive into existential inquiries and moral quandaries, the latter may well remain the Iranian maestro’s sharpest political expression, as well as his most radically stripped-down tableaux. This engrossing and episodic docufiction set in Tehran – a chamber drama, if you will, in how it’s rigorously confined within a car and shot using two dashboard-mounted cameras – captured, through ten vignettes, the interactions between a beautiful, confident and fiercely modern woman (played with irresistible self-assurance by Mania Akbari), who’s always seen driving, and five different passengers, viz. her petulant son (played by Akbari’s real-life child Amina Maher) who’s angry with her for having divorced his father, her elder sister facing marital crisis, a delicate young woman jilted by her fiancé, a prostitute who uninhibitedly shares her opinions on the hypocrisy of men and idiocy of their wives, and a religious old woman. Kiarstoma’s belated answer to an Iranian critic’s question to him on the possibility of making films on independent and working Iranian women – repurposed from an earlier idea of a psychologist conducting her sessions in a car on account of renovations at her workplace – blurred the lines between private and public spaces through these nakedly intimate and free-flowing conversations that touched upon patriarchal norms, gender identities, cultural mores, societal impositions, and feminist assertions.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Experimental Film

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

The State I Am In [2000]

 Christian Petzold, having earlier made three TV features, made a striking theatrical debut with The State I Am In. With this first chapter in his “Ghosts Trilogy” – it was followed by Ghosts and Yella, two similarly glacial and elliptical inquiries into Germany’s complex and asymmetric reunification process – he boldly combined political cinema, formal exactitude and genre exercise wherein each informed the others. It began on a languid note as teenager Jeanne (Julia Hummer) selects Tim Hardin’s plaintive song “How Can We Hang On to a Dream” on the jukebox at a seaside café and sits down for a smoke; young surfer Heinrich (Bilge Bingül) approaches her for a cigarette, joins for a chat, and the two lonely souls strike a mutual chord. What seems like a coming-of-age love story gets a genre spin when we meet her edgy and secretive parents – Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer) – who embody archetypal lovers-on-the-lam. However, as we gather – even though the script was shrouded in ambiguity – the couple are former Red Army Faction members, the disbanded left-wing group which’d dreamt of violently reshaping Germany during the 1960s and 70s; they’ve been hiding under false identities for years now, hoping to escape to Brazil. When their covers are blown at a small Portuguese town, they decide to return to Germany with hopes of cajoling and coercing help from old comrades. Jeanne, however, craves for a different escape – hanging out with Heinrich and listening to pop music – increasingly oblivious of the fatal risks that pose for her parents. Co-written with influential political film essayist Harun Farocki, it delivered a wry jab at fading political memory through Resnais’ powerful Holocaust documentary Night and Fog.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Political Thriller/Road Movie

Language: German

Country: Germany

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

Crossing [2024]

 Swedish-Georgian filmmaker Levan Akin’s fourth feature Crossing began with the seemingly curious information that both Georgian and Turkish languages have gender-neutral grammars; the implication of that became eminently clear over the course of the film as we realize that both countries – like so many others around the world – are steeped in intense gender prejudices, heteronormative attitudes and acute transphobia. This tender and understated film begins in Batumi, the Georgian port city located on the Black Sea, but then quickly moves over to the vibrant melting pot of Istanbul that, despite the right-wing nationalism, religious conservatism and populist rhetoric of the current Turkish government, continues to harbour a throbbing immigrant culture and underground LGBTQ+ scene. The loosely structured narrative revolves around three characters – Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a retired Georgian schoolteacher and middle-aged woman who decides to visit Istanbul in search of her lost trans niece Tekla, in keeping with a promise made to her dead sister and possibly to make amends to her past intolerance; Achi (Lucas Kankava), an opportunistic but essentially goofy, penurious and harmless teenaged guy who coaxes Lia into taking him along, as he wants to escape his brother’s dreary home; and Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a vivacious trans woman and activist lawyer in emphatic solidarity with trans sex workers, who lives a proudly liberated life despite the daily harassments and bigotry that she encounters. The evolving relationship between the trio – debutante Dumanli’s performance being the standout of the lot – was portrayed with empathy for those living subaltern existences on the margins, restrained emotions which cut loose on occasions but stopped short of sentimentality, and enchanting depictions of the bustling local sights and sounds without ever going touristy.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Levan Akin

