Ingmar Bergman guarantees the loss of youthful innocence in Summer with Monika as sure as seasonal changes, contrasting the light nostalgia of a gleeful escape against the demoralising fatigue of contrived, urban living by studying the expressive contours of his young lovers’ faces, poignantly recognising what modern society has so cruelly stolen from them.
In Denis Villeneuve’s tragic reconstruction of the 1989 Polytechnique Montreal massacre, he traps us inside a labyrinth of narrow corridors and bleak modernist architecture, following the immediate perspectives of two students whose fates will be forever intermingled with one violent, hateful man and his brief reign of terror.
Through Jia Zhangke’s interweaved motifs of colours and landforms in Ash is Purest White, he creates an epic character study of feminine strength, and its moulding in the fiery heat of adversity.
