Songs of Forgotten Trees review – sensitive, ambiguous drama of female intimacy in Mumbai

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A sex worker and a call centre employee forge an ambiguous relationship in a film of strong feelings In a tiny crumbling Mumbai apartment two women move around each other, squeezing into the kitchen to cook, or past one another in the hallway. The cramped space hems them in – just as society limits their choices. That is surely the point first-time director Anuparna Roy is making in a gentle drama set mostly in the apartment about the closeness that develops between the two women. One of the roommates is Thooya (Naaz Shaikh), an actor and part-time sex worker. The apartment belongs to a client, Nitin (Bushan Shimpi), an arrangement that outrages the neighbours. Thooya doesn’t care what they think, and has rented the second bedroom to a stranger, Shweta (Sumi Baghel), who works from home for an IT call centre. There is an awkwardness between them at first that develops into … what exactly? Romance? It looks that way, although the film’s final scene is ambiguous. Continue reading... f...
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The Animal Kingdom review – Romain Duris leads post-Covid fantasy of virus-triggered mutants

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Duris stars as a father protecting his son, who may or may not be mutating, in Thomas Cailley’s well-crafted thriller

Thomas Cailley’s sci-fi fantasy has too much sensitivity and good taste to be the proper horror-thriller or creature feature that it almost resembles. It’s a drama of emotions and ideas about post-Covid society – which is welcome enough – but with a dash of prosthetics and CGI and some scares. I felt something very similar about Bong Joon-ho’s monster film The Host back in 2006: the worthiness operates against the excitement and I found myself wanting something more gleefully crass and shocking, something more ironic or thrillingly callous. The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would – or a Marvel movie.

The scene is a France of the near future in which there has been an outbreak of some disease which has caused humans to mutate into animals. The government is just about on top of the situation, having established high-security clinical holding units to confine the “bestioles” (“critters”) as local people heartlessly call them. François (Romain Duris) is a stressed guy keeping his emotions in check since his wife became a “bestiole” and now has to be a single-dad to his tricky teen son Émile, in which role Paul Kircher indicates that he might be succumbing to the disease with unnervingly subtle bovine and simian mannerisms, camouflaged within classic adolescent sulkiness. Adèle Exarchopoulos rather phones in the role of a uniformed female cop who appears to have a tendresse for François.

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