“As you go around the world, ideas of comedy change, ideas of beauty and romance change, but one man hitting another man plays the same way everywhere.” — James Cameron, as quoted by Kenneth Turan
My respect to Big Jim, who’s more right than he’s wrong, but I just don’t think he gives audiences enough credit when it comes to comedy. He made the observation above in reference to the struggles funny movies face when playing across the globe, at least in comparison to action movies like the ones he makes. The idea is that humor derives from culture, which varies drastically between regions. It’s learned, while violence is innate.
I’d like to think people are starting to prove Cameron wrong. In the past year, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has risen from art-house oddity to bankable global name. Poor Things winning 4 Oscars surprised me, yes, but the movie grossing over $100 million across the world genuinely shocked me. This deeply weird sexual odyssey of a baby in an older woman’s body is not the kind of movie that can find an audience outside of cinephile circles is remarkable.
I’m curious to see if Lanthimos’ hot streak continues with Kinds of Kindness, a nearly-three hour triptych of bleakly comedic novellas that satirize humans’ lack of control within the institutions of business, marriage, and religion. Unlike the oddities of The Favourite and Poor Things, both of which fit into a tidy narrative structure under the tutelage of screenwriter Tony MacNamara, this film reteams Lanthimos with his former writing partner Efthimis Filippou. It gets absurdist and surrealist quickly in ways that may be unfamiliar to newer Lanthimos converts.
But contrary to popular (and James Cameron’s) belief, there is a long tradition of global comedy that has managed to transcend geographical borders and find an international audience. No matter what separates us, an ability to spot both human and societal folly can bring us together. Any great artist with the ability to illustrate the gap between the world that a character wishes to live in and the one they inhabit can draw a laugh from anywhere. I’ve gathered 10 such films from around the world to showcase just how well humor can travel and unite us in shared merriment (and, occasionally, misery).
🇨🇿 Daisies, Max/Criterion Channel
Look, if you don’t want to take my word for it, at least listen to Charli XCX. She recently programmed Věra Chytilová’s Czech New Wave comedy Daisies for a repertory cinema series at New York’s Roxy Cinema, writing: “After realizing that all world is spoiled, Marie and Marie are committed to be spoiled themselves. They rip off older men, feast in lavish meals and do all kinds of mischief. But what is all this leading to?” It’s leading to anarchy, that’s what. This early feminist triumph is a raucous good time that only runs 76 minutes, to boot.
🇵🇸 Divine Intervention, Netflix
Finding comedy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might seem like a fool’s errand, but director Elia Suleiman has found a way for decades. Divine Intervention sees the filmmaker at his most imaginative and incisive, transforming fraught episodes between quarrelsome neighbors into a distillation of their dynamic at large. It’s all fun and games until it turns violent, and the potential for the latter outcome bubbles underneath the surface of every interaction. Suleiman dances on a geopolitical tightrope with a masterful form and finesse. To be human is to be yoked in our mutual ridiculousness, he argues persuasively.
🏴 Limbo, Peacock
Yes, again. To me, Ben Sharrock’s Limbo takes aesthetic elements from a number of the filmmakers listed here and transforms them even further. Sharrock imbues these visual techniques with undeniable humanity as he depicts the absurdities and indignities facing migrants at a waystation outside the United Kingdom. As I wrote in my review of what went on to become my favorite film of 2021:
“The longer Sharrock lingers in these fastidiously staged frames, the more his radical approach to the style begins to emerge. The so-called planimetric framing in which Sharrock dabbles is usually employed as a tool of irony. The impossibility of such clean, tidy images instantly alerts the viewer to how the director is constructing something unreal, placing them outside – often above – the action of the film […]
Sharrock employs irony not to create distance from his characters but instead to bring the audience closer to the incongruities of refugees’ existence on a remote Scottish island. He draws viewers in rather than keeping them at arm’s distance. And by situating his story within a recognizably mundane milieu rather than in the removed realm of the ‘issues’ drama, he opens up new possibilities for how audiences can relate to impacted people. Rather than anesthetizing viewers with cold calculation, Sharrock suffuses his orderly frames with uncommon compassion and care.”
Please, please, I cannot encourage you to laugh and feel with Limbo enough.
🇫🇮 The Match Factory Girl, Criterion Channel
Depression and existential despair are never as gut-wrenchingly funny as they are when rendered by Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki. This director really knows how to put the “dead” in “deadpan” as he charts the lonely existence of the titular production line worker. I thought the film would be entirely dialogue-free as it spends several scenes relying on gesture and process to tell the story, but the downtrodden Iris does eventually speak. Her quiet despair never reaches the point of screaming, but this desperation does eventually peek out behind her timid facade. It’s a remarkably, often startlingly, even-keeled depiction of Iris learning to take a stand against the disregard she receives in her romantic and family life.
🇪🇸 / 🇫🇷 The Phantom of Liberty, Criterion Channel
If any film on this list could “prepare” you for the Kinds of Kindness experience, it’s this one. The Phantom of Liberty marks a largely freeform effort from surrealist pioneer Luis Buñuel, who you might recognize as Dalí’s sidekick from Midnight in Paris. The various comedic sketches in the film bear only a loose relation to each other plot-wise, requiring the audience to locate the thin (yet sturdy) connective tissue between the droll episodes satirizing society’s hypocrisy. It’s exciting to watch the sparks generated by the friction from two of Buñuel’s favorite topics: coincidence and codes of misguided morality.
🇷🇴 Plastic Semiotic, MUBI
My quest to get everyone to watch a Romanian film continues!
I’ll put the hard sell on Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World at a later date because it’s one of the few recent movies I think is genuinely pushing cinematic grammar forward. But for now, enjoy Jude’s brilliant short film Plastic Semiotic to get a sense of just how much juice the director can squeeze from a simple juxtaposition. This is COVID cinema at its finest as Jude assembles tableaus of children’s toys to create scenes rich with irony and intentionality.
🇫🇷 PlayTime, Criterion Channel
Many silent film fans like to pit the era’s two comedic giants, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, against one another. But French filmmaker Jacques Tati asks, “Why not both?” His films utilizing cinematic creation Monsieur Hulot combine the pantomimed brilliance of Keaton with the social commentary of Chaplin, and nowhere is that on more vibrant display than in PlayTime. This largely wordless send-up of post-war consumerism is a true merry-go-round of movement that makes a mockery of modernism. Each precisely calculated sequence is more jaw-dropping than the one that came before. You can’t two-screen this one, folks.
🇸🇪 Songs from the Second Floor, Criterion Channel
This is a film I’m willing to recommend a second time on the newsletter because it’s often been unstreamable. “I’m still not even sure how to formulate all the thoughts swirling in my head from watching this drolly absurdist comedy at Film Forum a few years ago,” I wrote last April, “But it touched on something profound and painful about the human condition in a way that I found revelatory, surprising, and deeply entertaining.” Roy Andersson’s film layers single-shot sequences on top of each other to build toward something profound about our existence. The vignettes from Songs from the Second Floor are funny in the way anti-humor is funny, always harkening back to laughter as perhaps the only natural response to living in such a cruel and unfeeling world.
🇺🇸 Stranger Than Paradise, Max/Criterion Channel
OK, I had to sneak in one homespun title on the list, but it’s mostly because Stranger Than Paradise does not feel like an American film at all. What struck me most about rewatching Jim Jarmusch’s breakout at Film Forum this summer was just how much the film abstracts New York. Watching the camera rove through the ragged streets of downtown in the 1980s feels like a war photographer making a neorealist film in my backyard. The characters act accordingly, like they exist outside of their own time … yet also somehow outside of time altogether in this black-and-white curio. Jarmuch’s shaggy story follows two Brooklyn hustlers who find unexpected companionship in one of their visiting cousins from Hungary. Their off-kilter adventure down to Florida provides more of the DNA for American independent cinema than I realized before.
🇦🇷 Two Shots Fired, MUBI
Here’s one that, had I not known going in was a comedy, I might not have found funny at all. Two Shots Fired opens with a jarring scene of a teen’s lazy day around the house culminating in a failed suicide attempt. Since he had otherwise shown no signs of depression, the act punches a hole in the stomach of his family. Argentine director Martín Rejtman asks us to laugh at the whistling tune generated by the wind passing through that hole. With an unflinching poker face, the filmmaker finds the truest absurdity of all coming from characters who try to apply a rational approach to such an irrational act. Trying to re-establish normalcy after such a jolting event is true lunacy, Rejtman posits. Two Shots Fired finds the most difficult laughs of all: those with little sense of levity.
At last year’s New York Film Festival, I had the pleasure of interviewing the two women at the center of Last Summer (now playing in select theaters) for Slant Magazine: legendary French filmmaker Catherine Breillat and leading lady Léa Drucker. This story of a working mother who becomes embroiled in a passionate affair with her troubled stepson is far from the tawdry tale you would expect from the premise.
I’m especially proud of the Breillat interview given that she can be a bit spiky (deservedly so given the ridiculous controversy she’s faced). Her answers were giving, generous, and great. A real chef’s kiss moment when she declared: “I am scandal.”
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
My own voice?
I was glad to once again glad to join Little White Lies’ podcast Truth & Movies! We discussed new releases The Bikeriders and Green Border as well as Marlon Brando’s star-making The Wild One. Give it a listen — I thought it was such a great conversation that I even braved hearing myself to hear it again!
Well, I realized I forgot to put the watch log in last week’s newsletter. Oops.
Also, my goodness, Martin Short may be the funniest person alive? Or at least the most underrated at his craft. This interview of Bill Hader in his Jiminy Glick persona had me in stitches. Hard to think of a more accurate depiction of hack celebrity journalists who enjoy a craft services table at a press junket than this:
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.
Another film that opened during last weekend’s pile-up of new indie releases was Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, a quiet mother-daughter drama that snuck up on me at 2023’s New York Film Festival. Conversations with the playwright-turned-director in The New Yorker and Vulture have me eager to revisit the work!
Here’s a great long read by Ben Pearson of Slashfilm — with many great composers on the record! — on why there are so few memorable movie themes in today’s scores.
And perhaps an even longer read, but it flies by: here’s The Ringer’s oral history of DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story at 20.
July’s Upstream coming to you next week!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall