At its debut at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Ashim Ahluwalia’s chameleonic Miss Lovely was declared a new type of anti-Bollywood cinema aimed squarely at providing an antidote to the mass-produced, broadly-appealing entertainment that is such a lucrative and successful business in Indian popular culture. That Ahluwalia chose to do so by directly addressing the debased, cheaply produced “C-grade” subgenre of Hindi cinema – mired as it is with its unique cocktail of schlocky horror and soft porn of questionable taste – only served to raise the public estimation of artistic ambition for the project, and Cannes’ Un Certain Regard audiences responded in suit at an intellectual level on which few expected the film would be registering. Two years down the track, Miss Lovely has picked up a excitable distributor (very excitable, if this Twitter account is anything to go by) and wide-release audiences can finally decide for themselves where they land on this bold, intriguing feature.

Shot in a pseudo-damaged, vintage film print style best compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse aesthetic, Miss Lovely opens on one such picture produced by brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) in late ‘80s Bombay. Splicing together low-fi horror stories with sloppily-directed sexual interstices, director Ahluwalia confronts his audience immediately with a disquieting contrast in the way the huge, predominantly-male audiences respond to the material in juxtaposition to how his present audience, watching Miss Lovely, might. As sleazy as the films are on an objective level, Vicky and Sonu represent opportunists giving the people what they want, with often hypnotic, frenzied reactions from the masses they are pleasing. With this simple demonstration of the base economic forces of supply and demand, Ahluwalia begins to tap into a kind of widely saturated, openly felt sexual repression within his culture whose darker pyschological impacts and impetuses prove his most exciting moral and intellectual area to plumb.

Things turn sour between the brothers and their distributors – higher ups within organised crime circles – when they try their hand at going direct to the multiplexes with their work. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the exploitative nature of his business, Sonu, the more reserved brother, begins to imagine a life where his work has a bit more artistic merit. Miss Lovely, to be his own, personal project, will be a ‘truly romantic’ love story, and his designs include for the shy, inexperienced, incorrupt beauty Pinky (Niharika Singh) to star. Sonu’s intrigue turns expectantly and quickly to love for his muse, and Ahluwalia follows his protagonist right down the rabbit hole of repressed desire, then total lust, then a more dangerous obsession and unwavering resolve to redeem and salvage her from the plight of his brother’s leering grip. Ahluwalia’s formal presentation follows a similar trajectory, the tone changing constantly with Sonu’s circumstances: it’s at times C-grade sleaze, at others a dreamily lensed love story, then later still an absorbing thriller replete with pounding music and bodies and suspects and chases.

It’s Miss Lovely’s final turn and leap forward in time that is likely the cause of both the film’s rapturous praise on the one hand, and criticism of a rather bleak, defeatist outlook on the part of its director on the other. Reuniting the brothers after a personal ordeal has enforced a schism between them, Ahluwalia truncates the story with a revelation about Pinky that necessitates a chaos at once abrupt, final, and hugely challenging for audiences to reconcile. It’s a clear statement of amibition for his cinema to align with what I might loosely coin the ‘pop-art’ works of the best Hitchcock, Scorsese and P.T. Anderson: American entertainments that prove themselves, on repeated viewings, underlain with deeply serious social-cultural concerns. Whatever it is that Ahluwalia is trying to say – and Miss Lovely is certainly one to invite many interpretations – it is unequivocally no Bollywood song-and-dance. I daresay he might equate such a gloriously upbeat thing with saying nothing at all.

Following his recent announcement of a retirement from directing, it’s difficult to ascribe any thoughts to Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises without also finding the analogue between himself and his subject. Both are concerned with the aspirations of a life’s work and the implausibility of trying to assess this work in hindsight. Rather than trying for the ambitious, all-encompassing masterpiece to the kind of surreal, fantastical worlds that saw his imaginative vision the most revered in animation from any nation, The Wind Rises dials it down, bringing it all back home to Earth. With this straightforward biopic of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, Miyazaki offers viewers his most subtly restrained and arguably “grown-up” work in years.

That Miyazaki adopts a traditional three-act structure following Jiro through childhood, adolescence and adulthood does little to suppress the profound power of his wonder-filled imagery. Instead, the long passages depicting the gritty, harsh realities of early thirties Japan serve  to underscore the otherworldliness of his dream sequences, in a manner most similarly achieved by Guillermo del Toro in 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The many foreboding, and frankly apocalyptic, visions of Jiro’s creations causing destruction suggest the deeply humanist or environmentalist thread that runs through Miyazaki’s oeuvre and, simultaneously, the subconscious reservations Jiro holds for the capacity of his designs to cause harm.

The film has an encouraging complexity that results in occupying this troubling space, with the idea that art has an inherent potency and power that, like anything that contains embedded energy, can be manipulated or misused by the hands of its beholder. Miyazaki’s thesis is that such matters are beyond the realm of the artist, whose responsibility to the world is merely to enrich it with their innovation. So much attention has been drawn to the political and moral dimension of Miyazaki’s taking this stance; his perceived indifference some attribute to an awestruck representation of Jiro’s designs, which were used prominently in Japan’s World War II efforts. I applaud the boldness of a director interested in seeking something truer and more universal within his work: if that truth is more difficult to palate, less distinctly leftly or rightly leaning, then so be it. Who would live in a world without Pyramids?

The Wind Rises is unlike Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke, which in the final analysis might vie for chief position amongst Miyazaki’s finest works. Its appeals are less immediately present, like a record that needs several spins before it grows on you and begins to saturate your thinking. Slower and more deliberate, the film is nonetheless loaded with exquisite matte backdrops packing the kind of selective detail that remind us of the complete command over every minute element of visual storytelling Miyazaki had learned over the better part of 75 years drawing, rendering and animating. When the backdrops themselves move, like in an earthquake sequence that is the picture’s early action centrepiece, it’s a shockingly cathartic experience that speaks to an overarching theme of giving oneself over to the laws of nature. Its forces — earth, rain, fire and the titular wind — continually propel Miyazaki’s characters into situations where they come to understand aspects of themselves and one another.

It’s less hokey than I make it sound, even when we consider a central love story (with saintly, chance childhood acquaintance Nahoko) rounding out the life of a man who was guilty of an almost defeatist commitment to perfecting his work. Defying the sentimentalist traps of its controversial, artistically-licensed inclusion into Jiro’s real story, its earnest and humbly sincere presentation refuses to be trivialised or marginalised as unnecessary fluff: it’s moving, goddamnit, when anyone tells anyone they would wait one hundred years to be together, because a hundred years is such a long time.

If this is to be it, then Hayao Miyazaki has gifted us with one last work of understated mastery. The Wind Rises represents no showboating, no easily digestible adventure. It’s a hard, devastating and uncompromising work of art that holds deep-seated insights into the difficult nature of having art as one’s calling. As a closer to a storied and rich career, we can ask of nothing more from the man than that.

Martin Scorsese went cold after surprising everybody with his 2006 Best Picture winning The Departed. Years of toiling for Oscar with big-scale period epics like Gangs of New York and The Aviator reaped little reward. Instead, it was a violent, rapidly-paced gangster picture with its loose roaming camera that finally gave a great director his due. In the seven years since, he’s made a slick thriller from a popcorn crime page-turner (Shutter Island), a couple of music documentaries (Shine a Light and George Harrison: Living in the Material World), a love-letter to his art disguised as a family movie (Hugo), but nothing to match the equal parts existential tragedy and offhanded comedy of the aforementioned Oscar champ; his best film since setting the mold with Goodfellas. Cue The Wolf of Wall Street, the 5-times nominated gonzo Jordan Belfort biopic that, while hardly ‘indie,’ is more against-grain than you’d think.

Working from a script by his Boardwalk Empire collaborator and show runner Terrence Winter, with The Wolf of Wall Street  Scorsese sets a feverish pace and never lets up, as if defying anyone to get bored across its epic, 180-minute runtime. A quick scene-setting with a wide-eyed graduate Belfort and his mentor, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, who can currently do no wrong) thrusts us right into the mindset of the wolfish stockbrokers that guide the audience through this twisted version of that elusive dream: pump some people up, screw some people over, then subject mind and body to enough excess to forget the amorality of it all. The film doesn’t waste it’s time getting into the specifics of the acts of swindling executed by Belfort and his merry pack of deranged bandits. Scorsese is more focused on the life they lived as a result of it: the seductive extravagance of it, the excitable glee we feel toward it as we live vicariously through the actions unfolding. It’s a hardline stance against giving the film a moral compass to relate to (and Academy members love their moral compasses) that has equally found detractors decrying Scorsese’s glorification of the depravity, and champions praising the artistic verve in his aligning the camera with the repugnant pricks, so that we experience the same empty, uncaring attitude they hold for their victims; the same selfishly indulgent attention for only their possessions, their own highs, their own comedowns and sexual coups.

It’s brash, bold filmmaking, but those qualities are worn like a face tattoo: overtly apparent and even attention-seeking, as if Scorsese wanted to subtly remind us he made Goodfellas by taking a megaphone into an echo chamber and blaring “Remember when I made Goodfellas?!?” Leonardo DiCaprio gives a brilliantly committed performance as a classically deluded Scorsesian protagonist, blind to his steadily advancing comeuppance because his brain renders ideas quicker than his rearview can reveal the speed bumps. But when he breaks the fourth wall to remind us we don’t really care about the technicalities of what he did, it’s his best Henry Hill conceding to the artifice of the work of art. And when he’s doing his best His Left Foot, in a magnificent expired quaaludes sequence that’s both a peak and nadir in Belfort’s story, it’s with the kind of satisfying, outwardly showy performing that makes you miss the frustrated, inwardly-focused anguish that so marked his unawarded career-best work in The Departed.

Still, add in the comic chops of Jonah Hill, as deranged caporegime Donnie, and a relatively unknown Margot Robbie (as Belfort’s second wife, Naomi) — who, for better or worse, has nailed the sort of role that will make her a lot better known — as well as bit parts from Hollywood’s finest just-shy-of-A-Listers (McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin, to name a few), and The Wolf of Wall Street offers more than enough to satisfy at the cineplex. It’s an explicitly funny, absolutely entertaining three hours that nonetheless leaves us with a distinctive sense of emptiness, despite the fullness of aesthetic experience to which we’ve just been subject. Scorsese means precisely to close the film with his camera turned back to the audience, with a moment that — in perhaps another nod to The Departed — is almost cheekily literal. In spite of its length, it’s been said that The Wolf of Wall Street barely scratches the surface, hardly covering half of the story contained in the book. It may have just been a running time thing. Maybe I look too hard for poetics. But I like the idea that Scorsese wanted his audience to close the loop by design.

The Wolf of Wall Street trailer:

In light of Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips — in which Tom Hanks’ performance is the tip of an iceberg of Oscar winning collaborators involved in a terse, modern-day piracy movie — the far fewer-studded Danish thriller A Hijacking (Kapringen) has likely fallen by the wayside. My respect for Greengrass (despite Green Zone) aside, Captain Phillips draws few similarities to A Hijacking, even given the shared dramatic premise: white man’s (Danish, American) ship is hijacked by Somali pirates demanding obscene sums of money for hostages. Rather, what director Tobias Lindholm has achieved with A Hijacking seems counter to every trope from which more conventional Hollywood-backed thrillers (among which we can count Captain Phillips) are made.

Yet here are two remarkably gripping and effective movies that are unlikely to escape comparisons to one another, in spite of their vastly different formal and performative sensibilities. This is not a think-piece espousing upon a pious white hat-black hat division with regard to correct or incorrect filmmaking styles. I’m hoping instead to look at their differences as contributing factors to similarly white-knuckle viewing experiences: both have in common highly contemporary presentations of the medium, but in many respects the ways in which the stories are told form a kind of unmissable and inherent flag-waving for the aesthetic, moral and emotional values of their makers and subjects.

We can’t rush these people. Time is a Western thing. It means nothing to them.

A Hijacking

The titular act of hijacking in A Hijacking is never shown: the first clue that director Lindholm has other priorities. The importance is not in reliving the ordeal that young father and Cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek) and crew endured when their cargo ship was taken upon, but the fact that—cut—here they are, suddenly in a situation nobody expected and fewer are prepared for.

Back home in Copenhagen, CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) is busy caught between expert hostage-scenario negotiators, headed by frankly-speaking Brit Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), and a board of advisors within the company growing increasingly finicky about the political ramifications for their business as the situation grows increasingly — and unapologetically, with Lindholm’s dispassive tally of chronological title-carding through not days, but weeks and months — drawn out.

With a stoic, subdued but no less impressive performance for its restraint, Malling plays a man-in-charge in too far above his head, incapable and unwilling to let anyone see it. Advised by the experts to let the experts do the talking, Peter insists on negotiating with the pirates personally, feeling a responsibility and accountability for his men that is both heroic and, in a moment of both knowing and dread for the audience, foolhardy.

In extraordinary circumstances where human lives — their families and livelihoods — are reduced to seemingly meaningless numbers of dollars, the common gut reaction is to just give them what they want. That the expert negotiators insist on playing the riskiest hardball (a figure of millions demanded by the pirates is retorted by a nominal increase of tens of thousands to a base of mere hundreds of thousands, for example) is not a tactic driven by profits or money-saving, but a strategy of psychological chess-boarding that more emotionally-attached men like Peter struggle with. In numerous instances, Peter must hang up on a member of his crew begging for their life, offering a curt, dismissive “I will not discuss this with you,” when we can feel he is seeking nothing more than his own redemption through their safe release. Scenes showing Peter alone, before and after these calls, highlight the incredible toll they take and elicit genuine sympathy for the corporate bigwig in a suit. Lindholm understands, and makes us understand, that negotiations of this sort benefit little from bombastic threats or rash decisions: that sometimes silence speaks louder than words, even in the most extraordinary cases.

Onboard, the bargaining on behalf of the Somali pirates falls to interpretor Omar, in a chilling and terrific turn by Abdihakin Asgar both sympathetic and, on a whim, frightening. Omar insists, persistently, to Mikkel and crew that though he speaks their language and speaks for them, he is not one of them. In one scene in particular Mikkel crosses this line, a phone call to his wife dramatically turning into perhaps the most psychologically harrowing moment of the picture. It’s a reminder from Lindholm that regardless of the surface-level formality and sense of ordered, polite transactions he so effectively and unflashily portrays, A Hijacking is dealing with complex, subtextual exchanges of power; where every word selection, every second delayed in response, carries with it communicative consequences that impact the final negotiation.

The turn of events that lead to the resolution of conflicts may well be hardwired into the fact that the pirates understand humanity. But the undercutting of this moment, the closest A Hijacking comes to traditional sentimentality, in the coda brilliantly and daringly underscores that this is a film that remains attuned to the immeasurable and finally unpredictable chaos of the modern world.

If they find you, remember—you know this ship, they don’t.

Captain Phillips

For a director known for his ability to bring a frenetic urgency to action filmmaking, yet do so in a way that the viewer remains oriented and aware of the stakes, Captain Phillips must rate as one of Paul Greengrass’ most accomplished achievements. He showed with the cathartically powerful United 93 (2006) and in the more conventionally thrilling The Bourne Ultimatum (2007’s franchise high) a brand of you-are-there cinematography and rapid-fire editing that has become his signature, but equally found him detractors.

Greengrass’ is a cinema of seemingly mundane scenarios repeatedly revisited and cross-cut amidst a melange of other mundane scenarios, acutely aware and across all the tiny little details that are unraveling a greater narrative tension slowly building. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but regardless of whether you want to allow it to, it works. No filmmaker is better at depicting a good day gone bad than Greengrass, and Captain Phillips captures a good day gone particularly bad indeed for Richard Phillips (the inimitable Tom Hanks).

Working from a script by Billy Ray from Phillips’ own memoir, the witnessing of the buildup and inevitable hijacking of Maersk Alabama, the US Cargo ship sailing the Somali Coast, is paramount. It’s a partly dramatic and partly political directorial decision to provide such emphasis on the event: two skiffs approaching fast, one with a more motivated band of pirates than the other, dissuaded as the latter are by the perimeter of high-speed water jets brought up to defend the oncoming attack. Where the Europeans were content with a mere smash-cut to the sticky situation, Greengrass is here purposefully trying to provide an elongated context for Phillips’ heroism beyond whatever even he deemed himself capable: that here is a man who has worked his way to the top through a disciplined study of process and protocol, but that despite his best preparations the ship’s resources — and by extension the institutions that provided them — have failed him; that here is an instance where a man should be able to just reach for a fucking gun. But as marine regulations of the time (circa 2009) dictated all Cargo ships were to sail unarmed, Phillips is left to rely on his own resourcefulness and personality to try and reach a resolution in his interactions with Muse (impressive first-timer Barkhad Adbi), his Somali counterpart.

There is a gleeful sense of schadenfreude when Muse and his crew learn they’ve boarded an American ship, as if they’ve struck some kind of moral jackpot in doing so. Muse makes a habit of mocking Phillips’ Irish heritage, even as they grow to understand each other over the standoff; one of many knowingly cynical jabs at the status of the United States as a much-touted land of opportunity. When things invariably escalate to a point where both Phillips and Muse are backed into their corners, a desperation emerges in each that takes remarkably different forms. Muse finds himself in a life or death scenario: literally on a sinking, claustrophobic lifeboat, his hostage his only bargaining chip, his rag-tag band of pirates variously injured or frustratingly inept, losing hope but seeing no way forward but to commit to a fight he can’t win. Across the boat, we see in Phillips’ eyes the startling realisation that Muse is realising exactly this. As the almost cartoonishly Yankee-sounding S.E.A.L ‘negotiator’ cooly disseminates radio instruction with unfailingly exact protocol, syntax and procedure, we feel the weight of a land with seemingly infinite resources flexing its muscle, but doing so only as and when provoked in the appropriate manner. If the Somalis question the American Dream for non-Americans, there is no questioning this—the finality of the end, and the restoration, however momentary, of order to the modern world.

That we have so deeply related to Phillips is testament to the effortless niceness and rounded comprehensibility of Hanks as a presence and a performer. For all his brave and Big (pun intended) performances in the past, his Phillips resonates because he seems, this time, to be trying so very little; and similarly for all the prevailing America, Fuck Yeah! that can be felt in the inevitable third act, Greengrass too manages to make something subversive by dialing back the largess of the patriotic sentiment. Are our emphatic responses to the clinical efficiency of the Marines not motivated by the same impulses that caused a cackle when the Somalis realised they’d jumped an American ship? In Captain Phillips‘ understated, but unexpectedly moving final scene, Hanks unravels with a kind of ‘un’-acting acting that brandishes any semblance of method, technique, or studied process, and which brings the film to a thematic and experiential converging: we are right there, with him, like him, not knowing where we are — or where we stand.

As a bracing, painfully honest look at the artistic temperament in its full kaleidoscopic nature, few films will come as close this year as Zachary Heinzerlig’s Cutie and the Boxer. Following the trials and tribulations of Japanese-born, New York-based ‘action’ painter Ushio Shinohara (the ‘Boxer’ in question, owing to his dipping fists in paint and punching to apply layers of abstract colour to his huge canvases), this efficiently-made documentary is by turns subtly powerful and deeply sad, given our introduction to the counterpoint to Ushio’s ‘genius:’ unflailing Noriko, wife and lifetime supporter and carer. When the action opens we’re witnessing the couple well into their twilight years (Ushio is an Octogenerian and Noriko late into her 60s), in a makeshift and far from glamorous New York loft and studio, still living with an air of bohemian spontaneity but at least, it seems, content.

Far from content, though, is director Heinzerlig with just crafting a hagiography of The Artist for that more obscure Lennon-Ono you probably haven’t heard of. With a whimsical contrast in style, Heinzerlig opts for hand-drawn animation to delve into the troubled shared past of Ushio and Noriko. He was almost 40, eccentric, ambitious and wild, and successful in his homeland before making a cocksure move to Manhattan; she 19, a starstruck art student with well-to-do parents that kept her afloat while she fell in love under guise of working towards her qualification. When that fell through, Ushio and Noriko were left to fend for themselves financially over the tumultuous next four decades which saw Ushio fall into bouts of Alcoholism, wavering between bursts of passionate creation and an nihilistic outlook toward his art. Meanwhile, Noriko effectively gave up her own career to absorb Ushio’s turbulent changes of affect, alternating moments of self-aggrandizing Ego with moments demonstrative of the generous, infectious love she was drawn to all those years ago.

The animation affords Cutie and the Boxer a sense of undeveloped, childlike immediacy in sentiment that is key to the emotional effectiveness of the film as a whole. In the same way that Isao Takahata’s animated Grave of the Fireflies (1988) employed the medium as a buffer between a difficult and in many ways traumatic subject matter and having an audience understand those feelings without being subject to direct re-enactment, Cutie and the Boxer too frames Noriko’s silent suffering in ways that alarm with their simplicity but achieve their impact precisely because of it. We begin these sequences unsure if the narrator is the director Heinzerlig or Noriko herself, but as her own work burgeons because of (or perhaps in spite of) all the attention paid to Ushio, we slowly realise we are witnessing the liberation of an individual, highly singular artist in her own right. Noriko’s meticulously drawn cartoons are full of the narrative, repressed feeling and labored-after, thought-about technique that the work of her husband can be argued to ‘lack’. If his art is about an essential kinetic energy and iterative, impulsive aesthetic judgments through the layers of abstraction, the two exhibited in tandem could not provide a greater material and philosophical contrast.

A combined show of this kind is precisely what Heinzerling works towards as the climactic moment of the documentary. No doubt the issue of artistic and creative competition among the couple is prevalent, providing dramatic tension, but Henzerlig’s generosity in his shaping of the film is in not leaving this a clear, clean, black and white dynamic. Regret and resentment form only smaller parts of a more complex relationship that marries the petty with the intangibles that form the bonds of long love. When we watch the reactions of these parents to their son Alex – who, we learn, is very much his Father’s Son in temperament – there is an inimitable sense of true failed opportunity, a sense of loss, but not of fingerpointing between the couple, and through it all a humanity shines through in the acceptance of whatever shortfalls he might have, and an ability to support him through it: to love, anyway. In this freely structured but both intimate and impartial document of the artist as a persona, it’s a reflection of the extraordinarily elastic relationship his parents share with each other — one that, I suspect (and perhaps Heinzerling is offering) is not so uncommon or extraordinary at all.

Cutie and the Boxer trailer:

Never leaving the rural French lakeside setting on which it opens, Alain Guiraudie’s new film Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) establishes an economy from its opening frame. In spite of the abundant sunlight and wide, cinematographic expanses (exceptionally lensed by Claire Mathon), there is an uneasy feeling of closure and confinement to the scene, achieved through an impeccable sense of composition, editorial timing, and with particular mention to the film’s densely layered, natural soundscape. Within moments Guiraudie has established the milieu: a secluded gay cruising spot; and the players, principally Franck (Pierre Delandonchamps), an unfazed and fit twenty-something who considers himself an infrequent visitor these parts of the lake, and Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), a heavy divorcee content with staying clothed and dry, and not speaking unless spoken to. What is less clear—and let to unfold across the artfully modulated, ensuing hour-and-a-half—are Guiraudie’s stakes.

To establish these, Guiraudie purposefully employs a cinematic language that keeps its distance but nonetheless invites interpretation. Franck engages an intellectual and platonic friendship with Henri, whose return sentiments are stunted by his introverted nature, and then a physical relationship with Michel (Christophe Paou), whose forwardness and unpredictability suggest a direct link between sexual desire and the inexplicable. The filmmaking repeatedly engages these opposites—most prominently through these main characters—diving right in to ideas that should repel or negate each other, and dwelling within the pathological anxiety that naturally surfaces when these come together. I’ve already mentioned the seclusion and exposure of the setting, but Guaraudie’s chronicling of the frankly explicit sexual encounters of his players, over the course of a few weeks in summer, occupy the troubling space between love and a danger that’s both physical and emotional.

Guiraudie is first and foremost an imagist, and with Stranger By The Lake excels at storytelling without spoon feeding. His script is minimally composed with regard to dialogue; Guiraudie would prefer to hold a frame and pose an idea with a minute action than an overabundance of words. In this respect the film as a whole is offered a sense of uncluttered and immediate potency while scarcely feeling as if it’s trying—not a simple accomplishment. Its refined and pared-down parts make for a lingering and thoroughly engaging, shrewdly thrilling whole. Guiraudie’s closing shot is one that will long haunt anyone who sees it, where the literal and figurative darkness envelops our subjects, but in such a way that vision (or the knowing that is associated with light) is not discounted. It’s the clarity Maton finds in this barely moonlit scene, in that rare instance where digital camerawork offers an aesthetic advantage over film, that affords the finale its atmospheric power.

I think the bravura of Stranger By The Lake is finally in this defiantly committed embrace of metaphor, in a independent filmmaking typology that often shies away from direct allegory in a yearning for ‘arty’ credentials. Murder features in the film not merely as a narrative propeller, but a proxy for actual death and the complex perils of this subset of the homosexual lifestyle. Guiraudie has spoken of his characters as being splintered personas of the same man. It’s a provocative and beautiful way to assess Stranger By The Lake in hindsight, an occasion where the artist, precisely like his movie, says so much while saying so little.

For many (myself included), the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi was relatively unfamiliar before a little film called A Separation rode on a huge wave success; from unprecedented victory in every major category at the Berlinale Film Festival, to an Oscar for Foreign-language feature a whole year later. As a result, worldwide audiences were exposed to a kind of intellectually, culturally and morally even-handed cinema marked by a direct visual approach and equally balanced, literate screenwriting. To those who have yet to see the director’s About Elly — where a L’Avventura-esque mystery eventually reveals itself as an incisive and finally humane look at contemporary Iranian society — I cannot recommend it enough. But by the same token, About Elly’s embryonic formal and tonal strategies for what would later blueprint A Separation become clear in hindsight. The lingering question on the minds of most remained whether such clarity and slow-burning intricacy in Farhadi’s stories could persist in absence of the intricate nuances of Iranian life he obviously knows so well. Farhadi’s answer to that is The Past (Le Passé).

Set in Paris, The Past opens on Marie (Bérénice Bejo, The Artist), a French woman grappling with her myriad of relationships at various points of burgeoning and disintegration. Chief among them is the visit from her husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who is returning to France to sign divorce papers after four years back in his native Iran. Complicating matters more, Marie plans to marry Samir (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet), whose child she is pregnant with. Both Marie and Samir bring children from previous romances to densify the relational web Farhadi spins, and as the story progresses Marie’s eldest, Lucie (Pauline Burlet) plays an especially pivotal role as we learn of her possible involvement with Samir’s present wife, who is eight months comatose. All of that sounds cinematically heightened because it is. But unlike the matters of faith and custom that so drove the dramatic urgency of his earlier work, Farhadi here seems to relish the opportunity to take an otherwise melodramatic premise and make it agonisingly, persistently relatable, regardless of cultural context.

It’s not my aim to delve too much into the plot, as many of The Past’s pleasures are drawn not merely from the revelations that Farhadi offers (stunning as they are), but the simultaneous deftness and weight with which he announces them: the director’s inherent ability to doubly affect our minds and hearts, to wring empathy from the brink of apathy, is so evident through The Past’s deliberate 130 minutes. The escalating tension that A Separation played straight and fast is here rendered rather more exponentially: curiosities and twists in the narrative are slower to creep in and more pronounced in their unraveling. This has led some to criticise the third act that plays overtly dramatic, but the crescendo that forms is a result of a more patient, more measured setup—so it’s only natural that once those emotional blows arrive, they seem to land harder.

Farhadi is helped in sticking said moments by an ensemble of performances that play like a well-pitched orchestra, Burlet and Elyes Aguis (as Samir’s young son Fouad, quietly absorbing each familial interaction to form his own worldview of death and consequence) offering breadth beyond their years; Bejo’s elastic, rangy Marie providing sharp contrast to both her silent, charming breakout role in The Artist and her co-star Rahim. In the thankless role of the imposing fourth wheel to an existing (though fractured) family unit, Rahim takes his one-dimension and makes it many, playing Samir’s troubled fatherhood, splintered devotions and not inconsequential guilt in a manner so implicitly interiorized that it’s perhaps the most impressive part of the film.

For all the histrionics that threaten to topple The Past overboard, Farhadi ends the film on a contemplative note that revisits (no pun intended) the multiple thematic readings of its aptly abstract title. It gives away nothing to reveal that the closing scene features Samir at his wife’s bedside, speaking though he knows she can’t hear, and asking though he knows she can’t do — a silent, microcosmic moment that flawlessly summarises the film, yet leaves audiences in perpetual wonderment. If my party line here is that The Past is great precisely because it isn’t overly indebted to A Separation, then I’m thankful that they still share instances of Farhadi’s profound ability to close a movie out.

The Past trailer