‘Men of Deeds’
The themes at the heart of “Men of Deeds” — bureaucratic corruption; political murk — are the staples of modern Romanian cinema. And yet Paul Negoescu’s provincial noir feels bracingly unusual. This is in part because of the film’s tone, a strange and uncertain mix of deadpan irony and gutting moral darkness. Then there’s the surprising tenderness of the protagonist, Ilie (Iulian Postelnicu), a bored policeman in a small village on the Moldovan border.
At first, the story revolves around Ilie’s desire to retire and own an orchard, a simple pleasure he seeks amid the loneliness of his sparse life. Scenes of Ilie touching trees and gazing at grass, rapt in imagining his coveted idyll (much to the confusion of his new deputy, arrived from the city), imbue “Men of Deeds” with a lovely melancholy and languor. But this dissolves into dread as Ilie’s second-in-command goes rogue investigating a bloody death and starts to uncover the putrid power games just underneath the village’s charming facade. The good-willed Ilie is both shocked and called to action as noxious secrets unfurl, and his modest dreams of rural bliss give way to a fatalistic sense of purpose and duty.
The hallowed aura of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the enormous tutoring industry that has grown around these competitive public engineering schools have been fertile terrain for movies and television in India. There’s something about hopeful millions chasing a near-impossible dream that lends itself to the screen. In 2009, “3 Idiots” became a global blockbuster with its tragicomic tale of life at an engineering college, while streaming shows like “Laakhon Mein Ek” and “Kota Factory” have set poignant coming-of-age stories in the private coaching centers that train students in the elusive art of cracking the IIT entrance test.
“All India Rank” follows in this trend, with a charming story about a teenager dispatched by his parents to a coaching center, their hopes ardently in tow. But Varun Grover’s film has both a lighter, lower-key touch than its predecessors, and a more expansive lens.
Unfolding in the late 1990s, “All India Rank” sets the tale of young Vivek against the story — sketched deftly, with exquisite period detail — of a country on a cusp, transitioning from years of quasi-socialism to a rapacious capitalism that has left the middle class adrift. Vivek’s parents dream of upward mobility and scrape their savings to pay for a future that he doesn’t even want. As Prime Minister Indira Gandhi speaks on the television and news of Princess Diana’s death arrives in the papers, Vivek and his parents join a whole nation in measuring the distance between their dreams and realities.
‘Anatolian Leopard’
Emre Kayis’s Turkish noir sets political conspiracy and a murder mystery in an unexpected setting — a zoo, presided over by a devoted director, Fikret (Ugur Polat). A pall hangs over Fikret as the film opens. His beloved institution is in its last days, having been bought out by Arab developers who want to turn it into an Aladdin theme park.
There is one thorn in this privatization plan: an Anatolian leopard named Hercules, an endangered local species that must be transferred to another sanctuary before the zoo can be shut down. Then Hercules goes missing, and all hell breaks loose.
“Anatolian Leopard” is suspenseful and twisty, but the film is less a thriller than a slow-burning lament. Anchored by a remarkable performance by Polat, it tells an elegiac story of loss and change, of the ways in which corporate greed bulldozes cultural heritage and entrenched ways of life, leaving people uprooted in its wake.
‘Incompatible With Life’
Eliza Capai’s gorgeous documentary mines the political and emotional depths of a cold, clinical term: “incompatible with life,” a description for a fetus that cannot survive because of congenital issues. Capai received this diagnosis a few months into her pregnancy and decided to get an abortion — a crime in Brazil, where she lives. In “Incompatible With Life,” she turns this painful and terrifying personal journey into a collective inquiry, seeking out other women who have had similar experiences as her.
She weaves together home videos of herself and her partner as they navigate the thrill of pregnancy, and then the heartbreak of terminating it. Interviews with a range of women, varied in circumstance and experience, detail how bureaucratic challenges compounded their psychological turmoil. One woman describes rejection from every hospital in the region; another, the dehumanizing judicial process on top of her grief. Capai’s gentle camera frames herself and her interviewees poetically, channeling both empathy and a quiet rage at a world that so insidiously curtails women’s rights over their bodies.
‘Just the Two of Us’
Rent it on Amazon Prime Video.
Valerie Donzelli’s domestic psychodrama is smart, taut and often painful to watch. From its very first scenes, where Blanche (Virginie Efira), grimly recounts her fairy tale meet-cute with Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud) to an unseen interlocutor, one senses the gravitational pull of a downward spiral.
As it cuts between her recollections and scenes from her seven-year relationship with Grégoire, “Just the Two of Us” emerges as a textbook tale of an abusive marriage: A whirlwind courtship with a man who dresses up obsession as devotion turns dangerous as he weaves a web of manipulation so intricate that even a self-assured woman like Blanche struggles to disentangle herself.
Though the film’s style evokes classic Hollywood melodramas, with high-contrast colors and shadows and brisk, claustrophobic edits, it is rooted in an everyday realism. Much of the movie details Blanche’s daily routine — her days at work, her commute, her time with her kids — and how Gregoire’s intrusions and demands, innocuous at first, slowly creep into every aspect of it. This balance of banality and pathos is key to the film’s emotional force: It casts domestic abuse as a sadly commonplace experience and a tragedy of cinematic proportions.
Read More: Five International Movies to Stream Now
