‘The Art of Nothing’
Stream it on Prime Video or Ovid.
Once a provocative conceptual artist famous for exhibiting “empty rooms,” Jean-Yves Machond (Benoît Poelvoorde) has spent the 20 or so years since his painful divorce as teacher. Now retired, he decides it’s time to return to art, and moves into a tiny, oceanside studio in a small town in Normandy. Jean-Yves arrives in this provincial community with an upturned nose — when a local points out that his squat studio has no windows, he explains haughtily that the architect refused “the dictatorship of the panorama” — but he’s very quickly cut down to size. This town he presumes is full of hicks who would be awed by him turns out to have a thriving art scene, including a posh gallery whose owner, the seductive Cécile (Camille Cottin), nips his habit of responding to simple questions with lofty Rilke and Joyce quotes in the bud.
Stefan Liberski’s script is whip-smart in its skewering of the fragile male artist ego; one hilarious running gag involves a series of paintings Jean-Yves makes of hedgehogs, which he describes as an exercise in “going beyond the subject,” but which everyone mistakes for — or recognizes as — vaginas. Liberski’s wit is brought to delightful life by the actors, particularly Poelvoorde, who embodies the pathetic yet endearing Jean-Yves with pitch-perfect physical comedy.
‘A Child of My Own’
Stream it on Netflix.
Known for her canny blending of real-life stories with the thrills of genre fiction, the Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi takes on a strange Mexican true-crime tale in her new feature. In 2008, a 25-year-old woman, Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, was arrested and imprisoned for kidnapping a newborn baby from the hospital where she worked as a nurse. “A Child of My Own” opens with a series of young women relating Alejandra’s story in first person — how she got married at 17, how she always wanted to be a mom — before a zoom out reveals that we are watching Alberdi’s auditions for an actress to play her subject.
One of them, Luisa Guzmán, plays Alejandra in the re-enactment that unfolds, laying out the bizarre and heartbreaking story of a woman shamed by her husband and in-laws for her inability to stay pregnant. After her third miscarriage, she makes a deal with a pregnant woman who agrees to give Alejandra her child, and comes up with an elaborate ruse to fool her family into thinking she’s carrying a baby to term. That, however, is Alejandra’s version. Halfway through, Alberdi switches gears from the re-enactment to a documentary investigation of the actual events. But this is not a “gotcha” or a cheap attempt at sensationalism. Alberdi empathetically explores the almost pathological societal pressures inflicted on women, and deploys cinema as a tool not for rewriting the past but for reclaiming agency over one’s story.
‘Personale’
Stream it on Ovid.
Close-ups of crumpled white bedsheets covered in strands of brown hair. Loads of dirty laundry being stuffed into industrial-size washers. Women in white aprons scrubbing toilets and showers. Carmen Trocker’s documentary is a portrait of a fancy hotel in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy, but from the inside out. We get no glimpses of its famed amenities, upscale guests, glitzy facade; instead, we see the world of workers in basements and hallways whose invisible labor runs this establishment. Trocker uses a fly-on-the-wall style to observe the staff — mostly women, and many from Africa and Ukraine — going about their daily business.
We see the rush to clean rooms after someone checks out and before new guests arrive; arguments over who gets to do the sheets and who cleans the bathrooms; conversation among the workers about their families, who are often miles away; and complaints about how they’re overworked and underpaid. In one ironic scene, the manager lectures the staffers on the need to put “love” into their work so the hotel can go up from four to five stars — a goal that has no material effect on their lives. But “Personale” is not just a picture of gross exploitation: Trocker captures the lively personalities of the employees as they bicker, commiserate, joke and challenge their boss about their work conditions, inviting us to perceive them in all their humanity.
‘World War III’
Stream it on Tubi.
In this satirical thriller from Iran, a daily-wage laborer is hired to work on the set of a Holocaust drama and, after a series of mishaps, is cast as Adolf Hitler. As silly as that premise sounds, Houman Seyedi’s film is pitched just right, on the line between absurdity and pathos-filled realism. Shakib (Mohsen Tanabandeh), a widower who lost his family in an earthquake years ago, relies on odd gigs to get by. When a truck comes by looking to hire some workers, Shakib just jumps on, eager for cash and a place to sleep.
Initially he’s tasked with guarding the film sets and stepping in as an extra in crowd scenes, but soon he is cast in the main role, and a pungent comedy of errors begins. Instead of sleeping in the leaky and crowded “gas chamber” with the other hired workers, Shakib is sent to stay alone in “Hitler’s house,” a fake mansion that seems luxurious to him. Then Shakib’s lover Ladan (Mahsa Hejazi), a sex worker, shows up, and Shakib is forced to hide her below the floorboards. The jokes write themselves … and so does the tragedy. The ironies of the film shoot are only one layer of this complex and unpredictable movie, which slowly unfurls a drama of power, patriarchy and class. Tanabandeh and Hejazi perform with a depth of conviction that makes each of the film’s wild swerves utterly believable, and utterly heartbreaking.
‘The Wolves Always Come at Night’
Stream it on Film Movement Plus.
The scene that opens Gabrielle Brady’s fiction-streaked documentary is the very picture of freedom: a man rides a stallion across a vast plain, the horse’s mane flying in the wind. That freedom is central to the lives of Davaa and Zaya, a Mongolian herder couple who live nomadically in the Gobi Desert, sustained by the land and their animals. The majestic landscape, soaked in pink-orange sunlight, is seemingly limitless, and the people are tender. In some of the most remarkable scenes, Davaa and Zaya help their goats give birth, and cuddle with their four children in their warm, intimate yurt. Yet the idyll is not all that it seems. Making a livelihood is getting harder as the climate crisis transforms the region, with terrible storms and high heat that kill animals and make the land inhabitable.
Brady made “The Wolves Always Come at Night” in collaboration with her protagonists, who re-enact their difficult move to a settlement on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, where Davaa takes up a construction job. Among cramped buildings, he digs up the land using an excavator — a far cry from his days tearing through the steppes on his horse. Woven through with ghost stories and haunting visions, the film is a poignant portrait of a way of life irrevocably destroyed by climate change.
The post Five International Movies to Stream Now appeared first on New York Times.
