CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — January Films
Art design: huxley.media via Photoshop
Cinema, an inseparable part of our lives, entertains while persistently raising sharp and uncomfortable questions. A lot can be said about a person based on the films they watch and love. Over the past half-century, at least thousands of lists of great movies have emerged — films every curious individual should watch to discover something about themselves.
For the next 12 months, this column will feature «alternative» cinema — perhaps not the loudest, but certainly extraordinary and profound. Films that deserve to be watched. Watched and loved. These are 24 stories of love, hate, actions, violence, and death. Stories about everything that cinema truly embodies.
«SEVEN DAYS… SEVEN NIGHTS» (MODERATO CANTABILE, FRANCE, ITALY, 1960)
Director: Peter Brook
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo
A classic of modernist cinema in general and post-war French cinematography in particular, Seven Days, Seven Nights marks the second feature film by Peter Brook, the iconic British theater director and innovator who revolutionized the stage with his Shakespearean productions.
Adapting Marguerite Duras’ novel Moderato Cantabile, Brook imbues its narrative with Shakespearean passions, culminating in a mundane yet shocking murder. The crime is witnessed by a wealthy industrialist’s wife, portrayed by Jeanne Moreau (who won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1960), and a young worker played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. As they unravel the mysterious motives behind the crime, they find themselves consumed by a passion of their own.
Two years later, Peter Brook would present his adaptation of William Golding’s dystopian novel Lord of the Flies, a harrowing tale of civilized English schoolboys who, stranded on a deserted island, descend into chaos, losing all sense of discipline, friendship, and humanity. However, in this earlier provincial tale of a romance, Brook explores the impossibility of reconciling spirit and flesh, heart and touch within the realm of human emotions.
Brook’s influence soon extended to Michelangelo Antonioni, whose Seven Days, Seven Nights prefigured the bourgeois modernist aesthetic of alienation and disconnection that would later define his Eclipse. Similarly, Andrei Tarkovsky borrowed Brook’s visual language — the icy beauty, dark waters, and stark, bare trees that became central to Ivan’s Childhood.
Even today, Brook’s film captivates with its hypnotic, languid rhythm and an understated sensuality emblematic of the revolutionary 1960s.
«NEW ORDER» (NUEVO ORDEN, MEXICO, FRANCE, 2020)
Director: Michel Franco
Starring: Naian González Norvind, Diego Boneta, Darío Yazbek Bernal, Mónica del Carmen
An outrageously powerful film for a quiet weekend, New Order is a masterpiece of neo-political cinema — a thriller about the dark side of a class liberation revolution that ultimately culminates in an Orwellian military regime.
Set in a sun-drenched, semi-fictional Mexico City, the city is engulfed in protests. Demonstrators seize district after district, overwhelming police forces. Hospital patients are hurriedly discharged to make room for wounded revolutionaries.
In just under 90 minutes, New Order, which won the Grand Jury Prize («Silver Lion») at the Venice Film Festival, grips the audience from the opening scenes and doesn’t let go until the very end.
Following a harrowing prologue filled with chaos and bodies piling up, the focus shifts to a bourgeois wedding in a luxurious mansion. An elderly man, once employed by the family, arrives in shabby clothes, asking for a large sum to pay for his wife’s heart surgery.
The hostess gives him about a tenth of what he needs and quickly sends him away. Her son does the same. Only the kind-hearted bride defies her family, offering the man her wedding gifts to cover the surgery. When her mother interferes, the bride leaves her own wedding to go to the hospital and pay with her credit card.
But she will not return home — because there will be no home to return to. About 15 minutes after her departure, armed activists storm the mansion. The household staff, now siding with the revolutionaries, execute the bride’s father, then her mother, and some of the guests. By dawn, the military restores order, imposing a new regime — a «new order.»
New Order pulsates, quivers, and dances with intensity. Shot by Belgian cinematographer Yves Cape using an impatient, immersive style, the camera captures a world unraveling through riots, looting, and street violence. Edited and scored with a syncopated jazz rhythm, Michel Franco’s film (Sundown, After Lucia, Memory) radiates extraordinary nervous energy.
While most political dramas are fueled by anger, Franco opts for detachment. With a cold, unflinching gaze, he imagines a near-future dystopia where humanity’s declared hunger for justice leads to the stripping of freedoms from one another.
The director, who had to apologize for his film in his homeland, revealed that he conceived the project back in 2016, never imagining how seamlessly his dystopian fiction would align with the narrative of 2020. He drew inspiration from the «Yellow Vests» movement for economic justice in France, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the civil unrest in Hong Kong, Chile, and Lebanon, which he saw as symptoms of societal disintegration in a world on the brink of change.
Despite its somewhat schematic approach — Marxist leftists versus pro-American bourgeois elites — and its southern specificity, New Order portrays a universal scenario. Rioting students and the oppressed proletariat rage against their exploiters, drenching their opponents in green paint.
Franco’s depiction of this explosive violence lacks cinematic embellishment, instead offering the detached perspective of a harsh social realist observing an anonymous coup. The revolution’s portrayal is disturbingly detailed and frighteningly believable. The military that seizes power leaves no room for dissent, executing some and terrorizing others. Whether they are right-wing or left-wing is irrelevant — the physical consequences for citizens and society remain the same.
Michel Franco debunks romanticized notions of conspiracy theories, protests, and barricades. On both sides of the barricades are anxious, unjustifiably cruel, cowardly, yet simultaneously desperate and brave individuals. For those who show courage or kindness, there is only one reward — a bullet.
Balancing between black comedy and dystopia, New Order evokes Buñuelian absurdity and the mechanics of evil, presenting a merciless, blood-soaked reflection on social injustice. It’s a film that is impossible to look away from despite its stark and escalating brutality.
In its depiction of a modern society fractured by class divisions and raw economic inequality, New Order recalls Parasite. However, while Bong Joon-ho escalates his narrative with humor, violence, and a relentless assertion that the social elevator so desperately desired by his characters doesn’t and won’t exist, Franco is intensely serious and compassionate.
In the deliberately detached world of the New Order, one element makes this dystopia resemble real life — there is no justice. Not the earthly kind we so desperately hope for. The director offers viewers a God’s-eye view while imbuing the film with celestial justice, invisible from the ground.
New Order is a bitter and terrifying tale. Yet, this uncompromising film is undeniably relevant in today’s monstrous political climate, where authoritarian regimes have reared their heads worldwide, brandishing weapons and fostering hatred and intolerance.
