Andrey Zvyagintsev is without doubt one of the great film-makers of our time. If you only know Leviathan, it's about time you looked at the rest of his considerable oeuvre. What is it about Russian cinema?
The Bulgarian co-directing duo of Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov proved their skill with the scalpel in slicing through the unforgiving world depicted in their first film, The Lesson, from 2014. Their follow-up in a loosely planned trilogy, Glory continues that dissection of Bulgarian society, one now depicted on a broader canvas and with an element of pitch-black comedy that is new.
It’s a darkly entertaining watch, which involves direct comparison between two very different worlds – one that appears virtually unaffected by the social changes that followed the end of communism, the other infected with a cynicism that is very much a product of the new order that followed. Grozeva and Valchanov’s story has a pronounced simplicity that gives the film an aspect of parable.
Tsanko is treated more as an object than as a human being
Their main character, Tsanko (Stefan Denolyubov), represents the uncorrupted old order, his thick beard and generally unkempt look making clear that he’s not concerned with appearances. He works as a linesman on the railways somewhere out in the provinces, checking the track. Something of a loner – he has a severe stammer – he’s engaged with his own private world, which revolves around domestic tasks, and keeping the exact time, something essential for his work. When one day he finds a stash of cash on the railway line, his innate honesty means he doesn’t hesitate – though he lives a very basic life indeed – to turn it in to the police. It’s a deed that sees him labelled, given the corruption of his surrounding world, a “fool of the nation”.
But it draws the attention of his bosses at the Ministry of Transport off in Sofia, for whom such a selfless gesture comes as a welcome corrective against wider corruption allegations being bandied around about the high-ups. Arch Ministry PR boss Julia Staykova (Margita Gosheva, pictured below) arranges an award ceremony that sees Tsanko brought to the capital – he’s treated throughout more as an object than as a human being – to be paraded to the press. When her distracted forgetfulness means that Tsanko loses the family watch which is a crucial part of his identity (it’s a Russian-made Slava, or "Glory" in English, historic brand), a whole destructive chain of events is set in motion, and her thoughtless (but unwitting) mistake brings drastic consequences for all.
The unlucky hand of fate is a familiar element in the cinema of Eastern Europe – “inexorable” seems to be one of its recurring words – and it assumes an extra tragic element here, given the extreme innocence and naivety of one party in the story. Tsanko becomes something of a holy fool, his stammer making him excruciatingly unsuited for the cynical PR world to which he is exposed: when we witness the thoughtless laughter that he provokes there, real cruelty hits home. The directors are equally unsparing in their depiction of their heroine, however: Julia’s work concerns are played out incongruously against the background of her attempts to conceive a child through IVF, with each clinic appointment perpetually interrupted by calls on her mobile. The directors don’t need to labour their point, that she has lost track of the important things in her life: the closing chaos in which she finds herself brings that home. Even so, the darkness of the film’s implied conclusion endorses a markedly bleaker view of the world than anything that has come before.
The satire of Glory is certainly impressive: it’s the very fluency of some of its comedy that gives rise to a more profound feeling that something is very wrong in this story told in microcosm from a wider national narrative. The gradual process of adaptation to drastic change in society is bound to be slow, and we can only hope that Grozeva and Valchanov will be around to chart it for a long time to come. The Lesson proved that they could make powerful drama out of everyday events. Glory reunites them with both that film's main cast and technical collaborators – DP work, playing heavily with handheld style, from Krum Rodriguez looks as accomplished as ever, while Margita Gosheva as Julia simply carries all before her – from their first film, but has stretched both their perspective and repertoire. Their style certainly veers towards the understated, but its power grows incrementally, and most importantly it compels an element of human involvement from us as viewers.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Glory
One of the oldest pleasures of cinema is the opportunity it gives us to look at beautiful people in beautiful places, possibly having beautiful sex. Often audiences get exactly what they came for but sometimes it isn’t exactly straightforward. Take The Square, the Oscar-nominated film from Swedish director Ruben Östlund that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Its cast includes Danish heart-throb Claes Bang (tipped as a potential James Bond), handsome Dominic West (of Wire fame) and lovely Elizabeth Moss (freed from her Handmaid’s Tale wimple). The setting is Stockholm’s fashionable art world so there’s a visual feast of ultra-cool art gallery interiors, gilded halls, luxury apartments, modernist offices and a Tesla slicing through streets familiar from all those Scandi noir series.