Genre: Drama/Road Movie

Language: Georgian/Turkish/English

Country: Georgia

Caught by the Tides [2024]

 Few filmmakers have so masterfully blended profound socio-cultural upheavals with achingly intimate individual stories, and the inexorable flow of time with stasis, melancholy and transience, as Jia Zhangke. Caught by the Tides – with its episodic structure, zooming in on two outsiders drifting and reconciling over three segments across multiple years, inextricably counterpointed with China’s tectonic mutations – immediately recalled his two previous films Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White. Jia, in a remarkable artistic choice, composed the first two segments by sifting through a thousand hours’ outtakes from three films – as well as deliberately shot additional footage with plans of converging them into a future work – viz. Unknown Pleasure from 2002, his sublime masterpiece Still Life from 2006, and Ash… from 2018; the final segment, shot during Covid-19 pandemic, was the only one filmed in present. Astonishing self-reflexivity aside, this radically conceived assemblage imbued it with fascinating additional textures and subtexts – be it the organic ageing of the two lead actors (Zhao Tao, Jia’s partner and muse, and Li Zhubin), or the changing visuals, viz. grungy and energetic low-fi videos in the first segment, bleak and meditative widescreen exteriors in the second, and recently shot digital images in the third. While it did have a skeletal narrative – a dancer (Tao) and her boyfriend (Zhubin) are separated when he leaves Daton to find work elsewhere; she travels to the site of the Three Gorges Dam to find him; and he eventually returns amidst Covid-19 restrictions – it also possessed long observational stretches and interludes like fly-on-the-wall documentaries and travelogue essays. Incidentally, while the mesmeric Tao hardly ever speaks, the film was a kaleidoscopic compilation of folk, pop and disco soundtrack.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Jia Zhangke

Genre: Drama/Romance/Road Movie

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Paris, Texas [1984]

 Good road movies are often less about reaching a specific destination; rather, they’re more around where the characters are ostensibly headed to, even if they never end up reaching there, and what they’re escaping from. Wim Wenders, who’d already made the acclaimed ‘Road Movie Trilogy’ with Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move and Kings of the Road (the 1^st and 3^rd films, in particular, were exceptional New German Cinema gems), magnificently blended his European arthouse aesthetics, understated voice and love for loners trying to get somewhere (or nowhere), with the quintessential, taciturn and weather-beaten texture of the “American Road” – the mythic vastness, desolate structures, endless freeways, neon-lit billboards, solitary motels, and the underlying existentialism, loneliness and ennui that they physically manifest and which was powerfully evoked by towering American playwright Sam Shepard’s script – in his moving and melancholic masterpiece Paris, Texas. At its core is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who was lost for four years, and has become an aimless near-mute drifter shorn of home and identity upon his scarring marital collapse with his beautiful estranged wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who presently works at a seedy peepshow in Houston. Upon being fortuitously located by his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) and brought back to Los Angeles, he attempts to reconnect with his young son Hunter – being brought up by Walt and his wife (Aurore Clément) – and find his wife whose memories and absence – and the reasons that led to their devastating separation – continue to profoundly haunt him. In Robby Müller’s moody lens and accompanied by Ry Cooder’s plaintive score, the film took a fatalist tenor that was a mix of meditative Western, Edward Hopper paintings and Charles Bukowski’s poetry.

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

Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: Germany

The Holdovers [2023]

 Narratives featuring two difficult individuals who overcome not just their borderline hostilities, but also gain rare insights into the other and thereby form an unlikely bond, upon being compelled to endure each other’s companies despite mutual differences and dislike, are as old as cinema itself, especially among its popular variants. Alexander Payne, who’s been adept at marrying Indie sensibilities with mainstream storytelling, made smart and captivating use of this otherwise hackneyed strand in The Holdovers; that it was also an outwardly bitter but essentially fuzzy and likeable Christmas movie, added to both its conventionality and charm. Set in an elite boarding school over the course of the winter holidays in 1970, it portrayed the growing camaraderie between an irascible and infuriating professor of the classics (Paul Giamatti) – derided and hated by all, which he reciprocates with undiluted scorn – and an intelligent but troubled teenaged student (Dominic Sessa), who’s been forced to stay back under the former’s guardianship, much to the chagrin of both. Giving them company is an African-American woman (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) who’s the school’s canteen manager and a bereaved mother, with her son having been killed in the Vietnam War. Payne could’ve interlaced striking commentaries on class and race into the film, and therefore taken it beyond just its aesthetic homage to the New American Cinema of the 1970s and instead pushed the cinematic boundaries like them; his thematic intent here, however, was steadfastly hinged around personal redemption. What prevented its devolution into just another conventional fare were Giamatti’s stellar turn as the lonely and caustic man, the script’s edgy tones that kept sentimentality in check, and the shared empathy that develops between the three social outsiders.

