In the Last Days of the City, the long gestating debut feature of Egyptian
filmmaker Tamer El Said which he’d started in 2009, is laced with beguiling
formalism, ambiguity and meta-elements. It didn’t just blur, to the point of
being indistinguishable, the line between documentary and fiction, it also self-reflexively
traversed in and out of a film within the film, and had multiple sections shot
in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square just as Arab Spring, that would end with
the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, was about to sweep across Egypt (though, ironically,
things became even worse thereafter). The film’s protagonist (Khalid Abdalla)
is a documentarian trying to capture the city’s essence and its myriad facets,
by interviewing people he knows and capturing moments and events like a
guerilla filmmaker. Unfortunately, in a curious parallel, his work is going
nowhere just like his life seems to be stuck in a stasis – his mother is
unwell, his girlfriend has decided to move on, and he keeps visiting one place
after another with an increasingly frustrated broker in a seemingly endless
apartment-hunt. When he has a catch-up with a few of his politically conscious filmmaker
friends from the troubled cities of Beirut and Baghdad, does he finally seem to
start finding a sense of direction and perhaps a way out from his artistic
block. The film, filled with striking and visceral images of the city,
comprises of a few memorable moments – the demolition of a dilapidated building
with strong metaphorical connotations, political protests getting a brief
reprieve upon the Egyptian football team’s success in the African Cup of
Nations, and candid displays of daily violence inadvertently caught on camera.
Director: Tamer El Said
Genre: Drama/Existential Drama/Experimental Film
Language: Arabic
Country: Egypt
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is at once monumental and deeply personal, seemingly detached
and yet deftly affecting, and with a scope that’s both bombastic and intensely focused,
thus justifying the film’s adventurous title while also subtly critiquing the
folly of grand politicking. The filmmaker’s parents, both of whom died just as
the Velvet Revolution was about to kick-in, had a complicated relationship; inspired
by their tale, he retained their names but fictionalized their journeys by
concocting an exhilarating, tumultuous love story that cut across national borders,
political ideologies, and the complex and volatile Cold War era during which it’s
set. The brooding, laconic, chain-smoking Wictor (Tomasz Kot) is a musician extraordinaire
who, along with a musicologist and a would-be apparatchik, founds a folk song-and-dance
troupe, where he meets and falls for Zula (Joanna Kulig), a vivacious,
temperamental and enigmatic lady with a silken voice. As the troupe starts
touring, at the backdrop of a rapidly evolving political climate, one might be
reminded of Angelopoulos’ pièce de résistance The Traveling Players or Zhang-ke’s masterful Zhantai. The film, however, brilliantly changed its trajectory from
the epic to the intimate when Wictor, upon deciding to defect to the West, isn’t
joined by Zula as she decides to stay back. Their fascinating tale of love and
lust, constantly alternating between separations and reunions, toggles between
Communist Poland and jazz-soaked Paris, with a bit of East Berlin and Yugoslavia
thrown in. Music in its myriad shades in general, and an incredibly haunting
central song in particular, formed the central motif for the film’s circuitous
narrative, and were wonderfully complemented by enthralling B/W photography, absorbingly
moody atmosphere, and a tour de force performance by the dazzling Kulig in
particular.
Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Political Drama
Language: Polish/French
Country: Poland
Gus Van Sant, who’d forayed from his explosive Indie
beginning (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) to mainstream
Hollywood (To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Milk), – and here's a rarity – circled back with his acclaimed ‘Death Trilogy’ (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days). His explorations of teenage subcultures, disaffected
youth, lost innocence, normalization of violence in the American society,
homosexual subtexts – elements which have featured in all his Indie works –
were palpable in Paranoid Park as
well; however, the deliberate distancing, heavy formalism, ennui and such
thematic/stylistic similarities have made some cinephiles propose reclassification
of ‘Death Trilogy’, which this
immediately followed in terms of release too, into a tetralogy. The film’s
title refers to an illegal skatepark in Portland, Oregon, which provides the melting pot for an underground, marginalized and loosely connected skateboarder
community. Alex (Gabe Nevins; the amateur cast, including him, was
apparently found via MySpace) is an emotionally alienated high-school student existing
in a state of flux – he’s unaffected by his parents’ ongoing divorce
proceedings, he’s indifferently going through the motions with his vacuous girlfriend
whose prime focus is in losing her virginity, he responds to the US’
intervention in Iraq disinterestedly; he finally experiences a sense of
euphoria when he gets introduced to the grungy skatepark; the comment from his closest
buddy, “Nobody's ever ready for Paranoid Park”, however, proves oddly ironic,
when he gets embroiled in a gruesome incident involving a security guard. Understated
lyricism, loopy and disjointed narrative, deliberate arthouse tropes, an ending
that was overly abrupt, pervading sense of torpor and inaction punctuated by an
uncharacteristically grisly moment, defined, for me, this intriguing and
low-key, albeit half-baked and tad directionless, coming-of age film.
Director: Gus Van Sant
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Teenage Drama/Coming-of-Age Film
Language: English
Country: US
While modernist films may sometimes appear weird, few have unabashedly worn that as a badge on their sleeves like the 'Greek
Weird Wave', the arguably most well-known use case for which is Yorgos Lanthimos’
Dogtooth. Pity, the 2nd feature by former TV commercial-maker and Lanthimos-collaborator
Babis Makridis, possesses all the archetypes that makes it an exquisite member of the
afore-mentioned movement; and interrestingly, despite its tar black humour, deliriously
oddball premise, undeniably formalist approach and an eccentricity-quotient
that brilliantly exploded as the narrative progressed, it still had a strong
emotive appeal beneath its frosty, deceptively perverse and brutal visage. Its central tenet
is the universality of pity as an expression and the absurd lengths one man is
willing to go to elicit and preserve that. The film’s unnamed protagonist (fabulously
enacted by Yannis Drakopoulos) is a taciturn, middle-aged, well-to-do lawyer,
whose luscious wife (Evi Saoulidou) is in coma due to an accident. He, as a
result, basks at the oodles of pity and sympathy that he gets from all – his neighbor,
dry cleaner, secretary, dad, friends, a client whose father has been murdered
and even a stranger he encounters in the hospital where his wife is admitted. Things,
however, take a darkly funny downturn when his wife suddenly gets cured and
returns home; while everyone is happy, he goes into a deep existential
crisis and begins lying and prevaricating as well as coaxing and cajoling to
keep eliciting pity. But, when his efforts cease engendering the desired
results, he starts taking elaborate steps – from the sinister to the shocking –
in this delicious, slow-burning black comedy, with its luminous photography
providing excellent juxtaposition to its increasingly disconcerting proceedings.
Director: Babis Makridis
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire
Language: Greek
Country: Greece
Érick Zonca, best known for his acclaimed debut
feature The Dreamlife of Angels,
hadn’t directed a film since
Julia – inspired by Cassavetes’ Gloria.
Black Tide, therefore, was bound to pique
interests as this was his first film in a decade; and a noir aficionado
like me, with an unsavoury penchant for dark and twisted thrillers, was bound
to be intrigued irrespective of the above, given the film’s
delicious premise. The tale revolves around the disappearance of a 16-year old
boy for apparently no discernible reasons and with no available clues to his
possible whereabouts; hence, when the distraught mother Solange (Sandrine
Kiberlain) seeks the help of the incorrigible, alcoholic and self-destructive,
but veteran and undeniably competent police detective François Visconti
(Vincent Cassel), the latter is compelled to create potential conjectures on a blank
slate; the fact that the divorced cop, who resides alone in a cluttered apartment,
has a torrid relationship with his troubled son, provides an additional impetus for the relentless vigour with which he gets entangled into
the case. Along the way, while downing alcohol at every given opportunity, he encounters
a literature teacher (Romain Duris) – a slimy, warped man with potentially devious
intentions who lives in the same apartment block as the missing boy and had a
rather suspicious fascination with him; he gets disturbingly attracted to the
mother; he earns severe displeasure of his boss and his colleagues; and yes, he
ends up uncovering some truly sordid secrets about the seemingly bourgeois
family. While the film felt overdone and messy at times, it was also taut,
engaging (with a few red herrings thrown in), and a string of excellent
performances led by the brilliant, implosive and campy Cassel.
Director: Erick Zonca
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Murder Mystery/Post-Noir
Language: French
Country: France
