Shubhra Gupta

When a bunch of kids are greeted by a school principal saying jovially, no Draculas here, you are meant to surmise a few things. That the children have a connection with Romania, and that this remote Norwegian town with a fjord on one side and mountains on the other, is a new experience for them. Turns out that The Gheorghiu family, with a Romanian father and Norwegian mother, and their five children — two teenagers, two younger ones, and the fifth, a babe in arms, have relocated from Romania and come to live in Norway. Mihai (Sebastian Stan) is an IT expert, and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) who works in medicine are here for fresh prospects and fresh air, both of which seems to be in ample supply in this snowy, windy place, which turns out to be not as welcoming, leaving the new entrants facing an uncertain future.

To say that Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘All Of A Sudden’ (Cannes competition) is a long film – it weighs in at a solid 3.15 hours – is stating the obvious. The Japanese auteur doesn’t do sudden – the title is a nice little touch of unintentional irony; a leisurely unfolding of events is much more his thing. In fact, he doesn’t do events either; capturing moments like no one’s looking is more like it. Here, his deeply observant style suits the central thrust of the film, which is mainly set in a home for the elderly, where the big themes accompanying end-of-life scenarios are a natural outcome.

There cannot be anything more timely than the premise of Hirokazu Koreeda’s Cannes Competition entry, ‘Sheep In The Box’, which deals with the evolving nature of grief in the age of AI: a couple who’ve lost their young son bring home a humanoid android, who looks and sounds exactly like their boy. It is when Kakeru ( Rimu Kuwaki) begins to show signs of thinking like their son that Otone ( Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke ( Daigo Yamamoto) start wondering about the larger implications of their actions. The question- does a machine have a soul– has been at the heart of such discussions for a long time.

Small town upright cop up against the all-powerful mobster. That could also be read as monster. Because the bad guy in Kartavya is yet another variant of the dhongi baba from Ashram, and several others that I’m finding hard to remember now because there have been so many of varied stripes but who broadly adhere to the ground rule: the more beatific you look, the more depraved you are. It says something about the utterly generic Kartavya, a crime thriller set in Haryana, that the good guy, played by Saif Ali Khan is surrounded by a bunch of bad guys — a senior cop (Manish Chaduhuri) who keeps blocking Pawan’s (Saif Ali Khan) path, and a junior cop (Sanjay Mishra) who is a constant companion, basically playing the BFF trope, and not one of them has been given a characteristic that we haven’t seen before.

Black-and-white frames can be rendered either warm or cool, depending on what you’re going for. Pawel Pawlikowski manages to combine stateliness and intimacy in his signature look, where both those colours are given several shades of grey. As soon as ‘Fatherland’ (Cannes competition) begins, in which unfolds a fraught chapter of the famous author Thomas Mann’s life and times, we know we are back in Pawel territory. It is 1949. Mann (Hanss Zischer), who had fled Nazi Germany for the US, is back, readying for the Goethe prize to be conferred upon him. The film loses no time in setting the context: here is a man who has essentially given up on his country — not motherland; Hitler had turned it into fatherland, a paternalistic, authoritarian, murderous dictatorship — and is to be welcome back at a time when the recently-concluded war has drawn a line separating the East and West.

There’s been a recent upsurge of the interest in Japan, as both location and metaphor, in Indian cinema. The romantic leads in both Toh Ti Ani Fuji ( Marathi) and Ek Din (Hindi), wander around Japanese hills and vales, looking for themselves. The four central characters in Koji Fukada’s latest Nagi Notes (his first in Cannes Competition) are also searching, and their quest turns into a ruminative marvel, which sneaks into your heart without fanfare. Two women, co-sisters-in-law in spirit even when the man in question has vanished from their lives, reunite for a week in Nagi, the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone else, public service announcements on radio talking about mundane civic affairs (as well as the war in faraway Ukraine) become the chief source of information, and where the rhythms of nature reflect the inner turmoil of the characters.

What is a woman’s life? It’s been one of those questions that filmmakers down the ages have grappled with, and will continue to do so, as we engage with the eternal dance of identity, gender politics, roles and responsibilities. Some of the answers that Charline Bourgeoise-Tacquet comes up with in her second feature, prosaically titled, A Woman’s Life (Cannes Competition section), are a surprise. Gabrielle (Lea Drucker), 55, is clearly on top of her profession, a surgeon of repute, who heads her section in a city hospital. When we come upon her, she is juggling multiple things: a long day at work, a husband (Charles Berling), a mother (Marie Christine-Barrault) with advancing dementia, and a room full of interns who seem to think work is a picnic.

Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 is exactly the kind of rom-com that Bollywood is constrained to doing these days, in an era swinging wildly between minority drubbing and bhajan clubbing: empty of fresh ideas, trying to please the conservatives and the so-called moderns, going exactly nowhere High-school dropout Shivansh aka Sunny (Avinash Tiwary) is a kushti-loving fellow who is careful to wear a langot which looks more like a pair of shorts. His big ambition is to wrestle at the national level, but a wrong video going viral puts paid to that plan, leaving him unhappy and unfulfilled in his Rishikesh house, which he shares with his father (Sudhir Pandey), and older brother and bhabhi, and a tenant who doubles up as the ‘hero ka BFF’.