Director: Alexander Payne

Genre: Comedy/Drama/Road Movie/Buddy Film

Language: English

Country: US

Shakespeare Wallah [1965]

Shakespeare Wallah – the sophomore Merchant-Ivory collaboration that earned them international fame – was a rare example of exceptional films focused on travelling performers, alongside the likes of La Strada, Floating Weeds, The Travelling Players, The Puppetmaster, Arekti Premer Galpo, etc. It was loosely based on English thespian Geoffrey Kendel’s diaries, who’d toured throughout India in the 1940s and 50s – along with his wife Laura Liddell, and daughters Jennifer and Felicity – with their travelling theatre troupe “Shakespeareana”. In a fascinating blurring of lines between memoir and fiction, it starred Geoffrey and Laura themselves as ageing Shakespearean artists Tony and Carla Buckingham, and Felicity as their teenaged daughter Lizzie, who, as “The Buckingham Players”, criss-cross through post-Colonial India staging the Bard’s plays – from private performances for wealthy royals (Utpal Dutt) and at boarding schools, to public shows for paying audiences. The rapidly changing social climate and landscape of the newly independent country – intent on leaving behind the shadows of British Raj – has meant a sharp decline in the demand for classical English theatre and therefore the Buckinghams’ finances, further exacerbated by the swing towards popular cinema. While the parents are alternately cynical, nostalgic and resigned, an affecting romance brews between the naïve ingénue Lizzie, and a wealthy playboy (Shashi Kapoor, who was married to Jennifer Kendal), albeit complicated by a fiercely jealous Bollywood star (Madhur Jaffrey). This ravishingly beautiful, bittersweet and evocative representation of an era fading out in the mists of time – embodied by brilliant, nomadic artists converting into fossils – was made particularly memorable by a magnificent and rapturous soundtrack by Satyajit Ray, gorgeous cinematography in hypnotic B/W by Subrata Mitra, and a sensitive script by Merchant-Ivory regular Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Director: James Ivory

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Period Film/Film a Clef/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: USA

Stress Is Three [1968]

 Stress Is Three, the middle chapter in Carlos Saura’s wickedly brilliant and pungently satirical ‘Bourgeois Trilogy’ – which painted scabrous portraits of Spain’s Franco-era bourgeoisie, focusing on toxic and perverse relationships that’re defined by self-destructive obsessions, twisted passions, and unsettling fetishes hiding underneath false propriety – provided for a striking contradiction to the two superb films that sandwiched it, viz. Peppermint Frappé and Honeycomb. While the two films on either side were made in vivid colours, had greater thematic complexities, and broader temporal scopes, this stood aside with its monochrome visuals, narrative conciseness and events set over a single day. These facets, along with its off-balancing tone – which kept playfully veering towards psychological and even physical violence –, and portrayal of simmering marital and sexual jealousy that reached a ferocious intensity, made this an interesting companion piece to Polanski’s terrific debut film Knife in the Water. The film unfolds over a road trip – from Madrid to Almeria – taken by the uptight Fernando (Fernando Cebrián), a well-to-do and feudalist industrialist, his teasing wife Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin, Saura’s muse at that time who featured in all the three films in this trilogy) who he’s obsessed with, and his laidback friend and business partner Antonio (Juan Luis Galiardo) who he suspects Teresa is having a fervid affair with. His jealousy is especially amplified by the ironic tussle between his fears and his desire of being proven right. Grainy B/W imagery, along with the sparingly used pulsating jazz beats, filled the proceedings with electrifying undercurrents of paranoia and tension – to the extent that it felt the film is inevitably progressing towards an ugly denouement – while also complementing the brooding atmosphere with cynical levity and discordance.

