![]() ![]() In Hong Kong, a Chinese woman and her Japanese friend debate war crimes. In a church in Berlin, a priest and his brother, a policeman, discuss their incestuous relationship. In Athens, an old white artist and his younger (and inexplicably Asian) self swap notes on mortality and regret. Combining the mannered affect of a sitcom and the brazen intimacy of a therapy session, the film unfolds as a series of dialogues between pairs of outlandish interlocutors in five world cities. Of these, “The Last City” is perhaps the most ambitious. ![]() ‘Song Lang’Īfter two decades of making erudite, observational documentaries about urban landscapes and monuments, the German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz has turned, in a spate of recent fiction(ish) films, to a different kind of architecture - that of the mind, or maybe the universe, depending on your vantage point. ![]() ![]() Audaciously intercutting scenes of performance and the characters’ personal lives, Ranjith crafts a drama that pulsates with rage, humor, grief and magic, while daringly interrogating the very possibility of making political art. Around her swirl a bevy of equally complex, serrated characters, including her boyfriend, Iniyan, a cosmopolitan liberal who nevertheless lets a slur slip in the middle of a heated argument the crude, macho newbie Arjun, who undergoes a reckoning as his bigotries are challenged and the queer couple Diana and Praveen, who wrestle with loving openly in defiance of their parents. As the group decides to stage a production about “honor killings” - filicides of lovers who dare cross caste and religious lines - creative differences become political battles, and romantic tiffs become ideological impasses.Īt the heart of this eye-popping, neon-lit film is Rene (Dushara Vijayan), a magnetic, strong-willed actress who wears her Dalit (the so-called untouchable caste) identity proudly on her sleeve. Yet, if “Natchathiram Nagargiradhu” is more modest in scope than Ranjith’s recent masala epics, the stakes are no lower. Ranjith has returned with an altogether different genre of film: a talky, postmodern romantic comedy about a troupe of diverse Indian youngsters putting on a play. After a series of action blockbusters that effortlessly blend politics with swaggering style (see “Kaala” and “Sarpatta Parambarai,” streaming on Amazon), the visionary Tamil filmmaker Pa. ![]()
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