The Case is Closed (Kharij)

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)

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

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

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

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.