the review diary

AGNEEPATH: MOVIE REVIEW

2012-02-02T11:08:00.000+05:30

Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Sanjay Dutt, Rishi Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Om Puri, Sachin Khedekar

Director: Karan Malhotra

Runtime: 178 min.

Verdict: Awesome. And Mr. Rishi Kapoor simply knocks it out of the park.

Genre: Drama, Action, Crime

Unlike Mr. Mukul Anand’s film, what moves us here is its utter purity that distills through its frames into its characters, into its narrative, right down to its themes. I wouldn’t want to be so sure of that order though, and it could easily be the other way around. Behind his suits, his shoes, his sunglasses, Vijay Dinanath Chavan harbored a desire to not merely be accepted but worshipped. A 36-yeard old Vijay Chavan outgrew his childhood just as much as Mr. Bachchan outgrew the character, and the accomplishment was the manner in which Mr. Mukul S. Anand built a film around this individual phenomenon where characters found themselves quickly pushed to the peripheries once it entered (a lot of Agneepath has to do with entering and leaving) those frames. We covet what we see, said a real wise man once, and amidst the banality of the rural the glamour of the urban (Kancha Cheena), and by that definition the western, was probably what installed itself within Vijay Chavan, whose amalgamation is mirrored in the way Jean Michel Jarre was at clash with that traditional melodramatic score, and which also mirrors in Mr. Anand’s aesthetic and oeuvre (he remade Cape Fear before Martin Scorsese).

Mr. Malhotra, whose film probably appreciates the undercurrents and understands the limitations of Mr. Anand’s film better than anybody else, completely strips away all these layers of deception, these facades behind which its characters hid, and pulls the narrative back to its primal self in an almost declarative manner. The paranoia of the urbanization of the rural owing to foreign investment and the ensuing cultural dilution is not the talking point anymore, and it should not be now that we have a whole range of foreign brands endorsing the film, and what we have here is a rather straightforward tale dynastical/feudal oppression and the ensuing revenge. Mr. Malhotra, as the trailer announces, is concerned only with revenge, and that ways this film is as much a remake of the older Agneepath as it is of M/s Abbas-Mustan’s Soldier. Only that it is a significantly better realized film, with a far greater narrative clarity (the plot might still trouble you but it makes for perfect dramatic sense, in the process alleviating a lot of the problems I had with the original) and some really unsettling compositions, invoking just as much extra-textual stuff as Mr. Anand’s film, and which leads me to suggest ‘correction’ instead of ‘remake’. Here is that age-old story of an ordinary man thrust in an extraordinary situation, a little boy robbed of his forming years, and there’s probably nobody who can convey that combination of sincerity and brainwashed resolve (Fiza, Mission Kashmir) better than Mr. Roshan. He is not the guy who walks into a room and owns everybody around, and Mr. Malhotra rightly stacks larger-than-life figures against him. The film’s narrative, then, assumes its title and the parent poem in a figurative sense, into its very core, unlike Mr. Anand’s where a mostly kitschy (but stylish) literal justification to it is merely appended at the end.

It is a rather strange Mumbai that Agneepath creates, with little to no traces of modernization (despite the guns and telephones), with back alleys and stone roads, and what we get is the feel of a medieval world controlled by warlords and where the regime is merely another faction living within its own cocoon. There’s not merely a distinct lack of sophistication but civilization altogether, the only places accumulating any sense of decency being the chawl, and wherever it is his mother and sister live. Rauf Lala (Mr. Kapoor), who controls the city, is probably the closest approximation of Mr. Danny Denzongpa’s materialistic Kancha Cheena, and yet he might be miles away in that he’s out in plain-view. He sells little girls and he is despicable, and there’s a great conviction in there, and although I wouldn’t describe here for you how incredible Mr. Kapoor is, I would leave you with the tease that the resolution of his angle, which quite brilliantly stages the film’s central idea, is intensely awesome. And here I intend to imply the awesomeness of the fist-pumping kind.

Mandwa, that little isle cut away from the motherland, is something of a synecdoche for all the terrorist hotbeds, close enough to cause havoc but far enough to resist quarantine. You almost wonder what the Indian Coast Guard (already born by the film’s timeline) is doing, and I wonder if that was intentional. The strangest weirdest bit though is the archetypical Kancha Cheena (Mr. Dutt), a completely homegrown entity, and who, over and above Vijay Chauhan (Mr. Roshan), returns to his Mandwa. We see the massive figure walking down to the village in a long shot, and just as memories of High Plains Drifter start condensing, Mr. Malhotra provides for a heavily disconcerting over the shoulder shot of the village. The raw scalp in the foreground, and somewhere deep within the subconscious a memory started itching, which turned into a full-blown realization the moment Kancha walks into the village and picks up the salt in his fist (a close-up here). Maybe it is because Jan 30^th happened to be just a couple of days before, or probably because Master Dinanath (Mr. Chetan Pandit) invokes Mahatma Gandhi for only the 11,347^th time in Hindi cinema history only a little while before Kancha’s homecoming. We’ve had our fair share of Gita-quoting villains (Aks comes to mind), some of them just for the heck of it, but to become the very embodiment of anti-Gandhi, what with Mr. Dutt’s bulky physicality almost spelling out violence. And this was the guy who made Gandhi trend recently. He walks around with a stick and opens the doors for creating cocaine (salt), and I was completely blown away. We don’t get images as macabre as this every now and then.

And if the Mumbai in Agneepath is medieval, Mandwa is straight out of the dark ages, a sort of externalization of Kancha’s barren ugliness, quite literally the underworld. And again, despite the machine guns, or maybe because of it, there’s the memory of Col. Kurtz floating around, and so yeah, Vijay Chauhan’s walk down Mandwa’s memory lane becomes a tour through the heart of darkness.

The thing is, Vijay Chauhan is our everyman, innocent more than anything else, pitted against all these heavyweights, all of whom are quite central to the frame. And although my kind of tonal austerity might even suggest downplaying his introduction, it acknowledges the absolute dramatic/thematic idiocy of the mother’s arc in Mr. Anand’s film and justly brands her as the misguided one. And still, despite Vijay knocking off all the bad guys, and their sons, the film doesn’t justify vigilantism of any kind. Any other movie (M/s Abbas-Mustan’s Soldier) and the dude could’ve been an undercover cop, but because he’s not, and because he still has to will himself through all this ugliness is an accumulation of the film’s moral weight (I’m reminded of William Costigan, and even Joseph Pistone without the accompanying righteousness). The physicality here in his film is palpable, and whoever it was that did the sound design (Vijay being banged against the wall had me wincing and hiding for cover) deserves my hat tip.

**SPOILERS ABOUND, KINDLY SKIP FOR LATER. YOU MIGHT CONSIDER THE NOTE THOUGH**

A small bother here. Killing off Kaali (Ms. Chopra) is an ill-advised move. I understand where the film is coming from, but it’s a decision that’s a bit of a cop-out. The moment we lay our eyes on the adult Vijay Chavan, we know he’s on a death wish. And the moment he declares his name, and such is the clarity of narration here, we immediately realize all hell is going to break loose. Still Vijay acknowledges her love and reveals his own for her, and they decide to marry despite knowing his eventual fate, and the film here achieves a moment of pure grace. What would simply have been a throwaway character, as is the case with the original, here turns into one of the film’s thematic manifestations (innocence et al.), and by conveniently dumping her off, the film both dissolves and resolves the beauty of it all. I think she should’ve lived on, you know, and a parting shot of her, or the little sister, in the vein of Billie Frechette might have been dramatically devastating. But then, what the heck, you want to draw an estimate of Mr. Malhotra’s filmmaking chops all you need is the opening burst where Kancha distributes money. Agneepath is the sort of blockbuster we’ve absolutely forgotten to make, like Ghatak, and if you were to ask me, Mr. Johar can safely say he’s done his father proud. So yeah, there you go.

Note: No, Mr. Mukul S. Anand’s film is not a classic; it is in fact not even close to being a classic. It is a most interesting film, a film that has influenced me a great deal, and I would be the first to admit that to hail it as something close to holy writ is taking our reverence for a decade that churned mostly nonsense a bit too far. Going by that rule, most of our films in a decade’s time ought to be eligible for the “classic” tag. I mean, we’re so forgiving for the past, we might want to extend that generosity to the present as well.

AGNEEPATH: MOVIE REVIEW

2012-01-27T19:45:00.003+05:30

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan

Director: Mukul S. Anand

Runtime: 167 min.

Verdict: One of our finest filmmaker’s masterstroke.

Genre: Drama, Crime

It might be tempting to brand Mr. Anand’s Agneepath as one of those “interesting failures”, especially when he himself wasn’t exactly satisfied with the finished film, and walk away. But then, this was a time a kid (me) was fed with ready-to-digest stuff like Toofan and Shahenshah, or even Deewar (this was the late 80s, my dad started taking me to the movies as early as he could), where the images were exciting but linear, and where the general notion assumed an Amitabh Bachchan film was mostly designed keeping the kids in mind, Mr. Anand’s film, with its grim barely lit interiors mostly served only by a silvery ray barging its way in, and its dynamic almost distorted frames – the distortion seeping from/into the anger within – the experience was somewhat maddening, and probably even unpleasant. It was an Amitabh Bachchan film unlike any Amitabh Bachchan film, and there was a resident ugliness about the proceedings I probably wasn’t prepared for.

This is, we need to understand, a time when the social structure was easily defined, what with our movies mostly being mouthpieces for the working class, and a deep-rooted suspicion of any foreign body wanting to “invest” in here, who happened to be easily classified under the section provided for my Mr. Tom Alter, or the late Bob Christo, or even Mr. Kader Khan donning a white suit and silken grey hair and a pair of sunglasses and walking inside a submarine. This was the time where suits were almost shorthand for some kind of corruption, or in the very least financial affluence, and power, that one ought to be in the very least suspicious of. And unlike much of mainstream Hindi cinema’s resident classical cut-and-dried approach to such issues as if reading out a newspaper article, Mr. Anand doesn’t leave the fabric all clean and dry. The camera does track along smoothly but jags along in a staccato. There’s a roughness in those “steadicam” (probably?)shots that seem to betray the undulating undeveloped terrain below. There is some serious physicality going for his film here, and in the manic energy of the film’s exaggerated movements the feeling is one of exploding warts. You know, like watching, and applauding and squirming watching Saurav Ganguly’s shirt-waving antics down at the Lord’s, or Virat Kohli in general. I quite like the tone of this article.

Mr. Anand probably was the only other filmmaker, besides Mr. Chandra Barot (Don), who displayed the filmmaking chops to modulate an Amitabh Bachchan performance, and to not let the rest of the film be an aside. There sure is respect, so much so that one might even be “fooled” into believing the film is playing to the performer’s tune. Vijay Chavan (Mr. Bachchan) walks into the Commissioner’s house intending to warn him, and in keeping with his restlessness Mr. Anand provides us with this profile foregrounded heavily with the Commissioner’s body. We know he’s talking, but until now it mostly feels like rhetoric.

And the camera starts tracking in, slowly as the performer’s restlessness gives way to conviction, and this is where we end. Oh yeah, we’re listening. Movements like these, and Vijay Chavan feels less a character and more a force of nature.

The film, though, wouldn’t let the performer run away with its tone. Here was a man fresh from his political debacle and really angry, and Mr. Anand both plays up the icon and causes him to embarrass himself using that very same raw material (performance). Vijay Chavan walks into his bosses’ den, and Mr. Anand uses one of narrative cinema’s standard tropes – the introduction through shoes – to not merely tune into its standard service of representing the power equation, but to let him physically announce his presence as well. Be it the murder in the prison, or climbing down those symbolic stairs down in Mauritius, or the crowd outside the hospital, Mr. Anand goes real close with his compositions and wraps it around the corporeality. In those dark rooms he’s the one surrounded by enemies, or in those slums he’s the one hogged by devotees touching him, feeling him. The need for this reverence, or worship, is at the heart of Agneepath, and it is a need that seems to run within the genes, from dad to son. Mr. Anand highlights (contrasts) this spectacularly in a sequence down at a classy restaurant, an absolute caricature/shorthand for the bourgeoisie, and despite the odds (what chance does the precious affluent class of society have against the raw honesty of the working class) Vijay Chavan neither intimidates nor trumps the establishment (ala Howard Hughes in The Aviator) but instead, thanks to the almost disdainful calmness of everyone including the restaurant official, is basically caught frothing in his mouth. It is an expansive place, with human figures distributed around, and in its vacuum Vijay Chavan cuts a pathetic figure, the embarrassment of which he wishes to wash away in the intimacy of the slum. There’s a sense of insecurity in the performance that Mr. Anand taps into. Here is a man neck-deep in his identity crisis, and to constantly recite his roots is probably more of a defense mechanism than anything else.

Mr. Anand draws some serious leverage from banisters, which hitherto in Hindi cinema were only silent representatives of status, but here becomes the defining boundary, a sort of separation between the powerful and, well, us.

It is in fact one of Mr. Anand’s one of many masterstrokes in the way he separates even “our hero” from us, making in many ways “the inaccessible powerful”. This was never the Amitabh Bachchan we have known. The whole sequence down in Mauritius, i.e. the Alibaba song, becomes a sort of meta-narrative to the proceedings (so much so that I might as well shed everything else and concentrate wholly and solely on this song), chalking out the power zones within the film, and also through those spectacular uber-stylish ultra-closeup staccato pans, from right to left and from top to bottom around Vijay’s profile, juxtaposing the opaque present with the past, acting some sort of reminder is probably one of Hindi cinema’s inspired moments. There were many films (Ram Lakhan and Parinda) that dwelled on revenge and moral corruption but none that incorporated the whole bargain into its very aesthetic.

This makes it all the more frustrating when the narrative absolutely derails in the final hour, achieving some ludicrously high melodramatic pitches, which, to be honest, didn’t make sense then, and don’t make sense now. Mr. Anand was rightly unsatisfied the way the film came out. I never understood his wife lamenting him about Mandwa, as if he had meandered from his goals, when the film presents a Vijay Chavan so resolutely chasing his vengeance. There’s probably something about Vijay Chavan coming around from wanting to be worshipped to conforming to God, and I guess that was on Mr. Anand’s mind, that gesture of dropping the village’s mud before the idol could be an indicator of submission and acceptance. Yet, Agneepath is a maddening trainwreck, arm-twisting its way into some sort of resolution. Which is disappointing. Because this remains one of my greatest influences. Those intense expressionistic closeups focusing on a raised brow or a moved finger, those rack-focused shots, the staccato pans are personal territory. But more importantly it showed one of cinema’s great actors in a rather new light. Despite Adalat, despite Trishul, and despite Aakhri Raasta, there never was an image of my man sitting around talking whilst a man pleaded on his legs. I never knew Amitabh Bachchan could be ruthless and frightening. To see a hero smile whilst his sister is kidnapped leaves one hell of an impression. It was some experience, when I first saw Agneepath, of not an anti-hero but a neo-villain. For that alone, for bringing a crisis into the very identity of this great actor, I consider this Mr. Mukul Anand’s masterstroke.

The Physicality of Mukul Anand's AGNEEPATH

2012-01-25T16:33:00.000+05:30

The Best Movies of 2011, and your Best Picture

2012-01-17T20:55:00.001+05:30

The Grumbach Awards 2011

SPECIAL MENTION:

I thought this might be the appropriate moment to discuss the one title that has managed to make the transition from my wish-list of movies-to-see to things-to-do, although it is still a fair distance away from things-to-do-before-I-die. Nevertheless, I have fantasized all year, since the day I read David Bordwell’s blog, to one day pack my bag with portable food, take my wife and spend a whole day watching Christian Marclay’s The Clock. And talk. And watch. I say, that’ll be the day.

Best Picture

The Nominees are (In alphanumeric order):

Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan) (Review forthcoming)

The mayor’s daughter sure is beautiful. I mean, she’s divine. Not since Inglourious Basterds’ opening has there been a scene that has achieved such precise connection with the audience, being both with it and ahead of it. It’s magical and amusing working on so many different levels, motivating explaining and mystifying the entire film. Not many movies remind us of Stalker, and Mr. Ceylan’s film does. My guess is it isn’t merely the most perfectly crafted film of the year, but its most perfectly realized. A masterpiece.

Budanggeorae (Dir: Ryu Seung-wan) (Review forthcoming)
If somebody ever wanted to make a sequel to The Departed, here is a film infinitely more skillful and precise. What’s more, it is readily available. Arguably the year’s most dynamic film, and easily its most stylish. From its opening of a city enclosed within and under a media-controlled apparatus, to its skyrises, to its golf-courses, Mr. Ryu Seung-wan, much like Elena below, creates the year’s keenest layout of a city in a social context. This is what we call an absolute stunner, the kind of genius we seek from the Koreans in the genre department. This is a filmmaker we need to keep a track of. At least, I need to.

Elena (Dir: Andre Zvyagintsev) (Read review)
Mr. Zvyagintsev’s best film, and I absolutely agree with what I believe to be the film’s central political stance. I mean, why the hell should he? But leave all that, and relish the sheer mastery of some of the shots here, especially the opening, where new spaces are revealed in a way as if the history of a nation is being re-created. I do not think any other film this year builds a keener more insightful layout of a city in a historical context. And yeah, those three-way mirror shots not only reveal a novel way of staging that cliché but greatly intensify the Macbeth-ian angle. Killer, I say.

El Primio (Dir: Paula Markovitch)

The autobiographical film of the year. Filled with so many moments so detailed it could not be fiction. The way a name is to be pronounced, to the way a chessboard is to be used, to the way words are understood, to the way an essay is written, Ms. Markovitch’s incredibly moving film doesn’t let the shaping of a childhood be oblivious of a country’s politics, or the society, or the family. My guess is that linguists, and maybe even anthropologists, would be thrilled. And in the mother’s breakdown piece we’ve the sort of honest and heartbreaking moment James M. Cain would be proud of.

