The wickedly engrossing
crime thriller Good Time – brimming
with manic energy, suffused with nihilism and packed with frenetic urban grunge
– helped the Safdie Brothers leapfrog from the Indie circuit to prestige space,
and also served as an apt preamble to their gleefully outrageous next film Uncut Gems. It rests on the fidgety shoulders
of the smartly etched Connie – a small-time hoodlum who lives on the edges, has
a disdain for authority, and is glibly oblivious of the repercussion of his self-serving
choices on those around him – magnificently brought to life with chameleon-like
brilliance by Robert Pattinson, and made further compelling by the filmmakers’
absolute refusal to either judge or denounce his broken moral code. Set largely
over the course of a single day (and night) – but for the remarkably sedate opening
and closing sequences – it burst into action when Connie impulsively drags his
mentally disabled brother Nick (played by Benny himself) out of a therapy
session which had just started going well. When a botched bank robbery leads to
Nick’s arrest, he must find a way to get hold of a load of money by the next
morning to secure the huge bail bond while also evading the cops. And thus begins
a mad dash of crafty hustling, crazy conniving and old school survival that
involve his emotionally unstable older girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a surprisingly
level-head African-American teenage girl (Taliah Lennice Webster) who he
briefly befriends, and a wounded guy (Buddy Duress) arrested for drug offence
who he mistakenly gets out of police cover from a hospital. The film’s pulsating
beat was amplified by the neon-lit visuals and the mesmeric
electronic/synth score by Oneohtrix Point Never.
Director: Josh & Benny Safdie
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller
Language: English
Country: US
Ema – Chilean
auteur extraordinaire Pablo Larraín’s third collaboration with Mexican actor Gael
García Bernal after No and Neruda, and his second movie after Tony Manero where dance plays a striking
role as a tool for both individual and political statement – is electrifying,
scorching, crazy weird, deliriously subversive and filled with untrammeled
energy. In its rousing expression of individual identity, woman’s agency, moral
ambiguity, sexual fluidity and cinematic freeform, the film walked a razor’s
edge – like a petrol bomb with a loose fuse – in balancing its bold stylistic
splashes, narrative flamboyance, combustible emotional cocktail and sociopolitical
provocation; in short, this was an audacious, no holds barred gamble by a supremely
confident filmmaker, given that it could’ve easily gone crashing spectacularly.
The narrative’s incendiary heroine is Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo in a ferociously
brilliant turn) – a stunning enigma with shocking peroxide blond hair, unfathomable
in her impulses, pyromaniac, anarchic, borderline sociopathic and with a
passion for the reggaetón and hiphop danceform – and she’s desperate to get
back Polo, a Colombian kid who she’d adopted with her older choreographer husband
Gastón (Bernal), only for them to give him back for readoption after he burned Ema’s
sister’s face. And, in order to achieve that, she embarks on a scintillating romp
involving seducing Polo’s current adoptive parents – conventional family man
father and seemingly staid mother but with a suppressed and simmering
sensuality (Paola Giannini) – torching street lights along with her wildly rebellious
friends, and indulging in defiant freestyle street dance. The dazzling shot
compositions, pulsating score, euphoric dance sequences and the gritty graffiti-laced
milieu of Valparaíso added to the film’s chaotic, scalding, liberating and
hypnotic expression of anger, grief, desire, dissent and freedom.
Director: Pablo Larrain
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: Spanish
Country: Chile
Hong Sang-soo’s
typically meandering and conversational work Hotel by the River – made in the same year as his incisive gem Grass – is a film suffused with guilt,
mortality, suppressed bitterness and desperate attempts at clinging to someone.
Its tone and tempo are also a tussle between aimlessness, torpor and the flash
points of relationships. Hence, while these facets, including the oscillating
tempo, filled it with affecting moments, it was also beset with formal laxity,
and lack of stylistic ingenuity or self-reflexive humour, that have marked
Hong’s best works. Further, in place of quirky romantic relationships, there are
rather staid familial and platonic ones here operating largely in parallel at
an idyllic hotel at a wintry locale – the first strand portrays the emotionally
complicated relationship between Young (Gi Ju-bong), an ageing poet lodged in
the hotel temporarily, and his two estranged sons who’ve dropped by in a
fleeting attempt to bond with him, viz. Byung-hoo (Yoo Joon-sang), a sensitive filmmaker,
and Kyung-hoo (Kwon Hae-hyo), an assertive, recently divorced man; the parallel
strand is centered on Sanghee (Kim Min-hee), a young woman who’s gone through a
bad break-up and has taken refuge here as a means to escape, spending moments
of solitude with her friend Yeonju (Song Seon-mi). The film was strewn with a sense
of casual intrigue – for instance, Young’s refusal to allow his sons to come up
to his room and his propensity for silently taking off leaving them in the
lurch, Kyung’s unwillingness to disclose his divorce to his father, Byung’s sentimental
flare up while drunk on soju, and the intimate cuddling that Sanghee gets from
her beautiful older friend Yeonju that was just shy of homoerotic.
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Genre: Drama/Family Drama
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea
Inherent Vice, PTA’s ambitious adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s
stoner classic, reminds one of his first three films – Hard Eight in that it belonged to the broader crime genre, Boogie Nights in its throwback to a lost
era and Magnolia in its bold
extravagance; the similarities, however, end there, because, like each of his
other 7 movies, this too was an absolutely distinctive work in all possible
respects. The excellent evocation of 70s mood and atmosphere – the carefree zeitgeist
and laidback charm of the Hippie movement, and the tenuous feud between the
counterculture spirit and reactionary conservatives – along with the grimy, sweltering
ambience, and pulpy, sordid tale of gnawing human corruption ensured it keeps
one captivated; however, the overly labyrinthine plotting and unrestrained self-indulgence
made it tad contrived and incoherent. Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix)
is a pot-smoking LA PI who prefers living in hallucinogen induced trance between
investigations. He’s awakened from his dazed stupor, however, when his
bewitching old flame Shasta (Katherine Waterston), who he still holds a torch
for, mysteriously appears out of nowhere into his messy shack, informing him
about his affair with a real estate tycoon and land shark, who his sultry wife and
her boyfriend want to have committed into an insane asylum. And the nasty affair
grows only murkier with the entry of neo-Nazi bikers, heroin addicts and a
vicious underworld syndicate leaving a trail of dead bodies. Phoenix was superb
as the dopey gumshoe, as was his deadpan camaraderie with a hulking, violent, civil
rights violating cop played by a terrific Josh Brolin. The ensemble cast of the
languorously paced film also comprised of Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and
Benecio del Toro, among others.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Genre: Crime Drama/Neo-Noir/Mystery
Language: English
Country: US
Xavier Dolan’s
exhilarating and sumptuously mounted magnum opus Laurence Anyways is a ravishingly beautiful exploration of sexual
fluidity, gender choices and transgender rights. Its lush and vibrant palette
brimming with idiosyncratic energy and formal flamboyance, and extraordinary
evocation of the topic with its myriad nuances, made this film a memorable
companion piece to Almodóvar’s dazzling masterwork All About My Mother. And, that the Quebecoise wunderkind was hardly
23 when he made a work as fearless, daring and ambitious as this – in its
stylistic abandon, thematic complexity, emotionally engrossing portrayal and
sprawling 168 minute length – made this an even more astonishing achievement
drawing comparisons with RW Fassbinder. The story follows, over the course of a
decade – from the late 80s to the late 90s – the tumultuous journey of sexual transformation
and liberation of Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) who, on his 35th
birthday, reveals to his girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément) that he identifies
himself as a woman. While he becomes a pariah to the heteronormative society around
him – loosing his job as a university professor, facing hurdles to his promise
as a talented writer, getting distanced from his conservative parents, bullied
and beaten on the Montreal streets – a chance encounter with the lively Rosa
family, his torrid on-off relationship with the passionate Fred who’s torn
apart between denial and love, and immersion into poetry and literature, keeps
him going. Offbeat narrative elements (including a dash of surrealism here and camp
there), baroque visuals, vivid colour schemes, throbbing pop soundtrack,
enthralling cocktail of a myriad emotions from deep pathos to moments of
fleeting euphoria, and powerhouse performances – at once ferocious and
heartbreaking – by Poupaud and Clément, made this a rare work of unhinged exuberance.
Director: Xavier Dolan
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama
Language: French
Country: Canada
