Blazing Fists

I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of funerals, and the other was Blazing Fists, Takashi Miike’s kickboxing movie. The surprise, then, is that only one of them made me tear up, and it wasn’t the one boasting all the funerals. Blazing Fists — or Blue Fight, according to its on-screen English title; or possibly even Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors, as Wikipedia dubs it — is the kind of movie Miike makes every once in awhile (as with 2019’s First Love) to remind viewers that despite his audacious weirdness — and there is a guy conspicuously wandering around this movie inexplicably wearing an animal mascot costume — he remains one of the most technically proficient and gifted craftsmen in world cinema. He knows exactly how to make a traditional boxing picture while also giving it his own unique flavor, a true artist stamping his personal vision on a time-worn formula, reinventing it in his own image while still hitting all the right notes to satisfy the demands of one of cinema’s most enduringly popular genres.

Kaname Yoshizawa stars as a young hoodlum named Ryoma who gets sent to juvie. There he meets another inmate named Ikuto, played by Danhi Kinoshita (in what should be a star-making performance). The two become friends and, after a guest lecture by real-life MMA star Mikuru Asakura, who runs a kind of reality show-type martial arts program, the two decide that, once they’re freed, they’ll join a gym and train hard so they can compete in Asakura’s program, called Breaking Down. But once on the outside, the two buddies are beset by problems all around them: at least three different gangs of hoodlums want a piece of them; they have to get boring jobs in a factory; their moms don’t quite believe they can reform; a pair of pretty girls might be interested in them; and, worst of all, Ikuto was innocent of the crime that got him sent to juvie in the first place — he was blamed for a robbery that Ryoma actually committed.

Miike juggles all these plot threads with aplomb. We may not always know exactly which gang is which or what their motivations are, but we can trust that the director knows what he’s doing and it will all pay off in the end. And indeed it does in a spectacular finale, rising across the film’s final third as characters once seen as single-dimensional villains are proven to be just as complex and contradictory as our heroes. It’s all anchored by Kinoshita’s performance as Ikuto, a young man of righteous stubbornness — not a perfect hero by any means, but an aspirational example for everyone he meets to follow. He’s a character with natural charisma, the kind of man who inspires everyone he meets down the path of self-improvement. In lesser hands he might have come off as cartoonish or hokey, but Kinoshita keeps him grounded and authentic, while Miike surrounds him with so many other flavors of corrupted or inadequate manliness that his leadership seems instead to carry the simplicity of truth. He’s just a good guy in a world that’s anything but.

On top of this, Miike still gives us all the thrills of a traditional brawler. There are boxing matches that are intricate in their choreography and thoughtfulness, conveying something of the thinking match that goes into every fight. But there are also all-out street fights that are a chaos of flying fists, feet, and whatever other props happen to be lying around the back alleys and grimy bars of the Japanese underworld. It all culminates in a massive free-for-all between the teens and a vicious gang of psychotic bikers, the young men with their outlandish clothes and complicated haircuts taking on an army of black-leather-clad tough guys and their too calm to be anything but incredibly dangerous boss.

But more powerful still is Blazing Fists’ coda, which should be the final boxing match, a showdown between the forces of the rich and powerful against the poor and honest. Instead, however, Miike cuts away from this at just the perfect moment, with the realization that the result of the fight itself isn’t what’s important. What matters is that it happens at all and it wouldn’t be possible without this wild community of weirdos, brought together in friendship by nothing other than a shared sense of humanity and justice and the beautiful belief that things don’t have to be the way they are. — SEAN GILMAN

Guo Ran

Matching the restless anomie of its cityscapes, or perhaps in contrast to their flurry of homogenous activity, Li Dongmei’s Guo Ran foregrounds an inscrutable austerity of the mind harboring currents both political and existential. Neither overt social critique nor sentimental dramatization of the psyche, the film finds its starkest expression, nonetheless, in a muted synthesis of both dimensions as its protagonist, Liyu (Li Manxuan), measures her days against a backdrop of urban sprawl. Expecting a child with her partner, Xiaotong (Wang Yitong), and by turns excited and enervated by this prospect, Liyu proves enigmatic, her interiority unveiled just partially by the various relationship dynamics she has with those around her.

What inheres throughout Guo Ran is the sensibility of glacial, helpless withdrawal: glacial in its ellipses and barely perceptible movements, and helpless because no particular malady appears to directly afflict the increasingly estranged couple. As with suffocation, the underlying cause — an absence of oxygen — is invisible to the eye, and while such a conceit might have led a less confident work astray, Li’s sophomore feature adroitly explores and exploits the multifaceted aspects of precarity in fashioning an impalpable sense of alienation. Where Mama, her 2020 feature debut, registered the last days of a pregnant mother amid the circadian rhythms of rurality, Guo Ran’s anonymous metropolitan locale (revealed to be Chongqing in the credits) charts a different kind of precarious existence: a nexus of youth, femininity, and white-collar credentialism that poses its own set of inarticulate melancholies. Xiaotong’s salary as a video editor ostensibly does not net them much, and even early on in Liyu’s pregnancy he begins to withdraw, both from intimacy and from broader communication. Liyu, on the other hand, faces her own problems. Her side of the family, we infer, may not be very close-knit; her own mother passed away from childbirth complications; and the periodic tests she undergoes at the hospital are perpetually tinged with foreboding.

This foreboding never quite comes to pass in the film’s brief 90 minutes (whittled down allegedly from a first cut that clocked in at 2.5 hours), in which whatever tenuous hope the couple holds out — or imagines themselves holding out — comes undone through the inertia of its frames alone. Perhaps the framing of Li’s characters mirrors their own perception of the world, as a white, neat, and antiseptic space from which little refuge is possible. And so languor becomes the order of the day, whether in the long, unbroken shots of balconies and sterile interiors or in the stiflingly verdant reveries that bookend this reality. In one such dream, a snake appears, its unblinking gaze auguring hope and dread alike. Liyu, recounting her late mother’s belief in the serpentine symbolism of pregnant dreams (a black snake represents a boy, a striped one a girl), has her own motherhood disturbed by the seemingly innocuous statement of her young niece Muzi (Zhang Zimu): “I thought of it lying dead in your tummy.” But the film’s title, intended as the name for Liyu’s unborn child, also bears the connotation of “sure enough.” Its compound structure — forged from “fruit” and “natural” — inexorably inverts its fertile metaphor into something fatalistic, and one gathers, from Guo Ran’s unceasingly quotidian rhythm, that its fatalism rests precisely on the assumption that it is part and parcel of motherhood and of all life. — MORRIS YANG

Bad Girl

A cause celebre the moment the trailer was released, Bad Girl prompted attacks on its more famous producer, the director Vetrimaaran, for portraying oppression in a Brahmin household and not among other castes. Those following politics in India will know that this is nothing new, for a considerable majority of the Brahmin community willingly victimizes itself and engages in petty whataboutery at the slightest critique of its outsized privilege, and unfortunately, they are especially emboldened by the neoliberal fascist government of Modi to demonize their critics. In the case of Bad Girl, however, I think they have conveniently forgotten that the director, Varsha Bharath, is from the same community and milieu, and invisibilizing her for bigger targets from a different caste only reinforces their casteist patriarchy. And like how knee-jerk reactions thrive on the social media landscape for the slightest utterance of “Mughals” or “Nehru” by the Hindu right, long-worded responses defending the film and even critiquing it for not being progressive enough proliferated on social media, all on the basis of one trailer.  Regardless of the intention, Varsha Bharath’s voice is still stifled, and while one might criticize the trailer, one has to remember that a trailer does not make a movie.

Fortunately, Varsha Bharath is talented enough to ensure that her voice is at least heard by those who attempt to watch the film. Telling the coming-of-age story of Ramya (a feisty Anjali Sivaraman), a girl born to a conservative Brahmin household, Bad Girl follows her romantic relationships from school age until her 30s, all of which are at constant odds with the wants of her family. Divided into three segments, the first follows a scandalous school romance, the second her tortured college relationship, and finally, her attempts at happiness after a breakup in her 30s, an age where the pressure to get married has exponentially increased, especially because her friends have “settled” into their marriages.

It’s in the films’ first section where Bharath is at her best, establishing a cinematic style to match the flighty moods of her character. Ramya’s doe-eyed dreams of bourgeois bliss are frequently interrupted by the prevailing dogmas of family and society, which Bharath films through saturated sun-lit shots broken by sharp edits. Never one to back down from pressure, Ramya responds with rebellious rejoinders of her own, and her confused, fluctuating shifts between romantic longing and defiance set the film’s narrative machinery into motion. Bharath has certainly absorbed the language of commercial Tamil cinema through her usage of songs and witty punchlines, but unlike many lesser filmmakers, she is able to organically weave both into her film. Ramya’s romantic musical dreams are abruptly jolted by unwanted adults who cruelly snap her back into reality, and songs are sustained only when she and her boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon) are alone. Once word of her relationship gets out, the adults naturally quell it, and her mother (Shanthi Priya) transfers her to a different school. Enraged by her family’s attempts to control her life, she leaves her home and lives in a hostel.

Unfortunately, Bharath is unable to sustain the energy and clarity of this first stretch throughout the rest of the film. The second section involves a protracted, familiar saga about Ramya falling for a toxic boyfriend, and Bharath resorts to staid slo-mo coupled with sharp bursts of edits of Ramya’s memories of her relationship to capture her swoon and pain. But unlike in the film’s initial section, the director has nothing new to say about the nature of Ramya’s thoughts. And though Ramya does build friendships during this phase, these friends are rendered as nothing more than consolers.

Bad Girl’s final third, then, deals with her reconciliation with her family and herself, and Bharath bridges scenes of momentous importance with lazy sentimentality and shopworn truisms. Ramya’s mother becomes an object of sympathy whenever Bharath wishes to make a point, and any moment of reflection in that relationship is resolved by edgy jokes. However much Bharath used the accoutrements of commercial Tamil cinema to great effect in the first section, she, unfortunately, uses the trite narrative dramaturgy of the same lesser filmmakers to make her points in the film’s latter stages. Naturally, her conclusions are more progressive and her sustain-and-splinter style does sustain a baseline of engagement, but the director’s overreaching and self-conscious artiness and facile conclusions seem more awards-driven than anything more substantive or genuinely insightful. Bharath might go against the grain in her portrayal of Ramya, but a lack of reflection on her form and a certain genericism with regard to familial relationships and romance renders her defiance a far more limp than she clearly wants it to be. — ANAND SUDHA

And the Rest Will Follow

In her fifth feature film, Turkish director Pelin Esmer adopts a self-reflexive approach to storytelling. While the attempt is admirable and occasionally intriguing, And the Rest Will Follow lacks the conceptual rigor necessary to organize her Matryoshka dolls into a meaningful formation. A viewer will detect elements of Hong Sang-soo’s gamesmanship in Esmer’s film, but there’s a self-defeating, po-faced tone throughout the film, as if the filmmaker had received an assignment that she mostly wanted to ignore. The action takes place in the town of Söke, on the Aegean coast, in the midst of its second annual film festival. The cinema is conveniently located on the bottom floor of the town’s biggest hotel, and a housekeeper named Aliye (Merve Asya Özgür), inspired by the presence of a favorite filmmaker, takes us through her own personal story, implicitly presenting it as a counterpoint to the Turkish cinema she loves. In other words, Aliye uses the framework of art cinema to articulate her own frustrations and desires.

Unfurling in parallel with Aliye’s story is that of a director named Levent (Timuçin Esen). He has been commissioned to make a short film by the festival, and we observe his creative process — the rehearsing and shooting of a Kiarostami-esque film about an introspective little boy (Oğuz Kara) — as he navigates the slow-paced social scene in Söke as well as the end of his marriage. Esmer offers a number of suggestions that Levent and Aliye will cross paths, that he will seize upon her story of deferred dreams, disappointment, and ill-fated love, bringing it to the screen. Interestingly, this never happens. Aliye reaches out to Levent, and her audio letter to him often serves to structure the narrative we’re watching. But, like the post-middle-aged barflies whose empty glasses Aliye clears away, Aliye finds herself unable to spin her existence into a dramatic arc.

