Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 21/9/2017)

Following some background captions and an André Agassi quotation about tennis being a microcosm of life, the action opens in Monaco in 1980, as Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) prepares to compete for his fifth consecutive Wimbledon singles title. Ever since he was a boy hitting against the garage door, Borg has dedicated himself to his sport and we see him dancing along a clay court baseline to return balls fired at him by a service machine. However, as a flurry of sound bites suggests, the ice-cool Swede faces a stiff challenge from John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf), a left-hander from Queens who has developed a reputation as a firebrand. Despite his outer calm, Borg has allowed McEnroe to get under his skin, so that even when he locks himself out of his car and has to do chores in a café to pay for a cup of coffee, he finds himself blenching at a newspaper story about his fiercest rival.

Across the Atlantic, McEnroe goes on a chat show and has to rein in his frustration as the host (Colin Stinton) keeps referring to Borg rather than focusing on him. Bored with the British press calling him `SuperBrat', McEnroe claims to have no interest in whether Borg ever loses his temper. Yet, as he arrives in London with Romanian girlfriend Mariana Simionescu (Tuva Novotny) to start practicing on grass with mentor Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård), Borg has to fight back his annoyance that the court hasn't been sealed off and that Bergelin has failed to find the same car he had used during his previous Wimbledon campaigns. He also seems to be finding the hordes of screaming fans a bore and is snappish with Mariana when she tries to dissuade his business people from selling the photo rights to their forthcoming nuptials.

While McEnroe scrawls the draw on his lodging wall and Borg tests the tension of his rackets, we flashback to the tweenage Borg (Leo Borg, Björn's son) losing his temper during a match and a snooty Swedish tennis official informing his mother Margareta (Julia Marko-Nord) that winning isn't everything and that not everyone is suited to a game with certain standards. When he is given a six-month suspension for unsporting play, father Rune (Mats Blomgren) suggests selling his racket. But Bergelin (a onetime Wimbledon quarter-finalist and Davis Cup captain) has spotted something in Borg (who also excels at ice hockey) and persuades him that he can help control the demons that plague him when he plays and take him to the top of the sport.

Having irked McEnroe by being late for a pre-tournament press conference, the 24 year-old Borg worries that he will be forgotten if he only wins four titles in a row and asks Mariana if she can imagine him coping after tennis. She nods supportively, but he is nervous before his first round match against unseeded Egyptian Ismail El-Shafei (Mohamed Shabib). Bergelin advises him to stick to his metronomic style against a big hitter with little else to threaten him. But it takes some time for him to find his rhythm before he progresses, while McEnroe prepares for his own opener by hitting the town with doubles partner Peter Fleming (Scott Arthur) and compatriot contender Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms). Yet, while he sinks glasses of champagne, McEnroe also hears about Borg's obsessive rituals from Gerulaitis, who claims that he is less an iceberg than a volcano ready to blow.

Another flashback shows the teenage McEnroe (Jackson Gann) donning his trademark headband and putting in the lonely hours on a New York court. Yet, rather than being praised by his mother Kay (Jane Perry) for his dedication, he is admonished for only getting 96% on a geography test because the world is a big place and the missing 4% might make all the difference as to whether he succeeds or fails. She asks if tennis is proving a distraction and we hurtle forward to McEnroe's second round tie with Australian Terry Rocavert, where he is ranting at the crowd for putting him off while serving. Watching on television, Mariana suggests he is a wild cannon. But Borg recognises a kindred spirit and thinks back to his teenage self (Marcus Mossberg) raging at every setback on court and being taught how to channel his emotions by Bergelin, who had tried to protect him from media hype after he became a Davis Cup star at the age of 15.

The sense that they have more in common than many suppose resurfaces when McEnroe storms into the Wimbledon changing-room while Borg is waiting to start his third round match against Australian Rod Frawley (Igor Tubic). Rain comes to Borg's aid, as he gets off to a poor start and he urges Bergelin to have play abandoned. But he reminds him of his duty to himself and a flashback to how Bergelin used to rile Borg during training sessions so that he would learn the value of self-control snaps him back to his best and he wins on the resumption without undue difficulty. But he blames his struggles on Bergelin failing to string his wooden rackets correctly and Mariana is stunned when the coach pulls over and gets out of the car when Borg threatens to sack him. When she tries to reassure him back at their digs, he tells her to stop pampering him and recognise that there is nothing easy about being Björn Borg.

As he goes for a run, he thinks back to the night Bergelin had told him that he was going to play New Zealander Onny Parun in the Davis Cup. But he makes him promise never to show a single emotion on the court again because it gives his opponent something to exploit and he needs to appear impregnable. Borg had thrown up before the match, but he had won and become an overnight sensation in the process. He won his first French Open in 1974 and his first Wimbledon came two years later. In each case, he was the youngest ever winner and Gerulaitis had taken him to Studio 54 in New York to enjoy his celebrity.

While Borg tries to sleep, Bergelin finds Mariana in the hotel corridor and invites her in for a drink. She recalls how Bergelin had come along on their first date after Borg had seen her play in the French Open and she asks why he got out of the car when Borg had fired him. He says he fears for him, as he has put so much into becoming the best that he has no idea how he will cope when he starts to lose on a regular basis. This drive to win is shared by McEnroe, however, who stops speaking to Fleming when they come up against each other in the quarter-final and seemingly takes an ankle support from his bag to undermine him before they even step on court. After the match, Fleming tells his friend that he will win Wimbledon one day, but that he will never be remembered as a great because nobody likes him.

As a youth. McEnroe had sought to impress his father (Ian Blackman) by doing complex multiplication sums and had been mortified when a dinner guest had posed an impossibly difficult puzzle. He still seeks his approval and has him accompany him to a business meeting about an advertising campaign pitting him as the rebel against Borg's automaton. But Borg has recognised that McEnroe uses his antics as a coping mechanism, just as he uses his sang froid. Thus, rather than being polar opposites, they are almost identical.

In the semi-final against unseeded American Brian Gottfried (Vincent Eriksson), Borg finds a way to win without playing well and is stung by press comment that McEnroe has described him as a machine that will eventually break down. He loses his temper en route to beating fellow bad boy Jimmy Connors (Tom Datnow) and then fumes at the press when they wish to discuss his behaviour rather than his talent. While he storms out of the media centre, Borg goes through his own private hell in the showers and the case is cannily made for them being driven to the edge of implosion in order to win.

But we get another insight into Borg's mania for perfectionism when he returns to Södertälje to knock the ball against the garage door for Argentinian television and struts back into his stretch limo when he can't remember which door he used to use and he has to watch old home movie footage to clarify things in his mind. Realising that he has a duty to stick with his prodigy, Bergelin seeks him out in the changing-rooms (which always seem to be conveniently empty regardless of how many matches are being played around the venue) and puts a protective arm around him. Borg rests his head on Bergelin's shoulder and accepts the empathy. But he doesn't need the reverse psychology when Bergelin barks at him to stop snivelling like a kid and either face up to the challenge that McEnroe poses or duck it by feigning injury.

A corny shot has the rivals sitting silently under the famous Rudyard Kipling quote about triumph and disaster, as they wait to go on to Centre Court. The crowd erupts as they come into view, as commentators from around the world set the scene and the BBC producer urges the sound engineer to keep the microphone nearest McEnroe turned down. McEnroe Senior sits in the box across from Mariana and Bergelin, as McEnroe takes the first two games of the first set. However, the controlled assurance that Metz has brought to the film to this juncture goes out of the window, as he throws the audiovisual kitchen sink at generating the excitement of a match whose outcome will be known to the majority of those watching.

Whereas in previous rounds he could keep the `staged' sport down to a minimum, Metz is forced to rely more heavily on his expert doubles for Borg (Finn Henrik Sillanpää) and McEnroe (Dane Thomas Kromann) and then have editors Per K. Kirkegaard and Per Sandholt cut into facial close-ups to allow Gudnason and LaBeouf to register the requisite emotions following each key point. However, not being as precise a lookalike as Gudnason, the latter struggles to capture McEnroe's on-court personality, as he loses the second set 5-7 and the third 3-6 after taking the first 6-1. The phoned-in commentaries hardly help maintain the tension levels, even though this is one of the most thrilling contests in tennis history.

McEnroe trembles with rage on his chair at the end of the third set and things don't go well at the start of the fourth, with dubious calls (in the days before on-court appeals) convincing the commentators that an eruption is inevitable. At one change round, Borg tells him to keep playing his game, as it's a great match and McEnroe rallies. Mystifyingly, Metz chooses this moment to show much of the play in top shots that only show half of the court and give no sense of the ebb and flow of the set, as Borg gets to match point. He hits an ace long and is so rattled by his failure to close out the final that he his serve is broken and misses five more championship points in a tie-break that ends with the American winning 18-16 to take the match into a fifth and deciding set.