Ha-Shoter (Dir: Nadav Lapid) (Read review)

In Mr. Lapid we probably (there’s Ms. Julia Leigh as well) have the hottest new talent. For topicality alone (Israeli social unrest), this movie achieves the kind of significance few others this year have. Very political, and very critical, my guess is this movie probably finds Israel at a very critical juncture in its history. Or maybe…I don’t know. Whatever it is, this film gets macho. And that is an A+ in my book.

Hwang hae (Dir: Na Hong-jin) (Read review)

Sergio Leone once said of Once Upon a Time in the West – “The rhythm of the film was intended to create the sensation of the last gasps that a person takes just before dying. Once Upon a Time in the West was, from start to finish, a dance of death.” All of the characters, apart from Jill, seem to be conscious of the fact that they wouldn’t arrive at the end alive. In Mr. Hong-jin’s film, everyone seems to be destined to their death, and yet they are resilient to survive at any cost. It’s a dog’s life, they say. This follow-up to The Chaser is a massive epic, slowly building and spreading into some sort of a contagion, affecting everybody. Arguably the most intensely physical film of the year, and certainly it’s most visceral.

Meek’s Cutoff (Dir: Kelly Reichardt)

The tension here is unbearable. Your mind runs in a thousand directions, and as opposed to Mr. Ceylan’s masterpiece, we do not even have the comfort that everybody would end up safe. It runs something like an extended Hitchcock experiment, observing the everyday details, but ticking the bomb in the background. Ms. Reichardt uses the academic ratio to killer effect, essentially boxing what would have been Lawrence of Arabia widescreen, and somehow manages to create claustrophobia from that expansive landscape. Oh yeah, there’s the year’s most astonishing dissolve.

Mildred Pierce (Dir: Todd Haynes) (Read review)
I hated this film. I mean, I was filled with hate while watching this film. For its characters. Mr. Haynes, channeling Fassbinder here, creates such carefully constructed frames, where you’re watching and reading the stuff at the same time. Womenfolk are in full control here, and men are constantly used. And re-used. At the end of it, you want to strangle somebody. Probably the strongest I reacted to any movie all year.

Nostalgia De La Luz (Dir: Patricio Guzmán Lozanes)
If The Tree of Life was the film Rise of the Planets should’ve been, than Nostalgia for the Light is what The Tree of Life should’ve been. From the earth to the moon to its craters to plates to wheels to telescopes, Mr. Guzmán makes us see the cosmic in every little bit. An order so to speak. At once specific and cosmic. If you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t reveal to you the film’s central connection, except for that it is probably impossible to identify which is the metaphor between the two. Whatever it’s worth, one of my personal favorites. It is a movie I shall be losing myself in with some regularity now.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Dir: Rupert Wyatt) (Read review)
In a year that would historically be remembered for the revolution-virus, and where this film reminded us of moments from our own consciousness, this Ape film thundered across with blockbuster filmmaking of the awesome kind. A moment that serves as a victory for sound in cinema, a moment where an animal learns to control another animal, a moment where an animal looks at another sleeping peacefully, a moment where an animal achieves chilling cruelty (as against grace), and they all serve to hail one of cinema’s greatest accomplishments – Caesar!

Senna (Dir: Asif Kapadia) (Read review)
The humanity in here is overwhelming, and more than movie I’ve ever seen, this documentary really gets what sports is all about. Yes, it is about us v/s them, but historically sports movies tend to stop there. Mr. Kapadia doesn’t leave Prost as a rival but an integral part of Ayrton Senna, as much as his father was, or as much as McLaren was. Involving arguably the greatest tracking shot ever…okay, let us keep it down to my favorite tracking shot, it is a shattering film and a humbling experience.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Dir: Tomas Alfredson) (Read review)

Ah, that killer ending! To which I stood up and applauded. To which the film itself applauds. There’s that faint smile on George Smiley, and trust me here when I say that if Mr. Alfredson had made Smiley declare – It’s just you and me now, sport – I would’ve taken my shirt off and waved it around like a madman. Who knows, given all the frenzy, even running around the auditorium would’ve been a distinct possibility.

And the Grumbach for the Best Motion Picture of 2011 goes to:

Word of advice: Ideal time to watch it – 0400 to 0630. As the night breaks into dawn into morning, the film shall be a memorable experience. Take my word.

Oh yeah, just in case you’re wondering, The Tree of Life is some sort of achievement, if not a masterpiece. The editing is something monumental, the way it picks up tiny fragments and associates them all. And so is A Separation, which is one giant moral mess, just as its frames are.

Movies I’m looking forward to:

Myshkin’s Yuddham Sei, Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance, Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Life in a Day, Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, Johnnie To’s Life Without Principle and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film, David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, Steve McQueen’s Shame, Jeff Nichols Take Shelter, Mariano Llinas’ Extraordinary Stories and Raul Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon.

Oh yeah, if you’re thinking there’re as many titles to watch as there have been nominated, that’s a bingo.

COLLATERAL: MOVIE REVIEW

2012-01-16T12:50:00.004+05:30

        I were to cite five of the greatest influences that have shaped the entirety of my movie-going experience till now, one name shall always hold the most significant of spots – Michael Mann. I have always wanted to do some kind of a retrospective of the man, an exercise that might provide me the excuse to pay homage to all the films he has made, films which might not be the ones to come to anybody’s (a critic or otherwise) minds when they cite their list of the greatest films ever made, or might not hold the most lofty spots when it comes to jot down the most popular films of all time. But these few films are ones that have made me what I’m today, both as a movie-goer and a person, and for that reason alone they hold the most special place in my heart, and mind. These are films much beyond what I might claim as influential, what I might claim as a favorite. These are personal territories.
        And as I sit around to begin this series of retrospectives, I find it not one bit strange that I do not take even a moment to choose my first film. And the reasons aren’t that hard to figure out. One might, on a cursory glance, claim that Collateral is the most signatory of Mr. Mann’s films, probably the most representative of his style. In a visual sense, yes, but nothing could be farther when considers the general tone of a Mann film, and the tone here in Collateral. A Mann film, if might draw an analogy, is the action/thriller/guy movie genre’s romantic outings. A film that, after all its journeys, would always end on the promise of a new day, and almost all of them have a parting frame that seems drenched in either the first rays of the sunlight, or in the wee hours of the morning. Heat, with Neil MaCauley and Vincent Hannah holding hands in the night sky filled not with stars but twinkling city lights might be one of the most beautiful endings of all time, suggesting a relationship of the deepest levels of understanding. Mr. Mann, I believe is a romantic at heart, and it shows in all of his films.
        But not in Collateral, which I believe is a tragedy. More so the parting note – an image of a man, an indifferent man, sitting all alone in a vast and empty subway car, dead – a note that felt painful the first time I saw the film. It is an intensely powerful image capturing probably the entirety of a lonely existence, and it has stayed with me for more than four years now.

        This is a great image, in my opinion, and if it had a caption it might have read – The Invisible Man died, think anybody will notice? In its profoundness one is reminded of that heart-wrenching scene from Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle is standing in a bare hallways and is calling Betsy from a wall payphone, apologizing. Speaking of which, it is strangely ironic, in the cinematic universe I mean, that it is the passenger and not the cabbie who dies alone and un-understood. Yet Mr. Mann, who ends almost all of his films on the exact perfect note, chooses not to end it here but to linger around following Max (Jamie Foxx) and his lawyer girlfriend Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) out of the MTA, and to dilute the proceedings. Interestingly the music that accompanies these final moments of the film is titled Requiem, and that leads me to believe somebody had a better idea than Mr. Mann and his editor.
        Now, before we proceed further, let us try and gather what the title suggests. The word collateral, for much of the film, seems to indicate all the collateral damage that occurs over the span of the night. As the film’s central theme holds, nothing can be planned. Fate always plays its part. People who aren’t supposed to would die. Yet, if we look at the Mann universe and his characters – William Graham and Hannibal Lektor, Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna, Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman, Lowell Bergman and Mike Wallace – another meaning of the word collateral comes to hold significance.

Collateral (adj.):- 1. Having an ancestor in common but descended from a different line.
2. Situated or running side by side; parallel.

