The astonishing lure
of French cinema can perhaps be gauged by the string of celebrated filmmakers who’ve
dabbled in it – from Buñuel, Kieslowski, Ophüls and Kiarostami to Polanski,
Haneke, Kaurismaki and Farhadi; one can now add Hirokazu Kore-eda, as well, to
this fascinating list. The Truth (La Vérité) – which is about a
complicated mother-daughter relationship – between a famous, overbearing mother
and a daughter who’s always lived in the shadows, yearning for attention –
coming to tenuous terms with old grievances, resentments and wounds – referred to
the template laid down by Bergman in Autumn Sonata (and one that has been reimagined a few times over the years, from
Woody in September to Rituparno Ghosh
in Unishey April). It’s to Kore-eda’s
credit, therefore, that he successfully avoided the trappings of this double-edged
sword, by making the film his own through infusion of his trademark humour, playfulness,
humanism and elegance. The narrative is hinged on its two protagonists –
Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), an ageing superstar of French cinema who’s just written
a memoir filled with half-truths and blatant omissions, and her daughter Lumir
(Juliette Binoche), who’s on a visit from New York with her actor husband
(Ethan Hawke) and kid daughter (Clémentine Grenier). In an interesting meta
element, Fabienne is working in a film within the film where too
mother-daughter relationship is grappled, but with the roles reversed. While
performances were good throughout, Deneuve stole the show with her infuriating
yet infectious portrayal of the prima donna oozing with charisma and
self-delusion. In a mischievous sequence, by the way, the ever insecure
Fabienne scoffs at the name of former French diva Brigitte Bardot who too had
once starred in a movie titled La Vérité.
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Genre: Drama/Family Drama
Language: French
Country:France
Melancholy,
existential despair, crisis of faith and the cycles of devastation wrought upon
through human folly are some of the themes in Roy Andersson’s bleak, haunting, absurdist
and darkly funny About Endlessness. It
also forms – aesthetically, thematically, tonally and structurally – a fabulous
extension to his unique vision of cinema that he’d crafted with ‘Grandeur of Existence Trilogy’ (which comprised
of Songs from the Second Floor, You the Living and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence), marked by hyper-minimalism,
wan-faced middle-aged people, punctiliously constructed urbanscapes reminiscent
of Playtime’s Tativille. The
narrative was perhaps even more episodic here than in the preceding three films
(the quartet have been made over a staggering 20 years). And, it comprises of a
series of fleeting, mournful, tragicomic tableaux connected by a pensive voice
observing the lonely hearts and the lost souls, that ranged from the banal and
commonplace to the appalling and momentous – a priest plagued with nightmares upon
losing his faith; a husband who loses his cool on his wife who might be
cheating on him; a guilt-stricken father who might have killed his daughter; a
man who keeps his money under his mattress as he doesn’t trust the banks;
another man experiencing pathos on being ignored by a former schoolmate; forlorn
men and women drinking in silence; a couple out of Mark Chagall’s Over the Town hovering over a ravaged Dresden;
grieving parents mourning over his son’s grave who died in war; a legless man
playing a desolate dirge for passersby; Hitler’s warmongering military leaders
faced with certain defeat; a swarm of POWs walking towards a harsh Siberian exile;
a captive possibly left to die by the army; etc.
Director: Roy Andersson
Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden
Hungarian filmmaker László
Nemes’s formally and thematically daring directorial debut Son of Saul – he had earlier assisted Béla Tarr in The Man from London – is an intensely
harrowing and a deeply disorienting film. The topics of Holocaust, Nazi
extermination camps and the Final Solution, and more specifically the Sonderkommandos
– a unit of death camp prisoners who were tasked with the hideous responsibility
of disposing of dead bodies from gas chambers by burning them in pits, making
the chambers spic and span for the next lot of doomed arrivals, and passing on
the valuables left behind to the camp authorities – made this such an
excruciatingly harrowing watch. And, in a stylistic choice that made it such a disorienting
experience both visually and viscerally, the film was shot not just in long
takes, but more notably in extreme shallow-focus close-ups pivoted on its dazed
and numbed protagonist Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a Jewish prisoner and
member of the ghastly aforementioned unit in Auschwitz-Birkanau; the camera was
obsessively centered either on his face or on his back throughout the duration,
with the rest of the screen largely out of focus, as a result of which most of
the action happens off screen, so to speak. Set over the course of a day
towards the end of WWII when mass exterminations were horrendously accelerated,
Saul finds a young boy among the dead heap in the gas chamber. Calling the boy
his son – though the veracity of that remains doubtful – he embarks on a
monomaniac endeavor to find a rabbi and give a proper burial to the boy, even to
the detriment of the tragically futile uprising being planned by the camp’s Resistance.
Director: Laszlo Nemes
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Holocaust Film
Language: Hungarian
Country: Hungary
Let the Sunshine In, Claire Denis’ first collaboration with Juliette
Binoche, is a sensuous, playful and elliptic exploration of the absurdities,
illogics, vagaries and capriciousness of love. And, that middle-age romance
outside the conventional realms of marital relationships was the focus here,
added an interesting dimension to it. However, that said, it was also
incoherent, frothy, flippant and self-consciously arty. The film’s central
protagonist is Isabelle (Binoche), a divorced middle-aged Parisian painter, who’s
tireless and unwise in her constant quest for love, thus often leaving her
lonely, desperate and heartbroken. It begins with her relationship to a wealthy
banker (Xavier Beauvois) who’s clearly besotted with her, but is also rude,
arrogant and unsubtle in decision to not leave his wife for her. Next she has a
tentative one-night stand with a thespian who takes some coaxing to respond to
her overtures, but later expresses guilt for having cheated on his wife, thus
spoiling the possibilities for her. Next in line is a stranger who refuses to
introduce her to his friends, which leaves her piqued. She even temporarily
starts seeing her ex-husband again, only for it to quickly end in a fight. And
finally, a tender connect develops with a colleague from the art world (Alex
Descas), but, despite her impatience, he prefers not to rush. The affairs were at
times funny and mischievous, while staid and exasperating at others, and the finale
involving Gérard Depardieu as a hulking love guru bordered on the pretentious.
What turned out as the film’s best aspect, therefore, was Binoche’s delectable turn
as the fickle, confused and easily heartbroken artist who keeps falling in love
to her own emotional detriment.
Director: Claire Denis
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama
Language: French
Country: France
Octagenarian British
maestro Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You
reminded me of the title of an unrelated Indian film called Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin (which translates
to ‘there’s no end to this night’), and, like his stirring and powerful previous
work I, Daniel Blake, provided a damning
portraiture of apathetic socioeconomic systems that often take the working
class population to financial and emotional devastation. The film begins on a
superficially positive note when Ricky (Kris Hitchen) – a Newcastle man who’s
struggled to hold a steady income since the 2008 financial crisis – is hired as
a delivery driver by a franchised courier company, under the false pretense of
empowerment and infinite future potential sold by the insanely tough
competitive supervisor (Ross Brewster). The job requires him to purchase a
vehicle, and hence his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) – who works as a home care
nurse for the elderly and disabled – sacrifices her car to help finance that.
The lies and spins of the gig economy – luring people into harsh contract
labour without any rights or benefits – lead Ricky on an irrevocably downward
spiral, both professionally and personally. The challenges start small, but
they keep growing exponentially – courtesy the dehumanizing rules and policies,
and compounded by the enormous stress on him, his loving wife and their sweet
daughter (Katie Proctor) due to emotional difficulties with their son (Rhys
Stone) – until they consume him completely. The film’s humanist spirit, deep
compassion for its proletarian protagonists and seething anger against a
lopsided system that leads those like him to the brink, were complemented by
the fine performances; however, the relentlessly bleak and brutal pessimism
can be a truly hard pill to swallow.
Director: Ken Loach
Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Family Drama
Language: English
Country: UK