As he sits on his chair, with Bergelin willing him to take it one point at a time, Borg recalls the strop in the forest when he was a teenager and how he managed to regain his composure by looking at the sunlight glinting through the trees. He takes the first game as though nothing untoward had just happened, as Metz cuts between scoreboard flashes, facial close-ups and random points shown from all manner of angles to the emotive throb of the orchestral score composed by Vladislav Delay, Jon Ekstrand, Carl-Johan Sevedag and Jonas Struck. We are even treated to a couple of childhood flashbacks. The intent is to turn great sport into pulsating cinema, but the fussiness of the approach simply calls attention to the technique and deflects away from the athleticism and tenacity of the players at the very moment when the game should be everything.

Suddenly, its 7-6 and McEnroe is serving to save the match. At championship point, the Swedish commentator superstitiously lights a cigar to help his countryman win and it does the trick, as Borg sinks to his knees with relief at having notched up his fifth win. As Mariana and Bergelin hug and Borg receives congratulations at his chair, McEnroe shrugs in the direction of his father, who averts his eyes in disappointment. During the presentation ceremony, the commentators opine that plucky McEnroe has won the hearts of the British public, while Borg will forever be the king of tennis.

During the post-tournament function, Borg manages a smile in Bergelin's direction, but he takes the first opportunity to leave with Mariana. At the airport, however, she is left to feel like an outsider when they bump into McEnroe in the departure lounge and Borg goes over to shake his hand. They exchange a few awkward words before giving each other a manly hug that seems to be the start of a beautiful friendship (Borg was best man at McEnroe's wedding). Closing captions opt not to mention that McEnroe beat Borg in the US Open final a couple of months later, but reveal that he became World No.1 the following year after defeating him at Wimbledon. This loss prompted Borg to retire at the age of 26 and the film closes with photos of the real Borg and McEnroe and the pivotal people in their lives (although we learn nothing about the subsequent fate of Mariana or Bergelin). The intriguing epilogue allows fictional first-timer Metz to return to the more considered style he had utilised before the final had got the best of him. However, many a fine sporting movie has been spoilt by the shaky reconstruction of the action and this otherwise fascinating biopic certainly won't be the last. In truth, the Swedish film-maker appears more interested in his compatriot, with McEnroe often being reduced to a necessary bit player alongside Mariana and Bergelin in Borg's battle with himself. However, the fact that Gudnason is such a dead ringer for Borg and nails his mannerisms on and off the court gives him an advantage over LaBeouf (no stranger to opprobrium himself), who never looks or sounds enough like the volatile McEnroe to atone for the fact that he also misses the gait that could switch from petulant strop to peacock strut in the course of a single point.

As for the central thesis, Metz and Sandahl concoct a convincing case that Borg employed the ultimate poker face to steel himself and disconcert his opponents, while McEnroe employed diametric tactics to achieve the same results. For many sports fans, however, it would be more instructive to see a documentary examination of this supposition, as, despite the excellence of Niels Thastums cinematography and Lina Nordqvist's production design, the 26-minute summation of the 1980 Wimbledon Men's Singles Final currently available on YouTube does a much better job in capturing the excitement of the occasion, the brilliance of the play and the begrudging respect that initially sparked Björn Borg and John McEnroe's four-decade friendship.

Asian cinema had a tradition for abrasive action heroines long before Quentin Tarantino stumbled across it and made Kill Bill (2003). From the 1960s, Hong Kong built pictures around martial arts superstars like Angela Mao, Yu So Chow, Judy Lee (aka Chia Ling), Cheng Pei Pei, Kara Hui, Cecilia Wong and Hsu Feng, as well as such 1980s `Girls With Guns' as Cynthia Khan, Moon Lee, Michiko Nishiwaki and Yukari Oshima. Over in Japan, the Nikkatsu studio could boast the presence of Chieko Matsubara and Ruriko Asaoka, while Toei's Meiko Kaji acquired a cult international following for her work in the Female Convict Scorpion and Lady Snowblood series.

South Korean stuntman-turned-director Jung Byung-gil is clearly aware of these high-kicking, fist-flying, sword-wielding women. But he and co-writer Jung Byung-sik also lean heavily on Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (1990) in making The Villainess, his second fictional feature after the serial killer thriller, Confession of Murder (2012). But the influence of Yasuharu Hasebe, Park Chan-wook and, yes, even Tarantino is evident in an often gleefully over-the-top romp that combines cartoonish and sickening violence with a punishing attitude towards women that is supposed to be back-handedly complimentary.

Following a bravura opening sequence that uses a wall mirror to switch from a first- to a third-person perspective as a black-clad assassin slays all-comers in corridors, stairwells and a gymnasium, Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) is cornered by the cops in a back alley downpour. She is placed in a sparsely furnished room with a large wooden crucifix on the wall and sedated with fumes pumped in through a ventilator. On the orders the Korean Intelligence Agency, Sook-hee undergoes plastic surgery and is afforded the opportunity to escape from handlers in breathing apparatus so that Kwon-sook can assess her prowess, as she takes a hostage and blunders through a ballet class, a kitchen and a drama rehearsal before being shot while attempting to jump to freedom off a rooftop.

The KIA broadcast that a Chinese-Korean agent has committed suicide in detention and Sook-hee agrees to work for the bureau for a decade after she is informed by handler Kwon-sook (Kim Seo-hyung) that she is pregnant. However, she does poorly at the aptitude tests designed to determine her sleeper profession and only responds to acting before giving birth to a daughter, Eun-hye (Kim Yun-woo). But, while she proves a doting mother, Sook-hee remains a honed fighter and teaches cocky Kim-sun (Jo Eun-ji) a lesson when she tries to humiliate her in a kendo session. She also beats her in a speed trial to assemble and fire a pistol, an exercise that reminds Sook-hee of put coerced into taking a similar test as a young girl (Min Ye-ji) by Joong-san (Shin Ha-kyun), the gangster who had turned her into a killing machine following the murder of her father (Park Chul-min).

Sook-hee had been hiding under the bed when her father had been butchered and his blood had splattered her face. But she also sees a young girl looking down at her after she has a spot of bother dispatching her first target as a KIA killer and has to sword fight with him before eventually running him through on the upstairs landing. Momentarily stunned by the gaze of her witness, Sook-hee had fled on a motorbike, only to find a fleet of besuited henchmen pursuing her. Several fail to survive bushido duels while speeding through a narrow road tunnel and Sook-hee is forced to ride over a police car and plunge into the river when confronted with a roadblock.

Holding her breath underwater, Sook-hee sees her father's reassuring face and recalls the fishing trip with a family friend when she had been shown the white opal she would be given on her wedding day. However, this prompted the unseen friend to murder Sook-hee's father and he had found her cowering under the bed when he had returned to find the precious stone. Thus, Sook-hee sobs when she surfaces and scrambles to the bank, where she finds Kwon-sook waiting for her. She takes Sook-hee to her new apartment in an undisclosed part of South Korea, where she literally bumps into Hyun-soo (Sung Joon) in the lift.

Sook-hee has no idea that he is her KIA minder and has been following her progress on CCTV from the moment she arrived at the base. Indeed, he gave baby Eun-hye the cuddly rabbit she still takes everywhere and he tries so hard to make a good impression on Sook-hee that she calls Kwon-sook to run a background check on his story about being widowed in a robbery. She finds him irksome when he intercepts a pizza delivery and suggests she should give her daughter healthy food. But she is also touched by the fact that his wife came from Yanbian, the autonomous prefecture in north-eastern China where she was raised.

A succession of chance encounters softens Sook-hee's attitude to Hyun-soo, especially as Eun-hye seems to like him. But, when he greets her off the bus with an umbrella, she invites him to watch her perform in a play and they go to dinner afterwards. As he knows her so well from his KIA observations, he wears a tie the same cobalt colour as the one Joong-san had worn on the day he married Sook-hee and took her to Seoul for their honeymoon. However, despite his promise that they would live a normal life, he had been murdered by the same man who had killed her father.

Driving home after supper, Hyun-soo lets slip that he wishes Sook-hee wasn't married and offers to walk home in the rain rather than embarrass her in front of the babysitter. But Sook-hee stops the car and comes back for Hyun-soo with an umbrella and they kiss on returning home after she admits her husband is dead. They are undoing shirt buttons when Sook-hee gets a phone call and she lies about a colleague being rushed to hospital in order to meet up with Min-joo (Son Min-ji), her only friend on the training course who has just been given her first mission. They are to pose as escorts to steal the secrets hidden on their client's phone. However, Sook-hee's theft of the man's phone is easily detected and Min-joo is stabbed through the neck during the ensuing struggle. Having killed her foes, Sook-hee rushes Min-joo to the waiting van. But Kim-sun refuses to get medical attention for Min-joo and blames her death on Sook-hee's bungling and she returns home to sob in the shower with Hyun-soo trying to console her.

During a debriefing on Min-joo's death, chief Joong-san reveals that Sook-hee has ties with Joong-san's treacherous lieutenant, Choon-mo (Lee Seung-koo), and may even be a double agent. However, they are keen to catch Choon-mo's boss and Kwon-sook suggests that Sook-hee might be the perfect woman for the job. But, first, she has to approve Sook-hee's request to marry Hyun-soo, who has hinted that he isn't the man she thinks he is, only to be informed that she is a very different woman to the one he knows. Sook-hee pretends to seek permission from her parents and Kwon-sook is sitting next to Hyun-soo when she phones with good news about their wedding.

On the day of the ceremony, however, Kim-sun arrives out of the blue and taunts Sook-hee for getting Min-joo killed. She also hands her a phone, as Kwon-sook orders Sook-hee to go to the toilets and assemble a high-powered rifle from packages hidden around the room. Yet, when she aims through the fan blades of a building opposite, Sook-hee is taken aback by the target in the sunglasses and misses her aim with several shots. She is called back inside and marries Hyun-soo, with Eun-hye as the flower girl. He urges her to be happy, but she knows she recognised Joong-san and can't remember why. But (despite the plastic surgery) he finds her face familiar, too, when Choon-mo shows him a photograph of his would-be assassin.

Sook-hee spots Joong-san in the audience during the next performance of her play and he looks on as the heroine shoots herself in the head in the last act. He slips into the seat opposite her when Hyun-soo is called away during dinner and asks if she recognises him. She stays in character, as he pulls out a gun beneath the table, and warns him that she would be prepared to eliminate a past love in order to protect what she now has. Remaining icily cool, Joong-san apologises for mistaking her for someone he once loved and a tear wells in Sook-hee's eye, as he rises and leaves.

As she starts out of her reverie, we flashback to Sook-hee's wedding night with Joong-san. He had been forced to self-stitch a wound on his cheek and this had reminded him of the dead face of his new bride's father. She twirls in her wedding dress and promises to forget about seeking vengeance if Joong-san promises to live a normal life, as she knows he was not responsible for killing her father.

Back in the present, Kwon-sook shows Sook-hee a photograph of her speaking to Joong-san in the restaurant and asks why she failed to finish him on her wedding day. She claims he is merely a fan and is piqued when Kwon-sook reminds her that she jeopardises her future by not following orders. Joong-san sends Sook-hee flowers and she feels a pang when Kim-sun taunts her with the fact that she has been ordered to wipe her ex-husband out. Despising Kim-sun, Sook-hee messages Joong-san and he ambushes the assassin when she arrives in his building and beats her up.

Furious that her plan has been thwarted again, Kwon-sook sends Hyun-soo to Yanbian to execute Joong-san and warns him that Sook-hee's safety depends on his success. Fully aware of the relationship between his wife and his target, Hyun-soo declares that he needs to nurse his ailing mother and hugs Sook-hee, who may just be starting to suspect that her husband is not who he says he is. However, she gets no time to ponder her predicament, as she is taken at gunpoint by Kwon-sook, who reveals that Hyun-soo is a KIA agent. As he goes to collect Eun-hye, Joong-san rams the car carrying Sook-hee and shoots Kwon-sook and her henchmen. He gives Sook-hee a gun and tells her to rescue her daughter, but she arrives home in time to see them thrown from the apartment by a bomb blast that kills them both and Sook-hee is distraught.

She returns to KIA headquarters and finds Kwon-sook, who has been wounded in the right arm. Sook-hee pulls a gun on her, but Kwon-sook plays her surveillance footage from inside the flat and shows Choon-mo (carrying the sledgehammer that Sook-hee had seen from under the bed on the night her father died) attack Hyun-soo with the help of Jang-chun (Jung Hae-kyun) and Kim-sun (who has clearly betrayed Sook-hee in the hope of surviving) . Recognising him as Joong-san's sidekick, he tries to shout down the phone that Eun-hye is his child. But Choon-mo drops a blade into the floor to distract him and they fight before Hyun-soo is eventually overpowered. Choon-mo executes Kim-sun and detonates the bomb so that Sook-hee sees her husband and daughter die.

Distraught, Sook-hee asks Kwon-sook why she is tormenting her and falls to her knees. But she isn't down for long, as she drives a car across the mid-air divide between two buildings to crash through a window into Joong-san's lair. Choon-mo looks on, as his men are picked off during a titanic gun battle. She ventures upstairs and finds Joong-san alone and asks if he ever loved her. He insists he did, but claims the right to destroy her because he had made her. Sook-hee drops her gun and produces two blades and seeks to show him the kind of killer she had become. They crash through a window and keep struggling as they hang from a ledge before dropping into the street below. Sook-hee is hit by a car.

Undaunted, however, she smashes its windscreen and hurtles after the bus on which Joong-san has escaped. Clambering on to the bonnet, she somehow keeps the vehicle speeding in a straight line while she leaps on to the bus and breaks through the window in order to obliterate several more of Joong-san's oppos. With Choon-mo at the wheel of the careering bus, Sook-hee and Joong-san fight between the seats until she stabs Choon-mo so that the bus crashes and turns on its side. Staggering to her feet, she picks her way through the wreckage to the injured Joong-san. She raises an axe to kill him and he taunts her when he hesitates. As the camera gyrates around the couple, Sook-hee hears the whistled melody that had preceded her father's death and, finally knowing the truth, she buries the blade in Joong-san's skull. Sirens approach and the heavens open, as Sook-hee emerges from the bus with blood and a sardonic smile on her face. Looking directly into the lens, she lets out a manic laugh that continues to echo as the credits roll.

Given that this slick, but whoppingly contrived actioner takes homage to the point of blatant emulation, there seems little need for a Hollywood remake: but that's never stopped anyone before. Structurally similar to another tale of a gun-toting avenging angel, Sarmad Masud's My Pure Land, the flashbacking narrative mosaics its fragments together without a hint of character depth. But, while editor Seo Hun-mi deserves credit for retaining a semblance of plot logic, he must also be blamed with Jung and cinematographer Park Jung-hun for reducing choreographer Kwon Gui-duck's fight and chase sequences to shakicam obfuscations, whose self-consciously intricate dynamism deprives them of any visceral potency.

Just as the excess of crashing, banging and walloping generates precious little excitement, the performances lack the charisma to persuade the audience to care what happens to Sook-hee, Hyun-soo or even the pudgily adorable Eun-hye. One suspects this is Jung's judgement call, as Kim Ok-bin and Sung Joon have proved perfectly serviceable before. But, for all Kim's pugnacious exertions, she is upstaged here by the pitiless Shin Ha-kyun and the icily impassive Kim Seo-hyung, who respond to Sook-hee's demand to know why they have put her through so much suffering with equal indifference. Such misogyny might have been more impactful if Jung had allowed a little bleak comedy to seep into proceedings. But there's nothing ironic or drolly postmodern about the violence on show here. It's flashy and lurid and winds up being sadistically nasty. This might have mattered less if the story had been as compelling as it is convoluted. But, in the case of this overblown video game, it feels smugly gratuitous.

During the Communist era, Hungary was renowned for encouraging women film-makers to make their mark. Among those still revered are Marta Meszáros, Judit Ember, Livía Gyamarthy, Judit Elek and Ildikó Enyedi, who won the Camera d'Or at Cannes with her first feature, My 20th Century (1989). This surreal comedy of errors involving twin sisters was followed by Magic Hunter (1994), which made innovative use of a parallel story and a child's perspective to comment on the ménage involving a police marksman, a chess grandmaster and the latter's wife. But Enyedi settled for making shorts and TV shows after updating a New Testament story to modern-day Budapest in Simon Magus (1999) and surprised many by returning in triumph to win the Golden Bear at Berlin with her first feature in 18 years, On Body and Soul. However, this unsettling study of the animal instinct in human behaviour reveals that Enyedi has lost none of her thematic acuity or stylistic audacity.

Following shots of a stag and a doe (named Góliát and Picur, for the record) nuzzling in a snow-covered forest and cattle cramped in a lorry being delivered to a Budapest abattoir, finance director Géza Morcsányi has lunch in the canteen with human resources chief, Zoltán Schneider. The latter boasts about never letting women call the shots, but wife Éva Bata passes the table to order him to pick up the kids from school because she is going out with the girls. The bearded Morcsányi, who has a withered left arm, notices new quality inspector Alexandra Borbély at the service hatch, and sits at her table to introduce himself. His efforts at small talk fall flat, however, as the socially awkward blonde is plain spoken to the point of rudeness.

However, the exchange makes an impression on the obsessive compulsive Borbély (who also has an eidetic memory), as she returns home to use her salt and pepper shakers to recreate the conversation and add in a few unsaid thoughts. She leaves the cruet representing herself on the table, as she goes to watch an old war movie on television, while munching sweets from a glass. Morcsányi buys a couple of cans of beer from the corner shop and spends the evening alone.

Contrasting images follow of the deer roaming freely in the woods and a bullock being coerced into a gate to be executed, beheaded and eviscerated. Other animals wait patiently in pens, with classical music playing to keep them calm, as the workers gossip about the primly austere Borbély, as she goes about assessing the quality of the meat. However, the staff are unhappy that she keeps giving everything a B grade and Morcsányi breaks up an interview with cocky new recruit Ervin Nagy to ask Borbély why she has a problem with the cuts. She explains that they are fractionally over the limit for premium meat and he commends her eye for detail.

