Drama

പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം
Prabhayay Ninachathellam)
dir: Payal Kapadia

2024

All We Imagine as Light is something of an enigma, at least for me. I thought I knew where it was coming from, and numerous times I was proven wrong.

I had it slotted into the types of films from India that are more about social realism than the flamboyant spectacle we’re more stereotypically used to. I have seen enough older Indian films to also know about the ones where the horribleness of the upper castes and the eternally put-upon lower castes are paraded around for our amusement / horror for three hours a pop.

But this is not that. This isn’t about the unfairness of the system, or institutional abuses or cartoonish selfishness. This is just about people trying to get by, in a society that is pretty constraining upon women (unlike all those other ones).

The three women the movie mostly focusses on are Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha and Anu are nurses, while Parvathy works as a cook in the same hospital all three work in. Before we even meet these women, there are night time scenes of market stalls being set up pre-dawn, or general city scenes and packed train platforms in Mumbai, as voice recordings, sounding like legit vox pops, talk about how desirable or how difficult it is having moved from the country to the city for work.

Later on in the film one of these voices says something along the lines of “they say this city is the City of Dreams, but I think it’s more a city of illusions. You have to believe the illusion, or else you go mad.”

dir: Bas Devos

2023

This flick called Here should not be confused with the Robert Zemeckis directed, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright starring flick called Here that came out last year. Totally different movies. Could not be more different. Each interesting in its own way, but completely different.

This here flick called Here, or Heɿe, if you believe the opening credits/title is a prime exponent of “slow” cinema, in that there is no hurry in any scene for anything to happen or anyone to do anything. There are people in the story, actors, I believe they’re called, and stuff happens, but it’s of the mundane, every day, slice of life sort of stuff.

And lots of images of nature, and mosses. Lots of mosses.

You should absolutely already know whether this is your own personal vision of hell or not by now. It didn’t aggravate me at all, but then I have the patience of a fucking saint, so, there’s that to consider.

Not everyone has either the time or the inclination to sit through something in which not a lot happens, and that is the point. Me, I sometimes relish chances to watch slow, meditative stuff, even if there’s not that much to meditate on or ruminate over. We bring what we have to these kinds of films, because they rarely tell us exactly what to think about what we’re seeing.

There is a chap, and he works in construction, as in, on a construction site for a skyscraper somewhere in Brussels. He, like his co-workers, is getting ready for his summer holidays, with construction industry folks taking 4 weeks off over summer. He is not Belgian, and, as a Romanian, is intending to drive home.

He looks at the veggies in his fridge, and thinks “these will all be rotten when I get back; I better make something with them now”, so he makes a big pot of soup. This soup will play an extraordinarily important role in the film.

I’m not actually joking. Our chap, often clad in t-shirt, shorts and flip flops, suffers from insomnia, so he either walks around at night or visits people he knows are awake. He visits a friend who works the night shift at a hotel and gives him soup. He visits his mechanic, whose says his car will be ready Tuesday, and once he offers the soup, the mechanic says the car will be ready Monday. He visits his sister who’s a nurse at a local hospital, and they enjoy the soup together. Everyone loves the soup.

إن شاء الله ولد
Inshallah walad

dir: Amjad Al Rasheed

2023

This is the Jordanian remake of Kinda Pregnant, and instead of Amy Schumer in the lead we have Palestinian actor Mouna Hawa playing a recently widowed woman in Jordan just trying to get by in a country that clearly hates women. And She’s a Woman!

Structurally, culturally, legally, everything is set up to emphasise that women and girls ain’t shit compared to the lowliest man in Jordan. If a woman is married and she hasn’t borne the MAN a SON, she doesn’t even inherit property from her husband when he dies – his brothers inherit instead.

How’s that for a kick in the teeth? And how is that for showing up how meaningless the complaints of American (white) women’s first world problems are in comparison?

Oh no, they mixed up my drink order and wrote the wrong name on my coffee cup boo hoo think I’ll pretend I’m pregnant to get revenge on the world.

No, Nawal has far more to worry about than that. When her shitty husband pops off this mortal coil unexpectedly, the vultures start circling almost immediately. I say her husband Ahmad was shitty because he really did leave her seemingly deliberately in a terrible financial and legal position by having neglected to do a number of actions that would have safeguarded his wife and daughter from what is to come, mostly because he was a shitty person who had been lying and cheating on her before his death. You can’t expect a class act like that to look out for his nearest and dearest, can you?

No. But he would have expected the system, the Patriarchal System, to screw her over the first chance it got, and that clearly did not keep him up at night, adding to the irony that he dies in his sleep.

dir: Aaron Shimberg

2024

A Different Man now joins the pantheon of films about various allegedly interesting men. A Single Man. A Serious Man. A Simple Man. A Family Man. A Fortunate Man. A Lucky Man. A Common Man. A Company Man. A Most Wanted Man. A Man Apart. A Man Called Otto. And finally, simply A Man, a recent Japanese film. A Different Man now nestles in between all of those “A”s and “Man”s. So many mans you’d think it was a gritty modern update on the Mr Men books, probably directed by Zach Snyder, with more of a focus on rugged individualism.

That’s not at all to be confused with the other “Man” films, being the ones that start with “The”. The Thin Man, The Fat Man, The Tall Man, The Third Man, The Quiet Man, The Empty Man, The Snow Man, The Elephant Man, The Gray Man, The King’s Man, The Running Man, The Railway Man and oh so many more mans. So many movies about men, and their many foibles and peccadillos. It’s almost like so much of cinema is so man-centric. No idea why that might be.

Sebastian Stan stars as the Man of this Different Man, playing a man with a facial difference, due to neurofibromatosis. He gets some work as an actor, but his life is a fairly quiet, fearful one. His appearance often brings shock, or terror, or ridicule from members of the public, which isn’t fair. He has a new Norwegian neighbour, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), and has some awkward interactions with her. We notice, like he notices, how horrified she is when she first sees him.

She is something of a piece of work. I have only otherwise seen her as the lead in a film called, no shit, I’m not making this up, The Worst Person in the World, and let me just say that there are actions and dialogue her character performs here that is far worse than anything in that earlier film. She is… an aspiring playwright, and Edward’s an aspiring actor, so he urges her, even down to giving her his typewriter, to work and dazzle the world. Little does he suspect what she’s actually going to do, the depths she’s going to stoop to.