5 international movies to stream now.

By DEVIKA GIRISH

This month’s picks include an elliptical Mexican anthology film, an experimental biopic of the writer Suzanne Césaire and more. 

‘The Follies’

The new feature by Rodrigo García — son of revered Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, and an acclaimed filmmaker in his own right — is a beautifully crafted prism of a movie, revealing new layers depending on the vantage point from which you view it. Set in Mexico City, it traces a day in the lives of a series of women, each a troublemaker or boundary-pusher of some kind, who are linked by chance encounters.

The first chapter introduces us to Renata (Cassandra Ciangherotti), the crux of this tale. She is under house arrest after a psychotic episode, and is driving her father crazy with her tirades against the world’s injustices. From there on, an unraveling yarn leads us to other characters: a vet specializing in euthanasia who drives past Renata’s window; Renata’s court-appointed psychiatrist, who goes to a catastrophic dinner with her toxic family; a businesswoman having a secret affair with Renata, and several others, with unexpected connections crisscrossing these narratives. As each character strains (sometimes hysterically) against the straitjacket of acceptable femininity, the film accumulates a complex, kaleidoscopic and often mischievous portrait of women’s verboten desires. (Stream it on Netflix.)

‘Homebound’

In 2020, in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, journalist Basharat Peer saw a photograph that moved him: that of a man holding his dying friend in his lap beside a highway in North India. He tracked down and reported, for The New York Times, the story of a beautiful friendship between two strivers, one Dalit (the term for India’s so-called untouchable caste) and one Muslim, that ended in tragedy. In “Homebound,” Neeraj Ghaywan crafts a lyrical, elegiac film from this tale, imagining the past lives of the friends with lush detail.

In his fictionalized telling, Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) and Mohammed (Ishaan Khatter) grow up together, finding common ground in their experiences of marginalization: They live in a society that demeans Dalits and demonizes Muslims. As young men they are determined to better their circumstances, pursuing jobs in civil service and sales. But the world is cold and unforgiving, and eventually, they find themselves in the city, two among thousands of rural migrants working in factories.

Ghaywan shows us both the outright violence of bigotry and its subtler traces: Chandan’s hesitation in sharing his last name, a marker of his caste; Mohammed forcing a smile as his Hindu co-workers jokingly question his nationality, implying that he’s Pakistani rather than Indian. That things will not end well is evident even if you don’t know the film’s source; yet, by the time the friends are caught up in a mismanaged lockdown that left migrant workers adrift, you’ll have rooted for them with all your heart. (Stream it on Netflix.)

‘The Temple Woods Gang’

The films of French Algerian filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche have a slippery, elusive quality to them. Often focusing on the lives of North African immigrants in the banlieues of Paris, where the director grew up, his movies challenge categorization, combining genre frameworks with the grit of realism and the hushed elegance of poetry. His latest film is no exception. It opens with a slow pan across the buildings of Temple Woods, a project in the suburbs, before we enter an apartment where, we learn from peripheral details, someone has just died. At the funeral, the camera zeros in on the smoke swirling from the incense, and then lingers on a singer’s transcendent performance.

Then we switch focus to a group of men from Temple Woods who rob the car of a Saudi prince — a premise borrowed from a real-life robbery in 2014. As the consequences of the thieves’ act unfurl, the film grows taut and suspenseful. Yet the patient beauty of those opening scenes persists: Ameur-Zaïmeche dwells in the everyday interactions of our working-class antiheroes, as they drink beers, feed pigeons, bet on horses and talk about the things they’ll be able to buy with the money. The film’s tragic turn is inevitable — against the power and wealth of the prince, they stand no chance — but their lives, Ameur-Zaïmeche emphasizes, are tender and complex, far more expansive than stereotypes and statistics allow them to be. (Stream it on Ovid.)

‘The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire’

Writer and activist Suzanne Césaire is remembered primarily as the one-time spouse of Aime Césaire, the great Martinican thinker and politician. This might be by her own design: She only published seven essays in the course of her life, although her contributions to the anti-colonial and Afro-surrealist movements of the ’30s and ’40s were highly influential, not least in her role as co-founder and co-editor of the Caribbean literary journal, Tropiques. Her story and legacy are full of ellipses and mysteries, not just because of her privacy, but likely also because she was a woman and a mother (of six) in a historical moment that rarely accommodated them.

In “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire,” filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich crafts an experimental film that is less about Suzanne’s life than about the impossibility of rendering a simple, objective account of it. French actress Zita Hanrot stars as Suzanne — or so we think, until a “cut!” early in the film reveals that we’re watching the making of a movie, and Hanrot is playing an actress playing Suzanne. “Ballad” weaves in and out of the film-within-the-film. Between scenes, Hanrot’s character takes breaks to care for her infant, and engages the other actors and crew in probing discussion: Is it possible to be both a mother and a revolutionary? Did Suzanne even want to be remembered? What was her marriage like? By unfolding as a series of questions rather than statements, the film pays tribute to Suzanne not just in its content but also in its form. (Stream it on the Criterion Channel.)

‘People and Meat’

In Yang Jong-hyun’s bittersweet film, three older loners in Seoul, South Korea, take an unusual path to finding renewed purpose: They start dining and dashing. U-sik (Jang Yong) and Hyeon-jung (Park Keun-hyong) meet on the streets while collecting cardboard that they sell for a few bucks; nearby, Hwa-jin (Ye Su-jeong) hawks a pitiful selection of vegetables on the sidewalk. Poor and bitter, they’re initially hostile to one another, but bond over some beef that U-sik mysteriously acquires, and Hwa-jin makes into soup. They learn one another’s stories: Hyeon-jung is estranged from his sons, who live abroad; Hwa-jin lost her daughter and son-in-law to an accident and toils for her indifferent teenage grandson; and U-sik has no family — or so he claims. He is the most elusive of the trio, and the one that hatches a plan for them to eat hearty meals that are beyond their means.

Soon, the three delinquents are addicted to their little con, the thrill and the companionship — not to mention, the good food — injecting color back into their bleak lives. Of course, the dream doesn’t last forever, and a reckoning arrives. But the director and his actors keep the film from dissolving into sentimentality, instead finding wry, dark comedy in the trio’s desperate quest to find nourishment, for their stomach and their souls. (Stream it on Film Movement Plus.)