‘How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies’
The Thai director Pat Boonnitipat’s first feature was a box-office sensation across Asia when it came out in theaters last year. It’s easy to see why. “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” is the rare feel-good family drama that tugs at the heartstrings, but with a warm and gentle naturalism that never tips into cloying melodrama.
M (Putthipong Assaratanakul) is a slacker with futile dreams of becoming a big-time gamer who lives off his mother. When M’s cousin inherits a fortune after taking care of their dying grandpa, M realizes there might be a moneymaking opportunity on the horizon for him, too: His grandma (Usha Seamkhum) has just been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Suddenly, he inserts himself into her life, much to her surprise and initial skepticism.
As you might predict, M’s pretense of care eventually becomes palpably real, but there are no contrivances in this patient, attentive film. Assaratanakul and Seamkhum bring an understated wit and sensitivity to their characters’ fumbling interactions (like when M awkwardly bathes his grandma and mistakes her mole for a nipple) so that by the end, their emotional journey feels wholly earned.
‘The Siren’
Stream it on Metrograph at Home.
In this gorgeous animated drama, the Iranian director Sepideh Farsi spins a grand, tragic fairy tale out of a little-known slice of history: the siege of Abadan, a major oil port in the South of Iran, during the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. Rendered by Farsi and her art director, Zaven Najjar, in a fluid, two-dimensional style, the film follows the 14-year-old Omid, who stays behind with his grandfather after his mother and younger siblings flee the town; his older brother has joined the war, and Omid refuses to leave without him.
Omid’s life of soccer and cockfighting soon grinds to a halt amid relentless bomb strikes, and he takes up a job delivering biryani on his bike to the remaining residents of Abadan — a motley crew that includes soldiers, Armenian Orthodox priests, a madcap engineer, a Greek photographer and a beautiful, once-legendary singer who has been banned since the revolution.
As Omid begins to concoct a plan to lead this group away to safety on his late father’s old boat, “The Siren” tempers the grittiness of war with bursts of magical realism — including a heart-stopping climax that attests to the resilience of beauty, romance and hope even in the face of constant destruction.
‘Youth Trilogy’
Streaming a three-part, 10-hour documentary set in Chinese garment workshops at home may seem like an absurd, even masochistic, exercise. Wang Bing’s “Youth” trilogy is indeed long, without a linear narrative, and often repetitive. But this portrait of the unseen labor that fuels the world’s consumerism is also intensely watchable — like reality television, but without the sensationalism or manipulation.
Shot between 2015 and 2019 in the Chinese city of Zhili, a hub for small, privately owned textile factories, the three films in the series immerse us in the workshops where 20-somethings from faraway provinces toil long hours each day to produce children’s clothes. The setting is oppressive — cramped, sunless rooms in which workers push out pant after pant, shirt after shirt, vest after vest — but Wang’s gaze is never pitiful or exploitative. His subjects are young and ebullient, and across the three chapters, we watch them fight, laugh, flirt, cry and join up together in an attempt to negotiate higher wages.
The trilogy’s duration, if daunting, is essential. The footage is raw and up-close, and over the course of ten hours, it viscerally conveys the insatiable relentlessness — not to mention, the soulless monotony — of this kind of mass production. Watch these films, and you’ll never look at your clothes the same way again.
‘Thunder’
At the heart of this austere Swiss drama set in 1900 is the striking presence of the actress Lilith Grasmug. At times, she evokes the iconic visage of Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc” from 1928. That film’s influence is undeniable in Carmen Jaquier’s provocative period piece, which follows a young woman, Elisabeth (Grasmug), who is pulled out of the convent where she is training to be a nun and sent back to her family home following the death of her older sister, Innocente. The milieu Elisabeth returns to feels foreign — she has been away for several years — and abounds with unspoken secrets; no one will tell her what happened to her beloved Innocente, barring some whispers about “the devil” and accusatory looks at church. Slowly, she uncovers traces left behind by her sister and begins to comprehend a different kind of religious devotion, one driven by the flesh and its desires. Grasmug’s face, often framed in close-up against the rural, mountainous backdrop, is the stage where the film’s dramas play out. Without ever spelling out its themes and ideas, “Thunder” weaves a rapturous fable of feminine self-awakening and spiritual transcendence that feels startlingly modern despite its historical setting.
‘Light Light Light’
Two teen girls meet in a Finnish town. Mariia (Rebekka Baer) is shy and reserved, and a goody two shoes; Mimi (Anni Iikannen), newly arrived at school, smokes and drinks, and is brash and bold. Mimi draws Mariia out of her shell and sparks fly; soon they’re kissing in the woods and sneaking away for trips to the beach.
“Light Light Light” follows the tropes and contours of gay coming-of-age dramas to a T. But the director, Inari Niemi, situates the movie in a specific moment in history: the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which looms over the film and its characters’ fraught, fledgling romance. Orange-pink clouds, drifting all over Eastern Europe, hang in the sky above the town, exuding both beauty and terror; TV and radio programs offer safety tips; the townspeople take iodine pills and fight strange aches and pains. A sense of tragic, romantic doom suffuses the air, and becomes the backdrop to Mimi and Mariia’s naïve adventures — before real doom arrives, in a shape much more banal than radioactive blasts. Told in flashbacks as the older Mariia revisits her hometown to care for her cancer-stricken mother, the film is as bitter as it is sweet, capturing those indelible moments when the fantasies of adolescence come up against the harsh realities of adult life.
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