Film Review: “L’Avventura”

Films with a cynical attitude towards sex are among my least favorite. When the characters prioritize sex above all else, and when the filmmakers have nothing more profound to say besides that we are primitive beings driven to sex at all costs, I check out early and I tend to stay checked out. That’s what I did watching Terms of Endearment and Y Tu Mamá También, and now, I can add another established classic to that ignominious list: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Since its riotous premiere at Cannes in 1960, this film’s reputation rests on a single narrative innovation: a disappearance mystery in which the vanished, here named Anna, is not just never found, much less her fate confirmed—she’s forgotten about. Why is that? Because her boyfriend Sandro and her best friend Claudia are too eager to take advantage of her absence and consummate their own relationship. This is not the type of couple I like to invest two and a half goddamn hours of screen time in. Monica Vitti as Claudia is an emotionally dishonest performance, mainly spent reciting maudlin dialogue about how conflicted her character feels and wants to feel about bedding her friend’s man-candy in these circumstances, when the brief time between Anna’s departure and Claudia and Sandro’s first shag makes it crystal that she couldn’t care less what Anna would think, even if she did return. Gabriele Ferzetti as Sandro and Lea Massari as Anna are spoiled, suave ciphers, as vacuously clever and forgettable as most of the film they populate.

The story is peppered with hints as to what may have happened to Anna—a boat leaving the volcanic island where she was last seen, a handful of rumored sightings—but this is not to say Antonioni is trying to create the state of confusion and contradiction that all the best unsolved/unsolvable mysteries do (see Michael Haneke’s Caché). Rather, he uses these hints to tease, throw off and say fuck you to any audience members anticipating that he will tell a mystery with a routinely clear resolution when he’s more interested in telling a cheating story. Disclaimer: Going against the audience’s genre expectations is fine. Mixing and switching genres is fine. Telling a story without a neat “ending” is fine. I’ve seen films work wonders bucking these conventions, and I detest Antonioni’s contemptuous presumption that we are adapted to traditional stories and consider everything else torture. In fact, there is something very oblivious and snide about how he keeps prodding us with clues and red herrings into the back half of the film, by which point it is pretty clear that the story’s focus has strayed away from Anna to Claudio and Sandro, so why bother taking Antonioni’s bait and trying to solve this puzzle? That we will not learn about Anna’s fate thus strikes me as more predictable than innovative, even granted that the film’s fame (infamy?) has diluted its central conceit. A mystery with absolutely zero hints as to the status and whereabouts of Anna, I think, would have been much more haunting and effective. That way, we would truly know nothing, and the story could concern itself with how much time after Anna’s vanishing Claudia and Sandro feel they should wait before consummating. Instead, one gets enough of a sense from the hints that Anna is still alive and has simply abandoned Sandro and company of her own accord, in which case Sandro and Claudia aren’t really being unfaithful, so who gives a damn?

Antonioni’s belief is that we’re always on the lookout for the quickest excuses to have sex. As sexual partners—and thus as people—we are replaceable and mutable. A woman accidentally wrecks a man’s work of art, and the man uses it as an opportunity to begin foreplay with her, expressing no passion for art and no anger at the accident. Hundreds of men slowly crowd around Claudia in a public square, as if street harassment were ever that obvious and that methodical. Photographers fawn over a tear in the dress of a famous actress—even though the wardrobe malfunction reveals nothing—in what amounts to a miniature poor man’s La Dolce Vita. These scenes are glib and proud, and the philosophy behind them is fatalistic and inaccurate. There are plenty of people in this world who contemplate sex seriously, with control and hesitation, and the people who jump into sex right away on a whim are very few. That Antonioni thinks otherwise speaks to the perverted impulses that are tucked neatly behind his highbrow veneer. The best thing I can say about L’Avventura is that superficially, Aldo Scavarda’s B&W cinematography is gorgeous, and I admired Giovanni Fusco’s brooding jazz score. It’s not enough. I don’t like to call films “pretentious” because that label is usually used by nihilists who would prefer to discourage artists from art’s potential to transcend the industrial and the commercial. L’Avventura is pretentious, and if any of my favorite filmmakers have ever happened to take inspiration from its long takes and its meandering anti-narrative, then they have merely improved on Antonioni’s gross errors.

Grade: D+

31 Days of Cinema, Day Twenty-Five: “Eternity and a Day”

I predicted a few days ago that Lore would go down as the best film I’ve seen this month, and I have nothing but to chalk it up to the magic of cinema to always surprise me: Lore has been surpassed by a rather wide margin. Theo Angelopoulos—the master of Greek cinema, killed in a motorbike accident in 2012 at age seventy-six—is poised to become one of my favorite filmmakers, and after much reflection, I am all but ready to induct his Landscape in the Mist into my all-time Top Ten. Eternity and a Day, which won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is much further credit to him. I wrote earlier of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia—which has a script by Tonino Guerra, who also collaborated with Angelopoulos on numerous films including this—and which has an estimated 117 shots in just over two hours. Eternity has fifty-four shots, give or take a couple, in about the same span of time. Long takes were Angelopoulos’ specialty. Each shot to him, and to his photographer Yorgos Arvanitis, was a theatrical construction, slow and patient but never glib and never contrived, always telling a complex, layered narrative in its own right. Many of his shots switch places and time periods without resorting to obvious cuts, gliding between and juxtaposing past and present with rarely matched smoothness and perfect clarity. With one pan, we travel back in time over a century. Later, characters from the present walk into and observe the past from their own era, then move on. That’s just one example. Time gains as much dimensionality and tangibility as space. One adapts to the story’s rhythm, learns to appreciate the artistry of such setups, realizes that such a film is sui generis.

The “eternity” of the title is Alexander (Bruno Ganz), a poet whose goal in life was to complete The Free Besieged, the incomplete epic poem of Dionysios Solomos, the author of the national anthem of Greece and Cyprus. Alexander has failed; he is terminally ill and somehow plans to euthanize himself the next day, or so I guess. He gives away possessions and reconnects with remaining family one last time. He flashes back to happier times with his late wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld). Maybe he is the “day” of the title, since that is all he has left. Or maybe the “day” is the boy (Achileas Skevis), the Albanian runaway who kills time squeegeeing dashboards, whom Alexander rescues on a whim from a black market adoption service—in a ten-minute sequence told almost without dialogue, which is one of the film’s highlights. Or maybe the boy is “eternity,” since that is what it seems like he has to look forward to once Alexander takes him under his wing. The film is rife with such contradictions and clashes. There is an infinitude in a day—in any unit of time, really—and the inverse of that truth is that a day has the ability to encapsulate an eternity. The concept of infinity/eternity itself is a grand paradox: you can add anything to it, and it will retain its character. The concept of “one”—of one day—is literally infinitesimal, is all but nothing, up against it. Or is it? I could go on; such is the nature of endlessness and thought. The film’s signature achievement is that it illustrates such a paradox by fleshing it out in Alexander and the boy, and the age groups they represent. Infinity in the sense of math can be grasped by children and adults alike, and both struggle with it equally.

Is there any theme more significant in the arts and in history than the generations? I don’t think so. All the other great themes of art—among them the negotiation between liberty and security, the fundaments of human dignity, the vain fight against mortality—seem to be subsumed by the crises and interplays between the old and young generations, the development of one into the other, the idea of our offspring as our ultimate legacy in the world. Eternity conveys this universal theme in the simplest way possible—with one kid and one old man on life’s threshold—and expands from there. Throughout time, society as a whole has had nothing much besides contempt for children; look at how they’ve been imprisoned in schools, streamlined into unskilled labor, perceived as innately stupid, tricked into thinking their perspectives and agonies are invalid, used as shock absorbers for the pettier concerns of adults. Respect for children is a standard to which I hold people in general, and few if any filmmakers have more esteem for and understanding of youths than Angelopoulos had. There’s a devastating sequence in which one runaway kid, Sélim, appears dead in a morgue. His fellow street kids gather in a warehouse, where the boy eulogizes his friend as Alexander watches in stunned silence. Listen to the boy’s speech with care, and you will see how his meditations on and experiences with death and the afterlife are no less profound than Alexander’s, maybe even more so. Really, the boy seems to ask, what is the afterlife? Does consciousness cease or go on forever? Will we be forever young or creatures of eternity? Both outcomes have their pros and cons, you know. I once wrote in a poem (of which I am quite proud), “The end is terrifying, so is eternity: heaven the olive branch between the two.” I am confident that Angelopoulos would have agreed with that sentiment.

