‘Slow’
Early in this Lithuanian feature, Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas), a sign language interpreter, asks out Elena, a choreographer conducting a workshop for deaf dancers, immediately after their first meeting — and they hit it off instantly. Something feels a little off about it all. His gentle confidence, their spontaneous chemistry; it’s all a bit too easy. When movie meet-cutes start out this good, you might as well brace yourself for a twist.
And sure enough, the twist soon arrives in “Slow” — but it is surprisingly wholesome. Dovydas is asexual, and his forwardness comes from being closely attuned to his emotional desires. Marija Kavtaradze’s drama is a delicate love story that explores a kind of queerness that is widely misunderstood and rarely depicted with such fullness onscreen.
For Elena, who is used to a promiscuous lifestyle but is starved for connection, Dovydas is both thrilling and alienating: a man who is intentional with his feelings, but doesn’t want her in the ways she is used to being wanted. Through tentative conversations and gestures, they unlearn and relearn what it means to love another person. That they’re both professionals who communicate with their bodies adds a beautifully tactile layer to their explorations. Erotic, tense and soft all at once, “Slow” probes into the nature of desire with candor, and not a trace of judgment.
Divya Prabha, one of the stars of last year’s breakout Indian movie “All We Imagine as Light,” offers up another tour de force performance in Mahesh Narayanan’s bleak yet forceful drama. She plays Reshmi, a young South Indian woman who has moved to Delhi with her husband to work at a factory that makes medical gloves; they’re both saving up to go abroad in the hopes of finding better work prospects. From the very beginning, one has the sense that their world is closing in on them. For one, the pandemic lockdown is in effect, though for our protagonists it only means more toil to compensate for their sick colleagues.
They divide their time between a small apartment and the sterile, suffocating factory run by corrupt bosses. Their travel agent has no updates on their visa application and refuses to return their money or their passports. And the city itself is shrouded in smog, lending everything a gray veneer. Then things get even worse: An edited, X-rated video of Reshmi starts making the rounds, and attempts to find the culprit only unearth an even deeper rot in the factory and its management, and in Reshmi’s marriage. But “Ariyippu” never feels like an exercise in gratuitous misery. The striking visuals, particularly of rows of plastic hands moving silently past workers at the factory, accord the film a kind of quiet poetry, while Prabha’s turn as a woman cornered in every way, and yet refusing to concede her dignity, makes it a stirring, even rousing watch.
‘Nightsiren’
A series of eerie images open this Slovakian horror: a girl with a bloody scalp, a woman surrounded by snakes in dark woods, a terrifying tragedy that strikes with the suddenness of lightning. But for all its gothic stylings and witchy themes, “Nightsiren” — which follows a young woman who returns to the provincial hometown she fled as a child — is less about otherworldly terrors than those of the flesh-and-blood world of men and women. When Sarlota (Natalia Germani) arrives at her mother’s cabin, having received an official letter about her inheritance, she first elicits disbelief and then morbid curiosity from the townspeople, who thought she was long dead. They are secretive and highly superstitious, and whisper stories of murderous hags, evil children and pagan congregations. Sarlota also has secrets of her own, slowly drawn out by her only friend in the village, Mira (Eva Mores), a young woman whose brazenness infuriates the predatory men and conservative women of the town. As it twists and turns, “Nightsiren” becomes increasingly delirious in its folkloric visions and sharp in its social critiques, exposing myth as a desperate cover for misogyny, bigotry and the biggest boogeyman of them all: fear of the other.
‘Sisterhood’
The original French title of Nora El Hourch’s Paris-set drama is too raunchy to spell out in this paper, but it captures the film’s spirit perfectly: a nickname combining “HLM,” the term for low-income housing in France, and a reference to a female body part. It’s an insult lobbed at Djeneba (Médina Diarra), by her classmates, which she and her best friends — Zineb (Salma Takaline), and Amina (Léah Aubert) — reclaim with their indefatigable spunk.
The fact that Amina is actually wealthy and doesn’t live in the projects, or that Djeneba, who is Black, receives the worst of the bullying, doesn’t affect their bond. The three are an indivisible unit: sisters who share in each other’s joys and woes, and new-age feminists unafraid to give back as they get.
But when Zineb starts being harassed by her brother’s older friend, things get darker. #MeToo is in the air, and Amina recklessly takes matters into her own hands using the Zoomers weapon of choice: social media. The consequences ripple. Suddenly, differences of class and race become real, and the stakes of the fight for women’s safety, and the courage and solidarity it requires, are impressed upon our heroines. “Sisterhood” is funny, moving and refreshingly angry: a tribute to a generation of girls coming-of-age amid a cultural shift, and rewriting the rules for what they can demand from each other and the world around them.
‘Runner’
True to its name, this Lithuanian film unfolds with the single-minded intensity of a sprint. From the moment Marija (an astounding Zygimante Elena Jakstaite), a young woman in Vilnius, wakes up and finds that her boyfriend, Vytas, is missing, she is on the go, and so is the movie. There is no exposition, no setup; we learn about the characters and their relationship through stray details as Marija frantically calls friends, makes visits, and chases traces of Vytas (Marius Repsys) throughout the city. She has a fresh wound on her lip, and her arm has started to go numb — but nothing will pause or slow down her pursuit for her man, who is dealing with a psychotic episode.
In her moments of forced quiet and immobility, as when she’s taking a bus, Marija fixates on eerie details: a man pressing up creepily against a woman; news reports of Russia at war; soldiers gathering at street corners. The director, Andrius Blazevicius, folds a touching drama about what it means to care for someone in need — even at the cost to your own well-being — into an atmospheric thriller where paranoia blurs our sense of reality. In lieu of judgments or answers, the film offers us a kind of empathy: a few, breakneck hours spent in Marija’s well-worn shoes.
