I can't pretend there's any more of a unifying theme to this collection than there was to the previous "turning-points" post in the Pictures series. But the year is about to end, and over the last couple of months I've seen a few movies that merit a quick note.

Two on food, to begin with (originating in England and Morocco); then two on relationships (set in India and Singapore); and to close, a spy thriller (from the two Koreas).

1.
Toast
2011, S.J. Clarkson

The life-changing turning-point: Embracing your love of food, and starting to cook your way to success and happiness.

The plot: Young Nigel grows up in a house with a distant, judgemental father, and a mother who often resorts to toast to feed the family when her other culinary efforts have gone awry. Nigel loves her no less for that, and misses her terribly when she becomes ill and dies. Into the lives of the bereaved father and son comes Mrs Porter, who starts as a housekeeper, and ends up as Nigel's stepmother. The two compete ferociously on the cooking front, and Nigel's dad is helped on his way to an early grave by his wife's colossal and copious productions. Nigel, however, goes on to become a renowned chef.

Pluses: This movie doesn't receive a huge round of applause from the critics (62% on Rotten Tomatoes), but I liked it much more than they did. Having not done my homework, I didn't realize at the time that it was based on the memoir of a real person (Nigel Slater). Nevertheless, I found the characters' journeys moving; the piece is worth watching just for Helena Bonham-Carter's uproariously OTT performance as the curler-sprouting, chain-smoking stepmother; and as a walk down the memory lane of 1960s/70s food, it's unrivalled... Remember Caramac? Actually best forgotten... Remember Fray Bentos pies? Remember instant desserts? As children, my brother and I were constantly battling to sway my mother as to the rival merits of Birds Instant Whip (his choice) or Angel Delight (mine). Toast-the-movie brings that kind of thing galloping back into the memory...

Minuses: Occasionally, the slapstick elements gain too much of the upper hand, but it's a minor criticism.


All the photos in this post come from our trip to India in 2011. Firstly, villages near Jodhpur







2.
Tazzeka
2017, Jean-Philippe Gaud

The life-changing turning-point: Embracing your love of food, and starting to cook your way to success and happiness (again).

The plot: Elias has always been fascinated by food and French recipes. Growing up in the Moroccan village of Tazzeka, he cooks in a restaurant there, but doesn't have much scope for inventiveness. It so happens, however, that celebrated French chef Julien Blanc arrives at the restaurant, and is impressed by what Elias cooks. "Stop by my restaurant if you're ever in Paris," he tosses off, in one of those bland asides rich Westerners make to their less mobile brethren. Elias actually does get to Paris (unlike his older brother, who perished on the way), but there's no immediate magic ending. He's worried about his grandmother, who is left behind in the village; he's undocumented; and because of this he is able to find work only as a day-labourer. So he leads a pretty fraught and dismal life for a while. But he starts to cook again, for his friends and their family, and eventually he decides it's time to try his luck with Blanc. Grandma dies -- another of these distance-severed relationships -- but Elias believes she would have ended up proud of him.

Pluses: It's total food porn... Example: When Elias cooks for Blanc, back in the village, he makes a dessert of caramelised apple pastilla with pistachio cream, which he serves with white cardamom coffee, and garnishes with strawberries and fresh green mint... Can you imagine...? Yet the movie is sufficiently grounded in the reality of many migrants' experience -- struggle, precarity, emotional loss -- that it doesn't end up feeling frothy. Ted Scheinmann: "All the deep hope and loss are here, as well as the small, life-saving grace that immigrants can show toward one another."

Minuses: A little more rounding in the depiction of the characters wouldn't have gone amiss.













3.
Aligarh
2016, Hansal Mehta

The life-changing turning-point: Being on the receiving end of a cruel and cynical sting.

