Chocolat

Growing up alone and isolated in a foreign nation while nestled in the country, a young child observes the inner-workings of a French colonial government.

Things generally proceed without dilemma, issue, hiccup, or re-modification, since her father's level-headed and makes Indigenous friends and local contacts.

He's gone for extended periods pursuing various governmental initiatives however, leaving his wife and child in the steady care of a clever resourceful citizen.

Who's been able to casually bridge relaxed European and African customs, with fluid evocative hands-on knowledge he feels at home wherever he goes. 

He's a jack-of-all-generational-trades and gets along well with both parents and children, like a cool open-minded and friendly babysitter who can also fix the generator or chase away hyenas.

The routine life upon the compound proceeds dependably without much uproar, although a plane lands one day nearby due to unfortunate mechanical malfunctions. 

It introduces a cast of characters representing less settled colonialist viewpoints.

Little France observes with wonder.

While the adults search for temporal occupation.

Chocolat presents a raw depiction of a select period from an atypical life, offering accounts of unfiltered memories that seemed peculiar to youth in blossom.

It's fun to watch Claire Denis's film because the narrative isn't strictly linear, there's a story that progresses throughout no doubt but it's broken up by random occurrences.

It's like a thoughtful surrealist embarkation into the innocent world of youth and playtime, in a sincere environment where the child tries to make sense of the strange conversations held by different adults.

The memories are like cool flashbacks to uncanny airs which must have seemed odd, certainly not like the familiar adventures she would have imagined with other bureaucrat children.

As it unreels, one scene after another depicts a fascinating narrative technique, where everything fits, nothing's misplaced, but the individual scenes are like mini-stories of their own.

You can pick and choose the individual tales as if you were leafing through an anthology, or watch them in succinct succession as they serpentinely structure a mischievous yarn.

Like being transported back to early childhood to freely reflect upon bewildering pastimes, the mesmerizing curious vignettes peacefully prosper through animate invention.

Held together by an African saint who can efficiently tread so many walks of life.

Unlike anything I've seen before.

Unique beauty inspired in motion. 

Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows)

An unhinged imagination mendaciously prone feverishly flows with mischievous delinquency, in a time less alternatively accommodating when harsh punishments still prevailed.

He can't fluently comprehend discipline as its laid out by his parents and teachers, and begins skipping school after a headstrong dispute with his weary fed-up severe enseigneur.

His step-father habitually complains as his treasured belongings keep disappearing, the boy not comprehensively considering his disastrous petty malcontent abbreviations.

Unfortunately, his independent mother even admits his routine irritates her, and like little Claudius he proceeds unloved although he acts out much more rebelliously.

This lack of love the absent bond awkwardly infuriates further as he misses school, and notices her spending time with someone else, someone clearly not his step-father.

His thefts become more daring and he even enlists the aid of a lonesome friend, before the law is swiftly called in and a new trajectory meticulously hewn.

They didn't have to be quite so draconian if they had only accepted sole responsibility.

And made a serious effort to turn things around.

They're occupationally challenged however (they're more focused on their careers).

They don't really care, it's a bitter denunciation of self-centred parents who don't nurture their children, and the horrid situations which potentially arise if the young one reacts with aggrieved insurrection.

It may have had an impact on social reform within France after it was released, nevertheless, the French actually listening to what their artists have to say, since the poor child's utter abandonment and isolation in the film's final moments evocatively promotes the need for systemic change. 🎻

It's a powerful scene which correspondingly brings to mind A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or any artist in his or her childhood when they let their genius run chaotically amok. 

It's clear little M. Doinel needs compassion not the fastidious lockdown permeating bootcamp, but that's what things were like in the cold-hearted old world which blind foolish unsympathetic jerks look to with manufactured nostalgia.

Many blossoming artists remain ill-accustomed to ubiquitous rules.

Especially when they're young children. 

A bit more progressive in this day and age.

Jules au pays d'Asha (Adventures in the Land of Asha)

It's a shame there has to be so much conflict as different groups try to inhabit the same space, mad insensitive aggrieved prejudice spoiling what could have been mutually beneficial otherwise.

Latent curiosity and shapeshifting definition steering clear of volatile absolutes, can lead to less authoritarian conviction as so many others have noted.

Less authoritarian conviction leads to less violent prescription as possibility proves multivalent and choice radiates concurrently. 

Thus, to be curious about secular orders and different faiths leads to fascination, through noteworthy respectful chronicles inquisitively investigating difference.

It's fun to imagine the divine touch illuminating each distinctive viewpoint, through natural immaterial observances characterizing piece of mind.

The traditions can be appealing as they provide industrious links, stretching thousands of years into the past, direct connections to extant history.

Applicability to cultural mutations and newfound initiatives scientifically spearheaded, perhaps lead to doctrinal adjustments which celebrate difference and transformation.

You wonder why books stopped being added to sacred texts as if the ancient world had monopolized spirituality, suspicious how divine inspiration has been sharply dismissed forever after since then.

Scientific observations of the heating planet do rationally suggest, that sustainable stewardship of global environments will lead to a less disastrous future.

