Onlyne

The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)

2012-01-08T21:09:00.002+05:30

Michaelangelo Frammertino, 84m

A tree is felled, chopped into logs and transported to a kiln where it is turned into charcoal. The movie opens with a smoldering soil covered heap and for quite a while one is in suspense what exactly is going on. When we learn that it's all about charcoal, it comes like the resolution of a mystery. The film is set in a primitive European mountain village and the rhythms of life are beautifully depicts in this film in three parts, of which the story about the tree is the last. The second part depicts the life of a lamb from the moment of birth onto its journey of life in the world. The first is about the death of an aging goatherd.

There is no dialog or musical score. The sounds and visuals combine to take us through a slow absorbing journey through this event-less hamlet in the lap of nature. The film is just the right length.

To think there could be such drama and beauty in the manufacture of charcoal!

Much Ado About Nothing

2011-12-26T07:40:00.005+05:30

1993, Kenneth Branaugh, 110m

The title is appropriate for this example of the Shakespearean sub-genre. It is a loosely bound series of quickly resolving love tangles involving two couples, full of misunderstandings, impersonation and mild villany. Its distinguishing feature is the verbal sparring between the lead pair which sustains like a tight rope walk till the end. Beatrice, the heroine, is known for her robust, independent, intelligent character which must have been anachronistic when the play was written. On the whole, in this presentation the comic element is artificial and overdone, with much unnatural grimacing and overdose of merry England. We have a surfeit of Branaugh's mannerisms which make this role of his little different from his better known Hamlet. Finally, the exuberant harmonizing life force, which is the poet's signature, in mirth as in tragedy, overpowers and compensates all. This is a film drenched in sunshine, laughter, prosperity, set in a carefree demi paradise--as much hallmarks of the scriptwriter as his great tragedies.

The Mill and the Cross

2011-12-21T21:59:00.010+05:30

Lech Majewski, 2011, 90m

This is a movie about a painting, The Way to Calvary, by Pietr Bruegal the Elder (1525-69). The cross dragging figure of Christ is of miniscule size, surrounded by scores of peasantry, citizens, soldiers, dogs, some lamenting figures, carts, urchins. The biblical scene has been transported to the artist's contemporary Flanders, which was under Spanish domination and a period of barbarous religious prosecution. Poles mounted with wheels meant for strapping condemned men facing skyward to be pecked to death by carnivorous birds dot the sprawling plain. Towards the left rustics dance, while towards the right crucifixes are under erection and a thick circular crowd like a cluster of flies has gathered to enjoy the spectacle. Most striking is the eponymous wind mill perched atop a bizarre sheer vertical cliff composed of writhing twisted shapes of rock. This is certainly an unusual depiction of the events of Calvary, an inconspicuous non event in a carnival like atmosphere. The painter has depicted his times with a profusion of detail and mingled it with the events of the New Testament, which are lent immediacy by the startling transposition to a contemporaneous setting. He simultaneously passes judgement on his times, expresses his own depth of religious feeling (reminiscent of Tolstoi) and at the same time surrounding it with the beauty of nature, the country folk with their simple, rough, mild or merciless ways.

As the film opens the painting is being set up, with real actors taking the place of the painted figures on an actual plain identical with the painting and of course the mill on the cliff except that the mill sets into motion and the figures jump to life.The painting is enacted and put to music with but few scraps of dialog and we share a dozen stories from the hundreds of folk who populate the picture.

Breugal's vast and dense canvas is a little more than a commentary on his age. It is in fact an impassioned expression of his vision of existence, as complex as la Giocanda, seen in the light of Christian ideology, using the powerful metaphor of the crucifixion, here inconspicuously embedded in the eventful microcosm of the middle ages. The film uses the arsenal of latest technology, to transmute it into something widely accessible. It is universal enough to be about our own time, because much is the same.

This is a ravishing movie. More than anything else it captures the mood and feel of the original work, its tints and shapes and the rustic music. Painting, after all is like cinema a visual art primarily. The director's achievement is to have imbibed, interpreted and preserved the exaltation of feeling (which may be termed sublime), giving it the extra dimensions of motion and sound. He has in fact brought the canvas to life for the common man.

The Way to Calvary, by Pietr Breugal

A Separation

2011-12-19T23:34:00.003+05:30

2011, Asghar Farhadi, Persian, 117m

A taut drama portraying current (pre-cellphone) Iranian society. A couple is on the verge of separation because the wife wants to immigrate but the husband wants to stay on to look after his Alzheimer afflicted father. It's a plot driven film with no musical score (except for the end credits) and expertly put together like a jig saw with no redundant edges. It depicts a modernizing society overcast with Islamic ethos and illuminates our picture of Iran with a profusion of detail. I do not think it is of the rank of Kiarostami in terms of delicacy and humanistic insight. On one level it is a courtroom drama and we observe the legal system, which seems simpler and quicker, lacking the strictness of procedural detail we find in India or US, but perhaps stern and rigid in terms of punishment. Certainly an engrossing movie which had me hooked from early on to the end.

Mamma Roma

2011-12-14T04:07:00.002+05:30

1962, Pasolini, 90m, Anna Magnani

In 1962 it was a sin to be anything but a communist, at least hereabout. The defeated European nations seem to have faced at least for a while, something like third world conditions. The economic divides of society naturally appear like karmic chasms which determine the course of life of the lowest classes helplessly projecting them into an unenviable trajectory of life. Mamma Roma is a streetwalker who switches over to vegetable vending in her forties in order to retrieve the future of her sixteen year son but the force of destiny is too strong to resist. This is a compact and impassioned statement from the young and prodigious director of what Marx calls the harsh reality of social class and orientalism calls chains of karma. Anna Magnani is an uninhibited Thespian in the classic mold, a prima donna of the screen who eclipses everything else, though the slow witted son with his awkward slouch also communicates the world of the street child. A universal and compassionate film which deserves to be better known. Scarred ruins which could be ancient remnants or a result of the war are an eloquent background.

Janet Maslin
Wiki

Carmen (1875)

2011-12-09T16:56:00.010+05:30

Georges Bizet (1838-75), Carlos Kleiber (conductor), Vienna State Opera , Yelena Olbrazstova (Carmen), Franco Zeffirelli (Director)

This is an emotionally torrid romance mixing love, bullfighting and death. It is set in Spain and the music has a Latin beat. Carmen is a gypsy girl who works in a cigarette factory and is also a member of a smuggling gang. The plot is a fatal love triangle with a soldier and a bullfighter. The Opera experience has been brilliantly captured for TV and one shares the immersion of the audience, as the camera periodically reminds us of the orchestra and the uninhibited applause. The many choruses celebrate the communal experience of life and the story is more or less engrossing till the finale. One can but imagine the feel of the hall overflowing with a splendor of sound.
Obrazstova
Callas

Don Giovanni (1787)

2011-12-01T17:51:00.004+05:30

Mozart (1756-91), Furtwangler, 1954, Cesare Siepi as Don Juan

Gustave Flaubert is said to have placed this opera, along with Hamlet and the sea, as the three finest things created by God. Be that as it may, it is a heady amalgam of rich music, drama, comedy, poetry, song, morality merging with overtones of the mystery of life and death. Don Giovanni is a primitive human bereft of conscience only driven by his own boundless desire. As he piles his list of amorous conquests destiny begins to catch up and the drama concludes with a stunning climax. Siepi in the title role gives a majestic performance of the unrepentant retrograde. Mozart's music undulates like waves merging with the script and giving voice to the human emotion.

CLIP

Falstaff

2011-11-20T20:38:00.001+05:30

2001, La Scala, Barbara Frittoli as Alice, Verdi 1893

This last of the composer's works is based on The Merry Wives Of Windsor. The exuberant comedy is given an extra dimension in scintillating voice and music making it a pause less roller coaster of the joy of life. Falstaff, a dissolute but ever improvising knight schemes to seduce two beautiful wives of Windsor, with a mind to unloosen their purses as well, driven as he is to his final pennes. But he has not reckoned with the virtue and resourcefulness of these prank loving ladies, who take him on many a merry turn. The dilemma ridden Falstaff remains unfazed to the end. An electrifying energy and joy sizzles from end to end. Frittoli is unforgettable, as are almost all the characters, and one is left with the feeling of transcendent drama, comedy and music.

CLIP

The Magic Flute

2011-11-17T22:43:00.007+05:30

Royal Opera House, 2003, Diana Damrau, Simon Keenlyside, Colin Davis, 160m, Zauberflote

Opera is not such heavy stuff. Children would have no problem with this one. It has elements of the film musicals, circus, fairy tale and some bawdy pieces. This is a televised version of the actual Mozart opera, complete with the audience responses and glimpses of the orchestra just below stage. The plot is an excuse for the music and voice and the exploration of emotions through music. The effect is joyous, uplifting and sublime. Diana Damrau as the Queen of the Night is terrifying and transcendant with her voice soaring to unheard heights in the famous Der Holle Rache (Hell's Revenge), where the dreaded mother commands her daughter to kill her (the mother's) enemy. Keenlyside as the poor bird catcher and comic role is deeply human.

Der Holle Rache

The Tree of Life

2011-11-02T20:50:00.005+05:30

Terence Malik, 2011, 132m

This is a film about religion from the viewpoint of a highly perceptive sceptic. It tries to portray on its canvas the Mystery as it would appear to a human being of our generation equipped with the accumulated knowledege of the race.

It summarises in enthtalled cinematography the grandeur of the birth of the universe, the emergence of life and the drama of evolution. There is an intriguing patch about a good hearted dinasaur who declines to feed on another that lies dying. Everything is done in a way that is faithful to science in a poetic sense. It presents the dimensions if not the details of what surrounds us.

And finally all this is wound around the life of a contemporary American family--three brothers and their parents--and the griefs and anger which populte the luxuriantly beautiful world in which they live.They go through the pain of birth, death and discord, all summed up in a desolation in sharp contrast with the overall grandeur of the processes of the universe. What a mis-shapen thing so often is the thing called a family! It would seem that modern man is as intermediate a stage as were the dinasaurs in contrast to all that followed.

The question of an order within events is raised, and the arguments articulated by Job are eloquently expressed. To top it all, we have a vision of the Hereafter, where everybody meets everybody else, including themselves at different age, and all is love and blessedness.

The film is too direct and explicit and cannot escape the charge of resemblance to the National Geographic. It is a naive theological/scientific statement, and serves an educational purpose similar to Avatar, but is far less enjoyable. Probably it is too glazedly American for the rest of us to catch the nuances in one go. A revisit will definitely be a burden. I understand that the local audience responds to the human story with strong nostalgia and this is precisely where it might draw a blank from the rest of us. It looks like a never never land half way to another planet.

Jai Baba Felunath (The Elephant God)

2011-10-28T17:22:00.001+05:30

Satyajit Ray, 110m, 1978

Here is a whodunit filmed in the ambience of Kashi, with the Ganges rippling and the music of boatmen. A jewel encrusted Ganesh idol is stolen and Soumitra Chatterjee playing detective Feluda is summoned for the investigation. The chase takes us around the wending lanes of the world's oldest city with a delightful score keeping joyous pace with the camera. It is Ray reveling in the streets and smells he passionately loves. The sadhus, bhajans, posters for saree ads, ancient havelis, weathered walls, take us back to our childhood which has not quite disappeared. The film is soaked with nostalgia. The plot meanders languorously picking up momentum half way and has a typically perfect Ray-film ending-suspenseful, funny and deeply sentimental. Ray is a true artist who loves everything and his camera is able to convey that joy of just being alive.

Otello

2011-10-22T17:52:00.001+05:30

Opera by Verdi; Karajan, Jon Vickers, Mirella Freni

As my first viewing of a full fledged Opera, this is eye opening, though unlikely to be the first of many. One may miss the plot as well as the language of the play, but this adds a different dimension by rendering the turbulence and pathos into the language of voice and orchestra, a language simpler and more piercing than even poetry. Both the leads are rendered with regality, like lightening answering to thunder. Iago's evil is delivered is wryful, even with a comic touch.

Parash Pathar (Philosopher's Stone)

2011-10-17T02:32:00.000+05:30

Ray, 1958, 90m

The philosopher's stone is supposed to turn iron into gold. The movie is a mature children's story, a comedy, a farcical fantasy with moral overtones. It's certainly atypical, and the master's hand is barely recognizable although it dates within the trilogy period. The discovery of the stone turn's the world of a bank clerk on the verge of being fired upside down. But he is smart enough to realize the perils latent in the blessing. A miss-able film, unless it is for Ray's sake.

The Grand Illusion

2011-10-13T22:46:00.003+05:30

Jean Renoir, 1937, 2 hours

This is the best of the three Renoir films I've seen. The River, set in India, is the worst, at least from the POV of Indian sensibility (reviewed somewhere on this blog). Grand Illusion is acclaimed as a masterpiece. I certainly found it enjoyable, choked with the tragic ironies and absurdities of war, a strange film. It is out and out anti war and is a compound of satire, humanism, and acute observation, with a stretch of caricature. Set in WW1, it was released just before WW2. No wonder it was suppressed by the authorities, so powerful and heartfelt is the anti war message. War is an unnatural manufactured thing and the differences, here between the French and Germans, have to be pumped up. The average soldier as well as officers have a hard time sustaining the hatred, almost a duty. It is full of social observation, the sense of fraternity between the French and German officers as a social stratum, reminiscent of the mutual recognition between the officers of India and Pakistan, both trained in the British military ethos, during the Bangladesh war. Finally we have the heart rending POV of a German woman who has lost all her kin in the war and who offers shelter to two escaped French POWs. This is truly a perfect film and could hardly have been digestible to the officialdom. Erich von Stroheim as the aristocratic German commandant of the POW camp gives an unforgettable performance.

What indeed is the Illusion? The Enemy. The hatred against people on the other side is a feeling that has to be systematically worked up in an organized fashion to the point of hysteria. What greater sin is there in wartime than not to hate the guys on the other side of the fence?

Nayak (The Hero)

2011-10-10T00:56:00.006+05:30

Ray, 1966, 2 hours

Matinee idol Arindam (Uttam Kumar) is travelling from Calcutta to Delhi by train to receive an award. His life and personality is revealed in a series of encounters, dreams and flashbacks. The swift moving train is a metaphor for the passage of time in an event crowded life and the film concludes with the train's arrival at the destination. We meet a series of exquisitely etched characters representing the social pageant, lensed with love, humor and refinement. Sharmila Tagore is a journalist not particularly keen to encounter him but, as things turn out, is drawn into a close interaction. The dreams probe the morbidity of the subconscious, depicting drowning, death, betrayal, desire and decay. The world of the stage and cinema is brilliantly surveyed with great realism and of course the knowledge and involvement one would expect. The world of a celebrity with it's intoxication , power and loneliness is shared with us. There are tinges of Sunset Boulevard and the dreams have the flavor of both Bergman and old Bollywood.

Having seen most of Ray's films, this is easily one of the best. It has the delicacy and lightness of touch that is Ray's distinction and moves as relentlessly as the train, hardly pausing for breath till it's heart warming finale. This is great cinema. He is arguably the most humanistic among great film makers.

A Woman Under the Influence

2011-10-06T17:45:00.007+05:30

1974, 155m, John Cassevetes

A family is a machine in which the family members like machine parts inter-mesh to produce effects between themselves and outwards. Variegation is the rule with families as with individuals. Tolstoi famously said that unhappy families are all unique. Dysfunctionality has a million hues and we are presented with a meticulously etched specimen.

This film is about a family in which the two parents are severely disturbed even as they struggle with enormous effort to take care of their three children and each other. Love for the children is what spells their salvation from doom and despair. Somewhere down the story, the wife has to be committed for some time, but the tragi-comedy resumes on her return. That they inhabit a brink of disaster becomes evident when the lady is upset enough to to try to do something to herself with a knife which is grappled loose resulting only in a bloody hand. It is as though they have a different sort of time, watchful and dangerous, where the inner house of cards has to be propped continuously to keep real peril at bay. The film ends on an uplifting note as it bypasses the possibility of tragedy. If there is a lesson, life itself is ultimate, and it is significant that the film affixes no demeaning labels.

Elektra

2011-10-04T01:34:00.002+05:30

Cacoyannis (dir), 1962, 107m, based on Euripedes.

Elektra is the daughter of Agamemnon, the returning hero of the Trojan war, who is murdered by her mother and her lover. Her brother Orestes escapes with his life but Elektra is imprisoned and later on married off to a peasant. The powerful plot is about the revenge exacted by the siblings, particularly the slaying of their mother. There is a chorus and the main actors strike statuesque poses and declaim their words. For all the stilted acting, the film does manage to hold your attention, extracting the last ounce of emotion out of each twist of the story. The black and white photography of the bare undulating countryside is one of the attractions of the film. A relatively painless introduction to Greek drama, all the more since all the poetry has been nearly shorn to leave us a virtually silent film or a mime performance.

What's love got to do with it

2011-09-28T01:37:00.001+05:30

1993. 2 hours, Angela Basset as Tina Turner

This is the story of the prodigious singer and her experience of physical abuse at the hands of her husband. It is a story of a courageous battle and victory over adversity. It features her most famous songs in her own voice which is responsible for the power of the film. Basset's portrayal really gets inside the skin of the character. It is a portrayal of the soul, spirit and culture of Black America, which the singer as well as the actress seem to embody so well. It is a film not only about the life of a legendary artist, but also encases her art. The music has it's roots in the Afro-American soil, but also expresses with deep pathos universal human emotions of sadness, joy and defiance. The titular song is expressive of a kind of maturity of emotion transcending superfluity.

Othello

2011-09-27T21:18:00.000+05:30

1995, 2 hours

Othello is played for the first time by an Afro American and Iago by Branagh. I think Ian McKellan's version is the best I have seen. Branagh fails to deliver the grandeur of distilled evil which is Iago's essence. Laurence Fishburn's adds little to the Q of Othellos except his color--Shakespeare never wrote to be underplayed or without gusto. But this is an adequate and enjoyable re-reading of the text if lacking in much brilliance or innovation or interpretation of it's own, an old wine in the same bottle.

Henry V

2011-09-22T18:24:00.000+05:30

Branagh, 1989, 2 hrs

This is much closer to the original play than the forties Olivier version which was moulded into a jingoist piece of wartime propoganda, cutting out several central incidents. The Henry here is more fleshed out, human in his failings, and complex as a character. It is interesting as a study in leadership. The war scenes, for all the gushing streams of blood and swathes of gore, are tiresome because one has seen them so often. They resemble a cricket match from a present day perspective, particularly since wars seem to have been framed with so many nice rules.Branagh as the king is loud even though the role demands it. This is a very adequate introduction to the play.

God on Trial

2011-09-21T18:48:00.005+05:30

TV film, 90 minutes, 2008

The enormity of the holocausts that have taken place within living memory raise fresh questions about existence of any order of justice in the world. What kind of God could have let this happen? The present film is set in Auschwitz and the prisoners in the camp many of whom await the chambers on the next day set up a kangaroo court to put God on trial, specifically to examine whether he his been true to his Biblical covenant with the Jewish people to take care of them. The drama is neither able to project the gravity of the questions about theology which twentieth century experience raises, far less to make out a case for faith in spite of them. The film is set in the unlighted interior of a dormitory and haggard victims harangue around a stool, mostly expressive of anger about the grief they have passed through. It's a depressing film unilluminated by passion. This drab, verbose, lack lustre drama does not rise above quibbling over the text of the Jewish scripture, failing even to bring the great enigma into focus, leave aside its resolution.

Kagemusha

2011-09-20T21:40:00.001+05:30

Kurosawa, 1980, 3 hours

The intent of the film is to depict sixteenth century warlike Japan framed in an exciting, colorful, humorous, racy plot. A convict about to be executed is found to have an impossible resemblance to the warlord and is spared for his possible utility as a double. As it happens, the lord dies in battle and in deference to his wish to have his death kept secret for three years, the ex convict has a full time and difficult job of impersonating the lord. He gradually learns to deceive even the concubines and grandson. We have a panoramic depiction of the era, including the codes of honor and war. Firepower is an integral element of weaponry and we see the glimmerings of European influence. This is historical film making of a high order.

Menilmontant

2011-08-13T13:11:00.010+05:30

Dmitri Kirsanoff (1899-1957), 1926, 38m, silent

The film's claim to attention was it's mention by Pauline Kael as her favorite film. At well under an hour, and easy availability in an excellent print on YouTube, it seemed worth a try, in spite of being silent. Most memorable is the haunting, misty, autumnal black and white cinematography. The title refers to a suburb of Paris and the film is as much an exploration of the place as an essay on human experience framed exquisitely by these run down environs as they must have been in those twenties. It is a modernistic montage of cobbled streets, aging weathered working class dwellings, flowing water and bridges, trains and machinery, old and new.

The film opens with a curtain swelling to unfold a scene of grisly brutality followed by the murder of a couple. This is followed by the travails of the two daughters as they grow up, get involved with the same man, experience jealousy, the birth of a child, learning the meaning of hunger, suicide contemplated, and a violent climax. The plot is not explicit but the forty minutes concentrate a lot. The rapid fire rush of images weaves a film of stunning power and artistry. Though diametrically opposite in flavor and content, its lyricism reminds one of that more acclaimed masterpiece, 8 1/2.

Silent cinema is no poor cousin. Unpropped by technology and sound, it must be sustained by its own inner resources.

The film in five parts and excellent print and sound can be viewed HERE on You Tube .

Gospel According to Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo)

2011-08-04T00:24:00.007+05:30

Pasolini, 1964, 132m

The most widely accepted accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus are the four Gospels, which are included in the New Testament. The life of Jesus is told here following closely the version of Matthew, the first of these four. Pasolini was a professed atheist and Marxist, but it would appear that his artistic vein is deeper than his skin deep ideology. He is a strident humanist and belongs to that season when Marxism was often synonymous with sympathy for the downtrodden and inarticulate.

The visual beauty of the film lies in the ramshackle villages from another century sprawled on the mountainside, with ragged urchins and tattered peasants crowding the narrow labyrinthine lanes. A smug and voluble Christ is played by a university student who looks like one. There is little of dialog or script and the movie is virtually a reading of the text of the Gospel, with a rather noisy and jarring musical score which keeps alternating between Bach and Negro spirituals. What does come through with some force is the conviction of the message, whose revolutionary aspect is mainly in the divine identity of it's deliverer. The ethical content is probably not drastically different from the values which may have prevailed more in conspicuous neglect than observance.

The divinity of Jesus is not stressed and the miracles are just stated in a matter of fact way by way of textual faithfulness. This may be as things may have actually looked like, the extra ordinariness lying in the inner fire that must have blazed inside him.

The film is helpful as an introduction or a revision exercise in the essence of the Christian outlook and teachings. The final feeling is of a rather bleak and dreary other worldly outlook. The film drags on a bit too long to its depressing conclusion. Guilt and sinfulness are not pleasant baggage.

Othello (1952)

2011-07-30T22:35:00.004+05:30

Orson Welles, 1952, 92m

This Othello is a flight of dazzling cinematographic imagination. It is a dark, brooding and melancholy vision set in the moisture permeated island of Cyprus, the waves from the far stretching sea lapping the stone architecture of the castle. Taking the play for granted, what remains from his viewing is the haunting power of the chiseled black and white images, the boldly crafted brushstrokes of the camera. It is backed by a perfect score which unobtrusively matches the flow of images. It is indeed difficult to do justice to the visual beauty of this film in words. The drama itself starts of somewhat slowly, but gathers pace to a satisfying climax. Welles as Othello gives a somber and restrained portrayal, very unlike the theatrics of Olivier. This is probably not a good introduction to the drama but stands as a cinematic vision on it's own strength. The movie is a tribute to the power of black and white. So what if the camera and not Shakespeare occupies the center space!

Richard III (1995)

2011-07-29T21:58:00.004+05:30

Ian McKellan, 1995, 98m

Ian McKellan transplants the most unabashed of Shakespeare villains to the twentieth century, lending it an altogether unexpected immediacy and magnifying the impact. The action takes place in the second quarter of the last century, and although the movie is a deliberate cocktail of anachronisms, in flavour it combines into a slightly parodied presentation of the worst nightmares we have known. What is retained is the language and lines of the original, which combine with the modern setting to give a bizarre touch to the story, which ultimately becomes a stylised commentary on recent modern times, with specific focus on the Europe of the thirties. The setting is British, with some American flourishes and many echoes of Europe. The characters, the British aristocrats identical to the original play, don military uniforms or business suits, and tanks and aeroplanes substitute for the horses and swords. When Richard shouts, "My kingdom for a horse !", ongoing is a battle of armored carriers.

The cinematic element dominates over the drama and the movie goes much beyond what the bard could have said or conceived of. The film uses parts of the Shakespearean script as an element of a surreal recreation of the megalomania that characterizes our times. Everything is larger as twentieth century evil dwarfs the medieval conception. This is an "adult" movie compared to Olivier's, which is more or less a faithful photostat of what the audience at the Globe may have seen. Olivier's Richard is almost kiddish in comparison to what McKellan's is capable of. This is truly a state of the art Richard III complete with nuclear teeth. After all this is 1995. This is a Richard who means business, more than the narcissistic hunchback we are familiar with. It has more the flavor of Cabaret (1972) and Salo (1979).

Richard III

2011-07-29T00:42:00.007+05:30

Laurence Olivier, 1955, 158m

Richard III may be the most colorful of the bard's constellation of rogues. He is the only one physically deformed and who has the central role in the play. Glossing over the historical intricacies of plot, Richard ascends the ladder to the throne by a series of murders of his close relatives, including two young nephews, his wife and a cousin. Moreover, at the outset, he declaims his resolution to chose the path of unbridled evil, as a revenge against nature for his deformed body. Olivier gives a spectacular performance which cannot fail to delight lay viewer and critic alike. From his hawk like nose (is it his own?), his marvelously executed limp, the crooked monumental posture as he stands, his ominous shadow which trails him like a company logo and the masterful elocution of the lines, it is the work of an actor born to do Shakespeare without apology or inhibition.

This is Shakespeare's first play and he probably didn't want to risk a failure. He treads the safe path to the heart of the audience by providing bloodshed, wickedness, pathos (the killings are portrayed with extended dramatic detail to make them as heart rending as they are gruesome) and romance. The costumes, sets and the portrayal of the concluding battle are all competently done to evoke the era portrayed.

Shakespeare's villains are men driven by intelligence and ambition, single minded worldly risers who have shaken off the shackles of conscience. As such, they are psychologically simple, since once we decide to overlook the niceties of right and wrong, life becomes clear, focused and mechanical as a chess game. Obsessive monologers must be clear thinkers. Whether it is Richard, Iago or Edmund, the evil is played out to (almost) the very end with scarcely a hiccup of remorse. (Only milk liver'd Macbeth sleeps no more, but he wasn't villain enough to start with.) Only under the stare of death does the edifice of evil show signs of crumbling.

This is a drama more entertaining than profound, of Shakespeare's green days, and flawlessly done here by Laurence Olivier.

Henry V

2011-07-26T23:45:00.002+05:30

Laurence Olivier, 1944, 135m

Of Shakespeare's ten or so dramas about English history this is one of the most popular, at least on the Isles. This filmed version was made in the thick of WW2, with support from the British government, including personal interest taken by Churchill. The film was intended to bolster the morale of the British public at a time of crisis. Shakespeare's play has a strong nationalistic streak, though it is nuanced by many negative aspects of the king's personality and deeds, which have been skipped. Keeping the purpose of war time propaganda in mind the drama has been pruned to half, portraying him as a popular paragon.

The film is in brilliant technicolor. It starts of as a play at the Globe theater. We see the boisterous Elizabethan audience and a hilarious parody of the opening as the chorus keeps forgetting his words and has to keep fumbling at the sheets of the script. There is a sudden downpour, which hardly dampens the spirits of either the audience or performers, the more or less open air nature of the theatre notwithstanding.The stage flavor is retained for much of the film and colorful backdrops are often used. But then it gradually expands to the open spaces of cinema and the battle scenes with the French adversary are brilliantly filmed. For all the staginess, there is an undercurrent of realism and urgency, considering the real war which was going on, and the the film's audience must have heard it's rumbling and echoes throughout

Europa '51/ The Greatest Love

2011-07-26T00:14:00.005+05:30

Rossellini, 111m, 1952

Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1947) ended with a macabre child suicide. That was an unrepeatable piece of cinema which the director perhaps could not drive from his mind. He attempts an encore and the present film opens with the suicide of Michelle, son of Irene (Ingrid Bergman) and her wealthy husband. Sensitive observer that he is, Rossellini weaves a picture of the world at that juncture of the rapidly changing times around this movie about a grief struck mother.

Irene suddenly finds herself out of place in the comfortable zone of life she has inhabited. Her personal tragedy has opened out in her a wide ranging compassion. She tries to find expression in the Communist ideals of her cousin, as she helps out some poor people. She spends a day as an industrial worker, and is horrified by the wage slavery she discovers. She helps a dying woman and comes into contact with religion. More and more she stays away from her family. She is arrested for helping a criminal to escape, finally ending up in a mental hospital where we see her subjected to a parody of psychiatric examination. Is she a saint or a lunatic?

Whichever the case, this is indeed a weak and meandering movie and which fails to edify or entertain. It's hard to believe it comes from Rossellini. Even Bergman is rather pathetic with a dyspeptic expression which conveys neither saintliness nor insanity. One may suppose Rossellini tried to express a personal experience of sudden alienation. At best one can appreciate it as another psycho-social documentation of a period.

Othello

2011-07-23T21:06:00.006+05:30

National Theatre, Laurence Olivier, Frank Finlay (Iago), 1965, 158m

Olivier gives a spectacular and uninhibited performance in the title role. This is a staged film which closely follows the text and brings the drama to life in all it's psychological depth. Olivier is an actor, not a star, with the ability to step into the shoes of the most impossible roles. I always recall his portrayal as the Mahdi in Khartoum.

Othello's character portrays universal aspects of human nature. It is more than a romance, more than a tale of jealousy and cuckolding. The disintegration of a mind is portrayed in language of awesome power and precision. His love for Desdemona or more exacty her love for him, is the core around which his being is constructed.

"But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!"

One can only marvel at such lines. Indeed, "chaos is come again."

More than jealousy, it is doubt which is his doing. Step by step, he tries to build certitude from the seed of doubt, cementing his delusion with driblets of proof. In a sense he is the helpless victim of insurmountable circumstances but finally it is the chinks in his own mind which result in his dissolution. His inner collapse is more profound even than that of Lear, lacking Lear's inner reservoirs. Hamlet in contrast sets force on a project of painful self reconstruction once the onerous duty is imposed on him, concluding with the triumphant "the readiness is all". Macbeth plummets down to the bottom and remains there where no shaft of light can reach.

The film may have cinematic deficiencies, the acting might be overdone. Certainly Finlay as Iago, for which he got a supporting Oscar, delivers his lines with convincing ease and power. He is the philosophic chorus, his intelligence a formidable foil to Othello's tempestuous nature. The simple sets keep us focused on the drama and the ochre palette accentuates the painfilled story. This is unmistakeably drama, Shakespeare, vintage Olivier.

Zorba the Greek

2011-07-21T13:42:00.008+05:30

Cacoyannis, 1964, 142m

Basil, an introverted aspiring and blocked writer of Anglo Greek parentage, returns to Crete to revive an inherited lignite mine. He comes into contact with Zorba (Anthony Quinn), an exuberant old timer with an overflowing zest for life, who becomes his friend, business manager and mentor.

The film is memorable for bringing to life the rustic lives of the mountain folk, in an anthropological way. An adulterous woman is stoned to death. When an aging Frenchwomen dies bands of villagers descend to scavenge her belongings. A cloistered, harsh, unforgiving world enclosed by this picturesque, stone age environment. Quinn gives a powerful if unrestrained portrayal of a larger than life unlettered personality with a home spun philosophy which dwarfs the book learned Basil. Irene Papas gives an unforgettable tragic portrayal of the doomed widow. Lila Kedrova as the withered ailing courtesan, compassionately wooed by Zorba, won an Academy Award for her supporting role.

The sun drenched and sea embraced mountainous island has been beautifully captured.

This is a film with no message but the glory of life in all it's sadness and humor and the power of the spirit to negotiate stormy seas. It is about the voyage of life like a Homeric poem.

On the other hand, one can search out meanings in this deeply felt film cast in a somewhat traditional mold. One can sense the humanistic power of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, which "almost" won a Nobel prize, akin to the works of Hugo and Zola, . The rapacious villagers represent society as it always has been, from the time of the New Testament to the passive or conniving population which let the Shoah happen. The story is a parable. Zorba is the redeeming all too rare power of compassion. He is a human being, victorious even in defeat.

He does not believe in patriotism, finding no difference between Greeks and Turks, against whom in his younger days he fought. His age, in the sixties, has an accumulation of wisdom gleened directly, as for example when he recalls the death of a three year son, the grief of which he extinguished by dancing himself to exhaustion. His humanity lights up the younger man's life, and the concluding dance of Zorba celebrates this wondrous occurrence. It is indeed a cry of victory, the failure of the ludicrous business project notwithstanding. Even the two tragic deaths cannot detract from this exultant flood of optimism, the primal life force. Zorba's "affair" with the aging and withered Madame Hortense is another extraordinary story.

Bosley Crowther's Review

La Paura (Fear)

2011-07-19T03:00:00.009+05:30

Rossellini, 1954, 71m

Irene (Ingrid Bergman, wife of Rossellini when this film was made) is the owner of a pharmaceutical industry. Her husband is psychologically impaired due to war time imprisonment. Irene has been having an affair for a long time. She is wracked by guilt and wants to terminate the affair to devote herself to her husband and children. But then a the ex fiancee of her lover begins to black mail her. Her anxiety and terror of being discovered as well as her guilt sucks her into an intensifying vortex to the brink of self destruction.

This is a tightly chiseled psychological thriller and like most of Rossellini's film the real action takes place in somebody's head (one is reminded of Janet Leigh driving away with the stolen money in Psycho), and the environment serves only to mirror the disquieted mind. What stands out in this one is the electrifying black and white camera work which explores all the shades of grey and black to paint haunting and ethereal canvases of mist, light and darkness. He made several films on wife Ingrid in the fifties. The nightmare of war is becoming a receding memory and concerns of ordinary life are his subject: love and betrayal, desire, jealousy, parenting. He handles the films set in this period with the ease and instinct for perfection of a master. He achieves a sad and gentle lyricism in the camera work. He eyes the ordinary happenings of life and creates an enchanted universe. As Pauline Kael said, great movies are rarely perfect and it's easy to forgive him the rather absurd twist in the tail in La Paura. This is a gem of a woodcut.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

2011-07-18T05:08:00.002+05:30

Woody Allen, 104m, 1985

This has been called a black comedy but it is appropriate to call it a philosophical manifesto. Comedy happens to be his idiom but behind the irreverence is a morbidly thoughtful and incisive mind. His movies are verbose and witty and the humor sometimes laid on, particularly at a juncture when he steps on the scatological, so to say, unnecessarily.

Judah Rosenthal, a successful Jewish ophthalmologist, has an extramarital affair but when he wants to wriggle out after two years, the woman threatens to destroy his marriage as well as career unless he divorces his wife to marry her. He is viciously cornered and solves his problem by getting her murdered. This is as black as a Woody Allen film can get since both the murder and the body is for real (a movie with even a moderately gory corpse loses the qualification of being called any sort of comedy). He is tormented with thoughts of guilt and based on his religious upbringing, which he had long since rejected, forced to reconsider whether indeed there is, as his father once taught him, a god with eyes which see all. After a period of hand wringing a la Ms Macbeth, life is back to normal. He has got away with murder, but has he indeed?

A parallel plot relates to Allen as an unsuccessful film maker, who gets involved with Mia Farrow, who ditches him for a man Allen despises and envies for his success. This part of the tale is presumably the misdemeanor. He has gotten away with a mere broken heart, his marriage and his luster less career intact, unstained by what for want of a better word let's call sin.

Allen has addressed his own religious and philosophical concerns. Is there right and wrong, is there a god or his equivalent? (Yet a third strand of the story tells of a life affirming Professor Levi, who Allen admires and respects. Levi walks out of a window one day with no explanation.) Allen is probably too smart for his own good and cannot reconcile himself to a moral order to the universe (the classic holocaust argument is interposed). He ends up in the manner of existentialists by concluding that faith and meaning are what we endow things with. Judah hasn't really gotten away with his deed, because actions are their own reward or retribution, and all one does either ennobles or demeans our being. The movie concludes with the words of the deceased Levi that one is the sum total of one's choices.

Woody Allen's films are intelligent, witty, philosophical but beautiful is the word which does not spring to mind. He is talented in his chosen domain and this movie is perhaps the distillate of his art and craft.

Korol Lir

2011-07-17T05:40:00.009+05:30

Kozintsev, 1971, 132m

This is the Soviet version of Lear, which I abandoned just where Edmund steps in. The script is faithful to what must be a standard translation of the play, going by subtitles. The movie starts with a grandiose panoramic spectacle of the age of feudalism, duly populated with lepers, beggars and hunchbacks. The aim obviously is to inform us how bad things were in the pre-socialistic days. You have the the prols in their worn tatters crawling in a biblical procession, to the almost grotesquely primitive palaces of indeterminable vintage owned by those in control of the reins. The lot of the exploiters would seem to have been equally pathetic. It is an age of wood, from wheels to walls to ramparts. We have beggars, the maimed with their crutches, and sick being dragged in wooden trolleys. This mournful vista, duly trumpeted by a pompous musical score of Shostakovich, is supposed to remind us of Lear's words in the play:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

In fact, the herds of people are more reminders of the Communist and Fascist regimes than of a pre-modern age.

This is for one thing too spectacular for a Shakespeare drama. The power of the bard is entirely in the words, even more than the acting. Spectacle detracts from the essence. Shakespearean drama is about individuals, not aggregates--the humblest of minions and underlings are persons. To make the play into a statement of political ideology is really twisting it out of shape. The subject matter is an individual's journey through life. Further it makes little sense to see a literal translation of something you know in the original. Kurosawa's trans-creations of Lear and Macbeth are not bound by the original and depart freely in plot, language to transmute into the idiom of cinema. This is stilted, melodramatic, an unsavory reminder of an oppressive era, providing little insight into the great play.

Umberto D

2011-07-16T00:34:00.003+05:30

Vittorio de Sica, 1952, 88m

Umberto is a government pensioner on the point of eviction from his apartment, where he lives alone with his small dog Flike. He does not have the 15000 lire owed in rent arrears and the landlady, for reasons of her own, wants him out. He tries to raise money by every possible means at one time even getting himself admitted to a hospital on some pretext. But nothing is working out and we see him driven step by step to a pitch of desperation and sadness. He cannot bring himself to beg on a street corner (he was a respectable official all his life). Finally we see him gazing with a kind of longing at a train rushing by. But what will become of Flike?

This is a perfect piece of humanistic cinema about the sadness and loneliness which can be a part of old age. More than that, it is about the pain of living. Vittorio de Sica has captured a life's throttled cry of despair. But it's not all bleakness. It has humor, courage, defiance, defeat and a rising from the ashes. It is a picture of "life" through eyes of compassion. Nor is it about old age alone. Somewhere the artist has touched what one may call universal life. The youthful pregnant maid who does not know which of her two lovers is the father now faces an uncertain future, no less than Umberto. And the yelping puppy who itself has had some perilous brushes with disaster is no less an expression of existence. Everything melds. The black and white camera work, the mournful score and the pitch perfect acting make this a great movie to watch.

Dead Man Walking

2011-07-14T15:36:00.008+05:30

1995, 122m

Violence is deeply rooted in human beings and this film ends up making a case more in favor of capital punishment even as it set out to do the opposite. Although it examines the issue from different viewpoints, the one emotion that comes across authentically is the pain, anger and grief of the two sets of parents of the murdered teenagers. Sean Penn as the condemned man gives a fine portrayal as a man of impaired mental development. He is obstinate, feeling-less and vain and only impending death hours or minutes away bursts his dams of defense. As he finally "walks" the sister encourages him about death on the basis of her faith and it is at this point alone that the film achieves moments of transcendence.

The abolitionist viewpoint is subtle and goes against our "natural" grain of thinking. The Catholic nun with her armory of faith becomes an object of ridicule from all quarters including her clerical colleagues and even the condemned man himself who only wants to use her as an intermediary to exhaust all legal stratagems to change the death penalty to life imprisonment. The execution of the death by lethal injection is graphically portrayed and the cold machinery of state sanctioned death is the only chilling argument of what seems like necessary justice. The process of execution is described by the lawyer defending him:

We strap the guy up. We anesthetize him with shot number one. Then we give him shot number two which implodes his lungs.And shot number three stops his heart.We put him to death just like an old horse. His face just goes to sleep while inside, his organs are going through Armageddon. His facial muscles would contort, but shot number one relaxes those muscles. So we don't have to see any horror show. We don't have to taste the blood of revenge while this human being's organs writhe, twist, contort. We just sit there quietly,nod our heads and say: "Justice has been done."

Intellectually, it is easy to argue against capital punishment, but only an unusual sea change in our habitual thinking could give it substance.

Th sensational subject of the film manages to grip your attention till the end. The gruesome crime itself is depicted in short segments like pieces of a jig saw spread through the movie and the picture completes only towards the end. One gets the feeling of pieces sewed up, rather than being apiece. The film is an adequate and fleshed out but somewhat superficial treatment, with an eye to the box office. One may be tempted to compare it with Dekalog 5.

Cartesius

2011-07-13T01:55:00.002+05:30

Rossellini, 1974, 152m
This is a documentary/biopic about Rene Descartes (1596-1650) the French philosopher and mathematician. He was a contemporary of Galileo but by exercise of prudence avoided any collision course with the authorities, though his ideas, like those of Galileo, specially regarding planetary motion, were at variance with Christian religious dogma of his time. Rosselini has made a beautiful Rembrandt tinted film depicting the era. The life of the well to do Descartes as he zealously devotes his life to research is presented without the least effort at dramatization.

We share the excitement of the scholarly life and the all consuming passion of a mind absorbed by the search for elusive truths. We attend lectures of men of medicine as they carry out dissections and hotly debate Harvey's new theory of blood circulation. We come to understand the perilous linkage between science, philosophy and religion in those times. The authenticity and grace of the narrative along with the polished and quickening dialog carry us through the long running time with little exhaustion as we savor the colors and aroma of that bygone time. Through the genius of an inspired director, one shares the wonder of existence and the fascination of history..

This is a movie about the excitement of the pursuit of knowledge, the delight in the exercise of intellect, and finally, perhaps, lack of commitment so often characteristic of scientists. Camus has said that Galileo was right in not putting his own life on the line, because the truths at stake were not important enough, inasmuch they don't touch our lives. Camus interestingly further states that the only important philosophical question is that of suicide, whether life is worth living or not.

Journey to Italy

2011-07-12T11:55:00.003+05:30

Rossellini, 1954, 84m

This is a film from Rossellini's middle period, after his acclaimed war trilogy and before he shifted to TV to give around a dozen faithfully historical films with a view to educating people. The female lead is Rossellini's then wife Ingrid Bergman and one may wonder how much is autobiographical. A wealthy English couple arrives in Naples to sell of some property inherited by them. They have been married for eight years and have reached a point of mutual boredom and resentfulness, finding little amusement with each other. We are taken through a series of incidents where their relationship is portrayed with a delicate brush.

Woven into this waning romance is a beautiful travelogue, as Catherine soaks in the fascinating sights and sounds of the place. We are introduced to the museum with it's awesome ancient sculpture, the sulphur springs whose vapors spread up to the horizon, the catacombs with thousands of skulls are displayed as a chilling monument to mortality, and finally the ruins of Vesuvius, which was wiped out in a moment as the volcano erupted two thousand years ago, much like an ancient Hiroshima. These exquisite journeys, showing us things through the disturbed mind of the heroine, is itself adequate reason to see the film.

It is as an authentic portrait of human relationships that the film excels. The marriage bond is particularly fragile, which is why it has cemented by strong legal and ethical boundaries. Peoples' feelings towards each other shift from moment to moment, influenced by even a word or a gesture. It is a film of magnificent refinement and delicacy, as Rossellini's ventures into the mysteries and wonders of ordinary life.

Salo

2011-07-11T15:36:00.008+05:30

Pasolini, 1979, 112m

This is an unwatcheable film, in it's unrestrained outpouring of scatological, sado-masochistic and sexual perversion culminating in torture and sadistically engineered murders. This is a true holocaust film and the metaphors are hideously apt. It made me think at once of Claude Lanzmann's unforgettable Shoah. It is based on Marquis de Sade's well known novel, 120 Days of Sodom.

Salo is a town in Italy which was the headquarters of a short lived Nazi-Fascist puppet regime from 1943-45. De Sade's seventeenth century narrative is transported in time and place to Salo in 1944 and the perpetrators are four individuals in positions of power who use the opportunity offered by the impending defeat to enact their fantasies on a group of chosen young men and women. Also, it is Pasolini's last film, since he was murdered soon after it's release, further magnifying it's ill fame. However no one can deny that Pasolini was a great artist, and the film is far from a purposeless exercise to shock for the sake of shocking.

The film is a powerful metaphor for the blinding of entire nations, specifically narrowed on the transient fascist regime in the town of Salo. Ordinary means would not be commensurate to express the realities that transpired, and the director's choice of using the French novel as a metaphor is impeccable. The subject of the holocaust hardly admits of decorous language or sentimental finery of images. This film is as crude, shrill and agonized as its subject demands. Even Dante's Inferno belongs to gentler times when things like the Holocaust were beyond the ken. The squalor of the soul which Salo reveals is a reality we have yet to learn to face. This is no mad dream but seldom visited chambers of the human soul. It calls for a strong stomach.

A Mad Dream, an essay by Pasolini

The Rise of Louis XIV

2011-07-10T20:47:00.000+05:30

Rossellini, 1966, 92m

In the last third of his career, Rossellini abandoned cinema for TV to turn out a series of historical and biographical films made from an educational viewpoint. The present film is a fascinating slice of French history as it examines the reign of Louis XIV, starting with his seizure of real power at the death of his trusted adviser and prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin. The concluding part shows us the court of the sun king in Versailles, in it's zenith of ostentation and excess, as the king consumes an endless meal with the entire nobility in attendance. The film abounds in veracious historical detail like a group of doctors attending to the dying cardinal, trying out or contemplating remedies like extensive bleeding, or consumption of gold and precious stones, as they smell and examine his perspiration and urine.

The film is worthwhile as a lucid, colorful and entertaining presentation of the political system of monarchy through one of its extreme manifestations.

Germany, Year Zero

2011-07-09T16:49:00.032+05:30

Rossellini, 1947, 73m

The concluding sequence of this film is one of the most harrowing, tragic and perfect things in cinema. Rossellini remarked that this was the only thing in the film that occupied and interested him. A boy around twelve years, driven to desperation by the pressures of hunger and want, poisons his ailing father in an earlier part. Now, driven hither and thither, by unnameable sorrow and remorse, he leaps to his death from the top of a war devastated, bomb hollowed ruin. Just before, he is seen wandering among the ruins of Berlin, now kicking a football as he meets a group of children, now going up and down the staircases surrounded by piles of rubble, lost in thoughts, far beyond the reach of tears. He looks down to find his family calling out to him. He is momentarily dizzy and scared by the height but the tunnel of emotion sucks him deeper, and, in incremental steps, he is led to the edge of his doom or salvation. To quote from Rosenbaum:

It is especially in this closing section—anticipating Robert Bresson’s Mouchette in its depiction of a child oscillating between the contradictory reflexes and demands of childhood and adulthood, where suicide itself becomes the culmination of a child’s game—that Rossellini’s film achieves its devastating lucidity..... his playing with a piece of rubble as if it were a gun, are integrated into Edmund’s behavior, which includes some desultory stabs at hopscotch and similar kinds of play.

Even though this is a powerful film about life among the smoldering ashes and a documentary which can hardly be equaled, it is in essence a human tragedy of epic compression. Edmund is a twelve year old Hamlet, and the movie is almost as little to do with it's historical milieu, as Hamlet is about Denmark. We see Edmund aging in the last fifteen minutes as he is overpowered by unfamiliar feelings. The child suicide is an apt metaphor for the profanity of fascism. It is a weird, gut wrenching sequence, exquisitely composed.

An earlier review is here.

The Shawshank Redemption

2011-07-08T00:25:00.009+05:30

1994, 141m

A riveting drama about life in a US prison. A young banker is awarded a double life sentence for killing his wife and her lover, a crime of which he is fact not guilty. The story is mainly about the corruption and brutality of the officials as well as the inmates towards each other. It has many twists and turns and tests one's credulity at many points. It is based on a clever and skillful Stephen King yarn, after all.

It might be termed a modern fable about the travails of imprisonment, with a somewhat far fetched happy ending appended which was probably responsible for it's popularity over the years. Somewhere along the way it gets confused between chronicling the harsh realities of prison and it's determination to insinuate the soaring human spirit, in this case not unaided by luck.

The fairy tale finale seems like a conjurer's trick. In any case, to escape from the prison after thirty and forty years respectively and land oneself into an idyllic Zululand-on-the Sea is a conclusion lacking in depth and power hardly qualifying for the word redemption. Brooks as the aging librarian who is paroled after fifty years but fails to connect with the world he encounters outside, choosing to end his life, is a more convincing figure, apiece with the magnitude and duration of the suffering. Andrew Duresme is no Count of Monte Cristo with the cleansing vindictive flame--he remains a clever Mozart loving banker, a sore thumb in the environment into which chance lands him. Dead Man Walking was a far more consistently knit and powerful film of the genre.

Overall, a juvenile romance with touches of soap, which manages to grip your attention for it's long running time. So now we know that good does triumph over evil, and how.

Washington Post Review

Shoeshine

2011-07-05T20:47:00.000+05:30

Vittorio de Sica, 1949, 84m

This is de Sica's first film and a favorite of Pauline Kael. It tells of two boys working as shoeshines in harsh post WW2 Rome. They fulfill their dream of buying a horse by entering into dubious transactions but are eventually framed and arrested for a burglary of which they are innocent. The movie is about the heartbreak and dehumanization of these youngsters as they are thrown into an overcrowded prison for young offenders.

This first of the director's film is marked by the humanism which runs through his entire work. The film is restrained and realistic and nowhere tries to project the law enforcing establishment as excessively wicked or perverted. The cops too have a human touch. It is a portrait of the period it depicts and human beings, specially children, trapped in an environment and circumstances which they have learnt to regard as the norm of life. This is humanity waking up from the dream of war.

Notes towards a film about India

2011-07-04T00:02:00.001+05:30

Pasolini, 1969, 33m

This is a film about a film about or set in India which never got made. Pasolini was in the process of formulating a plot as well as exploring with his camera. He starts by asking a variety of people whether they would be willing to offer their bodies to feed a starving tiger. Sadhus, rivers, eagles hovering, faces, autorickshas, the Indian parliament. Pasolini indifferently roves over the images which one imagines a tourist to associate with this land.

Once upon a time there was a Maharaja, who, after India became independent, decides to give up his palace and luxury to fend for himself as a commoner. The family falls into ill days, and the film concludes with a cremation, presumably of the scion.

The movie includes some interviews, with farmers, industrial workers, people on the street, news paper editors, eliciting dull responses to dull questions.

The film has nothing to recommend it except the director's name and the short running time. It is no surprise it never got made, which attests to his sound judgement. It is a relic and a curio.

How to Die in Oregon

2011-07-02T18:49:00.003+05:30

2011, 107m

Physician assisted suicide became legal in the American state of Oregon in 1994. Such a law already exists in three European countries.The documentary examines the working of the law and the experience of some patients who chose this route out of their suffering. The main focus of the film is on Cody Curtis, a middle aged woman stricken with liver cancer. The film mainly consists of interviews of patients, doctors and family members, and the travails, sorrows and emotional upheavals on the route from taking the decision to it's final implementation. It is a story made up of tears, courage and laced with much humor, black or white, as for example when one person describes the taste of his dispensation, for posterity's benefit, as "woody". This is a film which may disturb, but which can hardly be devoid of interest to anyone subject to the law of mortality.

Suicide has always been with us, for all the moral and legal sanctions attached to it. Death is scary, but life being painful as it is, one suspects that what keeps a lot people from doing oneself in is the ignorance or unavailabity of the means and the messiness of the whole business. Not least of it's attractions is the economy it effects, which may positively dispose those miserly inclined. An intelligent person contemplating it may yet make it his study. But with the mushrooming of legislation like this making it a graduated painless reversible choice under the supervision of the best that medical science has to offer, it's popularity could well increase. Five hundred Oregonians have already benefited from the law.

One of the fundamental features of life, the very foundation stone of philosophy, are the uncertainties attached to death. By reducing, if not eliminating, these, the way we view life alters considerably. As such, this may be the ultimate luxury, or trip, that science can offer. If, that is, convenience and comfort is what you seek.

One must hasten to add that the benefit of the Death with Dignity Law is only available to terminal cases and circumscribed by other stringent conditions, making it's use as a convenient escape route difficult, if not impossible. From the back of Jack Kevorkian's Volkswagon, to the gleaming interiors of hospitals, and reassuring no nonsense practitioners, is a long way.

You Don't Know Jack: the Life and Deaths of Jack Kevorkian

2011-07-01T11:18:00.005+05:30

Levinson, 2010, 134m

Medically assisted suicide is a procedure where the patient is provided with the facilities to terminate his life but must pull the plug or press the switch himself, making it a voluntary act and absolving the administrator. In euthanasia or mercy killing the mechanism is triggered by the doctor. Currently, euthanasia is legalized in Belgium, Switzerland and Oregon, USA.

Jack is Kevorkian, nicknamed Dr Death. He attained fame and notoriety for facilitating 130 assisted suicides, all furtively and often with makeshift arrangements like the back of a car. Finally he carried out an act of euthanasia , video taping the event. The tape was nationally broadcast on TV. Kevorkian was tried and convicted for second degree murder and sentenced from 10 to 20 years. He served eight and half, after which he was paroled. He died in June 2011 at age 83.

The movie stars Al Pacino in the title role. Going by the film, Kevorkian, apart from his humanitarian concerns as a doctor, seems to have been a zealot fighting for what he made his life's cause. He even went on hunger strike on occasions protesting the unjustness of his arrest. "If Gandhi could do it, so can I." The film is absorbing and informative, with an excellent script and acting all round. The concluding drama at the Supreme Court is particularly well done.

The question, the ethical side, the legislation, the social consequences is a complex enigma of a far reaching nature touching the core of life and cannot be lightly discussed.

At least, We Know Jack Now.

Oedipus the King

2011-06-28T00:02:00.006+05:30

Pasolini, 1967, 104m, "Edipo Re", based on Sophocles

The oracle proclaims that Oedipus, a heir apparent, will murder his father and marry his mother. Hearing this cataclysmic prophecy, Oedipus flees to distance himself from those who he believes are his parents.

Unlike Euripedes Medea, who is the deliberate architect and agent of a barbaric revenge on her deserting lover, Oedipus, for all his qualities, is a helpless pawn of destiny, caught in the vice like jaws of a deus ex machina, borne towards destruction. Here indeed we are in a universe in which human beings are to the gods as "flies to wanton boys" who kill them for sport.

Pasolini gives us an unusual treatment of the play, which opens and closes in the modern era, but transports us to ancient times for the bulk of the film. His treatment has an anthropological flavor, using the costumes, chants and mud dwellings of different peoples with complete artistic liberty to evoke a harsh and terrifying ancient era, with great poetical force more than historical veracity. The film uses the director's favorite barren desert landscapes, with undulating dunes and scorched mud or brick buildings, which seem to grow out of the ground. This is an apt stage to act out dramas of torment or exaltation. It seems as if the camera and the desert is the main protagonist of his intensely spiritual cinema.

Pasolini is a director who feels comfortable tackling large themes. He is an artist of compassion and humanism. He has been called a Catholic communist, an unbeliever who yearned for faith. His vision is integrated and holistic, unlike the fragmented analytic introspection which is the hallmark of many current film makers like Charlie Kaufmann.

Medea

2011-06-26T12:34:00.001+05:30

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75), 1969, 105m, Italy, Maria Callas as Medea

This is good enough as an introduction to Greek drama, conveying it's primeval spirit and power in a nutshell. It's savagery leaves Macbeth many paces lagging. One can guess that the period of Greek civilization depicted was barbaric compared to modern or Elizabethan times. Pasolini was a precocious multi faceted artist, murdered for his communist leanings. He was an unbeliever who longed to believe. He won the Silver Lion at Venice for his ardently poetical interpretation of The Gospel According to Matthew, in which Christ is portrayed in strictly human dimensions.

Medea, a barbarian Princess, elopes with Jason, chopping her brother and strewing his limbs to stall her father and his men, who are pursuing. She is later abandoned by Jason for one of his own kingdom. She wrecks a bloody revenge, destroying his family, including her own children by him.

The movie has a hypnotic quality attesting to the passion of the film maker. The score is a monotonous drone of a chant which waxes and wanes like a chorus. The first half of the film has an anthropological flavor and transports us to a semi savage period. The film starts off with a gory human sacrifice performed in the full glare of the community to propitiate the forces which determine the harvest. From there the movie takes on the plot of Euripides play more or less.

This is a magnificent and powerful film and one can hardly imagine anyone but Callas to do justice to the intense opera like quality of the Greek drama.

Vincent Canby's review

Hamlet

2011-06-24T12:32:00.002+05:30

Director: Doran, 2009 TV, 3 hours, David Tennant as Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Company

Claudius wears a business suit, and the bespectacled grave digger is dressed in immaculate tweeds like a well to do gentleman. Many of the characters, including Horatio, are non-white and one of the two envoys to Norway is a black woman. Hamlet himself is a nervous and twitchy young man in modern western attire, like a graduate student, at his most disturbed with an unbuttoned white shirt. Surveillance devices like TV cameras have been planted by Claudius to keep the incomprehensible prince in sight. Hamlet makes a movie of Claudius' reaction to the play within the play. All these anachronisms come very naturally and go to show that the drama is beyond time and place. Since most of us are familiar with the drama, and know what comes next, the TV film arouses a kind of suspense by making us wonder how things are going to be presented and the director gives us a welcome novelty of touch (always unobtrusive) at every twist and corner.

This is not to say that this is gimmickry. By freeing itself from constraints of costume and setting--we almost seem to on a time and space machine which hops from period to period--the film focuses on the essence of the play: the speeches, the acting, the depth of human experience. The film has a fluency of narrative and is a most enjoyable and unburden some revisit to the classic. David Tennant gives us a convincing and powerful Hamlet. At first his thin and office clerk like very unprincely appearance made him seem an unlikely candidate but we forget all that in the abandon of his portrayal--Hamlet, after all, is universal in his composition, and need not be confined in any particular physical mold. The seasoned Patrick Stewart, balding, bespectacled, and across sixty, gives a magnificent performance as Claudius.

This is the best of Hamlets, certainly better than the theatrically ornate and unnecessarily gloomy Laurence Olivier take, and even the over cinematic and applauded Kenneth Branaugh film. The least meddlesome are the best of Shakespearean enactments. After all, a successful enactment is one which takes you a step closer to the bard, and I feel inclined to another reading.

A Performance of Macbeth

2011-06-22T16:25:00.014+05:30

Trevor Nunn, 1979, 145m, Ian McKellan (Macbeth), Judi Dench (Lady Macbeth), Royal Shakespeare Company (TV)

This is purest drama enhanced by the camera's ability to telescope the human face as it intimately eavesdrops on it's changing expressions, mirroring the turmoil of the inner landscape. All superfluities are dispensed: the murder , the field of battle, the forest on the move. The focus of the direction is on what goes on in the mind. The leading pair have given unforgettable performances taking one as close to the heart of the drama as one's own ability to empathize with life at such an extremity. This beats any other Shakespeare performance on the cinema screen. The darkness of the screen is broken only by the faces and figures of the players and the camera revolves and leaps to scrutinize the faces and the expressions they wear as they melt, ripple or freeze. The faces seem like lamps. It makes you think of Bergman, but the bard's scalding intensity and breadth can hardly be scaled by mere mortals. A youthful McKellan gives a mouth frothing crazed version of Macbeth where one might tend to imagine a middle aged, calculating and philosophical person. Judi Dench has a matronly stoutness and the emotional range to take us through the shades of the metamorphosing anti-heroine. She was made for this role.

Once again, this (the play) is a pinnacle of art that leaves one struck with amazement that such could ever have been written by a human being. This is language like lava: thick, turgid, sulphurous. It is the kind of literature one can imagine to have been born only in a vision or a dream. Shakespeare takes the part of a murderous couple and shows us the human beings dwelling therein. In fact, the drama could not have power or be comprehensible if we did not partake of their natures. Trevor Nunn and his troupe take us one step closer to this unique self image of humankind. Perhaps this is the greatest of the plays.

King Lear

2011-06-20T22:58:00.004+05:30

Trevor Nunn, 2008, 153m, Royal Shakespeare Company, Ian McKellan as Lear

This is a fine presentation of the play, without cinematographic frills. The enjoyment of Shakespeare lies overwhelmingly in the flow of words and the performer's ability to breathe life and authenticity into them. The only other production of King Lear I have seen is the 1982 version in the BBC series directed by Jonathan Miller, in which Michael Hordern gave us a restrained but powerful and nuanced Lear. The present film is superior in terms of production values, being of more recent date, and adequately conveys the drama, to add yet another canvas to come closer to the dramatist's intentions. The performances I find most memorable are Frances Barber as Goneril and Philip Winchester as Edmund. Frances' portrayal is far from the stereotyped vixen which Goneril is usually made to seem.

To gather my immediate thoughts soon after seeing the film it seems Shakespeare gives us a picture of common mortals in their frailty and foibles. The Lear of towering royal rages dissolves in a short span of several hundred lines into a helpless old beggar shivering in the storm. He transforms through the experience as though the storm and what went before had pierced his egoistic delusions to awaken in him dormant compassion and understanding. He metamorphoses more than disintegrates. Edmund, portrayed so well, may well be one of our modern politicians or men of business, who are well served by their single mindedness and lack of scruple. The pantheon of Shakespeare's characters are like humankind in procession. As my late friend, Prof Darshan Singh Maini, was fond of saying, Shakespeare was "God's spy on earth", using Lear's words to Cordelia. It is as though he miraculously packed inside him the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of people--ruler and ruled, women equally as men, villains more than saints, beggars, bawds, jokers. The present play, like some others, scrutinys the human experience to the brink, the very last breath of life. It is amazing, the familiarity and ease with which Shakespeare is able to approach the ultimate dilemma and mystery of death.

Since everybody does not have the chance to see stage productions, such TV versions of great drama, like the BBC series, are invaluable. Cinema seems to detract more than enhance from the richness of the drama, which needs no addition of spectacular surroundings.

Ran

2011-06-14T08:40:00.001+05:30

Akira Kurosawa, 160m, 1985

Hidetora, a feudal lord who controls three castles, in his senescence, cedes his castles, Lear like, to his three sons. Two of them prove disloyal, and he is driven to a point, where ie has no option but ritual suicide, which also he fails to perform because of lack of the proper instrument. Crazed, he wanders into a storm with his faithful fool, to be reconciled with his Cordelia like third son, but the gods that be, in their perversion, allow them but a momentary reconciliation before the beloved third son is felled by an arrow.

The problem is that one keeps reading Lear into the movie, whereas it would perhaps be best enjoyed if you don't know the Shakespeare play. This is a film of great visual splendor. We have armies clashing, horses neighing, castles burning, concubines in mutual suicide, and vistas of Japan's traditional architecture and mountainous terrain, all in the glare of bright sunshine (or the light cast by houses on fire) and the blue dome of the sky. Kurosawa is a master of battlefield choreography and the pennants of the rival armies as they flutter (Japan seems to e a windy place) give the battles a ceremonial and carnival liveliness. Particularly poetic is the repeated symbolism of cloud formations in changing moods, which mark the dramatic turning points. Light is one thing the movie is not short of.

The most impressive acting performance, and perhaps the films high point, is Mieko Harada as the demoniacal Lady Sue. Her controlled yet explosive performance embodies her deep and single minded hunger for revenge for the destruction of her own clan and family. Hidetora's transformation into insanity is well depicted by his incomprehension as the world he has constructed over a lifetime goes up in a tower of flames.

The film is a shrine which had to be visited, and it does add something to the pantheon of Lear depictions, but the drama still remains something of a mystery. I have the Soviet and Ian McLellan's versions on queue, and if the gods allow, there is always the wine of the play itself to savor again.

Before the devil knows you're dead

2011-06-06T19:28:00.008+05:30

Sidney Lumet, 2007, 115m

This is a drama of a crime veering tragicomically off the planned trajectory. It is a film chiselled to perfection which holds you by the seat from end to end. The pieces of the story go back and forth in time and are assembled with wicked ingenuity to grip the viewer with suspense and uncertainty about what is going to come next. The pace never lets up and the film gathers momentum till it explodes to a befitting finale. A gem of film craft and story telling which is worth watching for it's sheer wizardry of execution. The high point is the subdued but mesmeric acting performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman. He completely embodies the seemingly confident yet inwardly crumbling character of Andy Hanson.

It is a film about the depths of desperation which money can drive people to, the terrifying spirals of evil in which they can be caught. It begins with a mother's slaughter and concludes with a gut wrenching act of revenge. The title of this sombre masterpiece derives from a saying, "Spend a half hour in heaven before the devil knows you're dead." Lumet died in his late eighties soon after this film. It is a chilling vision of human fallibility seen from the pinnacle of age, experience and impending death. It almost seems as though the great director had taken a spot on the pulpit and was teaching the rationale of the Christian faith through this tragic modern parable with it's macabre grandeur..

High and Low

2011-06-03T14:56:00.006+05:30

Kurosawa, 1963, 143m

The wrong child is kidnapped. As long as businessman Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) thought it was his own, he was all too ready to shell out the enormous thirty million yen ransom demand. But the next moment it becomes clear that it is not his but the chauffeur's son who has been abducted, and now he somersaults and refuses to pay, all the more because his financial situation (a bit complicated to explain) is such that he is likely to be driven roofless if he pays. Through the importunity of the chauffeur, the persuasiveness of his own wife, and his own inner awakening, he finally decides to pay the ransom at the cost of impending ruin. The child is recovered. The movie now turns into a thriller of police investigations.

What makes the movie interesting is the motive. The culprit turns out to be not one of the business rivals, as expected, but a demented unknown person. A poor man, he has a sickening jealousy of the well to do, and with devilish cunning he plans and works out his revenge. Marx was perhaps not mistaken in thinking that the material divide is the most elemental in all societies.

The film is plodding by Kurosawa standards and for the most is a fairly routine detective story, and the suspense is enough to keep you attached to the seat for two and a half hours. The cinematography is a salvaging feature and we see the sights and sounds of the faded world of post war Japan--the harbors, the crowds, the alleys, the undulating terrain and the sea at Yokohama, all captured in a wistful nostalgic black and white. Mifune delivers as always, with his cobra like intensity, a Kinsky without the kinks.

This belongs to the dwindling genre of wholesome, uplifting entertainment.

Infamous

2011-06-02T14:32:00.003+05:30

2006, 121m

The best one can say about this film is that it expands the territory covered by the other two. Capote (2005) was more about the writer than the criminals, whereas In Cold Blood (1967) was more or less a straight thriller about the crime and the people involved. This film squeezes out some extra mileage by giving a portrait richer in detail about the fascinating personality of the author, though Toby Jones' portrayal lacks the texture and depth of Hoffman, though more finely etched. The treatment of the criminals' personalities is heavy handed, unnecessarily stretched, and maudlin. Keeping the other two films in mind, much of this is definitely redundant. The 2005 film was sufficient, and the other two seem just for curiosity's sake. The three movies in their totality are informative about how this particular best seller got written, and the pain, effort and sacrifice behind a creative triumph. Capote wrote little after this. Nor did his friend, Harper Lee, write a second novel after the one which got her the Presidential Medal.

Nothing like bloodshed to sustain interest over a span of three films.

In Cold Blood

2011-06-01T16:20:00.007+05:30

1967, 134m

This film is based on Truman Capote's docu-novel of the same name. The writing of that novel was worthy of a movie by itself, which materialized as Capote (2005) ( referred in previous post) and Infamous(2006). The present film adds little to Capote, which was a more sophisticated and multidimensional film. I intend, for the sake of completism, to seeing Infamous too, as the unavoidable third part of a trilogy.

The film covers the sensational Clutter murders in 1959, in which an entire well to do family comprising the parents and two teenagers, were killed for robbery. The present film covers most of the grisly details. Predictably, it tries to link the crime with childhood deprivation. The black and white photography and jazzy score creates a sombre melancholy mood. As Capote said, the event was the intersection of two worlds which co-exist, the world of respectable "decent" folk, and the social underbelly where jungle laws prevail.

Robert Blake as Perry and Scott Wilson as Dick give convincing authentic performances. Perry's mind is hunched by his early trauma. He sheds tears even as he slits a throat.Wilson is shifty, jocular, talented in criminality and completely scruple free--a likable conman.

I realized soon into the film that I had already seen it, but then it was like it seeing anew, so thoroughly was it forgotten, and that goes to show it's not memorable, though as well made, riveting and competent as the state of the art.

Capote

2011-05-31T01:51:00.001+05:30

2005, 114m

Truman Capote was a prominent American writer, known, among other things, for inventing the genre of non-fiction novel. The present film is about how his novel, In Cold Blood, got written. The novel is based on a 1959 multiple murder in an isolated farmhouse, which Capote (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) decided to make the subject of his book. The two killers are arrested and convicted early into the film. Capote, using bribery, lying and influence, is able to enter into a long interaction with one of the two killers, driven by his need to create, not to speak of the associated fame and wealth. He even helps the pair with their appeals, prolonging the legal process by four years.

Apart from the psychological aspects of the criminals, and Capote's own difficult childhood, the film is interesting about the way the novel took shape. At one point he says he feels it as if he and Perry, one of the killers grew up in the same room. He (Capote) escaped from the front door while Perry left from the back door. Capote is completely immersed in his work, and feigns all kinds of deception and sympathy to gain the confidence of Perry, who is the subject of his study. Towards the end, he even longs for the Supreme Court to turn down the last appeal and confirm the sentence, so he can finish his book.

It is an engrossing film which manages to spare us unnecessary depiction of the gruesome events (with the exception of some minimal segments), but the horror is , through indirection, all the more effectively conveyed. Hoffman is adroit in portraying peculiar character types, and this is a film adequate enough to pass an hour or two. It makes up in execution, control and restraint it's lack of depth. It makes me curious to see the movie based on the novel and also to read at least a short story by Capote.

Ganashatru

2011-05-28T13:17:00.000+05:30

Ray, 1989, 100m

This is the second last of Ray's films, made at the age of 68. It is ponderous compared to earlier films, as it examines man in relation to society. It is based on Ibsen's drama, An Enemy of the People, which it follows fairly closely, as far as I can make out from a synopsis.

Ashoke Gupta (a now somewhat wrinkled Soumitra Chatterjee) is employed as a medical practitioner in Chandipore, a small town with a temple which attracts large number of pilgrims, which is the city's primary source of income. Some people come down with a serious variety of jaundice, which the conscientious doctor is able to trace to the water supply of the temple. To rectify this would call for major repairs which would affect the traffic of pilgrims as well as the reputation of the temple. As the doctor seeks to awaken the people to an impending epidemic, he is brought into headlong confrontation with the authorities, headed by his own brother the president of the municipal committee. The situation escalates and the doctor soon finds himself homeless, jobless and friendless.

The film is a straightforward and powerful portrayal of the elemental conflict of good and evil, drawn in broad bold strokes, compared to the subtlety and delicacy of many of the more famous films. Ray was ever experimental, and his films do not fall into a single genre. This tempts me to read the play on which it is based.

Adventures of Goopy and Bagha

2011-05-28T00:37:00.008+05:30

Satyajit Ray, 48m, 1968

This is one of several films which Ray made for children.

Goopy, a rustic lad, is banished in disgrace (mounted on a donkey) by the music loving Rajah of a small village for his atrocious playing on the Tanpura. Soon he encounters Bagha, another youngster in identical straits except that the offending instrument was a drum. They are set upon by a lion who makes his exit causing no more damage than a bit of roaring. Very soon they meet the hilariously ferocious King of Ghosts and we are treated to a prolonged ballet performed by his retinue of ghosts depicting, for no apparent reason, an enactment of the country's colonial past. The benign Devil grants them three boons, the first of which is to summon food of choice anytime, anywhere. Next, they are able to bring about rapprochement between two armies poise for conflict by the simple stratagem of causing it to rain sweets. The starved warriors forget everything in their eagerness to do justice to the refreshments. Not just that, the tearfully reconciled brothers, leaders of the two armies, express their gratitude by offering the hands of their respective daughters to the two friends.

One of the nice things is the melodious singing of Goopy , set to words which are a mixture of poetry and nonsense. The power of musical entrancement was one of the three boons. This was used in the peacemaking process also, as the friends regale the armies with the futility of fighting.

This is an utterly lightweight tale told with abandon, and great fun all the way. It is a contrast to Western fairy tales, which, below the surface, are anything but child-like, as they present themes of death, destruction and doom.

This definitely makes me want to see Ray's other films in this genre, there being around half a dozen.

Here is one of the songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7u6faceJIw

Mahapurush (The Holy Man)

2011-05-24T01:35:00.001+05:30

Ray, 61m, 1965

This is possibly the least of the Ray movies. This is comedy bordering on social satire. Movies with a message are not his forte.

This is about a conman posing as a Guru. He claims to be several thousand years old and to have encountered the likes of Jesus and Buddha. He has a following and offers magical solutions to problems. A group of friends take on the task of exposure. Lacking in any kind of psychological depth or richness of characters for which Ray is known, it evokes little mirth and the climax turns out to be far short of hilarious. In any case, it is a relief to encounter a Ray film in which it is unnecessary to search for adequate words or to go hoarse in the strain of being eloquent. Unbroken perfection is also tiresome and this flawed non-entity of a film cuts him down to human proportions.

Prasad Mukherjee as the Guru gives gives a versatile acting performance.

The Masque of the Red Death

2011-05-23T00:26:00.011+05:30

Roger Corman, 1965, 88m

This is my introduction to Roger Forman, the King of B-movies. They say it is better to be a king in the god forsaken Place rather than a lackey elsewhere and the title bestowed on Corman is indicative of his phenomenal success in the niche he chose to inhabit—low budget quickies catering to a market which does not fancy subtlety. He boasted having made a hundred films and never losing a cent.

The movie under review is based on a story of Edgar Allan Poe, and this is what attracted me to it. But as a matter of fact it is a potpourri of several of Poe’s tales, trying to glue them into something one may be able to consume in an undiscriminating mood.

An epidemic of a dreaded disease called the red death visits the kingdom of the cruel and perverted Prince Prospero. The prince has already sold himself to the devil and his pleasures in life consist in tormenting his subjects with unspeakable acts of violence, degradation and humiliation. Among his courtiers is the dwarf Hop Frog (borrowed from the story of the same name) and his beloved, a midget dancer. Part of the story is about how Hop Frog avenges the insult to his friend, and that itself could be the material for a tightly knit tale of minutely contrived revenge, but is here perfunctorily inserted as if to make up the stipulated weight of the consignment.

Poe’s stories, springing from his demented personality, are visions of hell, with a unique macabre beauty. Death, decay, premature burial, chilling vendettas (The Cask of Amontillado), terror of painful death approaching inch by inch (The Pit and the Pendulum)—such are the themes that sprang up from this fertile but sick imagination. I remember in my teens to have been star struck by this small collection of tales.

The flavor and Gothic majesty of Poe’s fevered mind is altogether missing. Corman’s movie is merely a juvenile high school drama. I have a feeling most of the audience would comprise of that age group. The acting is stiff and labored and the characters are either marching like soldiers on parade or overdoing the bacchanals. The canvas is crimson, more the color of overflowing chilly sauce than blood. The idea seems to assemble and deliver the product at the earliest, assembling the available parts like lego pieces.

A movie need not be faithful to source material but here the product is sold on the strength of Poe’s renown, even using the title of one of his stories. Everything is in the public domain so the late Mr Poe can do no more than groan in his grave.

But as an ardent Poe aficionado, I claim the right to protest this desecration. In the unlikely event of my visiting the US, one of my acts would be to lay a wreath at the writer’s grave. Certainly, nobody should judge Poe, genuine if not great artist that he was, by this tomfoolery.

Incidentally, I have heard it said by no less than Roger Ebert that Poe could have been a fine film director, by virtue of his strong visual imagination. I wonder how he would have reacted to this. I am reminded of the film Hannibal, in which the musically inclined and cannibalistic Dr Lector makes mince pies out of a violinist whose playing was out of tune in a musical performance the previous evening, and serves it graciously to other members of the symphony orchestra (of course without disclosing the recipe), much to their approbation. Perhaps that was a bit extreme.

Kapurush (The Coward)

2011-05-22T00:23:00.003+05:30

Satyajit Ray, 66m, 1965

This is a profound , minutely etched and exquisitely delicate character study. Amit (Soumitra, Ray's favorite), a writer, has a car breakdown in a sparsely inhabited region of tea gardens in Eastern India. He is offered shelter by a wealthy estate manager Bimal Gupta, and it turns out that his wife Karuna (Madhabi) is the woman Amit wooed in college but was not courageous enough to marry. The story flashes between past and present. Amit proves unequal to the hour of crisis when Karuna visits him in his hostel. She asks him for immediate marriage or else she would be cast into a bleak future planned out by her well meaning but orthodox foster parents, alarmed as they are by the ongoing affair. Satyajit Ray is a great admirer of the fortitude of Indian women and Karuna, in this marvelous portrayal, takes a place in his gallery. Her inner strength and anger is tightly leashed, and pride prevents her from expressing the pain of her dilemma in words. But her eyes and expressions are communicate all. Bimal (Haradhan Banerjee), as the loud, good natured, anglicized husband gives an equally riveting performance.

Ray's treatment of the Amit character is contemptuous and unsympathetic. This is a story about how we write out the scripts of our lives and the way a crisis lays bare human character as if in a stroke of lightening. Ray's greatness lies in his sensitivity to the human heart, his attunement to the subtlest strains of feeling, and the ability to put the drama of the dignity of life (the feminine viewpoint particularly) on the screen, with refinement and delicacy.

To be or not to be

2011-05-21T11:37:00.002+05:30

Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947), 1942, 93m

Woody Allen's films are sometimes described as Lubitsch type comedies, and that was what made me want to encounter the work of this director whose name has become an adjective. The film itself was entertaining enough, though the identification with Allen was not at all apparent. The film is about the adventures of a troupe of actors in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. Hitler or his impersonator appear and the doubles and mixing of identities gives rise to numerous amusing situations. The film is said to have shocked many people because it appears to make light out of the grim horrors of the occupation of Poland right when it was happening. If a comparison is to be made on the basis of this single film, one might say the humor is crass compared to Woody Allen.

Whatever Works

2011-05-19T11:57:00.007+05:30

Woody Allen, 2009, 91m

This is the other end of the spectrum, Woody Allen's latest at 74. He is still enacting himself, except that it's Larry David impersonating Allen, in the guise of a missed genius. There is considerable physical similarity and for quite a time I thought it was Allen himself grown bald and senile, if not less talkative. What emerges is that nothing has changed. People change little if at all, over the course of a lifetime. They return to where they started. The film depicts the relationship of the retired professor with a teenager. The familiar witticisms propel the film which is amusing in a mild way. The title expresses the philosophy which he has presumably derived from his journey of life and one can quote from the script:

"That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself. Because its by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck, than you'd like to admit."

This is self indulgent, good natured, broad minded film with a contemporaneous feel. It would seem that Woody Allen has come full circle to return to the well known films of his younger days. What I found missing was the growth and evolution one might hope a lifetime brings. Except for a\ mellowing one might say that this takes it's place in his life work as evidence of the stasis that life usually is.

Annie Hall

2011-05-18T02:27:00.004+05:30

1977, Woody Allen, 93m

This film turned out to be exactly what I expected, and far below the riveting point. As my third film from him, I have a fair template of the branded product in my mind. There was little outside the numerous and often brilliant one liners, the references to high brow cultural subjects handled unaffectedly (that being what he is) and nuggets of homely or philosophical wisdom characterized by ease of delivery. This is too American a movie to be really effective in another hemisphere and it was with a sense of relief that I watched the end credits rolling up. The subject is the complexity, brief flowering and decay of relationships. It's the dolce vita all over again, tragic only in it's sheer boredom and absence of meaning. To paraphrase one of the witticisms from the film, life is like a restaurant where not only is the food bad, but also the portions are small. Life, he says is divided between the horrible (like being maimed or leprous), everything else being miserable, so one may be thankful to be merely miserable. The film is about those lucky enough to be miserable. But, from another viewpoint, even the horrible may be preferable to the enuii of a living death, implicit in the comforts of misery.

I still look forward to some of the "dark and serious" films of Woody Allen. I'm curious to know what time has done to this jittery philosopher.

Chimes at Midnight

2011-05-16T23:54:00.003+05:30

Orson Welles, 113m, 1965

The character of Falstaff appears in three of Shakespeare's plays. Orson Welles takes on the daunting task of portraying tis complex comic villain in this compilation from the different plays (Henry IV and V and MWW), bound up in a seamless plot. This is one of the best screen adaptations of Shakespeare. Elizabethan England is brought alive in this boisterous mosaic which takes us through taverns, brothels and the court. Even more than the central characters of Falstaff (played by Orson) or the young and dissolute Prince Hal (later to blossom into the charismatic Henry V) or his antagonist Hotspur, or the aging Henry IV (played by the seasoned Gielgud) is the galaxy of secondary characters, who have a dickensian vitality even though they are cardboard creatures. Perhaps the most brilliant is Justice Shallow, played by Alan Webb.

The brilliant b/w photography has shades of Citizen Kane with shafts of light streaming in diagonally through skylights or ventilators in darkened interiors. The battle scenes are unusually realistic in their brutality. Falstaff is played with aplomb, but it seems Welles all the way--the identification is uncanny.

Manhattan

2011-05-13T23:17:00.008+05:30

Woody Allen, 1979, 93m

Woody Allen made this film at the age of 42. It seems to be very autobiographical and personal in a straightforward way, even though the events may not have occurred. It is a sentimental, nostalgic portrait of the city in which it is set and the dusky black and white photography to the score of George Gershwin, makes the ancient and weathered phenomenon that is NY spring to life, as it could only through the eyes of someone who grew up there. The skyline of tall buildings, the river with it's bridge, the crowds, people drifting along the walkways lost in reverie--everything is lovingly lensed. One of the best sequences is when the lead couple gets caught in a thunderstorm. The film has something of the turgid neon-lit metropolis of Taxi Driver, and something of the beauty of decadence one associates with the word parisienne. After all, NY must be the old world of the New World.

The story is an effervescent romance set among a group of people with minds occupied by culture, books and ideas, and their own fragile affairs--it seems like an accurate portrait of the kind of set of people Woody must have grown up with, somewhat weird in thought and expression, but ordinarily human enough just a bit below the surface. This gives Woody, braniac that he is, ample oppurtunity to exercise his wit and gentle sparkling brand of humor, as the script roves intelligently but shallowly over the fashionable topics of the young academic crowd.The dialog is laced with unselfconscious references to artists, philosophers and books, and the characters are smart enough to recognise their shallowness. It is a good enough movie for similarly inclined folk, who may be kept pleasurably entertained by the unending dazzle of the repartee. Diane Keaton's former husband, whom she extolls in a mixture of awe and hate, as an overpwering prodigy of virility and intellect, "who taught me everything",turns out to be a dimunitive, balding "homunculus". This is obvoiously humorously self referential and shows Woody Allens broad humanity which embraces gays, intellectual morons and homunculi like himself (all manner of peripherals and battered souls). Woody Allen is his good hearted, brainy,creative self. Diane Keaton is brilliant in her emotionally confused, culturally pretentious and high spirited role.

It is a film that often touches the heartstrings. It is a refined, polished yet shallow movie, as perhaps it is meant to be, because Woody Allen is not one to feign profundity about the business of life. It is also a movie about human rootlessness, even in the best of times and places.

Love and Death

2011-05-04T20:17:00.003+05:30

Woody Allen, 1976, 84m

This is my first film from this famous director, and it really goes beyond my expectations. This looks like an undiscovered cinematic vein of gold which may gobble much time and attention. It was equally welcome to re-encounter the beautiful Diane Keaton, so far known only as the bewildered and helpless Mrs Godfather the Second. Here she has a stellar role and an opportunity to exercise the complete range of her talent. One looks forward to Annie Hall, Allen's award winner which again features Diane.

This is a movie falling under the blanket of screwball comedy. More specifically, it is a philosophical comedy which fools around with sex, laced with wit, innuendos and abundant titter provoking wisecracks. The script scintillates as it irreverently engages in serious questions while always maintaining a dead pan face. Woody is obviously a person of erudition, aman more of words and thoughts than of feelings, except perhaps the weedy ones, which coming from a guy with his biodata and biometrics, is not too surprising. The Napoleon figure serves as a foil, and perhaps embodies Woody's own fantasies. We seem to be getting psychoanalytic, but he virtually begs for it, in so many words. But everything is fun, even the sickly ones, because they hide gentleness and refinement. As he says, "My disgustingness is the best part of me."

It is a costume drama set in nineteenth century Russia and we enjoy many hilarious situations as Boris (Allen) unwillingly joins the forces fighting the invading French under Napoleon. He gets to marry by a quirk of fate the woman he has unsuccessfully wooed for long; becomes a decorated national hero; plots to assassinate Napoleon in conspiracy with his wife Sonya (Keaton) but is held back by ethical qualms. We also see the Man wit the Scythe dancing away. The comedy is detail perfect, from the inflexions of expression, to the layers and multiplicity of meaning in the dialog.

This is in fact a movie comparable in philosophical depth to Bergman. Woody Allen however has a far lighter touch (there are no answers anyway) as he examines questions of love, sex, death, war and morality. Here is none of the gloom, and even should you need pinches of salt for the ideas part, it's all part of the comedy, which is solid stuff.

More than anything else, Woody Allen reminds me of Voltaire's rapier sharp Candide.

A sample of the script:

"The question is have I learned anything about life. Only that human being are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun. The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter... if it turns out that there IS a God, I don't think that He's evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He's an underachiever. After all, there are worse things in life than death. If you've ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know what I'm talking about. The key is, to not think of death as an end, but as more of a very effective way to cut down on your expenses. Regarding love, heh, what can you say? It's not the quantity of your sexual relations that counts. It's the quality. On the other hand if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into."

French Connection Part 2

2011-04-27T20:36:00.004+05:30

1975, 119m

This is a film which perfectly fulfills the purpose and expectation with which one sees it, namely an easy watch and to kill time idly. The ground was all ready well prepared by part one, which was actually half a movie, since the villain, a really slimy figure (see image) whom one heartily desired to see receiving his deserts, got away at the end, which was rather unfair on the viewer, and hence the sequel was almost mandatory. The present one takes off in exact sequence, and everything takes place in the cheerful and elegant surroundings of Marseilles, in contrast to the dark interiors of NY in Part 1. A novel feature is the enforced drug addiction of the hero when he is captured by the crooks, and the subsequent painfully comic de-addiction process. Gene Hackman as a goofy cop obsessively chasing his quarry, the rivalries and exchanges of the French and US police, finally ripening into respect, and the language barriers faced by the American, make this a rich and riveting entertainment. Comparing with Part 1 seems pointless, since they are like two halves of a film (even though directors are different), and in any good film, the second half is invariably more enjoyable.

Devi

2011-04-27T00:03:00.005+05:30

Satyajit Ray, 93m, 1960

The year is 1860. Daya (Sharmila) is the daughter in law of an upper class Bengali family. Her husband has progressive ideas and dreams of going to England. While he is away to Calcutta, Daya's father in law has a dream that Daya is an incarnation of the goddess Kali. As a lifelong devotee of the diety he develops an overpowering conviction. Patriarch that he is, soon everybody, including Daya is convinced about the authenticity of the vision. In no time at all she becomes an object of devotion for the countryside as people in hundreds stream to the place where she remains seated all day long to be worshiped. To top it all, she becomes the instrument of a seemingly miraculous cure when a child who is supposedly dead is revived by her ministration. And much more.

The film is deeper than a mere condemnation of superstition. We see an entire community gripped by religious fervor nourished by an apparent miracle. It is a powerful and authentic portrait of the minds of people in the period depicted. This is a dark and brooding movie pervaded with religious symbolism which examines the deeper layers of the human psyche from a rational yet sympathetic viewpoint. Ray is not seeing the medieval mind from the viewpoint of a westernized intellectual that he was. He feels it from inside--he is almost one of the milling crowds that throng towards the devi. We are too as we listen to the intoxicating devotional melodies and participate in the shared beliefs that must have offered solace and warmth, if not hope, in those benighted times. Ray is not given to judgementalism. He never repeats himself and this is another unique and unforgettable film.

The Fountainhead

2011-04-24T20:28:00.011+05:30

King Vidor, 1949, 114m

Howard Roark, an architect, is the protagonist, created to serve as a mouthpiece to embody Ayn Rand's strident philosophy of ultra-individualism, for which this film might serve as a crash course. The film is based on Rand's thick novel of the same name. The script also is by her. Ayn Rands philosophy of "objectivism" speaks of man's prerogative to pursue his self interest, as opposed to the idea that a human being is a means for the collective good. Somewhere locked in this way of thinking is the idea of the Superman as contrasted to the herd. Rand, who grew up in Russia before immigrating to America, is a champion of capitalism, as a system which allows an individual full scope to pursue his individual dream.

The architect Roark risks his livelihood, reputation and love in order to design buildings according to his own genius, refusing to pander to popular trends. In one sequence he gets his lady love to blow up a huge building designed by him, because changes to the design had been made by others. The story builds up as an engrossing if highly voluble drama, punctuated by extended patches of philosophical discourse, ending in a court room speech where Roark has an opportunity to deliver a straightforward lecture on his philosophy. To quote in part:

"The reasoning mind cannot not be subordinated to the needs, opinions, or wishes of others. It is not an object of sacrifice... It is an ancient conflict. It has another name: the individual against the collective. ...Our country, the noblest country in the history of men, was based on the principle of individualism.... It was a country where a man was free to seek his own happiness, to gain and produce, not to give up and renounce....... I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim....The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing....I do not care to work or live on any others. My terms are a man's right to exist for his own sake. "

What do you think of that? Even though it sounds reasonable that people are ends not means and entitled to seek self fulfillment, one may ask whether self fulfillment is possible at other's cost. After all, we are supposed to be social animals.

At least movies really talked in the forties and thirties! Think of Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Who's minding the baby?, Ducksoup and even Citizen Kane. Nothing like the later films, where the things are muttered at bare audibility with minimal opening of the trapdoor. (Chigurh and Vito Corleone). The dialog is all in paragraphs, and loud, in this one.

The film is hardly distinguished by cinematic merits. However it is an unusual experiment as a device to put forth ideas in the raw. The philosophical novel has been translated into philosophical cinema with considerable success. Perhaps the correct view of life lies somewhere between Ayn Rand's overbearing individualism and the individual-demeaning extinct philosophy of communism.

The French Connection

2011-04-22T18:30:00.009+05:30

1971, 103m

I ventured on this film, drawn by Gene Hackman, multiple awards, including best film, and the expectation of a sizzling thriller. The expectation is but minimally fulfilled. The twists and turns of the plot are not self explanatory, nor worth the effort of sorting out, and the constant motion of men and cars is just about bearable. Towards the end the film builds up to a gripping climax, as the drug smugglers are cornered--more would be telling. The film is famous for it's chase sequence, as a car tries to keep pace with a train hijacked by a killer. Apart from that, we have attractive shots of a French town, an exquisite villa jutting on the French seaside populated by an attractive young female, even though all this is ill begotten luscious fruit of the narcotics trade. We also have glimpses of the culinary preferences of high profile crooks.

Highly forgettable and missable, proving that old gold is sometimes not so golden. Or maybe one has become harder to thrill.

The Conversation

2011-04-20T22:39:00.005+05:30

Coppola, 1974, 113m

Harry Caul is a professional snooper, a state of the art surveillance man proud of his wizardry with all kinds of electronic gadgetry. The movie dates after Watergate in which wire tapping was a major issue. It starts with Caul at work recording the conversation of a couple as they move around in a crowded public place, an amazing but credible feat. The eves dropping is being being paid for-a hefty amount-by the woman's husband, a powerful non-person, referred to somewhat disparagingly as the Director. The possibility of the operation culminating in murder hangs throughout the film, and the suspense, laced with humor, builds up smoothly till a bloody culmination.

This is a low key superbly crafted suspense drama. The inner workings of this seedy, esoteric profession with the rivalries of it's small fraternity of experts, is skillfully and comically presented. The variety and sophistication of the gadgetry is displayed in an exhibition, like a display of the latest in burglary tools. The line beyond which spying on people becomes illegal is never clear. Obviously, if you have the money, it is possible to listen on to anything anybody whispers anywhere.

Saul, played by Gene Hackman, comes out as a poor dear, a helpless, confused, amusing prodigy. He just happens to be in the profession, and proud to be the best man in it. Talk of technology taking over. He is neurotic, if not paranoid, and can scarcely trust his own shadow. He is troubled by conscience, no great asset in his line. And finally he demonstrates courage, knowing lives are at stake.

The opening sequence is memorable. The quiet camera glides down from eagle height on a bustling and colorful American street scene. We are soon immersed in the crowd and picking the threads of the ingenious plot, as the clandestine couple and the hapless surveillance man move around in their assigned roles. The equipment is parked in different places, the center being inside a van parked on the side. It is a superb opening which plunges us directly into the heart of the film..

The Wild Bunch

2011-04-12T02:25:00.006+05:30

Sam Peckinpah, 1969, 144m

Three sets of brigands, white or chocolate skinned, some in military uniforms, real or stolen, engage in a prolonged shooting spree sprawled over the Mexican-US border. Who was shooting whom and why was less than crystal clear to me and did not seem particularly important. I was drawn to this movie as the magnum opus of a celebrated director whose work I am unfamiliar with but it did not prove to be my cup of tea, and it was something of an achievement to complete the marathon in about twenty interruptions spread out over two days, to be able to add Peckinpah's Wild Bunch to my array of scalps. There is much scenic splendor of a colorfully barren landscape, and the quaint Mexican villages with their poor, bawdy and ragged inhabitants belong to a medieval age, though the year is 1913. The villainous General treats us to a feast of women, killings and and drunkenness. But it is make believe violence and the bodies collapsing like nine-pins might as well be dummies. The male camaraderie is rather self conscious and the style of speech also sounds stereotyped. The attempted humanization of the outlaws does not touch any chord. Everything is deja vu. Maybe Westerns, like War movies, is an extinct genre. More likely, at some point, movie watching itself becomes wearisome.

Godfather Part III

2011-03-31T01:29:00.003+05:30

Coppola, 1990, 170m

The film came seventeen years after part 2 and twenty years have advanced in the story. A tense, furrowed and diabetic Michael Corleone desperately seeks to erase the past and buy respectability for the family. The series could well serve as a model for the depth of in-family ties, with the scepter of fratricide thrown in. The film starts with a ceremony where the Vatican confers a distinction on him in return for a donation of a hundred million (dollars, of-course). But then he is tied up in the knots of the past and the harder he tries and the higher he goes the dirtier and messier it gets. He is haunted by the murder of his elder brother which he ordered. His wife Kay has been separated since long.

The chain of evil and corruption leads right up to the papacy and the poisoning of a newly elected pope. This is yet another feast of killings, each served with the love , artistry and craftsmanship of a master chef. The movie is further spiced with a love interest in the infatuation of Michael's daughter Mary, played by Coppola's daughter Mary, for her ultra-violent first cousin and future Don Vincent. All three films break free from the dark brown interiors which set the pervasive mood, with tracts in the beauty and charm of the sun drenched Sicilian landscape, with it's quaint and weathered villas and timeless gardens and vineyards, a land of olives and tomatoes.

The film is marked with pageants and ceremonies like the first two. The murders, mostly of rival crooks, are events of victorious jubilation, to the accompaniment of music, fireworks and crowds. Murder in Coppola's films is cathartic more than foul, nor really so serious, any more than in Hitchcock or Agatha Christie. Michael's remorse seems comical at times (like a poor cousin of Macbeth) as though the movie had tired of it's own genre.

On the whole, comparisons aside, the film is an engrossing conclusion to the series. Unfortunately there does not seem room for yet another sequel, although the movie does leave a third generation Godfather , the illegitimate son of the late headstrong Santino of Part 1, whose temper cost him his life, on the loose. But if ever there were to be one, I'm sure it would do well, since the Corleones are as addictive as Harry Potter.

Apocalypse Now

2011-03-26T23:13:00.008+05:30

Coppola, 1979, 147m

The Vietnam war was a while ago and this film does not arouse the sense of immediacy it might have done in it's time and place. At best it is a lecture on the gruesomeness of war. The brilliantly colored photography captures the grandeur of the natural landscape. However, the continuous and prolonged scenes of villages on flame, the rattle of machine gun fire and swarms of helicopters swooping like birds of prey becomes tedious. The human story is weakly developed and one is held captive by the expectation of Brando's appearance at the end which proves the greatest disappointment. He is a bloated Godfather (a role which may have clung to him) who is scarcely visible, more comical than charismatic, as he is supposed to be. His speech expressing his admiration for the grit of the Vietnamese (mutilation of children inoculated by the Americans) makes them look perversely barbaric more than heroic. The film appears to be wallowing in narcissism in it's heavy tone of contrition. The repentance seems weak and watery for an outsider. For all it's visual splendor, the film is lacking in substance and is quite burdensome.

Godfather Part I (or just Godfather)

2011-03-25T14:06:00.003+05:30

Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 177m

The story of Vito Corleone, the first Godfather, unforgettably played by a hardly recognizable Brando, has become part of folk-lore and lexicon. Often classed as one of the best ever, I can at least say it had me glued for three hours, in my third viewing over the years. It is thriller-noire, a dark, brooding, elegantly violent, solidly constructed chunk of celluloid. To compare it with Part 2 is unnecessary since they are very different kinds of movies. The canvas of 1 is tightly knit and is confined to the bloody feuds of the "five families" who control the illegal businesses. Part 2 is more ambitious in it's portrayal of the immigrant's experience as it takes us across several generations. 2 is a vivid picture of the rich complexities that constitute the US.

The palette is sepia and it is a film of darkness and golden brown. Nina Rota's melancholy score goes well with the lives of these very human creatures eking out their own survival and ambitions in the crevices of society. The Don yearns for the day when the family will buy it's way to the daylight of legitimacy, maybe even become Senators. Michael wants to steer clear of the family business, but destiny sucks him into becoming it's most ruthless practitioner. This is Brando's film, even though he is on the screen only for a few small intervals. He rarely shows emotion (twice, in fact, to chastise his godson Johnny and eldest son Santino). His voice rarely rises above a purr as he straightens his hair in a contemplative gesture, a picture of leashed power. He does not directly order a single killing. He even has the magnanimity to forgo revenge for the brutal assassination of Santino, in the larger interests of "business" and the safety of his youngest son Michael, his ablest offspring and successor to be. One of the most dramatic sequences is the Summit where the bloody lords of the gang-world assemble to negotiate a truce and settle the differences around the narcotics trade. Another memorable sequence is the Don's grief when he learns of Santino's killing, his veins bursting as his lips spread out in a silent sob. Or the glad smile bursting through his semi-consciousness when Michael tells him that he will hereafter be part of the family business. And the heart attack that strikes him down finally as he childishly plays with his grandson.

It is difficult to lay one's finger as to where the magic of the movie lies. Perhaps the dish of violence has been served with refinement and artistry without passing judgement. The characters ring true and authentic and it shows us the world in all it's complexities which goes beyond simple categories and descriptions. Perhaps it is a a voyeuristic delight to gain admission into an inaccessible world, like the British aristocracy.

Godfather Part 2

2011-03-21T19:38:00.005+05:30

Francis Ford Coppola, 203m, 1974

The Godfather trilogy is about a family of Mafia moghals spanning several generations and sprawling across different countries and continents. This second part of the series, like the first, won the Academy Award for Best Film. It is a human drama of epic proportion and whoever compared it to a Shakespeare play had a point. Although it belongs to the gangster genre, in essence it is an inspired study of human nature and destiny. This world of mobsters is a very human world, where family bonds are paramount, with a rigid code of loyalty, honor and revenge.

The movie intertwines two stories. The first tells us what happened before part one, titled simply Godfather-how Vito Corleone, played as an aging Don by Brando, and portrayed as a young man in part two by Robert de Niro, became what he was. Part one tells us about the final chapters of the mature Don's life, after his power and empire are already established, his death and the succession of the business to his youngest and ablest son, Michael, played by Al Pacino. (The movie will not make sense without seeing the first part).

Godfather II starts in Sicily when Vito is nine and his family is wiped out in a vendetta, and his hasty and furtive transportation to America. In several episodes, we see his ascension by virtue of courage, intelligence and charisma into a charming, successful and ruthless power of the underworld. In parallel, we trace the fortunes of his successor, Michael. The "business" expands as the chain of bloodshed continues. Michael becomes more and more ruthless and at the end of the film, we find him grim and unhappy on his throne, his own family blown to pieces, ambition still unsatiated. Like Shakespeare's tragedies both parts one and two conclude with the screen littered with a pile of corpses.

It is a film with many dimensions and hard to encapsulate in a paragraph. It is a tragedy of ambition, power and family relations. It is also quintessentially American and depicts the underworld with love, admiration and acceptance. For America has grown out of wilderness and it's past has not been entirely idyllic. The savage murders interspersed with Catholic iconography shows the criminal world as a familiar habitat well integrated into the social system perhaps with it's own functions and contributions. There seems more homeliness than strangeness about the ways, norms and customs of this world. It is an established sub-culture. As they say America loves her gangsters.

Coppola has a sense of dramatic grandeur of mixing the sacred with the violent. Vito's first murder is celebrated with a grand fire work display as crowds swell in the illuminated New York streets. It is the casting of the die, a coronation, and a coming of age. In part one, the baptism of Michael's first son in a grand church ceremony as the organ churns sublimely, and his succession to the blood red worn out seat of power was interspersed with a macabre chain of killings to eliminate each of the enemies of the Corleone dynasty. If the Corleones did not have the destiny to be rulers of the criminal world, they may have been something great, and Coppola sees the grandeur in this saga of human ascent and decline. Perhaps the film is about love for the canvas of America. The Godfather series is an epic in three Acts and America in all it's largeness is it's grand theme.

One of the best sequences depicts the nine year old Vito's arrival in America. On a magenta tinted screen the Statue of Liberaty swings into view-the first step into a new world. Like Shakespeare, Coppola mixes murder, poetry and drama in a heady celebration of life.

Black Swan

2011-03-17T23:45:00.015+05:30

A hallucinating ballerina mutilates herself with a sharp edged object and thereafter delivers an outstanding performance as the villainous Black Swan in Swan Lake. Maybe the director needs to have done the same because wings of any description is precisely what the movie lacks.

A virile teacher/ballet-company director is a hard taskmaster who uses unnecessarily convoluted and unconventional tactics, mostly of an erotic nature, to get the kind of transcendent performance he has in mind. He starts off as a leering Dracula/Don Juan/Rasputin but gives the audience a smile in the final shot to reassure all he was just a nice guy trying to be helpful all this time. But the film itself hardly takes off from ground level and is mired in excesses of different kinds from start to end. Throw in substance induced hallucinogenic experiences, banal routines of sexuality of both shades, blur the lines between reality and delusion, and make the plot sufficiently ambiguous to give food for mental mastication on the evening after and you have the kind of pseudo sophisticated potboiler which will keep the cash boxes jingling with music rivaling that of the great Tchaikovsky. It is not worth the effort sifting reality and hallucination because it's celluloid anyway. This is the profundity of the spirit starved affluent masses, the kind of conjuring trick which surveys will reveal as commercially safe in these confabulated times, a clever Hollywood masala. A redeeming feature is the snatches from the ballet itself.

This is a very ordinary movie, one more from the assembly line, with little shelf life.

Reflections on Life, Death and Love: Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson

2011-03-08T11:46:00.007+05:30

This 52 minute interview of the the two lifelong friends and collaborators in cinema and theater was filmed for TV in 1999. Bergman was 81 and Josephson 75 at the time. The title is pretentious since the subject matter is predominantly the amorous side of their lives. Bergman had around half a dozen marriages, affairs with all his film heroines, and sired numerous offspring, all graciously looked after by their mothers, who, according to him, were equally accommodating not to complain about him to the children. At the end of the day, he emerges as quite a family man, a doting grandfather and great grandfather, easier than being a parent. The last of Bergman's marriages (to another Ingrid, not the actress) lasted twenty four years, and seems to have been the real thing, whatever that means, which his celebrity status probably merits, ending in her death at an early age, leaving him very forlorn. "I was continuously in love since I was fourteen. It started with my puritanical mother, with whom no overt expression was permitted, except when I was sick, so naturally I was sick often, which she, being a nurse, saw through easily." After Ingrid's death, he gave in to his natural propensity for solitude. He refers briefly to the inconveniences of aging, like taking minutes to put a button. We learn little about the wellsprings of his creativity, except perhaps his obsession with Strindberg, whose entire work he devoured at an early age. Professionally, he was focussed, disciplined and tyrannical. About death, he has little to add, except not being too scared. A salacious 52 minutes, worthy of Playboy.

Click HERE for the text of the interview. The video on Youtube is HERE.

Germany Year Zero

2011-03-07T02:07:00.008+05:30

Roberto Rossellini, 70m, 1948

The opening credits include the following statement: "When ideologies distance themselves from Christian morality and piety, the very foundation of human life, they become criminal folly."

This timeless film is set in post WW2 Berlin, bombed and disfigured beyond recognition. The Americans have occupied the country and people live perched in the skeletal remains. Tenacious life is crawling out from the burrows. Trams resume . People wage a grim struggle in a period of shortages and inflation, as currency is replaced by barter. Hitler is already a distancing memory in the excruciating priorities of survival, even as Nazi memorabilia fetches a modest price. A gramophone record of the late Fuehrer's speech plays shrill, ludicrous and ghostly in an abandoned ruin.

Like the previous film, this too starts and goes on laboriously till it reaches it's shattering climax. Rossellini reportedly said, only the climax, where the boy protagonist wanders in delirium in the hollowed out upper storeys of a building, interested him. Since this is a film worth watching, the plot details are better omitted. Rossellini is a passionate, humanistic and inspired film maker. This is one more heart rending portrayal of perilous childhood to place besides Ray, de Sica, Kiarostami and Tarkovsky.

Thanks are due to Nathanael Hood for introducing this director.

Rome, Open City

2011-03-06T01:41:00.004+05:30

Roberto Rossellini, 1945, 105m, Italy

World War 2 was a long time ago, and I set out on this film without much enthusiasm. Who has heard of the Italian Resistance to a Nazi Occupation? Historical complexities apart, this not so easily watchable film which drags laboriously for the first hour builds up to an unforgettable and powerful human drama.

Rome is occupied and the populace responds in different ways to the continuing traumas. Manfredi is a Communist and leads a section of the resistance movement. A priest acts as an intermediary conveying messages. Manfredi and the priest are finally captured and finally tortured and shot respectively without breaking. The film realistically depicts the inherent spiritual flame capable of inspiring many others. Extremes of adversity bring out the best and worst, both courage and cowardice. The movie was made immediately after the liberation of Rome and is an impassioned statement of the eternal brutality of war made in the heat of the moment. It has a documentary feel and texture. It is truthful and the voice of a people.

The film probably needs a second watch to appreciate the realistic details of the place and time which have been captured so well in the bleak black and white cinematography. The iconic still above shows the female lead Pina (played by the charismatic Anna Magnini) just before she is shot while running towards her just arrested fiance.

Bosley Crowther's Review

The Flowers of St. Francis

2011-02-22T01:48:00.009+05:30

Roberto Rossellini, 1950, 83m, Italy

St Francis of Assisi a Christian messianic figure lived in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. The film is based on a book of the same name which recounts fifty three disconnected incidents from his life-of which the movie selects nine- referred to as flowers because of their child like sweetness. The unpretentious Saint and his dozen or so bare footed friends and followers rove in the undulating Italian country side like a troupe of joyful schoolboys whose pranks comprise somewhat fantastic acts of piety and love. The mood of the film is of exaltation born from tranformative inner experience, resulting in a zeal to share the joy with others. The highly charged prologue, a hymn of adoration and gratitude for creation, probably a direct quote from the original source, might easily be a Vedic chant:

Praise be to Thee, my Lord,through all Thy creatures......especially brother Sun,who illuminates the day. And beautiful is he and radiant with great splendour. Of thee, most High he bears the likeness.Praise be my Lord, for sister Moon and for the stars. ln heaven, Thou hast formed them luminous, precious and fair. Praise be my Lord,for brother Wind,...and for the air and clouds,and all the weather......through which you give all Thy creatures nourishment.Praise be my Lord,for sister Water...she is greatly helpful, Praise be my Lord,for brother Fire......Praise be my Lord,for our sister, Mother Earth,who sustains us and governs us...and brings forth diverse fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

We see Francis conversing and preaching to a little bird, who trustingly perches on his hand, making no effort to fly off. The ragged bare footed band, joined by a camaraderie of faith, seem to be having a jolly time, enduring even the beatings and abuse they sometimes encounter as a joyful and welcome service to Christ. In one discourse, in the course of which they are beaten by a house owner on whom they insist on imposing their evangelization, Francis explains true happiness (this sounds like a Sufi discourse):

..even if we could make the blind see the deaf hear, exorcise demons,and raise the dead - this is not perfect happiness. Even if we knew the language of the angels, the soul's secrets,this is not perfect happiness.Were we to convert all to Christ,this is not perfect happiness.Tell me, where is perfect happiness?....... God, in his mercy, will surely show us where perfect happiness is.....(at this point the two of them receive a thorough beating).....Brother Leone, lamb of God, now that we've suffered all this for Christ it is perfect happiness.Above all the graces which Christ gives His followers is the grace to conquer oneself. Only in this is perfect happiness! We poor monks roam the world for love of others.and to endure suffering for love of Him.Only in this is perfect happiness!

In one of the hilarious but moving stories one of the comrades is captured by a tyrant but escapes with his life after sufficiently puzzling him with his attitude and behavior to win him over. This is one of the realistic natural miracles which form the substance of the film. It is reminiscent of the Buddha's encounter with the ferocious demon Angulimal.

This is beyond doubt a great film, born out of the deep spiritual insight of the director. It is outstanding cinema and captures in immaculate black and white the spirit of Christianity in pristine. Perhaps the greatest spiritual film I have seen, far, far from the madding crowds of Hollywood and Cannes..

Ek Din Pratidin (One Day, Every Day)

2011-02-20T21:24:00.003+05:30

Mrinal Sen, 1980, 95m, Bangla

Mrinal Sen has a sharp perception of the bitter realities experienced by the lower middle class, presumably born of personal experience. This one is pretty despairing.

We have a large family comprising three generations living in a tenement comprising a room or two. Many other family's are crowded into this congested bee-hive of a building, with people all but peering into each other's quarters and lives. There is a single tap which serves all tenants. Neighbors can be civil, helpful, interfering or judgmental. As the title implies, life is a continuous, repetitive and bitter struggle to make ends meet and to retain dignity and decencies in a rigid and unforgiving society. His Kharij is set in a similar if not the same group housing building.

Chinu (Mamata Shankar), the eldest of four siblings, is the sole earning member in the family. One day she fails to return home. What could have happened-was she held up at work, or involved in an accident, or, hard to imagine, is she seeing someone? The alarm mounts as the day deepens into night and soon the whole neighborhood are observers and participants, each with their own theories and surmises, mostly derogatory. Why do they have to send a daughter for work and depend on her earnings? Police are not helpful and there is a tense sequence where the youger brother visits the morgue to identify the dead bodies found by the authorities. Finally the family bonds explode in mutual recrimination and accusations.

This is certainly depressing material, perhaps unnecessarily so, but it should hit us in a vulnerable spot. If Ray soars in hope and optimism even as he portrays extremities of suffering, Sen's world is an insider's dreary and claustrophobic vision. He sees no glamor in the curse of poverty.

Mercifully, India has been changing dramatically since the film was made.

The Clockwork Orange

2011-02-19T19:51:00.004+05:30

Stanley Kubrick, 1971, 130m

This is a film with a message: it's the capacity for choice that makes us human. To be capable of good and bad and to choose to be good is what makes us good. Divested of this capacity and to be programmed to behave only one way makes us into clockwork automatons--Clockwork Oranges. Orange is appropriately ambiguous because how can a biological organism-a nice, beautiful, juicy orange-be like a passive assemblage of nuts, bolts and levers?

Alex is the magnetic leader of a band of young men whose way of life is to go around beating up people and molesting women. The setting is England, the near future, a world sufficiently like and unlike ours to make it a grotesque uncanny valley. The language of the script is a parody of English: words and phrases from different periods (thou and oh my brothers, and a liberal sprinkling of sovietisms to suggest a totalitarian state). The boys are dressed in a mixture of the Dickensian and Elizabethan with prominent codpieces and affect an exaggerated civility and cultivation of manners as they indulge in acts of brutality. Alex loves Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the violence is accompanied by this music. It is true that much of our musical heritage has been inspired by the battlefield. Beethoven's Symphony which is inspired by Utopian sentiments of human harmony is here used ironically to express a world bordering on chaos..

The mayhem of the first hour of the film results in a power struggle and the unintended murder of a woman. Alex is arrested, spending two years of prison, which is full of hilarious parody, as Alex feigns an inner change in a desperate bid to have his fifteen year sentence commuted. He is chosen, in recognition of his exemplary behavior, for the newly invented Ludovico treatment, whereby he is programmed to become incapable of wrong-doing. Beethoven's Symphony now throws him into paroxysms of agony.

The movie, for all it's famed lurid subject matter is an artistic triumph. Even the violence is meticulously choreographed, and I think ultimately Stanley Kubrick is depicting the violence which is a part of our nature. We are riveted by it's spell binding power because Alex and his friends represent an undeniable aspect of the human nature of which everybody partakes. In the middle of the film is some footage about Hitler and the troops of youth parading with Nazi emblems. Kubrick has replaced Wagner with Beethoven in a brilliant feat of irony.

War has always been synonymous with glory. History is punctuated with gory battlefields. In the film, this propensity for violence is expressed in an easily conceivable situation where the machinery of law and order has become ineffective. One solution which the film satirically offers is the lobotomization of the capacity for choice. This of course is much easier than "educating" people to a point where they stand in control of the tempestuous and unruly seas which constitute our inner reality, spiritual victors in the inner war.

A great movie.

Red Beard

2011-02-17T00:14:00.006+05:30

Akira Kurosawa, 1965, 185m

This is a film about human exaltation and suffering. Human nature has a capacity for goodness and nobility commensurate with it's potential for evil. Contemporary art is more comfortable with depicting the latter, often in clever disguises.

Red Beard is a doctor in nineteenth century Japan (it is an age without electricity but the medical practices we see are modern if rudimentary and certainly not primitive). He is fired with a spirit of compassion to help the poor and suffering and earning is nowhere on his agenda. He runs a hospital partly supported by the government. A bright young doctor trained in Dutch medicine in Nagasaki visits him but finds himself trapped to work in the lack luster environment which offers no scope for worldly advancement. But he is quickly infected by the elder doctor's humanity, charisma and zeal to serve.

We are exposed to a pageant of extremes of human suffering seldom depicted to such a pitch of intensity. A dying man unburdens his strange tale of marriage deceit and reconciliation. Another's suffering is so deep that he refuses to say a word until the end. A girl of twelve is saved from the clutches of a brothel but is already broken to the point of insanity. A family is driven to suicide by starvation. One of the inmates is a young and beautiful murderess of three men, and the new intern himself has a narrow escape. What better place can there than a hospital for the poor to encounter the meaning of suffering. Death is a regular visitor and there is a spiritual brotherhood which includes the staff. Of course this is no ordinary hospital, not even the missionary sort. (At one point the good doctor reveals a not altogether surprising side when he beats up and maims a bunch of hoodlums.)

This is perhaps too plain a story and some may find it mawkish. It is perfectly structured and the several strands are tautly drawn together into a powerful composition. The black and white cinematography captures the Japanese environment with powerful and lucid clarity. The tiled sloping roofs seem beautiful and the architecture and interiors are a feast for the eye. Snowfall and rain are filmed exquisitely. Says Ebert most aptly, "I've never seen wetter rain in another movie." I differ slightly, the wettest rain was the unending downpour which opens Rashomon.

One is tempted to compare Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray, particularly in view of their mutual admiration. Both are rooted in their respective soils and depict their respective countries and people with artistry and love. Kurosawa is more robust and warlike, whereas Ray remains a gentle and neutral observer of his universe. Ray weaves delicate tapestries, Kurosawa's fabric is coarse but tough. Perhaps Kurosawa has delved deeper into human reality. However , he cannot match Ray in delicacy or accuracy of characterization. The two children in Red Beard are no match for the children of the Apu Trilogy.Both are optimists and believers in human nature and their movies end on a note of triumph. In Ray, suffering is mute. In the present film, the wounds are raw and cry out, even though the samurai Kurosawa never loses restraint.

The Case is Closed (Kharij)

2011-02-15T20:43:00.006+05:30

Mrinal Sen, 1982, 95m, Bengali

A pre-teen ager servant boy dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on a cold winter night. He was employed by a young working Calcutta couple (Anjan and Mamata) with a small boy of their own. Taking money from a neighbor's friendly daughter, he slipped away to watch a movie on a cold winter night. Finding his usual sleeping corner below the stairs too cold, he bolts himself inside the kitchen, where a fire was burning. The next morning we witness a powerful discovery scene like on the morning after Macbeth's murder. The door is forced open and we see the commotion in the apartment block which is the stage of the drama.

Who is responsible? The landlord who failed to provide ventilation in the kitchen ("it's not a bedroom"), the couple for employing child labor (which is illegal) and failing to provide reasonably comfortable sleeping arrangements? The police takes over and a post mortem is performed. Meanwhile a procession of the boy's relatives arrives and the father is inconsolable but lifts no accusing finger, his head bowed in acceptance of the nature of things. The film ends on a heart rending note of under-stated inconsolable sorrow.

Comparison with the titanic Ray is inevitable. Sen is also gentle but has a more steely and masculine quality. Ray has a child's sense of wonder, but Sen's tragic vision is touched with youthful anger. He has been called Marxist in outlook but the present film does not point an accusing finger at anyone, but does dramatically bring out a class divide almost as of two different species. The deceased boy's father Hari seats himself deferentially on the ground. He has no capacity for anger. He wails like a lost calf, while remaining meek and respectful to the end.

This is a flawless, fully engrossing film and like a gust of fresh air after a heavy and prolonged overdose of the bucolic cinema of Satyajit Ray. Sen is no poor cousin.

The entire film is can be viewed on Youtube in excellent quality. Click HERE for the first of ten parts.

The Branches of the Tree (Shakha Proshakha)

2011-02-15T00:08:00.009+05:30

Ray, 1990, 122m

This is Ray's second last film made when he was just short of seventy. The tree is Ananda Mazumdar, a retired industrialist famed for his honesty and philanthropy, to the extent of having his town named after him. The branches are the four sons and two spouses. Mazumdar suffers a heart attack and as he hovers in the danger zone, the progeny converges around him. Ray is a good spinner of yarns and he knows how to play the heartstrings. Here he gives us a taut drama about old age and family relations with the background of Bengali society of the eighties (there is a family picnic and one of the cars is a Maruti 800).

Unlike some of his more acclaimed films which are about youth and childhood, this one is about aging with which comes cynicism and tolerance. He is able to turn an eye more understanding than indignant towards the corruption and rot in society. This somewhat lame anger is voiced through the youngest of the four sons, who chooses to opt out from the bribe driven business world. Ray was often accused of not being sufficiently concerned about the ills of society. He once said that no movie could ever change society, not even Battleship Potemkin, which only hooted for an ongoing revolution, nor Triumph of the Will, which pandered to the Nazi state. He is no firebrand: he is a mere humanistic genius, an artist and an impeccable mirror of the society which owns him, for all his anglophilia.

Ray is an enraptured by womanhood. His men are more often pathetic shadows, as in this one. Mamata Shankar as one of the wives gives a bold and charismatic portrayal of a woman disappointed in her marriage, with a mind and strength of self acceptance beyond her era and milieu.

This is a more ambitious film which expands the usual canvas to depict an era and a society. It achieves a high level of dramatic tension, even though it lacks the compassion and innocence of some earlier movies. It definitely limps at many places, as Ray is affecting a piety not his own. It is not his nature to judge people, as if to say, that might have been me. On the whole, a gripping film for all it's negligible weaknesses.

Eternity and a Day

2011-02-09T21:19:00.012+05:30

Theo Angelopoulos, 1998, 130m, Greece, Golden Palm ('98)

Alexandre, fifty-ish, a bearded poet, is terminally ill. I was attracted to the film by it's subject matter and to catch a glimpse of it's famous director.

Alexandre strikes a friendship with a vagrant Albanian boy, saving him from the clutches of the police and unsuccessfully tries to have him sent home. He wants to wind up his affairs and get admitted to a hospital. He visits his daughter, who is unable to take charge of his dog. He also learns with shock that a beloved family house on the sea has been sold and due for demolition. He meets his demented mother. The film is a series of dreams, memories (mostly relating to his wife) and conversations.

This is a mere sentimental romance and fails to do the least bit of justice to the gravity of the theme of near impending death. The great poet does not seem to get beyond the picture card sea-scapes and the bygone romance with his estranged or deceased wife to the accompaniment of concertinas and violins and traditional dances.

One can only conclude that the jolt has failed to wake up Alexandre, and merely propelled him on a trip of nostalgic fancies. These are the rather waterish sentiments of the film-maker and not of a man confronted with the most profound phenomenon of existence. It has been said, "The most terrible things in the world are the pain of fire, the flashing of knives, and the shadow of death. Even horses and cattle fear death, how much more a man in his prime."

Contrasting to the open blue skies and expansive sea of the present film (as though the victim has transcended concerns about death), I am reminded of the shrieking reds of Cries and Whispers. Wit was another film to deal with terminal illness with great sensitivity. Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry and Ramim Bahrani's Goodbye Solo are two movies (one by an Iranian and the other an Iranian-American director) which depict the grim melancholy determination of two meticulously crafted suicides.

In the present film, death becomes a matter almost of indifference-one more routine of existence rather than something transcendental and cataclysmic. To trivialize death is to trivialize life, of which it is the culmination and crown. And Hollywood seems to be on the way to being a more reliable brand label than Cannes.

Review by J Hoberman

La Dolce Vita

2011-02-07T21:16:00.009+05:30

Federico Fellini, 1960, 179m, Italy, "The Sweet Life"

The film is about a few days in the life of Rome based reporter Marcello and his varied misadventures. I was put off by it's length and acclaim and have kept it in the freezer for long but it turns out to be an exuberant eye filling roller coaster and a feast of black and white cinematography.

As the film opens a statue of the Christ one hand raised in benediction dangles from a helicopter borne across the sky. Marcello juggles three women in the loosely connected episodes which make up the movie. As he dallies with heiress Maddelina, his fiancée attempts suicide. There is a long chunk of his two day affair with a mercurial American actress. His father visits him and has a heart attack in the company of a dancer. A friend of his named Steiner inexplicably shoots his two children and himself. Another episode is about two children who have supposedly seen the Madonna. We see the public hysteria with milling crowds, sick people on stretchers hoping for a miraculous cure and media people converging at the site like a swarm of scavengers. The film is a series of parties and orgies sputtering to an abrupt closure with another media event: a giant fish is washed ashore while the ocean churns timelessly in the background .

What is the sweet life? Marcello is borne helplessly on a tide of events. The film maker lenses this chaotic melancholy joy ride with a gruesome tragedy dumped incongruously at it's center, with aplomb and detachment .The camera-work is conttinuously breathtaking. By making no attempt to confine the narration by constraints of plot and continuity the artist has managed to compress an effortlessly inspired cinematic essay about life into a short span of time. Indeed, this is black and white poetry.

Bhuvan Shome

2011-02-05T19:22:00.001+05:30

Mrinal Sen, 1969, 92m, Hindi

This is my first film from this acclaimed director, and it is also the one which brought him into prominence. Bhuvan Shome (Utpal Dutt) is an officer in the Railways, notoriously strict in his official dealings, and a terror among his subordinates, specially since acceptance of small bribes is a time honored way of life and an economic compulsion. A widower, he is known to have dismissed his own son. And one fine day, overcome by enuii with the stale routines of life, he sets out on a one man hunting expedition in the countryside. Not lions, just birds, the narrator (Amitabh) tells us. Khaki clad, with a gun and thick belt of bullets, self conscious and embarrassed, this grotesque unwieldly Bengali Rambo rolls country-wards on a bullock cart in lively repartees with the rustic driver, till they are chased by a bull and rescued by it's owner, the beautiful and lively Suhasini Mulay, a country lass who will be his guide and scout on the bird hunting expedition for the bulk of the film. That should do for the story.

One of the best things about the film is the musical score by the wondrous Vijay Raghav Rao, which encapsulates with love and rapture the rhythms of the desert and it's impoverished hamlets and their kindly inhabitants. The desert photography is of the finest, inviting comparison to the Japanese Woman in the Dunes. The film is superficially a comedy, and has a light touch, but in essence is a deeply humane poem about two ways of life, town and country coming face to face in mutual recognition, and it touches what may be termed the ancient subcontinental heart. Shome is unable to consume of the simple food which the rustic hosts impose on him. Flights of water fowl separate and soar as the shots are fired from the inept marksman. And somewhere far off trains churn noisily across the great plain. And a heart melts. Bhuvan Shome dances exultantly, wrenching away his necktie as the official papers fly across his office in the Railways Department. Liberation!

Mrinal Sen is no Ray shadow, he is an authentic force in his own right.

Ray, most feminine of directors, and his Charulata

2011-01-29T23:31:00.159+05:30

1964, 119m, Bengali, "The Lonely Wife", based on Tagore's "Nastanirh" (The Broken Nest")

Extra marital affairs were not unknown in Victorian India of 1871. Charu (Madhabi) is the bored childless wife of Bhupen, workaholic editor and owner of "The Sentinel", one of the yet faint newly emerging voices of protest against British rule. She embroiders a three petalled flower on a white piece of muslin stretched on an embroidery frame as the opening titles roll. She wanders aimlessly around the rooms of the immaculate upper class house, listening to the street sounds, observing the antics of a monkey on a string through a pair of opera glasses. Embroidery is a very apt symbol for this exquisitely delicate film. Her doting thick bearded somewhat unattractive husband emerges from another room, lost in his political journalistic reveries, oblivious of his wife's presence. But he is a kind well meaning chap and as he realizes his wife's need for company and occupation, he suggests inviting his own younger brother Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee, Ray's perennial hero, from the Apu trilogy onwards), who has just completed his studies, and has literary aspirations. And that is how the trouble starts. --the young, beautiful, intelligent bored to death wife and a handsome, poetic, romantically inclined, college pass out is inflammable stuff in the stuffiest of eras.

It is strange that this six feet five hulk of a man, Satyajit Ray, should have produced a body of work so feminine in it's texture.

Ray is at his most intoxicating in his portraiture of women. Even his favorite hero Soumitra has more of Shelley than Byron in him---he is a bubbling brook who sings a range of melodies. In Aparajito, he was a somewhat ordinary young man given to a moderation of revelries of youth who carelessly neglects his mother even as she expires in his absence. In Apur Sansar, he graduates from idealism to the tragedy of losing his deeply loved wife (Sharmila Tagore), already having lost in succession his sister, father and mother in the fist two parts of the Apu Trilogy-- and finally triumphant acceptance. Soumitra is feminine with abandonment. I suspect Ray was somewhat embarrassed with his towering frame and rough masculine, even coarse, appearance and saw in Soumitra someone he would have preferred to look like, someone who doesn't stand out like a thumb. Tagore too was six feet two. There is perhaps some food for thought in that Gandhi was was not even five feet five--he was the most manly of men and quite obsessive of his gender.

Charulata is a romantic film which hovers dangerously close to eroticism--dangerous in terms of the era it inhabits and also in terms of the Tagore-esque refinement of it's creator. One of the climaxes in the film occurs in the earlier part as the lovers never to be are in dalliance in the weedy garden where a naughtily dis-clad stone Cupid observes a poetry exchange with Madhabi on a swing. The dams of her emotion break down inexplicably in a later scene when Amol's poem is published in a respected magazine. She sobs uncontrollably. Is she lamenting her own strangulated creativity? But she has her revenge when her own short story is printed--she flings the paper at Amol, her eyes blazing in triumphant exultation.

And, in the background, the wheel of history silently rolls. Each of Ray's movies films are precisely located in a specific era of India's past and he recreates a period with poetic and masterly indirection. He is a great chronicler and passionately of native soil. He is a nightingale who sings of his land. In The Chess Players (Shatranj ke Khilari) the deadly British political game of gulping vast Indian territories is wound around the comedy of two dissipated nawabs and their errant wives. Ghare Bhaire (The Home and the World ) is towards the proposed partition of Bengal in 1909, and examines the ambiguities in the rise of nationalism, as birds of many feathers take shelter and advantage of the social turbulence. Ray brings history to life by telling stories--it is a moot question whether history or the story comes first. After all, the world, and even the British, know English history more through the series of Shakespeare's plays than what may have actually happened. In Asani Sanket (Distant Thunder), we learn of the harrowing Bengal famine of the forties artificially brought about by the diversion of rice to the troops battling the Japanese in South East Asia. It is a masterpiece of understatement as we participate in the rhythms of remote rural Bengal, and the famine is brought home through one single death. Excess is what you will never find in Ray's films.

Charulata is a delicious slice of historical cake, recounted with humor and love. Amol receives a marriage proposal propped by the carrot of higher education in England to be financed by his father in law to be. England, a magic word! The land of Shakespeare, gloats Amol , as his mouth waters. And of Macaulay, Burke and Gladstone, chimes in his brother! Even as they protest the excesses of British rule, their patriotism takes the form of hooting for the Liberal party in the British elections. Fiery Gandhi is a long way in the future and the spirit of the age is more expressed through the rather comically idealistic hymns of the anglophiliac Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who is buried in the Amos Vale cemetery in Bristol. There is little effort to hide their admiration for the English. Satyajit Ray embodies this deep dualism of Indian intelligentsia--we never seem to be able to chose between the East and the West, to this day. India has indeed been a confluence and a clash if never quite a melting pot for many and divergent civilisations, and this shimmering immiscibility of hues is what it is. It was in Bengal more than any other part of India that England and India came most closely face to face. Tagore and Ray are two pre-eminent examples of this fruitful insemination.

Ray has been on occasion compared to Shakespeare. This is not really far fetched. Shakespeare in his own words is "god's spy on earth". It is in his ability to encompass the entire range of human experience--birth, childhood, sickness, and above all, death; the seven ages of man; transcending differences between clown, king, soldier, man, woman--that he excels all other human beings. Hamlet's mind as he sets out on what is to be his final journey towards the fatal duel; the scene of the morning after when Macbeth's murder is discovered--Shakespeare straddles these incomprehensible extremities of life, even as he treats us to the exquisite social refinement of "Love's Labor Lost". Ray plays a gentler flute but his melodies recognise the secret recesses of the heart, and reach stunning crescendos. Again and again, in film after film, he soars. Ray unbares the range of human experience through the society of Bengal, the city more than the countryside, the middle and high more than the low. His sympathy is always universal.

He has a peculiar power of compressing an ocean into a drop--certain split moments which contain literally an infinity of meaning. Two such come at once to my mind. The first is from Pather Panchali. Apu is leaving his childhood home forever. His elder sister Durga has been lost to poverty and disease. He hurls into a muddy pond a lately discovered necklace, one which his late sister had stolen from a neighbour and vehemently denied having stolen. The object sinks into the slush to be covered by the floating algae. Now the little secret is theirs alone, a private jewel of memory. The past is dead, childhood is over.

Another one occurs in that other masterpiece, Jalsaghar. Bishwambar is of a an aristocracy hurtling towards economic extinction, overtaken by the newer moneyed aristocracies. A musical soiree, such as form the central passion of his days of decline, has just concluded. His much scorned lately rich neighbour Mahim is about to fling a purse towards the performer. Bishwambhar extends the hook of his walking stick to restrain Mahim forcefully by the wrist, claiming precedence as host to make the first offering. It is a stunningly dramatic moment, an assertion of dignity by a doomed man, of culture over vulgarity.

Such too is the conclusion of Charulata. Bhupati has been shamelessly defrauded by Charu's brother. And now he discovers Charu's infatuation with his own brother Amol, who has already scampered away in remorse and is on his way to England. Knowing everything, Charu extends her hand to her husband. But the hands fail to reach each other. Not yet. It is a sad moment of triumphant optimism, as if a flickering candle settles into a steady flame.

The Cow

2011-01-14T23:51:00.013+05:30

Dariush Mehrjui, 1969, Iran, 115m, "Gaav"

Hassan loves his cow, the only cow in the mud caked, sand blown village, in an age before electricity. He bathes the cow, talks to her, laughs with her. The bond between cow and man is extraordinarily powerful :emotional, spiritual, obsessive. But the star crossed love is smitten with incomprehensible tragedy, as the beloved dies suddenly, while he is away for a day. He cannot bear the shock. As he pines away, he gradually comes to believe he himself is the cow. A rare brand of insanity indeed as he turns into the deceased animal. We find him chewing away at the hay, big eyed and uncomprehending, bellowing furiously at the considerate neighbors who want to care for him. Well, this may verge on the ludicrous, but the film is profoundly tragic, as a man sinks into insanity beyond redemption, metamorphing into a different species.

In the process, we see the life in the village, which could be the stone age or millenia ago, but actually is very like what might have been in this part of the world a century ago. The environment is familiar to me from what I have heard from my own elders. The close neighborlinesses of the villagers, as they join in grief and festivity, is a picture of social symbiosis which has disappeared. The grief of the beloved Hassan as he sinks irretrievably into his delusions, becomes the common concern and grief of all the village. And then the village is regularly terrorized and plundered by a tribe of bandits and the shared peril draws them together. This impoverished and tightly bound fraternity of good people brings in me a feeling of nostalgia for places I know only from hearsay.

This is a strange, powerful, imperfect film. The background score, using indigenous string instruments is evocative of the heart wrenching pains of this semi pre-historic existence. The palette is a bit too dark. The village streets, the mischievous urchins tormenting the village idiot, the pathetic pots and pans,and the minimality of life's resources, is captured in the sensitive cinematography.

A deeply felt film. Hassan is a tragic and human figure. The director makes him entirely credible, though he borders on absurdity. This is the stuff of mythology, folk lore, the workings of the deeper strata of the mind. It is a portrait of an ordinary human being when confronted with the essential enigma. It is like Lear and his nevers. And it speaks the language sheerly of the heart, not the intellect.

Thanks to Nathanael Hood for introducing this film. His far more comprehensive review is HERE

Last Year at Marienbad

2011-01-14T21:53:00.006+05:30

Alan Resnais (1928-), French, 84 minutes, 1961, "L'Anee Derniere a Marienbad"

".....I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors--silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century, silent halls ..."

The film begins with this commentary accompanied by liturgical sounds of an organ( could be Bach or Handel) as the camera travels over various aspects of the building, a baroque palace turned into a hotel , examining the ornate cielings, the statues, mirrored walls. The voice belongs to X, the protagonist, and a major part of the film is occupied by this impassioned architectural discourse.

He is obsessed by the place no less than by the woman he has come to meet after a year (or is it a million years). Yes, the film is a love story. But his obsession for her (her name is A) seems to have reached a sublime (or pathological if you prefer) pitch, and every slab, every cornice, the corridors and salons etc., etc., seem to be the embodiment of this craving .

The hotel is like a living being, a piece of space-time in which his soul is eternally encaged, the place where the battle was fought and lost. It's architectural wonders represents the beloved's body (like the Taj Mahal). It has been rendered sacred by the events which are embalmed in its mass and spaces. It is the Zone. He is here to decide his destiny for evermored, a crucial rendezvous, maybe a duel.

This is a film without a story, or at least a story no-one seems to understand( not even the director). More importantly it is a film which does not need a story. The black and white images flow torrentially as the camera runs, leaps, somersaults, probing the architectural intimacies; a voice recollects a saga in modulated monotone to the accompaniment of the throttled, soaring notes of an organ; this is the substance. Understand it or not, you are not going to forget it. Who needs stories? Nor should we demean it by trying to figure it out childishly as though it were a riddle.. It has to be left alone and seen for what it is, a visual-vocal-tonal poem about the passage of time, the ante-chambers of the soul, and the pauselessly succeeding moments of our lives that become embalmed as they are extinguished.

The voice, the music, and this cathedral like hotel are the elements which fuse in a symphony. What a voice! Can anything compare to the sublimity of a voice? This is a voice as deep as the organ accompaniment; a full, resonant voice emanating from the bowels of the soul. And my French is not even primary.

The man(X) meets the woman(A) and tries to convince her that they had met a year ago. He tries to remind her with a desperate insistence of many small details of the encounter-where she sat, how she sat, how her elbow was positioned, what was spoken and promised-namely to meet after a year. She denies all recollection of such a meeting even as X serenades her with more and more details, culminating in his invasion of her chamber. Isn't life like that? What for him is a matter of life and death is not even recollectable for her.

Then there is the third character (M), possibly her husband, who defeats him in the game of Nim every time they play. M shoots her when he discovers her with X but this seems unsatisfactory to X so there is no problem to have her alive a few moments later. Apparently X commits a pseudo-suicide. But even death is ambiguous in this film.

These are but excuses for the circular and brooding film to investigate and explore the world of past-present-future embalmed in these precincts. There are the guests who now and then make an appearance, conversing in polite, muted, almost soundless tones as they float from chamber to chamber beneth the chandeliers, across the mirrored halls, through the corridors lined with marble sculptures. Mostly the the scene is populated only by the Voice in the deserted floors or at most one or more of the threesome, X, A, and M.

It does have all the elements of plot into which ambiguities are built in as a matter of artistic necessity. Be that as it may it is a powerful portrayal of the workings of the human mind and soul. The labyrinth of the palace is not just the setting but also the subject of the film. It is a poignant metaphor for one of those secret places to which we human beings are wont to happen by in our wanderings.

It is a choked, sorrowful film-about the past, about possibilities which failed to happen, hopes held in abeyance. It is also a film about time. It's about the three existences of past, present and future. It has echoes of the eternal which human beings are as capable of perceiving as their finitude.It is a film which could have been nothing other than what it is.

The Blue Kite

2011-01-12T20:02:00.006+05:30

Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993, 140m, China, "Lan Feng Zheng"

Mao died in 1976. Between his assumption of power in 1949 and his death is a strange period in which a series of experiments in social engineering were carried out at the cost of great suffering to ordinary people. This film narrates the experience of a single family caught in this tempestuous era.

The narrator is the boy Tietou and the movie covers the first ten years of his life, which falls in this period and we catch glimpses of the Great Leap Forward; the Anti-Rightist witch hunts; the organised and officially blessed mobs of youth whose rampages were the Cultural Revolution. The drama narrates the fortunes of the family comprising the boy's mother, the beautiful and plucky Chujuan; the three husbands she loses one after the other; her sister, a typical thoroughly brain washed, alternately politically awakened product of the period; her two brothers; and the mother, an anachronistic granny bewildered by events, as indeed are the best of them.

The reach of the party is pervasive and politics cuts sharply into private lives, often creating fissures within the family. We see the culture of mutual denunciation just as the boy's biological father is exiled to a work camp after he is reported against by a close friend. Teachers are publicly denounced and their heads shaved. His mother and third father are belabored by a mob after a poster campaign against them. It has resemblance to pre-war Germany in that people are compelled, at the point of the gun, so to say, to think in a particular way. It is a lesson in the power of distorted ideologies to wreak havoc and chaos.

Yet the scourge of Mao's reign was too short to succeed in obliterating traditional ways and we see normal humanity huddling together behind domestic walls and biding their time.

The film rips off the curtain behind which the reality of this enigmatic period is hidden. The street scenes with children at play and the details of life are realistically caught.The background score is non-existent but for brief subdued eruptions at climactic moments. A room with a bookshelf is a recurring marker, as though symbolizing the element of stability in the human heart which tempests cannot shake. Another repeated motif is a brilliant eruption of fireworks, punctuating both joy and tragedy, like the inherent energy and resilience of life.

A Time for Drunken Horses

2011-01-05T00:06:00.003+05:30

Bahman Ghobadi, 2000, 75m, Kurdish Persian, "Zamani Baraye Masti Asbha"

The eponymous horses are in fact mules which are employed to smuggle cargoes of tires and other articles across the snow covered and land mine spangled mountains which form the border between Iran and Iraq. They are routinely fed liquor in order to help them make the arduous journey across the harsh tundra like terrain. The title is also a satiric reference to the warring nations (who have more the obstinacy of mules than equine dignity), and the impoverished dwellers of the region who are the victims of their political vendetta.

The impassioned semi documentary centers on the vicissitudes of an orphaned family comprising two brothers and two sisters living with their uncle. All the cast retain their real life names in the film. The younger brother Madi is crippled and in urgent need of medical attention and in danger of his life. He is the MacGuffin around which this magnificent anthropological or political essay is constructed. Smuggling is the precarious means of livelihood of these simple and tough mountain folk, and any operation is liable to end in disaster due to gunfire and ambushes.

In the course of the narrative, we participate in the routines of these Kurdish Iranians. The elder sister Rojin is married off with the understanding that the husband's family will care for and provide for the desperately needed surgery of Madi. The bargain is not kept and instead a mule is given as dowry. The simple marriage ceremony and the almost funereal procession over the mountains is beautifully captured. We catch the life in glimpses of a class-room, a busy and quarrelsome market place, or a fist-fight over a matter of payment. The younger sister Amaneh badly wants a new exercise book, which her doting brother delivers right in her class-room. Madi screams as his hind is punctured with a hypodermic needle. Madi as Madi gives a wonderfully natural performance as a half intelligent and half moronic cripple of indeterminate age. The primitive life and poverty is invaded with symbols of the modern world like gleaming bicycles, tires, gunfire and land mines. It's the picture of a world in the sad and painful throes of transition.

This anthropological panorama is seamlessly embedded in the moving dilemma of these siblings hurled against the ongoing blizzard of national hostilities. The cinematography does justice to the bleak denuded magnificence of the landscape. The canvas is mostly sheet white with a cold, sunless sky and the only colors are of man made objects like clothing.

The overall impression is of poignant helplessness of tiny human figures moving across the harshly intimidating mountains, pawns in a mindless chess game. This is a masterpiece with western movie making standards and an Oriental sensibility.

Inception

2011-01-02T21:34:00.023+05:30

Nolan, 2010, 150m

Two questions which surface after seeing this long and tedious film are (a)Why was it so popular? (b)What motivated the film-makers to make it ($160 million, for heavens sake!)? I will leave the plot alone, since you have probably seen it. (It's about syringing ideas out of, or into, other people's heads, though I would think talking a more convenient procedure.)

With the world becoming increasingly complex, we are discovering ever newer and harder to pin-down or articulate dissatisfactions. We crave for answers, however half baked. Gurudom is a thriving business as people turn inwards seeking ways to fill the void left by the demise of faith, which no science or philosophy is able to fill. The present film seems to belong to the same genre of quackery as the latest breed of self-help books and self proclaimed jet borne sages, with or without flowing robes/beards.

The film has a germ of truth in that it vaguely mirrors the ideas of Jung in recognizing the vastness and depth of our inner world, which we have been slower to appreciate than the dazzling glories of astronomy and physics. On the other hand it presents a very desolate picture of the mind as a computer like automaton without intrinsic hope or creative energy. No room for the soul in this mind. And can happiness be found only in delusions and dreams? Surely we are not made of such vapid stuff, there has to be hard ground somewhere.

The investors probably realized this is a genre to cash in on, with the success of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which dealt with a similar theme of selective memory erasure and Matrix, dealing with collective delusion.

Very early in the movie, I decided not to make an extra effort to decipher the plot since I was clear there is nothing profound here. My compulsion to see it was mainly to join the discourse about this biggest block-buster after Avatar. The special effects are not impressive since you know it is just a computer generated deja vu of the world falling apart, (served ad nauseum since King Kong), and a dream or not in any case. Finally, cinema itself is the stuff of dreams, so what difference does it make? For the rest, people and objects criss-cross the screen at high velocities accompanied by appropriate noises, and folks (unless they happen to be apparitions) bashing or shooting at each other for reasons best known to themselves. They wear grim expressions (who ever heard of humor in a dream) and Ellen Page in particular has both eyes and mouth wide agape probably signifying architectural precocity, in contrast to her unforgettably innocent portrayal in Juno. The script itself is a desultory running commentary on the self manufactured logic needed to make sense of the psycho-neural skulduggery.

The pseudo-profundity and undecipherable plot accounts for it's mass appeal and one can imagine the heated discussions among the nouveau intelligentsia, on the drive back home, or over a drink, to dissect the plot thread by thread. Apparently, the market for such fare is much larger than one would imagine. In a way it may be good that people are asking self exploratory questions of the right kind, even though they take such puerile answers seriously. After all, the complexities of the times are fertile soil for charlatans and confidence men to thrive.

Best avoided, with due apologies to Nathanael Hood, not the first person to admire it. After all he is in the illustrious company of no less than Roger Ebert, who gave it four shining buttons.

Einstein and Eddington (2008)

2010-12-31T19:35:00.014+05:30

This BBC TV docudrama relates the well known events surrounding revolutionary changes in science which occurred in the first two decades of the last century. Einstein's two theories of Relativity ( the"Special" and the "General") which pointed out the limitations in Newton's ideas of physics, were propounded in 1905 and 1916. Einsteins ideas were radical (like the fact that "time" is different for different observers) and did not gain acceptance till they were experimentally verified. Eddington was the British scientist who carried out this verification by observations of a total solar eclipse carried out in Africa in1919. Of course the ultimate verification was the nuclear bombs used in WW2 but that is a different tale.

The events narrated take place in the background of WW1 and both the scientists face opposition in their native countries (England and Germany). Einstein, a Swiss citizen refuses to sign unconditional allegiance to the German nation and Eddington faces opprobrium for collaborating with a scientist from the country England is at war with, and that too in an endeavor which may prove the views of Newton, the greatest British scientist, wrong.

The film tries to tell us something about the personal lives of the two men. Eddington is a devout Quaker who refuses to enlist in the war. I had always imagined Einstein as a gentle and refined person. What we see here is a noisy, theatrical and coarse exhibitionist. It is hardly a picture of genius. Einstein was probably given to, and in a position to afford playing the fool, but could hardly have been this clumsy joker. What we see is the universalized stereotype. There is no serious attempt to bring out the human being behind the myth.

A highly forgettable movie.

The Ghost Writer

2010-12-30T22:47:00.007+05:30

Roman Polanski, 2010, 128m

A ghost writer is commissioned (for a quarter of a million) to write the autobiography of former British prime minister Lang. Another person hired for the same work was killed in dubious circumstances.The plot meanders drearily through possible war crimes committed on the orders of Lang at the bidding of his CIA masters with some glimpses of the lives of the high and mighty.

The tailor dummy PM is a feeble caricature of Blair. This political thriller is conspicuously deficient in thrills and and the politics too is obscurely infantile. It succeeds neither in being a James Bond movie nor in it's attempt to soar above the genre. One can only conclude that Polanski has ceased to tick. Everything is deja vu here. The only image that remains with me is the final one, with the pages of the manuscript scattering in the wind.

It's a ghost of a movie. A headache is acceptable as a means but not as an end in itself.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010-12-28T23:58:00.004+05:30

Apichatchong Weerasethakul, 2010, 114m, Thailand, Palme d'Or

Boonmee is a prosperous land-owner facing death. He lives with his wife and grown up son. As the end approaches, he is visited by his first wife who died nineteen years ago and a deceased son who has turned into a monkey like creature. In the netherworld of incipient death, he is able to recall his past lives, or imagines he can. The film alternates between two realities. One is the reality of Boonmee's house or farm or his car moving through the lush greenery. On the other side we find him moving through dark, damp forests with other-worldly rivers and grottoes, with brilliant psychedelic colors and lights. Indeed, it may well be a drug induced hallucination. There is a particularly haunting sequence where a palanquin born aging princess consigns herself to a pool at the foot of a dream like waterfall. Such is the general trend of the film. At best it may be regarded as presenting near death states or out of the body experiences.

Belief in life after death and the possibility of reincarnation are the underlying assumptions, as the title suggests. This is the lore of the East. The film ends up as a piece of pretty if exhausting gimmickry. It showcases the young director's cinematic talents but sentimentalizes death. It lacks the philosophical depth of films like Wit, A Taste of Cherry, or Goodbye Solo. Perhaps it can be commended for it's unusual, ever-pertinent if unanswerable theme of what happens to us after we die.