The Swindle [1997]

 The Swindle, despite being a seemingly lighter work in Chabrol’s filmography – relatively speaking, that is –, grabs one’s attention with its amoral protagonists, slippery motivations, sly asides, and a narrative laced with ambiguous identities and deception. However, what made it particularly enticing, were its two central performances. Isabelle Huppert – in a more playful collab with Chabrol, coming in between her more diabolical turns in La Cérémonie and Merci pour le Chocolat – was enchanting as Betty, a woman assured of her powers as a seductress, while Michel Serrault mellowed his character Viktor’s underlying cunning with endearing self-effacement. Together they’re professional con-artists, who expertly plan and coolly execute their jobs while avoiding suspicions, and pursue opportunities in a manner that caution and prudence always take precedence over reckless greed and immediate returns. We’re never sure of their individual and shared backstories, nor do we get a clarity on their relationship – father-daughter, platonic lovers or purely “business partners” – which added layers of ambivalence to the proceedings. The film began by jumping straight into action, as we see the pair smoothly pulling off their latest job at a business conference in a Swiss hotel, with Betty first seducing a hapless man into her sultry charms, and Viktor then robbing him just enough to avoid scrutiny. Their decision to remain under the radar, however, is undone when Viktor gets drawn by Betty – despite his reservations – into a high-stakes scheme involving a shady courier (François Cluzet) working for a dangerous money-launderer. Though the film lost some of its fun and sauciness towards the last third, the wry equation between the two leads and deadpan celebration of their unscrupulous chicanery made it amusing, mischievous and entertaining.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Comedy/Heist Film

Language: French

Country: France

Merci pour le Chocolat (Nightcap) [2000]

 Liszt’s rapturous classical composition ‘Funerailles’ attained edgy and sinister undertones in Chabrol’s Merci pour le Chocolat. Music, therefore, was simultaneously ravishing and unsettling, with extended passages devoted to it as a means for both organically progressing the narrative and marvellously shaping the mood, and thereby playing a sensuous role in defining the film’s tone and atmosphere. Isabelle Huppert, in her penultimate collaboration with Chabrol, made it even more enticing and delicious with a stunningly slippery performance laced with just the right mix of sweetness, sharpness, straight-faced sinfulness and impish layers of delightful perversity of a well-made Swiss chocolate. This being a quintessential French noir, it was draped in sunshine and laced with understated elegance; and, being a quintessential Chabrol, it savoured the slow unravelling of the fractured underbelly of an upper-class bourgeois family. The film begins with the rebound marriage between Mika (Huppert), the well-off owner of a chocolate company, and André (Jacques Dutronc), a virtuoso pianist. They were married 18 years back – André’s second wife, with whom he’s had a son, died under mysterious circumstances – and they live in Mika’s stately mansion in Lausanne. When Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), a talented young pianist who might be André’s daughter, makes an impulse visit to their place and forms a deep bond with him, Mika’s underlying sociopathic tendencies get ruffled, despite receiving Jeanne with outward effusiveness. Huppert’s striking turn as a treacherous person – the kind that she’s made her own over her illustrious career – was meticulously synchronized with the film’s musical crescendo and complemented the sardonic themes of control, obsession and dysfunction. The interplay between music and menace, incidentally, was re-invoked the following year by Huppert in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Drama/Psychological Thriller/Marital Drama/Post-Noir

Language: French

Country: France

The Birds, the Bees and the Italians [1966]