Too theoretical to be a simple hang-out film, but too diffuse to function as a meditation on the creative process, And the Rest Will Follow promises much but delivers little. Esmer’s title, which Aliye speaks at both the start and the end of the film, is like a statement of purpose, a conviction that by simply allowing events to play out with little external shape, a meaningful whole will come into focus. And while And the Rest Will Follow is never boring, it also feels rambling and desultory, a series of warm-ups that never shift into action. One expects that the focus on filmmaking and narration will circle back on itself, displaying the active process by which personal anecdotes take shape into symbolic fiction. Instead, it feels as if Esmer is suggesting that Turkish cinema has hit a dead end, having lost the ability to tell any story, including its own. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Transcending Dimensions

As far as titles go, few films are as aptly and succinctly summed up by their own as Transcending Dimensions. The latest project from Toshiaki Toyoda (Blue Spring, 9 Souls), the film is a psychedelic and cosmic odyssey that expands from this mortal coil to the ends of the known universe, exploring the limits of mankind and the potential greatness that can be attained. Packaged into a dense 90 minutes, Transcending Dimensions regularly flirts with incoherence, but often in thrilling ways, with Toyoda delivering an entertaining narrative loaded with psychic-powered confrontations, hallucinogenic visuals, and the eternal enigma of a magic conch shell.

Transcending Dimensions’ central plot concerns the disappearance of Rosuke (Yôsuke Kubozuka), a monk who was seeking to transcend his own being prior to going missing. Tasked with finding the monastic man and eliminating everyone responsible for his disappearance is Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), a hitman hired by Rosuke’s sister, Nonoka (Haruka Imou). Shinno infiltrates the inner circle of Master Hanzo (Chihara Junia), a cruel sorcerer who runs a cult and takes sadistic pleasure in maiming his followers. Preaching a lifestyle devoted to asceticism, Hanzo relies on his telekinetic powers to bend others to his will, capable of exorcising maladies and swaying the meek into severing off their own fingers to act as vessels into the great unknown. As it turns out, Hanzo also happens to be funding the very research facility that is holding Rosuke captive, where the monk’s mind is integral to unlocking the secrets of the universe (along with some assistance from artificial intelligence, natch). Meanwhile, Rosuke is venturing out on his own interstellar journey, exploring a spaceship seemingly millions of miles away from earth, where the rooms and hallways boast vivid kaleidoscopic designs and the lone inhabitant is another fellow monk. Through this quest, Rosuke appears to be unlocking some abilities of his own, as all characters hurtle toward a violent climax destined to spill blood. Also in the mix is the aforementioned magic conch shell that summons the monk and apparently eliminates the desire for all earthly pleasures when used — again, natch.

Transcending Dimensions opens with a piece of bravura filmmaking, kicking off with an understated but staggering shot of Rosuke’s reflection in a body of water as the camera tilts up to meet the man mid-meditation. These stunning formal traits welcomingly linger throughout the feature, as Toyoda’s camera appears not to be bound to any plane of existence, swirling and weaving in and out of prolonged sequences of behavior and discovery. Sonically, the film also impresses, employing terrific synth and jazz scoring that lends Transcending Dimensions a thrilling propulsiveness. These qualities coalesce into a show-stopping excursion into outer space, guided by the jamming soundtrack of “Inner Babylon” by Sons Of Kemet. It’s a total knockout sequence, and for fans of the beloved late title card drop, this is your Christmas morning.

But while the film’s continuous formal astonishment leaves any complaints against its style or technical chops feeling like bad-faith judgments, Transcending Dimensions does leave a little to be desired narratively speaking, hinting at an eventual Akira-esque showdown that sadly never comes to fruition, even going so far as to tease with a shocking visual of a man’s brain being summarily ripped out of his skull. In fact, for a film that occasionally engages in some fun telekinetic duels, Toyoda ultimately and surprisingly holds back on anything resembling an exciting showdown, opting for a more pensive exit. Still, Transcending Dimensions is consistently twisty and perplexing, and it typically lands with the right flavor of puzzlement, offering an undeniably good time audiences willing to submit to the mystery and particular flavor of indecipherability. Oh, and did I mention that there’s a magic conch shell? — JAKE TROPILA

Bokshi

Filmed almost entirely on location in the dense forests of Sikkim, the northeasternmost state of India, Bhargav Saikia’s Bokshi is a wildly ambitious debut feature, mixing folk horror, a teenage coming-of-age story, Sam Raimi-esque splatter, and intimations of post-#MeToo feminist allegory into one overflowing stew. It’s a film full of big ideas and dreamy, woozy visuals, replete with blood-red filters and creepy figures chanting incantations. It’s also frustratingly long, often narratively inert, and largely devoid of scares.