After Alexander stumbles upon the boy and becomes his guardian by accident, he makes it his life’s final duty to protect and guide the boy for as long as he can. It’s a less ambitious, more manageable, even more immediately humane task for him to take on than wrestling with Solomos, yet his time is limited and the boy will soon have to fend for himself, just like normal. Both use their time with each other as a reprieve—and it is an essential and worthwhile reprieve, which crafts a great story. One John Lennon (not the Beatle) has written, in Boxcar Politics, that political “movement[s]” are often manifested in “physical movement.” This applies well to Angelopoulos, who tracks his characters’ progress and political maturation in terms of their walks, runs and moments of stasis through space, time, history and technology, and across borders social and geopolitical. In one harrowing scene, Alexander takes the boy north to the snow-capped border with Albania, where a tall fence has silhouettes of bodies plastered all over it. Small wonder why the men decide to turn back. After they return to Thessaloniki, they witness a classical wedding party, which Alexander rudely interrupts to give away his dog. Angelopoulos herein is also tracing the movement of motifs across his body of work. In the adoption scene, the boys are lined up against a wall; one kid protests simply by walking forward and is promptly shoved back. This echoes a scene from The Traveling Players, in which the acting troupe faces a firing squad and Aegisthus fights back. As he aged, the filmmaker grew closer to youth—an act of atavism disguised as paradox—and decided to show that rebellion does not develop with adulthood but rather is primal, in us at birth—and, in a way, purer when we are young. (Recall Bob Dylan’s wistful refrain: “Eh, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”) The border crisis harkens back to Landscape, in which a young sister and brother (also named Alexander) head to Germany to reunite with their father, as if Germany bordered Greece and Cold War politics were nonexistent. That film also has a wedding scene interrupted by an animal—a horse, found dead.

Rest assured, the film can stand alone and is no less excellent viewed that way. Ganz as Alexander—hulking yet beaten down, artsy and snooty yet capable of tenderness and innate humanism—is near-perfect. I forgot right away that he was the actor who would go on to play Hitler. Renauld’s Anna is heard mostly in voice-over, from letters she wrote to her husband. Her dialogue is dense, ethereal, but appropriately so, and she imbues her words with enough emotion and poetry to make them compelling, and to get us to trust that she may well be talking to Alexander in some secret language that only they as lovers can understand, that we are not meant to interpret. The Italian actor Fabrizio Bentivoglio, as Solomos (yes, he does show up), has the daunting task of fleshing out a historic figure in a character’s national-mythological imagination without being garish. The key to his performance is its subtlety and nonchalance, and the way he (and Ganz with him) savors each unique Demotic Greek word that he purchases from common folk after his return from Italy. This is Angelopoulos’ way of cluing us in on art—film, in particular—as a constructive, economic process, with money and labor behind it, always a sign of the times it was made in—and on how art and the aural beauty of language and etymology depend on history and the generations to survive. Skevis as the boy is game for the challenge and matches Ganz in every scene. The men’s journey cannot last forever, and when they have two hours remaining, they can do nothing more mundane and unpretentious than go on a bus ride—a simple moment of mentorship made precious by context, which the filmmaker turns into yet another bravura set piece. In his obituary, critic David Thomson writes of the incompleteness that is reflected across Angelopoulos’ oeuvre, and of the irony (or is it?) that he was killed while in the middle of a film production, which will now be left unfinished forever. This is a man who seized at eternity and the eternal journey of man, and failed inexorably, but came up with a fragment of it that is plentiful and that does not fail to somehow symbolize infinity. The film’s denouement is inevitable and brutal; its emotional climax comes when Alexander parks in the middle of the road, longing for the boy to return just so he can clean his dashboard, for the twin youthful sensations of eternity and of carpe diem—of seizing each day, one by one—to return to his very mortal being, as we all do.

Let us hope that this film—and this director’s body of work—lasts for as long as its title prescribes.

