Tropical vegetation on a bluish thunderous sky. Red peppers dry impassively on a tin roof. What seems to be a gunshot wakes up the birds, but is it? A couple of glasses are topped up with wine, red too, of a particularly garish tint. A woman’s hand clumsily drops some ice in one and picks it up, making the cubes clink insistingly, almost uncomfortably. Garden chairs are wearily dragged on the paving around a disused swimming pool. The putrid water. An awkwardly choreographed dance of aged tan bodies and abusive screechy sounds. Much hustle to go nowhere, not far. And then, definitely, another distant gunshot.
The opening sequence of La ciénaga, however annoyingly intercut with black title cards sporting a questionable graphic effect, is beyond description. A stroke of bravura, both narrative and directorial, not only acting as a proper ouverture to the story that is about to unfold, but also quietly hinting at the current sociopolitical state of the country. Argentina at last millennium sunset, that is.
Lucrecia Martel’s striking feature debut is wet and green and sweaty. It smells of swamp, it has its colours, and the carnal weight of the murky depth of a pond. It is a film soaked in muddled conflicts that moves at the pace of the adults’ compliant ineptitude, while the young are desperately urged to grow, if into a cynical disillusion. Formally mirroring the intro, in the final scene Momi noisily drags a chair to sit next to her sister Veronica, who’s placidly lying by the pool in the unbearable heat. ‘Adónde fuiste?’ asks the latter, seemingly resurrecting from a nap. ‘Fui donde se apareció la Virgen.’ Long pause. ‘No vi nada.’

Discerning a parallel between the feral creature masterly incarnated by Michel Piccoli and the figure of the film director is almost inescapable. He goes round the house like a sleuth, equally attracted by a seductive woman and a rusty old contraption. He experiences the surroundings with juvenile interest, showing the same cynical detachment while skilfully cooking, recording normal sounds, reviving memories on the wall, licking honey on a pearly skin, or building a functioning pistol to then make it an improbable work of art—like a tormented storyteller in search of subjects, and his own self, as tedium triggers creativity in the most unexpected ways. Dillinger è morto is at once a daring existentialist satire and a witty reflection on the nature of cinema. So, is Dillinger really dead?
In Marco Ferreri’s inspired vision, identity crumbles as things are progressively dispossessed, becoming an addictive object of curiosity for the senses. Seamlessly assuming the form of an apartment, or a playroom, the world is designed by a bored man that clashes with the impossibility of designing himself as a human being, and so as such fails. Gestures and interactions lose their meaning fed by an aimless intellectual need for exploration that fails too, eventually reverting to the trivial. Touching, watching, tasting, hearing—like a child, he acknowledges his being an alien to the world he created around himself, and fleets from the nonsense to the unknown, to experience the illusion of a new excitement while nothing will stop the setting of a sun also made of plastic.

Herzog, Pasolini, Leone, Olmi, Alice Rohrwacher, even Nicolas Winding Refn—and of course the Taviani brothers, as any time a grumpy peasant, and a loner, is seen on screen. If so many critics have felt the tactless urge to compare it with with the works of such a prestigious host of filmmakers, it can’t be solely because they had nothing else to say—Re Granchio does encourage comparisons. And yet, being the fortunate fantasy of some passionate cinephiles prone to respectful homages, doesn’t mar in the slightest its value.
Like the folktales handed down by the elderly, often enriched by the extra glass of wine, Re Granchio is a crafty patchwork of different styles and narratives. Elaborating a fragmentary legend running among the regulars of an actual hunt house who meaningfully appear in the film as a sort of passing on the baton, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis go to the roots of storytelling to create the enigmatic character to whom artist Gabriele Silli lends his towering figure and magnetic stare. A drunkard, a free spirit and a fine thinker, a charlatan, a traveller, or a criminal, Luciano is the ousted nobody, an improbable and scruffier Ulysses who takes us from Tuscia to the edge of the world, incarnating the very essence of the romantic hero—the adventurer of his own life, struggling through and against his ineludible idiosyncrasies in search of atonement.
No matter how messy or flawed, Re Granchio’s genuine candidness and evocative imaginary are too attractive to let wordy scrutinies or presumptuous intellectual ejaculations get in the way—this is just cinema in its truest and most poignant incarnation. Aren’t we, after all, following too un cangrejo, persuading ourselves, step after step, that it is showing us the way?

‘Svanì per sempre il sogno mio d’amore.
L’ora è fuggita, e muoio disperato.
E non ho amato mai tanto la vita.’

What never ceases to fascinate me of the films made in the fortunate decade that starts around the end of the Sixties and conventionally ends with the infamous production experience of Heaven’s Gate, is that on top of being daring both technically, visually, and narratively, they are weird to the bones in a way that we have almost forgotten. Or at least largely has contemporary cinema.
Using the disturbing imagery of an industrial poultry farming machinery as a loosely metaphorical background, Death Laid an Egg follows a typical love triangle degenerating from boring daily inertia to havoc. As the theme of genetic manipulation is randomly dropped to provide some sort of secondary narrative leverage, the final part of the film gets a little clunky and unfocused. But what still makes it successful, and so inherently unsettling, are not its preposterous avian features, but rather the inner contradictory monstrosity of all its characters. A tormented man helplessly cornered by a convenient marital stability that plans a horrific murder otherwise showing a sturdy ethical sensitivity. A loving if superficial wife turning out to be a ruthless entrepreneur. A sweet and caring, almost childish, young lady seduced by trivial material pulses. A cynical scientist, a fake publicist, and a bunch of hooligan workers. None of them is empathic. They are all in some way disappointing, nauseating, obnoxious.
Dealing with more domestic demons than Elio Petri’s soon to be conceived Trilogy of Neurosis, Giulio Questi’s satire delves into moral and intellectual human aberrations with the same anxiety and scepticism that are intrinsic to a certain disenchanted way to look at modernity, and therefore the future.
In Questi’s words, ‘Industrialization was a rising tide that overwhelmed everything, a hymn to the future, a frenetic packaging of products without distinction between inanimate and animate, that still alive screamed in terror and pain. The big farms were a symbol of this. Each chicken was a man, each hen a woman, each chick a child. Wealth was built on them. And the egg triumphed over everything, white, smooth, perfect, with the life closed inside. Sexual perversion remained the only possible way out.’

I am not old enough to have met a Viking in person so I don’t know how they really looked like, though out of the many fantasies our perverted imagination produced about them, one above all I like to think true—that they could actually grab a spear in flight, turn it with one hand, and throw it back. Robert Eggers’s muscular epic distils in two hours of cold and grunts and fire, centuries of literature, legends, iconography of one of the most attractive populations in history, and one that recursively inspired legions of artists of any sort. But where the aesthetics gloriously succeed, everything else limps and eventually stumbles, making The Northman land not far enough from an empty Lion King with vain Shakespearean ambitions, and confirming that Eggers’s narrative skills are not yet as developed as his visual instincts. ‘A good revenge movie always works. Even if you don’t personally believe in the idea of vengeance, you know it’ll be fun to watch.’¹ True that, yet to me the potential of both the material and the author deserved a lot more than the fun-to-watch element.
While the ethereal presence of Anya Taylor-Joy, the beardy animality of Ethan Hawke, and Alexander Skarsgård’s physical and dramatic intensity are to be regarded among the heights of the film, I found Nicole Kidman miscast, her performance off, and her character in itself poorly written. As a similarly missed opportunity, it is a brilliant intuition that Amleth should eventually discover to have sought revenge for the wrong man, and therefore be torn between seeing King Aurvandil as a caring father, a ruthless ruler, or a brutish husband—but of this intriguing emotional complexity, there’s only a superficial hint that lasts the time of a couple of shots and disappears immediately after. Too bad, and yet for some reason I am already looking forward to his next.

1. Robert Eggers: ‘This is me trying to do Conan the Barbarian by way of Andrei Rublev’, Charles Bramesco (Little White Lies, 12 April 2022).

Whether real or ingeniously faked, filmmakers have been recursively attracted over the decades by telling a story in one continuous take. Having made it more achievable than in Hitchcock times, digital cameras have recently renewed the interest. But only a few have succeeded where many haven’t gone beyond making it look like a nerdy gimmick. Boiling Point easily stands out amongst the former. For once, it does feel narratively apt being able to follow the action in its hectic and erratic authenticity. Tons of television programs have made us relatively acknowledged on the hardships behind the double swinging doors of a restaurant kitchen, but rarely fiction has managed to dramatise the atmosphere so vividly. Scripting the entire piece even where improvisation seems to be taking place, Philip Barantini brilliantly mixes near documentary elements with captivating individual characters’ backstories. Professional and personal dynamics intersect and clash and overlap, to truly exhilarating cinematic results.
From the opening tracking shot on Stephen Graham marching to work while apologising on the phone for some parental negligence of his, what makes Boiling Point immediately resonate—with me at least—is its tragic being a rather accurate depiction of our brave modern life, and not even much in a parodic or caricatured way. No need to reach the extents of drugs and booze abuse—although again, both more round the corner than they may seem—to get trapped by an unhealthy form of addiction. ‘I need to stop,’ says chef at some point, sweaty and exhausted. Well, I promise I am not being rhetorical by saying I could clearly hear my own voice pronouncing it, with Scouse accent too.

The shadow of a warning is cast by Blier’s outrageously daring urban nightmare. Its characters are not just cynical, irrational, or perhaps indifferent to what we may consider the received range of emotions—they simply react according to a subverted logic which is perfectly coherent, but to a different set of values. To an even more absurdist effect, Blier places the individualist feral pulses of his creatures in a cold and largely empty dehumanised environment. The aesthetics of Buffet froid echo the void embodied by the lonely figures who inhabit it—desolated train stations, soulless modernist spaces, dismal interiors of metal beams, concrete walls, wooden boxes, and a near post atomic deserted natural nowhere. The only hint to traditional beauty, art that is, in the form of Brahms’s music, is in fact a nuisance that triggers more distress, estrangement, and victims. Whether this is a menacing projection of our contemporary society or a witty caricature of it, is for the audience to say—and for them to take the leap beyond the comedic appearance of the film. Of course, that was the tense and erratic decade that followed the hysterical optimism of the previous, and yet I wonder if those concerns have really vanished forty years on. If I still burst out laughing when Depardieu introduces his new visitor to his neighbour, the police inspector, bluntly saying, ‘Je vous présente l’assassin de ma femme,’ is because some truth in that humour has outlived its time.

There is a certain clunky patchiness to Koberidze’s ambitious digressions, as if he was too besotted with his intuitions—some arguably quite striking—to be able to distil them into something truly exhilarating. The same apparent lack of focus seems to extend to the aesthetics of the film, making it look at times like the work of a cinephile revealing too much of his influences. Koberidze mentioned Russian director Aleksandre Rekhviashvili—regrettably unknown to me—as one, while I couldn’t help discerning traits of Paolo Sorrentino’s lyricism and Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist sense of humour.
And yet, as I find myself more and more bewildered by the discreet observations of the human and beastly creatures of the ancient city of Kutaisi, I realise that it is right because of its naivety that What do we see seduces.
In and out of urban folktales and personal idiosyncrasies, I slowly get what Koberidze said in an interview¹, finding it thoroughly inspiring. ‘For me, to make a film is to film the things that interest me, not necessarily just a story. I really like to go out sometimes and make pictures and watch what’s going on. I think there are enough fairy tales and secrets in the things you can see everywhere.’ Which kind of echoes a brilliant quote from Russian animator Yuri Norstein, also mentioned by Koberidze. ‘The simpler the story, the more time you have for the film.’

1. Interview: Alexandre Koberidze, Jessica Kiang (Film Comment, 12 October 2021).

Despite the many characters and relative subplots, Peterloo is a masterwork of striking simplicity and linearity. Mike Leigh finds under layers of dust a shameful piece of history forgotten in the attic, and tells it with a combined sense of stage austerity and epic scale.
The enigmatic background of the opening credits, somehow reminded me of the minimalist beauty of nature as captured in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film—an almost abstract stillness at once grim and bucolic, that immediately sets the tone of the entire film. Moments later we experience the desolation on the battlefield of Waterloo through the eyes of a bewildered and traumatized bugler. There are screams, explosions, smoke, and corps, and yet it feels so very intimate and surreal—all the more as the young soldier randomly plays his sorrowful trumpet, quite off tune. It is an extremely powerful sight that, jarring with the praise with which Wellington will be shortly saluted, silently foretells the tragic epilogue.
In another fantastic sequence, Dorothy Atkinson sings with sombre optimism a touching ballad about the times getting hard. ‘For the sun it will shine, on the weavers again, for weaving of late, has been eclipsed a main.’ All the sound effects go suddenly quiet making her words even more piercing. From under the brick arches of a lower class market, their echo will resound all the way to the final stomach-churning scene—and beyond.
A brutal memento of the human political meannesses, Peterloo is an ever timely story that plants a heavy seed in the viewer’s mind.