        Is Mann saying something here? If I seek the liberty of taking into consideration the central themes of his previous films, he well might be. As in, he might well be drawing something of a parallel between Vincent the contract killer, played by Tom Cruise, and Max the cab driver. He might be suggesting that although they come from vastly different worlds (Vincent at one time suggests he has been in private sector for six years, which would point towards a probable CIA/Special Forces background), when the circumstances force them they sure can improvise. As the film’s central theme suggests, Collateral is all about the random tides of fate and the wisdom lay not in planning but to roll with it. Improvise. Darwin. Survival of the fittest and stuff.
        The later half of the film finds Max in a unique predicament, where he is cornered from all ends, and he has to survive. He comes out alive. Fate does help him. Coincidences, as one might call it. But, does that mean he is equal to Vincent? Equal, as Wigand and Bergman? Equal, as Hanna and McCauley? Equal, as Graham and Lektor?
Before we answer to ourselves that set of questions, let us wonder if the tone of Collateral is so uniformly romantic as that of Manhunter and Heat? I’m talking vis-à-vis the bonding between the two men, ladies and gentlemen, and for reasons I would suggest here later I believe the answer is a no. Not exactly a strict no, but one tending towards a no. Within the universe of Manhunter and Heat, there was a mutual respect, a deeply felt sense of admiration one might also discover and feel in films like 3:10 to Yuma (both the original and the remake). Within Collateral, I don’t feel respect, I don’t feel admiration and I don’t feel an entirely romantic tone. What I rather feel is a strange blend of a cynical tone, one that is fuelled by mutual disdain, more so on the part of Vincent, who merely smirks at Max’s rhetoric bullshit and lies about opening a limousine company.

        There is within the film a contradictory tone, a kind of love-hate tone, as if two separate tones are struggling within it, which never does quite settle down right until the end credits start rolling. The deeply cynical tone almost always has the upper hand, I have felt.
        And here allow me to put forth some unique pieces of evidence.
        Of all the films Michael Mann has ever made, only one doesn’t credit him with screenwriting – Collateral. The film has been written by Stuart Beattie, and the earliest draft had the action not in L.A. but in New York. One can find the script ready for download here (source: http://www.joblo.com/).
        Now, the script saw a minor re-write from Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), and eventually Mann, a lover of Los Angeles, transported the film over to his city. Not much of the action changed mind you, and not even much of the dialogs, as you would see for yourself. Yet you read the script, and you watch the film and you would have more than a fair idea the contradiction I’m referring to.
        Here I address Mann’s editing, his viewpoint, the script, the film and the innate contradiction that surface right towards the end. If one might choose to scroll right down to the end of the script here’s how Mr. Beattie chooses to end his very fine script.
……………
The WHEELS SHRIEK as the train pulls in to a station...

WIDE ANGLE OF SUBWAY CAR

...and Max pulls Annie to her feet. The doors open. They silently get off.

The doors close again. The train pulls out.

WE HOLD ON Vincent for a while. Riding the train by himself, head back as if sleeping.

Just another dead guy on the subway...

FADE OUT

        I’ve always believed that how a writer, or for that matter a filmmaker chooses to begin or end his film, and what he selects for his opening or final frames suggest a whole lot about what he intends to put forth, for in there he puts his heart out. That Mr. Beattie altogether ignores what happens to Max and Annie, and instead chooses to dwell in a rather somber moment of reflection on the just another dead guy is indicative of the fact who he believes the story is about. The invisible guy.
        Yet, Mann doesn’t ignore Max, follows them as they get out of the MTA, and decides to let out memories as an audience not forget him, but remember him along with Vincent. Critics have acclaimed it in that manner, many hailing Foxx’s performance, and most actually root for Max.
        And that is where I firmly stick my arm out and voice my difference of opinion, for I never see and have never perceived Vincent and Max to be of the same ancestry. They aren’t even in the same league, though fate throws them into the same sport. It just isn’t possible, whatever Mann is trying to do here, because Max is as common as common can ever hope to be. He represents the utter mediocrity, the collateral that is caught between the bullets fired by Vincent. Though many liberals might disagree with me, I do not believe that lives are equally significant. Valuable is a different matter, but when it comes to significance, especially on an objective level (for when we’re watching movies we are always starting off on an objective foot), a lesser significant character is less interesting and therefore less appealing, howsoever human or good he might be. Max, as a character, has never appealed to me, for he represents the uninteresting drudgery of everyday life. His end of the bargain, as far as the film is concerned, is to get in touch with the day to day world of Vincent, and bugger off for he never could comprehend it. The world we’re seeing is that of Vincent, let there be no mistake on that front, and I believe Collateral is all about him, or at least it is supposed to be about him. (That the Academy nominated Jamie Foxx in a supporting role for the film is quite interesting.)
        Before I continue, here is something I quickly and rather hastily edited out of the final few moments of the film, doing it on Windows Movie Maker. I might not offer a pretty quality, but kindly ignore the ugly transitions, and focus on what I intend to achieve through the frames I have edited out, which include a rather lengthy and digressive few moments involving Max and Annie pulling out of the train, as Vincent’s dead body is visible on the leftmost end of the frame, and such a scene later on. These two moments dilute not only these final moments, but rather dilute what we take away, since Max is supposed to be as important as Vincent, when I guess he isn’t. The ending frame belongs to Vincent, and Vincent alone. If you pay attention to Max’s expressions you would realize that Max doesn’t much comprehend Vincent, or what he represents. He is befuddled, and all he can do is stare for a moment or two, and shrug.

        But then enough about Max. The way I see Collateral, I never care about Max and I never shall. Vincent is the one who appeals to me, for beneath his indifference I hear a cry to understand him, to comprehend him. It is a different kind of loneliness, unlike that of Travis Bickle who is dumb and stupid and is actually crying out for help. Speaking of which, Bickle is more of the same ilk as Max here. Vincent, on the other hand isn’t crying out for help as much as to make sure his opinion is heard. He might be mistaken for being cynical, but what he merely possesses is an objective perception of things, including for him. One might be reminded of Doc Manhattan.
        Speaking of which, one also ought to be reminded, more so considering the cynical viewpoints, of Chris Nolan’s The Joker. And if one were to ponder over this little tangent one might realize how both Vincent and The Joker are essentially about forcing their opinions, cynical or objective take your pick. One can’t decide because the boundaries quite often blur. The fact of the matter, though, is that both want to be heard, and both speak somewhere on similar lines.
        Here, find a sampling, and juxtapose what Vincent remarks to what The Joker feeds Harvey Two-Face.

Collateral –

Vincent: Have you ever heard of Rwanda?
Max: Yes, I know Rwanda.
Vincent: Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?
Max: What?
Vincent: Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Whales, Greenpeace, or something? No. I off one fat Angelino and you throw a hissy fit.

The Dark Knight –

The Joker: You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

Collateral –
Vincent: Most people, ten years from now, same job, same place, same routine. Everything the same. Just keeping it safe over and over and over. Ten years from now. Man, you don't know where you'll be ten minutes from now.
..
..
Viewers who have watched the film might agree that Vincent is a believer of improvisation.
Vincent: Man, you were gonna drive me around tonight and never be the wiser, but el gordo got in front of a window, did his high dive. We're into plan B. You still breathing? Now, we gotta make the best of it. Improvise. Adapt to the environment. Darwin. Shit happens. I Ching. Whatever, man. We gotta roll with it.

The Dark Knight –
The Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just... do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans. You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So, when I say... Ah, come here. [takes Dent's hand into his own]. When I say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know that I'm telling the truth. It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. [Dent tries to grab the Joker]

I don’t cite these dialogs as some random instances of coincidence in a cinematic universe, but rather intend to bring to your attention how Mann’s film might have been influential on Nolan’s behemoth. Here’s a line of dialog, which involves the two guys drawing a rather farcical history of their parentage, and which again highlights my claim.

Collateral –
Vincent: They project onto you their flaws, what they don't like about themselves. I had a father like that.
Max: Mothers are worse.
Vincent: Wouldn't know. My mother died before I remember her.
Max: What about your father?
Vincent: Hated everything I did. Got drunk, beat me up. In and out of foster homes, that kinda thing.
Max: And then?
Vincent: I killed him. I was twelve.
[pauses, then laughs]
Vincent: I'm kidding. He died of liver disease.
Max: Well, I'm sorry.
Vincent: No, you're not

The Dark Knight –
The Joker: [holding a knife inside Gambol's mouth] Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was... a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not-one-bit. So - me watching - he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, "why so serious, son?" Comes at me with the knife... "Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth... "Let's put a smile on that face!" And...

        What I intend to further claim here is not how Nolan’s film resembles Collateral in parts, but to use it as an example to highlight how Mann’s films are influential than what is attributed to them. His films, visually, are the templates upon which the modern urban thriller/action movie thrives on. Critics and audiences have hailed Nolan’s masterful rendition of Gotham city, an urban sea. A close look at the visual strategy there, and what Mann offers in his films and one would notice the influence. Mann is the modern John Ford, his films urban westerns, and his cities (L.A. mostly) have an ethereal quality that signifies his stamp. His cities are almost always one of the characters, and he has a knack of including conversations that places the emotions of his lead characters towards and against the city they’re living in. One would remember the first conversation between Edie (Ms. Brenneman) and Neil (De Niro) in Heat, and of course what transpires between Vincent and Max here.
        Here’s a fascinating look at how he frames his shots, and how he fills his frame and surrounds his characters with the city. This is from Collateral, all of them, and I shall provide more glimpses to his magnificent visual style in subsequent retrospectives, most notably on Heat and Manhunter.
        And while you savor these images, here is another thought that springs in my mind. Vincent remarks about L.A. about how sprawled out and disconnected it is, much like Travis Bickle cribs about New York. I wonder of Vince feels that same way about every place in the world, for he himself is disconnected with the world around him. The world around him probably feels distant to him, and that stays that way right till the end. I find that tragic.

One would be reminded of Mr. Fincher’s visual strategy in Zodiac, from the frame below.

This is arguably the best and the most poetic of the lot, in the way Mann fills the background with the city lights, much like the ending of Heat. Look how his frame’s beauty is caused and enhanced by the contrast between the white of the train and the dark of the night, illuminated by millions of lights. It is a breathtaking image.

Look at the tone of these images, shot in digital format and not in the standard film reel, and how it all feels so immediate. Look at the beauty of these images. A Mann film watched in the night would transport you to a place like few films do. His nights and his cities assume a life of their own.

And here’s a little thought. While The Joker throws Rachel off the window and Batman dives to her rescue, a brief edit during the plummet actually shows a cabbie below eating something, while they fall on to his roof? Clever homage? You tell me. Why do I keep saying so? Because Nolan, on more than one occasion has cited the influence of Mann’s Heat on the visual style of The Dark Knight. I believe Collateral deserves a bit of it too.

        I’ve always maintained that Collateral is one of the most technically accomplished films of this decade. Action movies, especially the ones like the Bond movies, which try and imitate the Bourne movies, ought to learn from here the economy of editing and framing, and how it achieves maximum impact. For instance the shootout in the alley where two muggers are shot point blank by Vincent. Look how clean and crisp it is all captured, and how effective it is. It is quick, it is nonchalant and it is cool. Every action scene in every film is designed to deliver a punchline, but only few ever manage to land a punch that hurts. Cronenberg is a master, and so is Mann. Their punchlines knock the hell out of the audience.
        There’s one of the best filmed sequences in modern cinematic memory, the club shootout, and see how precise Mann keeps it. His usage of the background score is quite brilliant too. He choreographs the scene as if it was a dance number punctuated to the tune of score, but it all feels ultra stylish and ultra masculine. Rough edges and all.
        Or the final chase scene. Look how brilliantly Mann edits the scene, and the neatness with which he lays out the geography of the place right from the entire building to the MTA to the train. He uses amazing POV shots, which haven’t been inserted just for the sake of it, but to highlight one of the central themes of the film – the perspective, or the viewpoint. Mann did overdo the POV shot a bit in The Insider, but his sparse and precise usage here give the style an organic feeling, as if Mann has discovered the shot just now, and all by himself, and is already the master of it. He places the viewer right on the shoulder of Vincent, and gives him an idea how he thinks.
        (I include both the video excerpt and the images of the shot, for those who cannot gain access to the video clip could sure imagine what I’m referring to. But nothing can surpass the sheer beauty of watching it in video, as opposed to only an image, because Mann uses a kind of lag between Vincent’s head moving and the camera following, which results in a spectacular effect, that is simply beautiful for its aesthetic contribution alone.)

Video clip:

        It is a subtle, and a brilliant shot, and we imagine how the improviser in Vincent is thinking at the moment. Remember, this is a man who actually believes in fate, and who actually chooses to roll with it. He doesn’t do it for the kicks, but as a mode of survival. He is a man who is ready to take his chances with destiny, and dives in aware and prepared of the tides that he might encounter in the way. And at the end of the above sequence he takes a chance.
        Vincent, you see, is all about improvisation. His plans aren’t plans but broad frameworks. He trusts the various laws of probability. If we look at it symbolically, he hasn’t hired a car as The Jackal did when he set out to off Charles De Gaulle. He doesn’t have his own means of transportation. Through the cabbie he is dependent on a variable other than himself, and he is improvising on this otherwise disadvantageous position by using the cabbie and exploiting all the various possibilities, or benefits, such a predicament might offer. He is different than most killers we have seen at the movies, because in a way he is the progeny if we look at the evolution cycle of the assassin in the cinematic universe. So, continued failure eventually resulted in this evolved killer, who doesn’t plan it all at the outset only to be surprised at the last moment, but to actually use the surroundings and actually expect a surprise or a detour every step of the way. He is aware that there is a degree of unknown in every equation and his only plan is to try and use that unknown to his advantage. Darwin.
        Many critics have pinned down Collateral for its many coincidences, and I find myself amused at the short-sightedness. For Collateral is about the randomness of fate. It is an element absorbed into the very structure of the film, for that is as important a character as Vincent or Max.
        But I wonder, who is Mann’s character? I think it is Vincent, because of the way he frames him, often highlighted out of the crowd. The coyotes that cross their path also draw a reflection more from Vincent than Max, and it is apparent in the way the ensuing few moments revolve around Vincent. The coyotes find themselves lost in this place, and so does Vincent, it seems. In this vast and empty space. I believe it draws a kind of cosmic resonance from within him.
        Howsoever earnest Mann’s attempts were at equalizing both the guys, for much of the film Vincent drives Max. He makes remarks deliberately to draw a reaction out of Max, to gauge and understand what kind of person he is, and would he be fine for the night. Remember that Vincent must have hired a cab from the airport to the building where we see him get into Max’s cab, and it is worth noting that he changes when he could have made the offer to the first cabbie. Vincent is the smarter of the two men, let there be no doubt. Look how he controls Max as if a teacher – using Red Light, Max and Green Light, Max – and how he measures the length and breadth of him.
        As I have mentioned before this is Vincent’s world, and as a result Vincent’s story. It is his cry out to us. In his own way he is honest, and when he says he does this for a living he means it. His objective morality begs to be understood, which is reflected in the way he puts down his gun when he realizes the game’s over. The final moments see an honest and truthful moment from him, and in it he says what I consider to be one of the greatest parting lines ever – Hey Max, a guy gets here on the MTA. Dies. Think anybody will notice?

That is why the parting frame ought to have belonged to him and him alone.

Here is another brilliant image that cuts a painful image of loneliness.

        Collateral is a personal movie, one of those I see over and over and live over and over. And in my opinion it is the Mann’s most interesting film.

        Oh, one last thing I felt I should throw up into the air for you to speculate upon. Is Vincent the coolest character ever not played by Clint Eastwood? Look at the awesome poster below for any help.

HABEMUS PAPAM (WE HAVE A POPE): MOVIE REVIEW

2012-01-13T19:21:00.007+05:30

Cast: Michel Piccoli, Nanni Moretti, Jerzy Stuhr
Director: Nanni Moretti
Runtime: 102 min.
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Verdict: A lovely lovely film.
Genre: Drama, Comedy

        I was reminded of Synecdoche, New York. Probably around the middle, which accounted for some of Habemus Papam’s most interesting moments, where the curiosities of my dirty mind were stoked endlessly. Cardinal Melville (Mr. Piccoli) is on the run, and we’re served with one of those medium-shots with traffic in the foreground and the subject somewhere in the middle of it, invoking one of cinema’s overused (but still effective) shorthands. This is an old man, every bit as old and just as fragile as the one in A Separation, and as he reaches the pavement he trudges along for a while before he looks back directly at us, a fear writ large on his face, and he starts running. It is a blatantly (?) Brechtian moment, a conceptual representation of the whole running-away-from-our-gaze thing, and one which surprisingly touches us later on, when the Cardinal tenderly expresses his wish to just vanish as if he never existed. But Mr. Moretti follows him, and he later admits this to be a real interesting case. Maybe after Berlusconi it sure could be.
        The Cardinal “just happens” to walk into what seems like a store predominantly for women, or at least one filled with them and stuff for them. He doesn’t know where to go, it is a state of panic and general confusion, and he just wants to run away from it all. He looks around and walks and bums into a woman. He gets on the escalator and overtakes a couple of women. The meeting with a female psychiatrist seems to be bearing its weight on him. He gets to the towel section, and throws himself over just to catch his breath. A shopgirl offers him a glass of water, while several other customers (probably) look at him. He walks into a bar to make a call and a lady offers him her cell phone, and while he makes the call they look at him. Later on, we see him riding a bus, sitting next to a lady, and while he’s muttering his prayers she looks at him.

        What these moments do is ~~because~~ in spite of their shallow depth of field is to let these actions cause their presence to be felt. Do I sense something being, you know, “repressed” here? Mr. Moretti plays a psychiatrist, or rather the psychiatrist, and I wonder if he is assuming a similar role from behind the camera. You got to take into account where I’m coming from, my previous encounter with the Church being Mr. Dominik Moll’s Le Moine, and the ruckus Berlusconi has caused on my Twitter timeline during the latter past of last year. I admit to having seen what I was probably looking for, but then all my doubts just evaporate at this moment.

        Oh, I wouldn’t want to go so far as to claim that Mr. Moretti is being subversive or wanting to wink at something “scandalous”, or that he seeks to expose some sort of hypocrisy ala Mr. Moll‘s film. His film is far too gentle for those shenanigans. The warm tender face of the Cardinal couldn’t contrast more starkly to the palpable gruffness of Vincent Cassel’s. Rather, Mr. Moretti is more concerned in the temptations of humanity, and the Cardinal merely meanders around to feel the aesthetic pleasures of life. I’m reminded of Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation, his nightmares, the anguish of human forms, and his reluctance to take the heavy burden. In one of the film’s great moments Cardinal Melville sits around a table with stage artists and desires to lose himself in the cacophony of everyday murmurs rather than bear the burden of humanity, a call not coming from somewhere up above but through a television set. That the Church and its cardinals have been frozen in time, where prison dodgeball hasn’t been played in over fifty years and where their beliefs are not merely orthodox but probably archaic, should be considered more than an atheist’s downgrading of a religious institution. Because Mr. Moretti respects this place, respects its democratic inclinations, respects the purity of these cardinals, so pure they seem to be children. Sort of like institutionalized children. They prefer delicious cream-filled doughnuts and a Caravaggio or a Chekov. One might claim most of them are no more than archetypes, and I would want to refute that argument by claiming that it is one of the film’s intentions so as to be able to put anybody in Cardinal’s Melville’s shoes. He respects their beliefs, and understands their sense of religious responsibilities. He doesn’t intend to trump the Church or anything, or to hail science, and rather pokes jovial fun at both of them. It is a time where both can co-exist, and although he “gets” the administrative aspects more than the theological ones, the weight of The Last Judgment is just as much a real duty as an aerial view of Vatican is for the security personnel.

        I was speaking of seeking the aesthetic pleasures. Mr. Moretti structures Cardinal Melville’s escapade around such pleasures, eating a freshly baked doughnut (?), or listening to music, or watching a rehearsal of The Seagull. Or just being among people. During a year where Mr. Terence Malick wanted us not to merely look at but look beyond and ask why, Mr. Moretti finds his man of God losing himself in the exact opposite, not concerning him with the what or why, but finding pleasure in the surface. It is not much unlike the condition Mr. Joe Pantoliano’s character finds himself in The Matrix, wanting to return to the bliss of tasting chicken without any awareness. It is the temptations of these everyday pleasures Cardinal Melville seeks, and to not have to worry about the tough decisions in a time where he understands the Church needs to be aware of the zeitgeist. It is to escape from having to assume both the administrative and theological aspects, to both be politically relevant and spiritually ahead of the curve. The film both establishes its opening sequences in epic widescreen long shots as context (stakes), and runs away from it all by resorting to predominantly medium shots for the rest of its running time, prepared to take the Cardinals not as a college but as a bunch of individuals, finding them in their rooms, or dividing them into volleyball teams. To describe all of this as mere stage-fright is to greatly reduce what the Cardinal is running away from. Here is a man not questioning his faith, but a man who is unsure of himself.

        Habemus Papam, probably rightly so, is filled with such moments, tender moments, graceful moments, moments of kindness, moments that neither are laced with sarcasm nor weighed down by irreverential satire, moments that touch us. Cardinal Melville is wondering what he would need to say during his speech, and there is a beautiful little moment full of humility he shares with a fellow passenger. If it is not one of the great performances of the year Mr. Piccoli delivers, it certainly is the most graceful one. And there’s Mr. Moretti himself whose performance is an absolute joy in itself. The thing is there are great many pleasures to be had in the film, the sort of pleasures that inspired Jim Emerson to write his essay on falling in love with a film. In the midst of the chanting, the head of the conclave asks for a moment, and there is a charming goofiness that is reined in with minimum of fuss. Mr. Moretti walks into the film and his conversations with the cardinals and the editing beats (Cardinal Melville putting forth a mild objection to the psychiatrist’s lack of faith comes to mind) to graceful comedic notes. Oh yeah, here’s a film I have fallen in love with.
        And then there’s the ending. It is a moment of heartbreaking grace, and Mr. Moretti, in the head of an organization as big as the Vatican, finds an example for Italy’s former Prime Minister to seek a lesson from. What with all the economical mess these are unsure times, and in Cardinal Melville there’s a man who’s humble enough and courageous enough to admit his frailties. As he looks down upon the people, there is unimaginable kindness and love in his eyes. It is one of the year’s most beautiful moments, and certainly the purest.

Note: Just as the cardinal turns away from Cardinal Melville and towards the balcony to announce the new Pope, there is a simple ascending camera movement, sort of like a fraction of a crane shot, and from the height of the balcony it achieves the sort of vertiginous affect caused when the Giant Wheel starts achieving its height. For a man who is about to be declared the Supreme Pontiff, it is probably shit-scary.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY: MOVIE REVIEW

2012-01-04T20:12:00.004+05:30

Cast: Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds, Simon McBurney, Kathy Burke
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Runtime: 126 min.
Verdict: Could be a masterpiece. In Mr. Oldman’s turn we have the Daniel-Day Lewis performance of the year. And Mr. Cumberbatch is next in line to take over Hollywood.
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Horror