Grade: A+

31 Days of Cinema, Days Twenty-One, Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three: “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” | “Nostalghia” | “Beau Travail”

In The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, an early film from Japanese legend Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the title flowers is Kikunosuke Onoe (Shotaro Hanayagi), the presumed last in a long line of kabuki actors. He works in 1880s Tokyo and is thought to be an artistic-genealogical cul-de-sac because, besides being adopted, he has no talent. The onstage performance in the opening scene and the subsequent gossip make that clear. When the family’s wet nurse Otoku (Kakuko Mori) makes an improper—perhaps romantic—advance on Onoe to encourage him to improve his acting, both are shunned from the family, and Onoe flees to Osaka to follow Otoku’s advice, and to consummate his love for her soon enough. The film is tinged with nostalgia for an era lost and an art form dying amid unspoken historical change. Theatre is very much a common man’s art, a communal experience shared between actors and audience. Cinema is more privileged for its performers, more accessible across time and space, but not as ethereal and distinct, and lacking—as Walter Benjamin reminds us—the “aura” of theatre. Mizoguchi knew that film technology risked making theatre, kabuki and otherwise, obsolete—and that risk is still present today—but he accepted film as the up-and-coming storytelling medium and used it to tell a motive story that theatre in its stasis could not. What else besides film can appropriately reveal and convey such backstage dramas, or such insights into how theatre is prepared and received? Thus, Mizoguchi expertly plays on the contrast between film and stage, and the ironies of their interaction herein. Also a source of much profundity is the ironic and tragic injection of privilege into the universe of kabuki. Another contrast occurs between the refined, popular upper-class theatre of Tokyo and the poorer, more amateur traveling troupes of Osaka. This is one of the film’s many elements that are still relevant in today’s world, in which popular stage productions are confined to our greatest urban metropolises (New York, especially) and forsaken everywhere else—an astonishing universalism, given the isolationism of Japanese culture and cinema. Paralleling this is the film’s mixture of static (i.e., theatrical) and panning (i.e., traveling) shots, which were long and impressive for the time, 1939. (My favorite part of the film was likely a juxtaposition between a search for a major character on a store-filled street and a similar search, years later, across a row of train carriages.) The long takes do get ponderous at some points, but reducing them might have diluted the impact of the ending, in which the story culminates in a classical tragedy executed to near-perfection. This was my first Mizoguchi, and a splendid introduction to his vast body of work.

Grade: A

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There’s an infographic somewhere online—I can’t find it but still hope to—showing and interpreting one still from each shot of Nostalghia, the late-career film that Russian great Andrei Tarkovsky made in Italy. The very concept of such an infographic should tell you how refined a style of filmmaking it is, to weave just a handful of long takes into one story as Tarkovsky made his specialty. With films like these, I have made it a pastime to count—or at least attempt to count—the number of shots. Here, I counted 117 shots, give or take a few, in just over two hours, making an average of just over a minute per shot; that math of course neglects to convey the story’s climactic crux, which plays out in one nine-minute-plus shot. Frequently, Tarkovsky tricks us into thinking that a particular shot will end quickly, as it starts off with some falling action—a character or two walking away; a face, place or fact being established; the camera of Giuseppe Lanci zooming out. Yet, far after these falling actions have made their points and dissipated from their pinnacles, the camera lingers, yearning for more, conjuring life beyond a constructed false end. There’s a sense of winding down to the whole project that becomes all the more poignant knowing that this was Tarkovsky’s second-to-last film. He was dead three years later, due to cancer that he contracted working nearby nuclear ruins on Stalker, which he made before Nostalghia. The plot itself is threadbare and a little bloated: a Russian biographer Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky), clearly modeled on you-know-who, and his Italian guide Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) head to a Tuscan bathhouse where a late Russian composer whom Andrei is researching spent a brief but crucial sojourn. A local madman (Erland Josephson, a muse of Ingmar Bergman) gets involved, in ways on which I won’t elaborate. The narrative is stodgy and confused, and it’s going to take me a second viewing to comprehend it all, but the film works as a tone poem because its mood is innovative and assured and comes from a genuine, wise and palpable sense of mortality. And it is more than worth watching for two brutal scenes at the end, which involve different degrees and uses of fire. One of them is the nine-minute take I referred to, and it shows Andrei trying to make it across a bath while keeping a lighted candle aflame. It sounds banal, but trust me: when it happens, you will understand why it is happening, why Andrei is doing it, and it will be suspenseful, and you will be rooting for him to achieve his goal. What a beautiful scene.

