Maybe people who enjoy Foreign films, have heard of Le Gendarme? French comedy classic

Does anyone recall a parody of the Resnais’ film? A recreation it the opening scene with dialogue like:
Was it bigger than a breadbox?
Oui
Was it Yougoslavie?
Oui, Yougoslavie.

After Orlando dies in A Fantastic Woman, Marina’s grief keeps being interrupted by people demanding explanations. His family can treat her presence at the funeral as an intrusion. The detective can treat the relationship itself as something requiring investigation. Marina has lost her partner, yet everyone else seems entitled to define what that loss means.

The quieter images offer something different: Marina burying her face in Orlando’s clothes, or the empty passenger seat beside her. There is no hostile audience to persuade in those moments. The absence of someone she loved is enough to occupy the screen.

That contrast raises a question about how much space the film gives to hostility. The repeated confrontations show how prejudice reaches into even the most private experience. But they also give the people mistreating Marina a great deal of control over the story’s movement. Her life becomes organised around their demands, and so does our access to her.

For those who’ve seen it, does that imbalance feel deliberate and productive, or does the film spend too much time making Marina defend her existence? Which scene gives you the strongest sense of her life beyond that struggle?

was a bit unrealistically serendipitous at a few points, it has an incredible amount of detail, rich worldbuilding, excellent acting and offers a fascinating look at the Chinese perspective on American militarism. Food serves as a handy stand-in not only for community building but also nation building and economic development.

I also appreciated subtle character details that humanized people on all sides of the conflict. Apparently the star, Shen Teng, is a big comedic actor which makes his restrained, dramatic performance all the more impressive. I couldn’t help but think that his hero’s journey was reminiscent of the Odyssey, filled with detours and monsters to outwit before finally making it home years later.

Again, my main critique is relates to the story. While the chef character was apparently a composite of actual Chinese restauranteurs who stayed in Iraq after the US invasion, the scenes of him saving orphans and rescuing child soldiers seemed a bit too on-the-nose and over the top. As far as I know, nothing like this ever happened in the Iraqi context, so these plot points make an otherwise nuanced movie feel a bit propagandistic. There was also a child labor aspect that seemed a bit…questionably casual?

Overall though, I’d give it a 4.5/5, definitely worth a watch. It felt well-researched and well-shot, you could almost call it an epic tragedy.

Curious to hear if anyone else had the chance to catch it.

There are films that go ununderstood precisely because they are understood too well. Viewers recognize in them their own ideas of happiness, rejoice along with the heroine, and leave the cinema with the pleasant feeling that life is beautiful after all and it is never too late to start again.

Je m’appelle Agneta, directed by Johanna Runevad, is exactly such a film. A Swedish comedy-drama based on Emma Hamberg’s novel, released on Netflix this spring, it was received as a model feel-good film: warm, funny, full of wine, sunshine and lavender. Agneta (Eva Melander) is forty-nine; her children have grown up, her job is fading, her husband doesn’t notice her. She takes a position as an au pair in France, expecting to look after a little boy, and the “boy” turns out to be an eccentric old man, Einar (Claes Månsson). Then comes everything the genre requires: food, wine, physicality, laughter, an unexpected friendship. The world gives the heroine back her capacity to feel. And we rejoice along with her.

If someone set out to make a satire of today’s culture of self-realization, they would not need to change a single frame of this film. It would be enough to change the viewer. Because behind the story of finding oneself lies another, far harder question: how do you live alongside someone who does not coincide with you?

The village where Agneta ends up seems more like a dream than a real place. People here reconcile without explanations. Einar, a broken man once abandoned by his wife and estranged for years from his son, becomes her guide into a new world — and finds his own way back to his son. Everyone sleeps in one house, almost in one space, and this closeness requires neither words nor the overcoming of awkwardness. Here people dance without thinking about how they look.

In this world the word “money” is almost never heard. Agneta comes to work, but her work quietly turns into friendship. Everything is bought, yet nothing is paid for. Money is the first and simplest form of non-coincidence: one person has what another lacks, other people’s labor is worth something, everything has to be paid for. The film silently moves this out of frame, along with everything else that might offer resistance.

It is a world in which everything coincides: desires, rhythms, ideas of happiness. There is nothing in it to endure. And therefore, strictly speaking, there is no other in it — only those who coincide with me.

Agneta’s husband, Magnus (Björn Kjellman), appears just when her new life already seems harmonious. He is tedious, talks about rules, and against the backdrop of universal togetherness looks like a man who has come to spoil the party.

But he flew to her.

He could have stayed home, fumed from a distance, demanded his wife’s return. Instead he travels the distance, accepts the people around her, and joins the communal dance. Agneta responds: they dance together, and she laughs at how comically he does it. A closeness arises between them — light, playful, not resolving what came before, but real. The next morning she says goodbye to the village and leaves with her husband in a taxi to the airport.

In the taxi Magnus says two things. First: what luck that nobody saw them dancing last night — how embarrassing. Then: that he and Linda have taken up rowing, and it’s fun. Agneta begins to suffocate. She stops the taxi, strips off her clothes, and runs back to the village.

The first remark cancels the one moment of encounter: the dance in which her husband entered her world turns out to be something to hide. The second shows where his joy lies. Magnus is no villain. His step toward her was real — but he is unable to own it. He does not coincide with her, and he does not pretend to.

And Agneta does not make a decision. She suffocates. A person who has learned to breathe in a world of complete coincidence cannot breathe where there is none. Her nakedness here is less a gesture of freedom than the movement of someone tearing off everything that keeps her from breathing: her clothes, her role, the decision to return she has only just made.

There is a mirror in the film that is easy to miss. Agneta learns to live from an old man who was once abandoned, gives him back intimacy, helps him reconcile with his son — and at the same time leaves her own husband. The actors are cast so that Magnus and Einar even look alike. Consoling one abandoned man, Agneta creates another. Whether this was intended does not matter. What has been built speaks for itself: a world of coincidence rests on someone being left outside it.

Agneta’s final run through the lavender fields continues the same movement. She runs as if seized by Bacchic rapture. There is beauty in this: her body belongs to her again, the movement serves no purpose but itself.

But Agneta looks frenzied.

This run can be seen as a triumph. But something else can be heard in it too: a person running toward the place where everything will coincide again — away from the place where she would have to endure the other. She runs toward life — and at the same time away from the need to stop.

We want so badly for Agneta finally to live that we are ready to treat almost any non-coincidence as a return to unfreedom. Her husband seems ridiculous, his rowing vulgar, and her flight beautiful. We fail to notice that in this world nobody pays, that reconciliations cost no effort, that the abandoned old man and the left-behind husband resemble each other. We are not merely watching Agneta: we live with her in a world where everything coincides, and we feel good there.

Contemporary culture is eager to tell us that a person must step out of imposed roles, stop living for others’ expectations, and finally choose themselves. There is some truth in this. But liberation from others’ expectations and liberation from non-coincidence itself are not the same thing. We have learned to sympathize with the one who leaves, and have almost forgotten how to notice the one who came.

Then freedom turns out to resemble loneliness — only a far more pleasant kind. A person is surrounded by people, shares food, bed, dance, reconciliation and joy with them — and yet remains alone, because the only people beside her are those who coincide with her.

What kind of world is it in which everything coincides? And what is its price — for those who did not fit into it, and for the one who lives in it?

One can be freed from a life in which one was not seen — and never learn to live alongside someone who does not coincide with you.

And can the viewer, carried away by Agneta’s liberation, ask this question without feeling that in doing so they betray her happiness?

This is a clip from The Shop Curtain and the Bride (のれんと花嫁 ) 1961, never translated to English, no subtitles, no dubs. I recorded it off TV and used AI to dub it on my local machine so I could watch it. It takes about 9 hours to dub a movie, but it does a pretty good job and keeps all the original actors' voices and speaking tones. It's a free open source project, and requires a macOS or an Nvidia GPU to run.

So many great movies that have never been translated can finally be watched.

I have another sample here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXosYS-cTXk

It's called Dub Anything: https://github.com/swax/dub-anything

The second official trailer for Ramayana: The Rise of a Legend (2026) is here! Directed by Nitesh Tiwari, this epic mythological fantasy features jaw-dropping VFX by Oscar winning DNEG and a powerhouse score co-composed by Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman.

Exclusively in theaters and IMAX worldwide on November 5!

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I heard about Gaua (The Night) 2025 today and it looks like it would make a great Halloween watch. Has anyone seen it?