Haider (Ali Junejo) lives with his wife, his brother's family, and his father in a compound in Lahore. The family is deeply conservative, as many families in Pakistan are. Meek and soft spoken Haider is pressured to get a job and "be a man," whatever that means in his father's mind, while his free-spirited wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) is made to quit her job in order to begin making babies. Haider soon finds a job as a backup dancer for a Mujra, Biba (Alina Khan), who also happens to be transgender, and falls in love with her.
Joyland is anything but, finding its characters in all sorts of metaphorical (and even physical) prisons. Many other reviews have used suffocation or asphyxiation to describe this social pressure and it's not hard to see why. When society actively prevents you from becoming what you want to be, it feels no different than drowning, being denied the air that one needs to stay alive.
Through Haider and Mumtaz's gazes, there is a longing that persists, a longing for something that has been denied them. Within that longing is a tremendous feeling of loss for phantom lives that could've been lived out had things been a little different. In spite of its almost unrelenting bleakness, Joyland's final shot is that of the ocean, in contrast to the oppressive buildings and alleyways of the rest of the film. It is a prayer, perhaps, for freedom, however temporary.
The titular Ajoomma of the film of the same name is trapped in a different, metaphorical prison of her own: living alone, and with her only son in the process of emptying the nest, she is left with very little to do, other than watch K-dramas that make her live out alternate lives. A trip to South Korea, however, is set to disrupt her life and mostly in a good way.
There is such a large burden placed upon women, especially in Asian societies, especially traditional or conservative ones. The burden of caregiving - whether towards children, spouses or parents - is placed on their shoulders, so much so that they have little time for anything else. Almost in opposition to that, after caregiving duties are done, there is little that can help fill in the loneliness left in its wake that time for self care seems worse than what women like our protagonist has already lived, even when it's not.
The film is not perfect by a long shot. Ajoomma's journey may be a little far-fetched and whimsical in parts, sometimes so much so that it strains disbelief. But it leads to some heartwarming, crowd pleasing moments, and I think the payoffs more than make up for those flaws.
Lukas Dhont's Close has a premise whose simplicity only enhances its emotional power. It's a story about two boys, Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) who are two best friends, probably ever since childhood. Their first scenes together are of them being boys, and there are obvious signs there that the two may be closer than most.
Once school starts, however, Leo pulls away from Remi, in an effort to become more like the other boys. What happens next is predictable but no less heartbreaking. Societies that shun male intimacy end up with a generation of men who have difficulty expressing their feelings.
And it is in the expression of long held feelings where the second half of the film dwells, in the particular pain of being too late to apologize for mistakes, to make amends for those mistakes, to profess one's love, Though these feelings of regret are generally universal, there is a specificity to them that speaks true to queer experiences, and Close masterfully expresses that pain.
Christine (Eva Green) designs children's clothes for a living. After a supernatural encounter, she begins to experience strange symptoms. Conventional medicine seems to have little to no effect and she's at the end of her rope... that is, until Diana (Chai Fonacier) suddenly appears at her doorstep. Christine doesn't remember hiring Diana as a nanny, but Diana insists, and tells Christine she can help her.
Nocebo deftly explores the way the actions of the first world trickle down into the third world, as innocuous as these actions may seem at first. Much like the parasites that plague Christine's body, Christine herself and her ilk parasitize and suck the lifeblood of the workers of the third world. Her symptoms may be seen as the manifestations of guilt that may not be consciously perceived as guilt, but is felt all the same.
There was a bit of buzz regarding Chai Fonacier's depiction in this film, ironically from people who only saw the trailer and drew their own conclusions. But Nocebo's filmmakers know what they are doing: Diana is a fully formed character, shaped by her own history and by events in small and large scopes. She is driven by a deep seated anger, rejecting any western standards or expectations of what she is supposed to be. While the other members of Christine's family look at her with suspicion, we wonder if that suspicion stems from genuine concern or it it is not also rooted in stereotypes or racist beliefs.
While the way things play out are predictable, Nocebo does it quite well, and comes with my recommendation.
Based on real life events, Mihai Mincan's To The North is a languid yet deeply introspective exploration of altruism, faith and human nature. Set in a container ship on its way to the northern part of America, it stars Soliman Cruz as Joel, a seaman who comes across a stowaway on one of his ships. He looks at the stowaway, Dumitru (Niko Becker) with trepidation: prior to his discovery, at least three other stowaways, including Dumitru's friend, had been thrown overboard to a watery death.
As the film is anchored mostly only on this premise, it's understandable that it runs the risk of being stretched out. The film is admittedly not for everyone. For me, at least, its slow burn makes the proceedings all the more tense, as Joel and his crewmembers try to hide Dumitru before the Taiwanese captain and his first made find the stowaway. Most of this hinges on a spectacular performance by Soliman Cruz, one of the best (if not the best) character actors in Philippine cinema today. His presence on the screen is a tour de force, and it is worth the price of admission.
The film's denouement ends abruptly, but it does touch marvelously at the themes it is trying to present, in that altruism for the sake of doing good as opposed to assuaging guilt makes these moral decisions more gray that it looks on the surface, and that the dark side of trying to do good is that the person you might be helping might not reciprocate in kind. In the face of this irrationality, faith (whether in the innate goodness of people, a higher power, or whichever you may think) may be the only thing that spur one to do so.
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