An extended prologue introduces us to 17-year-old Anahita (Prasanna Bishit); she suffers from extreme nightmares, often awakening drenched in sweat after wetting the bed. Her father is aloof, more embarrassed by his daughter’s accidents than he is concerned for her mental health. Anahita’s grandmother seems more amenable, until the woman discovers that the family maid has instructed Anahita on certain rituals meant to protect her from unwelcome spirits. Distrustful of such superstitions but also in possession of a pronounced class resentment, Anahita’s grandmother harangues the help and rants and raves about the teenager’s deceased mother, hinting at some dark secrets in the family’s closet. At school, Anahita is mocked by her classmates for using peculiar oils in her hair, and when she finally lashes out and assaults a particularly cruel boy, she’s shuffled off to a boarding school. Here, Anahita seems to settle in reasonably well; she’s standoffish at first but finds a few friendly students and seems particularly interested in the history class taught by Shalini (Mansi Multani). Shalini also sponsors a history club, and Anahita begs to be allowed to join them for their annual field trip, a long hike through the woods to explore ancient temples and various religious statues. After much cajoling, Shalini allows Anahita to tag along, and so begins their journey away from civilization and into ritualistic violence and matriarchal mythology.

According to reports, Bokshi was entirely financed by the filmmaker and his family, taking roughly five years to develop and produce, including a long layoff due to COVID. The screenplay by Harsh Vaibhav has all the hallmarks of an overstuffed passion project, as if the creators were determined to get every idea they had into one film in case they never got to make another. The proceedings are downright languid, at least at first; the mixed-sex group seems to be enjoying nature, camping under the stars, and keeping each others’ company. Locals regale the students with stories of ancient traditions and the peoples who originally settled the lands, and the students are particularly interested in the strange statues they keep discovering on their hikes, all of which depict female anatomy in celebratory, ritualized fashion. There’s much talk about faith versus reason — as well as tension between “city folk” and the rural denizens — and how the figure of the Bokshi (“witch” in Nepali) could be viewed as a figure of empowerment rather than horror. Anahita also embarks on a burgeoning romance with one of her female classmates, which seems to suggest that some of her troubles are a sort of allegory for her repressed urges. But ultimately, the long march gradually turns into a slog, the film recapitulating the same themes and ideas over and over again, with only the occasional bout of spooky imagery to goose the audience. Moods soon sour and our intrepid students start to turn on one another; Shalini butts heads with the other chaperone, a male teacher who feels emasculated by the constant talk of feminine agency and divine power that these lands and symbols possess, while Anahita’s classmates start to turn on her as well. How does all of this relate to Anahita’s nightmarish visions and long-dead mother? What exactly is Anahita repressing in the dark recesses of her psyche? Is Shalini a witch herself?

All is eventually revealed, and it will only be a surprise to someone who’s never seen a movie before. Saikia and cinematographers Siddharth Sivasankaran and A. Vasanth do nice work with the more overtly horror-tinged imagery, bathing sequences in red gels and ominous, slow camera movements, but much of the dialogue scenes are static and uninspired. The whole thing is an extremely long trip to a mostly foregone conclusion, interrupted only by a miraculous, lovingly detailed hand-drawn animation sequence that reveals the origins of the Bokshi and the struggle of an Earth-bound goddess versus the masculine-coded Sky gods. It’s absolutely beautiful, so much so that one wishes they were just watching a movie built around that instead. The final act finally crescendos into full-blown horror territory, with possessed people chasing and murdering various characters, although it also inadvertently reveals how little we know about any of these characters (despite spending what feels like an eternity with them). And it all climaxes with a sequence seemingly inspired by, of all things, Midsommar (whether a film aping the Aster/A24 aesthetic is a good thing or a bad thing is ever up for debate). The performances are at least all quite good, particularly Bishit, who is in virtually every scene of this near-three-hour behemoth. But everyone on screen feels less like a fully realized person than a pawn that the plot moves around according to its needs. There’s a general sense of incoherence to everything, a bunch of disparate parts that never come together properly. So while there’s plenty of undeniable talent on display in Bokshi, there’s simply a fatal absence of cohesive vision that would have allowed for anything interesting to be done with it. — DANIEL GORMAN

Rhythm of a Flower

The films of Amit Dutta have always been concerned with exploring and re-imagining art forms through cinema, deepening the possibilities of both the art and cinema as an essayistic medium. This is true not only of the films dealing directly with artists and their work, such as Nainsukh (2010) and Scenes from a Sketchbook (2018), but also in works such as Sonchidi (2011) and The Seventh Walk (2013), where architectural expanses are being constantly reconfigured by leaps of the imagination. One art form is always nibbling at the boundaries of the other, intermingling and evolving by opening themselves to wider avenues while never compromising on the loose set of rules governing their forays into new territories. Such a fluid conception of art also opens up newer ways of thinking about art, be it in the form of studying the history of the medium (Museum of Imagination [2012]), organizing and presenting works of art (Chitrashala [2015]) or the community lifestyle around which the art develops and vice-versa (Notes on Guler [2019]). Though he has centred his works on art, architecture, and, more recently, philosophy, one could almost sense that it only would be a matter of time before Dutta would train his eyes (and ears) on the most abstract of art forms — music. And what could be a more fitting subject for this multifaceted artist (the reverse could also be true in some senses) than the legendary Hindustani musician, Kumar Gandharva?

A maverick and pioneer in his field, Kumar Gandharva’s artistry derives from his deeply felt philosophy and convictions of music and life. Rhythm of a Flower, Dutta’s latest, explores Gandharva’s music and life starting with a legendarily “fallow” period as inspiration. Gandharva spent six years of his life bedridden with tuberculosis, and, as legend has it, it was in this period he developed his unique bandishes (a particular kind of composition in Hindustani music) and Madhyalaya (loosely, neither fast nor slow) style of singing attuned to the gait of everyday life, be it in walking or birds chirping.  Dutta’s film, filled with delicate and sensitive hand-drawn animations courtesy of children’s illustrator Allen Shaw, opens not with Gandharva’s singing, but with the very actions of a man walking and a bird gently flying. The latter lands on a long petal of grass, bending it almost in the way a musician might pluck the strings of a tanpura to set the tonic and pitch for the concert. And right on cue, we hear Gandharva’s music, followed by the bird departing from the stalk. Music, for Gandharva and Dutta, stems from nature itself, as nature itself is endowed with music.

The title is derived from a quote by Gandharva — “No flower blooms without its rhythm” —  gracing the opening credits of the film.  A creative biopic of sorts, the film embodies the musical philosophy of Gandharva even when it provides more conventional biographical details such as his place of birth and influences. Gandharva’s music never stopped when he was bedridden, as some of the intertitles taken from interviews of his caretaker attest. Gandharva was seemingly muttering notes and music even if he didn’t have the energy to do so, and regardless of the veracity of the claims, Dutta whole-heartedly projects a vast musical canvas onto his vivid tapestry of sights, sounds, and camera movements from nature and community life, out of which Hindustani music forms only a part. This might anger some passionate fans eager to listen to Gandharva’s music, but Dutta asks us to broaden our conceptions of art by actually contending with Gandharva’s musical philosophy.

Like Dutta’s previous works, he also uses the artist’s modus operandi as a means of thinking about cinema itself, especially through his audiovisual rhymes such as the tortuous camera movements that precede the entry to Gandharva’s house, first scored to the chirping of birds and then, at a later stage, to Gandharva’s improvisations of the raag. Dutta, like the great essayists in writing and cinema, does not limit his work to a mere exploration of the art form, but also mulls over how the art form itself can inform cinema. Rhyming cadences from nature are not secluded to the privileged domains of music, but are open to all art forms to explore.

Dutta’s gradual shift to animation in recent years is prompted not just by the medium’s ability to expand and collapse spatial planes, something which he achieved even in his non-animated works, but also by its capacity for morphing different forms. Trees, tanpuras, and yogis here meld into one another, the circularity in Gandharva’s music translates into the motion of a chariot wheel (which Allen Shaw mentioned was inspired by the Sun-Temple in Konark, India), and motifs from different art forms trickle onto the expansive canvas of Gandharva’s musical philosophy. The sheer density of ideas and paucity of narrative explanations might make the film seem esoteric and even forbidding to viewers unfamiliar with Hindustani music. However, late into the film, we hear and view Gandharva’s quote as an audiovisual intertitle on the need to go to a village where the walls are filled with cow dung in order to understand the Raag Sarang. Music springs from the mundane, and Rhythm of a Flower boldly asks viewers to imagine artistic possibilities in our way of life without offering any patronizing instructions on how to do so. — ANAND SUDHA