Sometimes, it emerges between people divided by ideology, social class, or entirely different worlds. Other times, it becomes a space of untamed desire, of breaking conventions, of tension between power and vulnerability. Exoticized firefighters, carnal desire as the driving force of fiction, and a queer gaze wrapping it all in an aura of spirited enigma with kitsch undertones? With its pervasive silence the sublime scene where the family sits at the dinner table, nobody speaking, only the discreet chirping of a cricket filling the night , with its postures heralding a cinema of desire, Flammes feels like a fever dream dissolving in the morning light.
Victor Morozov. Flammes is available on MUBI. There are countless films I could have written about. Naturally, it was hard to choose, but the main reason I settled on Le Havre is that I recently recommended it to some friends in conversation, and it still feels incredibly relevant today, nearly 15 years later.
In short, a shoe polisher discovers an immigrant child in the French port city of Le Havre and decides to take him under his wing. The director approaches the subject — so pressing and difficult even today — with humour and tenderness, turning it into a digestible story. The young boy is hidden by the protagonist from the authorities, desperately trying to prevent his deportation. A warm film about compassion, solidarity, love, and sacrifice that shows both how cruel people can be and how good they could be.
No one is more synonymous with love stories than Maggie Cheung — throughout her career, the Hong Kong actress has taken us through every imaginable spectrum of love: low, high, funny, heartbreaking, ghostly, fantastic, possible, impossible, and beyond.
Tsui Hark, , is a must-watch. The unexpected love between two entirely different individuals quickly becomes inevitable — how could anyone resist the candid and hapless Xiao Jun, newly arrived in the city, unable to speak the language, stumbling at every turn yet eternally optimistic?
