‘20,000 Species of Bees’
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At a time when trans rights are under attack, Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s delicate feature, about an 8-year-old coming to terms with her gender identity, feels especially urgent. This is not to say that “20,000 Species of Bees” is an issue film. It is a richly detailed and beautifully acted drama that traces both the inner and outer worlds of young Coco (a magnificent Sofía Otero) with radiant naturalism, allowing us to acutely feel her struggle to be perceived as the person she knows herself to be.
It’s summer, and Coco and her two siblings are visiting their grandmother’s hometown in the Basque Country with their mother. From the beginning, Coco’s predicament seems clear as day, yet no one dares to give her the words for it. When she’s referred to with male pronouns, a shadow seems to fall on her otherwise wide-eyed, curious face; she hates going swimming for fear of being seen as a boy; when some old ladies identify her as a girl, she lights up. But she’s not the only one struggling with gendered pressures. Her mother and grandmother are navigating crises of their own around maternity and marriage, and it is in locating Coco’s struggle within this larger context that “20,000 Species of Bees” is particularly insightful. Coco’s relatives’ reservations with her identity have more to do with their own hang-ups than hers, and granting her the freedom to be who she is means claiming it for themselves, too.
‘Stolen’
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Karan Tejpal’s nail-biting thriller unfolds largely over the course of a single night in North India. As a woman sleeps on a railway platform with her infant nestled in the curve of her body, a shadowy figure steals the baby. Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) and Raman (Shubham Vardhan), two upper-class brothers from the city, witness the abduction. Gautam wants to leave — they have a family wedding to get to — but Raman can’t fathom not helping the distraught woman whom the police barely take seriously. The two are soon embroiled in a search that turns bloodier and more dangerous by the minute, involving corrupt cops, riled up village mobs and a trafficking racket. Tejpal’s script builds tension masterfully with each twist, while also sketching a keenly observed and detailed portrait of a society riven by class inequity. For the two brothers, blinkered by a life of wealth and convenience, the real horror is confronting the realities of a world in which money implies impunity, and poverty equals disposability.
‘This Woman’
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Directed by the Chinese feminist activist and artist Alan Zhang, this faux-documentary portrait of a young mother in Beijing — starring the actress Li Hehe, who wrote the script with Zhang — is a work of deceptive poetry. There’s a directness to both the style of the film and the demeanor of the protagonist, Beibei, that seems to belie fiction. The camera is loose and hand-held, and the editing is elliptical, avoiding a narrative arc or too much exposition. In scenes interspersed throughout, Beibei speaks to the camera, as if being interviewed or making a video diary; she exudes brazen candor and emotion as she laments having become a “typical wife and mother.”
Yet what we see is too intimate, too illicit even, to be completely unfiltered. Beibei lives with her mother and toddler, works in real estate and struggles to scrounge up money to buy her mom an apartment. Her husband is somewhere else, only heard on the phone, while on-screen, she engages in several affairs — romantic, sexual and emotional. As the film proceeds, the fourth wall starts to break, so that it’s unclear how much of what we’re seeing is fictional versus drawn from the real lives of the director and the actress. While Beibei ruminates on the balance of love and independence she desires in her life, Zhang and Li leave us with a metanarrative question to ponder: To what degree is this movie a thin veil, the sort of facade women must often employ to narrate the messy contradictions of their lives?
‘The Universal Theory’
A delicious sci-fi noir set in the 1960s, Timm Kröger’s film follows a German doctoral candidate who attends a physics conference in the Swiss Alps and finds himself caught up in a time-rippling, multiverse-crossing crime saga. Filmed in high contrast black and white, the film plays out like a Philip K. Dick story directed by Alfred Hitchcock: cryptic, seductive and extremely stylish. The trouble all starts when Johannes (Jan Bülow) — who is set upon proving the existence of multiple universes in his dissertation despite his supervisor’s disapproval — encounters the beautiful pianist Karin (Olivia Ross) at the conference and is overwhelmed by a strong sense of déjà vu. As it turns out, she knows more about him than any stranger ever could. Soon, more uncanny and sinister coincidences arise: doppelgängers, brutal but inexplicable murders, mysterious underground tunnels, prophetic dreams. Kröger does not solve all the puzzles he lays out. Rather, “The Universal Theory” is a mordant, intelligent and entertaining ode to the inscrutable complexity of the universe — and of the human imagination.
‘Ramona’
Andrea Bagney’s Madrid-set movie takes cues from all the great art house rom-coms, from “Breathless” to “Annie Hall” to “Before Sunrise.” But far from feeling derivative, “Ramona” is a sparklingly original — if also charmingly nostalgic — film that probes the gaps between onscreen fantasies and real life. At its captivating center is the titular heroine, a translator and aspiring actress played by the Spanish singer Lourdes Hernández. The film opens at a bar, where Ramona hits it off with a man, Bruno (Bruno Lastra). Their meet-cute turns into a heady, daylong adventure, but ends abruptly when he declares his love for her and she reveals she has a partner (Francesco Carril).
The next day, Ramona goes to an audition, only to discover that Bruno, still besotted with her, is the director. Reluctant at first but encouraged by her loving and supportive boyfriend, she takes on the role, and is soon embroiled in a classic love triangle: One man represents a sense of stability; the other, reinvention and possibility. The color palette of “Ramona” drives home this dilemma. Shot mostly in black and white, it blooms into vibrant color whenever our protagonist is in front of the camera. “Ramona” softens from the arch, cinematic artifice of its opening to a sobering realism by the end, but there’s no sense of loss or disillusionment in this gentle, empathetic film: only an openness to life’s many fleeting yet fulfilling possibilities.
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