Film reviews: Visually stunning journeys to far-away lands, with The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs and Neptune Frost
Folklore with a feminist twist in Himalayan India, and a mind-bending Afro-futurist trip through sci-fi Burundi, at The Cinematheque
The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs
Neptune Frost
The Cinematheque presents The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs on June 12 and 20, and Neptune Frost to June 12
TWO NEW FILMS at The Cinematheque transport you into stunning, poetic visual and musical worlds that tie into urgent political ideas.
Pushpendra Singh’s allegorical The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs immerses you in India’s northern Jammu-Kashmir region, where nomads herd sheep the way they have for millennia along the border of India and Pakistan. Singh reimagines an Indian folktale about the fierce and preternaturally beautiful Laila (the arresting Navjot Randhawa), who’s grudgingly married off to the herder Tanvir (Sadakkit Bijran), turning every frame into its own gorgeously composed photograph along the way.
The film transplants the viewer into places most people will never have the chance to visit—the bright-fabric tents of the nomads; wedding ceremonies, with their rice and mendhi rituals; vast sand-coloured mountain sides where the herders guide long, winding lines of goats.
The beauty of the place often has the heightened feel of a fairy tale: a pink-veiled Laila sitting amid an emerald, mossy pine forest, or restlessly lying in a red-quilted bed under a scrolling, leafy mural on a clay-hut wall.
Married to a weak husband, she’s the target of relentless harassment from the local park ranger. But Singh gives her unconventional strength: Laila repeatedly traps her unwanted suitor into fake rendezvous so he can get caught by her husband, and she asserts her sexual power in a way that upends traditional roles—and the age-old narrative of a man’s quest to “tame” a fiery woman, like livestock, as two men joke here.
In the way a folk tale repeats, the film can bog down in the repetitive trials that Laila puts the ranger through. What’s more compelling is how Singh uses Laila’s pride and resistance as a symbol for Kashmir’s larger battle, against the Indian government and separatists. In the final transcendent sequence, Laila escapes her earthly, feminine confines to become one with the snowy Himalayan land.
It’s a highly unconventional, feminist twist on folklore, with a startlingly fearless heroine. Some of the film’s strongest moments are when Laila sits in silence, staring out from the stone sheep pen at the sun setting over the Himalayas, her far-off gaze a mix of yearning, simmering anger, and escape from her endless labour. But The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs, split as the title suggests into seven chapters with seven mesmerizing traditional songs—some hauntingly illustrating the roots of flamenco cante, others echoing in unearthly santoor strings—often feels like entering an extended, melancholic dream where subtle magic might happen at any moment.
FROM THAT FABLE-LIKE world, head over to the strange, sci-fi-punk universe of the Neptune Frost—a dazzling and mystifying experiment in Afro-Futurism from poet-rapper Saul Williams and Rwandan artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman.
It’s a nonstop carnival of eye and ear candy—bodies adorned in neon paint and colourful computer wires, and a mashup of dance electro-beats, spoken-word, and traditional singing and percussion. But Neptune Frost also carries deeper, galvanizing messages about African freedom, gender fluidity, extraction exploitation, colonialism, and who controls digital space.
Set in hilly Burundi, Neptune Frost follows the parallel journeys of intersex runaway Neptune (Elvis Ngabo, Cheryl Isheja) and the escaped coltan miner Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse). In one of the film’s stunning early scenes, Matalusa drags his dead brother Tekno’s body through a coltan mine’s gaping valley of reddish rock, while fellow workers chant and beat drums in a pulsing rhythm. (Coltan is the metallic mineral that’s refined to make the tantalum used in many tech devices.)
Joining forces, Neptune and Matalusa build an anti-colonialist hacker collective, blending techno smarts with ancient wisdom, dreams, and spirituality, and wearing a trippy mix of keyboards, circuits, and computer wires that twist and coil through their braided hair. Into this world, cinematographer Uzeyman weaves in glitching digital effects and text, creating a sort of Utopian futuristic universe that is also deeply connected to the lush jungle.
Propelled by its own, nonstop rhythms and dream logic, Neptune Frost can be enjoyed on one level as a kind of hallucinatory, bewildering concept album. At the same time, it subverts all expectations of narrative, musical, and film—and imagines a vibrant and radical new order in the process.
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