This isn’t a thriller, although it is certainly filled with jeopardy, and it isn’t a romance, although it has one of the most startling sex scenes I’ve seen since Toni Erdmann. Instead The Square is a post-modern farce – a string of terrible mishaps befalls museum director Christian (Claes Bang, pictured below) as he tries to hype a new exhibit and we watch his life spiral from cool to chaos. It’s also a satire, gleefully poking fun at the pretensions of the art world and liberal Swedes’ earnest efforts to promote a dialogue on immigration and racism.
But most of all, The Square is brilliantly acted and very stylish, if at times just a little bit too pleased with how clever it is. To describe the plot in any detail would be to spoil the film’s unfolding pleasures; suffice to say there is a theft, inept revenge, social and professional humiliation, and an actor impersonating an ape who should make Andy Serkis a tad jealous.
Östlund is following up his disquieting hit Force Majeure and his budget has increased exponentially. For the first time he’s working with actors famous outside Scandinavia. But his directing style hasn’t changed – gruelling improvisations and multiple takes until the performance is just as he wants. Director of photography Frederik Wenzel's elegant shots are held at almost uncomfortable length; the audience is given plenty of time to observe closely each character as their thoughts and feelings flicker in front of our eyes.
There’s much clever framing too, marginal figures edging into our vision. The spaces Christian navigates are both claustrophobic and hallucinatory. Confusing, faintly disturbing peripheral sounds come from off-screen with no explanatory cut-aways to their source. Dialogue is kept naturalistic and doesn't get in the way of the actors – Aaron Sorkin does not haunt this script.
The noodling a cappella score is a touch irritating in its over-signalling of wit and the child actors lack credibility, but The Square finds Östlund at the top of his game. It should provide the most fun to be had in an art movie this month if not an art gallery (installation pictured above). And Claes Bang's English accent, a homage to David Bowie, is startlingly good. This Danish actor would have no problem squaring up to Bond.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Square
There’s a terrific drive to Kornél Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon, a cinematic powerhouse of both technique and ideas. The maverick Hungarian director’s film, which premiered in last year’s Cannes competition, may occasionally bewilder – such is the spectrum of subjects upon which it touches – but rarely fails to impress.
The energy of its opening takes us right into the frantic disorder of Europe’s refugee crisis, as an attempted border crossing – a rush from a crowded lorry onto boats – is intercepted by troops. A single figure flees, only to be felled by gunfire, before rising into the sky in a whirl of levitation: in a moment Mundruczó has stepped away from realism into its magical variety. His young hero is Aryan (Zsombor Jéger, doleful, soulful), a Syrian refugee separated in the confusion from his father, whose bewildered negotiation of the new world that he has entered, one that will prove far from kind, provides the film’s sometimes surreal journey.
The youth’s new ability has not passed unnoticed. He’s pursued by the same security forces that failed to apprehend him, while falling into the care of refugee camp doctor Stern (played by Merab Ninidze, the Georgian actor last seen in the BBC’s McMafia, as pale as ever, pictured below with Jéger). The latter, with his own murky associations and a past to expiate, becomes something of a father-figure, though his motives – to hawk these miraculous talents around ailing patients, refreshing them with some new, transcendent wonder – are initially mercenary. But a closer bond gradually establishes itself between these two lost souls, despite the hesitant English that is their only means of communication (it’s a somewhat "Europudding" combination not enhanced by some haphazard doubling).
