The French filmmaker’s ninth feature is a sweet and jaunty look at endings and beginnings. Nobody captures the quotidian ramble of life quite like Mia Hansen-Løve. One Fine Morning Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Just as the Panahis’ countrywomen are doing the same, so fiercely and courageously, on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere today. Both modes have their place and their value, of course, these urgent efforts to push back against a repressive regime. Heartwarming and heartbreaking, Hit the Road darts and glides where many Iranian films made by elder statesmen-including Panahi’s father-solemnly inspect. It is, in some ways, a wacky road trip movie, though the dire reality of what this trek is all about looms large over the boisterous familial squabbles that animate the film. Hit the Road is about a family on a journey to smuggle a son, who is fleeing a prison sentence for an unknown crime, across the border. Hit the Road is lively and energetic, even as it considers, much like No Bears does, the binding restrictions of life in present-day Iran. The younger Panahi has gone a more florid route, one perhaps befitting of his age. Jafar is currently embattled in a legal struggle against the Iranian government, banned from making films and from leaving the country, a situation reflected in the stony neorealism of No Bears. The Panahis are father and son, one boldly emerging into a film tradition to which his father has given so much. This year, two Iranian filmmakers offered up damning portraits of their country and its government: Jafar Panahi’s filmed-in-secret meta-drama No Bears and Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road. Saint Omer is another sterling entry in the recent spate of films, like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Nikyatu Jasu’s Nanny, that have addressed the West African diaspora with resounding power. The slow build of this precisely structured film is remarkable, as if we are watching the reinvention of a hoary genre. As these two women mull over, publicly and privately, their lives as Black women in France-and as mothers- Saint Omer whispers with the voices of so many drifting in the margins of what is meant to be a progressive and egalitarian society. She patiently and compassionately listens to Laurence in the form of Rama ( Kayije Kagame), a pregnant writer who sits in on the trial in search of a story. Diop, a documentarian making her narrative debut, based her film on the real-life case of a Senagalese immigrant convicted of killing her child. Instead, Saint Omer is a measured consideration of a tragedy: the death of an infant whose mother, Laurence (a forceful Guslagie Malanda), stands accused of murder. There is no lawyerly speechifying, no sudden discovery of salient evidence. Melancholy without being sappy, mordant without being cynical, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was the poignant surprise of the year, a marvelous debut feature from a director who, I hope, will take us on many more humane adventures in the future.Īlice Diop’s quiet and somber film is a courtroom drama, but not in the familiar sense. Anchoring the project is the invaluable voice work of co-writer Jenny Slate, who gives the adorable creature of the title some necessary pepper lest he become too cute. The film’s visual invention and graceful writing distinguish it from many of its peers Marcel speaks to little ones on their level while gently encouraging them to think and feel more expansively about their lives and the life of the world around them. Instead, Marcel is a wistful wonder of a children’s film, one that carefully balances the silly with the serious. Based on viral shorts from a decade or so ago, Marcel could easily have been lazy, cloying nostalgia, a too-late attempt to cash in on a bygone era of internet quirk. On paper, Dean Fleischer Camp’s film sounds like a mistake.
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