EO [2022]

  Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was an unclassifiable viewing experience, considering its bold narrative experimentations on a premise that walked a fine line between simplicity and simplistic; its balancing between tonal solemnity and demonstrations that veered towards cloying and cartoonish; its simultaneous espousal of the kind of themes and “radical sympathy” that aren’t really new, but situated in a modern-day European setting filled with topical social abominations that provocatively pointed towards its “rotten core”. These dichotomies were especially manifested by the way it unequivocally evoked Au Hasard Balthazar – which had made a profound impact on Skolimowski when he’d watched it sixty-seven years back – and in its dramatic departure by replacing the earlier film’s austere and rigorous form with an overly eventful sequence of tableaux and stylistic spectacle. The protagonist, like the Bresson classic, was the eponymous donkey who observes, experiences and journeys through long stretches of apathy, abandonment, dislocation, desolation, misery and cruelty – sparingly separated by brief yet unanticipated moments of love, tenderness, empathy, companionship and beauty – and becomes a mute, unwitting and oblivious witness to zealous animal rights activists who spark the first of its string of separations, casual exploitation of vulnerable immigrants, horrific hooliganism, humans’ shocking capacity for violence, decrepit aristocrats and whatnot. Its tad overdone journey began with a traveling circus that it was a part of and bleakly ended in an industrial abattoir, and traversed through Polish countryside, lonely highways and Italian towns. The hyperactive direction, therefore, was marked by mordant world-view, dazzling camerawork and hallucinatory visuals on one hand, and corny moments, glib humanity and showboating artifice on the other. Isabelle Huppert featured in a short, enticing cameo as a cold, frustrated countess.

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Polish

Country: Poland

The Novelist's Film [2022]

 Self-reflexive and metatextual elements, quotidian urban settings, rambling alcohol-fuelled conversation, passive-aggressive interactions, moments of epiphany – captured through rigorous form, improvisational style, loosely-strung narrative, sparse aesthetics, limpid storytelling, and wry, playful tones with undercurrents of melancholy – and performed by actors belonging to a small pool of regulars – Korean maestro Hong Sang-soo’s excellent 27^th narrative was delightfully laced with his distinctive signatures. And yet – thus underscoring the unassuming Korean filmmaker’s brilliance – this deceptively complex, gently affecting and nakedly personal film marvellously displayed his panache for serving refreshingly fascinating wines in amiably familiar bottle, while reinforcing his love for the medium. Lee Hye-young, who was memorable in the lead role in Hong’s sublime 2021 film In Front of Your Face – where the middle-aged former star played a middle-aged former star – is a famous, veteran novelist here struck with writer’s block. She’s therefore looking for inspiration in order to rejuvenate her creative impulses, and with that intent she makes an unplanned visit to a town in Seoul’s suburbia where she has awkward reconnects with two old acquaintances –a former writer (Seo Younghwa) who now owns a bookshop, and a well-known filmmaker (Kwon Hae-hyo) who’d once planned to adapt one of her books to screen but didn’t finally do. Amidst these delicate interactions, and a drinking episode too, a chance encounter with a renowned actress (Kim Min-hee), who’s taken an indefinite sabbatical from movies, proves fortuitous as she spontaneously decides to direct a novelistic short film, and even convinces the latter to collaborate with her. The ravishing colours at the end – providing fleeting glimpses of the said short – led this fragile and intimate film, otherwise shot in high-contrast B/W, to a deeply sensuous finale.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Drama

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea

Barbie [2023]

 The most intriguing irony defining Barbie is that, it’s a riotous satire of patriarchy, consumerism and the shallow beauty standards that the eponymous dolls had embodied and glorified, and yet it was also promoted through gimmicky marketing blitzkrieg that reinforced the very attributes the film lampooned. It’s, therefore, fascinating not just on account of Greta Gerwig – who’d established her toehold in the industry as an actor in low-budget Indie cinema, and demonstrated her understated feminist streak thereafter as a filmmaker – helming a big-budget studio movie as this, but more so in how she succeeded in making such a subversive and feminist work despite it being produced by Mattel Inc., the very organization that was responsible for these plastic, vacuous and regressive toys. One half of the pop-culture frenzy “Barbenheimer” – a portmanteau that was coined despite Barbie and Oppenheimer being two diametrically opposite works, in order to indicate the hype that presaged their simultaneous theatrical releases, and the gargantuan blockbusters that both became even though they were far removed from straightforward mass entertainers – its deliberately garish colour palette and kitschy aesthetics served as apt juxtapositions to its silly fantasy and comedic portrayal of Barbieland, a joyous matriarchal society inhabited by, among others, the ravishing Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) who, upon experiencing existential crisis, takes a trip to the grimy real world in company of a drooling Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling). That leads to widespread repercussions, including among the all-male Mattel executives led by its CEO (Will Farrell), a disenchanted mother-daughter combo, and Barbieland’s motley residents. The narrative’s messy, self-conscious and meta elements were both its unique strength and, by kind-of embracing the very artifice that it parodied, also its failing.

Director: Greta Gerwig

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Fantasy

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

Fire of Love [2022]

 Katia and Maurice Kraft left back a legacy that’s so rich, eventful and fascinating that it’s not surprising that their lives have been celebrated through two well-made documentaries. And, quite startlingly, both were released in the same year! Hence, alongside evaluating the two essay films on the iconic volcanologist couple – geochemist Katia and geologist Maurice – in a remarkable three-way affair with active volcanos, it’s especially interesting to do a comparative analysis of the two. While both Herzog’s The Fire Within and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love made extensive use of the treasure trove that they’d left behind – breathtaking images and videos of volcanic eruptions across the world – capturing their thrilling journeys until their tragic demise in a massive pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan, these were essentially two very different works. Where the former was edgier and more expansive, and charged with the German giant’s customary fierceness, deadpan irony, wry idiosyncrasy and fatalist undercurrents, the latter was relatively more light-hearted, intimate, lyrical, and with the edges rounded through good-humoured speculations and romanticism. Additionally, this was a relatively more straightforward work in its thematic exploration and form. Buoyed by Miranda July’s lilting narration – she brought in a freewheeling quality into the proceedings – we get to hypothesize on their first meeting; how they were drawn into this magnetic passion unto death; the two broad classifications of volcanos that they’d settled on – the more spectacular looking “red” ones and the incredibly deadly “grey” ones which leave devastation in their wake; how they divided responsibility between their tours to generate funds; Maurice’s flamboyance and daredevilry vis-à-vis Katia’s unassuming charm and level-headedness; and their efforts in building awareness for better preparedness among governments.

Director: Sara Dosa

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: English

Country: US

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft [2022]

 Werner Herzog, in The Fire Within, didn’t intend to make either a conventional biography or a straightforward hagiography of eminent French volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Kraft. His objective, rather, was to compose a personal interpretation of their legacy, by resorting to the stunning archive of footage and photos that they’d left behind prior to their demise in 1991 (they were both killed by the pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan). The result was a fierce and enrapturing essay filled with brooding atmosphere, ironic observations (delivered by Herzog in his customary deadpan voiceover), idiosyncratic moments, and breathtaking visuals. The narrative provided a fascinating peek into the Krafts’ transition over the years from wannabe scientists who recorded their experimentations in amateur home videos, dressed at times in oddball outfits to enable proximity to high temperatures, to grand filmmakers who – as Herzog quipped – “were shooting a whole film about creation in the making… they just didn’t have enough time left to edit it” through mesmeric visuals that silently captured the ferocious power of volcanos, and even quirky humanists deeply invested in the devastating human, sociological and ecological impacts of volcanos. The couple’s captivating journey and their shared, unwavering obsession with this frightening force of nature was bookended on either side by reportage on their fateful trip to Japan, while in between we see their visits to diverse places – Italy, Iceland, Hawaii, Alaska, Indonesia, Colombia, etc. – in their quest for fire and love, including a couple of truly near misses. As an interesting aside, 2022 saw another well-received documentary on the Krafts, Fire of Love by Sara Dosa, while Herzog himself had earlier made one on active volcanos, Into the Inferno.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Biopic

