Haider2014..semi Bollywood

This brave new made by India Hamlet is the third in Vishal Bhardwaj's trilogy of films based on the plays. The constraints due to  audience expectation as well as Vishal's own artistic powers show through. As a cinema craftsman he catches the snow blanketed valley as well as the nuances of speech and accent and depths of Kashmiri culture. As a dramatist he manages to transmute the great play in which the particulars are reshaped but nearly all the contours are clearly preserved in splendid refraction. The political backdrop is incidental in this essentially human revenge drama. The fratricide and maternal infidelity is captured with great power. But Haider is no introspective and complex Hamlet: he is boy who explodes into manhood in the quest for revenge. To paraphrase a reviewer "...it may be deficient in the Hamlet department but it gives good Gertrude." Tabu is indeed in complete command of her role. What remains most in my mind is the intoxicating snow enveloped landscape and what I can only call the soul of this place I once visited in the depth of winter.

The climactic "pile of corpses" sequence is wonderful; it takes place in a Muslim snow clad graveyard sprawling with some dozens of bodies, and with many a twist of plot we see Ghazala aka Gertrude self immolating, not for political reasons but as an act of penitence.

Chutzpah: the pleading for mercy by a person who has killed his parents on the grounds that he is an orphan.

Fanny and Alexander 1982

The luxuriant richness of life is captured through this portrait of a not very extra-ordinary (yet extraordinary in the sense that nothing is ordinary) family set in a horse-carriage era at the previous turn of century. It stands apart from the genre which has earned the director the nick name of "gloomy Swede". This is an exuberant film filled with joy, pain and mystery, specially when it sees life through the eyes of Alexander, the teenage boy who occupies the most space in the film. Alexander may be a parody on Hamlet, with a full fledged father-ghost, and a mother who marries a loathsome priest, but the movie ends, not in a pile of dead bodies, but the birth of three babies, two of them twins. Bergman liberally sprinkles the supernatural specially representing the pain, wonder and mystery seen through Alexander's eyes. He perhaps is the Bergman autobiographical prototype. It could well be Bergman's best film, made in his sixties, a picture painted by a person who has sipped deeply and richly, and meant to be, but was not, his final movie. 

Gertrud 1964

Visually, it looks like Ozu. Both the character and appearance of Gertrud resemble Kim Novak in Vertigo. The film has the same miasma of eroticism as Hitchcock's film. Interestingly, this is Dreyer's last film, at age 75, and a departure from his previous religious themes. It is a visually arresting film, whether in the composition of interiors and gardens or the poses struck by the human figures, as they slowly declaim their lines to the audience, rather than each other. Love itself is the theme, and what distinguishes is the presentation, rather than the substance. Not the usual stuff, nor forgettable. That apart, the film is at best about the pathetic absurdity of life lived on shallow premises, which, the film maker, going by his previous work, must surely have known. Unworthy, perhaps, as a swan song, for so accomplished an artist. On the other hand, as cinema, in perfection of form, it could be the best. It has the austere luminescence of Persona, sans its volubility. Could Dreyer have intended satire?

OLD REVIEW

The Last of the Unjust.Lanzmann.2013

A riveting film, 3 1/2 hours notwithstanding. Yet one more addendum to Shoah, it is based on interviews with Murmulstein, the Rabbi who functioned as a tool of the SS in administering the Theresienstadt. The interviews reveal an enormously forceful personality: intelligent, voluble, courageous and wily, capable of defending himself eloquently in a seemingly indefensible position. If he is a demon, he is a fascinating one. Having worked face to face with Eichmann over seven years he ridicules Arendt's conclusion about his "banality". "He was a demon", says Murmulstein. After the war, he was tried and exonerated by a Czech tribunal, spending the rest of his life in peaceful obscurity in Rome. He was ferreted out by the film-maker, and participated with great gusto in the week long interviews, expressing himself as a seasoned thespian to consolidate his position in history through the present film, which is no documentary of a season. Not only is it history, it pertains to the dark regions of human nature. "All martyrs are not saints", he observes, in reference to those who perished.

Passion of Joan of Arc(1927)

Returning to this silent masterpiece, I am more amazed than ever at the audacity of attempting so difficult a theme. This young Dreyer has been able to capture the essence of the well documented historical trial, and present it in minute detail in a succession of flawless images. It had me thinking of Welles. The story ascends--"passion" is so appropriate a word with its biblical resonance--right to the engulfing flames, very much like the procession to to the cross. Falconetti's powerful portrayal is rightfully lauded, but this is Dreyer's film, with his deep insight into human nature.

OLD REVIEW