The plot: Professor Shrinivas Ramachandra Siras, who teaches at Aligarh University, has been filmed having sex with a rickshaw-driver. Such a monumental invasion of his privacy is devastating for the quiet, reserved scholar, but things worsen exponentially when the university authorities choose to suspend him, and evict him from his home. By the end of the movie, this gentle man is dead. Horrifyingly, the film hews very close to real events.

Pluses: I can't put it better than the Hindustan Times critic: "Aligarh is a hard-hitting film that clearly advocates gay rights, but the beauty is that it does so by constructing a deeply moving portrait of love and loneliness." (Siras doesn't even like the term "gay". How can a three-letter word capture my feelings, he wonders...) The review continues: "The film invites you into Siras’ world. It makes you understand the very marrow of his melancholy. And then devastatingly, it indicts you for his terrible predicament. Siras dies, under mysterious circumstances, absolutely alone. And we understand that we have all contributed, in ways big and small, to the creation of a society which hounds a mild, smiling man to death simply because of his sexual preferences." There is a lot of loveliness in the film, too, however. The professor's domesticity is beautifully rendered, and music underlines the heartbreak of the story. There is, for example, a very moving scene in which Siras listens to a song by Lata Mangeshkar: "A poet himself, Siras finds bliss in the lilt of her voice and the poignant words. The lyrics ... are especially haunting because we know that for Siras there will be no shelter from the storm."

Minuses: None, unless you count the sense of utter bleakness with which you emerge at the end.


Agra, not far from Aligarh. This is the Tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulat









4.
Ilo Ilo
2013, Anthony Chen

The life-changing turning-point: Being engulfed by factors much larger than you are.

The plot: In the Singapore of 1997, the Asian financial crisis is starting to bite, and the family we follow illustrates the rapidly gathering uncertainty. Mr and Mrs Lim are fearful for their jobs, and their finances are under strain. With another baby is on the way, and their son, nine-year-old Jia Le, often in trouble at school, the parents decide to engage Terry, a live-in maid-and-nanny from the Philippines, to relieve some of the domestic pressure. Because Jia Le has Terry's attention in a way that he never consistently has his parents' (the Chinese title of the film is Mum and Dad Are Not at Home), he starts -- after a rocky beginning -- to bond with her, arousing the jealousy of his mother. But in any case the family can't afford to keep Terry. She returns to the Philippines (and her own small child), leaving Jia Le heartbroken. (The title Ilo Ilo names the province in the Philippines that the film-maker's real-life nanny hailed from.)

Pluses: Nothing is over-stated in this movie. Jia Le's mum and dad are not uncaring parents, and they're not monstrous employers. They're just stretched beyond the capacity of normal human beings, and caught up in a somewhat ruthless system. So their son suffers (he is spoilt materially, but deprived emotionally), and their domestic helper suffers (she has to deal with a barrage of little slights and humiliations: she sleeps in Jia Le's bedroom, on a rollaway bed; she receives no back-up from the parents during the difficult early stages of her relationship with their boy; when she is brought along to a restaurant dinner to supervise Jia Le, there is nowhere for her to sit...)

Minuses: I watched Ilo Ilo on the plane over from Malaysia to the UK, and it made me feel kind of homesick...









5.
The Spy Gone North
2018, Yoon Jong-bin

The life-changing turning-point: Becoming a South Korean spy in North Korea... As Major Park Suk-young (alias Black Venus, the real-life agent on whom this story is based) laconically testifies: "It was extremely stressful living as a spy..."

The plot: Park takes on a new persona in order to infiltrate himself into the North. He soon discovers, however, that there are bad guys on both sides.

Pluses: It's both nerve-wracking (you're always wondering whether he will be caught, and by whom) and mundane (establishing your alias is anything other than glamorous, it seems). And it doesn't whitewash North Korea, but the film-maker also has "plenty of vitriol left for the nation characterised as the good guys in the ongoing Korean conflict".

Minuses: You need to have your wits about you to follow the twists. Best not undertaken in a warm room after a bottle of wine...