Flavours of Iraq review – vivid childhood memories of 80s Baghdad from writer in Paris exile

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Powerful animation portrays experiences of a French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, with anecdotes about his father, a prominent leftist exile With a title translated a little inelegantly from Le Parfum d’Irak to “flavours of Iraq” when “the perfume of Iraq” might have been simpler and better, this film is a powerful, vivid animation co-directed by Léonard Cohen with its author, French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, robustly narrated in Alani’s first-person by the actor Malik Zidi. The animation style is stylised and expressionist: shapes and forms like silhouette cutouts suggest the piercingly insistent forms of memory. It is about Alani’s childhood and fractured family experience growing up in Paris in the 80s as the son of a prominent leftist Iraqi exile who was forced out of his native country on account of his opposition to Saddam Hussein. The story itself is told through a loose series of flashbacks occasioned by his father’s funeral, at which mourners, members of Iraq’s 1970s soc...
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The Shrouds review – David Cronenberg gets wrapped up in grief

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Cannes film festival
Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached

David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.

Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state of the art burial place where people can bury their loved ones with a new “shroud” whose thousands of tiny cameras can record and transmit real time, 8K pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.

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