‘Matter out of Place’
This documentary by Nikolaus Geyrhalter is something of a visual oxymoron: it is a visually gorgeous, even pristine, movie about, well, garbage. The Austrian filmmaker weaves together observational portraits of trash and its handlers from across the world, from immigrant cleaners at an island resort in the Maldives, to a mechanized sorting plant in Austria, to volunteers who pick up after Burning Man in the Nevada desert. But this is no navel-gazing exercise in aestheticizing detritus or finding beauty in ugly places. Rather, Geyrhalter’s keen, rigorous tableaux provoke us to think about the massive global industry required to deal with the rubbish we so casually generate in our everyday culture of disposability.
The overwhelming, even breathtaking scale of certain shots — a truck full of garbage bags is airlifted across a snowy valley; speck-size trash-pickers trawl through hills covered with litter — remind us that our relentless consumption accumulates immense collateral, and that keeping our homes and lives clean means relegating other places and people to the dirt.
‘Girlfriends and Girlfriends’
If you’re looking for a movie to help close out Pride month, look no further: The Spanish filmmaker Zaida Carmona’s lesbian comedy is a colorful celebration of queer joy, queer heartbreak and queer mess. Starring the director herself as a neurotic musician and aspiring filmmaker recently dumped by her lover, “Girlfriends and Girlfriends” follows Zaida as she goes to parties and therapy sessions, falls in and out of love, hooks up with the girlfriend of her best friend (who herself is having an affair with someone else) … and so on.
The title of the film riffs on the movie “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” by the French director Eric Rohmer, whose low-key, talky features play a prominent role in the plot — Zaida is a big fan, and many of her trysts take place at a theater screening a Rohmer retrospective. What Carmona crafts here along with her ebullient (and highly fashionable) cast is as much a homage to Rohmer’s movies as a defiant gay reclamation of them. His explorations of the ins and outs of heterosexual desire are restaged in “Girlfriends and Girlfriends” within a filmic world composed almost entirely of women who date women, who may be confused in love and life but are defiant in their queerness.
‘The Orphanage’
When we meet Qodrat (Quodratollah Qadiri), the teenage protagonist of Shahrbanoo Sadat’s coming-of-age film, he’s scalping tickets outside a movie theater in Kabul that is showing the Hindi film “Shahenshah,” featuring action superstar Amitabh Bachchan. It’s 1989, and Afghanistan is under Soviet occupation, which means that when Qodrat is caught by the police, he’s sent to a Russian-run orphanage. There, as he encounters friendship, bullying, romance and tragedy, his love of Bollywood movies keeps him going, inflecting his everyday existence with larger-than-life musical reveries.
Based on the unpublished diaries of Anwar Hashimi, who plays a teacher in the film, “The Orphanage” effortlessly balances naturalism and fantasy, levity and gravity. The scenes set within the orphanage, featuring a superb cast of nonprofessional actors, hit the familiar beats of adolescent dramas, but open up every now and then into the specific historical context of Soviet Afghanistan, as when the kids go to the U.S.S.R. on an exchange trip. As the film moves closer and closer to the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the politics of the outside world impinge on the insular institution. Yet Qodrat clings to his cinematic fantasies, in a bittersweet gesture that affirms both the hope and the futility of the movies.
‘Adoration’
Fabrice du Welz’s beguiling Belgian thriller begins like a fairy tale. Paul (Thomas Gioria), a sensitive boy who lives in the countryside with his creepy, controlling mother, sees a blond, blue-eyed girl, Gloria (Fantine Harduin), being brought into a nearby asylum by force. She’s been dispatched there by an evil uncle, she says, and soon the two children run away, fumbling like Hansel and Gretel through the verdant woods. But as Gloria turns out to be far more elusive — and perhaps deceitful — than Paul, and we, may have realized, their adventure confronts harsh realities of violence and mental illness.
Filmed in lush, dreamlike greens and blues, “Adoration” belongs to one of my favorite genres: movies about untrustworthy, unpredictable kids, who bait us with their innocence and then befuddle us with their cunning. Yet the film’s strength is that it commits fully to its protagonists’ perspectives, emphasizing how fearful and uncertain the world can seem to children who have learned a distrust of adults. As Paul, Gioria gives a performance of extraordinary tenderness, torn between fear, compassion and inklings of desire. Even as shocking twists accumulate, the film immerses us in Paul’s confusion until the very end, underlining how powerfully the yearning for companionship can scramble a child’s senses.
‘Neelavelicham’
A dark, haunted mansion, a beautiful ghost draped in white and a story of love betrayed. Aashiq Abu’s Malayalam melodrama, adapted from a renowned short story by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, has all the elements of a classic Gothic horror brimming with desire and danger. When a writer (Tovino Thomas) moves into an abandoned house in a village, everyone warns him of the bungalow’s supernatural inhabitant. But he decides to befriend the ghost, a woman named Bhargavi, who is said to have taken her own life after her betrothed left her for someone else. The writer never sees the apparition, but he speaks to her and seeks her permission to live in her home, promising to tell her tale in return. As he writes, the thrills and chills of the mansion — creaky doors, rustling leaves, evil cats — feed his imagination.
“Neelavelicham” combines two movies in one. When the writer finishes his story, we see it play out onscreen as a musical drama about Bhargavi, her lover and a jealous cousin. The details of the tale — and the climactic revelation — are fairly predictable, but the real pleasures of “Neelavelicham” are in the genre atmospherics. Abu turns the village, with its thick green foliage and damp, coastal air, into an intensely evocative setting for both romance and horror, while Rima Kallingal, who plays Bhargavi, is a pitch-perfect scream queen with her wide, kohl-lined eyes and cascade of black curls.