 The ingeniously named The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (the direct translation of its Italian title, interestingly, was simply “Ladies and Gentlemen”) – the concluding chapter in Pietro Germi’s “commedia all'italiana” classic ‘Honour Trilogy’ – distinctively stood out vis-à-vis both its precursors, viz. Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned.  For one, this was an episodic film with hyperlinked stories wherein the POV shifted between the same group of men; for another, it was set in the north-eastern region of Veneto, as opposed to the southern Sicilian towns in the preceding films. Germi’s preoccupations with moral codes seeped in provincial expressions of marriage, family, machismo, sexuality and infidelity, using satiric and farcical brushstrokes, were nevertheless there throughout. In the hilarious first story, a garrulous doctor (Gigi Ballista) can’t control his mirth and tongue upon being confided by a womanizer friend of his impotency; this lowering of guard was exactly what his buddy needed to seduce the doctor’s ravishing wife (Beba Lončar). In the middle segment, a morose bank employee (Gastone Moschin), who’s living through hellish marital life on account of his nagging wife, falls for a beautiful cashier (Virna Lisi) at the café frequented by him and his gregarious friends; the trouble starts when, instead of having an affair on the side, which would’ve been more socially acceptable, he decides to elope with his girlfriend. In the final episode, the lecherous men seduce a young girl from the country; upon realizing the legal implications as she’s still a minor, they must jointly suppress the matter. An alcohol-fuelled private party in the first tale, with the camera dizzyingly roving across multiple characters, was this ironic and irreverent film’s most bravura sequence.

Director: Pietro Germi

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Omnibus Film/Ensemble Film

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Seduced and Abandoned [1964]

 Seduced and Abandoned, the uproarious middle chapter in Pietro Germi’s subversive ‘Honour Trilogy’ – sandwiched between his rollicking masterpiece Divorce Italian Style, and the amusing The Birds, the Bees and the Italians – was a work of manic brilliance. The satire here was so pungent and acidic that a bout of heartburn is unavoidable, even while laughing uncontrollably – and uncomfortably – at its madcap, farcical and outré humour aimed at medieval mindsets and ways of life. The film was intimately linked to the delicious preceding film, which itself was scalding and grotesque, in that this too was centred on the primitive social mores of “custom”, “tradition” and “honour” in a Sicilian town seeped in patriarchy, machismo, gossip-mongering and shallow veneer; just that, it was nastier, crazier and even more baroque, and Germi wildly cut loose in his narrative design. When her family gets to know that the young and nubile Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) has been seduced by, and in the process lost her precious virginity to, Peppini (Aldo Puglisi), her elder sister’s shifty and lecherous fiancé, all hell breaks loose. Her father Don Vincenzo (Saro Urzì) tries every trick in the book to “save” his family’s honour and image – from deceit, browbeating and emotional blackmailing, to kidnapping, shotgun wedding and attempted murder. The film was made even zanier by noteworthy turns led by a stellar Urzi; string of oddball characters – a suicidal and penurious aristocrat, a cop who wishes Sicily’s erasure from Italy’s map, etc. –; idiosyncratic score with a mix of sardonic dirges and sassy jazz; and gorgeous B/W cinematography that alternated between wide-angled framing and the kind of oblique close-ups of gleefully sweaty and sleazy faces straight out of Buñuel.

Director: Pietro Germi

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Section Spéciale (Special Section) [1975]

 Cost-Gavras’ Section Spéciale bore the attributes that powerfully resonated in his stunning trilogy that preceded it and had made him among the most thrilling political filmmakers in the world – his pulsating masterpiece Z, the intensely unsettling The Confession, and the smashing gem State of Siege – in that it too portrayed a dystopian historical chapter from the 20^th century, did that using a progressive Marxist gaze that considered acts of abuse anywhere and against anyone as a personal affront, and on an ambitious narrative canvas smartly enmeshed with agit-prop elements. Made with the objective of uncovering the rotten core of “Vichy France” – the collaborationist regime that was formed under German Occupation during WW2 – it chronicled a sham trial that was held by it to appease its Nazi masters, and thereby underscored the power of corruption and the corruption of power. When a Nazi officer is assassinated by the Resistance in Paris, the Minister of Justice Joseph Barthélémy (Louis Seigner) – with active complicity of the government – quickly drafts a draconian legislation, sets up a kangaroo court, and retrospectively tries Communists, socialists and Jews – who’ve already been sentenced for petty offenses – in order to execute them, and thereby avert retaliations. Though lacking the visceral power and gripping dynamism of the said trilogy, and missing the charismatic presence of Yves Montand, it nevertheless categorically conveyed the state-sponsored abomination of foundational legal principles. A sequence near the beginning, where a peaceful protest is violently broken up by the cops, highlighted Costa-Gavras’ ability to create exciting outdoor set-pieces. Its depiction of the Vichy regime’s use of the guillotine as a brutal political device, incidentally, would have a companion piece in Chabrol’s damning Story of Women.

