Masoom ( Innocent ) 1983

**Shekhar Kapur**Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana, Saeed Jaffrey, Tanuja, Supriya Pathak, Urmila Matondkar*Gulzar ( script )*

Shekhar Kapur's first film, from where he took off into a variegated career spanning the likes of Mr. India, Bandit Queen, Elizabeth.

It is always nice to punctuate life with an occasional Bollywood flick ( as a relief , not to mention a return to one's own roots ), and this one, coming from the yet budding talent of Shekhar Kapur, supported by a script from the sensitive and sentimental Gulzar, is a pleasant enough specimen of the genre. Shekhar wisely may have decided to line his pocket with a block-buster or two ( this was followed by Mr. India with it's inimitable and immortal villain-comedian Mogambo ) before getting into the more serious and riskier waters.

D.K.Malhotra ( DK for short ) and Indu are an upper middle class Delhi based couple who along with their two ebullient school going daughters, share the common yet uncommon joys of familial bliss, depicted with deft and light strokes. There is a charming song-dance sequence at a party by Naseerudin Shah and Jaffrey in which their comic talent as well as  plasticity of limb and torso is  used to good effect.

A telegram from Nainital serves as the spanner in the spokes. It is from the dying schoolmaster who is in charge of an illegitimate son of DK, the result of a brief affair soon after his marriage to Indu. DK was unaware of this offspring, since the mother chose to disappear from his life. The mother herself dies, leaving his charge to the good hearted school master.

DK has to bring the boy into his family against the wishes of his wife. The daughters take to him immediately, and the movie revolves around the family drama of the wife's reaction to the husband's confessed infidelity, and her overt resentment to the boy.

At best, it is a drama of childhood, a boy innocent of his own illegitimacy, and his consuming need for love and parents. Shabana is a fine actress, expressive in her silences, and the fire-brand on screen which she is in real life. Her gradual melting towards the unwanted boy is a great performance. Who can forget her roles in Shyam Benegal's Ankur and Ray's Shatranj ke Khilari Naseeruddin also is an actor of range and versatility, the sort for whom Hindi cinema has not proven worthy. He is at his most natural best in Monsoon Wedding.

Shekhar Kapur's natural ability enables to steer clear from being totally formulaic, while yet remaining in the safety zone of commercial viability and popular expectations. It's a movie which gives  hope for better things to come. It's a different question if they did. At least he made it as far as Hollywood.

Pickpocket

*Bresson*1959*75m*France*

The portrait of a young sociopath, with echoes of Travis Bickle ( Taxi Driver ) and Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment.

Michel, the hero, has been brooding for some days of finally carrying out his first pocket-picking enterprise, and he is at the races, trailing an elderly lady. He positions himself behind her, opens the buckle of her purse ( his heart is pounding ), and as the horses rush by, extracts the banknotes and loses himself in the crowd. However he is nabbed by the police, questioned and let off for lack of conclusive evidence. As he hones his professional skill, he is drawn into a net of other more seasoned practitioner of the art of picking pockets. There is a wonderful sequence, in which we see the collusive performance of the team on a train about to depart from a station, and deft motions of finger and wrist which would evoke the admiration of a pianist or a guitarist--in fact, a symphony orchestra of pick pockets.

A police official who suspects him, but lacks the proof to nail him, frequently engages him in conversation. Since Michel is a pick pocket by choice ( he could have got a job ), we learn his belief that some special people should be above the law. Meanwhile, he neglects his ailing mother, who passes away. However he is becoming overconfident and careless and he is finally caught and imprisoned. In the prison, he is visited by the young and beautiful Jeanne, a neighbour who helped out his mother in her final days. Her love for him, inspite of his social descent, moves him, and the film concludes in a redemptive moment.

What drives this young man, living in his garret with his books? The room has no latch and is perpetually open. He is a person alienated from his surroundings, and the thought of working for a living is unthinkable. The adventure, risk and danger of picking pockets serves more than his financial needs. It has aesthetic and spiritual dimensions. It fills his life--it is a role he has selected for himself in the drama of the world. Does he have feelings? Certainly he feels the blood rushing to his temple at the climactic moments of the "act"--like the bomb defusing soldier in the Hurt Locker-- and this is is what he wishes to replicate and re-enact with ascending degrees of risk and boldness. He is an artist and an addict--"the adrenalin fix"--even as he is an amoral animal. The spiritual and moral vacuum, that he inhabits is indeed a state of life that may be the signature of the times. Picking peoples pockets is a drug that restores to him the feeling of being alive. He claims to love his mother more than himself. But he persistently refuses to see her, even as she is obviously approaching her end. Is this not the disconnect that pervades human relationships, which religions have vainly sought to bridge, and perhaps this is what Bresson was trying to address. John Donne says no man is an island, but tragically, that is precisely what we are. As the saying goes, breathing is not living.

At  seventy five minutes, it is dense fare. The style is muted, understated, enigmatic--Bressonian. It has the minimalism of a symbol. In Mouchette and Money, the robot-like expressionlessness serves to express extremes of feeling. In Pickpocket it serves to express a more complex state of life. Mouchette and Money are perhaps about the individual floundering in the gusts of social forces. Here the focus is on a seemingly autonomous individual and the radical choices he makes to give content to his own life.

It is perhaps characteristic of this artist to have selected the  gentler art of picking pockets rather than bloodier crimes--as Dostoevsky did-- as a study of the human mind. One can pick any number of pockets--giving scope for a leisurely longitudinal evolution of theme and character-- but killing would be a single shot affair.  True to his aims of precision, transparency, truth and detachment, he takes on a miniscule specimen of his subject of enquiry, the better to dwell on detail and texture---there is something  entomological in his style. What is beyond doubt is Bresson's own artistic passion to be true to the inner vision which he aims to replicate on film. That is why silence sweeps his film. Better to say little, or nothing, than a false note.

A portrait of homo modernus and much food for thought. Bears a third watch.

Roger Ebert's Great Movie Review

Money

*Robert Bresson*1983*85m*L'Argent*inspired by a Tolstoi short story*

The last of Bresson's films--he was around eighty--after which he was financially constrained from furthur film-making. One of the dominant images in the film is that of ATMs: the sound of machinery and the money disgorging. " A film has four things--visuals, music, dialogues and sounds." This one has no music except a bit at the end, little dialogue, plenty of sound effects and is visually very expressive. Bresson remarked that the present film belongs to his so called "lucid"--rather than pessimistic-- period. Whatever that means.

Money! Who can deny it's power, importance and desirability? For it's sake, how many tears are shed, hearts  broken , enemies made and crimes committed! It is the ultimate objectivisation of worldly desires-- neither sinner nor saint can be indifferent to it .

Two school boys set in motion a tragic chain of events when they pass a fake 500 franc note at a photographers shop. The photographer and his assistant in turn pass off this bad note, along with two others they have, to a young man who delivers gas. This young man is caught when he tries to use this money, tried in a court, found guilty but let off. However he loses his job, which sets him on a path of crime to support his wife and child. Again he is caught and sentenced to three years in prison. While in jail, his child dies, his wife leaves him and he attempts suicide. He emerges from prison a transformed creature, and the film culminates in four brutal murders.

It is a stark portrayal of the reality of human society, which seems quite valid as a description of India as I know it in the twenty first century. We are at the mercy of blind and invisible forces ( money and ATMs are perhaps a powerful metaphor for these forces ). The characters in the film--us-- seem to be like mindless rats scampering in a maze. With the austere style of expression for which he is known, Bresson observes this human tragedy of the obliteration of a youth with deep but leashed compassion--compassion utterly shorn of sentiment. At no point do we see violence on the screen--even a slap is only portrayed through it's sound. He maintains distance from the subject and his detachment is almost scientific. His poetry is cold and steely. As in his other films, the actors do not act, and speak only in monosyllabes. They are more like "mannequins". Bresson expresses himself through position and motion, a geometric linearity and minimalism.  His films are works of architecture, sculpted to the sinew. Bresson speaks to our soul, if  such an entity have existence, in deep humanism.

The film whets my appetite for  more of his work.
robert-bresson.com
Noel Vera's review

Monster 2003--of thieves and judges

Aileen Wuornos, an ex-hooker, was convicted of seven murders of her clients commited over several years around 1990. She was in jail for twelve years, and finally executed in 2002. The convicted woman has been captured in an unforgettable portrayal by the South Africa bred actress Charlize Theron. This performance, rated by Roger Ebert as among the best in the history of cinema, has been compared to that of Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc.

Criminals are not a breed apart, genetically  wired. They are us, in different circumstances. They are natural by-products of society as it is constituted. Going by the film alone, Wuornos, due to lack of education or parenting, drifts into a livelihood of prostitution, which, at a point of sadistic abusiveness at the hands of her client, results in his murder. She decides to give up her profession for a job, but finds doors closed, mainly due to lack of education. Thereafter, she commits a series of murders, mainly for money to support a gay teenager who has become dependant on her, and for whose sake she is impelled into the series of crimes, and who is the one to finally betray her.

We see a human being, deficient in inner equipage and anchoring sucked by a powerful maelstrom of environmental forces into a trajectory the responsibility for which cannot be laid at a single door. The film is a compassionate study of the downtrodden  and an indictment of present day human society. One is reminded of Gandhi's famous quip when asked his opinion of modern civilisation. He replied he thought it was a good idea. The law of the jungle still rules our world and it is a war to death between the haves and the have-nots.

Theron's portrayal of the tragic character has the  momentum and inevitability of a natural calamity. Loose limbed, overflowing her clothes, like a river in spate or a  log racing downstream, her flight towards doom is swift and  preordained. It has been said that weakness is the greatest sin.

A deeply humanistic film.

*I would not have seen this movie but for it's inclusion in Ebert's new list of ten best films of the decade. ( Link below. )

Roger Ebert's review
Wiki article on Aileen Wuornos
Ebert's best films of the decade

Mouchette---icy winds of youth

*Robert Bresson*1967*France*80m*


Mouchette means "little fly" in French.

The stark story of the sufferings of a teenage girl, Mouchette, living with her invalid mother and alcoholic father in a french country town. She is the object of ill treatment and suppression both at home and in the school and sinks into defiant dejection. Things come to a head when she is caught in a downpour in a lonely wood and accosted by a poacher.

The words "austere" and "spiritual" are often applied to this director. Spiritual is a vague and emasculated term because it often has shades of escapism and wishy-washy theorizing about things it is no use worrying about. The present movie is  humane and compassionate and a story of childhood and it's dignity and sensitivity, as well as the lack of mercy of human society as it is presently constituted, which in it's essentials does not seem very different in mid-century rural Europe as it is where we stand now.

Austerity of course may refers to his characteristic minimal style of direction and non-acting. Bresson's actors are expressly forbidden to "act", to make any "effort" to express. We see what seem to be dead-pan faces. But then, the emotion in the script and story is so authentic that this suppression comes through all the more powerfully. When we feel nothing, we act. What we feel too much, we need to hide. But the heart is omniscient: there's no fooling it.

Mouchette is a normal youngster of twelve or thirteen but all the desires and joy of childhood are crushed by the non-accepting, crushing and hostile forces in the shape of peers, teachers, family and the neighborhood.

In some powerful shots, we see tears of humiliation and anger streaming down her cheeks while no muscle of the face moves and no sound of a sob is able to emerge. The dams within have burst. It is as though a sculpture has burst into tears. The eyes have to do the talking.

In a moving sequence, when for once she has enjoyed herself at the fair and is about to make an innocent overture of friendship to a boy, she is rudely pulled back by her dissolute father and slapped in the middle of the fair and in front of the boy. This is the limit of indignity, and we see her silently crying as she pulls away. She is a child, like a million others everywhere from whom childhood has been snatched away. She has nothing and no one to hold on to.

What kind of person is she? Very ordinary, very normal. She has a strong self, a healthy sense of dignity, feelings of love, anger and hate. She will grow up into a responsible and beautiful individual. But alas, the gusts of adversity have come too early and too strong, little fly that she is, and she has had no chance to develop  commensurate inner resilience. She has no anchor. Not even the sick mother. No one is an island--once adrift from the main, we wither and shrink.

I certainly look forward to seeing more of Bresson.

A wonderful film.