Having spent another lonely night in their apartments (and after another cutaway to the deer lying peacefully in the snow), Morcsányi and Borbély bump into each other again in the canteen. He is sitting with Schneider and Bata, so Borbély goes to another table and he notices how the other diners shut up the moment she sits beside them. Morcsányi also sees Nagy mocking her during a cigarette break and flirting with co-workers Nóra Rainer-Micsinyei, Rozi Székely and Zsófi Bódi. But - following another cervine reveries, in which the deer touch noses while drinking from a stream - Morcsányi's attention is distracted when detective Pál Mácsai and junior officer Barnabás Horkay come to the slaughterhouse because somebody has stolen a bovine aphrodisiac and used it to spike the drinks at a 50th reunion party. Suspicion falls on Bata, who runs the pharmacy department, but Mácsai keeps an open mind and recommends that the entire workforce has `mental hygiene' sessions with psychiatrist Réka Tenki to see if anyone gives themselves away.

Tenki catches Morcsányi looking at her breasts when she reaches back into a filing cabinet while preparing to interview him and he is put out when her first question is about his earliest wet dream. She remarks on 10 being young for such an occurrence and he requests that she sticks to the script. Suppressing a smile, Tenki urges him not to be embarrassed and quizzes him about his last dream. He describes the scene of the stag and the doe touching noses in the stream and is affronted when she asks if the animals mated. Struggling to retain his dignity, Morcsányi apologises for staring at her, but reassures Tenki that he has no desire to mount her. She scribbles on her form before fixing his gaze and inquiring when he lost his virginity.

As she waits outside, Rainer-Micsinyei teases bearded colleague Vince Zrínyi Gál about his subconscious thoughts and he tries to deflect attention by asking ageing cleaner Itala Békés about her dreams. She shocks them all with her graphic reply, but all eyes turn to Tenki when she bustles along the corridor to go to the lavatory and returns with a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe.

Borbély enters the office and Tenki asks about her first menstruation and is puzzled when she provides precise dates for this and a bout of chicken pox. Impassive as ever, Borbély pauses before describing her most recent dream, as she is usually too shy to share her innermost thoughts. However, Tenki thinks she has conspired with Morcsányi to undermine the process and Borbély is confused when Tenki asks why she is tormenting her. She calls them back after hours and plays a recording of Morcsányi's answer and Borbély is alarmed by how similar his dream was to hers. He tries to reassure her that coincidences happen, as they wait on a deserted railway platform. But Borbély is disconcerted by the incident and has to cling film her meticulously laid-out supper because she has lost her appetite.

That night, the deer and the doe watch each from opposite ends of a wintry pool. When lunchtime comes, Borbély sits at Morcsányi's table and asks about his dream. He lies that nothing came and she leaves to sit elsewhere. Schneider slips into her chair and confides his theory that Nagy stole the mating powder because he regards himself as such a stud. He also complains about Tenki messing with his mind before bluntly admitting that he fancies her. Eager to catch up with Borbély, Morcsányi hurries away and tells her about the round pond and she blurts out that she saw the same thing. That night, the deer meet in lush greenery and Borbély wakes to feel the sun on her skin, as she stands on her balcony.

She arrives at work to find Morcsányi waiting for her with a written account of his dream and he lingers while she produces her own. Looking up from the papers, they smile and agree to meet in their special world that night. But, when they hook up in the canteen to discuss why the doe ran away, they are interrupted by Nagy, who begins hitting on Borbély in a boorish manner. Leaving them together, Morcsányi waits until tea break to broach the subject again. He warns her that Nagy is a womaniser and she averts her eyes and nods. Yet, when he asks for her phone number, she informs him that she doesn't have a mobile and he backs away fearing he has overstepped the mark.

There is no sign of the stag that night and the doe looks at her reflection in the pool. Unsure what to do, Borbély consults her childhood psychiatrist, Tamás Jordán, who suggests that Morcsányi might not have believed her because everyone has phones. He also wonders whether he was jealous because he saw her talking to Nagy. Going home, Borbély finds a box of Playmobil medieval characters and uses a warrior and a maiden to rehearse what she might say to Morcsányi to reassure him that she thinks he is beautiful and that she has no time for Nagy.

The next day, Schneider slumps down at Morcsányi's table and asks if he has ever slept with Bata. He claims she has had affairs with half of the factory and has now tilted her cap at Nagy. As they talk, Borbély stops to tell Morcsányi that she is planning to buy a phone. However, as she can only think of her pre-rehearsed lines, she blurts out that she thinks he is beautiful and, much to the amusement of Schneider, he is mortified. But he denies that anything is going on between them and returns to his office to find Mácsai waiting for him. He asks why an abattoir would stock mating powder and Morcsányi has to give him a bag of free meat to stop him snooping. As he leaves, Nagy asks what the cop had wanted and this convinces Morcsányi that he spiked the school reunion drinks.

Neither Morcsányi nor Borbély sleeps that night and he is relieved when she calls to say she has bought a phone and he readily agrees when she suggests that they call to fall asleep together that night. Eavesdropping daughter Zsuzsa Járó asks Morcsányi whether he has a girlfriend, but he ignores her and her request to borrow some money. Borbély gets ready for bed early and is lying in her pyjamas when Morcsányi rings. He urges her not to be afraid of her and hangs up.

At lunch, the next day, Borbély sits at his table and Morcsányi thanks her for a lovely dream. She smiles when he invites her to lunch and one is left to suspect that the stag and the doe have mated for the first time. On returning to his office, he finds Tenki waiting for him. She reports that Schneider probably stole the aphrodisiac, but Morcsányi decides against letting her submit her findings to the police and says he will handle the matter. As she leaves, she asks if he and Borbély's dreams have ever synchronised again, but he lies that they had played a joke on her and she turns away disappointed that something she had found intriguingly romantic was merely a prank.

Schneider sees Tenki leave and barrels over to ask what she has unearthed. Morcsányi tries to be evasive, but Schneider's guilty conscience gets the better of him and he confesses to the theft and regrets trying to frame Nagy. Knowing he is under pressure with Bata, Morcsányi agrees to let the matter drop. But he makes a point of apologising to Nagy and they go for a beer together. On his way home, he pops into the corner shop and buys some aftershave for his lunch date and the manager smiles because Morcsányi has a beard. Back at work, Békés catches Borbély looking at herself in a mirror and gives her some tips on her posture and gait so she will make a better impression.

The usually busy restaurant turns out to be empty and Morcsányi is mildly rude to the oblivious waiter. They go somewhere else for supper and Morcsányi invites Borbély to a sleepover so that they can wake and share their dreams instantly. She agrees and takes the bed, while he bunks down on a mattress on the floor. However, with sounds coming in through the window, they struggle to sleep and get up to play cards. He is amused by her ability to read his bluffs and the fact she has remembered every word he says. Yet, when he reaches out to touch her hand, Borbély pulls away and he apologises for misreading the signs, as he has not thought about romance for a while and is out of practice.

She opts not to sit at his table at lunch the next day and tries watching porn online to see if that makes her feel better about being touched. When this fails, she consults a bemused Jordán, who is only used to dealing with children and feels awkward talking to Borbély about such grown-up issues. He suggests that she tries stroking her face or listening to music to relax, but she interrupts to ask if it's possible for two people to share a dream and he doesn't know how to respond.

On her way home, she drops into a record shop and asks Vivien Rujder if she can listen to some CDs before buying. She brings a large stack of discs to the counter and listens impassively on headphones to thrash mettle and easy listening before purchasing Rujder's recommendation of Laura Marling's `What He Wrote' .The heart-rending lyrics affect her and she turns them off. However, she tries to be more tactile and rests her hand on a plate of mashed potato before squeezing it with her fingers. At his flat, Morcsányi drops his supper on the carpet and angrily deflates the air mattress before fighting back tears in a café.

After dreaming of the stag running in the woods, Morcsányi sees a gaggle of workers watching Borbély stroking a bull's hide in its pen. She goes to the local park and enjoys the feel of the sunshine on her skin. Gauchely, she stares at a teenage couple kissing before lying on the grass and allowing the sprinklers to soak her as dusk descends. On her way home, she buys a cuddly panther and the camera creeps under the crisp white covers to focus on her eyes as she experiences the sensation of it being rubbed across her skin.

Meanwhile, Morcsányi sleeps with old flame Rainer-Micsinyei, who is put out when he refuses to let her stay the night and turns on her side and falls asleep. This seems to unsettle him and, when Borbély informs him in the lunch queue that she has brought her pyjamas for another sleepover, he brusquely informs her that things are not working out and that they should simply be friends. The camera peers through the dirty glass of the serving hatch, as she is stunned by the news and his uncharacteristic callousness. She goes home and throws a meat tenderiser through a glass panel and cuts her wrists in the bath listening to Laura Maring.