Language: English

Country: US

Petite Fleur: 15 Ways to Kill Your Neighbour [2022]

 Petite Fleur couldn’t have demonstrated a more dramatic departure vis-à-vis Argentina,1985 – the two wildly contrasting films that Santiago Mitre made in 2022. The latter was a serious, intricate and politically charged docudrama. The former, on the other hand, was a feral, eccentric and intoxicating blend of black comedy, stylistic playfulness, surreal flourishes and macabre poetry. That it essentially portrayed a warm-hearted story – comprising of love lost and re-found, disintegrating marriage, loss of employment, reversal of conventional gender roles, ennui, existential and artistic crises, and the bad press that “routine” gets – under the delirious, elliptical and exuberantly pulpy guise of murderous impulses, mucky charlatans, marital infidelity, violent crimes, zany outbursts and the sensuous thrills of jazz music, made it all the more engrossing. José (Daniel Hendler) and Lucie (Vimala Pons), an Argentine couple residing in an enchanting French town, find themselves in a mess when, having just become parents, he loses his job as a professional cartoonist, upon which she decides to take up work to enable their financial sustenance. As the soft-spoken man becomes a househusband – taking care of their baby, performing daily chores, living a life of dull repetitiveness – he finds himself losing touch with his creative zest, while realizing in parallel, when his vivacious wife falls under the influence of a charismatic guru (Sergi López), that their relationship too has started going south. Things, in the meantime, take a sinister yet fantastical turn when, one Thursday, he inadvertently befriends Jean-Claude (Melvil Poupaud) – a wealthy, rakish, insouciant jazz connoisseur, and a great aficionado of Sydney Bechet’s mesmerizing titular composition in particular – who he spectacularly kills in a moment of madness, and keeps doing that every Thursday thenceforth.

Director: Santiago Mitre

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Marital Comedy/Mystery

Language: French/Spanish

Country: Argentina

No Bears [2022]

 Does a filmmaker really ever become a martyr at cinema’s altar? While such a statement may appear disingenuous and even pompous in most cases, not so for Jafar Panahi, who continues to undermine legal restrictions, defy punitive retributions and push boundaries. No Bears – the fifth film that he’s made since being banned from making movies, barred from leaving Iran and intermittently placed under house arrest, and completed just prior to being handed a fresh prison term on old charges – organically manifested and was powerfully informed by these extrinsic realities, thus coalescing political with personal. Suffused with bristling meta-commentary, rich self-reflexive aspects, moments of unsparing self-criticism, and tones that veered between ironic and bitter, the film was as much a brilliant and complex formal exercise as it was a bold and incisive use of cinema as an agency of subversion and dissidence. Panahi, once again playing a version of himself with self-effacing elan, is remotely directing a staged docudrama – about an Iranian couple, playing themselves, who’re trying to emigrate to France using fake passports, with the shoot taking place in Turkey – on account of being disallowed from making movies and leaving Iran. He’s stationed himself at a remote village on the country’s border in order to have proximity with his crew, while barely controlling the urge to cross the imaginary lines that separate the two countries. Meanwhile, courtesy his love for photographing locals, he becomes unwittingly embroiled in a sensitive situation upon being charged with capturing a couple in a forbidden relationship on camera. Both narrative strands escalated unpredictably and with tragic consequences, which Panahi navigated – as filmmaker, dissenter, observer, individual – with a wry blend of incredulity, resentment and melancholy.

