Les Sentiments is a richly textured, humorous, deceptively lyrical, emotionally lucid, and intelligently crafted exposition on the dynamics of love, marriage, fidelity, and attraction. The film chronicles the genial and affectionate interaction between a happily settled, middle-aged couple, Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and Carol (Nathalie Baye), and their young, overly amorous tenants, a newly married couple […]
On the other side of the rural exodus captured in Llorenç Soler”s Long Journey to the Rage is Helena Lumbreras and Marià Lisa’s multi-faceted polemic, Field for Men, an exposition on the inequitable systems of landownership and tenancy farming under Franco that perpetuate a cycle of exploitation, unproductivity, and indenture. Wryly prefaced as the fairytale […]
In an early episode in Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, retired army officer turned volunteer poacher tracking commander Ritai (Duobuji) explains to a Beijing reporter Ga Yu (Zhang Lei) that according to custom, a Tibetan native would point his knife inward when cutting his meal at the dinner table. It is a seemingly anecdotal comment on cultural […]
Recalling the resigned regret of Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (albeit less potent) and Stanley Kwan’s Everlasting Regret in its elliptical intersection of personal and (implicitly political) national history, Lou Ye’s sprawling epic, Summer Palace is an adept and thoughful, if largely perfunctory and tenuous survey of late twentieth century contemporary history from the parallel perspectives […]
As in Eva Mulvad and Anja Al-Erhayem’s Enemies of Happiness, James Longley’s Sari’s Mother, the edited “fourth fragment” from Iraq in Fragments, is a sobering portrait of the pervasive confusion and uncertainty that continues to define everyday life under postwar occupation, and its unseen toll on the weakest and most vulnerable. In this segment, Longley […]
Composed of three self-contained chapters that integrally represent the figurative image of the country divided, not only by ethnic and religious sectarianism, but also by the further destabilization of an undefined and politically – and culturally – intrusive occupation, James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments exquisitely fuses the aesthetics of Godfrey Reggio in the artful presentation […]