Grade: A-

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Beau Travail was the second film in a row I watched that with a somewhat flawed body and a perfect ending—a wobbly routine that somehow sticks the landing. I hope to write more on this film later, because I want to re-view it in the context of its source, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, once I’ve read it. I’m aware it’s a loose adaptation, but it’s still a curious one. The director Claire Denis moves Melville’s tale of British naval impressment to a modern-day brigade of the French Foreign Legion being trained in Djibouti, a city-state on a strategic point of the Horn of Africa. The narrator is one Sgt. Galoup (the subtle yet versatile Denis Lavant), who for reasons unexplained develops an intense hatred for one of his group’s most popular and charismatic soldiers, Gilles (Grégoire Colin). The film is sublime as an ethnography of the Legion’s training regimen and interplay with the surrounding African color. The inclusion of Muslims into the Legion receives much focus and delivers much insight; observe their stamina in how they refuse to nourish themselves during Ramadan, even in the desert. Yet, as a psychological drama, the story feels quite vacant, too open to interpretation for its own good. Even in the hands of an actor as strong as Lavant, Galoup is all action and little if any motivation or context; he’s a muscled walking cipher, a stoic—appropriately, for the military—but a bizarre and blank one. His one-man war against Gilles comes out of nowhere yet gives the whole film its impetus. It works on the level of poetry, but how? Much is staked on the music of one Charles Henri de Pierrefeu, which samples Benjamin Britten’s opera of Billy Budd, and I worried at some points that I was being manipulated into showing interest and provocation at this thin plot.

Alas, here is my interpretation, and it is a subjective but valid one: Melville is thought to have had Asperger’s, and his works come up often in discussions of autism theory. Denis’ female gaze on the male body is said to lend the film a heavy homoerotic, homo-social subtext—a feminine takedown of masculine lust and aggression (which Kathryn Bigelow later riffed with The Hurt Locker) that bluntly uses feminine sexual interest to turn casual masculine/martial camaraderie on its head. The motif of oft-topless male bodies moving in harmony in the desert, performing grueling exercise, ought to make no secret of this, even to the layman viewer. Not to go out on a limb, but I as an Aspergerian have always felt a strong kinship with and esteem for LGBTQ persons and their human rights. That is not least because they grow up in a heteronormative world that refuses to contextualize their homosexuality, and that confuses and conditions them into a warped, dishonest heterosexuality. Not to mention, that same conservative world impelled the young me—a literal-thinking Aspergerian, too trusting of authority—to think that it was wrong to be in touch with myself on any sexual level, while everyone around me was throwing their virginities to the wind. Enough has been written about Galoup’s repressed homosexuality. Would it be fair to view him as an Aspergerian—cold, stealthy, loving of firm military routine, jealous of Gilles’ social aptitude? Or is Gilles the Aspergerian—compassionate in a tactless way, prone to abrupt violence, too obedient towards Galoup to protest his castigation? My reading of Billy Budd may decide how I answer these questions. Suffice it to say: I began this month’s challenge with The Rover, which had one abrupt use of pop music that was too jarring to work. The sudden soundtrack choice that concludes Beau Travail, on the contrary, is a stroke of genius, and wraps up the film on a big emotional high. Man, that song’s stuck in my head now.

Grade: A-

To Do: Reviews of Tsotsi and Eternity and a Day are imminent. Off to watch In the Name of the Father.

31 Days of Cinema, Days Seventeen and Eighteen: “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” | “Bicycle Thieves”

Where does power emerge from? From other people, of course. A leader of a nation is not so without the support and submission of his/her military, fellow politicians, and electorates—who are thus endowed with their own power. Which begs the question: if power is cyclical, does it have an origin? Well, perhaps it does, in a top-down environment where the strong holds total power over the weak—a situation that I find innately corrupt—but most political climates are more complex than that, I like to think. Power comes off as arbitrary and nebulous the more one contemplates it, the power of bureaucracy in particular. Who infuses all of these paper trails, historical traces, personal recollections and jurisprudential decisions with trust and influence? We do. But can we rely on them? What grants them significance? Better yet, can we be confident they have any significance at all? Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God takes these inquiries as its central theme. Based on the real-life accounts of the missionary Gaspar de Carvajal (here played by Del Negro), Aguirre tells of an offshoot of Pizarro’s army, in 1560s modern-day Peru, trekking through the Andean tropics in search of El Dorado, a city of gold that exists only in these guys’ imaginations. These Spaniards establish a dominion over the land—never mind the Incans prowling around them—and declare King Philip II overthrown. Yet, what power do they have over the king if he’s an ocean across from them? What power does the king have over them hence? What is the point of all these officious embellishments? Ego, I guess.

