Dry Leaf

Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of competing and converging interests that, if they’re lucky, alights on the ground every few years in a distinct, feature-length form. Alexandre Koberidze, whose third feature, Dry Leaf, premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, is no different. Since his feature debut in 2017, he’s established himself as a leader in a loosely articulated Georgian New Wave, whose characters are caught up in, and asked to navigate, the shifting ground of their national identity, modernity, tradition, progress, regress, and romance.

But one obsession rises above all the rest to crystalize them into an ecstatic, almost fantastical vision of the possibilities of contemporary life. Whether an aspiring dancer hoping to join a company, but caught up in illegal sex work and boxing in Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), or a pharmacist and amateur soccer player pair embarking on romance who find themselves suddenly isolated in unfamiliar bodies What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), the characters in Koberidze’s films often find themselves carried through epic sagas on the winds of chance.

In Dry Leaf, a name taken from the football kick that floats, darts, drops, and lands unpredictably, Koberidze’s aim in charting the search by an athletics instructor, Irakli (David Koberidze), and sports magazine editor, Levani (Otar Nijaradze), for Lisa, their missing daughter and colleague, respectively, is similarly in service of delighting in the mysteries of circumstance. Relying on Levani’s fading memory of a trip he took with Lisa to photograph rural football fields, their halting expedition lasts just a few days; but over the course of 186 minutes, their largely internal journey takes on an epic quality.

Koberidze asks the viewer to surrender to the fantastical logic of his off-kilter worlds (for example, like many people in this film, Levani is completely invisible), in the same way he asks us to surrender to his images. Like Koberidze’s first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again, Dry Leaf was shot on a Sony Ericsson, an early smartphone that ceased production in 2011. It’s no small task to get acclimated to the film’s blurry, pixelated, and occasionally overexposed images. The dramatic vistas of the Georgian countryside captured on the 15-year old cell phone are rendered in splotchy smears of muted, earthen color, the abstract limits of which Koberize explores through extended silences and digital zooms.

So too are the occasional bright interiors, such as the kitchen of Irakli’s aging uncle. Bright reds and blues of furniture; the green and rust gradients of apples on the table; a bright green water bottle held up by an arm dressed in plaid — all are rendered like a still life. Here, the pixels add to the objects’ sense of life rather than detracting from the so-called fidelity of the image. The effect is an impressionistic view of a near-forgotten country; feelings, rendered in hazy outlines, that have few means, other than in the missing Lisa and the dilapidated football fields Irakli and Levani encounter, of being literalized. The formlessness of Koberidze’s images, then, renders these merely plot-related facts of the world not just as parallel to its own scrappy, makeshift approach to expression, but as ecstatic proxies for lost cultural heritage. 

Throughout their journey, Irakli and Levani come across more than abandoned football fields, but the villagers, often children, who still find ways to play on them; adults who live with their abstract memories; and animals, among them dogs, cows, donkeys, and countless horses, who silently persist. These meetings open up refreshing possibilities for Irakli and Levani, two people who, without any kind of hand-holding by Koberidze, embody a melancholic and distinctly male loneliness. This loneliness is rendered poignantly not just by the fact of Levani’s invisibility — a trait that is never remarked upon except for a perfunctory acknowledgement early on by the film’s narrator — but by the fact that each fleeting encounter with a stranger never once provides them with a meaningful clue regarding Lisa’s whereabouts. Taken solely as a means of finding Lisa, which is all the film explicitly purports to do, their trip is pointless. Appreciated as a site for the possibilities of personal transformation, the psychological terrain within and outside the bounds of their weekend road trip are fertile ground. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

The Seasons

In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, which she co-directed with Miguel Gomes, Fazendeiro took an unusual approach to that problem. It was ostensibly a film about another film project that was derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and she and Gomes chose to arrange that film in chapters which were then shown in reverse order. The pandemic and lockdown, of course, generated their own bizarre sense of temporality, a distended twilight zone in which days and weeks were lost, even as the hours and minutes seemed to interminably drag. So Tsugua became about the unmaking of a film as time seemed to wind itself backwards, a vain attempt at reclaiming the old normal.

The Seasons has a similar theoretical bent, although it takes a little while to see what Fazendeiro is up to. In simplest terms, The Seasons is a landscape film focusing on Alentejo, a rural region of Portugal. Proportionally, most of the film consists of slow 360° pans of farmland and hillsides, the camera gently prodding our curiosity as scenery rolls into the filmed image like a panorama. This gesture shows a certain affinity with experimental filmmaking, in particular the atmospheric structuralism of Michael Snow, Chantal Akerman, and especially Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. As the camera describes the landscape in which Fazendeiro has situated it, the viewer feels themselves mentally connecting what we are seeing now and what we have previously seen into a coherent picture of the land. (To quote Snow, “events take time. Events take space.”)

