Pearls of the Deep [1966]

Pearls of the Deep, on hindsight, was a watershed moment for the Czech New Wave movement, as 5 of its giants collaborated for this omnibus film. It can also be considered as an alumnus meet for FAMU, as all the 5 directors associated with this project, viz. Jiří Menzel, Jan Nemec, Evald Schorm, Věra Chytilová and Jaromil Jires, had studied at the legendary Prague institute. Further, all the shorts were adaptations of short stories by one of the most beloved Czech authors, Bohumil Hrabal. Though rarely as politically charged as Czech New Wave generally was, or like, say, the fabulous Romanian New Wave anthology film Tales from the Golden Age, it did bear some of the hallmarks that were representative the former movement – alternately bittersweet, darkly funny and whimsical humour, idiosyncratic characters, absurdism and oddities, breezy tone, and oftentimes experimental narrative styles. Menzel’s delectable Mr. Baltazar’s Death focused on a death and racing-bike obsessed husband-wife pair; Nemec’s The Imposters, the best and the most heartwarming of the lot, showed 2 aged patients in a hospital reminiscing about their pasts, using, as was later revealed, exaggerations to embellish their personal histories and memories of themselves; Schorm’s The House of Joy, the most politically charged of the lot and the only one shot in colour, concerned the futile attempts of 2 insurance salesmen to sell their product to an eccentric painter; Chytilova’s The Restaurant of the World, unsurprisingly the most surrealistic of the lot, was about the aftermaths of a suicide at a local café; and Jires’ Romance, chronicled the chance and fleeting romantic interlude between a shy apprentice plumber and a free-spirited Gypsey girl, and the associated social inequity.

Directors: Jiri Menzel, Jan Nemec, Evald Schorm, Vera Chytilova, Jaromil Jires
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Black Comedy/Surrealistic Drama/Political Drama/Omnibus Film
Language: Czech
Country: Czech Republic (erstwhile Czechoslovakia)

A Tale of Springtime [1990]

A Tale of Springtime marked the beginning of Rohmer’s late-career ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’, his 3^rd and final movie series, and his distinctively Rohmersque examination of the frailties and vagaries of the heart with the titular weather providing key tonal backdrops for the respective films. Jeanne (Anne Teyssedre) is a beautiful, intelligent and self-assured philosophy teacher at a Parisian school who’s looking for temporary accommodation as she’s lent her apartment to a friend. At a party she makes the chance acquaintance of Natacha (Florence Darel), an impulsive and childish young music student in her late teens who immediately likes Jeanne and invites her to stay at her place. As it turns out, Natacha’s divorced father, Igor (Hugues Quester), a 40-something bureaucrat, is having an affair with 20-year old Eve (Eloïse Bennett) who Natacha despises for various reasons, further fuelled by her conviction that Eve has stolen an expensive necklace that Igor was supposed to gift her. So, since Jeanne is ambiguous about her relationship, Natacha tries to get her linked with her father. The messy family details that Jeanne becomes unwittingly a witness to is compounded by the discomfort at Natacha playing the cupid, and these provided the driving forces for the character and interpersonal dynamics that the story focused on in order to reinforce its theme. As is common in Rohmer’s filmography, the dialogue-heavy plot had its share of coincidences, happy accidents and deux ex machina to both elevate and resolve tension, and the aesthetics were marked by a near-static camera and near lack of non-diegetic sounds. Though a lesser work in his canon, the charming set-up, controlled displays of emotions and the striking presence of the ravishing protagonist, made it noteworthy.

Director: Eric Rohmer
Genre: Drama/Romantic Comedy
Language: French
Country: France

Snowpiercer [2013]

