By Devika Girish
This month’s picks include a South Indian drama about sexual harassment, a film shot within a video game, a period coming-of-age movie and more.
‘Aattam’
A sexual-harassment allegation sends a mostly male theater troupe into a tizzy in Anand Ekarshi’s whip-smart Malayalam drama, which distills into a microcosm the contortions of a society unable to deal with misbehaving men and the women they victimize. “Aattam” takes its time in setting the stage, introducing us to the Arangu troupe — comprising 12 men and just one woman — on the eve of a big performance, featuring English theater scouts in the audience. In the preshow banter of the group, performed with fantastic naturalism by the actors, everyday sexism becomes apparent. It comes into sharp focus at their after-show party in a resort, where comments about the dressing and drinking habits of the sole heroine, Anjali (Zarin Shihab), circulate.
No one is overtly lewd, and when Anjali reveals the next morning that one of the men groped her in the middle of the night, they all jump into action. A meeting is called, and a long debate ensues. The men hit all the classic points — where is the proof; what about the fact that she was drunk; should someone’s career be ruined over one “mistake” — but Ekarshi also threads in various other elements: jealousies among the actors, secret crushes and affairs, class differences and a major career opportunity that throws everyone’s moralities into confusion. The irony of a council of men making a decision about a woman’s plight is front and center, but the film allows each character fullness and complexity, so that their failures emerge not as personality shortcomings but as the structural outcome of a deeply misogynistic society. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Octopus Skin’
This elliptical feature by Ecuadorean filmmaker Ana Cristina Barragán opens with a tangle of limbs in close-up — which limbs, and whose, only becomes clear a few moments later, as a wider shot reveals a pair of adolescent girls in tight embrace, touching each other with what could be curiosity, eroticism, familial affection or a mix of it all. This visual gesture repeats throughout the film: We see things in tactile intimacy — a hand stroking the wrinkled skin of an animal; faint traces of bodies in bright blue water — before their shapes and contours emerge in view. It’s a powerfully wordless way to convey the inner worlds of the protagonists of “Octopus Skin,” three feral siblings who live on a remote island with their mother, closed away from the larger world.
When finally, a serendipitous encounter with a boat leads the siblings across the water to a city, it’s as if the central formal maneuver of the film — moving from cryptic close-up to revelatory wide shot — is borne out in the narrative. Suddenly, the three teens’ limited universe, composed solely of things they know through touch and sense, explodes open, as they take in colors, sounds, people and a profusion of talk. “Octopus Skin” is a beguilingly enigmatic film that never lays all its cards on its table — the setting and the backstory of the characters remain a mystery throughout — and yet conjures a vivid and tragic tale of coming-of-age through echoes, suggestions and lingering whispers. (Stream it on Tubi.)
‘Knit’s Island’
Shot within the multiplayer survivalist video game “DayZ,” this film by French trio Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’Helgouac’h is poised somewhere uncannily between documentary and fiction. The directors spent more than 900 hours inside the world of the game, interacting with other players — real people — in unvarnished conversations. Yet we meet them and their interlocutors as animated avatars toting guns and decked out in militia uniforms, traversing a gloomy, pixelated, postapocalyptic landscape.
Is what we’re seeing and hearing some kind of truth, or performance, or somewhere in between? “Knit’s Island” is both eminently watchable — with cinematography that combines the first-person perspective of video games and the classical tableaux of traditional movies — and unsettlingly profound, as we watch people flit in and out of avatars (a mother, for instance, leaves the game for a moment to care for her crying child). Above all, the film provokes deeper, discomfiting questions with its faux-yet-authentic scenes of shootings, torture and death: Are these trivial fantasies acted out for play, or sordid proof of a real societal desire for violence? (Stream it on Metrograph at Home.)
‘The Beautiful Summer’
This luscious Italian drama about a pair of young women who pursue love and art in 1930s Turin might recall the works of Elena Ferrante, but it draws inspiration from a book that came out in 1949, decades before “My Brilliant Friend”: “The Beautiful Summer” by Cesare Pavese, who inspired generations of Italian authors. Laura Luchetti’s loose adaptation follows Ginia (Yile Yara Vianello), a dutiful young seamstress, who has just moved to the city with her brother. Her closeted world is thrown open when she meets the beautiful, bohemian Amelia (Deva Cassel), who works as a nude model for young painters. Suddenly, Ginia is confronted with a rush of desire — for Amelia, for the promiscuous men the two encounter in absinthe-fueled parties, for a different kind of life.
“The Beautiful Summer” follows predictable highs and lows, particularly as the partying starts to get the better of Ginia, but there’s a lush tactility to the film and its period setting that is captivating even beyond the narrative: It’s a thrill to just watch Ginia dress wealthy ladies in shimmering silk designs of her own making, or peek through a window at Amelia posing naked for a painter, Turin’s Baroque architecture looming around her small, hopeful figure. (Stream it on Film Movement Plus. Rent it on major platforms.)
‘Malintzin 17’
This documentary by siblings and filmmakers Eugenio Polgovsky and Mara Polgovsky is as delightfully simple as it is deeply profound. Over the course of a few days, Eugenio and his 5-year-old daughter, Milena, look out the window of their apartment in Mexico City at a pigeon nesting on top of the power lines running across the street. Milena leans over the window sill, excitedly making observations and posing questions, while Eugenio follows her gaze with his camera, showing us all that they see on the street: not just the pigeon and its nest, but also sanitation workers, car cleaners, squirrels and dogs. The camerawork is both casual and artful; at one moment, Polgovsky pans across the power lines, and day turns seamlessly to night, with no visible cuts.
The back-and-forth between father and daughter is particularly charming, their questions revealing what can be mystifying to adults versus children: While he quizzes her on her understanding of animals and birds, she asks existential questions with disarming directness: “Why do you keep filming?” The movie’s last image, of an empty nest, is even more touching when you learn the context of its making: The footage was found and edited by Mara after Eugenio’s untimely death at age 40 in 2017. (Stream it on Ovid.)
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