Director: Carlos Saura

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Marital Drama/Road Movie

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Broker [2022]

 Bittersweet chronicles of dysfunctional families have been the connecting thread in Kore-eda’s filmography, and Broker fell squarely in that bucket. However, what made it a companion piece to his zany and dazzling masterwork Shoplifters was that both were centred on “found families” – bound by choice and chance, as opposed to blood ties – comprising of misfits, outsiders and delinquents who reside outside the margins of social boundaries. While it displayed tremendous empathy for its characters like the earlier film – despite their moral greyness – his second consecutive feature made outside Japan was set slightly apart on two key accounts, viz. the morally complex topic at its core and its toned-down humour. These imbued it with both its strength and pitfall in that, on one hand, the plot was devoid of contrivances and easy answers, and was dealt with nuance and candour, while, on the other, sentimentality at times took precedence where dark humour and irony would’ve served better. Set in Korea, the motley and well-enacted ensemble cast comprised of two friends – owner of a debt-ridden laundromat (the always brilliant Song Kang-ho) and an orphaned worker in a church (Gang Dong-won) – who sell babies in the black market to those who aren’t able to adopt legally; a sassy sex worker (the striking Lee Ji-eun) who’s had to abandon her baby and go on the run; and a cop (Bae Doona) whose desperation to catch the two men in the act leaves her colleague (Lee Joo-young) both bemused and uncomfortable. The film, which alternated between oddball human drama, reluctant crime caper and quirky road movie – in a manner that Kore-eda has made his own – had a strangely satisfying ending despite hardly having one.

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

Genre: Drama/Road Movie

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea

Pierrot le Fou [1965]

 The anarchist, non-conformist, prankster, satirist, cynic, romantic and mad genius residing within Godard were all on dazzling display in Pierrot Le Fou – his exuberant, impudent, goofy and crazy gem. He took the template of outlaw lovers – or, in his words, the “the last romantic couple” – on crime spree, and deliriously punched into that pop-art aesthetics, wacky humour, comic-book violence, idiosyncratic genre subversion, sardonic class commentary, hilarious satire on consumerism, lacerating indictment on militarism, and a whole lot of manic fun, thus making this a dizzying mosaic packed with political, cultural, cinematic and literary references. That his marriage to Anna Karina was falling apart, added a poignant touch to their fifth and penultimate collaboration. Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) – a media exec leading an unfulfilled bourgeois existence filled with ennui, domesticity and shallow social circles, and married to a well-off wife (Graziella Galvani) who’s consumed by vacuous consumerism – takes off on a whim with Marianne (Karina), his ex-girlfriend and member of an underground racket on the run from OAS gangsters. They steal cars, commit murders, swindle, and engage in subterfuge as they ride drive Paris to Côte d’Azur in search of escape and idyll. Along the way they encounter dwarf criminals, perform a couple of infectious musical sequences, make buffoons of American GI’s through a parodic agitprop street theatre on the Vietnam War, etc. Belmondo as the deadpan and philosophical Ferdinand, and Karina as the enchanting and impulsive Marianne, made for an unforgettable pair in this zany work flamboyantly photographed by Coutard. American filmmaker Samuel Fuller, in an ironic cameo, mentions “cinema is like a battleground”… Godard emphatically espoused that maxim here, and made it his raison d'être over his radical career.

Note: My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Satire/Road Movie/Musical/Avant-Garde

Language: French

Country: France

History of Ha [2021]

