My Winnipeg

Universal Language (2024) - Rankin A missing case of the prize-winning turkey, a mistaken identity and money frozen in ice consist of Matthew Rankin's droll and absurd comedy, Universal Language. The surburbs of snowy, drab Winnipeg as its backdrop, Rankin pays tribute to the world of Abbas Kiarostami, from school kids and their quests to provide for their friend's missing pair of glasses, to the static, wide landscape shots. But unlike Kiarostami's Iranian countryside, we are presented with mundane brutalist architecture of none-discript, baige and grey brick and mortar buildings and highway over-passes of Winnipeg.

Rankin's visual comedy resembles that of Jacques Tati and Roy Andersson. The main characters, played by Rankin (Matthew) and co-writer Pirouz Nemati (Massoud), expressionlessly go about their very specific businesses - one reluctantly returning home by abandoning his city life and government job in Montreal, to see his mother, and the other, acting as a tour guide of made-up mundane history of Winnipeg - "This is a bench and a brief case left by someone who might have been waiting for bus in 1989," "this is Tim Hortons," "this dried up water fountain in an abandoned mall might one day shoot up gaysers once more, one would hope," etc, etc.

The nearsighted boy will get his glasses back, the beauty pageant turkey will be found, the frozen money in ice will be thawed, then put back into the ice in the ground again, the mistaken identity will turn out to be not mistaken at all. Rankin and co, create a deadpan comedy that is not only an ode to Iranian cinema, but a unique cross-cultural netherworld that feels consciously dour and less hipsterly yet familiar. Universal Language is a truly unique comedy that will put a smile on your face.

Unlikable

Hard Truths (2024) - Leigh Like many of Mike Leigh protagonists, Pansy (played by Marianne Jean Baptiste) is not a likable character. She thinks the world is out to get her, so long become bitter and confrontational in any human interactions, both family and strangers. Her contractor husband, Curtley (David Webber) and her slacker, grown up son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) get the brunt of Pansy's fury daily. With years of her abuse while living under the same roof, they have simply given up dealing with her. The only person who is still sympathetic to Pansy is her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) who is a down-to-earth, neighborly hairdresser. To Pansy's discomfort, Chantelle keeps on pushing her to show up for the fifth anniversary of their mother's death.

We know a person like that in real life, you'd think something bad must have happened to her in her early life, because she is so angry and anxious all the time. Not that Hard Truth gives you all the answers as to what happened to Pansy. No, that's not what Leigh is after. He and his collaborators, this time, the great Marianne Jean Baptiste as the lead, dig deeper into prevailing humanity underneath all the bitterness and hate. And it's a sight to see. Pansy is a very hard to like character. But by the end, we see a glimpse of her humanity peeking through here and there, that not all is lost. And with Curtley, despite his hurting back and Moses finding friends in unexpected places, that they are going to be all right.

Marianne Jean Baptiste deserves all the accolades for this performance. By far the best performance by any actor I've seen in a while.

Strange Desires

Misericordia (2024) - Guiraudie Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), comes back to a rural mountain town to attend his childhood friend, Vincent (Jean Baptiste Durand)'s father's funeral. He hadn't been to the village in ages. Aimless and recently unemployed in Beaudoux where he lives now, Jérémie decides to stay at the kind widow Martine (Catherine Frot)'s home and sleeping in Vincent's old room (Vincent is married, has a kid and lives nearby). There's some kind of past between two men, as they tussle in the woods like schoolboys. There's also a tinge of jealousy in Vincent as Jérémie surreptitiously invites himself into his life (first his mom, then his friends). There surely must be some sinister motives. Is he trying to take over the dead father's bakery? Is he trying to sleep with mom?

Things get complicated when Jérémie tries to seduce a local schlub and friend of Vincent, Walter (David Ayala) and Walter rebuffs his drunken advances with a shotgun. Soon after, things get boiled over and Jérémie ends up killing Vincent, after another violent tussle in the woods. The rest of the film is a police thriller of sort, Guiraudie style.

Guiaudie's a master at absurdist humor that is still very much down to earth. Think Misericordia as stripped down, depoliticized, working class Teorema where one person seduces everyone around him willingly or unwillingly. Jérémie is not a Godot, or American Uncle or your ideal manifest in a human form. He is full flesh and blood with his own desires and people somehow love him back. The police is on his track because of his shaky alibi, but it's the local priest who give him cover. Love works in stange ways. Misericordia is a delightful, absurdist comedy that says a lot about strange human desires and attractions.

The Rich Strikes Again

Anora (2024) - Baker Sean Baker's films are all about people living in the margins of society - the neglected, the poor, the invisibles, the underprivileged. What's admirable in what he does is that his films show them as human beings with dreams and aspirations however big and small they are. His subjects are always borderline (un)interesting. There might be a glimpse of beauty in banality. But is it enough to be a subject for a film that costs millions of dollars and all the talents and effort and time? I mean, a lot of shitty, frivolous movies are made all the time. Maybe I'm bitter with everything that's going on in the world. But I have zero interests in seeing an exotic dancer from Coney Island falling in love with a bratty rich Russian kid in a Cinderella type scenario, same as I have zero interest in seeing rich and famous people as subjects in movies.

Mikey Madison plays Ani, an exotic dancer who hit it off with Ivan (Mark Edelstein), a sweet but absurdly rich kid who is her patron one night. Ani wants to keep everything professional, charging him by the night. But once he asks her to be his girlfriend for a week, the money and the mansion and the drugs and champaign are too good to pass up. Better/worse, they fly to Vegas to party and get married on an impulse. When they come back to New York, Ivan's handler, Toro (Karren Karagulian), a middle-aged Albanian, an employee of his oligarchic Russian parents, gets into a full damage control mode. Ivan's parents are flying in, Toro will need to annul the marriage with some court connections Ivan's parents have.

There's no story here for a movie that's over two hours long. Everything is cliché. So, what do we watch in the next hour and a half? Ani freaks out at Toro and his goon Igor and Garnick, Ivan flees from the Brighton Beach mansion. It's all about them going through the Coney Island neighborhood looking for Ivan.

There are some fine visceral scenes that things get very physical and spontaneous. And I love the local details Baker inserts here and there and his direction with many non-actors too. Anora almost reminds me of Good Time and Uncut Gems of Safdie brothers in terms of immediacy and their peasantry. But within the context of the war in Ukraine and demonstrations in Georgia, al Assad fleeing Syria and atrocities in Gaza and Trump's second term (and NYers know about Trump's relations with the Russians in Brighton Beach), Baker doesn't seem to read the room with Anora.

Soon as Ani realizes that there's not going to be a fairytale ending, the grim reality besets - we are duped again by the rich. It doesn't matter if we have dreams and aspirations. We are just playthings for the rich. And that is not a good thing to be reminded of at this climate.

Self-Portrait

C'est pas moi/It's Not Me (2024) - Carax The question, "Who is Leos Carax?" was put on the French filmmaker of such films as Holy Motors and Annette by a museum, in preparation of an exhibit that didn't happen - explains Carax in the beginning of this 41 minute self-portraiture, ironically titled, C'est Pas Moi/It's Not Me. Like many artists, Carax has had his share of ups and downs in his 40-year career: Once touted as Godard's heir-apparent and an enfant terrible of French cinema, his grand, blurring vision of young love and cinema got him into a lot of trouble. His passionate affair with Juliette Binoche, and stormy relationship with the late Lithuanian actress Katerina Golubeva (whom he had a daughter with, Nastya Golubeva Carax, who is in the film), are often reflected in his films.

In C'est pas moi, Carax pays not too subtle homage to the late mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, in more ways than one. JLG's signature wordplay displays on the center of the screen in C'est pas moi, same size, same font - linking cinema, history and ghosts. His gravelly voice narration also reminds me of the late old master. He even includes a voice message Godard left him on his phone.

Here comes the full circle: Carax's earlier films were heavily influenced by the French New Wave. He started his career as a JLG's pupil (even appearing in JLG film King Lear), garnered acclaim for imitating JLG's style, but without the weight of the political, cultural subjects of his mentor. Instead, he aimed for youthful love, longing and whimsy that attracted many admirers like me. After the long hiatus (his magnum opus Les amants du Pont-Neuf/Lovers on the Bridge (1991)and its subsequent box office and critical failure almost destroyed his career and couldn't finance another film for decades), his resurrection with Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021), two very self-reflexive, fantastical films, Carax is back, embracing Godard again more openly, for the benefit of composing a dense, visually sumptuous self-portrait.

All Carax's past films are present – his vibrant color palette pristinely preserved in glorious celluloid (he was once idiosyncratically grouped with other 80s French filmmakers as ‘Cinema du Look’ in conjunction with his then cinematographer, the late Jean-Yves Escoffier).

It’s almost euphoric to see adorable faces of young Binoche, Julie Delpy and Golubeva, also baby Denis Lavant, a longtime collaborator of Carax, playing the filmmaker’s alter ego, Alex (Carax’s real name is Alex Oscar Dupont). His penchant for controversy (or bad French humor) is there too - in the form of Hitler and Polanski.

Carax is not a visual essayist commenting and reflecting on the state of the chaotic world we live in - maybe only a little bit but not in Godard's sense. The film is all about him. And it's beautiful and glorious. It builds up to a stormy solo piano session of the theme from The Young Girls of Rochefort, played by his daughter, Nastya - perfectly capturing the essence of Carax's career, his sentimentality, his art and beauty haunted by the ghosts of the past (including but not limited to departed: Golubeva, Guillaume Depardieu, Escoffier, Godard). C’est pas moi is the best cinematic self-portrait of an artist you can wish for. One of the year’s very best

Colonial Herstory

Grand Tour (2024) - Gomes Miguel Gomes’s beguiling new film Grand Tour takes us down to the tour of Southeast Asia through the eyes of a British colonial bureaucrat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) and his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), as they crisscross Burma, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and Chinese hinterland. Beautifully shot in 16mm in color and black and white by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Guo Liang (Chinese part) and by Rui Poças (for staged dialog scenes), Grand Tour illustrates the filmmaker's penchant for playing with its cinematic form and historicity, tinkering the boundaries of space and time. And it's delicious.

Based on Somerset Maugham's travel essays collection, The Gentleman in the Parlor, the first half of the story concerns Edward, fleeing impending marriage to his fiancé who is on her way from Britain to join him in Burma. The title card indicates it's the year 1918. The thing is, many of the footage in various places indicate that it's the modern times. That the film is not a period piece and nostalgia trip, swooning over the bygone era. That there is something bigger at work here than the mere silly screwball narrative. Nevertheless, these documentary style footage - a human powered Ferris wheel in Myanmar, Jeepney karaoke in Manila, shadow puppet play in Bangkok, the view from the boat in Yangtze river are all stunning. The dizzying display of places as Edward zips through one place to another, and the rhythm of the tour never slows down. He goes further and further away to avoid seeing Molly, his journey becomes more and more of an existential trip. What is he running away from? Even Edward himself doesn't really know.

The second half of the film is from Molly's point of view. And we repeat Edward's trajectory on the map with her. Molly is a spirited woman, and not the type who gives up easily. With her determination and charm (with a distinctive devilish laugh), she traces Edward's path like a good detective. She picks up dutiful servant Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) while staying in a palatial house of a smitten American colonialist Sanders (Cláudio da Silva) in Bangkok and continue her journey in the pursuit of catching up with her runaway fiancé.

On the surface, Grand Tour is an old Hollywood screwball comedy of the battle of the sexes. But it's also a rebuke of the inherent male oriented adventure story- a man wants to be free and subservient woman haplessly pursues the love of her life into foreign lands and dies. In Gomes's hands, the artificiality of footage shot in studios of the exotic locale- jungles, a train wreck, colonial homes, etc., rubs shoulders with the 16mm color footage shot on locations is all the more accentuated. Molly is both that lovelorn girl in silent pictures and stubborn, fraternizing modern woman with a charismatic laugh.

Grand Tour exists on its own floating cinematic biosphere outside spatio-temporal continuum where past and present intermingle, in the context of first-world colonialism and the old-world sexism. It's another delicious concoction from Gomes.

Adieu Godard, Adieu Cinema

Scénarios + Exposé du Film annonce du film "Scénario" (2024) - Godard Jean Luc Godard's last, 17 minute film, Sénarios, which was completed just a day before his 2022 assisted suicide death, is paired with the 36 minute 'making of' documentary for this year's New York Film Festival. For the fans of the late master it is an emotional one. Because it's the last material to see and hear him on screen in his very last days. Originally planned as a feature, this long gestating project had been constantly worked on, even during Covid lockdown. With his failing health, Godard truncated the four part project into two chapters - DNA: Fundamental Elements and MRI: Odyssey. The message is also simplified and more direct. "The final warning," uttered on several occasions to whatever Godard saw as impending for us.

You can tell that the end was on his mind. Images of death, the violent ones at that are displayed - Pina (Anna Magnani)'s Death in Rosselini's Rome, Open City, car wreck that ends Contempt and the infamous car pile up in Week End (both from his own filmography). So are the images of war. Like the DNA itself- the base, the beginning element for all living creatures, Godard here equates the old film clips as what cinema is based upon. The distinctive sound MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging - a modern medical technology of scanning your body for grave illness) machine makes- the beeping, the loud thuds, are incorporated into the latter part of the film. Not new to the procedure at that point in life, Godard signals the end. Beginning and end, of life and cinema, at least his own, ending as well.

Sénarios exhibits primary colors boldly painted on stock papers over the images and words - the technique he used in his later periods with Image Book and the last year's posthumous release, Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars. The colors,shapes, texture painted over collages, Godard was in full late period Mattise mode. At the end, we are shown his exposed old man's hairy torso, as he puffs away his cigar with wild white hair, reading Sartre's aphorism "Using a horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse is less efficient than using a non-horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse." I keep wondering what he would make of the current state of the world - The war in Ukraine and Gaza, the rise of misinformation, the world in chaos.

The making of documentary that follows Scénarios, confirms my assumption about the Mattise comparison. Mattise, wheelchair bound and with physical limitations in his final years, turned to a new type of medium, with the help of his assistants, he began creating paper cut collages (decoupage). Godard, filmed by his long time collaborator Fabrice Argano in 2021, gives detailed instructions on, then, a planned 4 part feature on stock paper cards, what to include, what to cut and what to modify in terms of images, music, colors and what sequences. With a lighter in his hand, we get the rare glimpse of his working method in his last years. It's an invaluable and emotional viewing for the fans of cinema at large.

Bright Lights, Big City

All We Imagine as Light (2024) - Kapadia Payal Kapadia's soul stirring docudrama, A Night of Knowing Nothing, delicately weaved India's national politics, student protest movement and cinema and its nostalgia in 2021. Her follow up narrative film, All We Imagine as Light proves that she is one of the most exciting new talents emerging in the current international cinema scene.

All We Imagine as Light starts with the documentary style footage of bustling Mumbai, as its citizens start the day in a 'city symphony' style intro paired with voice-overs of actual workers who came to the big city, looking for work: street vendors getting ready for their businesses, people hanging on the back of trucks in a packed traffic, large crowd milling in to the commuter train stations, filling in a crowded train cars, talking, sharing music, taking a nap - it's a cacophony of sight and sound of the city of 22 million souls. With this routine, everyday chaos as a backdrop, we are introduced to Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha).

Prabha is a practical, sensible head nurse working in a busy hospital. Her young roommate Anu work at the same hospital as a receptionist. Just like many people, they are transplants from the rural villages who came to look for work in Mumbai. Prabha hasn't seen her husband in years - he left right after their arranged marriage for a factory work in Germany. Anu is a subject of a gossip at work, as she is constantly coming home late, prone to daydream at work and always short on money, that she is secretly in love with Shiaz, a young Muslim man - the relationship that their parents don't approve of.

A mild-mannered doctor takes an interest in Prabha, since he too is a transplant from Kerala region and he can comfortably speak with her in Malayalam, as he still struggles with his Hindi at work. He walks her to the train station and shyly gifts her with his book of poems.

Nights take on a different air in the film as the craziness of the daytime activities slow down and give the city’s inhabitants a slight reprieve. It affords some of the most lyrical scenes in the film - with the rain hitting the window in what seems to be the middle of the region's rainy season, Prabha reads the doctor's poetry with only her phone flashlight while sitting against the window as the train goes by outside her window. After cleaning up the rain leak on the floor one night, Prabha hugs the brand-new red rice cooker that her absent husband supposedly sent (as a farewell gift?) And Anu and her boyfriend frolicking through the night market and sharing a passionate kiss in dimly lit underground parking lot of a mall.

Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a hospital cook, is about to get evicted from her home, in which she has been living in for more than twenty years, due to a shiny new development. Prabha tries to help her by contacting a lawyer. But because of Parvaty's lack of papers - her late husband didn't leave any of the paperwork necessary to prove her residency, she has to resort to go back to her rural village in the south.

Fluidly switching from documenting what it's like living in bustling Mumbai to the melodrama of these three women with their emotional and economical insecurities, All We Imagine as Light comments on many social and political issues in India. The early voice-over suggests that at least one of the family members in each household from the country leaves home to go to work in Mumbai. Anu wears burqa to have a secret rendez-vous with Shiaz in his predominantly Muslim neighborhood, which is an indicative of Modi's right wing Hindu government making it harder to reconcile between Hindu and Muslim relationship. Parvaty attends worker's rights meeting at night and Prabha and Parvaty clandestinely throw stones at the billboard advertising near Parvaty's house, that reads, "Class is privilege reserved for privileged." Kapadia's tapestry of sensorial storytelling and sociopolitical commentary of Mumbai is on the level of Jia Zhangke's observations on changing Shanxi province he frequently depicts in his films.

In the third act of the film, Kapadia changes the film's tempo and breaks the physical, social, political confinement of the city life for the women as Prabha and Anu accompany Parvaty to her home in rural India. In a fantasy sequence where Prabha resuscitates a castaway found on the beach, tells the yearning of a woman who was cruelly abandoned, to imagine a better life. Shiaz who followed Anu to the countryside, gets to be acknowledged in public without scrutiny. All We Imagined as Light is a major work of contemporary Indian cinema. Kapadia along with Chaitanya Tamhane (Court, The Disciple) showcase the emergence of new voices that is not by the Bollywood system, depicting underrepresented working-class India from a woman's perspective, in a still heavily patriarchal society.