Director: Jafar Panahi

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Leila's Brothers [2022]

 The eponymous Leila in Saeed Roustayi sprawling, ferocious and enthralling Leila’s Brothers – in an ironic elucidation of art imitating life (and vice versa) – was as gutsy, freethinking, fearlessly outspoken and defiantly anti-patriarchal as the acclaimed Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti, who’s a feminist and political activist, and courted arrest for her dissent during the Mahsa Amini protests. That she wasn’t just outstanding in it, but even gave a standout performance – amidst a cast that was terrific too – complemented the political underpinnings with artistic merit. The film was as riveting as a thriller, and – in what has drawn analogies with the likes of Rocco and His Brothers and the Godfather saga – formally audacious in its intricate juxtaposition of expansive attributes – complex intergenerational fault-lines, familial conflicts, emotional volatility – with intensely intimate domesticity. 40-year-old working woman Leila stays at her riotously chaotic family’s ramshackle house in Tehran, takes care of the household while also managing domestic chores, confronts everyone whenever needed, and strives to secure the future for her unemployed brothers – the serious but timid Alireza (Navid Mohammadzadeh) who loses his factory job in the excellent opening sequence that underscored the country’s economic downturn precipitated by US sanctions; morbidly obese Parviz (Farhad Aslani) who keeps begetting children and works as a lowly janitor; the scoundrel Manouchehr (Payman Maadi) who pursues shady schemes; and the hunk Farhad (Mohammad Alimohammadi) – who she loves fiercely and intends to get them financially settled. Their narcissistic, selfish, shadow-chasing and stubborn-as-mule father (Saeed Poursamimi), meanwhile, is intoxicated by the idea of being crowned patriarch of the clan, that threatens to jeopardize the plans devised by Leila, who’s prudent, resolute and ready to do whatever it takes for her brothers.

Director: Saeed Roustayi

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Showing Up [2022]

 Kelly Reichardt’s delicately strung Showing Up vividly bore the Indie auteur’s signature through its minimalist form, unassuming tone, awkward characters, sparse setting, and crises that imbue life with dramas both grand and intimate. It felt like a companion piece to her marvellous third film Wendy and Lucy, in that both centred on lonely, withdrawn women, with each a potentially alternative version of the other. It’s also arguably the funniest film in her canon, filled with deadpan, situational humour, and perhaps her most personal too given that, like her protagonist, she partakes in her vocation while associated with a liberal arts college. Lizzy (Michelle Williams, in a transformative turn filled with grumpy neuroses, furthering one of the richest ongoing director-actor collaborations) is a sculptor who makes dainty clay statuettes – on women in complex, anguished expressions, borne from evocative watercolours – while employed as resident artist at a small but vibrant arts college, where she doubles as administrative assistant to her mother. As she strives to be ready for a show on her work, she finds herself increasingly roiled and on the edge thanks to those surrounding her – Jo (Hong Chau), fellow artist, landlady and rival, who’s proudly exhibiting her flamboyant installation art, while ignoring the fixing of hot water in Lizzy’s place; her gregarious father who’s allowed a hippie couple to crash in his place; her emotionally distant mother; her unstable brother; and – recalling the running presence of animals in her filmography – a pigeon left wounded by her pet cat. All these come to head in the most idiosyncratic manner at the said show. The grainy, soft-hued cinematography visually complemented this gently eccentric portrayal of the fraught nature of creating art.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Genre: Drama/Family Comedy

Language: English

Country: US

Nope [2022]

 Jordan Peele constructed Nope like a multi-layered cake – wryly revisionist Western, acerbic satire on insatiable consumerism, and delightfully original sci-fi thriller that resorted to clever reworking of hackneyed genre tropes. It was also ecstatically permeated with metatextual elements through ironic references to movies and showbiz spectacles – through the recurrent motif of the camera’s gaze, audience’s voyeuristic impulses and exploitive nature of the industry – while resonant political readings were consciously invested into the narrative; the latter aspect made it particularly interesting for me, having watched it in succession with Kimi and Emily the Criminal over a long flight, given how the scripts were charged with topical political subtexts, even if, in this case, the scope was broader, the form more complex and the commentary subtler. Peele, therefore, displayed considerable audacity in composing this film; and, even though its zany ideas and moving parts didn’t always combine into a coherent whole, that never made it any less enjoyable. The brooding, taciturn OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer), who has bundles of dramatic flair, are struggling to keep their family business afloat – training and handling horses for film productions, out of their ranch in rural California – and therefore the legacy of being descendants of the nameless black man in Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering Animal Locomotion, after their dad mysteriously dies of a metallic piece that falls from the sky. Having had to sell most their stable to a former child actor (Steven Yeun), who’d faced a horrible experience while shooting and now runs a kitschy theme park, they decide to capture on camera – as their foolproof ticket to the wealth – a sinister UFO that’s been stalking the desolate, breathtaking place.

Director: Jordan Peele

Genre: Sci-Fi Horror/Western/Mystery/Showbiz Satire

Language: English

Country: US

Emily the Criminal [2022]

 It was a fun coincidence to watch Kimi and Emily the Criminal back-to-back, whilst on an intercontinental flight, given the interesting parallels – both were engaging genre films with scalding political subtexts, outspoken activism organically built into the script, and anti-establishmentarian stances that were manifestly zeitgeisty and topical; further, interestingly, both had bold, troubled, feisty and rebellious heroines at the forefront who aren’t afraid of taking on the established order. The titular Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is getting crushed underneath the burden of her student loans, seething under the financial exploitation and denigration that she faces as a gig worker and during job interviews, and still carrying the scars of a past DUI charge which scuttles her chances of starting afresh. She’s therefore very angry, at the end of her straws, and ready to subvert laws and even go rogue if need be. These, along with her fiercely independent nature and natural-born ferocity take her down a path that she should’ve never been pushed towards in the first place. It starts with acting as a “dummy shopper” – in lieu of a small pay cheque to start with, and soon graduating to more dangerous and reckless acts that come with more lucrative pay-offs – for the charismatic Youcef (Theo Rossi) who co-runs a credit card scam racket. Before long, with his help and her indomitable spunk, she starts off on her own. And things continue to get darker, messier, and as may be anticipated, more violent. Plaza brought in a sensational dose of brashness, volatility and chutzpah into her role – especially in the way she embraced criminality – which appropriately complemented the film’s tense and edgy thrills, as well as its scorching social commentary.

Director: John Patton Ford

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Kimi [2022]

 Kimi was a decidedly topical film with its anxiety-ridden, agoraphobic, work-from-home protagonist struggling to segue into the “new normal”, residing in a hyper-connected yet intensely dislocated world seeped in everyday surveillance, smart devices recording incessantly, and micro-artifice of zoom calls. Yet, as a paranoia and conspiracy thriller in the mould of 70s and 80s classics – albeit repurposed to a post-pandemic, late-stage capitalist milieu where unregulated market forces, corporate malfeasance, nefarious cover-ups and gullible consumers are par for course – it was also a lean, sleek and smart genre exercise. Steven Soderberg, who’s made a prolific career out of flying under the radar on most occasions and interpreting the human condition, was possibly the right person behind cameras for this evocation of dystopia operating in the present tense. Angela (Zoë Kravitz) – who made for a captivating heroine with her blazing blue-dyed hair, smartness, quirks, vulnerabilities, self-imposed isolation and defiant agency – is a highly capable techie who works out of her sprawling, spartan apartment in Seattle – her professional and private spaces having subsumed within one another interchangeably – for a flourishing Silicon Valley startup that’s developed a creepy virtual assistant called KIMI that’s selling like hot cakes, while also garnering controversy for resorting to human monitoring to enhance its algorithm. Her controlled, staid and estranged post-Covid life, however, gets blown apart upon stumbling across incidents of sexual violence recorded by the device that refreshes memories of a past trauma, and which the company’s CEO, on the verge of going into a money-spinning IPO, is desperate to bury. The film, led by Kravitz’s spunky turn, reminded me of the De Palma gem Blow Out, despite its conventional finale and without the latter’s pulpy brilliance.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Athena [2022]

 Romain Gavras demonstrated that he’s his father’s son – his dad being the great Costa-Gavras – with Athena. This rebellious, topical, polemical and vociferously political work, whose affiliation was clearly with defiant underdogs, was made in the tradition of such edgy and violent ‘banlieue films’ – a clear sub-genre within French cinema – as the enormously influential La Haine and, in particular, the thrilling Les Misérables; the latter resemblance wasn’t surprising considering that its screenplay was co-written by Ladj Ly. It kicked-off with an electrifying 11-minute sequence, shot in a bravura single take, that began with a solemn press conference, which spectacularly exploded into a mayhem upon a Molotov cocktail being thrown from the crowd, followed by the robbing of weapons and explosives from a police precinct by a group of guys, and them euphorically fleeing with the loot in a stolen police van. This meticulously orchestrated sequence saw the camera actively moving through crowded spaces, and in and out of a speeding vehicle. The pulsating tempo of the opening salvo, however, went down few notches thereafter, and the characters weren’t delved into enough either in this Shakespearean tragedy with a here-and-now spin and a rousing, albeit tad muddled, political stance. It portrayed the criss-crossing tale of three French-Algerian brothers over the course of a single day – Karim (Sami Slimane), the smouldering leader of a  resistance group of ghettoized young men, who’s decided to start an uprising for the murder of his 13-year-old brother allegedly in a display of police brutality; Abdel (Dali Benssalah), an army guy who’s come back from the front in order to appeal for restraint; and Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a crazy criminal intent on taking advantage of the madness.

Director: Romain Gavras

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Metronom [2022]

 Iconoclastic RJ, audiophile and jazz aficionado Cornel Chiriac hosted the popular music show Metronom in Radio România between 1967 and 1969, until its cancellation by the authorities, his defection to West Germany, and relaunching the show as part of Radio Free Europe. That eponymous show served as the driving force and motif for this time capsule awash in mood, melancholy and memories. Its director Alexandru Belc was earlier the AD to Romanian New Wave trailblazers Mungiu, Porumboiu and Puiu, and their dry, conversational, faux-realist minimalism and formal exactitude were amply evident here, perhaps indicating a second generation of filmmakers continuing what their predecessors had started. The film is structured as a three-act piece set over 24 hours in 1972. In the low-key first act, the striking and reserved Ana (Mara Bugarin) experiences heartbreak upon learning that her high-school boyfriend Sorin (Serban Lazarovici) is emigrating to West Berlin. The engrossing second act is set in the apartment of Ana’s rebellious friend where their classmates have congregated to secretly listen to their idol Chiriac’s radio programme, drink, dance, and write a letter denouncing Ceaușescu’s totalitarian state; Ana, defying her parents’ instructions, joins the party, hoping for a final fling before Sorin’s departure. Their world, however, comes crashing when they get arrested by the Securitate, with the focus shifting to a tense psychological duel between a menacing senior officer (Vlad Ivanov, in a typically show-stealing turn that he’s made his own) and the defiant Ana. The excellent soundtrack featured the haunting Cu Pleoapa De Argint and pop/rock classics – including a lazily beautiful sequence set to The Doors’ Light My Fire –, while its camerawork comprised of atmospheric palettes and terrific single takes.

Director: Alexandru Belc

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Triangle of Sadness [2022]

 Triangle of Sadness – the third instalment in Östlund’s ‘Anti-Capitalist Trilogy’, having been preceded by Force Majeure and The Square, and which won him a second consecutive Palm d’Or – was made with the incisive sharpness of a scalpel and the thudding blow of a sledgehammer. The resultant work, consequently, was filled in equal parts with cutting satire and unrestrained farce, in the Swedish provocateur’s outrageously unhinged assault on the shallow, vacuous, self-centred, hypocrisy-laden world of the über-wealthy. The film is structured into three disjointed episodes – the tantalizing first segment, made with barbed tonal precision, focused on a mutually corrosive battle of sexes, amidst the artifice of fashionistas and social media darlings; the superb second segment, set on an ultra-luxury yacht populated with grotesque affluence, traversed the highbrow farce of Buñuel and the lowbrow humour of Pasolini; the deadpan third segment, situated in a barren island, was a parodic variant, albeit with a class spin thrown in, to reality TV where celebs must “survive” for a grand prize. A model with a fragile male ego (Harris Dickinson) and a self-obsessed Insta influencer (Charlbi Dean) were the high-flying couple of the first chapter. The second chapter saw them aboard the exclusive cruise where they hobnob with dubious business magnates, smug aristocrats and repugnant weapons dealers; and featured a hilarious, alcohol-fuelled diatribe between the ship’s Marxist, world-weary American captain (Woody Harrelson) and a pompous Russian oligarch who worships Reagan and Thatcher (Zlatko Burić), and – arguably the film’s showpiece sequence – a truly cataclysmic dinner. Upon being stranded in the post-apocalyptic final chapter, the social order is spectacularly reversed as an Asian cleaning-woman (Dolly de Leon) lords over everyone as a stern but benevolent matriarch.

Director: Ruben Ostlund

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: Sweden

R.M.N. [2022]

 Cristian Mungiu’s proclivity for crafting singularly oppressive and viscerally haunting films harbouring sharp political critique, the ramifications of which transcend the tight spatial and temporal scopes of their microcosmic parables, have made him a powerful voice in contemporary cinema. R.M.N. – with its bleak, sparse, formally bravura and deeply discomfiting portrayal of xenophobia and fetid nationalism – made for yet another gripping inclusion to his canon. That toxic suspicion, prejudice and hatred towards others are manifested in a multicultural and geographically fluid milieu – one where the inhabitants are of multi-ethnic descent, regularly switch between languages (predominantly Romanian and Hungarian, with spattering of German, French and English thrown in), have emigrated over generations, and keep relocating to other European countries in search of work where they often face racial discrimination and social denigration – made the proceedings all the more ironic. Matthias (Marin Grigore), a Romani migrant worker, quits his lowly job in Germany after one racial slur too many and returns to his village in Transylvania – financially struggling upon the closure of the local mine – where he grapples with his marriage to his estranged wife (Macrina Bârlădeanu) who’s had enough of his boorish masculinity and incessant philandering, tries to “fix” his young son who’s emotionally regressed, struggles with his father’s health, and hopes to rekindle his affair with Csilla (Judith State) who’s an accomplished manager at a local bread factory. The threads tenuously holding this place together, however, irrevocably unravel when Sri Lankan workers are hired at the factory. These led us to the film’s pièce de résistance – a virtuoso 17-minute sequence shot in an unbroken take and featuring a dense, divisive crowd – which powerfully underscored its political urgency and formal brilliance.

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Genre: Drama/Political Drama

Language: Romanian/Hungarian/French/German/English

Country: Romania

Aftersun [2022]

 Scottish director Charlotte Wells’ assured debut film Aftersun is an achingly tender portrayal of memories – which can be alternately wistful, melancholic and slippery – along with gaps, overlapping recollections, ambiguities and haziness that either become more gaping with time or attain new clarity through a mix of realizations and reimagining. Interestingly, unlike filmmakers who’ve dealt on this subject with complex thematic explorations, ambitious structures, formal bravura and powerful political contexts – Tarkovsky, Fellini, Ghatak, Angelopoulos, Marker, Resnais, Akerman, Mekas, Hou, Lynch, Guzmán, etc. – Wells’ approach was disarmingly simple, her canvas decidedly small and her touch delicately low-key. It portrayed a short summer vacation to Turkey, as part of a budget tour package, taken by eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) – shy, vivacious, and surprisingly matured and perceptive for her age – with her genial and oddball 30-year-old dad Calum (Paul Mescal), who’s divorced from her mother even though they continue to maintain cordial relations, whose boyish looks lead some to assume that he’s Sophie’s elder brother, and has an easy-going camaraderie with her. As we gradually decipher – through fragmentary impressions, and Wells’ gentle brushstrokes and quiet observational style – Calum has a history of drug abuse, he’s grappling with depression, he’s carrying a crushing guilt which he’s unable to figure out, and he’s struggling with existential anguish that’s barely cloaked by his placid demeanour. Their seemingly uneventful time together – making home videos using a camcorder, having light-hearted fun, lazing around, playing arcade games, etc., and beautifully brought to life by Corio and Mescal – achieved additional depths through the prism of memories as Sophie, who’s now in her thirties herself, with a wife and kid, is essentially trying to gain fresh understandings on her “lost” father.

Director: Charlotte Wells

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: English

Country: UK

Esterno Notte [2022]

 In March 1978, former Italian PM and Christian Democracy party leader Aldo Moro was kidnapped, held hostage for 55 days and eventually assassinated by the revolutionary guerilla outfit Red Brigades. The centre-left politician was an influential statesman and popular leader whose sway cut across the political spectrum; “Caso Moro”, as a result, remains one of the most dramatic and defining moments in post-War Italy. Bellocchio, who’d made the acclaimed film Buongiorno, Notte on the same event – albeit from the perspective of an RB member – returned to this subject 20 years later with Esterno Notte, where he significantly expanded the scope by focusing on all key protagonists and therefore resorting to the miniseries form which allows for more expansive treatments while retaining the narrative elements and cinematic appeal of feature-length films. The resultant work, split over 6 Parts, was ambitious, kaleidoscopic and oftentimes compelling. The first 5 episodes spotlighted on each of the key players – Part 1 on Moro (Fabrizio Gifuni) himself; Part 2 on conflicted Minister of the Interior Cossiga (Fausto Russo Alesi); Part 3 on Pope Paul VI (Toni Servillo) who launched a parallel plan to get Moro freed upon realizing the government’s unwillingness to negotiate; Part 4 on RB and, in particular, Adriana Faranda (Daniela Marra), a single mother and committed revolutionary who was part of the core team and expressed disagreements with their pig-headed tactical choices; Part 5 on Moro’s wife Eleonora (Margherita Buy) who becomes increasingly furious at the CD leadership for their wilful inaction – while the final episode wrapped things up. Gifuni, as Moro, and Buy, as his devastated wife, gave superlative turns in this brooding docufiction on political conflicts, cover-ups, violence and aftermaths.

Director: Mario Bellocchio

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docufiction/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Trenque Lauquen [2022]

 There’s something inherently haunting and melancholic about films, books and songs – Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mohiner Ghoraguli’s Sei Fuler Daal, Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, Chang-dong’s Burning – in which a girl disappears for no discernible reasons and is never found again. Trenque Lauquen – directed by Laura Citarella, who’d produced Llinás staggering masterwork La Flor, and part of the Argentine filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine which Llinás, as well as actress and co-writer Laura Paredes, are also members of – is a bewitching addition to that list. This shape-shifting work – clocking at a staggering 4 ½ hours, cheekily structured in the form of nested flashbacks like Matryoshka dolls, and filled with playful red herrings and tantalizing MacGuffins – both tests and rewards patience. Three investigations were at its core, all of which began in media res and faded off enigmatically. The search for Laura (Laura Paredes) – botanist, amateur historian, part-time radio jockey – by her older boyfriend Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), and Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), with whom she’d developed an intimate friendship, upon her sudden disappearance, formed this episodic yarn’s central focus. Two curious quests that Laura was drawn into before she fell off the grid, were thereafter chronicled through intricate flashbacks. The first one involved piecing together a racy, intercontinental, epistolary affair; the way she locates old letters using teasing clues reminded me a lot of the gorgeous novel The Tango Singer – another sublime Borgesian work – where the narrator hopes to locate an obscure, evasive tango singer. The second one featured a strange woman (Verónica Llinás) who’s trying to find a rare flower and potentially hiding a fantastical boy. The futile quest for answers, therefore, formed an alluring motif in this delightful postmodernist opus.

Director: Laura Citarella

Genre: Drama/Mystery

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina