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‘In Her Place’
Chile’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for best international feature film is a historical psychodrama centered on a true story: In 1955, the writer María Carolina Geel shot and killed her lover in the crowded dining room of an upscale hotel in Santiago. Geel went to prison in a case that shook the country, and wrote a best-selling book about life behind bars. The president later pardoned her after the Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral appealed on her behalf.
But Maite Alberdi’s “In Her Place” isn’t about Geel’s spectacular life — it’s about the effect this case has on a fictional secretary working for the trial judge. Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) lives in a humble home with her husband and two teenage sons, and spends all her time either working at the court or cooking and cleaning at home. Geel’s scintillating crime of passion, and the brazen, glamorous woman at its center, captures Mercedes, who uses the keys confiscated by the court to let herself into Geel’s apartment. Reading the accused writer’s books, wearing her designer clothes, Mercedes starts to imagine — and vicariously live out — a different life that’s both seductive and frightening. An extraordinary tale of crime and redemption becomes the backdrop for a delicate portrait of an ordinary woman trapped not just by patriarchy, but by something that seems almost worse: mediocrity.
‘Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person’
The teen coming-of-age genre is turned on its head in this delightful film from the French Canadian director Ariane Louis-Seize. In Quebec, two vampires are raising a sensitive daughter, Sasha (Sara Montpetit), who refuses to kill humans, instead relying on the baggies of blood her loving but worried parents stock in the fridge for her. One day, they decide things have to change (“I won’t be hunting for all of us for the next 200 years!” her mother exclaims), and Sasha is sent to live with her cousin, an eager predator of lecherous men, in the hopes that she’ll pick up some skills.
Sasha continues to flail until she meets Paul, a bullied and lonely teenager eager to end his life. These misfit souls — the human who doesn’t want to live and the vampire who doesn’t want to kill — make an arrangement. As the two traipse about in the lonely dark of nighttime in the suburbs, Louis-Seize and her actors (Montpetit in particular is rapturous) conjure an alluring mix of deadpan comedy, sweet romance and existential angst, playing with the conventions of high-school dramas while probing profound questions about what it means to go against the grain of your very being.
‘Parking’
A two-hour film about a disagreement over a parking space might seem like a strange concept. But anyone who’s ever clashed with a neighbor or roommate will know that life’s greatest and most pervasive dramas sometimes arise from the smallest slights. In “Parking,” a Tamil-language drama by Ramkumar Balakrishnan, it all begins when Eshwar (Harish Kalyan) moves with his new, pregnant wife into an apartment in Chennai, India. The unit below has been occupied for a decade by Ilamparithi (M.S. Bhaskar) and his wife and daughter. Despite the differences between the young, modern couple and the old man with his rigid ways, the families get along.
Until Eshwar buys a car, that is, and the building’s small parking space — where Ilamparithi keeps his bike — becomes fraught terrain. Minor arguments snowball; harsh words are exchanged; egos are wounded. The men are soon engaged in a full-blown war, each leaving work earlier and earlier to race home for the spot. They begin executing elaborate schemes to avenge hurt pride, and the pathetic fragility of masculinity comes to the fore: The women in both men’s lives become pawns in the spurious, increasingly violent dispute. Scripted expertly, “Parking” is hilarious, suspenseful and discomfitingly relatable — an excoriation of the ways material possessions bring out our worst impulses.
‘Plastic’
Stream it on Metrograph at Home.
Endearingly lo-fi and unabashedly nerdy, Daisuke Miyazaki’s film captures a simultaneously cosmic and banal teenage experience: falling for someone over a shared love of obscure pop culture. In “Plastic,” two teenagers in Nagoya, Japan, meet when Ibuki overhears Jun playing a song on the guitar by her favorite band, an erstwhile garage rock act. Structured in brief chapters, the film follows Jun (Takuma Fujie) and Ibuki (An Ogawa) as they fall in love, break up, move apart and continue to cross paths over five years, including an interlude that occurs during the Covid-19 pandemic. Miyazaki unfussily portrays the predictable fizzle-out of young romance and the inexorable passage of time, giving the film an unforced realism, even as it maintains a twinkling sense of magic and possibility. The music that brought Jun and Ibuki together remains in their lives, weighted with that feeling of being seen by someone for the first time, making sure they are always connected, whether they know it or not.
‘Helene’
This period drama from the Finnish director Antti Jokinen is the rare film that luxuriates in the craft of a female artist. The story follows the painter Helene Schjerfbeck and her fraught relationship with the art critic Einar Reuter in the 1910s, but the real narrative and visual engine of the film is the long, luscious scenes of Helene at work. She gazes intensely at everyday objects, paints them with her signature smudged brushstrokes and produces sculptural visions of people and places that reach for emotional truth rather than realism. Laura Birn plays Helene with a serene poise, her face a deep, still ocean that breaks into a storm when Einar provokes the unrequited yearnings within her. Around her centrifugal presence, Jokinen crafts a patient film, hued in beige and brown and gray, as attuned as Schjerfbeck was to the currents that roil under the deceptive surfaces of faces and landscapes.
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