March Around the World: City Symphonies
In honor of ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” — Mark Twain
It’s that time of the year when, if you’re on Letterboxd, you’re probably seeing a lot of lists and tags for “March Around the World.” This month’s homophonic resemblance to the command for movement lends itself to people consciously seeking out international cinema that expands their horizons. Back in 2022, an early newsletter from Marshall and the Movies used the occasion to recommend ten non-English language films that struck me from my tours of the festival circuit.
I’m back with a sequel focusing on a specific type of film worth analyzing across borders: the city symphony. These works take the urban environment as their canvas, painting a landscape that encompasses the breadth and diversity of personal experiences. They take the vastness of voices within the auspices of a city and harmonize it into something greater than the sum of its component parts.
A recent example of such a film is Payal Kapadia’s Mumbai-set All We Imagine as Light, which recently became streamable through the Criterion Channel. This Cannes prize winner factored into many early awards conversations but came up short at the Oscars — in large part because the broken submissions process for Best International Feature meant that India did not choose the film for political reasons. So now it’s on us, the viewers, to discover and disseminate the word about this fantastic film about three women in India as their everyday romantic, professional, and political struggles play out against the expansive backdrop of their imposing city.
I had the opportunity to speak to Kapadia last fall for Slant Magazine, and the topic of how Mumbai functioned as character and subject came up across several of our exchanges. Here’s one that really stuck with me.
There are many declarations about what Mumbai is or represents by the people within it. Are there any that speak more for your perspective than others? For example, is it a city of dreams or a city of illusions?
It’s hard to say one without the other, because, for me, it’s that contradiction that creates the city. I have a love/hate relationship with it. It’s a city that gives a lot of opportunities, especially for women. Compared to other parts of the country, it’s a bit more free and possible in a city like Mumbai to walk around as a woman alone. So that’s one side that I appreciate, but it promises you a lot more than it gives you. And it’s quite painful to be able to live every day and just earn to live. It’s just a cycle that’s true of a lot of big cities, I imagine.
The enduring power of the city symphony is that while we may play different instruments across the globe, we’re often playing the same tune. The conflicts between past, present, and future are inescapable. The tension between the individual and the group is unavoidable. The pain of daily life is rendered joyous through its inexplicable interconnection with all who surround urban dwellers.
At this moment in history, the promise of globalization to bring the world closer together in recognition of our shared humanity is under threat like we have never seen before. Let these ten movies, like All We Imagine as Light and its like-minded rhapsodic cousins of the city-dwelling lot, remind us of what unites us as we explore the inexhaustible variety of civilization that surrounds us.
🇪🇬 Cairo Station, Criterion Channel
“The angriest I've ever been at my Netflix algorithm is when I realized that the complete works of Youssef Chahine were just on Netflix and it spent 18 months trying to get me to watch My Octopus Teacher,” newsletter guest Leila Latif told me last summer. For American readers, you have the catalogue of the Egyptian filmmaker at your fingertips on the Criterion Channel! (Spoiler alert: that’s where most films on this list are — I swear this was not sponsored.) Love, labor, and loss all intersect in Cairo Station, a mid-century look at Egypt’s capital city from the ground up at its titular train depot. Chahine’s ensemble drama takes many an unexpected turn over its 77-minute runtime as it illuminates a key paradox of cities that rings true in developing and hegemonic nations alike: It’s the place you have to go so you can one day afford to move away from it.
🇫🇷 Code Unknown, Criterion Channel
While it’s tempting to take to the streets of Paris through the lens of a French New Wave director, the portrait of the City of Light that’s seared into my brain comes courtesy of Cinema of Cruelty pioneer Michael Haneke. (An Austrian-German, to boot.) Code Unknown is an eerily prescient watch now as it details the fracturing of a city’s collective conscience under the weight of post-Cold War migration. Haneke saw the fault lines that would one day erupt across the continent in a wave of far-right backlash against the neoliberal consensus. Not all city symphonies make a beautiful noise, and this canary in the coal mine warbles a discordant tune across its seemingly disparate sections.
🇲🇽 Güeros, Netflix
In his impressive debut feature Güeros, Alonso Ruizpalacios subtly highlights a sliding scale that’s necessary to understand to adapt in a city. He makes concrete the conflict between the private and public that’s made unavoidable in a big metropolis like Mexico City. His Jim Jarmusch hipster vibes-meets-Fresh Prince of Bel-Air concept makes for a fascinating lens on the journey of a troubled teen adapting to his new surroundings. What starts as a claustrophobic tale cloistered in a cramped apartment eventually spills out into the streets, where two brothers get caught in a wave of student protests rocking the city. Like many an urban quest, what begins in the realm of the personal gets swept up in the wider shared struggle in a way that feels both inevitable and invigorating.
🇮🇹 La Dolce Vita, Plex (free)
Federico Fellini’s Rome-set opus La Dolce Vita (translated “the sweet life”) entered its title as a phrase in the lexicon, but the three-hour film tells a much more complicated tale. La dolce vita, as the Italian maestro understood it while the nation’s capital roared back to life after WWII’s destruction, was not merely the pure joy of the sugar rush. It was also the crash of hedonism run amok and unchecked after so many years of deprivation. As Marcello Mastroianni’s tabloid journalist looks for the heartbeat of the city over a madcap week, he finds ennui and enthusiasm are two horns on the same goat. No slogan can define something as vast as a city like Rome. Its irreducibility is its essence.
🇵🇭 Manila in the Claws of Light, Criterion Channel
In the middle of the crowded city coming to life in black-and-white, Lino Brocka’s camera snaps onto the protagonist, Julio, zooms in, and switches to color. The trailblazing Filipino director sets the stakes and scale early in Manila in the Claws of Light, a melodrama of the highest order. This struggling laborer barely scraping by amidst explorative work conditions is but one in a country whose conditions of extreme poverty and severe underemployment under Ferdinand Marcos did not lend themselves to the formation of a cohesive polity. As the camera jiggers focus constantly between the one and the many, Brocka accentuates the importance and the impermanence of a single person within a city’s limits. Julio’s quest to free his lost love, Ligaya, from the nefarious sex trafficker who ensnared her from their rural home distills a key contradiction within the rapidly developing Manila. It’s difficult to reclaim one’s past while trying to move forward into the future. By the time the film’s conclusion rolls around, its setting against an anti-capitalist protest doesn’t exactly feel like a cheap backdrop.
🇺🇸 News from Home, Max and Criterion Channel
I saw Chantal Akerman’s News from Home in what can only be described as the closest thing the Belgian director made to 4DX. That’s to say, I went alone on a rainy afternoon at Metrograph in New York City to see her rueful plainsong about the isolating experience of living in the Big Apple alone. Akerman’s roving camera surveys the lonely streets of Manhattan in the “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” era as the Belgian director reads the letters her mother sent to her while she lived there. There’s a gentle but consistent friction as Akerman tries to reconcile the place she lives and the place she calls home. Beyond serving as an immaculate record of a bygone Gotham, News from Home captures a wistfulness that never fully goes away when you move far from family. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Taxi Driver’s solo saxophone score but rendered as a lament.
🇹🇼 Taipei Story, Criterion Channel
If Edward Hopper picked up a movie camera rather than a paintbrush, it would look like Edward Yang’s Taipei Story. The Taiwanese director’s haunting compositions recall the strikingly beautiful and quietly tragic images of quiet urban despair that play out against the backdrop of the titular city as it expands in the 1980s. Yang’s intimate marital drama renders in miniature the perils of globalization experienced by the city. He questions with suspicion whether the new can be grafted onto the old without compromising its essence as Taipei begins westernizing and expanding. Growth for growth’s sake is not necessarily a virtue, as the film shows, because that growth can be apart from one another. As debates about urban planning continue to rage across the world, Yang’s debut feature now has the sheen of a warning bell as it observes the homogenizing effect of industrialization without intentionality.
🇩🇪 Wings of Desire, Max and Criterion Channel
No film has captured the ebullience underlying city living quite like Wim Wenders did in 1987’s Wings of Desire. As if presaging the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, his representation of the German capital’s soul as literal angels gives this romantic drama a spiritual lift. Wenders, in tandem with cinematographer Henri Alekan, matches that emotional sensation with a visual style that makes us feel as if we’re floating above the city free from the human rules of gravity. This weighty film about the longing for the things that make us human, even if painful, manages to feel weightless as it glides across the screen. Wenders himself
And, finally…
🇬🇧 Happy-Go-Lucky, Pluto TV (free with ads) and available to rent from various digital platforms
I spent the longest time trying to think of what a city symphony for London, a city I once called home for three months, would be. It took me reading the essay collection Big Smoke, Big Screen to realize it wasn’t just Love Actually.
Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is about the closest example I can think of to a city symphony for London. While Sally Hawkins’ indomitable Poppy might not be the most prototypical dweller of England’s capital, she takes in all that London life has to offer and somehow still finds a way to keep smiling even when presented with uniquely urban obstacles. She’s distractible, delightful, and maybe even a bit delusional … in the way anyone has to be to tolerate living in a place that otherwise makes no sense.
“I suppose her inability to give up, even when bad things happen to her, taps into something that most Londoners must be equipped for to survive here,” Big Smoke, Big Screen’s editor Tom Barnard tells me. “It’s not a city for the faint hearted.”
To dig further into Happy-Go-Lucky and London’s on-screen representations, Tom Barnard joins me in a deep dive on tomorrow’s newsletter for paid subscribers. Upgrade today so you can read our conversation in full.
An early top-10 list contender has arrived in select theaters! Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia was a favorite of mine from NYFF last year, and I got the chance to talk with the French writer/director whose work finally seems to be having its moment. Read our conversation and its surprising detours into a discussion of religion on Slant Magazine.
If you’re NYC-based, put Holy Cow on your radar — it opens at Film Forum on Friday. I reviewed this solid coming-of-age film from rural France for Slant Magazine.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
Thank goodness: it’s now officially spring because
dropped the spring playlist over on .Also, Cate Blanchett is forever a great hang.
A Marshall and the Movies subscriber sent me — perhaps ribbingly, given that I spent six hours waiting in line for this at NYFF last year — this delightful Atlantic article about the joys of the Criterion Closet.
I know God’s plan for me does not include watching The Accountant 2, but I’m glad the movie exists so I can read Ben Affleck gabbing it up with GQ in a longform chat.
For those who sit at the cross-section of communications and cinephilia, this Vulture article on how to plan a press tour for a convicted domestic abuser in Jonathan Majors is certainly something.
Finally, I had the epigraph at the top set many weeks ago, but it served as a nice coincidence that Conan O’Brien’s speech accepting the Mark Twain Prize (at the Kennedy Center) over the weekend also cited the same quote. His remarks are worth reading in full.
If this newsletter doesn’t have you looking like Mike Leigh here, get excited for tomorrow’s London talk!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
Thank you, Marshall, for the Wim Wenders notification! [I'm catching up on your posts]