Mundruczó and his co-writer Kata Wéber dial up the mystical element as the levitation scenes – they may not have quite the same angelic connotations as Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but they’re not far off, either – bring religion into the equation, with Aryan (son of a carpenter, no less) pitched as a contemporary Christ figure. The world he has possibly come to redeem is sorely in need of said treatment, including a presentation of contemporary Hungary’s political extremism (as incisive as it was in Mundruczó’s previous film, the canine-themed White God), plus a plot cross-strand (ultimately rather extraneous) involving terrorism.
Technically it’s all extremely accomplished, from the levitation elements – what a long way a little CGI can go – to a terrific single-take car chase through the streets of Budapest, and a shape-shifting interior scene that surely riffs on Christoper Nolan’s Inception, all the product of outstanding cinematography from Marcell Rév. But all such invention on big visual elements would be nothing if the director didn’t convey the micro-mood of his world so well: its theme colour is a sickly nocturnal yellow, Mundruczó’s characters pallid and clearly still dealing with the traumas of the 20th century as well as the issues that the new one has brought. It’s a potent and somehow very European cocktail – the title’s allusion is to a planetary moon, apparently a cradle of possible new life forms, that is named after our continent – from a director who is never afraid to set his sights as high as his characters fly.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Jupiter's Moons
Beach Rats is a film that has “indie” etched in its bones. The second feature from Brooklyn-born Eliza Hittman, it was made with support from New York's independent outfit Cinereach, and went through development at the Sundance Labs. Appropriately, it took that festival's Best Feature Director award last year.
It’s strong on the kind of atmosphere that might easily float into nowhere, but is backed up by a striking performance from British newcomer Harris Dickinson that holds the attention in the subtlest ways. Dickinson plays 19-year-old Frankie, who’s on the cusp of adulthood and apparently coasting through an idle summer in the company of friends. An encounter at the Coney Island fireworks introduces him to Simone (Madeline Weinstein, pictured below, with Dickinson), and initiates a tentative, on-off interaction that also never quite gets anywhere.
But underneath such surfaces the young man's world is considerably darker, reflected in the fact that his father is in the last throes of cancer; he’s dying at home, grief and tension hanging in the air. And Frankie is in the course of discovering his identity, tentatively exploring gay contact websites. But Hittman resists driving Beach Rats in any more standard coming-out narrative direction: rather her concern is with Frankie’s state of increasingly uneasy limbo, emotions suppressed until they come close to crisis in late overlaps with external circumstances. 
Hittman talks, in one of the two short interview extracts that come as extras on this release, of her attempt to get into the mind of a teenager pressured by expectations and circumstances (her first film, It Felt Like Love, was a story of female adolescence, so this is both new and familiar territory for her). Frankie’s reticence and uncertainty – “I don’t really know what I like” is a phrase he repeats through the film – means that the changes and charges of emotion are shown in the smallest of gestures.
Dickinson’s striking features are richly expressive of such nuances, and they are beautifully caught by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s subtle textures, which also capture the languid summertime atmosphere of the remoter edges of Brooklyn (it’s the director's home territory, very different from the trendier neighbourhoods of the borough we are more used to on screen). The film seems somehow removed from time (no mobile phones), and Hittman creates the fabric of its world beautifully. She draws absolutely natural performances from a mainly non-professional cast – Frankie’s three beach-side companions, as well as his younger sister (Nicole Flyus) – and a deeply insightful role from Kate Hodge as his mother.
It’s a world in which no one intends wrong, but things go wrong. Frankie himself acutely realises his own shortcomings, but the director isn’t interested in judging him. No doubt he will one day reach resolution of some sort, but for now Hittman is honest enough not to suggest answers. Expect to hear much more both of her, and of her star.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Beach Rats
After the anger, the emptiness… Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is his fifth film, and harks back to the world of complicated, somehow unelucidated family relationships that characterised his debut, The Return, the work that brought Zvyagintsev immediate acclaim back in 2003. His previous film, the tempestuous Leviathan from four years ago, was defined by a degree of social involvement that was new in his filmmaking, and engaged with contemporary Russia through the prism of politics. Its story of a lone individual’s clash with the corrupt society that surrounded him could not but provoke strong emotion.
Loveless sets out to do something different. It’s a film of wintry emotional withdrawal – a perfect pairing of season and subject – about the absence of almost any natural human core in the world it depicts. It’s as critical of its society as its predecessor was, but on a more oblique level, and arguably bleaker for that remove. There’s something of a loss in translation, too: the Russian title Nelyubov means, literally, “not-love” – almost “anti-love”, closer even to “hate”, but not quite that extreme. “Loveless” lacks the necessary muscle, as well as that particular Slavic antonymic essence that can assert absence as something far more visceral than simply a lack of presence. (The film’s French-language title, Faute d’amour, perhaps comes closer to the sense of the original.)
Zvyagintsev makes us view these proceedings almost as if we are observing animals
It is not a film defined by over-complexity. There’s a luminous clarity to the world that Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg Negin (the director’s collaborator since his second film, 2007’s The Banishment) have created, which hints at the simplicity of parable. And “clarity” is as good a word as any to describe the particularly composed, poised cinematography of Mikhail Krichman, who has worked with Zvyagintsev from the very beginning. The sense that a style has evolved between them is strong.
The spare script drops us in medias res into the painful throes of divorce. Any love between Zhenya (Maryana Spivak, pictured below) and Boris (Alexey Rozin, lower picture) has eviscerated itself long ago; the final, symbolic dissolution of their marriage awaits the sale of their flat, which is one of those typical Russian living spaces where middle-class comfort within belies a coldly imposing, anonymous exterior. Desperate to leave their old lives behind, both have new partners, and the only remaining impediment to their assumed (separate) future happiness – one to which they have clearly not paid overmuch attention – is their 12-year-old son, Alyosha (Matvey Novikov, main picture). The only thing they still spar about is what to do with him, each wishing to offload responsibility onto the other.
Our sense of the boy’s alienation is conveyed practically without words, but speaks so powerfully: Zvyagintsev builds towards an unforgettable scene that defines the extreme of his agony, all the more shocking for its being set against the banality of his parents’ ongoing lives. We see them in their separate professional environments – Zhenya runs a beauty salon, Boris is a middle-management salaryman – as well as with their new partners. Boris fears that his divorce will be unacceptable to his ultra-religious employer, which is almost more of a worry than that he and his heavily pregnant girlfriend, the younger Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), are going be living with her mother. Zhenya has found new security with the older Anton (Andris Keishs), drawn as much by the attractive way of life that the prosperous single businessman offers her as by any attraction of the heart.
The director is engaging again with the differences of social class (which in Russia is defined as much as anything else by economic status) that were at the centre of his 2011 film Elena: it’s clearest in early scenes in which the couples are eating, one in an exaggeratedly posh restaurant, the other bringing their supermarket purchases back to the kitchen table. Then we watch them as they make love. The way that Zvyagintsev presents all this is characteristic: somehow he makes us view these proceedings almost as if we are observing animals, subjects engaged first with appetite, then recreation (sex-ercise?). The alienation is double, not only in the world of the director’s characters, but in his perspective, too.
This 'lovelessness', we come to understand, extends far beyond the present divorce
When Alyosha disappears – he’s reported missing from school before his distracted parents even notice his absence – the couple is forced to reengage, while the plot takes on an element of ongoing urgency and some rather welcome procedural tension. The police won’t take action immediately, recommending instead a volunteer search-and-rescue group (it's based on real-life Moscow precedents) to take over the investigation; it initiates increasingly large-scale searches of the area (the anonymous suburb in which the family lives borders on woodland). But there’s surely something ambiguous in how we perceive this citizen group action: it’s all impressively efficient and coordinated, especially when set against the lethargic reluctance of the police – yet do we wonder, in the wider context of Russian history, about the ramifications of such collective energy?
If Zvyagintsev leaves us to make up our minds on that one, he pulls no punches in the night scene in which the couple drive together to check whether their son has run away to his grandmother. Natalya Potapova plays Zhenya’s mother as a harridan haunted by history – her son-in-law describes her as “Stalin in a skirt” – and we begin to appreciate how her daughter has become who she is. The reception the old woman gives them is matched for acidity only by the bile they throw at one another along the way.
It’s a revelation that proves as terrifying as anything brought in the film’s resolution, which develops incrementally towards a conclusion that has all the inexorability of the territory (it comes with some exterior locations that match even Tarkovsky’s Stalker for wondrous dereliction). The dimensions of terror widen, becoming somehow ontological: this “lovelessness”, we come to understand, extends far beyond the present divorce, right “back to the beginning”. Is it fanciful to think of those moments of birth (rebirth) in Russian history of the last century, to go back to 1991, the collapse of the certainties and seeming securities of the Soviet world, even to 1917? It’s for the viewer to decide.
Of course, there’s another context behind Loveless too, the cinematic one that Zvyagintsev has alluded to not least in his acclaim of Ingmar Bergman, whose Scenes from a Marriage is, not surprisingly, a film he has referenced directly. But what is most potent in the way that the Russian director depicts his homeland is the sense that no alternative outcome could finally be possible, so rotten is this world in which the concept of empathy seems to have been entirely lost. Zvyagintsev may have altered his register – where Leviathan was painted with a broad brush, Loveless is a scalpel dissection – but his message remains constant.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Loveless
In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.
Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the white American privilege and you'd be getting close, although In Between most reminded me of another director who made their debut film focusing on a feisty female central character, Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It, back in 1984.
She has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times
Although In Between is an ensemble piece, Laila, played by the stunningly beautiful and super-smart Mouna Hawa is the strongest figure. She’s a lawyer with a mane of curls who sees nothing wrong in showing her cleavage at work. Laila is a secular Muslim who knows exactly what she can expect from her Jewish colleagues in the legal business. And in her downtime she also takes no prisoners; she’s got an appetite for drugs, dancing and female solidarity but is still looking for a man to be her soul mate. Her friend Salma (Sana Jammalieh) finds life a little tougher; she’s a DJ who works shifts in a restaurant as a sous chef where the Israeli boss doesn’t want the kitchen crew speaking Arabic. Meanwhile back home her Christian parents endlessly line up potential husbands because Salma hasn’t dared tell them she’s gay.
As there’s a lot of wild partying in their apartment, it’s not the obvious place for new flatmate Nour (Shaden Kanboura) to find a quiet room to finish her computer studies degree. Nour is a hijab-wearing Muslim with a disapproving fiancé who sees Tel Aviv as a city of sin. He wants Noura to marry him and return to their ultra-conservative hometown of Umm al-Fahm on the West Bank. Their relationship provides the film's most shocking scenes. There’s plenty of vivid drama along the way, all beautifully shot by Itay Gross and made wholly credible by semi-improvised dialogue scenes as not all the actors were professionals.
In Israel the film has been a huge and controversial hit. Maysaloun Hamoud has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times (pictured above: Mahmud Shalaby skinning up with Mouna Hawa). The film was banned in Umm al-Fahm while others criticised the director for receiving some funding from the Israeli government. Hamoud has received death threats because she is challenging fundamentalist religions, casual racism from Israelis towards Arabs and the endemic cultural repression that traps women (and to a certain extent men) in restrictive roles. In Between would make a fascinating double-bill with Menashe – both sympathetic portraits of normally inaccessible communities, ultra-orthodox Jews in Menashe; bohemian, radicalised Palestinians in In Between.
Intended as the first in a trilogy, I can’t wait to see more of the central characters. The DVD release comes with a scrappy short feature compiled from on-set footage and interviews with Hamoud and her Israeli producer, Shlomi Elkabetz. It looks as if they all had fun making the film – there’s a lot of hugging and high spirits – which makes In Between’s cool coherence even more impressive.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for In Between
Rungano Nyoni’s debut feature premiered at last year’s Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, and immediately marked the Lusaka-born, Wales-raised director down as a figure to watch. Putting her film into any category is more challenging, though, with its elements of fable and somewhat surreal satire, although “surreal” and any associated hints of the absurd risk saying more about the perspective of the observer than the world Nyoni herself depicts.
But however you look at it, I Am Not a Witch is a startling, vibrant piece of filmmaking. Over a spare 90 minutes Nyoni follows her nine-year-old heroine on an unlikely journey: rejected from one community because she stands out as an unlucky outsider, she is attached to a state-supported witch colony, then exploited as a curiosity and for commercial ends by her semi-official “minder”. The name she is given by the community of much older women into which she is partly absorbed is Shula, which tellingly means “uprooted”. She’s outstandingly played by Maggie Mulubwa, a tribal girl found by Nyoni, whose silence through most of the film leaves her face to speak, indelibly, about unspoken fear and apprehension and plaintive bafflement.
There’s such sadness there: the few moments when Shula seems to be discovering something about herself, for herself, are so tentative that the film’s conclusion almost comes as a tragic relief. In parallel to the wider position of women in society, Nyoni has come up with an unnerving central image for her community of witches: they are tethered on long ribbons, attached to huge bobbins, that supposedly prevent them from flying away. Her opening scene shows a witch camp (the director spent time in one such place, in Ghana) being visited by tourists, a pitiful place where impassive old women sit around apathetically, their faces daubed in white.
At least when they are taken out to work – they travel on a special lorry, converted to accommodate their bobbins, a bizarre and unforgettable sight – there’s a certain sense of community, of personality, laced with unlikely, sometimes dark humour (the visit of a wig-seller peddling the latest models, mis-named after US pop celebrities is just one such moment). Gin is another consolation for them. Surrounding official structures, nominally perhaps benign but in practice indifferent, are resolutely male, embodied by the rotund Mr Banda (Henry BJ Phiri, pictured above, centre) – he’s attached to “Tourism and Traditional Beliefs” – who exploits the girl for money, making her adjudicate village disputes or perform to bring on rain. He’s not actually cruel to her, though: his own wife is a “reformed” witch, having earned nominal respectability “because I did everything I was told” (she puts her bobbin in a supermarket trolley when she goes out).
This is a society in which superstition is a convenient garb for prejudice
Nyoni leaves the plentiful elements of mystery in her story to speak for themselves, not least because Shula remains the passive protagonist throughout, but there’s no escaping the fact that this is a society in which superstition is a convenient garb for prejudice. There’s an undeniable aesthetic consolation – not perhaps the right way of putting it – especially in the work of cinematographer David Gallego (previously seen in the no less strange jungle exploration of Embrace of the Serpent), whose compositions capture the arid beauty of the film's scrub landscapes and delight in its particular visual details. A score from Matthew James Kelly is dominated by treated Vivaldi effects for violin, complete with snatches of Schubert and Estelle’s “American Boy”.
This DVD release includes two of Nyoni’s short films. From 2011, her 23-minute Mwansa the Great is a playful Zambia-set story of a village boy attempting to assume the mantle of his late father, in a family environment where the female presence, in the form his assertive younger sister, looms large. There are lovely moments that touch on the contrasting worlds of children and adults, a theme also there in Listen, from 2014. The 13-minute film, codirected with young Finnish-Iranian filmmaker Hamy Ramezan, was in Directors’ Fortnight too, its story of immigrant experience, and how past attitudes can’t be escaped even in new worlds, all the more chilling for the concentrated, formal control with which it is executed.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for I Am Not a Witch
A Woman’s Life first premiered at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival, alongside the likes of La La Land, Arrival and Jackie. Though it’s taken longer to get to our shores than its contemporaries, the film feels fresh and relevant. This immensely personal character study is at times dense, but subtly effective.
“With that film I became a filmmaker,” Wim Wenders remembers in one of the extras accompanying this new release of his 1974 Alice in the Cities. More importantly, it’s the one that convinced him that he wanted to be one.