Perhaps thousands of years ago when technology was rather primitive, and the wild was still imposing and seemed like a limitless potent hostility, the desire to cultivate and criticize it predominantly spread across the land, especially noting habitual plagues and many frustrating incurable ailments, nature must have seemed at times quite daunting to ancient researchers. 

Yet there were also thousands of years when people around the world lived harmoniously with nature, and reciprocal symbiosis drove renewable extents!

I suppose if the fossil fuel age comes to a sudden end and no alternative technologies emerge to replace it, the likelihood of an embrace of nature will be nautically necessitated. 

Perhaps with adaptations and a much less wild and reckless impetus, the loss of such a multidimensional society enough to humble even the most self-serving autocrat.

Back to travelling by boat, ye olde steam engines, bikes, and blacksmiths. 

Things are so expensive in Canada and Québec nowadays it's not like there's much opportunity to travel interprovincially anyways.

Cool film.

*It's not just groceries. Let's look at gas that hasn't gone back down to pre-pandemic levels either. 

El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive)

There was once what was known as censorship, so that impressionable youths could avoid narrative trauma, accompanied by bad dreams and apprehension, throughout the course of the traditionally peaceful day.

Thus, categories such as General Audience, Parental Guidance, PG-13, Adult Accompaniment, and Restricted, kept psychological maturity in check, and prevented the development of madness and paranoia within the investigative general public.

But with the advent of online movie watching these stalwart categories have become less applicable, and younger generations have been unsuspectingly bombarded with material ill-suited to their corresponding age-level.

Not that it didn't happen in the past, in El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) local enthusiasts bring the cinema to a small town, a wide variety of pictures featured, one week none other than Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.

Two young sisters (Ana Torrent as Ana and Isabel Tellería as Isabel) eagerly take in the age old tale of artificial authenticity, with its accompanying inherent lugubrity, its ill-fated misunderstandings.

The older soon swiftly realizes that the younger has been affected, and takes to morbidly teasing her with sadistic sordid sorority. 

The younger isn't ready for the antics since she can't make sense of the haunting tale, her vivid imagination set to haywire through the horrific happenstance.

They live on a vast estate sedately situated in the Spanish countryside, their father (Fernando Fernán Gómez as Fernando) dreaming of becoming a writer, their mother (Teresa Gimpera as Teresa) keenly focused on the past.

General guidance periodically emerges but ample free time encourages imagination. 

But is Frankenstein coming to get them?

Ill-conjured consumed contingencies.

The film brilliantly depicts thoughtful youth with jocose harrowing perplexed curiosity, a patient heartfelt delicate examination of distressing ill-computed dissonance. 

Why would someone create that?, they've found a niche through gross indecency, the dissemination of random ideas as incredibly eclectic as a national library.

I never watched much horror in my youth but later watched many of the films I'd ignored in my early twenties, occasionally encountering an impressive force but still often wondering why so grotesque?

But lives aren't only orchestrated through the coherent mechanics of the master narrative.

Ill-fated wayward comprehension.

Experimental novelty. 

Moonlight

Locked-down in isolation but technically free, young Little (Alex Hibbert/Ashton Sanders/Trevante Rhodes) moves between drug abusing mother (Naomie Harris) and violently dismissive classmates as gracefully as he can, finding refuge with a childless local dealer (Mahershala Ali as Juan) whose guilty conscience and ironical good nature suggest he accommodate the boy.

An oasis helplessly haunted, Little still attends school, and the bullies still bully as he ages, as he grows, as he matures.

One way to stop bullying is to fight back but they travel in packs in Barry Jenkins's Moonlight.

Cowardice.

Little (now Chiron) does bash the most vicious of them in one day with a chair after which the police take him away, suffer in silence or respond and go to prison, not much of a childhood for the peaceful gay fatherless African American kid.

Moonlight is a sad film, a resilient film, a crucial film, a sophisticated film.

A simple story on the surface which fluently presents coy critiques of cultural codes without recourse to sentiment while patiently blending in focus, asking why is difference so frightening?, why do so many instinctively suppress it?

Difference spices things up to add alternative flavours which merge and diverge with eye-opening wonder.

Adventure.

It's as simple as bread.

Different types of bread.

White bread tastes good but one day you might try brown, then rye, then pumpernickel, then multigrain.

Then you have 5 options rather than one for making a sandwich, and can experiment to find out what tastes best, for you, on each different type.

If you have to prove you're tough by forming a group to violently suppress another or an individual, you aren't tough, you're pathetic.

If you're afraid of difference ask yourself why?, and try something new, something startling, like blue cheese or a strawberry shake.

Overcoming fears is what Men and Women do.

Took me a while to start loving olives and hot peppers.

Now I eat them all the time.

A lot of the gay people I've met are chill with a great sense of humour.

It makes for good conversation.

Not many films make as serious an impact as Moonlight while just simply presenting a story.

It's profoundly chill considering the tale it's telling.

The highs and lows.

The emptiness.

Crack ruins communities, ruins lives, makes a sewer of superlatives, which otherwise may thrive.