As she winces at the pain of the warm water on her gushing wound, the power goes off and is aghast at the sense of anti-climax. However, the phone rings and she rushes to answer it and exchanges pleasantries with Morcsányi as blood runs down her legs. He goes to hang up, but cries out that he loves her and she starts to cry as she declares her love for him. When he suggests meeting, she binds her wrist with gaffer tape and puts a plastic bag over her hand. However, she wipes the work top clean before going to hospital, Declining a bed or an appointment with a psychologist, Borbély goes to Morcsányi's apartment and they make love. His left arm hangs over the side of the bed, as she supports his weight with her hands. She shows little emotion as he rolls beside her, but she half smiles as she announces she feels sleepy and reaches over to lift his withered arm on to the mattress. The following morning, she slices a tomato for him at breakfast and they laugh when she squirts him with juice. He tears some bread and she instinctively brushes the crumbs into her bandaged palm. As he gazes at her, he asks whether they had dreamed and she looks startled on realising that she had not dreamt anything and the film ends whiting out from an empty snowy glade.

Keeping backstory detail to a minimum and making no effort to understand why Morcsányi and Borbély might share a dream before they have even met, Enyedi immerses the audience in their daily routines and the physical and psychological restrictions that hinder their full engagement with life. As a father who admits to having had a few too many lovers, Morcsányi is a gentle man whose is capable of speaking his mind and rushing to judgement. But Borbély is such a bundle of nerves and so cripplingly shy that it seems remarkable that she managed to get through university and embark upon such a demanding career. Yet, whether in her dreams or in the sordid reality of a slaughterhouse, she finds her soulmate in an equally damaged individual who had long considered himself too old for romance.

Subplots involving the stolen aphrodisiac and Schneider and Bata's unhappy home life root the somewhat fanciful central story in a recognisable reality. But this is a modern-day fairytale whose closing drift towards melodrama is arrested by a contrivance that is readily forgiven because it guarantees the happy ending that the majority of viewers will crave. However, Enyedi also uses the abattoir and the graphic scenes of butchery to explore the way humans treat other living creatures and the extent to which we are driven by our animal instincts.

Morcsányi and Borbély (in only her fourth film) do a magnificent job of making two such eccentric characters so empathetic, while Réka Tenki stands out from the supporting cast with her droll turn as the shrink enjoying her power over the factory workers and taking exception to being guyed by a couple she considers flawed. But Imola Láng's evocative interiors and Máté Herbai's sensitive camerawork are equally intrinsic to the contrasting senses of vulnerability and terror and exposure and trust that Enyedi weaves throughout this unusual and ultimately deeply moving fable, which reveals the extent to which the long shadow of Communism continues to cast its pall over citizens still coming to terms with the trappings and responsibilities of freedom.

The status of women in Palestinian society has been explored in two recent films: Maha Haj's Personal Affairs and Maysaloun Hamoud's In Between. Respectively set in Nazareth and Tel Aviv, they offer contrasting insights into Arab-Israeli attitudes to gender and the interaction between Jewish, Muslim, Christian and secular citizens in a society forever under threat of conflict. Hamoud's feature debut reaches the UK this week and follows the shorts Shades of Light (2009), Sense of Morning (2010) and Salma (2012) in suggesting a bright future for a film-maker who was born in Budapest to Palestinian parents and now resides in the Israeli city of Jaffa.

Following a heavy night of drink and drugs, Tel Aviv flatmates Mouna Hawa and Sana Jammelieh are taken aback by the arrival of Shaden Kanboura, a jilbab-wearing computer student who is a cousin of their friend Samar Qupty and who needs some peace and quiet to study for her finals. She is from the city of Umm Al-Fahem, while Hawa is a secular lawyer from Nazareth and Jammelieh is an aspiring DJ from a Christian family in Tarshisa.

Unbeknown to her parents, Jammelieh is a lesbian and has no intention of marrying boorish men like chicken farmer Ali Assadi, with whom mother Khawlah Hag-Debsy and aunt Afaf Danien keep trying to matchmake her. With her shock of corkscrew hair and a cigarette always on the go, Hawa is quite prepared to speak her mind and makes little attempt to disguise her amusement when Kanboura bundles excessive amounts of luggage into the car when the trio attend a wedding. She flirts with one of the male guests in the same way she teases a Jewish lawyer who has a crush on her. But she remains in control and enjoys watching macho men dancing attendance on her.

Kanboura gets a visit from her fiancé, Henry Andrawes, who dislikes the fact she has moved to the centre of Tel Aviv and tries to persuade her to stay with a member of his family in Jaffa. She refuses politely and is put out when he snaps that he would rather she stayed at home and raised his children than working at the local school. He refuses to shake Jammelieh's hand when they are introduced and sniffs his disapproval when some of her friends arrive with beer bottles clinking in a carrier bag. Having had a tough day after quitting her restaurant job because the boss refuses to let her speak Arabic in the kitchen, Jammelieh just wants to chill with some friends. But Hawa takes a shine to film-maker Mahmoud Shalaby and, having smoked a joint on the balcony, they tumble into bed, with the intrigued Kanboura listening at the door.

When Hawa returns from a walk by the sea, she finds Kanboura dancing to pop music with her hair down. They bop together and chat about their men. Kanboura admits to not loving Andrawes, but hopes that they get along well enough to make the marriage work. She helps Hawa cook dinner for Shalaby and makes herself scarce when Andrawes orders her to inspect a bedsit he has found for her in Jaffa, even though it's a long way from the university campus. On his next visit, he berates her for burning the food and for disobeying him. He accuses her of having been corrupted by her flatmates and, when she refuses to leave because she likes living with Hawa and Jammelieh, he rapes her and leaves her sobbing on the bed.

Meanwhile, Jammelieh has found a job in a bar and has landed a DJing gig. She has also met doctor Ahlam Canaan and is hoping to spend the night with her when Hawa gets so drunk that she has to see her home. They arrive to find Kanboura slumped on the bathroom floor and help her shower and regain her composure before plotting their revenge on Andrawes. He works for a charitable organisation and Hawa phones for an appointment and cover her hair so he won't recognise her. She spins him a sob story about being beaten and he can't resist touching her shoulder when she exposes it to show him the bruises. But, when Hawa calls on Shalaby to go for dinner, he is frosty towards her because his sister, Nahed Hamed, from the village of Taybeh has come for advice because her son has been arrested for possessing drugs. Hawa reassures her that he will probably be treated leniently for a first offence, but Shalaby is furious with her for smoking in front of Hamed and, when he suggests that she starts behaving like a Muslim woman, she threatens to end their relationship.

Jammelieh takes Canaan to meet her family in Tarshiha and she is embarrassed to discover that her mother has set up a supper meeting with another suitor. Gawky mechanical engineer Sobhi Hosari arrives with his mother, Yasmin Makhloof, whose ample bosom fascinates Jammelieh's teenage brother, Amir Khoury. She is embarrassed by the fawning chit-chat and the excruciating song of welcome and takes the first opportunity to flee to the kitchen and make coffee. However, when Canaan gives her a consolatory kiss, Hag-Debsy sees them through the door and hurries away in distress.

Dinner at the home of Kanboura's parents is no less strained, as she refuses to make eye contact with Andrawes, let alone speak to him. He asks her father, Eyad Sheety, if it would be possible to bring the wedding forward and boasts that he is making good progress with the house he is building. But, when he raises the subject in the car back to Tel Aviv, Kanboura informs him that she doesn't love him. At the same time, Hag-Debsy tells husband Suhel Hadad what she has seen and they order Canaan out of the house and he slaps his daughter across the face before declaring that she will stay in the house until he finds a husband for her.

Over-hearing her father hissing that rumours of a lesbian scandal will ruin his chances of being elected to the local council, Jammelieh sneaks away and takes a taxi to the city. She tells Canaan that she plans on moving to Berlin, as she can no longer stand the petty restrictions that make her life intolerable. However, she joins Kanboura in ambushing Andrawes when he meets with Hawa in an underground car park and they show him photographs of him touching up Hawa during their appointment at the charity. He tries to persuade Kanboura to have nothing to do with the whores who have turned her against him. But she remains resolute and when Andrawes starts to tell Sheety that he is renouncing Kanboura because she has changed, he refuses to hear a bad word against his daughter and sends Andrawes packing before embracing his crying child.

Hawa keeps it equally short and to the point when she bumps into Shalaby while out with Firas Nassar, the gay friend who had introduced them. Shalaby waits for Hawa by her car and slides into the passenger seat and asks why she is being so off with him. When she asks if he would ever let him meet his parents, he looks away and she accuses him of using her for sex when he is wholly unworthy of her. She orders him out of the car and drives home for the goodbye party she and Kanboura are throwing for Jammelieh. Hawa puts on bright red lipstick and snorts some coke, while Kanboura drifts on to the dance floor to have fun. However, she sees Hawa being pestered by one of the guests and follows her to the balcony, where the three friends sit in silence and wonder when things will ever change.

While there's no question that the issues raised in this engaging debut need addressing, this isn't always the most nuanced of films. The generational aspects seem particularly clichéd, while the menfolk are almost uniformly boorish or nebbish caricatures. Moreover, much of the action teeters on melodrama, with the feisty Hawa and Jammelieh falling head over heels with surprising speed, while Kanboura's dilemma makes little sense as it's readily evident from the denouement that her father would have supported any decision to split with the hypocritical Andrawes.

Nevertheless, Hamoud deftly interweaves the storylines while ensuring that each receives equal(ish) screen time. Hawa starts out as the most intriguing of the trio, with her wild ways contrasting tellingly with the shrewd way she negotiates a plea bargain with a Jewish lawyer. But her romance with Shalaby hits the skids too quickly, even though Hamoud points out that a cosmopolitan who has trained to make films in New York can be as much a chauvinist as the next man. Hawa's entrapment interlude also feels somewhat specious, as it's unlikely that a lawyer would take such a sizeable professional and personal risk. More credible is the casual racism that Jammelieh endures, which reminds viewers of the extra burdens placed on Arab women in Israel. But, while her matchmaking trysts are amusing, the romance with Canaan rarely convinces and her decision to decamp to Berlin (when she has never mentioned leaving Israel before) feels unduly contrived.

The Kanboura strand contains echoes of Hamoud's short, Salma, in which the equally voluptuous Jasmin Abu Al-Naaj develops a telephone crush on the freedom fighter whose life she had saved, only for him to ditch her when they finally meet and she fails to live up to his fantasy. But, while Kanboura is as solid as Hawa and Jammelieh, Andrawes is a fotofit villain and much of the other support playing feels stiff. Fortunately, Itay Gross's photography is more agile, while production designer Hagar Brutman draws neat contrasts between the urban and village domiciles. Li Alembik's costumes are also effective, as is MG Saad's style-flitting score. Furthermore, it's good to see producer Shlomi Elkabetz continuing to challenge the perception of women in Israeli society, as he had done with his late sister Ronit in the powerful courtroom saga, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014).

Charting a blind musician's bid to uncover the truth about his shrouded past, Vatche Boulghourjian's debut feature, Tramontane, offers a densely symbolic assessment of Lebanon's recent history. The notion of a war-scarred state refusing to see the damage that continued deceit and obfuscation can cause may not be particularly original and the action sometimes lacks metaphorical finesse. But, while it's prone to first-time archness, especially in its use of grilles, windows and doorways to obstruct the view, the Kuwait-born, New York-trained Boulghourjian's direction is sensitive to the Lebanese landscape and the pain of a people that has endured more than its share of suffering.

Having accompanied himself on a drum to sing a song about demanding answers at a family gathering, blind musician Barakat Jabbour goes to the military authorities to get a passport to travel to Europe with his choir. The duty officer realises that his ID has been forged and Jabbour is forced to ask mother Julia Kassar and uncle Toufic Barakat for the papers to prove his identity. She claims that Jabbour's birth certificate was lost during the War of the Camps because the family was forever on the move, but she stalls when she is informed that she can collect a copy from the hospital where she insists Jabbour was born.

Needing a new violin, Jabbour goes to a dealer, who shows him an instrument that once belonged to an Egyptian, whose granddaughter is reluctant to sell. Despite its uncertain history, the violin sounds superb and Jabbour asks if he can borrow it for the duration of the tour. He works at the blind school where he was educated, but principal Gaby Khalil is concerned when the police start asking questions about him. However, Jabbour is also curious when Barakat is approached in the street by Raymond Haddouni, who requests money to pay for an operation. Barakat obliges, but is eager to get away from the man who has recently been coming to the house to find him.

His suspicions are further aroused when the hospital can find no record of his birth and the administrator suggests he returns with Kassar for a blood test to prove they are related. However, she reveals that she is not his birth mother, as he was found by Barakat in the bombed village of Kfarlaya when he was three months old and she agreed to raise him as her own. Jabbour is hurt that she has withheld the truth for so long and storms into the night to find his uncle. But he is not home and Jabbour snubs his mother when he returns to spend a sleepless night.

Determined to discover the truth about the family killed in Kfarlaya, Jabbour asks tweenage neighbour Sajed Amer to help him annotate a map so that he can find his way around Lebanon. His friend Michel Adabachi offers to drive him south, but local sheikh Hussein Mwannes insists that the village has never been attacked and that no one ever had their baby taken away by soldiers. On returning home, Jabbour is slapped by Kassar for leaving without telling her where he was going. She is puzzled by his story, but admits that they can't check with Barakat because he has mysteriously disappeared and isn't answering his phone. Convinced she is lying or hiding something from him, Jabbour packs a bag and goes to stay at the school, where he plays a mournful tune on his violin in the half-darkness.

The next day, he seeks out Haddouni to ask if he knows anything about his past. He admits to being in the same platoon as Barakat and mentions two other soldiers, Georges Diab, who is currently in Africa, and Nassim Khodr, who lives in Enfeh. But he implies that Barakat didn't find Jabbour as a helpless baby and suggests that he visits Khodr. Adabachi wanders around the coastal village, as Khodr tells Jabbour that Barakat pulled him from a burning car and discovered that his dead parents were Armenian. As the baby had lost its sight in the accident, Barakat had taken him to an orphanage at Jbeil. However, he had grown attached to the boy and had sought to adopt him to raise with his fiancée. But they had parted and he had given the child to Kassar, who had raised him with her late husband. Yet, when Jabbour calls at the orphanage, the director has no record of a blind infant being lodged there in 1988.

On returning home, Jabbour learns that Kassar has been hit by a car and is in hospital. Amer's mother, Odette Makhlouf, takes Jabbour to the hospital, where Kassar denies that she had been standing in the middle of the road when she was struck. She is discharged and Jabbour asks about Barakat's fiancée and she reveals that he was Diab's sister, Raymonde Saade Azar. They had broken up when Barakat argued with her brother and Jabbour sets off to find her. However, she informs him that Nabil is not in Africa, as he has spent the last few decades in Wardieh Psychiatric Hospital because Barakat felt he talked too much.

Jabbour pays him a visit and he explains why he needs to know about his roots. Diab tells him about an attack on the village of Wadi El Tin and how Barakat decided to spare Jabbour from the slaughter. He also reveals that Barakat knew his parents from before the war and this confuses him more. But he pulls himself together to perform with his band at a wedding and returns home to find Barakat has produced a forged birth certificate. Demanding to know the truth, Jabbour asks his uncle what war crimes he is trying to sweep under the carpet and stalks away, leaving Kassar upset at being denying that she is his mother.

Once again, Adabachi drives Jabbour to his destination. En route, he confides that the blind man's odyssey has convinced him to visit the ancestral home that he had always vowed to ignore. On arriving at Wadi El Tin, Jabbour is introduced to an elderly couple, Rached Koussa and Julia Elramy, whose son was killed during the war. They admit that their grandson went missing in the raid that accounted for his parents, but they refuse to accept that Jabbour might be him, as they had buried an empty coffin in the belief that God had deemed them unworthy to raise the boy. Jabbour sits silently, as Koussa hopes that his grandson is still alive somewhere, but wants nothing to do with him, as he now belongs to another family.

Returning home, Jabbour lies on the bed beside Kassar and puts an arm around her. She apologises and they hug. The next morning, Amer escorts Jabbour to police headquarters, where he uses the fake birth certificate to get his ID. That night, he performs with his band and they play the song he had sung at the start of the film. However, as Kassar and Barakat look on, they note that he has changed the lyrics to suggest that he has found his answer and has forgiven those that chose to forget him and embraced those who accepted him for who he is.

Bearing echoes of Bahman Ghobadi's Marooned in Iraq (2002) and Hiner Saleem's Kilometre Zero (2005) in its road movie structure, this is a thoughtful study of the secrets, lies and crimes that have been suppressed in order for Lebanon to function. Those unfamiliar with the finer details of the invasions and internecine feuds that have benighted the country will miss some of the subtler references. But Boulghourjian tends to favour the forthright statement and the blatant symbol. Thus, some might be frustrated by the occasional lack of nuance.

However, there is no doubting the strength and integrity of the visually impaired Barakat Jabbour's performance, as he struggles with his sense of self and his diminishing trust (as a blind man) in the people who had raised, protected and guided him. Julia Kassar also impresses as a surrogate mother who has either chosen to bury the truth or has also been misled by her brother, whose veneer of respectability begins to chip as soon as Jabbour starts his investigation. But the secondary characters are little more than ciphers designed to reinforce Boulghourjian's thesis that Lebanon needs to open its eyes before it can fully come to terms with its past. However, he doesn't always succeed in convincingly fusing the personal and the political aspects of the story.

Even though its supposed to convey Jabbour's sightlessness, cinematographer Jimmy Lee Phelan's interiors err on the murky side. But, while the images are often archly composed, he makes effective use of the contrasting countryside, as Jabbour ventures outside his comfort zone to the unsettling strains of Cynthia Zaven's score.

Although films made in the teeth of a momentous event have an affecting immediacy, the rush to topicality means that they can often seem blinkered and naive in retrospect. A glut of pictures were produced during the Arab Spring, but the mood of the country in the last days of Hosni Mubarak's regime can probably be best summed up by a project that was started in 2009 and debuted on the festival circuit last year. Directing by the debuting Tamer El Said, In the Last Days of the City is showing at The ICA in London and reveals just how much Egypt and its capital have changed over the last decade.

In December 2009, film-maker Khalid Abdalla is looking for a new apartment in the Downtown district of Cairo. However, everything estate agent Mohamed Gaber shows him is unsuitable and he is getting no further with the documentary he is editing with Islam Kamal. They survey footage of Abdalla asking drama teacher Hanan Yousef to reflect on her youth in Alexandria and of Maryam Saleh seeking to come to terms with a recent trauma. But Abdalla can't make any decisions and goes out to buy a painting and drop in on Yousef's acting class. On the radio, newsreaders detail every movement of President Hosni Mubarak and his family and seek to create the impression that he is wholly in control at home and a power broker abroad.

Returning home past a clothing shop that has been forced to put newspapers on its windows to hide some naked mannequins, Abdalla notices that someone has put `Thou Shalt Not Look at Women' stickers in the lift and he cheers himself up by watching a clip of translator girlfriend Laila Samy on his computer. His mood soon dips when he goes out again, however, as his taxi gets held up in a fundamentalist demonstration and he is relieved to get to the venue where film-maker friends Bassem Fayad, Hayder Helo and Basim Hajar are holding a round-table discussion on besieged cities and coping in war zones. They repair to a café, where they tease Hajar about the fact that he has left Bagdad for Berlin and refuses to admit that he misses a city he considers a friend. Helo is also an Iraqi and has only been given a limited travel visa, while Fayad has flown in from Beirut, which has become less exciting in peace time. Poring over his footage again, Abdalla interviews mother Zeinab Mostafa, who is now bedridden and insists on covering her hair. She recalls how her marriage to his poet father changed following the loss of their daughter in a car crash. Abdalla listens to a tape of his father telling his children a story about a sultan who saw the world in a day by riding on the sun and drifts into the local radio station to see Fadila Tawfik, an old colleague of his late father, recording the same story for broadcast. She remembers the tenderness of the love letters that his father had written to his mother, but admits that the loss of his sister had driven a wedge between them.

Later that night, Abdalla hooks up with his film-making buddies. As usual, Fayad has a camera rolling, while Hajar asks Helo why he has stayed in Bagdad when it's so dangerous. They bicker until Helo challenges Hajar to explain why he left and he recalls travelling behind a truck with a corpse in the back that left a trail of blood behind it in the road. He felt he could have been that body and didn't feel able to remain in a city where chance played so big a part in his fate. Fayad then makes an unsubtle remark about the fact that Samy is leaving Cairo and Abdalla admits that this has not made finishing his film any easier. The friends drink beer and take a ride around the city at 5am, filming statues of the great and the good and revelling in the fact that, unlike Bagdad and Beirut (which Fayed claims is like a whore who's had a facelift), Cairo always manages to bounce back from crises (a remark that will strike many current Cairenes as being filled with bitter irony). Having wasted his morning waiting to view a flat in a building whose lift buttons start prayer recordings, Abdalla sees his three pals off to the airport and pops in to see Saleh. She waters the cacti on her window ledge and the drops fall on to the balcony slabs below. He waits by Samy's car, but she is too busy to see him and his taxi follows her through a traffic jam, as a young girl sells cigarettes to the motorists. Abdalla goes to see Mostafa in hospital and they share an apple, as he avoids her question about how seriously ill she is. He slips into a café for some tea and sees news coverage of a bomb in Beirut and calls Fayad, who jokes with him that he only ever calls when he worries about him.

Back in the street, Abdalla struggles to cross a busy road and the sheer bustle of Downtown seems to reinforce his sense of stasis, as he struggles to finish his film and find a new abode. Yousef stops to give him a lift and she announces that she will only agree to more filming if he focuses on her class, as she is tired of reminiscing and wants to live in the present. She chides him for having such a sorrowful view of Cairo and urges him to snap out of his torpor and realise that he can't make a living simply by observing the passing scene. Buying his nightly paper from an elderly street vendor listening to a radio report about the football team selected for the Cup of Nations in Angola, Abdalla notices that the mannequins in the shop front are now wearing niqabs and he wonders where Egypt is heading.

Arriving home, he finds a video message from Helo about the old calligrapher he had mentioned during his stay. He creates a positive impression of Bagdad, even though it is being reduced to rubble and he reminds Abdalla that they all promised to make video postcards. He takes his camera, as dusk falls, but he doesn't seem to find any inspiration and Helo scolds him over the phone for not keeping up his end of the bargain. As the call ends, he spots Samy in a café and watches as she recognises his number and lets him go to voicemail.

He watches a fire crew attend a blaze and returns home to a news bulletin lauding Mubarak from guaranteeing the human rights of all Egyptian citizens. Yet other headlines involve the extension of emergency laws and a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Tired of listening to the same old spiel, Abdalla puts on his headphones and watches some of his footage, including shots of a man selling red balloons. He hears a commotion in the street and sees a man beating a woman. But, rather than phoning the cops or rushing down to help her, he grabs his camera and is threatened when the assailant notices him at the window.

Fayad sends Abdalla a message from the waterfront in Beirut. He stands with his back to the camera and gazes out to sea, while his voiceover laments how scared and alone he feels. The next day, he passes a strike demonstration against Mubarak and watches helplessly as one of the protesters is chased and thrashed by the cops before being bundled into a vehicle. A woman photographer records the incident, while Abdalla the film-maker stands startled and too afraid to react. He does have his camera to record the fans watching the big-screen coverage of the match against Algeria in the Cup of Nations and captures the flares and fireworks when Egypt score a penalty. But he sees Samy through the throng and returns home to look at old photos and a recording of her wearing a white flower in her hair and stating that she would like to travel with him so that they could kiss in the street and feel normal not terrified of arrest for indecency.

Meeting with Kamal, Abdalla tries to concentrate on editing his film. We see what appears to be footage of Saleh's home being demolished in Alexandria. But we segues into a scene of Abdalla wandering round an empty apartment that could belong to his mother. However, it turns out to be a palatial pad he simply couldn't afford and the estate agent complains that he is getting tired of his perfectionism and negativity. His lease is close to expiring and he is packing his belongings when Samy calls unexpectedly. He makes her coffee and she realises he is still down in the dumps. But, while they kiss tenderly, she disappears from his life and he looks down to see her arguing with a traffic cop because she has double parked on a busy street.

Fayad sends a message from a wet wintry Beirut. He describes how his father had to hide in an alleyway on the day he was born in 1975 and witnessed people being flung off a bridge and shot. Abdalla watches the link with Kamal, who suddenly jumps up and opens the curtains because he no longer has any idea what Abdalla is trying to do with his film. He chunters that footage from Beirut and Bagdad sits awkwardly with the interviews with Yousef, Saleh, Samy and his mother. As birds fly outside the window, Kamal sighs that he is tired of wasting his time by going around in circles. Walking home, he passes men praying on the pavement and a vocal demonstration against Mubarak and his military cohorts. The speaker wielding the bullhorn promises change will come and the look in the eyes of a young riot cop suggests the authorities will struggle to contain any uprising.

As he continues to pack, Abdalla listens to the radio about insurgents in Yemen, Iranian centrifuges and car bombs in Iraq. He gets a call from Hajar and stands dumbfounded in the street (presumably because Helo has been killed in a blast in Bagdad). Returning home, Abdalla rips the religious stickers off the wall of the lift and opens his window for the first time in months to let the sound of the city in and the stifling sense of ennui out. He visits his mother and slumps in a chair beside her bed, as the night light twinkle outside. When morning comes, the camera focuses on the tablets dissolving in a glass of water to keep a pretty white flower fresh, as Abdalla sits with Mostafa, as though waiting for her to slip away so that he can finally take a new path. Returning home, he plays the last message Helo sent him, in which he looks into the lens while bobbing along the Tigris. He smiles serenely and, as the film fades, he leaves Abdalla with the advice to start his film from the beginning and bare his soul.

It's often said of generals and football managers that the often need to be lucky rather than good and El Said is certainly fortunate in the added depth that hindsight brings to his musings. Adroitly described by Variety as `a city requiem rather than a city symphony', this is a demanding odyssey that requires a good deal of patience and a degree of insight into the events the preceded and followed the toppling of a detested dictator. There are moments when one El Said appears to be as directionless as Abdalla, as he fails to integrate the threads involving Yousef and Saleh and never really involves the viewer in the painful break-up with Samy. Indeed, we get a better idea of Egypt's progress in the football tournament than we do of the reasons for the once-contented couple's split.

In truth, we never quite discover why Abdalla is making his film and what he is trying to say through it. But that may well be the point, as he rather symbolises the fence-sitters who will be swept along by the rapidly changing tide of events that will follow the catalytic protests on Tahrir Square. Yet the characters always seem a secondary concern, as El Said and co-writer Rasha Salti turn Bassem Fayad's camera on the people of Cairo, while sound designer Victor Bresse capture the hubbub of the streets.

In whittling down over 250 hours of actuality footage, editors Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Vartan Avakian and Barbara Bossuet ably convey the pace of Downtown life, which production designer Salah Marei deftly contrasts with the cluttered stillness of Abdalla's flat and the empty chill of Mostafa's hospital room. Amélie Legrand and Victor Moïse's sparingly used score also switches neatly between the elegiac, the mournful and the troubling, as Abdalla sees the cracks appearing in so many aspects of his seemingly well-ordered, but actually privileged, detached, desensitised and ineffectual existence and, yet, seems oblivious to their import. The irony is, of course, that the Glasgow-born, London-raised and Cambridge-educated Khalid Abdalla put his acting career on hold in 2011 to demonstrate in Tahrir Square and co-found the Mosireen Collective, which championed the rise of citizen journalism in Egypt through its YouTube channel. At the height of their powers, María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes were the finest tango dancers in Argentina. They continued to be so long after their passion had been extinguished and they had endured a divorce that left them barely capable of being civil to one another. But, as German Kral reveals in Our Last Tango, they recognised and respected the other's talent and the duty they shared to the dance that had made them famous.

Now in her eighties, Nieves recalls the Buenos Aires milongas of her youth in the late 1940s and revisits Estrella de Maldonado where she first met Copes at the age of 13 or 14. She recalls him treading on the toes of his partners and he admits he took time to hit his stride. But, as Nieves tells Juan Malizia and Ayelén Álvarez Miño, who play the couple in their youth, she couldn't get him out of her head. But a year passed before she saw him again at the Atlanta (which is now a roller-skating rink) and he had made a marked improvement. Indeed, Copes was already thinking about making a career as a dancer and he knew that he had found his Stradivarius.

Nieves puts Malizia and Álvarez through their paces in a rehearsal room with choreographer Melina Brutman before we see a reconstruction of Copes and Nieves dancing together for the first time. They have different recollections of what was said (if anything), but she recalls looking into his eyes and a wire is used to convey the sense of Nieves being swept off her feet by his dashingly handsome man. Considering she had been raised in abject poverty, with her only doll being a soda siphon with a tea towel dress, it's hardly surprising that she let herself dream. Nieves becomes teary in a studio mock-up of her old home and Francesca Santapá (as the young Nieves) and recreates her dancing to the radio with a broom before Álvarez flirts with some construction workers overlooking the backyard, as she dances in her underwear while doing the laundry and hiding coquettishly behind the sheets.

Inspired by Nieves's fond memories of seeing Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in Singin' in the Rain (1952), Álvarez and Malizia dance on a rain-soaked bridge under the glow of the streetlights. Nieves hopes to meet Kelly in the afterlife and Malizia jokes that he resembles the pugnacious Pittsburgher, as he and Álvarez watch footage of their routine being projected on to a screen in the rehearsal room, where they had earlier perused photographs of Copes and Nieves in their pomp.

Back in the mid-1950s, however, Copes recalls tango going out of style, as dance hall owners opened their doors to Cumbia and Rock. But he corralled some of the better tango dancers and created a new style that they perfected on a factory floor, with Nieves going along with his vision because she trusted his instincts and was besotted with him. Yet, when they joined a stage show for the first time in 1955, Nieves was furious with Copes for ogling semi-naked chorus girls and he still resents the fact that she felt she owned him when he knew perfectly well that she belonged to him. Nieves insists she suppressed her jealousy and channelled it into growing as an artist, but Copes shrugs that he wouldn't have been a red-blooded male if he hadn't been tempted.

A brief routine shows a chorine coming between the partners before we see a colour home movie of Copes and Nieves dancing outdoors in what looks like the 1970s. We also see Nieves walking through Buenos Aires with her cigarette holder, as she explains that she finds it hard being old and alone, even though she has always found solitude a positive experience. Clearly, she has never fallen out of love with Copes, even though she has stopped loving him because he replaced her as both his lover and his partner.

Having conquered Corrientes Avenue, Copes wanted to take his brand of tango to New York and Leonardo Cuello comes to the studio to help Álvarez and Malizia master the tabletop `double gaucho' dance that became Copes and Nieves's signature routine. He explains how he taught her the steps in a square chalked on the floor and coaxed her into dancing on the table, even though she was terrified each time that she would fall off. We see grainy colour footage of the duo in action, as Álvarez asks Nieves why she kept putting herself through such an ordeal and she replies that all she could do was dance tango and she wouldn't do it with anyone else.

Yet, soon after they had married in Las Vegas in 1964, Copes realised that he could dance with Nieves, but not live with her. She had dreams of having a family, but he left on a tour with five female dancers and she fell into an affair with a man who treated her like a woman not a stage prop. A barefooted Álvarez dances on the shiny shoes of her new beau (Pancho Martínez Pey), while Malizia cavorts on stage with his troupe. But Copes freely admits that he felt he had proprietary rights over Nieves when it came to performing and she fell back into line when he snapped his fingers, as Alejandra Gutty and Pablo Verón demonstrate in taking over the reconstruction roles.

Now sporting Nieves's familiar dark red bob, Gutty dances with both Martínez and Verón in the hope of making her private and professional lives work in parallel. But, as Nieves explains, tango and Copes proved too demanding and she made the choice that left her alone. But Gutty looks stunned, as Nieves tells her in the back seat of a car driving through the nocturnal streets that she learned to discard men in order to survive because none of them is worth a single tear.

Despite divorcing in 1974, Copes and Nieves reunited at the Caño 14 for the Copes Tango Show, which ran for four years. Nieves shows Gutty the street where the theatre used to stand and jokes about it being a good place to meet handsome men, while Copes recalls the feeling of freedom he had when he danced her. We see archive footage of them on the tiny stage close to the audience and there isn't a hint of the backstage tension, as they perform. But Copes needed to deal with an internal rage that Nieves feared might drive him to suicide. Instead, it led him to marry non-dancer Miriam Albuaernez, who has been his wife for 42 years and has borne him two daughters.

This crossroads in their relationship is translated into a floodlit rooftop dance between Verón and Gutty. But the news of the first child hurt Nieves and she loses her temper with Kral for forcing her to talk about Copes all the time. This anger tips into a dance between Verón and Gutty over a small table in the theatre. But Nieves reveals that her mother had told her that Copes would always be her first love and her husband and this realisation made her so angry on stage that she danced with a new maturity and with less of an inferiority complex. We see them dancing on a busy street with a troupe and alone on a small stage and the chemistry is still there. But Verón notices in photographs from this period how they always look away from each other and kept more of a distance in hold.

Out of this angst came Tango Argentino, which took Broadway by storm in 1985 and Nieves admits that she was grateful for this show, as it meant she never had to worry about money again and it gave her a chance to reach a better understanding with Copes off stage. She tells Verón that the love of tango helped them sort things out and there is a grace in the ensemble routine that Gutty and Verón dance in pools of light. Even archive footage of the time shows them smiling together, although Nieves jokes that they could seethe insults at each other through clenched teeth.

However, Myriam was tiring of the partnership and gave Copes an ultimatum to ditch Nieves or lose her. So, before a tour of Japan in 1997, Copes broke the news and their televised festival performance proved to be their last and Copes watches the footage alone, while Nieves is surrounded by the rest of the cast. She gave an impromptu speech on stage about tango having been her life and she claims to have thrown up in the changing-room. But she retained her poise, as she turned and led Copes across the stage before dropping his hand as they came to the wings.

Nieves describes his treachery as being like a dagger to the heart and Álvarez, Gutty and Nieves herself dance with black-clad shadow figures to suggest her isolation and despair. But Copes felt compelled to keep dancing and daughter Johana Copes became his new partner. While she knows she is a Nieves clone, she has never sought to replace her and is glad to be able to give her 83 year-old father the nightly applause he needs to hear to make his life worthwhile. Nieves has also made solo appearances and the cheers echo around a festival stage at Luna Park (the scene of an unmentioned talent show win that set them on their way in the early 1950s), where she proves to be as nimble and sensual as ever before making an emotional reunion with Copes at the curtain call. Nieves admits to missing the tango, but Copes has no intention of retiring, as he feels driven to keep refining the dance he helped to transform.

At the start of the film, the pair had walked on to an empty stage and stood opposite each other in anticipation of another dance. But, while their hands go into hold, they separate in the closing scene and stride into the wings without even starting their last tango. This affectation seems apt, although it would be nice to know who made the decision for them not to dance, as this is the only time that they appear together in old age in the entire documentary. Clearly they had no desire to share reminiscences, although one senses that Nieves was more willing to talk that Copes and that Kral's sympathies lie more with her than with her erstwhile partner.

But, while an element of point-scoring is inevitable in any study of a broken relationship, Kral tries to maintain a level of civility. He also presumes a good deal of foreknowledge that makes it difficult for non-aficionados to piece together the Nieves-Copes chronology. Yet, while a few more dates might have been useful, this is an informative and inventive account of a formidable partnership whose use of dance as a narrative tool recalls the flamenco films of Carlos Saura and Pina, executive producer Wim Wenders's 2011 tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch. Kral might have unearthed more archive footage, but Álvarez and Malizia and Gutty and Verón dance majestically in routines that are photographed with effortless grace by Jo Heim and Felix Monti to infectious traditional tango music variously played by Luis Borda, Sexteto Mayor, Gerd Baumann, Quinteto El Descarte and Juan D'Arienzo.