Snowpiercer, gifted Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of a French graphic novel and his English-language debut, is a dystopian and futuristic sci-fi thrillers. With the world made inhabitable due to freezing temperatures, the last surviving members of the human race have become passengers in a train driven by a perpetual engine. The elaborately designed train, which is a closed ecosystem, provided a stark but over-emphasized metaphor for society’s class system where the rich enjoy at the cost of the poor. Thus, as can be expected, the rich wants to ensure continuance of the status quo while the poor wants to challenge it, with use of violence being a necessary tool for both the sides. Despite the massive odds placed before him, Curtis (Chris Evans) isn’t deterred from sparking the latest armed revolt to take control of the train and reverse the scenario for residents of the rear section who are forever at the receiving end of oppression, injustice and punishments. It also stars John Hurt as a wise but old and crippled leader of the Tail Section, Tilda Swinton as the grotesque enforcer for the Front Section, Song Kang-ho as the man who’d designed the train’s lock system, and Ed Harris as the leader of the Front Section. The train’s interiors were marvelously designed, with the grimy, grungy and claustrophobic art décor of the tail section providing for striking visual juxtaposition to the front section. The fast-moving script, except for the rather stretched climax, ingenuity of plot and nicely choreographed action sequences, added to the thrills. However, this would possibly rank as Bong’s weakest work so far, with the plot-holes, ludicrosity of proceedings, and lack of characterizations restricting it to just a muscular genre exercise.

Director: Bong Joon-ho
Genre: Thriller/Sci-Fi Thriller
Language: English/Korean
Country: South Korea

25 Fireman's Street [1973]

In Budapest Tales Szabo had used a train bogey and a group of travelers to present a marvelous sociopolitical allegory. In 25 Fireman’s Street he did that with the help of a crumbling building block. Even if it wasn’t as powerful or as eminently watchable as the former, the metaphors were nonetheless potent. It provided an incisive chronicle for dark times of Nazi-occupied Hungary and the equally bleak post-War Soviet Bloc years, through the imposing but dilapidated apartment complex and its bunch of tragic, idiosyncratic residents, further stressed through the infusion of surrealism. The residents of the house located at the titular address in Budapest are regular folks – their physiological and psychological ailments, bouts of loneliness, moments of love and heartbreak, fears, grief, hopes, loss, the desire for physical touch, and so forth, provided an intensely personal portrayal of the ensemble cast. However, it never became just a collection of personal tales, as the outside turmoils added both drama and rich context to the story – political affiliations made some turn into active or passive partisans, some into lunatics, and others flee at the first opportunity, divisiveness led to conflicts, and hiding of people and stuff from the secret police was a regular feature (various fellow-residents requesting one of the ladies to validate on paper that they never revealed that she hid someone close to her, and, at the end, she requesting people to return the stuff she’d kept with them, made for poignant moments). The narrative style, however, didn’t make for easy viewing – it regularly jumped back and forth across time, often veered between dreams and reality, and never provided easy answers or explanations.

Director: Istvan Szabo
Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Psychological Drama/Ensemble Film
Language: Hungarian
Country: Hungary

The Friends of Eddie Coyle [1973]

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, directed by Peter “Bullitt” Yates, is a melancholic, downbeat and character-driven crime drama laced with grim plot developments, harsh realism and fatalism. Adapted from the debut novel of George V. Higgins, who’d also written the source novel for Killing Them Softly (viz. Cogan’s Trade), the film transplanted the author’s love for rambling and discursive narrative style to provide a grim look, shorn of sentimentality and romanticism, into the bleak, chance-ridden and thoroughly unfair world of gangsters, particularly the ageing little fishes in the unforgiving big pond. The titular Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), a middle-aged gunrunner in Boston’s organized crime sector, despite being well-connected on account of having spent his life in this arena, never managed to make it beyond the middle-rung or ensure sufficient financial backing for his family. Consequently, when faced with a long tenure in prison and devoid of any godfather to help him out of the fix, he’s forced to become a part-time informant for the police in order to earn a favorable verdict on account of services rendered. Meanwhile, a gang of masked bank robbers is conducting heists with clinical efficiency, and when Eddie earns the damning, albeit false, reputation of ratting on his colleagues, his fate gets sealed. The most poignant aspect of the film lay in its tragic finale when Dillon (Peter Boyle), Eddie’s buddy and a professional hitman, is asked to neutralize him, he treats Eddie to an ice-hockey game, food and drinks before coldly executing the dirty job. Mitchum was marvelous as the weary, detached and down-on-luck protagonist, and the disconsolate mood was evoked with minimalist ease. It also comprised of a couple of brilliantly staged heist sequences.

p.s. This is an earlier review. My recent review of the film can be found here.

Director: Peter Yates
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster
Language: English
Country: US