 Lav Diaz’s sublime 4-hour gem History of Ha bore the hallmarks of “slow cinema” and the free-spirited Filipino maestro’s oeuvre – formally rigorous, structured around a metaphorical and deeply existential voyage, infused with trenchant political commentaries, filmed in entrancing single takes and stark B/W, and with continuous interplays between silence and conversations. It’s foregrounded on Philippines’ murky and turbulent political history, wherein even its most respected leader Ramon Magsaysay had problematic shades associated with his stint – his anti-Marxist Cold War interventions, militarism, and links to the US – while two repressive, brutal right-wing rulers, viz. Marcos and Duterte – ironically alluded to as “leader from the South” and “leader from the North” in the film, even if they were deliberately anachronistic as the film is set in 1957 – would dominate the country’s political scenes in the future. Akin to Hou’s masterful The Puppetmaster – which portrayed a puppeteer amidst complex, tragic political forces – the protagonist here’s Hernando (John Lloyd Cruz), a well-known ventriloquist and socialist poet, who retires around the same time as Magsaysay’s death in an aircraft accident. As his country’s dark fate gets sealed and his personal life is thrown into despair upon his fiancée’s decision to marry a landlord to help pay her family’s debts, the lonely and disillusioned man embarks on a directionless cross-country voyage and takes refuge in self-imposed silence – speaking, where unavoidable, through his puppet Ha. During his odyssey, he’s joined by three oddball characters – a do-gooder nun, a brash prostitute and a lost teenager – who all wish to go to an island where gold rush is underway, and finds himself in a disturbing psychological tussle with a despotic local strongman (Teroy Guzman) who’s a Marcos/Duterte stand-in.

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Road Movie

Language: Tagalog/English

Country: Philippines

Hit the Road [2021]

 Panah Panahi proved that he’s his father’s son in his debut film Hit the Road. Even if it’ll take him some time to fill the great Jafar Panahi’s shoes and emulate his voice – and it did feel slight and tad unmoored on occasions, and the cuteness went overboard at times – this charming, effervescent, and funny road movie – a quintessential American genre that, ironically, has paved way for a number of Iranian gems too – displayed in no uncertain terms Panahi Jr.’s storytelling mettle, willingness to use narrative as a springboard rather than an end in itself, and – like his defiant father who’s never tempered his dissent nor his distinctive chuckle – the gall and temerity to tackle politically uncomfortable topics, albeit under the guise of a playful and unassuming exterior, that may not please the authorities. Gray-haired vivacious mom (Pantea Panahiha), gruff but adorable father (Hassan Madjooni) with a broken leg in cast, brooding and taciturn elder son (Amin Simiar), and one of the most energetic, precocious and chatty 6-year-old kids (Rayan Sarlak) imaginable, are on a cross-country road trip in their old and dusty station wagon. They drive, sing, smoke, argue, fight, reflect, reminisce and bond as part of their seemingly aimless journey – through some stunning and excellently photographed Iranian landscapes – while the real reason for their trip, and therefore their possible destination, gradually emerge. That, in turn, provided context to the interpersonal undercurrents that were regularly alluded to until the disclosures happened, and which added interesting emotional dynamics to this tender, bittersweet and featherweight comedy. There were a few interesting asides too, especially a hilarious one involving a motorcyclist who’s compelled to take a brief ride with the family.

Director: Panah Panahi

Genre: Drama/Road Movie

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Compartment No. 6 [2021]

 The premise of Compartment No. 6, viz. formation of an unlikely bond between two strangers while traveling on train, had reminded me of Kawalerowicz’s Night Train and Linklater’s Before Sunrise; admittedly, a bit more of the former, as the chances of a Russian movie being tonally closer to a Polish film seemed relatively higher, despite the pointless comparisons to the latter. However, on hindsight, this charming, earthy, offbeat, gently eccentric and delectably anachronistic film was as similar to them as Russian vodka is to Polish lager and American bourbon. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish woman fluent in Russian who’s studying archaeology in Moscow and is having an affair with her professor (Dinara Drukarova). The two had planned a rail trip to Murmansk in order to see the ancient petroglyphs there; but when the prof drops out at the last moment – she’s looking at ending their relationship, unbeknownst to her love-struck student – Laura embarks on this massive cross-country journey herself to the sparsely populated and bitingly cold little Arctic town. Sharing her tiny compartment is Lyokha (Yuri Borisov), a rough young miner. The two oddball characters couldn’t be further apart – she’s fidgety, luckless, sensitive and forlorn, while he’s hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, coarse and loutish – and yet, to the director’s credit – and arguably the two excellent actors’ too, in the way they so effortlessly brought forth their characters’ vulnerable and lonely inner cores – they gradually develop a warm, quirky and endearing relationship. The 90’s setting – with its analogue devices, handicam, and electronic music played on Walkman and old car stereos – along with the captivating juxtaposition of claustrophobic interiors with harsh exteriors, made it all the more joyous, melancholic and nostalgic.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Juho Kuosmanen

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Romance/Road Movie

Language: Finnish/Russian

Country: Finland