Director: Costa-Gavras

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Historical Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Three Brothers [1981]

 Rosi’s melancholic film Three Brothers is a tale of grief, familial convergence and attempted reconciliations, as well as one of anger, disillusionment and resignation. These made it a quietly meditative exercise that’s alternately brooding and lyrical, and punctuated with flashes of riveting political commentary – through allusions, arguments and anecdotal footage – that contextualized the interlocking personal stories. This was, therefore, closer to his majestic preceding film Christ Stopped at Eboli rather than his blazing prior works, in that politics inherently shaped the elegiac proceedings without foregrounding them. The titular brothers are Raffaele (Philippe Noiret), a well-known, prosaic, middle-aged judge in Rome who’s considering presiding over a high-profile trial involving the Red Brigade that could invite danger for him; Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), a religious and reticent man who works at a correctional facility for troubled youth in Naples; and Nicola (Michele Placido), a shopfloor worker at an auto factory in Turin actively engaged in labour union actions, and facing marital breakdown. Upon their mother’s demise, their father – the elderly Donato (Charles Vanel), who resides in a farm in Southern Italy – summons them for the funeral. While that gives a rare chance for them to revisit a place and reconnect with its inhabitants who they’d left behind long back, it also engenders simmering undercurrents – particularly between Raffaele and Nicola – on account of their diametrically different backgrounds. The opposing forces evoked by their homecoming were alternated with startling flashforward sequences, poignant ruminations by Donato who’s increasingly lost in his memories, and Nicola’s young daughter captivated by the bucolic rhythms of this rustic milieu. Filled with gorgeously framed images, the film served predominantly as an observational portraiture, despite the underlying zeitgeist, politics and violence.

Director: Francesco Rosi

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Christ Stopped at Eboli [1979]

 Christ Stopped at Eboli, Francesco Rosi’s sublime adaptation of Carlo Levi’s celebrated memoir, was composed as much as elegiac memories of enforced exile, as it was crafted as probing field notes on people existing in the margins. Through these parallel routes – informed by Levi’s personal impressions, political consciousness, and ethnographic meditations borne out of curiosity and empathy, and that unfolded through a series of loosely strung vignettes and anecdotes – it emerged as a document both specific in its context and timeless in its eloquence. Levi, a qualified doctor, left-wing intellectual and anti-fascist activist based in Turin, used his passion for painting as a front for his political resistance against Mussolini. Upon being arrested for his dissidence, he was banished to a remote town in remote southern Italy. While residing there from 1935 to 1936 – his exile was cut short upon the country’s successful invasion of Ethiopia – he witnessed impoverishment, disenfranchisement, diseases, superstitions and ancient customs. Despite the arid, desolate and alienating environs – poetically captured in washed-out colours – he got enmeshed into the community, participated in discussions, renewed his long-severed tryst with medicine, captured the place through his paintings, and even developed a sensuous relationship with a promiscuous cleaning woman (Irene Papas), leading to a rich understanding of the irreconcilable North-South divide. Rosi’s observational style provided the perfect counterfoil to Gian Maria Volontè’s immersive turn as the soft-spoken yet fiercely perceptive Levi, in this eloquent, essayistic study. The opening sequence, languidly cataloguing Levi’s gigantic journey via multiple transportation modes, during which he befriends an abandoned dog, was particularly memorable. The locale, premise and overarching theme, incidentally, heavily reminded me of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, their tonal departures notwithstanding.

Director: Francesco Levi

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Biopic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Land and Freedom [1995]

 Loach’s deeply underrated gem Land and Freedom remains a singular work in his oeuvre, for his rare foray into historical epic – thus presaging the excellent The Wind that Shakes the Barley – and into a setting far removed from his preferred milieu of working-class Britain. Yet, it was also profoundly linked to the political inquiries, meditations and dissents that he’s pursued throughout his career. This rousing ode to the collective spirit of resistance – albeit, one tampered with bleak setbacks and heartbreaking defeats – opens with the death of the aged Liverpudlian Dave Carne, upon which his granddaughter (Suzanne Maddock) delves into his mementoes at his flat – newspaper cuttings, letters, photographs, and earth wrapped in a red cloth, the immensely moving significance of which will emerge later – and thereby pieces together an extraordinarily eventful chapter from his younger days. Unfolding in 1936 over flashbacks, David (Ian Hart), an unemployed Communist, travels to Spain to enlist with the International Brigade and fight with the Republicans against Franco. However, he ends up joining the Marxist Revolutionary and unwaveringly anti-fascist group POUM. There he experiences the thrill of fighting fascists, seeing a freed village opting for collectivization, befriending comrades, and having a tender romance with a fiery Catalan fighter (Rosana Pastor), as well as facing terrible losses, witnessing the appropriation of the left by Stalinists, and most devastatingly, the collapse of shared dreams. Marvellously shot on location that lent it both poetic and gritty textures, this electrifying collaboration between Loach and playwright Jim Allen recalled Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s unforgettable memoir from his days of walking with POUM revolutionaries during the Spanish Civil War, and ended on a stirring display of solidarity during David’s funeral.

Director: Ken Loach

Genre: Drama/Historical Epic/War

Language: English/Catalan

Country: UK

The Wind That Shakes the Barley [2006]

 The Wind that Shakes the Barley was equal parts poetic and political, as evidenced by its deeply elegiac title that referenced a revolutionary Irish folk ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce. A rare foray by Ken Loach into a complex, sprawling and historical canvas – that, and its fearless dive into a bloody civil war from which no one comes out either physically or morally unscathed made it a splendid companion piece to his magnificent Spanish Civil War saga Land and Freedom – it focused first on the Irish War of Independence and then the Irish Civil War over a turbulent couple of years, viz. 1920-22. Beginning on a tranquil note, we see a group of young guys playing “hurling” against an enchanting background. The game, unfortunately, becomes a tipping point, as they’re rounded up by the vicious “Black and Tans” – British soldiers stationed in Ireland to crush the IRA’s rebellion – and a youngster is executed for refusing to speak in English. Damien (Cillian Murphy), a studious, soft-spoken and pacifist doctor, does a radical volte face upon witnessing this and another act of mindless thuggery, and joins the IRA outfit led by his elder brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney). Structured roughly into two halves, we first see them fighting as comrades-in-arms against British imperialism; but, upon formation of “Irish Free State”, they become profoundly opposed as Teddy decides to forcibly support the compromise struck with Britain while Damien continues his struggle for complete independence and socialist state. Beautifully shot in sombre palettes, filled with murky moral intransigencies that bloody conflicts invariably elicit, and led by riveting turns, this film was at once furious, bleak and melancholic… just like a revolutionary folk ballad.

Director: Ken Loach

Genre: War/Historical Epic

Language: English

Country: Ireland/UK

Homework [1989]

 Kiarostami’s meditation on what it means to be a child in an adult’s world, and in how behavioural dynamics of kids – demonstrable even by something as seemingly ordinary as school homework – are moulded and shaped by both familial contexts and political forces, achieved multi-hued dimensions in this bravura documentary. Furthermore, its nuanced, ironic and disarmingly radical elucidation of the form’s fluidity – achieved through manipulation of the camera’s gaze and inducing of fictive elements that undermine the truth-seeking role that documentaries are expected to play – magnificently presaged his dazzling form-smashing masterpiece Close-Up. It also capped a sublime triptych on pedagogy along with the terrific docu First Graders, which recorded a teacher’s incessant instilling of behavioural traits in a school, and the timeless film Where Is the Friend’s Home?, which portrayed how homework can elicit heroic camaraderie. Influenced by the difficulty that he himself faced while helping his son, he ostensibly formulated this “visual study” and “research project” to comprehend this ubiquitous phenomenon. However, by training his disarmingly equanimous lens on first graders at a working-class boys’ school, he crafted something that transcended the said premise. What emerged through the “interviews” of his adorable subjects is a society driven by punitive culture and fear of reprisals – the kids innately associate “punishment” with belts, aren’t aware of what praise means, and promptly rate their love for doing homework over watching cartoons, even though that’s manifestly untrue – as well as how they’re oftentimes helped by their elder sisters as their parents are either illiterate or too busy or both, and the regrettable seeping in of political narratives even in the “safe” space of schools, as evidenced by references to then ongoing Iraq-Iran War.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

First Graders [1984]

 Made under the auspices of ‘Kanun’ (local parlance for the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults) – as were most of Kiarostami’s films during the 1970s and 80s, in keeping with the fact that he himself had set up its filmmaking department in 1970 – First Graders was a remarkable early work in the Iranian giant’s canon. It reiterated his impressive ability to evoke nuanced renderings from children that he’d already demonstrated until then, exquisitely presaged the two magnificent films that he made subsequently which arguably remain among the greatest works involving children (Where Is the Friend’s House? and Homework), and provided glimpses of his adroitness in complementing wry social observations with bold modernist impulses. This simultaneously deadpan and playful documentary – it impishly subverted the form through recording of seemingly spontaneous interactions that must’ve been subtly coloured by the presence of a camera in the periphery, albeit a hidden one – was set completely within the confines of a school for boys from lower economic backgrounds and located at a working-class neighbourhood in Tehran. Filmed alternatively among chaotic outdoor gatherings and in intimate indoor spaces, differential focus was accorded to how the school’s surprisingly patient and ostensibly even-handed principal – manifesting the paternalistic and moralist tendencies of the larger society – spends an inordinate amount of time disciplining, chiding, instructing and counselling kids at his chamber, for a variety of childish infarctions that were as deeply revelatory of their social contexts as the carefree worlds that they inhabit. Though mostly tight in scope and framing, Kiarostami at times delectably cut loose by amusingly observing kids in candid group settings, and even through something as digressive as a euphorically floating plastic bag.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

First Case, Second Case [1979]

 Banned upon its release and largely buried for next three decades, Kiarostami’s discursive, loosely structured and deceptively piercing essay First Case, Second Case was, primarily, an astute pedagogic examination. Made for Kanun – the filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults that he helmed – it presented two alternative outcomes to seven students being thrown out of the class by their teacher, as one was creating disturbances, with all suspended for a week unless they reveal the miscreant. In the first scenario, one of the students eventually divulges the perpetrator to be able to get back in, while in the second, they refuse to budge and continue to remain outside for the entire stretch. Kiarostami used this as springboards for inducing reflections and opinions from an extraordinarily diverse group of people, ranging from parents, teachers and education board members to intellectuals, artists, political activists and religious leaders. What unfolds is a fascinating debate on informing on one’s comrades vis-à-vis demonstration of collective solidarity, along with underlying structural critiques, and thereby a fascinating Rorschach test on the experiment’s self-consciously serious participants. The work, incidentally, got interlaced with sharp political undercurrents and topicality as the Iranian Revolution was transpiring when it was in production. He made shrewd changes in his contributors to underscore that tumultuous moment in time, which moulded it into an allegorical document on children of the revolution and foreshadowed an inevitable cycle wherein calls for solidarity during a popular uprising oftentimes regresses into informing on others once the new status quo has set in. On a wry note, the picture that the teacher is seen drawing, viz. an ear, was an allusion to surveillance.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

30 Favourite Films from 2023

1. The Zone of Interest | Jonathan Glazer | UK/Poland
2. The Mother of All Lies | Asmae El Moudir | Morocco
3. Occupied City | Steve McQueen | The Netherlands
4. Bad Living / Mal Viver | Joao Canijo | Portugal
5. The Battle | Vera Egito | Brazil
6. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World | Radu Jude | Romania
7. El Juicio / The Trial | Ulises de la Orden | Argentina
8. Our Body / Notre Corps | Claire Simon | France
9. Afire / Roter Himmel | Christian Petzold | Germany
10. Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan | US
11. About Dry Grasses | Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Turkey
12. Youth (Spring) | Wang Bing | China
13. Living Bad / Viver Mal | Joao Canijo | Portugal
14. The Old Oak | Ken Loach | UK
15. And, Towards Happy Alleys | Sreemoyee Singh | India
16. Killers of the Flower Moon | Martin Scorsese | US
17. Four Daughters | Kaouther Ben Hania | Tunisia
18. Kayo Kayo Colour? / Which Colour? | Shahrukhkhan Chavada | India
19. Green Border | Agnieszka Holland | Poland
20. 20,000 Species of Bees | Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren | Spain
21. Yannick | Quentin Dupieux | France
22. The Delinquents | Rodrigo Moreno | Argentina
23. Against the Tide | Sarvnik Kaur | India
24. Aattam / The Play | Anand Ekarshi | India
25. Anatomy of a Fall | Justine Triet | France
26. The Teachers' Lounge | Ilker Çatak | Germany
27. The Plough / Le Grand Chariot | Philippe Garrel | France
28. Fallen Leaves | Aki Kaurismaki | Finland
29. Terrestrial Verses | Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami | Iran
30. La Chimera | Alice Rohrwacher | Italy

Music [2023]

 It’s rare for a filmmaker to remain steadfastly committed to their politics or form or both over the entire stretch of their career, and to defiantly walk a rigorously crystalized path unconcerned with what’s considered de rigueur for the times. Angela Schanelec – co-founder of the “Berlin School” – belongs to the dwindling group of such outmoded giants as Ken Loach, Patricio Guzmán, Philippe Garrel, Hong Sang-soo et al. Music – the sexagenarian’s 10^th feature – is a spare, elliptical, elusive, experimental and characteristically Bressonian exercise exactly along the lines of her abstruse filmography. In other words, it definitely isn’t a film that one should approach either uninformed or expecting conventional storytelling. On paper, it’s an interpretative modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; however, it’s defined as much by its references to the Greek play as its departures from it. As a reviewer pithily remarked, it’s “a postmodern expression of a premodern text”. In its barest essence, it’s a tale of tragic union between Jon (Aliocha Schneider), an orphaned guy who serves a prison sentence upon inadvertently killing a man, and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a guard in that same prison where they get acquainted. Their seemingly contented marital life is short-lived as he starts losing his vision, though that’s partly compensated through his passionate vocation for singing. Their union, unfortunately, is based on a dark coincidence unbeknownst to either, which eventually and inevitably leads to suicide when that gets uncovered. Composed of sparse, austere and muted tableaux, and with long stretches of dialogue-free sequences interspersed with evocative classical diegetic music, this fleeting, exacting and stripped-to-bones work obliquely elucidates how a terrible price can be extracted by both knowing too much and too little.

Director: Angela Schanelec

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: German/Greek

Country: Germany

All of Us Strangers [2023]

 Adam (Andrew Scott), the protagonist in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, is a man shaped, bound and defined by internalized trauma – on account of his parents’ death when he was just 12, and growing up as an alienated orphan on account of his homosexuality – and the consequent rootlessness, social estrangement and deep-rooted feelings of otherness. He, as a result, exists in a liminal space haunted by past ghosts, detached present and formless future. His loneliness and melancholy are complemented by his sense of being stuck and intensely secluded life. A drifting television screenwriter, he lives alone in a swanky but thoroughly deserted upscale high-rise in London. Two parallel – and ostensibly unconnected – threads suddenly unfold that throw his ennui-filled life into an emotional whirlpool. On one hand he finds his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) at the suburban house he grew up in – exactly as they were just before they died, thus making the film seem an intriguing mix of magic realism, ghost story and a schizophrenic mirage induced by the subconscious – and starts reconnecting with them and bringing them up to speed about his life, including his being gay. On the other, he befriends and gets sucked into an intense relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), an enigmatic, volatile, borderline self-destructive younger guy – and seemingly the only other resident in that building – who exudes a troubled vulnerability. Led by powerhouse turns by Scott, Mescal and Foy, suffused with rippling emotionality, comprising of a glorious disco-era soundtrack, and adapted from the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, this achingly intimate exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and being queer boldly walked a delicate line between passionate melodrama and sentimental contrivances.

Director: Andrew Haigh

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Fantasy

Language: English

Country: UK

May December [2023]

 As Todd Haynes’ May December opens, we see a warm social gathering, on a sunny day, at the charming house of Gracie (Julianne Moore), genially hosting her guests, and her husband Joe (Charles Melton), operating a barbecue grill. Something, however, is clearly off, as Gracie seems overly effusive, while Joe appears withdrawn. And, if their massive age difference doesn’t mean anything in itself, it gains disturbing ramifications when it's eventually revealed that 23 years back, the then 36-year-old Gracie was caught being intimate with 13-year-old Joe. Loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, this had created a massive public scandal, evoked media frenzy, and led to her arrest and prison sentence during which she ended up giving birth to Joe’s child; most bizarrely, she resumed this paedophilic affair upon release, left her husband and son, and married Joe; furthermore, they had more kids, and even ended up staying together since then. The film’s opening added an intriguing parallel dimension in the form of acclaimed actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) joining them to initiate her preparedness for portraying Gracie for an “independent film” in the making, thus cheekily alluding to greater nuance and respectability vis-à-vis lurid tabloids and exploitative telenovelas. Elizabeth walks a fine line between detached observations and sly manipulations, as her voyeuristic curiosity and saviour complex get simultaneously stoked while embedding herself into their lives. Meanwhile, in parallel, we see Gracie’s conniving relationship with the thoroughly lost Joe, who she bullies, stonewalls and weepily manipulates depending on what the situation demands. Shot in overexposed images resembling soap operas and led by the two solid lead turns, it captured the double manipulations and fraught relationships with cool rigour and parodic self-awareness.

Director: Todd Haynes

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: US

Living Bad (Viver Mal) [2023]

 In Living Bad – João Canijo’s riveting reverse shot to the magnificent Bad Living – the Portuguese filmmaker shifted his gaze from the women running the decadent, crumbling hotel in Ofir to the guests visiting it over the same weekend. While it had interesting departures – three episodes in place of a single thread, the tone more cutting, and the colour palettes tad brasher – it too centred on feral, mutually lacerating relationships with manipulative matriarchs. Further, like its companion piece, the same exchanges between the hotel’s proprietors and guests reappear here, albeit foregrounded on the latter POVs this time, while conversations from the other side continue bleeding in; and this formal ingenuity added playful layers to the abrasive tales. These, alongside the choice of often filming the charged interactions from outside glass panes and through reflections – the sumptuous visual compositions were orchestrated in both films by cinematographer Leonor Teles – reiterated the diptych’s decidedly voyeuristic overtones. Canijo adapted motifs for the vignettes, each featuring toxic three-way relationships, from three plays by August Strindberg. In ‘Playing with Fire’ – tad reminiscent of Östlund's wickedly funny Triangle of Sadness – a photographer (Nuno Lopes) is intensely jealous of his alluring, successful, narcissistic and possibly cheating wife, and their marriage is further strained by his mom’s incessant phone calls. In ‘The Pelican’, a self-serving woman (Leonor Silveira) is having a secret affair with the opportunistic husband of her anxiety-ridden daughter (Lia Carvalho). And in ‘Motherly Love’ – the best of the three – a possessive, elitist mother (Beatriz Batarda) is clinically undermining her fragile daughter’s (Leonor Vasconcelos) intimate relationship with another woman (Carolina Amaral), because she can’t accept losing the “apple of her eyes” to someone from a lower class.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama/Omnibus Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Bad Living (Mal Viver) [2023]

 João Canijo’s Bad Living – which formed an ingeniously imagined and magnificently shaped diptych with Living Bad, where the two counterpointed and bled into each other like reflections on a shattered mirror – is a work of such dazzling formal exactitude, simmering emotional ferocity and hypnotic visual compositions that it leaves one crushed and exhilarated in parallel. It, incidentally, eloquently recalled the supercharged undercurrents of Bergman and the unsettlingly visceral palettes of Martel, while retaining a distinctive perspective and texture. Set in a hotel in the coastal town of Ofir – its retro décor, forlorn atmosphere, and interplay of spaciousness and claustrophobia made it a brooding character, in the same way as the sublimely beguiling and instinctively unnerving Saint-Tropez villa in Deray’s mesmeric La Piscine was – the deceptively fluid narrative is structured akin to a fiendish voyeur gliding along the different spaces in order to snoop at what’s transpiring, and weaving those intensely private conversations into an impression of complex intergenerational fault-lines that’re coloured by unresolved past contexts, memories, blames, wounds and deep-set misunderstandings. Over the course of a weekend, we witness the devastatingly fateful unravelling of the dysfunctional relationship between four troubled women – the abrasive matriarch Sara (Rita Blanco) who owns the failing property, her irrevocably crumbling elder daughter Piedade (Anabela Moreira) and volatile younger daughter Raquel (Cleia Almeida) who manage operations, and Piedade’s ravishing, estranged, grief-stricken daughter Salomé (Madalena Almeida) – who’re craving for their respective mother’s love, but continuously scarring each other in the process. Rapturously shot in arrestingly framed long, static shots – with the vibrant colours beautifully juxtaposing the moody, lonely atmosphere – the astonishingly enacted film substantiated Tolstoy’s hypothesis that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Youth (Spring) [2023]

 Shot over 6 years (between 2014 and 2019), and condensed from a staggering 2600 hours of footage into an immersive and observational 3 ½ hour documentary essay – which, incidentally, made this a relatively concise work in Wang Bing’s formidable canon – Youth (Spring) is composed on a canvas that’s simultaneously expansive and intimate, rigorous and free-flowing, focussed and digressive. The first chapter in his planned ‘Youth Trilogy’, it comprises of vignettes stitched into a long-form impressionist reflection on the textile hub of Zhilli – the town, located close to Shanghai, has over 18,000 privately-run workshops catering mostly to the domestic market – where around 300,000 migrant youngsters work. With thematic preoccupations, understated tone and unassuming aesthetics that reminded me of Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary masterwork Still Life, the film painted a picture of grind, compounded by the gritty complex and claustrophobic spaces where they both slog and stay. Yet – and this is what made it such a gently affective exercise – it was never oppressively dreary or pedantic, despite the undertones of melancholy and urban desolation. Rather, it’s easy, organic, lively, jaunty and even hopeful at times, as we see kids in late teens and early 20s horsing around, flirting, indulging in silly and carefree frolic, acting like cool hipsters, lip-syncing to bouncy pop music (played at the shop-floors to alleviate monotony), creating pipe dreams, having relationships, and building camaraderie, despite the grimy environs and exhausting labour. Yes, they also recognize the exploitation and participate in collective wage negotiations with their stuffy bosses, even if these end in futility. What emerged through Bing’s empathetic gaze on a slew of individuals, was a vivid, kaleidoscopic and eloquently real portrayal of community and life in action.

Director: Wang Bing

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Yannick [2023]

 Yannick, Quentin Dupieux’s sharp and subversive cultural satire – and one of two films that he made this year alongside the surrealist farce Daaaaaalí! – packed considerable punch despite its unassuming setup and narrative brevity. It touched upon the relationship between art/artistes and the audience – especially the unsaid and sacrosanct social contract that one enters into while partaking in that relationship – and the exponential rise of boorish trolls, who’d like nothing more than to heckle, disrupt and even cancel anything that offends their sensibilities. This darkly funny, impishly acrid and brilliantly staged work, therefore, also emerged as remarkably topical. The compact chamber-piece, ensconced nearly completely within a small Parisian theatre, starts off with a play in progress – a domestic dramedy called “Le Cocu”, featuring a self-effacing ménage à trois and being performed by three actors (Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin and Sébastien Chassagne) – watched by a spattering of audience. The show, however, is brought to an awkward halt by the eponymous Yannick (Raphaël Quenard), a watchman at a night parking, who’s taken a rare day off and travelled a fair bit in order to catch it. He’d come expecting to forget his personal woes and be entertained; however, upon finding it despairing instead of uplifting, he interrupts the play to express his indignation, unbothered by the mix of bemusement, irritation and anger that it elicits. And, upon realizing that his outrage isn’t being taken seriously, he decides to take control of the situation in the most unexpectedly absurdist manner. Led by an incredible turn by Quenard as the neurotic working-class anti-hero – ridiculous, exasperating, amusing and vulnerable in turns – this irreverent little gem certainly doesn’t run the risk of not being enjoyable enough.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France