In a pivotal encounter in Teuvo Tulio’s Song of the Scarlet Flower, a lovesick Olavi seeks solace in a brothel and instead finds himself confronting past transgressions when his abandoned lover Elli, now working as a prostitute, challenges him to follow through on his empty promises of marriage by arguing that, in her provocative dress […]
The recurring imagery of turbulent waters in Teuvo Tulio’s films reflect a kinship with early Norwegian (and more broadly, Scandinavian) cinema in the use of rugged landscape as a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of the human condition. In Tulio’s Song of the Scarlet Flower, a daredevil log ride through the swift currents of a […]
Based on the novel by Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo, David Ulloa and Tristán Ulloa’s Pudor, is prefaced with a tongue-in-cheek anecdote on the etymology of the eponymous title. Derived from the Latin word pudoris for honesty, modesty and reserve, a slight variation in spelling to putoris alters its definition to a stench. The idea that […]
Recalling Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in its atmospheric, if tempered historical epic on the bloody reign of sixteenth century Moldavian despot, Alexandru Lapusneanu, Malvina Ursianu’s Return of the Banished is a trenchant allegory on the moral corruption and madness of absolute power. Unfolding though a series of flashbacks and flash forwards, the film opens […]
A clear highlight in an already strong French cinema program this year is Agnès Varda’s playful and understated, yet endlessly inventive The Beaches of Agnès. Part autobiographical survey from her childhood in wartime Europe to her lifelong activism (she self-effacingly admits that she missed the events of May 68 because she was living in California […]
Agnes Varda’s Vagabond is an excoriating, subtly disturbing portrait of alienation and lost direction. The discolored body of a drifter is found in a ditch, frozen to death. Her name is Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire), an inscrutable young woman who comes from a good home and possesses employable skills, but has dropped out of society […]