Unrest (Cyril Schäublin, 2022)

Clara Gostynski in Unrest

Cast: Clara Gostynski, Alexei Evstratov, Valentin Merz, Laurent Ferrero, Mayo Irion, Monika Stalder, Hélio Thiémard, Li Tavor, Laurence Bretignier, Nikolai Bosshardt. Screenplay: Cyril Schäublin. Cinematography: Silvan Hillmann. Production design: Sara B. Weingart. Film editing: Cyril Schäublin. Music: Li Tavor. 

The portmanteau "docudrama" was coined to denote an attempt to depict an actual event in a medium for fiction. It's kind of an oxymoron, and as a genre it usually works only if the historical element and the artistic element balance each other. Cyril Schäublin's Unrest fails to do so. It dramatizes the visit of the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) to a watchmaking factory in Switzerland in 1877, seven years before the adoption of the Universal Time standard. So we learn that in Berne, where the film takes place, the railroad, the municipality, and the telegraph office each ran on a different clock. You might call this anarchy, but it's a different kind of anarchy than the movement espoused by Kropotkin is concerned with, which centers on the rights of workers, including the ability to govern their work. The watchmakers of Berne, of which Josephine Gräbl (Clara Gostynski) is one, are suffering from the abitrariness and micromanaging of the company, which is determined to improve the efficiency and productivity of the workers, who do labor that demands patience and concentration. So the film has a lot to chew on, from the process of watchmaking to the political struggles of the day to the nature of time itself. Unfortunately, Schäublin also wants to experiment with cinematic technique and likes to savor moments at the expense of forward narrative drive. He seems to expect us to do the work of putting together the historical background while savoring the beauty of his images. He likes, for example, to frame scenes with the characters at the bottom of the screen and sometimes at its corners. Josephine and Kropotkin serve as the central characters to help lead us through the maze of history and ideas with which the film deals, but we often lose sight of them. In short, it's a tantalizing but chilly movie that only a dedicated cinéaste could really love. 

Our Father, the Devil (Ellie Foumbi, 2021)

Babetida Sadjo in Our Father, the Devil

Cast: Babetida Sadjo, Souléyman Sy Savané, Jennifer Tchiakpe, Franck Saurel, Martine Amisse, Maëlle Genet, Hiba el Aflahi. Screenplay: Ellie Foumbi. Cinematography: Tinx Chan. Production design: Philippe Lacomblez. Film editing: Roy Clovis. Music: Gavin Brivik. 

Ellie Foumbi's debut feature, Our Father, the Devil, is a thriller in which all the violent action occurs off-camera. When Marie (Babetida Sadjo) recognizes the new priest, Father Patrick (Souléyman Sy Savané), at the upscale French retirement home where she's the chef, she faints. She thinks he's the man she knew back in Guinea as Sogo, the warlord who raped her and forced her into his cadre of child soldiers. So one night when he comes to her kitchen after hours to ask for a snack, she knocks him out with a cooking utensil, hauls him into her car, and imprisons him in an isolated cabin. When he comes to, he denies that he was the man she once knew until she tortures the truth out of him. It's the setup for a moral fable that Foumbi tells quite well, and the absence of on-screen violence only heightens the tension and reinforces the film's treatment of the ethics of revenge. When Marie is torturing Father Patrick we see instead shots of her chopping vegetables and pounding a cutlet, which sounds comic in description but is really quite effective in the tense atmosphere Foumbi creates. Unfortunately, the tropes of thriller movies sometimes intrude. The scene when Marie and the hot bartender (Franck Saurel) she's been seeing consummate their relationship is gratuitous, and the sequence in which the roles of captive and captor switch back and forth is awkwardly handled. But it's superbly acted, especially by Sadjo and Sy Savané, and gives great promise of Foumbi's future as a director.    

Tótem (Lila Avilés, 2023)

Naíma Sentíes in Tótem

Cast: Naíma Sentíes, Montserrat Narañon, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza, Mateo García, Teresa Sánchez, Iazua Larios, Alberto Amador, Juan Francisco Maldonado, Marisela Villarruel, Galia Mayer, Lukas Urquijo López. Screenplay: Lila Avilés. Cinematography: Diego Tenorio. Production design: Nohemi Gonzalez. Film editing: Omar Guzmán. Music: Thomas Becka. 

I don't cry at movies, but sometimes I hold my breath in awe. I did so at the ending of Lila Avilés's extraordinarily beautiful and accomplished Tótem. I've never seen a film about a dying man so endowed with life. Everyone in Tótem knows that Tonatiuh (Mateo García) is dying, even his small daughter Sol (the enthralling Naíma Sentíes), and that the birthday party they're throwing for him will be his last. But they soldier on, filling this climactic day with brightness and love, along with some tears and some fights. Tona himself is a reluctant participant in the occasion, battling as he is with weakness and incontinence, but he's drawn into it anyway. The film could have been mawkish, but Avilés takes a documentary approach, concentrating on the noise and bustle of a house full of children and animals. The latter include a cat, several dogs, a parrot, a goldfish, some snails, and a few insects, which add the continuity of life to the tale about dying. There are funny scenes, too, one of them involving the charlatan one of Tona's sisters hires to rid the house of evil spirits, making an nuisance of herself and getting the film's biggest laugh with her curtain line. Avilés choreographs the crowd of actors of all ages well, getting fine performances from even the youngest. The cast was unknown to me, although afterward I discovered that I had recently seen Teresa Sánchez, who plays Cruz, the nurse hired to tend to Tona, in quite a different role, as the tough, determined owner of an agave plantation in Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González, 2022). I suspect there was quite a bit of improvisation beyond the script and a few happy accidents that got included, because it's a film that feels lived in.   

The Breaking Ice (Anthony Chen, 2023)

Chiuxio Qu, Haoran Liu, and Dongyu Zhou in The Breaking Ice

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu, Chiuxio Qu, Ruguang Wei, Baisha Liu. Screenplay: Anthony Chen. Cinematography: Jing-Pin Yu. Production design: Luxi Du. Film editing: Hoping Chen, Mun Thye Soo. Music: Kin Leonn. 

Anthony Chen's The Breaking Ice is a post-pandemic fable centered on three members of Generation Z, the cohort that perhaps suffered the greatest cultural dislocation when Covid emerged: At a time when they should have been exploring life's options, setting out on careers, discovering themselves, they were severely restricted. The film also features a relationship that has been oddly prevalent in movies recently, the two-guys-and-a-girl triangle popularized by French New Wave directors in films like François Truffaunt's Jules and Jim (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964). (It was also central to this year's film by Luca Guadagnino, Challengers.) The "girl" in this case is Nana (Dongyu Zhou), who works as a tour guide, a job she certainly doesn't want to turn into a career. Leading a group of tourists, she meets Haofeng (Haoran Liu), who works in finance in Shanghai and has come north for a friend's wedding. He takes the tour to fill time before his flight leaves, but being much younger than the rest of the tour group, he strikes up a conversation with Nana. When they return to the hotel, they continue to see each other, and eventually she introduces him to Xiao (Chiuxio Qu), who has come north to work for his aunt in a restaurant, a job he also doesn't intend to keep. The rest of the film is about the discoveries the somewhat misfit trio make about each other and themselves. Chen is a little too heavy-handed in creating epiphanic moments for his protagonists and with the trope announced in his title, from an opening sequence showing ice being cut into blocks to a scene near the end of the film in which the three protagonists pass an ice cube from mouth to mouth. Still, it's a film with engaging performances and the beautiful scenery of an unfamiliar setting: northeastern China right at the border with North Korea.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023)

Deniz Celiloglu in About Dry Grasses

Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Muzab Ekici, Ece Bagci, Erdem Senocak, Yüksei Aksu, Münir Can Cindoruk, Onur Berk Arslanoglu, Yildrim Gücük, Cengiz Bozkurt, Emrah Özdemir, Elif Ürse, Elt Andaç Çam. Screenplay: Akin Aksu, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Cinematography: Cevahir Sahin, Kürsat Üresin. Production design: Meral Aktan. Film editing: Oguz Atabas, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Music: Philip Timofeyev. 

Midway in the third hour of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses, he breaks the third wall. Actually, he breaks all of them: The camera follows the protagonist down a hall and through a door that opens onto the studio where the set has been constructed. We see the crew moving about in the studio and the actor going to what may be his dressing room, where he takes a pill and then returns to the set. We then follow him back onto the set and the film proceeds with no further such interruptions. It's an audacious moment that breaks the tension but not the mood. We have just witnessed a long scene that's the intellectual and moral heart of the film, and we're anticipating something physical and emotional to happen. The effect is to add another layer to an already complex narrative that centers on the film's anti-hero, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a schoolteacher in a remote Turkish village. Samet hates it. He hates the climate, which he says has only two seasons, winter and summer. In the former it's covered with snow and in the latter with dry grass. He hates the school administration and some of his fellow teachers. He hates the social and political unrest that plagues the region. He hates its poverty and ignorance. And as you can guess, he hates himself for not being able to escape. He also hates his students, except for one pretty young girl, Sevim (Ece Bagci), in whom he takes an interest that will get him into a lot of trouble. His only release is in griping to his roommate, Kenan (Muzab Ekici) and to a woman they meet, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), who teaches at another school in the area. Nuray lost a leg in a terrorist attack, but she copes with the loss and with the less than ideal circumstances in her life. Eventually, the plot will center on the relationship of Samet, Nuray, and Kenan, which Ceylan uses to explore topics like survival, commitment, endurance, and more. Celiloglu is superb at playing a character we come to loathe even as we maintain a certain sympathy for him, but the triumphant performance in the film is by Dizdar, who won the best actress award at Cannes for the film. About Dry Grasses is overlong but it's filled with moments of beauty in which we come to see the landscape that so plagues Samet with other eyes than his.   

A Prince (Pierre Creton, 2023)

Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton in A Prince

Cast: Antoine Pirotte, Pierre Creton, Grégory Gadebois (voice), Vincent Barré, Mathieu Amalric (voice), Manon Schaap, Françoise Lebrun, Chiman Dangi, Pierre Barray, Yves Edouard, Maxime Savouray, Olivier Chaval, Evelyne Didi, Bruno Martin, Marie-Odile Daubeuf. Screenplay: Vincent Barré, Pierre Creton, Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat. Cinematography: PIerre Creton, Léo Gil Mela, Antoine Pirotte. Film editing: Félix Rehm. Music: Jozef van Wissem. 

At a key moment in Pierre Creton's A Prince, Antoine Pirotte, the actor playing Pierre-Joseph, gets out of the bed he's sharing with two other men and is replaced by the much-older director himself, who then assumes the role. The voiceover narrator simply notes that Pierre-Joseph had gotten older. It's clear at that point, if it hasn't been earlier, that the film is deeply rooted in Creton's own experiences, dreams, desires, and vision. So much so, in fact, that it almost becomes a barrier between the viewer and the film, disarming even critical responses to something so personal and idiosyncratic. Some critics, for example, took Creton to task for the "orientalism" of the character Kutta (Chiman Dangi), an Indian, the titular prince, who is viewed as an exotic creature, culminating in a startling nude scene near the end of the film. But it's clear that the Kutta of the film is a reflection of Pierre-Joseph's -- and by extension Creton's -- own imaginings. Similarly, critics objected to the heavy use of voiceover narration, whereas I think Creton resorts to it as a way of suggesting that we all turn the past into stories in our head. This is all to say that I found A Prince fascinating but often opaque, a tantalizing but inaccessible attempt at autobiographical fiction.

Chicken for Linda! (Sébastien Laudenbach, Chiara Malta, 2023)

Cast: Voices of Mélinée Leclerc, Clotilde Hesme, Laetitia Dosch, Estéban, Patrick Pineau, Claudine Acs, Jean-Marie Fonbonne, Antoine Momey, Pietro Sermonti, Scarlett Choleton, Alenza Dus, Anaïs Weller, Milan Cerisier, Anna Parent. Screenplay: Chiara Malta, Sébastien Laudenbach. Film editing: Catherine Aladenise. Music: Clément Ducol. 

Chicken for Linda! is a candy-colored animated feature about a mother's attempt to prepare a chicken dinner for her little girl. It's a film about children and maybe for children, but I wouldn't show it to an averagely inquisitive child unless I was prepared to answer questions about the death of a parent, the stress of a single parent, corporal punishment, family quarrels, organized labor strikes, chicken theft, police enforcement of the law, and the killing of animals for food. (I've probably missed a few. It's been a while since I was a child or had one.) Much of the often frenetic, if colorful, action centers on the attempts to kill the stolen chicken, which is not going to sit well in some households. The whole plot is initiated when the mother, Paulette, slaps Linda for something she didn't do. (The fat purple cat did it.) To make it up to her, the guilt-ridden Paulette promises to make Linda a dinner of chicken with peppers, which Linda recalls as the favorite dish of her father, who died when she was very little. Paulette's efforts to find a chicken are thwarted by a strike that has closed all the markets, so she drives out to the country to find one there. Finding only a sulky teenager at the farm, in desperation Paulette steals one, only to have the cops called on her. And matters get worse when the chicken escapes. Each character has their own bright color, so it's easy to keep track of them once the action gets complex. There are also some interpolated song sequences with the flavor of French pop music. It's an enjoyably lively film unless you really want to examine its subtext, so maybe try not to.
 

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

George MacKay and Léa Seydoux in The Beast

Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Elina Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Jula Faure, Kester Lovelace, Felicien Pinot, Laurent Lacotte. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit, based on a story by Henry James. Cinematography: Josée Deshaies. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Anita Roth. Music: Anna Bonello, Bertrand Bonello.

Bertrand Bonello's The Beast is a jigsaw puzzle of a movie, asking the viewer to assemble the scattered pieces of three distinct stories -- a doomed romance set in early 20th-century Paris, a contemporary suspense thriller about stalker and prey, and a futuristic sci-fi tale about artificial intelligence -- into a single frame. The risk of such non-linear narratives is that the viewer may think that the finished product doesn't reward the effort of putting it all together. Each individual story in The Beast is enough to base an entire movie on. They share a common theme: the intersection of fear and desire. Is anything gained by jumbling them into one another? I think that Bonello knows the central fact about jigsaw puzzles: that the end result, the finished picture, is less important than the pleasure of putting the pieces together. He demonstrates this knowledge by opening his film with a distancing device: Léa Seydoux playing an actress in front of a green screen, being rehearsed through the movements -- a woman taking up a knife to defend herself from an unseen beast -- that will recur in some fashion throughout The Beast. It's a little like the picture on the cover of the puzzle box that helps you know what pieces are likely to go together. It's well-acted, with Seydoux and George MacKay deftly handling the switches between French and English, including the American accent called for in the thriller section, and Bonello achieves some creepy and suspenseful moments throughout. But in the end, I think its success depends mostly on the viewer's willingness to play his game.  

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

Liyo Gong and Stefan Gota in Here

Cast: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Cédric Luvuezo, Teodor Corban, Saadia Bentaïeb, Alida Constantin, ShuHuan Wang, Victor Claudio Zichil, Jovial Mbenga, Sanae Kamlichi. Screenplay: Bas Devos. Cinematography: Grimm Vandekerckhove. Production design: Spela Tusar. Film editing: Dieter Diependaele. Music: Brecht Ameel.

Bas Devos's Here is about soup and moss and names. It's also about fireflies and construction work and family and lab work and evolution and climate change and cities and nature and shorts and rain and long walks and diversity and kindness and whatever sticks in your mind after you watch it and start thinking about it. It must have been an incredibly difficult film to edit: Just how long can and should you hold a shot of men sitting on a bus or branches waving in the breeze before a viewer begins thinking they should watch something else or go get something to eat? I kind of hated it while I was watching and kind of loved it afterward.  

Adieu Bonaparte (Youssef Chahine, 1985)

Patrice Chéreau in Adieu Bonaparte

Cast: Michel Piccoli, Mohsen Mohieddin, Salah Zulfikar, Patrice Chéreau, Mohamad Atef, Ahmed Abdelaziz, Abla Kamel, Hassan Husseiny, Huda Sultan, Dahlia Younès, Christian Patey, Gamil Ratib. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Onsi Abou Seif. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte is about a clash of empires: the nascent one that will be led by Napoleon Bonaparte and the crumbling one that saw Islamic culture spread across much of what was Eurocentrically called "the known world." But its point of view is primarily that of the people caught between these two powerful forces, the people of Egypt, when French forces under the command of Bonaparte, not yet emperor, clash with the Ottoman Turks who then ruled Egypt. Mostly it's about the relationship between a fictional character, the young poet and interpreter, Aly (Mohsen Mohieddin), and the French general Maximilian Caffarelli (Michel Piccoli), an intellectual who had lost a leg in an earlier conflict when the French annexed a territory belonging to Belgium. (The movie repeats a witticism that Caffarelli doesn't care what happens because he'll always have one foot in France.) Caffarelli befriends Aly and his brother Yehia (Mohamad Atef) partly because he's sexually attracted to the young men, but also because he has a curiosity about Egyptians and their culture. Meanwhile, Bonaparte (Patrice Chéreau) suffers a defeat when Admiral Nelson destroys his fleet and forces him to stay in Egypt. Chéreau gives a wonderful performance as the preening but determined man who would be emperor, and Piccoli is equally fine as Caffarelli. Mohieddin holds his own with the French stars, as Aly struggles with his admiration for Caffarelli and his loyalty to his brother Bakr (Ahmed Abdelaziz), a leader in the struggle for Egyptian self-determination. It's a handsomely filmed production, with fine work by cinematographer Mohsen Nasr and an epic score by Gabriel Yared. But it's also often hard to follow, with its swarm of characters, many of them members of Aly's family, and its historical backstory. Chahine has a tendency to overload his narratives with incidents that distract from or seem only tangential to the main story.