However, The Seasons is held together by a broader concept of human temporality. The film begins with a look at the fossilized remains of snakes, and at several points in the film Fazendeiro shows us an in-progress archeological dig. The fact that this process, with its cordoned-off area and tools of measurement, looks a lot like a film set goes some way toward explaining the underlying sedimentary layers of The Seasons. This is a film about incommensurable time frames, different ways in which the landscape endures, both in spite of and because of the various uses that people put it to. We see farmers herding goats, the stripping of cork trees, and abandoned orange groves. The title, of course, explicitly conjures our awareness of the natural cycles of time as experienced by humans, animals, and plants — periods of growth and decay, fields that bear fruit and at other times lay fallow.

But Fazendeiro also introduces historical, political, and folkloric time into the mix. At a couple of points during the film, we see groups of elderly residents of Alentejo, discussing their participation in a socialist agricultural collective. One woman sings a protest song, the gist of which is, if you reject collective farming, then go grovel before the landowners and see if they care. One man has a handwritten volume that contains notes, poems, and chronicles from the days of the commune, and they tell of how their project was destroyed by the rise of Salazar’s fascist government. At other moments, Fazendeiro dips into historical reenactment, with men in period costumes acting out both historical and mythic narratives from the 17th and 18th centuries. And all of this is staged within the landscape that The Seasons has inculcated us into. That is, we know we are seeing a fictive invocation of Alentejo’s past, enacted on the landscape whose contemporary existence is the formal foundation of the film.

Fazendeiro uses cinema as an instrument for excavating the various layers of history contained within any given landscape. A complex work of human geography, The Seasons demonstrates that the earth has been and continues to be a material coalescence of timelines that cannot be squared with one another, some of which are actually unavailable to human perception. Only by uncovering the artifacts of the past can we get a picture of geological time. And while rural life may be lived more in accordance with the natural cycles of the environment, this in no way represents an exemption from the movements of social and political time. It is no coincidence that Fazendeiro is examining Alentejo from the perspective of fascist control, and the periods before and after Salazar’s regime. Authoritarians cannot control the weather, the shifting of dirt and dust, or the life cycles of the animals. But this doesn’t mean that we can simply retreat into geological or mythic time. Our capacity to live both within and alongside nature is determined by our sociality, and that means that even the age-old shifting of the seasons is inseparable from questions of human freedom. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Birthday Party

The decadent luxury and moral rot of extreme wealth; a location as isolated as it is idyllic; lithe young bodies glistening in sunlight; the churning ocean lapping at the shore; relationships marked by melodramatic tumult and scandalous secrets. These aesthetic and narrative trappings of Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s The Birthday Party contain undeniable pleasures, yet are unavoidably, fatally familiar. Look to The White Lotus as just one example of how pulpy, soap-operatic dramas of the ultrarich, set in vacation destinations and with a polished veneer of prestige, are well-trodden and reliable sources of entertainment. The Birthday Party, though persuasively performed and appealing to the eye, unfortunately plays like a faded derivative of Mike White’s ultra-popular HBO series. Little wonder, then, that Jiménez’s film has been acquired by HBO Max, where it will doubtless be auto-played for thousands of subscribers upon finishing their White Lotus binges.

Willem Dafoe, decked in wide-framed eyeglasses and high-end linen, plays Marcos Timoleon, a Greek mogul modeled on Aristotle Onassis. He is preparing for his daughter Sophia’s (Vic Carmen Sonne) 25th birthday party on his extravagant private island, but his motives stretch beyond simple festivity: having learned that his daughter is pregnant by tapping her phone calls, he aims to buy off the father-to-be, a British journalist named Ian Forster (Joe Cole) who has written his as-yet-unpublished biography; set her up with her childhood friend Carlos (Carlos Cuevas), the son of a Spanish marquis; and abort the pregnancy. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Panos Karnezis, The Birthday Party is set in 1975, and geopolitics lurk alongside the domestic drama: the marquis (Francesc Garrido), squeezed by the impending death of Franco and Spain’s expected relinquishment of its territory in the Western Sahara to Morocco, uses his son as a bargaining chip when negotiating with Marcos to maintain ownership of some of the infrastructure in the Sahara.

