Embracing Mystery

Inside Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) - Pham Vietnamese director Pham Thien An's assured debut feature, Inside Yellow Cocoon Shell, will make a great 'existential road trip movie' double feature with Bi Gan's debut Kaili Blues. A languid style with no cuts and slow zoom-in, this unhurried film starts with a group of young men discussing faith and afterlife in a busy Saigon outdoor restaurant. There is a fatal motorcycle accident off the frame and the camera slowly tracks to the busy intersection to reveal the sight of the accident. We later learn that it was Hanh, a sister-in-law of our reluctant protagonist Thien (Le Phong Vu), who died in the accident, and left him her 5-year-old son, Dao to take care of. Thien leaves with Dao to their hometown in the lush countryside for the very catholic funeral and following wake.

In the home village where he left long ago for Saigon, he encounters many people and engage in long conversations, including an old man who was in the army fighting viet congs and his old flame who is now a nun. The present melds with past and reality blurs with dreams, Inside Yellow Cocoon Shell presents the waking dream that is fleeting human life. The last third of this languid 3-hour film is Thien looking for his brother in the neighboring village. His motor bike breaks down and Thien has to take shelter in a snack stop. There he engages with an old woman who asks him why he had forsaken his soul and proceeds to tell him her near death experience. Is Thien really looking for his brother? Or is he in a spiritual journey to find himself? With the backdrop of colorful Vietnam and its western and eastern influences and its tumultuous history, young director Pham paints a very arresting picture of one man's journey to find himself and leaves room for us to contemplate and embrace life's mysteries.

Dissection of a Marriage

Anatomie d'une chute (2023) - Triet A fallen death of a husband in a troubled marriage in a small town in French Alpes and a following indictment and trial of his foreign wife is what constitutes Justine Triet's Palme d'Or winning courtroom drama. It's a modern marriage maginified under a microscope, revealing the nitty-gritty life of a young couple as their power dynamic plays out in the courtroom for all to see.

Triet, with only 3 feature films under her belt, all of them comedies, shows her tight handling of a material (co-written with her partner Arthur Harari). But the real star here is Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann), a German actress whom Triet collaborated in her previous feature, Sybil. With the film's natural dialog and believable setup, Hüller manages to build a sympathetic character, a successful writer, a foreigner, a mom to a blind boy, trapped in a mountain town with a husband who has an inferiority complex.

At first, the police rules his fall from the attic window as a suicide. There were no witnesses. But there were some forensic evidence casting enough doubt that it might have been a murder. Sandra (Hüller) gets indicted and the case goes to trial. With her lawyer Renzi (Swann Arlaud) who was a college friend who was in love with her, Sandra defends herself from a vicious procecuter who accuses her of ill-tempered and violent woman who couldn't stand her loser husband.

As the trial plays out, it's revealing that there's prejudice against Sandra, a foreign woman, in a place where her husband grew up and had community. The film becomes less of a murder mystery but a procecution of a woman in the eyes of judging public. The unrelenting media blitz surrounding the trial and everyone painting her as an unfaithful harlot who blamed her husband for his own shortcomings.

Anatomie d'une chute paints a complex picture of a marriage where no one particular party is to blame. It's people's pre-ordered hate that makes one party more at fault and not the others. The real life isn't that black and white, especially when children are involved. Even the court decisions in family court can't ever paint the complete picture. Triet is very good at showing these nuiances and balancing all the points. The reenactment of the couple's violent argument recorded by the deceased as a material for his book, Triet skillfully cuts away to the courtroom, leaving us to guess who's throwing glasses and who's hitting who. Moral muck, guilt, ambiguity are bread and butter of every day life. Their son Daniel grows increasingly uncomfortable around Sandra as she tries to shield him from all the ugliness of the grownups - the money problems, dad's depression and taking anti-depressants, her own infidelity, etc. But he ends up becoming a pivotal witness to testify.

Well tuned and balanced, Anatomie d'une chute is a revealing film about this day and age where patriarchy and everyday sexism is slowly losing its grip on our society (or lets hope). Sandra Hüller again, is fast becoming the heroine we need in this social climate. Also, Triet, as with Sybil, examines the nature of art and literature- the art immitating life, plagiarism and even autofiction in a very captivating way.

Kaleidoscopic Picture of Africa Here and Now

Omen (2023) - Baloji Omen, a new film by Belgian rapper, Baloji, presents a compendium of pan-African experience told in a vibrant palette. It addresses variety of different issues in modern day Africa: African diaspora, colonialism, youth gang, sexuality, tradition, progress, among other things. You won’t see any other films this unique and different, this year.

The film starts with Koffi (Marc Zinga), cutting his sizable afro off as he prepares to travel to his home country with his pregnant Belgian wife, Alice. They are expecting twins. He is seen practicing his Swahili. It will be a tense trip for him because he hadn’t been back home for many years and now must present their biracial marriage to his family and get their blessings. Also, they need to give $5,000 dowry to his parents as it is a custom.

It is a total chaos when they get to the unnamed African city (the film is shot in bustling Kinshasa, in part). His very busy sister Tshala (Eliane Umuhire of Neptune Frost) doesn’t pick them up at the airport and the young couple must navigate the crowded city in their rental car. They first drive out to the coal mine where Koffi’s father works but it turns out that it’s his day off. It becomes a running joke that Koffi’s father is never around every time he wants to see him.

No one, in their extended family, including his stern mother, Mujila, seems to be happy to see them. Things get a lot worse than they anticipated at the family luncheon, when Koffi accidentally nosebleeds (due to stress) on one of his sisters’ new baby. Born with a large purple mark on his face, Koffi is known to be a sorcerer from his mother’s side of the family. The religious elders, practicing a mix of Christianity and shamanism, perform a gruesome ritual on him in full costume that involves a head mask and nails, to lift his curse while Alice helplessly protests.

Koffi and Alice cross paths with a pink dress wearing street gang, Goonz, headed by Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya). Still mourning the death of his little sister, Paco is in a fierce turf war against a rival gang. They have to fight out their differences in the makeshift wrestling ring under the mountain of coal.

With multiple storylines and characters, Omen introduces a different kind of storytelling that the Western filmmaking is not used to. Much like Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams’s Neptune Frost couple years back, the film is not bound to a straightforward narrative. Presenting a multicultural society in flux, where things clash with each other for dominance, the film’s colors and texture vie for your attention. It takes everything from everywhere – from the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and multiple other African nations, even from the Creole culture of Louisiana.

The film is mainly told through sensations and visual poetry. It’s in Mujila’s breastfeeding the river in the beginning of the film with purple milk as purple milk slowly spills out. It’s in a decrepit school bus full of pink dress wearing street urchins violently being towed. It’s in a group of women mourners crying until the floor of the house is ankle deep with their tears. It’s in witch doctor trying to exorcise a couple with sexually transmitted disease by painting their bodies and pelting them with a tree branch soaked in palm oil.

Omen is a truly unique experience to be had. Using the magical realism and symbolism steeped in tradition old and new, the film is a kaleidoscopic picture of bustling Africa that is here and now.

Omen plays as part of Cannes 2023’s Un Certain Regard section.

New Wave Noir

The Other Laurens (2023) - Schmitz A case of mistaken identity in Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens plays out like a neo-noir directed by Aki Kaurismaki or a Belgian Big Lebowski with New Wave aesthetics.

In the center of all the convoluted plot twists and turns is Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin), an unkempt, sad, middle-aged, private investigator specializing in lurid marriage infidelity cases whose mother is dying in the hospital. It is pretty clear that it’s his more flamboyant twin brother François, who has always been his mother’s favorite... and everyone else’s, it turns out.

Gabriel’s uneventful life gets turned upside down when his sexy niece, Jade (Louise Leroy) shows up at his doorstep, informing François’s death and suggesting there might have been a foul play in his accidental death. She doesn’t trust the local authorities and insists Gabriel to investigate. She also feigns that she is being followed by a dangerous man on a bike. Gabriel reluctantly agrees to accompany Jade to her home in the south.

When they get to Perpignan, A town in Southern France bordering Spain, Gabriel is coldly received by François’s American wife Shelby (Kate Moran of Yan Gonzalez films) and her entourage of aging biker gang, headed by Valery (Marc Barbe) living in her opulent white mansion. Shelby says drily of Gabriel’s appearance, “like seeing a ghost, the same but out of focus.” Even though Gabriel is eager to get back to Brussels, things keep getting in the way of his departure every time. And he begins to doubt that the car accident that resulted the death of his brother. Someone’s hiding something.

With theatrical lighting and primary and neon colors, The Other Laurens has the look and feel of highly stylized 1980’s New Wave aesthetics. Think of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva or Luc Besson’s Subway. It’s in the yellow of the sports car, Jade’s tight blue jeans and black leather jackets and neon signs of a nightclub.

Rabourdin’s accidental hero, skulking around like 80's Gerard Depardieu is a charming mess caught among shady side of his brother’s dealings, Shelby’s scheming, the Spanish mob, and Jade’s affection.

While snooping around Spain with Jade, to find out what François was up to there, Gabriel attempts to leave everything behind once again, denouncing François’s gaudy lifestyles and how his bad taste permeates everything around him. It is revealed he has never got over the fact that his twin brother stole away the love of his life- Jade’s mother, from him. Gabriel and Jade exchange some hurtful truths to each other.

Then in an act of revenge, Gabriel hooks up with François’s Spanish mistress, whose affair started the whole mess in the first place, by pretending that he is his twin brother. Then he figures it all out.

It all builds up to the final shootout between the Shelby’s biker gangs and the Spaniards, resulting a daring helicopter escape involving Shelby’s American pilot.

The Other Laurens is an enjoyable deadpan noir with visual flair resembling the cool era of filmmaking.

The Other Laurens plays as a Director’s Fortnight selection at Cannes Film Festival.

Frightening Female Sexuality

Creatura (2023) - Elena Martin Gimeno A subtle observation on female sexuality by Catalan director/writer/star Elena Martín Gimeno, Creatura examines a childhood sexual repression manifesting in physical form on the body of Mila (played by the director herself).

The film starts with Mila and her mild-mannered boyfriend Marcel (Oriol Pla) moving into the house of Mila’s parents, Gerard and Diana, as the old couple moves out. It’s the house by the sea that she grew up in. Mila is always horny, but her demands are met with Marcel’s frustration because he doesn’t know what Mila really wants. Mila in turn, gets hives all over her body because of the stress. She says to him she got the condition from her childhood.

The lengthy flashback in the middle concentrates on Mila as a 15-year-old girl. With her more promiscuous bestie Aina, they discover boys and explore sticky situations, as well as anonymous internet messengers for voyeuristic sexual encounters. But it’s still all normal stuff that teenagers are into.

Mila experiments with a hunky boy that she has hots for, but it doesn’t end well. She finally hooks up with a neighborhood boy whom she has known all her life. But when she asks for permission for a sleepover at his house, her father, usually very calm and loving, angrily rejects the idea. Again, Mila breaks into hives all over her lower body.

Creatura is an interesting film about how the female sexuality frightens men. The word 'uncomfortable' gets repeated twice with both Mila’s father and her boyfriend who can’t handle it whenever she expresses her desires.

In a patriarchal society, the idea that girls are either sluts or virgins, depending on their level of curiosity in sex, is embedded early on, while boys grow up expecting, at least, to get a handjob from a girl who shows even the slightest interest in you.

Martín Gimeno goes even further back to find the origin of Mila’s physical conditions with her as a pre-pubescent child, spending the summer days with her parents on the beach. She develops a strong attachment to her father, as he gives her a piggyback ride and giving her swimming lessons in the ocean.

It’s a man stroking his female companion’s bum on the beach that sears into little Mila’s head. She asks her parents to stroke her bum so she can sleep. At first, the parents are not alarmed about her clingy behavior. But her display of learned behavior frightens her father deeply, as it is not ‘normal’ for a girl to behave in what can be construed as sexual in any way.

Her father gets upset when little Mila barges into their bedroom demanding to see him naked. She breaks out in hives and it’s her mother’s turn to console her and wash her in the sea, because sea water cures it all.

After the adult Mila’s role-playing sexual game gets too uncomfortable for Marcel, he leaves. Then Mila gets to spend time with her parents alone, as they come back to console her. Now a grown woman, Mila asks her dad, who is still uncomfortable around her, if he ever felt physically affectionate toward her. This talk is a revelation to him, as he never thought about it in his life.

Creatura delves into a difficult subject to many men: female sexual desire and its brutal suppression early on. Martîn Gimeno gives a committed, bracing performance and bares it all in a film with a difficult subject matter, taking a nuanced yet frank approach, without sensationalizing its subject.

Creatura is a selection in The Director's Fortnight at this year's Cannes Film Festival.