In this #supernatural Filipino melodrama, it being a Filipino melodrama, the town's muse tragically drowns, taking her newborn child with her. The orphaned baby floats down the river then is picked up by an older, childless couple who gladly raise her as their own. The child has a strange attachment to the #Pasig river where at night, a mysterious spellbinding voice sings the #kundiman [traditional love song] Mutya ng Pasig.

 

While Mutya ng Pasig is a lovely, somewhat predictable mystery by Richard Abelardo, it's well worth your time on a slowly meandering, hot summer night.

Japanese author Yukio Mishima was, besides an aesthete, a fierce proponent of Japanese nationalism. In 憂國, based on his short 1960 story, Mishima plays palace guard Lt. Shinji Takeyama. Despite being one of the instigators of an ultra-nationalist coup, Takeyama decides he cannot overthrow the government as it would mean having to kill his friends and be disloyal to the Emperor. Returning home, he and his bride Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka) perform #切腹 (#seppuku / #HaraKiri), as in line with Takeyama's #samurai heritage.

 

Yūkoku is a #SilentFilm that plays out like #Noh #theatre, with an extreme emphasis on the beauty and love of death and loyalty respectively.

 

After Mishima's own seppuku in 1970, his widow ordered all copies of Yūkoku to be destroyed. In 2005, in Mishima's house, a pristine copy was uncovered in a tea box.

Like in Enrico Novelli's Un matrimonio interplanetario [A Marriage in the Moon] (1910), interplanetary romance blooms in Аэлита.

Through her #telescope, Queen Aelita spots engineer Los, a handsome Earth man, and he promptly travels to #Mars to be with her. There, Los uncovers an uprising by the Elders against his beloved queen that he vows to – in good proletarian fashion – stomp down.

 

Aelita*'s constructivist stage and costume design had an enormous influence on science fiction, as far as the late 20th century.

The global audience of #Mondo-Vision, a live broadcast #TimeTravel experiment, determines through their emotional investment in the lead's screened experience what the man's destination will be. Even so, the spectators' collective energy should serve as a powerhouse, enabling a televised leap into the future. The man whose faith determines it all is Terence Stamp – played by the actor with the same name. He agrees to partake in the hope that enough emotional energy can be harvested for him to travel back in time so he can reunite with his lost love.

 

While definitely taking a cue or two from Alain Resnais' Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), Hu-Man has a much grimmer feel to it. The seventies were not a time of or even for optimism, including Stamp's career and personal life. Noun Serra's dizzying editing and the real-world danger both the in-movie actor and real-world actor are exposed to makes Hu-Man a much more self-referential and personal experience for this future's reality-fatigued viewer.

During a #summer #vacation on #FireIsland, two young men come across Sandy, an attractive young woman with an injured #seagull. While nursing the bird back to life, the relationship between the three deepens. A second girl, the much younger Rhoda (the breathtaking Catherine Burns) is taken in by the trio.

“What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Sit on the shore and watch?”

– Sandy

Set almost entirely on a sunny #beach, Frank Perry's Last Summer may be one of the most claustrophobic films you'll ever watch.

May Lin is a real estate agent who meets up with a man in the bare, too sterile flat she brokers. Another man who took the key of the same dwellings for his own cause, decides to settle in.

 

Over time, the apartment serves not only as the space where events take place, but locks and guides the flatmates through their compulsions.

A Walloon language professor and his French set designer fiancée are at an impasse. While his Flemish students vocally protest against more Walloon influence at their uni, the couple – who superficially speak the same #language, #French – struggles to find the right words. They meet, part ways, then find each other again on a train that at morning turns out to be standing still in the middle of nowhere. The man, now without her, disembarks and with two acquaintances who also were on that train tries to find out where he and she are.

 

André Delvaux's Un soir, un train is a masterpiece about finding the right language in a fractured world.

An American tourist visiting Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by volatile con King – a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous advances.

“I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!”

– King

The couple elopes to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control.

 

They are the damned.

A man and a woman meet and fall in love. The woman – Anouk Aimée – still mourns the loss of her stuntman husband, while the man – Jean-Louis Trintignant – is alone since his partner took her life, incapable of dealing with his near-fatal #crash at #LeMans.

“It's foolish to refuse happiness.”

#Trintignant came from a family obsessed with race car driving and was an avid amateur driver himself. His uncle, the #GrandPrix racer Maurice Trintignant, can be seen driving a #Maserati Tipo 151/1 during the race scene.

A deceptively simple film by Claude Lelouch, with an equally breezy soundtrack by Francis Lai.

A young woman jumps out of a window, leaving behind her husband, an #antiques dealer. Sitting in their bedroom with the body lying in state, the widower remembers her. In his memory, she is nameless, abstract, a state not a life..

 

Une femme douce is closely adapted from Fyodor #Dostoyevsky Кроткая [Krotkaya / A Gentle Creature] (1876).