The main strength of Aguirre is its absurdist bent; a theme of performativity has been running throughout most if not all of the films I’ve watched this month, and here, it is especially prominent (and set perfectly to the music of Popol Vuh, the electronic band named for the Mexican epic). These wannabe conquistadores declare hegemony over the land as if they were walking into a bathroom. Laws are signed in; a trial results in a death sentence followed by a pardon; a civilization, albeit a short-lived and poorly run one, takes shape from this chaos. Inéz (Helena Rojo), the girlfriend of expedition head Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra), has her servants schlep her around in a litter—a clichéd symbol, but a valid one for demonstrating the isolated, oblivious, ideal Spanish sphere of influence that these nutcases wish to impose on the Andes. Power changes hands as cards in blackjack; the title character (Herzog’s muse, the tacitly wild Klaus Kinski) has a great speech in which he emphasizes that those who rebel against power—those who recognize power’s abstraction—are ultimately history’s biggest winners, and that’s the end of Ursúa. The barely seen Incans, meanwhile, seem to hold the most power, with their awareness of the landscape, its borderless quality, and its myriad opportunities for hiding. Characters are alive and kicking in one shot and dead with arrows sticking out of them the next. The futile hunt for El Dorado continues throughout—which Aguirre may not mind, as the pursuit is more vital than the destination. Yet, how does he allow himself to fall so hard for such a myth? How does he have such faith in his mortal civilization? How can we believe that power and its apparatuses are concrete when they really aren’t?

Grade: A-

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A little part of me worries that I am not yet qualified to review Bicycle Thieves, because the version I watched (on Hulu) was dubbed into English. So allow me to take the chance to say: I despise dubbing. When I watch a film, I want the authentic aural experience as well as the visual one, and that means being able to hear the actors’ actual voices and judge their performances based on that. It does not mean having to listen to a bunch of fourth-rate radio actors try and fail to contort the actors’ mouths into English with stereotypical, insultingly bad accents. Subtitles or bust. (Curious, how Aguirre was filmed in English and dubbed in German—with actors pretending to be Spanish, no less.) That said, Bicycle Thieves was strong enough that I enjoyed it and got sucked into watching Hulu’s copy of it, even with the dubbing. If you know cinema, you know this film: it’s about a poor man named Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), who needs a bicycle for a job—and hence for social mobility, so to speak—and gets it, only to have it stolen from him, an event that leads him on an impossible citywide hunt to reclaim the bike. The film was directed by Vittorio de Sica and was the vanguard of Italian neorealism. I was worried it might be too simple, but it isn’t.

I admired the photography (by Carlo Montuori) and how it constantly frames its characters within the trappings of urbanity. Bicycles, windows, ladders, grilles, benches, buses, wheels, spokes, beds, posters—all of these seem to constrict on Antonio and his family (Lianella Carell as the wife, and young Enzo Staiola as the son) as their economic situation grows more dire by the second. Capitalism is presented as artificial, a two-dimensional construct, whereas nature is one-dimensional, linear, simple: the trees, the grass, the rain, the buildings and pathways, the people and the lines and crowds they form—they’re so straight, the city of Rome can’t seem to accommodate them all, and it can’t. There are only so many bicycles to give and so much money to get. The film also has a keen eye for the silent, unspoken social behaviors and codes of crowds, overseeing the rituals of everyday metropolitan life: queueing for bus rides and tarot readings, gathering for sport and meals and mass, protecting and defending those in their own economic class. There is a human fabric visible, a way of connecting while staying disconnected, of fulfilling the social contract amidst acidic class competition, and much of the conflict arises from Antonio disrupting this fabric with his insistence that his bike be returned and the thief brought to justice. The ending, what with its blunt cyclicality (pun intended), is predictable but moving, and it doesn’t cop out from the cruelty of Antonio’s predicament. You can feel his longing for his bike, his humble job, his family, for just a few hundred more lira, long after the credits have rolled.

Grade: A-

Tomorrow: God willing, I’ll get through Lore, Memories of Underdevelopment and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums.