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Légua (João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis, 2023)

It’s been five years since Djon Africa, the last feature from the directorial duo of João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis. That film was about a Cape Verdean man in Portugal who decides to return to his birthplace in search of the father who left him years ago. In certain respects, Légua is a reversal of that trajectory. It’s about the bonds of family, biological and chosen, and the steadfast refusal to leave one’s home behind, even when staying is no longer a viable option. At the heart of the film is the relationship between Ana (Carla Maciel), a wife and mother in her late 40s, and her much older friend Emilia (Fátima Soares), the head housekeeper at a Portuguese manor house. The owners of the house never come around, but Emilia is almost fanatically devoted to keeping the place in perfect condition, should they ever deign to appear. This inflexibility becomes a problem once Emilia is diagnosed with advanced cancer, and Ana feels compelled to care for her friend during her protracted decline.

The primary conflict in Légua has to do with Ana’s sense of duty. It’s implied that Emilia helped Ana at a particularly low point in her life, and feels obligated to return the favor. This is complicated by the fact that Ana’s husband Vitor (Paolo Calatré) lives and works in France, and very much wants her to join him. She refuses, because she must care for Emilia. This creates tension not only in the marriage but in Ana’s relationship with her college-age daughter Mónica (Vitória Nogueira de Silva) who, not without reason, feels her mother is choosing an outsider over her own family.

In its early moments, Légua resembles Carla Simón’s Golden Bear winner Alcarràs. Like that film, Légua observes the activities of numerous people in a rural setting, allowing their relationships to gradually become apparent. But where Simón’s film was about family standing together at all costs, Légua is about dissolution and loss. At the end of the first third of the film, we see a celebration for Ana’s birthday, a scene filled with family and friends. In time, though, Ana’s entire world is reduced to Emilia, someone who was an irascible character even at the best of times. Ana steals private moments, to lay out in the sun or listen to pop radio, but in the end everything comes back to the grueling, painful process of tending to a dying loved one, an experience Miller Guerra and Reis depict with great acuity.

In a rather unexpected manner, Légua doesn’t end so much as it peters out, something that could well be another thematic expression of the complicated timeframe of end-of-life care, the way illness produces its own disconnected affective bubble. But what is clear at Légua’s conclusion is that all those who counted on Emilia, her employers as well as her own family, have completely forgotten about her. Ana refuses to follow suit, making Légua an admirably knotty depiction of the ethic of care, the refusal to let a fellow human being die alone.

It's Raining In the House (Paloma Sermon-Daï, 2023)

In her last film Petit Samedi, Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï profiled her own family, paying particular attention to her brother and his drug addiction. Making her feature film debut, It’s Raining in the House, Sermon-Daï shifts her focus, considering the way that children are forced to cope with a mother (Louise Manteau) who is absent and unreliable, for reasons that are never clearly articulated. Seventeen-year-old Purdey (Purdey Bloquiau) and her 15-year-old brother Mak (Makenzy Lombet) have typical sibling conflicts, such as Mak not keeping the house tidy or Purdey not answering Mak’s calls. But there is a firm bond between them, because essentially, they are all they have.

Whether speaking with a real estate agent or a prospective employer, Purdey must continually emphasize that she will be 18 “in just a few days,” because it’s up to her to see her family through until their mother deigns to return from wherever she may be. Purdey, and to a lesser extent Mak, being thrown headlong into an uncertain adulthood, is the primary theme of It’s Raining, which takes its title from a broken skylight above Purdey’s room, a situation that would be a major problem in most lives but here is just another lingering crisis. To its credit, the film mostly deemphasizes the various troubles the kids face, since they are fairly ordinary for this poor family even in the best of times.

In fact, Sermon-Daï gives greater significance to the interpersonal and psychological problems the siblings are grappling with, even as they are struggling to survive. Purdey must take a job as a hotel cleaner, putting her ambitions on hold. She wants to study nursing, and her judgmental, upper-middle-class “boyfriend” (Amine Hamidou), who already keeps their relationship a secret, tells her she will amount to nothing and is not good enough for him. Mak, meanwhile, has just failed out of school, and spends the summer fencing stolen bikes with his slightly better-off friend Dono (Donovan Nizet). Although Sermon-Daï never spells it out, Mak’s anger issues may owe as much to anxiety about his sexual identity as to his mother’s indifference.

Although It’s Raining seems to owe a little something to Belgium’s best-known filmmakers, Sermon-Daï’s approach is very different from that of the Dardennes. Where their narratives tend to be rather propulsive, It’s Raining is languid, at times even a bit inert. The essentials of its story will call to mind other, better films such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows (2004) or, perhaps more closely, Ursula Meier’s Sister (2012). But where those films seemed intent on dramatizing their young characters’ plights as signs of egregious neglect, It’s Raining merely observes, as if to suggest that there’s nothing that surprising about kids left to fend for themselves. Sadly, this may be true.

Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)

Although his name may be unfamiliar to some, Chinese director Wei Shujun has already made several feature films, including 2021’s Ripples of Life, which also debuted at Cannes. But Wei seems poised for a significant breakout with Only the River Flows. It’s a knotty, complex police drama that combines elements from genre masters like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Bong Joon-ho, but nevertheless displays a highly individual artistic sensibility. The story centers on a highly regarded police detective, Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the rural town of Banpo. He has been tasked with solving the murder of an elderly woman (Cao Yang), and what at first appears to be an open-and-shut case soon reveals unexpected layers of social dysfunction.

This is a fairly standard noir set-up, that one case that the genius detective couldn’t solve. However, by setting the action in China, 1995, Wei is able to show just how ensnared Ma’s task force is with the CCP and its oppressive need for neat conclusions and positive P.R. When Ma thinks maybe the cops have rushed to judgment, he is told in no uncertain terms by his boss (Hou Tianlai) to sign off on the paperwork and move on, because “our superiors are watching.”

One notices something quite remarkable about Only the River Flows right off the bat. The first Chinese feature in many years to be shot on celluloid, the film looks very much like an actual artifact from the mid-90s. Exhibiting the same muted palette and soft lens one sees in early Hou Hsiao-hsien or Jia Zhang-ke, River exhibits a physicality that feels genuinely oppressive. When one considers that Wei has Ma’s team set their offices up in an abandoned movie palace, it’s evident this director isn’t only interested in the investigative mindset but its imbrication with filmmaking, the way cinema and police work are two complementary technologies for managing the populace.

Once it becomes apparent to all that the wrong man may have been arrested for the old woman’s murder, Ma is forced to battle against his own instincts which, he discovers, are tied to common social prejudices. Is the old woman’s ward, referred to as “the madman” (Kang Chunlei), under suspicion because of his cognitive impairments? Is Xu Liang (Wang Jianyu), the hairdresser, actually guilty, or is he confessing because he knows his queer sexuality ensures he’ll be framed? These ethical crises only intensify when Ma and his pregnant wife (Chloe Maayan) learn that their unborn son has a high risk of birth defects, which would mark him as another unwanted “other” in a society of rampant xenophobia?

To his credit, Wei offers no easy solutions to these problems, or even to the crime itself. Not unlike Bong’s Memories of Murder (2003) or the recent French film The Night of the 12th (2022), Only the River Flows examines crime not as a rift in the social fabric, but as the logical outcome of oppression so complete that it tends to elude notice. It’s no secret that Chinese cinema has suffered artistically under the Xi Jinping regime, even as it has reaped truckloads of money. Only the River Flows is a very welcome sign of life.

A Prince (Pierre Creton, 2023)

Pierre Creton’s acclaimed 2017 documentary Va, Toto! was, among other things, an examination of the lives of elderly gay men in rural France, depicting their aging bodies as they work the land, and one another. Creton brings this subject matter into the fictional realm with A Prince, a film that combines narrative convolutions with a rare formal limpidity. In its awkward precision, A Prince is likely to remind some viewers of the early films of Alain Guiraudie. But Creton replaces that director’s bucolic surrealism with an almost Straubian directness. And while more conventional aspects of cinema such as plot and characterization remain opaque, Creton makes the themes and subtext of A Prince so blatant as to be almost inane.

The film centers on a young man named Pierre-Joseph, a seemingly simple soul who almost by accident discovers a penchant for gardening. By devoting his life to horticulture, Pierre-Joseph finds not only a vocation but a seemingly endless string of male lovers. In one of the film’s most unique and bizarre strategies, the main character roles are split, with one actor appearing onscreen while another articulates their thoughts in voiceover. For example, young Pierre-Joseph is vocalized by Grégory Gadebois, but physically manifested by Antoine Pirotte. That’s until the final third of the film, however, when in a single scene, young Pierre-Joseph is replaced by middle-aged Pierre-Joseph, played by the director himself. P-J’s journey eventually lands him in a three-man polycule with two elderly gardeners: Alberto (Vincent Barré onscreen, voice of Mathieu Amalric), his original botany teacher, and Adrien (Pierre Barray, mostly silent), who owns a nursery with his wife.

Although the floral and sexual education of P-J is the main dramatic thread of A Prince, there is another character who, although appearing only near the end, is discussed and alluded to throughout the film. This is Kutta (Chiman Dangi), an Indian child who was adopted and raised in France by Françoise Brown (Manon Schapp / Françoise Lebrun), a schoolteacher (and Alberto’s sister). In her interstitial musings, Ms. Brown discusses Kutta’s difficulty growing up as an immigrant, a problem that the film explicitly compares to the transplantation of non-native flora. That’s right: Creton lays his symbolic cards on the table, likening human beings to plants, and gardening to the exercise of control.

A Prince, while often pleasurable, presents significant challenges for the viewer. At times it is difficult to even be sure who is speaking, since image and sound exist in separate realms. This means that certain aspects of these characters and even their basic narrative trajectories often remain opaque. This is frustrating, of course, but it’s fairly evident that this is Creton’s way of keeping the viewer at a distance. We are asked to admire these men, their efforts, and their often-ample appendages, as we would admire a flourishing rhododendron. Surface, not interiority, is Creton’s bailiwick. It’s a theoretically compelling approach, but at times it’s hard not to feel like A Prince is all plant, no payoff.