In a world in the grip of conflict and turmoil, many filmmakers across the globe sought to put on record their sense of alarm. While some dived into the vortex of the growing unease to look for light in areas of darkness, others celebrated the joy that humanity engenders even when the space for positivity shrinks. On our list of ten best international films of 2024 are works by several established masters as well by as a few younger filmmakers who revel in ploughing a lonely furrow and try to make a sense of things spinning out of control.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Shot entirely in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Persian-language The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Germany’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, is a powerful political allegory that examines the workings of an autocracy through the lens of fissures that open within the family of a government functionary appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. As protests erupt in the streets of the city and the man hands out hundreds of death penalties every single day and a gun given to him for protection goes missing, he is gripped by suspicion and distrust of his own family – his wife and two daughters, whose sympathies lie with the protesters. Rasoulof crafts a tale of a moral and psychological tussle between the man and three women who make up his family. It mirrors the divisions in Iranian society while reflecting the moral dilemmas that face individuals fighting, silently or actively, against, or for, a repressive regime.
A still from The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Emilia Perez
A magnificently luminous musical informed with deep complexities, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez is a dazzlingly free-flowing drama centred on a crime cartel kingpin who goes in for gender affirmation surgery. The French production – the film’s principal language is Spanish and the main setting is Mexico City – is propelled by a fantastic female ensemble (Karla Sofia Gascon, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz) and embellished with songs deftly dovetailed into the immersive narrative. The dreaded gangster enlists the help of a lawyer to disappear from the public eye and transition to a woman. The duo pulls off the daring ruse but the crime boss’ wife and children and her past inevitably catch up with her. Emilia Perez, an unblemished tour de force, is about three women fighting to break free from cages of different kinds – the transwoman rids herself of the man’s body she is trapped in, the lawyer shakes off the soul-crushing impact of a dissatisfying career, and the gangster’s conflicted wife seeks to live down an unhappy marriage and a ‘tragedy’. The differing fates and battles are woven into a remarkable tapestry of human experiences.
A still from Emilia Perez
The Substance
Coralie Fargeat’s feminist fable, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, is pitch dark in spirit, but the substance around which it is built is replete with colour, including whites and greys that reflect the state of mind of the protagonist, an ageing celebrity who on being fired from a popular TV show procures a grey-market drug that promises to create a younger version of herself. The Substance is as harrowing as it is electrifying in its savage takedown of showbiz where women have to reckon with unrealistic notions of beauty and saleability thrust upon them by an industry driven by bottomlines. Defiantly pulpy yet uncompromisingly polemical, the parable pulls no punches. Subtlety is not what Fargeat is aiming for. The Substance is after all a body-horror movie that makes no bones about reimagining the genre in the light of the indignity of objectification that a male-dominated world subjects its women to. It shocks and scalds.
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers does with tennis that no movie has ever done. The dynamics of the sport serve as a force that determines the shifting equations among three young people played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist over a decade and a bit. The messy triangle witnesses the ball being smashed relentlessly from one court to the other. It yields a fascinatingly erotic drama that employs subtle and highly effective means to titillate and provoke. Challengers, to an extent, is an elaboration on Guadagnino’s “desire” trilogy – I Am Love, A Bigger Splash and Call Me by Your Name. It is a sensuous and beguiling sports film that brilliantly plays up the emotional dimensions of a contest that goes beyond wins and losses. The highest point of Challengers is its incredibly hypnotic finale, which unlocks the power of cinema in a magically twisty way. Not that the rest of the film has any dearth of similar flashes of inspiration.
A poster of Challengers
Megalopolis
Unapologetically self-indulgent and unceasingly inventive, 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s jaunty epic could easily be dismissed as an expensive folly. But hang on, leaps of faith of the kind that Megalopolis is are rare in this era of AI-driven marketing of entertainment products and should, therefore, be talked up. “When you leap into the unknown, you prove you are free,” says one character in the film. Megalopolis is indeed free and fearless. It is the sort of big-swing filmmaking that only a master who has nothing left to prove can attempt. The film’s hero, a visionary architect who hopes to change the course of history and the face of the world, is not unlike the film itself. He may falter, given the sheer scale of his ambition. But his derring-do is in itself a work of art. It is an act of defiance of megalomanic and eye-popping proportions.
Spectateurs!
French director Arnaud Desplechin’s hybrid film branches out in different, exciting directions in its celebration of the love of cinema and the spaces in which movies are screened. Spectateurs!, as the title suggests, is not so much about makers of films as about its consumers. Stringing together clips from 50-plus films that shaped his cinematic vision, Desplechin focuses on the filmmaker’s alias, Paul Dedalus, as a spectator. When we first see him, he is a child watching the 1964 French comedy Fantomas with his grandmother. In a tongue-in-cheek later scene, Dedalus lies about his age in order to watch Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. The cashier at the ticket counter lets him in but not before warning him that the film will bore him. Informative and entertaining in equal parts, Spectateurs! provides a convincing substantiation of a line that defines the film: Cinema is a question, not an answer.
No Other Land
More than a film, No Other Land, the only documentary on this list, is a statement of hope and intent made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of activists working to find a way around the conflict raging in the region. Directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The project, a Palestine-Norway co-production, is led by Basel Adra, a trained but jobless law graduate who has been recording and resisting the displacement of his people in Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, since he was a boy, and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who represents a voice of reason in a climate in which the army is mandated to demolish the homes of those that have lived on the land for nearly two centuries. Personal and political, No Other Land paints a harrowing portrait of a people grappling with the stress, humiliation and depression of enduring decades of occupation and oppression.
Grand Tour
Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’s utterly mesmeric cinematic adventure is a brilliant mix of austerity of craft and flamboyance of ideas. In 1918, a British civil servant runs away from his fiance the day she arrives in Rangoon to get married. I will hunt him down whatever it takes, says the spirited Molly Singleton and goes on a tour across Asia for the purpose. The melancholic runaway Edward Abbott travels across Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Shanghai and parts of Japan. The film retraces the path using a mix of period and contemporary scenes, a blend of b&w and colour, and a voiceover in various languages, each representing a specific location. The impeccably crafted Grand Tour is at once beguiling and befuddling but always masterly. The tonalities are orchestrated with marvellous dexterity when, midway, the film shifts its focus from the morose man to the cheerful woman. For Gomes and Molly, “men are a tragedy, humanity is a tragedy”.
A still from Grand Tour
The Wild Robot
As wild and wacky as it is moving and magical, The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders, is the solitary animation film here because it marks the medium’s emphatic return to its vibrant and vivid hand-painted roots. Based on the 2016 children’s book of the same name by Peter Brown, it tells the story of a marooned helper-robot and an orphaned gosling whose paths cross in tragic and tumultuous circumstances on an island uninhabited by humans. A deep connection develops between the two. From their bonding flows a moving mother-adopted daughter story that sublimely transcends the boundary separating Nature and Machine. The magnificently executed animated film blends technology, the vitality of wildlife, and human emotions (although the plot has no human character) to rustle up a vibrant exploration of motherhood and cross-species solidarity in a forest where predators roam free and the weak are perennially under the threat of annihilation.
A still from April
April
Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore venture is a visually evocative, tangential study of a community where the only constant is the will of the men who seek control over everything but are themselves never amenable to control. In its ambiguities and stylistic angularities, April is as strong as Kulumbegashvili’s debut film, Beginning. But the sole major commonality between the two films is lead actress Is Sukhitashvili, who plays an obstetrician in a Georgian village where she performs abortions despite the procedures being illegal. The dreary routine of her life is upset when she is accused of negligence and faces an inquiry. The defence of her values and the fight against facile assumptions that shape morality in the community takes its toll. April is a tough watch. However, its intriguing premise and the director’s adroit nuanced treatment of a woman at odds with the world around her lend the film an aura of solidity.