Dafoe’s characteristic mix of charm and menace suit him to the role of a scheming, charismatic mogul, and the supporting roles are as effectively filled. As his soon-to-be ex-wife and Sophia’s stepmother Olivia, who Marcos dangles a hefty divorce settlement in front of in exchange for her intervening with Sophia, Emma Suarez capably conveys how her character negotiates between doing the right thing for her loved ones and detaching herself in favor of thoughtless luxury. Vic Carmen Sonne gives perhaps the most dynamic performance. Playing a character who, for much of the runtime, functions more as an object of Marco’s machinations than a three-dimensional subject, Sonne manages to convey Sophia’s roiling internal conflicts with both nuance and expressiveness — in a pivotal scene where she realizes all that Marco really knows about her, Jiménez smartly keeps the frame focused on Sonne’s face, on which her sense of betrayal registers vividly and instantaneously.

Despite effective performances, the narrative development and dialogue, written by Jiménez in collaboration with Giorgos Karnavas and Nikos Panayotopoulos, too frequently veer headlong into overgeneralization and cliché. The characters never quite transcend reading as two-dimensional types, and within the many long, talky scenes involving high-stakes negotiations — personal, financial, and political — tired bits of dialogue undercut the tension (“There are things that can’t be bought,” Ian tells Marcos in a particularly lazy turn of phrase.)

The Birthday Party fares somewhat better when Jiménez allows an arch, wry tone to counterbalance the more earnest drama, and when he and director of photography Gris Jordana linger on the luxurious landscape and the actors’ beautifully framed bodies. Yet these pleasures are essentially shallow, surface-level accoutrements that mask a hollow core. The dramas of the wealthy, while always popular, have oversaturated film and television in recent years, and fresh perspectives are needed for any new entry to feel vital as works of art or entertainment.  Jiménez’s competently constructed and intermittently engaging film ultimately does not justify its stale take on well-trodden subject matter. — ROBERT STINNER

The Little Sister

Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under her belt — clearly plays in a different league. In the literal sense, too, as the Dickinson-Johannsson-Stewart trio has been given lovely and encouraging spots in the Un Certain Regard section by Frémaux’s team. But for those unfamiliar with the festival’s inner workings, The Little Sister is one of those films that make you wonder how it made it into the Official Competition.

Adapted from Fatima Daas’ eponymous autobiographical novel La Petite Dernière, the film follows Fatima, a 17-year-old closeted French-Algerian teenager, as she navigates a process of self-discovery and comes to terms with her lesbian identity — an experience that stands in tension with her cultural upbringing and religious beliefs. While Herzi’s approach to her protagonist, combined with Nadia Melliti’s grounded performance, demonstrates emotional intelligence and sincerity, the film’s latent instrumentalization of identity politics and its occasional narrative sloppiness result in a half-baked work — a structural weakness it shares with Robin Campillo’s Enzo, which also premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight and similarly explores queer identity as a process of discovery.

We meet Fatima in the spring, as she prepares for her high school qualification exams. Usually framed in interiors tinted with dark shades of blue, her introduction to the film conveys a sense of routine that seems to both protect her and render her invisible. She does her morning prayers, goes to school, hangs out with an all-boys group — the bullying type — and plays football. A rare case of a socially accepted tomboy, it’s her hard work that compensates for her perceived lack of femininity in the eyes of her family. She also has a painstakingly courteous Muslim boyfriend who hopes to move their relationship forward in halal ways.

For Fatima, being normal serves as a form of protection — until it doesn’t. During a class argument, someone calls her a “lesbian” — the first breach that reveals something hidden, prompting her to confront parts of herself she had kept buried. That’s when she downloads a dating app and begins meeting women under false identities. Herzi is at her strongest in depicting Fatma’s “undercover” trysts, focusing above all on the ways she seeks self-expression through invented names and shifting personas. Melliti skillfully captures Fatima’s restrained curiosity and the cool butch performance that conceals her inexperience.

Yet Fatima’s interactions with her entourage — whether with her family, her friends, or during her brief nightly encounters — lack a natural flow, a casualness in their rhythm. Herzi is a filmmaker who plays it safe, avoiding risky choices. From her decisions in framing, blocking, and editing to the venues where the characters appear — one of them being La Mutinerie, the emblematic lesbian bar no French queer person could fail to recognize, also featured in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Un Certain Regard film Love Me Tender — Herzi tries a little too hard to deliver a polished queer representation. Wanting to make a film that would prompt audiences to say, “Finally, a film that gets the lesbian coming-of-age trope right,” might sound good on paper and is a valid ambition, especially given the current state of French cinema — but this deliberateness weighs so heavily on the film that it ends up overshadowing its main character.

The most dissatisfying instance of this deliberate cautiousness comes in the relationship between Fatima and Ji-Na, the nurse she meets at a medical center where she goes for her asthma, and with whom she later goes on a date. Played by a luminous Park Ji-min, Ji-Na represents the first authentic and romantic relationship Fatima dares to pursue. The scenes of them flirting, eating and slurping noodles, having sex, hugging, and kissing each other joyfully at a Pride parade quickly turn into a game of “spot the reference” for connoisseurs. In the third act, Ji-Na suddenly announces that she no longer feels well in the relationship, leaving Fatima to silently grapple with her prematurely broken heart — turning the entire course of their relationship into a direct cinematic quotation of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color. Herzi’s recourse to these easily identifiable references stems less from a desire to disown Kechiche than from a will to rework and readjust his gaze — to show how a lesbian relationship should have been depicted instead.

The attentiveness of Herzi’s camera when filming queer, racialized bodies surely won’t go unnoticed. The Little Sister seeks to assert the female, or rather, queer gaze to every inch of its core — but it remains a gaze that is paradoxically “correctional,” dependent on what it strives to free itself from. Herzi’s latest is a counterpoint film that eats its own tail, so to speak. — ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU

Desire Lines

Credit where it’s due: Dane Komljen is one uncompromising director. After his debut feature, 2016’s All the Cities of the North, enjoyed widespread acclaim from critics and cinephiles, his next, 2022’s Afterwater, seemed almost designed to jettison the goodwill he’d earnt. Esoteric, unpredictable, and downright bizarre, it divided opinion in a way that his newest feature, Desire Lines, may be destined to do as well. But where this writer found Afterwater’s eccentricities to be audacious and endearing, Desire Lines is comparatively baffling, even comical in its earnest, banal pomposity. Its esotericism is commonplace, its unpredictability trite, and its bizarreness just silly.

Branko (Ivan Čuić, admirably committed) wanders the streets of Belgrade after his wayward younger brother, and ambles through his apartment, sleepless and detached from the world. He scarcely speaks, finding connection in no one and occupation in nothing. So he walks, apparently away from nothing and toward nothing, until he can walk no more. And he finds nothing. But then Branko is found by a group of fellow societal outsiders, people who appear to understand him better than he understands himself; as they nurture and embrace him, demonstrating what his life could and perhaps should be like, he finds a purpose to his existence that his old lifestyle never showed him.

And that’s basically it. There’s plenty else going on in Desire Lines — rocks have some importance, mushrooms some more, and Komljen gestures toward certain themes and motifs, but he’s far, far too coy with any of these ideas to integrate them properly into his story. It’s a soporific mood piece in search of its own purpose; unlike Branko, it never finds it, since Komljen only hints at said purpose, never fully communicating it. The disparate ideas only register as peculiarities and affectations, weightless and meaningless as one dour, posey scene drifts into the next. There’s so little material interest that investment is practically discouraged, and the various little quirks don’t contribute to the bigger picture — individually, they’re just absurd, and cumulatively, their significance is near-impossible to figure out. For such an ostensibly simple film, it’s quite the puzzle, yet it’s not one that rewards any attempts to solve.

Since Komljen has previously proven his competency as a filmmaker, one can see the signs of good, intelligent work here — it’s largely only his refusal/inability to convey the aggregate function of this work within this story that prevents any of it from acquiring substantial worth. City life is characterized by divisions and barriers, and contrasts with open spaces (the most memorable being a painted landscape on a wall — another division). Verbal connections are established only in separation, via telephone, and even then not directly. In one scene, Branko is seemingly only capable of viewing the world through heat vision goggles. There may be valid ideas underpinning these motifs but, if so, Komljen neither develops nor dictates them adequately. If not, then it’s considerably worse — could it be that these ideas are just as mundane as they read on paper (physical divisions representing psychological divisions etc.)?

It’s dispiriting to take such a dim view on the work of a gifted artist, but it’s so difficult to discern any other meaning to Desire Lines that it may be the only view to take. Komljen’s never been a straightforward filmmaker, never one to spell things out for his audience, but his uncompromising nature has led him down a most curious path here, and the outcome for him is much less auspicious than it is for Branko. One other motif in Desire Lines is the remembrance, or misremembrance, of the past. The past Komljen was a fascinating artist, full of promise, bold and distinctive in his vision and his approach. I hope I’m not misremembering him. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN