Mulholland Drive

*2001*David Lynch*147m*

Mulholland Drive is a scenic road running along the ridges of mountains in the vicinity of Los Angeles, offering panoramic views of the city, and along which are located  mansions including those of some Hollywood celebrities. The title of the film is perhaps an apt and alluringly feminine euphemism for a nightmarish roller-coaster through steamy subways of the mind.

The film opens when the intended murder of a woman on this road is interrupted by an accident in which she is the sole survivor. It closes with a suicidal gunshot, as if the confusing phantasmagoria which constitutes the bulk of the movie has to culminate in a reality too starkly real for ambiguation. For the rest, it does not seem worth the effort to go into the plot details since it is a loosely strung together patchwork of dreams and illusions, which is able to grip our attention by the violence, unexpected turns, fine acting and even a kind of nausea in this  freudian netherworld.

A romanticized, impressionistic, gloomy, jazzily poetic essay on life set right in the middle of where things are supposed to happen: Hollywood.

Film directors have no more answers to the verities than most of us, so it it is a fruitless labor to search out the meaning of something which is not meant to have any. Which is why they generally are wise to refuse to risk interpreting their own work, as in the present case. Which is by not to suggest that something comes of nothing. For art is supposed to make us deeper, broader, more caring, empathic and understanding rather than wiser.

Roger Ebert's review

A Serious Man (2009)--ages of man

*Coen brothers*97m*Michael Stulbarg*

Why are all these problems happening to me? What have I done to deserve this and what is the right thing for me to do? What's it all about? These are the large never answerable questions which the directors, or at least the harried hero of this film, Larry Gopnik, would have answered as life confronts him with a series of never remitting fiascos.

 His wife wants him to move out of the house to make place for his best friend, who, as Hashem ( a Hebrew appellation for god ) would have it, is killed in an accident, after emptying out the joint bank account of  Larry and his wife. His tenure confirmation as a teacher of physics hangs in uncertainty. A Korean student bribes and blackmails him to give him passing grades. This is only a partial list of the miseries of this contemporary Job. He has problems with his children and brother in law, to say nothing of the nightmares. He seeks "enlightenment" by consulting an ascending hierarchy of clerics.

The film concludes with the good news of confirmation of his tenure. This is followed by a bill for $3000 for legal expenses, and an ominous phone call from his doctor seeking a face to face meeting to discuss the result of an X-ray examination. And a storm is brewing afar as the credits begin to roll, and we leave our Larry, beautifully enacted, in the merciless lion-pit.

A fair enough picture of our existence while we are alive. There is a local saying " life is a carnival of those yet alive"(jag jeoondian da mela ). The carnivalesque is notably missing in this take on life. The supposedly grand drama of life fizzles into the bewildering, meaningless and excruciating experience of a young, intelligent and sensitive academic.

Roger Ebert aptly describes it as a "wince-wince" movie. One could regard it as a description of the contemporary human beings confusion about life and reality. Larry is suspended midway between the sterile certainties of science, in terms of which he has moulded himself, and the equal impotence of religion and clerics in the face of the hurricanes looming at the end of the film.

Deserves a second view, not foreseeably.
Roger Ebert's review

Up in the Air

*Jason Reitman*109m*2009*


Ryan (Clooney),  a graying bachelor, is a corporate executive, living out of a suitcase, his home the airliner at an altitude of ten kilometers. His ambition is to log ten million kilometers of flying which will entitle him to a badge of recognition from the airline and an interview with the chief pilot. His social circle consists of the airline and hotel employees he encounters as he moves from one hotel and air terminal to another. His job profile is that of a Termination Facilitator, or hatchet man, in a company whose line of business is "down-sizing" of companies. His job is to fire people.


The film gives a picture of the current spate of unemployment  in the US. As the script says, loss of a job is a trauma similar to a death in the family. People react in different ways to the shock of leaving a job, and are known to be suicide risks. Loss of one's livelihood is loss of one's dignity as a contributor in society. And you wake up the next day with no-where to go, facing a horrifying succession of Sundays. One's work is what gives structure and sequence to time and loss of occupation throws the pattern of life into disarray. Anger, disbelief, grief--the film captures it all well.


It's a film as perfect as the same director's Juno, and like that film, provides an authentic window to  present day US. In spite of a grim theme, there is a lightness, optimism and even joy running through the movie. As Clooney says in the movie, " Living is moving." On a canvas of blue sky or seas of cloud, with two romantic side-plots to add substance to the story, it is as enjoyable and educative as you would like.

Three Idiots--message(s) from Clark Kent

*Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Boman Irani*160m*Hindi*

It had to be seen because it was there, it's omnipresence, like Avatar and Titanic. Everybody I meet has seen it, and apparently enjoyed it, as I myself on the whole did.

But then it is a difference in points of view. Why, after all, does one see a film? For the majority, I assume, it's to soothe the nerves at the end of the day when the hurly burly's done, in the company of close ones, a packet of corn, or a drink if at home. Legitimate enough. But for better or worse, I tend to regard seeing a film as a more serious investment of time, for it's power to bring about an inner transformation, exactly the same reasons for taking up a work of literature. This time it was more out of social obligation.

It is a light hearted effervescent movie which reaches out to the heart by addressing, however clumsily, concerns that most of us NNRIs ( non-NRIs ) have to painfully confront. The impossible is a staple ingredient of mainstream Hindi cinema, and you will find the content beyond this obstacle. Aamir is Aamir because he knows how to tug at our heartstrings, even as he doesn't address our higher intellects, assuming we have time in our harsh little world to entertain such an organ. The film is one of the biggest grossers in recent times and this surely tells us something about the audience, since cinema, the most wide reaching of art media, is a barometer and mirror of it's society.

It's a story about the young and young hearted, the customers of the great dreams of capitalism, consumerism and virtual unreality-- bubbles which implode when experienced from the other side of the counter. The film is particularly addressed to students in a particular age segment, on the brink of the vast forbidding seas of adulthood. (The  box-office success in recent times of films addressed to this segment shows where the bulk cinema audience is presently situated, or at least it captures where and what they aspire to be. Gone are the days of Mithun Chakraborty, when youngsters aspired to be gangsters or their converse.) There is  a great hunger for education, and the pressures and heartbreaks of being young and middle-class are well presented even in caricature.Perhaps it will leave some imprint on the collective mind about the inadequacies of the educational system of which this film could be a symptom more than a cure.

In it's somewhat exaggerated depiction of male camaraderie in the late teens, the humor tends to be scatological, which is perhaps a step in graduation towards the openly sexual expressiveness of the west--our mad rush to catch up with their madnesses. We are treated to  a generous displays of male buttocks, and several urinary performances. For men will be men. Aamir of course is centre stage as the paragon, and his main strength, accounting for his popularity, stems from his projection of a mixture of traditional virtues, patriotism and super-heroism--a safe mix which would seem to be viable approximation, at least temporarily, towards the role model we seek in the sterile vacuum of our time. Cardboard idealism has long been a staple of Hindi cinema, hopefully heading for swansong. We are stuck on supermen.

Boman Irani is a natural comedian and he is ever innovative in his succession of performances, his face fluid and rippling in a chain reaction of expressions, antithesis of Chaplin and close to Raj Kapoor. Omi Vaidya as the Silencer also extracted many laughs with his mimicry of an NRI, which is a very original act. Aamir portraying Aamir is his usual self and manages to act convincingly as half his age but since we already know better it's rather pathetic to see him prancing around with a sling bag. But then in the immortal words of  Deng Xiaoping, the color of the cat is immaterial so long as it catches the mice.

The White Ribbon-"roots of evil"

*Michael Haneke*2009*135m*German*Das Weisse Band*

This 2009 film is a retrospective narrative of events in a German village in the year preceding World War 1. The narrator is a man of advanced years, who in the film is a teacher of around thirty years. The year of the movie is 1914 and the film concludes with the voice-over informing us of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke and heir apparent while on a visit to Sarajevo, the event which triggered of the first war. The unprecedented events which swallowed Europe in the following decades form a kind of silent backdrop of the movie. Whether or not the movie metaphorically examines the "roots of evil" ( Haneke's expression ) which bloomed as Nazism can be debated but I for one could not refrain from seeing it in the context of the looming future which has already happened, even though the dramatis personae are innocent of the knowledge we the audience posess, unless we regard the film as a play-out of the narrator/film director's memory.

This is a German village of 1914, and it might as well be 1814, since it is the world of horse driven carriages, oil lamps and manual agriculture. The era is re-constructed in exquisite monochrome. The fields, the streams, the barns, the rectangular grey stone houses with their gabled entrances, the weathered faces of the working class are all meticulously etched in a canvas of  bewitching beauty. The world of the early twentieth century resembles the sixteenth more than the present resembles the world fifty years ago. The other Germany, of music and intellect and Goethe is very much here, along with the  sordidness which is our universal karma as humans, and religion when it stretches to morbid extremes. It is as though the director is searching out in this world of noble music and harmonious seasons the roots of the evil which was to come about. The roots are slender indeed and need a good deal of searching.

Ah yes, the plot. It's a closed and rigid society, patriarchal and authoritarian, and a swarm of children wend around in the hushed isolation of their private world . There is the Baron, the first citizen of the dorf. The widowed lecherous doctor molests his own daughter, The doctor's assistant, midwife and mistress adores her mentally retarded son Karli. The pastor's love for his family has been transformed into sadism by rigid religosity, and he tyrannises his children, wreaking severe punishment for minor transgressions. The farmer struggles to feed his large family, as he and his children react to the loss of the mother and wife. The good natured teacher blends comfortably into this idyllic if somewhat demon-infested environment. The teacher's  courtship of  the shy and gentle milk maid like Eva, Gretchen like, forms a lighted center in this sombre drama.

There is a series of mysterious and unexplained occurrences: the doctor is the target of an engineered accident, the farmer's wife is killed when the floor of a mill gives way, children are tortured, a barn is set to fire, a field of cabbage is "beheaded", the farmer commits suicide. Who is responsible for the accidents or crimes? The teacher plays Sherlock Holmes and the movie starts with the narrators statement that all this may have had something to do with the events of subsequent years. However,  that does not seem to be the point of this delicate jewel of a movie indigo in mood , reminiscent somewhat of the 1972 Cabaret.

One may ask what quality in the German society led to the rise of hitlerism? What are the "roots of evil" which Haneke talks about which herald later events? The answer must be "Nothing." The society depicted in the movie could equally well belong to any other part of the world. The roots of evil, as of goodness, are universal attributes of the human make-up, not distinguishable by race, gender or education.

One can best enjoy and admire the movie as an especially delicate description of a time and a place, with melodic strains to evoke a sense of the ominous. The then unwritten but now sinking towards oblivion, future, suspends over the film like a  heavy, still and invisible cloud.
Roger Ebert's review