‘If From Every Tongue It Drips’
Stream it on the Criterion Channel.
Part of the Criterion Channel’s ongoing Queersighted series, this debut feature by the Pakistani Canadian artist Sharlene Bamboat deploys cinema as a kind of metaphysical ferry: It moves irreverently across the boundaries between countries, languages and genres, and between image and text. Filmed in Batticaloa in Sri Lanka, scored in the Isle of Skye in Scotland, and edited in Montreal, Canada, the movie is in part a portrait of a lesbian poet, Ponni, shot intimately on video by her partner, Sarala.
Speaking in a mix of Tamil and English, Ponni meditates on notions of duality in quantum physics and Urdu poetry, and the history of British colonialism and protest art in South Asia. Onscreen captions by the group Collective Text offer not just linguistic translations but also sensory notations. Appearing in various parts of the screen, the text lyrically describes the sounds and moods of the film (horn bleaaats; flowing water gently laps the shore), with different colors indicating different tenors. A layered, often prismatic experience, “If From Every Tongue It Drips” invites us to read, listen, see and think with extraordinary curiosity, embodying the questing thrill of queerness in form as much as content.
‘Lumberjack the Monster’
Any new feature by the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike should be celebrated as a cinematic event, and it’s a mystery that his latest has arrived on Netflix without a ton of buzz. “Lumberjack the Monster” is a gory serial-killer thriller that would be electrifying in a theater, though it is deliciously entertaining even on the small screen. A murderer dressed as a lumberjack is on the loose, bludgeoning a selective breed of victims — clinical psychopaths — and then stealing their brains. When he targets Akira Ninomiya (Kazuya Kamenashi), a ruthless lawyer with plenty of blood on his own hands, a three-way chase ensues between the two men and a forensic profiler, opening up an old, sinister case about a mad couple who experimented on children.
It’s a convoluted and pulpy script with some silly pop-psychologizing on evil and empathy, but in classic Miike fashion, the fun is in the style rather than the substance. The twists are thrilling, playing on the moral gray areas of all the characters; the action is directed with sleek, often gasp-inducing precision; and Kamenashi, with his perfectly shaped, dagger-like brows, is menacingly captivating onscreen.
‘Non-Aligned: Scenes From the Labudovic Reels’
Between the mid-1950s and 1980, Josip Broz Tito, the President of what was then Yugoslavia, traveled by sea all over the world on diplomatic trips called “Voyages of Peace.” His cameraman, Stevan Labudovic, followed in tow. On sparkling celluloid, Labudovic captured Tito’s visits to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the birth of the Third World: an alliance of newly liberated and decolonized countries that chose to side neither with the United States nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and instead be “non-aligned.” For years, Labudovic’s newsreels would play before movie screenings in Yugoslavia, but since the breakup of the republic in 1992, his films have languished in a vault in Belgrade.
In “Non-Aligned: Scenes From the Labudovic Reels” — part of an ongoing project of digitizing and re-narrativizing this footage — the filmmaker Mila Turajlic digs into those archives, stitching them together into glimpses of a historical moment thrumming with promise. Contextualized by interviews with Labudovic, nearly 90 at the time, and Turajlic’s own reflections on growing up in the wake of Yugoslavia’s fall, the feature looks back through layers of history and beyond simplified narratives of success and failure. Together with “Ciné-Guerrillas,” another feature-length project by Turajlic drawing on footage shot during the Algerian War of Independence, “Non-Aligned” is a visually arresting inquiry into what it takes to envision a new world — and to implode those visions.
The setting is South India. We are in the future — or maybe the past, or perhaps some other time entirely. War is on the horizon, or so the cops and the soldiers say, as they summarily arrest anyone wandering the streets and dump them at a mental asylum, where arrestees are told they’re insane and held for months before being released. Meanwhile, loud choppers traverse the skies, corpses mysteriously turn up at the local mortuary and migrant laborers are dispatched to a weapons factory that emits strange fumes. The allure of Dr. Bijukumar Damodaran’s dystopian drama, “Adrishya Jalakangal,” is how little exposition it provides. It drops us into its strange reality and has us follow a wacky electrician (Tovino Thomas) just released from the asylum after six months of unexplained detention.
He returns to the field of abandoned train cars where he lives, having turned one rusted coach into his home and workshop. But soon, he realizes that something has changed. Suddenly, he is able to speak with the dead, who tell him about all the ways in which the state is eliminating dissenting and vulnerable citizens under the pretext of a threat to security, and entrust him with a lifesaving mission. “Adrishya Jalakangal” is a whimsical (and visually delightful) yet gutting work of antiwar filmmaking. Abstraction is the movie’s strength: The playbook of war — fear-mongering, bloodlust, abuses of power — is the same everywhere, it suggests, and that madness may be the only sane response to its logic-defying violence.
‘Abang Adik’
One of the great pleasures of this Malaysian drama from Jin Ong is how slowly and carefully it shows us its cards, constantly unsettling our expectations. “Abang Adik” opens as a gritty underworld thriller, as Adik (Jack Tan), a young hustler with bleached blonde hair, narrowly escapes a raid on the immigrant workers he has helped to smuggle into Kuala Lumpur. The slightly older Abang (Kang Ren Wu), who cannot hear or speak, is more straight edge. He toils away at thankless jobs on the streets of the city, exploited daily by those who are better off than him. As these two arcs eventually intersect, the film reveals itself, at its core, as a kind of platonic love story.
We learn that Abang and Adik met as orphans; they lost their families, homes and identity papers as children, but found each other. They have lived together like brothers ever since, grinding away while a social worker tries to navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth to get them their documents. Then “Abang Adik” shapeshifts again. A tragic twist separates the pair and turns the movie into a seething meditation on fate, morality and the ways in which Malaysian society punishes the poor and undocumented for trying to survive. It’s a vividly directed film, full of rage and tenderness and pathos, anchored in a towering nonverbal performance by Kang.