There's no simple solution.

Besides giving up crack.

And refusing to sell it.

If that's the economy something's seriously wrong.

It does not have to be that way.

And takes courage to turn things around.

Bravery.

Dedication.

Understanding.

Will.

In the great wide open.

Moonlight states this without saying a word.

Blessed.

Captain Fantastic

Intellectual athleticism, extreme elastic environmental ecstasies, raising the fam in the wilderness like a self-sufficient acrobatic critically inclined motility, hunting game and gathering edible plants, roots, berries, vigorously debating political and ethical thought while fighting as if atavistic Thoreau went forth and meritocratically multiplied, thickets and thespians, excavated escalades, plundered idyllic trial-by-fire equanimity, willing free spirits, stereoscopic centigrade.

Off to the city.

To pay last respects.

Confrontation.

Introspecs.

Competing rationalities flourish in Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic as the traditional is multidimensionally deconstructed, the stark opposition culturally communalized entre the devout and the dedicated aptly displaying reasonable idiosyncrasies, alternative acclimatizations, to frenetically fluid shushed postmodern democracies.

The religious tradition, obediently abiding by the structures that be with respect for law and authority contra the inquisitive argumentative life that debates to understand dynamic sociopolitical distillations.

Both approaches formidable in their fragility.

They clash at a funeral for one of the clan's matriarchs, her father disgusted by his son-in-law's way of life.

The film, a wild playful illustration of familial fervency that is a definite must see, practically every scene generating active thought, a rowdy critical examination of critical examination, as mischievous as it is shrewd, as carefree as it is uptight, questions as it answers to inculcate critical discourse, an interrogative humorous vista, envisioning variety with causal robust gaze.

As Ben (Viggo Mortensen) accepts that he has to respect even if he disagrees while engaging with others, his humanity conscientiously expands, even if it irks him considerably.

Top-down and bottom-up, his children catalyze this transformation.

Balance you know.

Liberty.

Mustang

Children at play, happenstance and hijinks emboldening hilarity, the joys of youth spontaneously free-flowing, the unexpected and the ahistorical flourishing as they bumble, the beach magnetically galvanizing the zeal, time to excel at discovery and exploration, embrace what's new through awe and fascination, dive in and test the waters, let the ultrabliss cascade.

But the elders, the patriarchs and those who fear them, find such joyous acts of emancipated abandon troublesome and unproductive, the youths described previously being 5 young girls, young sisters, one perhaps with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks (Albertine), their village obsessed with strict definitions of the ladylike, coldhearted calculated restrictions which severely limit astronomical potentialities.

Soon they're being taught to be domestic servants while being married-off, one by one, the crime, exceedingly enjoying life, the punishment, squabbling in the shadows forever after.

Sure, it's nice when food is prepared for you, but if you're not prepared to cook the same, there isn't much point in benefitting from the enriching nutrient intake.

Sure, sometimes conversations with opposite genders seem bizarre and incomprehensible, but a collage of masculine and feminine ideas blended within a cultural and political fabric makes life dynamic and unpredictable, makes beautiful cities like Montréal, and is an integral component of vibrant contagious cohesivity.

Gender balance you know, it's not such a bad thing, you can refine some remarkable synergies, it works both ways.

Mustang examines sheer patriarchal oppression and the ways in which obsessions with ruthlessly employed conceptions of virtue and purity, even respect, can asininely suffocate blossoming imaginations.

Its fictional portrayal of incarcerated curiosity juxtaposes the harsh and the tender with disparate shocking alarm.

It's not that concepts like virtue and morality are necessarily threatening, it's only when a specific virtuous concept is enforced dogmatically, obstinately applied to each and every situation, like residential schools or Nazi Germany, that it dissolves its links with the good, and malevolently functions as condemnation incarnate.

You need rules in order to succeed in many domains, and if everyone is constantly subverting everything management decides it's difficult to accomplish anything.

But if management decides something and a situation arises which organically challenges that decision and they sharply suppress the challenge similar problems can arise.

You can be disciplined and successful while remaining young at heart.

Hopefully that's the life awaiting Lale (Günes Sensoy) as she leaves for Istanbul, taking a mature risk to thwart imposed maturity, relaxed in her liberation, ready to take on the new.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Uncompromised unilateral implacable joy is wreathed within Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild's opening celebrations, as a small community of countercultural enthusiasts gather to revel in the gift of life.

Seen through the eyes of young Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the festivities, and the rest of the film, transmit a youthful candour.

Qualified by directly applying extinct carnivorous didactic extracts to the forthcoming unreeling upheavals, as discoveries bearing no familiar points of tectonic reference, suddenly, present themselves.

And the resilient strength of her family and friends.

Innocently yet formidably dealing with while challenging her adventurous unpredictable shifting bohemian foundations, refusing to accept ill-considered permanent demarcations, imaginatively combatting fantastical realizations, and unyieldingly embracing the cycle of birth, death and regeneration, Hushpuppy inaugurates an icon for the free-spirited impoverished soul, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is a discursive feast for pensive humanistic diagnoses.

Beyond the state of nature.