        In many ways Karla is the target. With frames refusing to reveal a face, yet drenched in his shadowy presence, his name echoes from every corner of the film. The espionage fiction thrives on the presence of such a figure, usually the Soviets, condensing the enemy under his name, and a bunch of our good guys trying to work together in negotiating the threat. I am reminded of Robert Littell’s The Company, and Sasha, or the Jackal, or for that matter even Keyser Soze. Zodiac did have similar undertones, and I wonder if it is a part of our nature just so to make sense of things, or a way of thinking handed over to us as part of our culture. It could be one of those egg-chicken questions, but then history asks us to remember World War II as the Allies versus Adolf Hitler (Nazis). Or, the world against Bin Laden (Terrorism). Oh, we need a leader, sure, but a Patton needs an Eisenhower and a Montgomery, both to work with and be a rival of. There is probably a sub-textual political dichotomy here that reflects in the way our fiction structures itself. We’re many voices, many opinions, many minds and many plans against one; the “we” probably meant to be reassuring.
        In the wake of disaster down at Budapest, we’re let inside the Circus’ (British Intelligence, MI6) conference room, and Control (Mr. Hurt) is surrounded by five men, all clearly defined save one. There’s Toby Esterhase (Mr. Dencik), there’s Bill Haydon (Mr. Firth), there’s Percy Alleline (Mr. Jones) and there’s Roy Bland (Mr. Hinds). The fifth is pushed to a corner in the space defined by these figures, obscured. Control has been asked to resign, and he “brings” this fifth man in by announcing – “Smiley is leaving with me.” Smiley (Mr. Oldman) is shocked, but he’s not the one to wear his emotions up his sleeves. It is a sequence of astounding economy and precision, establishing not merely the equation between Control and the other four, or the office-category George Smiley fits into (the type apparently disconnected sitting silent in a meeting and speaking only when asked to), but also the equation between Control and Smiley. The two old men awkwardly walk along the length of the floors, on their way out, and several eyes track them, all astonished. They walk out of the gate, and the two share a silent little moment, Smiley searching into Control’s apologetic eyes. Control walks away, and Smiley is left all alone within the frame. It is a heartbreaking little moment in an opening credit montage that is probably the most evocative to come all year. Smiley sleeps alone, swims alone, walks alone, and in long shallow-focused shots Smiley cuts a lonely and tragic little figure. I know how retirement feels like, and I can only imagine the emptiness of a forced retirement. It is an emptiness that would be crucial to the film’s centerpiece.
        Mr. Alfredson contrasts these images of the lonely figure with that of the other four, jointly taking control of the Circus. Percy is the new Chief, but the four always seem to be together, often on one side of a table. The decisions they take are joint. Percy and Bland meet Lacon (Mr. McBurney) to discuss granting of funds for Operation Witchcraft, and the emphasis is always on “we”. There’s the film’s central memory, a moment of nostalgia the film keeps gravitating towards, of a Christmas Party where all the members of the Circus and their families have come about and are enjoying a jolly good time, and lit in bright colors it becomes a synecdochical moment of the Circus as a unit. The room is filled with people. Those were the good times, Connie Sachs (Ms. Burke) remarks. It is this unity, between the members of the Circus, or between the trans-Atlantic cousins, that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy intends to completely shatter, trying to reveal the inefficacy and innate impotence of such an enterprise. In times as these, where the special relationship was the subject of chuckles and embarrassments and terms such as poodleism, where the “respect in bed” in this relationship is vital, where Hollywood’s most popular choice for best actress plays the Iron Lady, and where a graffiti on a wall reads “The future is female”, Mr. Alfredson’s film seems to contain an undercurrent of a nation’s doubts in a world where it no longer is the dominant power but only one of the allies. The wish is to feel good.
        George Smiley recounts his conversation with Karla in Delhi eighteen years ago in ‘55, the only time he or anybody in the film (except for the mole probably) ever encountered him in person. Karla, then a little pawn, was caught by the Americans. Moscow center was in pieces, and he was on his way back to Russia, probably as part of some diplomatic exchange, and an imminent execution. Smiley was to convince him to come over, and he remembers giving him a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, a gift from his wife Anne. We would later see how that turns out. Peter Guillam (Mr. Cumberbatch) is the one listening, but as is the case with many monologues I wonder if the audience is the speaker himself. It is the elaborate expressionistic centerpiece of the film’s motivations and Smiley loses himself in it, miming the past, which is strange (against the pattern) in a film that is essentially drawn towards it. In front of him is a chair, with empty space over it, and Smiley fills it with himself. It is one of those mirror/doppelganger/you-complete-me across-the-table scenarios, like the one that Michael Mann did with Heat, or Christopher Nolan did with The Dark Knight, two sequences that now feel quite incomplete in the way Mr. Alfredson and Mr. Oldman thematically redefine it. The latter two represent a fantasy of a conversation, a sort of wish-fulfillment, and here’s Smiley talking in a vacuum about a shadow who was to meet certain death and yet seems to have the power now all to himself. It is one incredible choice from Mr. Alfredson, to cut to an intense close-up of Smiley as he stares into the frame, which quite unmistakably becomes a mirror of sorts. More than anybody in The Circus, it is Smiley who is haunted by Karla, by his seemingly endless almost fictional potency. The suspects are all black chess pieces, but Smiley has the respect to give Karla a white one. Here’s a man alone asked to forcibly retire, and a wife who has left him. One wonders, at this moment, if this memory of the conversation is his motivation, his personal fantasy.
        Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy goes about realizing this fantasy in breathtaking fashion. The film is as much about the disintegration of the unity of an organization as it is about the Nietzschian rebirth of a defeated figure cast into oblivion. The spaces within the film’s characters in the present starkly contrast with the Christmas party, and even Smiley, encourages this distance by sitting in corners interviewing Circus members (Sachs and Tarr and Prideaux), all reduced to subjects. He devours their pasts, asking questions and motivations and here both him the film spectacularly box each individual within their own worlds. The pasts float around unhinged, each of its subjects locked within the cells of their own perspectives. Jim Emerson describes here one particular moment, a framing of the Budapest parliament, and it is quite astounding how the film, by way of a simple backwards dolly not merely segregates and compartmentalizes the setting into an event, but establishes the film’s primary method – to look at the past, and from a distance. In a film as Zodiac, or even here, where the big four sit on one side of the table and question Peter, the methods of Smiley differ drastically. He sits on the chair, leaning back, and his handpicked men (one step towards realizing the fantasy) sit in the background. He keeps his cards close to his chest. Mr. Vishnevetsky notes a Melvilliean influence in Smiley’s laconic demeanor, and compares Mr. Alfredson a little unfavorably to my man, observing that the former is given to the mechanics of the plot. This, if I were to borrow a term from the film, is chickenfeed. Because hey, you know who else was laconic? Harry Callahan, who, by way of popular appraisal, is a fascist, and that is a fantasy at the heart of it all.
        There is the film’s central memory, a Christmas party, and it is broken down into the various conflicts. I had been watching the magnificent Nostalgia for the Light, with its fragments of past assuming a cosmic weight. There’s a similar tussles within these moments, a sense of fact almost displacing a sense of drama. There’s a remarkable set of edits (some of them so good I almost want to snatch my vote away from The Tree of Life) that furthers this tussle, and confirms Smiley’s transformation. He asks his right-hand man Peter to tidy up his stuff (in reference to his homosexual relationship), and as his boyfriend leaves the apartment, a heartbroken Peter, shot from outside a window, sits in the middle of the frame, sobs inconsolably. And at that very moment the film cuts to Smiley, who is in the very same position of the frame as Peter, smiling. He remembers his own heartbreak from the past and he nods it away with a smile. The thing is to look at the past straight, dissect it for its facts. It is heartbreaking the way the Circus falls apart, and retreats from its past. It is a moment the film celebrates, and it is the year’s strangest and awesomest moment, where George Smiley walks into the Circus’ big room and sits at the top of the table. In the background is the chessboard of wallpaper, and these intelligence guys know it is all about moves. Smiley, for the first time, leans not backwards but forwards, on the table, like a true grandmaster, allowing himself a smile. It is as if James Jesus Angleton met J. Edgar Hoover. The fantasy is complete. The music is Julio Iglesias’ La Mer. So yeah, in a way, Karla is the aim. He is, it seems, what drives him. The film applauds its man. It was both disconcerting and comforting. I applauded too.

Note: Regarding the film’s economy, and the bee in the car sequence, it is as much of an exposition as any sequence in, say, Inception. Just because no one says a word doesn’t equate to economy. The scene exists only to establish that fact, and a similar one with an owl does the same. But you have to ask yourself one thing - did the guy who was patient enough to let the bee out know it would be swatted by somebody?

ELENA: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-12-28T07:03:00.007+05:30

Cast: Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov, Alexey Rozin, Elena Lyadova
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Runtime: 109 min.
Language: Russian
Country: Russia
Verdict: Could very well be one of our modern master’s best film.
Genre: Drama, Thriller

        Elena finds Mr. Zvyagintsev in an intensely political frame of mind, and one might feel he isn’t pulling any punches. Punches, those seem to be coming from the extreme right. There are two crucial sequences where he almost goes out of his way to let his point be heard, and provide for a running commentary of sorts. Sequences, that work to “complete” a whole of sorts, like different perspectives in one of them hyperlink films. Around the 30 min. mark is angle-1, and it starts in a basement parking lot serving some luxurious apartments housing the affluent members of the society. Vladimir (Mr. Smirnov), the old rich guy, walks to his car. A primarily narrative/subjective/dramatic intent would’ve probably tracked his movement into the car, and fixated on him while he revved the engine, and either cut as he drove out of the frame, or tracked the car out of sight. Mr. Zvyagintsev instead chooses to layer Vladimir’s subjectivity with his own, thereby making the shot (and the ensuing sequence) morally and politically alive. He tracks Vladimir’s motion, as the old man walks towards his car and unlocks the central locking, all the while moving towards his subject, and just about the moment he “meets” his subject, who is settled in the car, the subject drives. There’s a remarkable almost mathematical precision to it all, the camera’s motion reflecting a similar optimization as that supported by the central locking. The sequence continues further in a fluid tracking shot of the car driving up the parking ramps, the view being from inside, and it feels as if the entire frame is floating. Vladimir turns the car around a corner and one of those automatic gates opens, and the entire sequence seems to be unfolding with the same sort of unobstructed, or rather “unopposed” ease as Henry Hill’s in Goodfellas’ Copacabana. Up until Vladimir finds some workers “crossing” the road seemingly taking their own sweet time. Mr. Zvyagintsev cuts to a shot of Vladimir from outside the vehicle, and here’s a man who seems to have nothing but contempt for this class. He doesn’t dwell on this reaction shot, which otherwise would’ve surrendered the emotion (contempt) completely to the subject (Vladimir), but instead cuts to the workers ambling across the road in a single file, thereby transferring, or rather inspiring that emotion within us. It is one hell of a moment from one of our modern masters, a moment that through its content addresses the motivations in the narrative and that through its aesthetic creates a rather synecdochical representation of history of a country that had its aristocrat stopped in his tracks by the working lot.

        The alternate angle comes just about an hour later, in another part of the city. It is one of those matchbox apartments, and considering the presence of three cooling towers in the vicinity, I guess it stands next to a nuclear plant. It concerns a bunch of good-for-nothing teenagers, a caricature of mindless criminal-tending anarchic youth if you ask me, and the fact that I don’t seem to have any problem of any sort with it when any caricature of the opposite kind (the establishment, the rich et al.) would have had my frothing in my mouth is probably a just reflection of the hypocrisy resident in my criticisms. My defense: we need more films that are pro-rich, and that this has come from Russia makes me very happy. Mr. Zvyagintsev’s constructs a social space whose geography reflects the desires and intentions behind any city – that of having the low-class pushed into a ghetto, where the prosperous form the sky-rises and wide roads and lush apartments representing the future, and where the decay is a representation of the past. These matchbox project apartments and the cooling towers are vestiges of the communist era, a city of Others, and the working class living within them is some sort of pest feeding over the prosperous and considering it its right to do so. I have a hunch that is Mr. Zvyagintsev’s view of things, especially considering the way he describes this alternate angle by tracking the teenagers crossing a road through a handheld camera, conveying a rough chaotic world. They hurl abuses at cars that pass by, and I have some special feelings for those who cross the road right in the middle of the traffic not even bothering to run and with that outstretched hand considering it their goddamn right. Elena reflected those feelings. These guys walk into the wastelands surrounding the plant and enter a meaningless brawl that is presented intentionally without any context and thereby becomes a caricature rather than anything specific. They all beat each other up. We don’t even know who is who, what with everybody’s outfit being so similar, and its abstractness inspires no emotion than contempt, especially in the wake of the film’s principal criminal act.

        Elena and Elena regularly travel between these two socio-geographic spaces, and judging by the length of Elena’s travel, these two seem to be pretty far away. Irreconcilably far away. That is not Mr. Zvyagintsev’s point though, but merely serves as the backdrop to his narrative. It is one killer of an opening as he reveals not merely new spaces but people and the equation between them. A montage of static shots establishes a luxurious apartment. We meet Elena. She seems to be living there all by herself. Until she opens another room and draws the curtains and wakes up Vladimir. Who is he, we’ve no idea? We wonder why they don’t sleep alone, and if they are relatives. We get the answer much later, by way of implication, of a rather young marriage between two older people, each having their own life. They sleep in different rooms, watch different televisions, have different kids – he a daughter, she her son – and yet there’s nothing apparently strained between them. Every marriage has a different logic, and this one has its own, which we need to find. Mr. Zvyagintsev sets it all up like a chain of clues, set of actions – she waking him up and walking into the kitchen, he walking into the bathroom, she coming back in and neatly setting up the bed, he coming back and getting ready and sitting on the table, and she serving the porridge and coffee. It is smooth and efficient, all working like a well-oiled clock. They talk about their kids, his daughter Katya and her son Sergey. They sit on opposite ends of the table. Elena, more than any of his two films, finds Mr. Zvyagintsev at the peak of his narrative capabilities, and he’s able to build images and sequences that support both associative and historic readings. You got to look at the train sequence later in the film and the Hitchcockian thrills that completely destroy our nerves. The apartment is an apartment, but then again one can easily read it, especially in hindsight, as symbolic of the palace (Kremlin). Vladimir and Elena come from different strata of the society. He has the money, and she provides him with sex and service. She needs some of that money for her son, which he refuses to give out of principle. Each new clue reveals something about the marriage. So much so that when Vladimir is discharged from the hospital we see a nurse set his bed right and open the window and clean the room, with just about the same degree of finesse.
        And yet, for all the specificity, Mr. Zvyagintsev’s intentions aren’t ambiguous. More than being pro-rich, he seems to stand against the anti-rich stance. He sets up standalone sequences detailing the uselessness of Sergey and his distinct lack of ethics or principles (little actions like taking money from his mother and hiding it in his pocket and handing over his wife only a portion of it) and yet corresponding complaints from Elena aren’t served with any evidence, her only standalone moment coming far later in the film and in a vastly different context. Still, one might argue that those make for the peripherals. Elena, what do we make of her? She walks into a church to pray, and she has no clue how to go about it. Not that she’s particularly religious either, as she looks through the picture at her reflection within it. It is remarkable how Mr. Zvyagintsev sets up these little daily activities and employs subtle variations in the order of focus-shift, or in behavior to reveal little nuggets of character subjectivity. You have to wonder about a woman who willingly wants to stay with a man and marry him who wouldn’t let her on his bed. Or maybe, you don’t. You don’t really need to wonder about a woman who watches reality shows, who looks at herself just as often, and one who offers different emotions (regarding her grandkids) before the husband and her son. The final sequence only confirms who her real family is, and the moral aloofness of it all. All she wants is the best for her and her kids. That is all she cares about.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-12-26T15:43:00.003+05:30

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, Monica Belluci
Director: Larysa Kondracki
Runtime: 112 min.
Verdict: An offensive often disgusting film.
Genre: Thriller, Drama

        Here is a film that is about sex trafficking and capitalist monsters and the titular whistleblower, and offers more than enough to whet our appetite for lurid material. There is a glorious scene right in the middle of it all where a huge metal rod is pierced into a woman’s you know where, and it is obviously the film’s showpiece a.k.a. the “gut-wrenching and horrific truth”. Thankfully, the film doesn’t explicitly show the action but implies it, by following up the poor girl’s wailing with the rod dropped on the floor, and the other girls’ reactions thrown in for good measure. Oh yeah, the men here are brutal, and all most of these irredeemable bastards want, ~~especially~~ even the guys who form the U.N. peacekeeping mission, is to bang every decent-looking woman in sight. Kathy Bolkovac (Ms. Weisz) is driven into Bosnia on a military bus to serve her peacekeeping contract working for a security firm called Democra Corp, and a cursory glance ~~underlines~~ reveals that her colleagues seem to be all men. Oh except for one other woman sitting in the behind. A guy nudges his friends to have a look at Kathy, and she laughs it off as she would any of these schoolboy shenanigans, little aware that she’s walking into the unfinished fourth part of the stories where the men really, really hate women. And although nothing of note happens to her, by way of physical harm I mean, while the Balkan girls are raped and mauled and pierced and shot, The Whistleblower’s utter brilliance lies in the manner in which it turns all of it into Kathy’s crusade. The girls might be in danger, a mother might have little idea where to look for her daughter, but the real fight is Kathy’s alone. My blood boils, but for different reasons.
        The film’s opening shot is of two young girls having fun in the night. The film’s closing moments provide for Kathy declaring to her BBC interviewer (Tim Sebastian?) that if needed she would do all of it again. The “all of it” includes trespassing into the organization’s office and stealing the necessary files and revealing it to the media. In the film’s post-script, we learn of the guys who committed these atrocities, we learn of Kathy and amidst all this Ms. Kondracki has somehow turned the story of scores of unwitting girls into a triumphant story of a crusader. Right from individual scenes, where the film’s primary strategy is to provide for these young girls to suffer or run or die and end it all with Kathy’s reactions, thereby making it all hers, to the film’s numerous 360-degree dramatic shots, which only serve Kathy and nobody else, one gets the feeling that the trafficked girls are merely the mechanics of a plot, or rather a macGuffin, whose sufferings the film only employs to draw some valuable dramatic tension so that the real characters – the good guys represented by Kathy, Madeleine Rees (Ms. Redgrave), Peter Ward (Mr. Strathairn), the bad guys represented by the significant others (no, not the Bosnians but the Americans) – can draw leverage out of it. A girl running in the woods scared shitless for her life is found by Kathy and the tears that are focused on (thereby more important) are not the girl’s. In a witness room, when a couple of girls ask Kathy to promise them safety, it is not their situation that the Ms. Kondracki is interested in but Kathy’s conscience and her word. Every sequence with Kathy in it ends with the camera on her. What’s at stake are not the lives of these girls but the humanity of an international organization, which, the film claims, was built from the ashes of Auschwitz. I wish I had a spare arm I could throw at the film.
        But then, there’s a parallel little drama, floating unattended, with the film cutting to it only as an obligation, which unfolds between the mother and her sister, and which in its present state only serves to further anger me. Yet, I think there’s more to it. There’s a story lying in the cutting floor, and maybe it is about them and not about the American morality. I would’ve respected The Whistleblower had it taken its subject head-on and not provide us with the kitschy horror of those young girls. Or if it had blown itself into one of those hyperlink films where the mother and her daughter and her friends and the other Balkans get the same respect as Kathy. Otherwise the film, for all its preaching, is treating them much the same way it accuses an organization of doing – like objects.

Art Cinema: The Shortening of the Sight

2011-12-23T21:37:00.004+05:30

A noted film critic, M.K. Raghavendra, about whom I had been quite ignorant until a few days back, has written a lengthy piece on the worthlessness of Mr. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation as an artistic work. I had the good fortune of meeting him at the recently concluded Bangalore http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifInternational Film Festival, right in front of the film’s poster while he was dissing the film and the filmmaker. stood there in disbelief, I was a little shell-shocked too, and it is probably a moment I wouldn’t forget.
He asked me to read his piece, which has been published here, and here are my reactions to it.

“An art film is the result of filmmaking as a serious, independent undertaking aimed at a niche rather than mass market.”

Should this sentence lead me to assume that The General, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather and Terminator 2: The Judgment Day aren't art? To define an art film in terms of its audience is asking for trouble even before the first word is written. Where exactly does "niche" end? Which of us audience member should be eligible to be considered as niche? Where does mass begin? How do we define mass? The author is dead smack in the middle of slippery ground and he has barely finished his first sentence.

“Film scholars typically define ‘art films’ through those formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films, which includes, among other things, a narrative dwelling upon the real problems of everyday life, an emphasis on the authorial expressivity of the director rather than generic convention and a focus on the subjectivity of the characters rather than on plot.”http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

This sentence places "mainstream Hollywood films" as not being art, and anything that is different from the mainstream automatically becomes eligible for consideration. Furthermore, a narrative dwelling upon the "real problems" of everyday life is art. What constitutes as real in our everyday life? I once had a discussion with Srikanth Srinivasan on my review of Mr. Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, and although my estimation of the movie's worth hasn’t appreciated the least bit, my arguments were ultra-narrow. Can we here at least appreciate how subjective that "real" is? What exact real-life problems did Sergio Leone deal with in the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West? Where does avant-garde sit here? Does seeking sensory pleasures from the medium count for nothing? I’m reminded of Susan Santog’s Against Interpretation, and although I disagree with her, her arguments carry a lot of weight here. The author cites generic convention and puts it against authorial expressivity, which represents a false dichotomy. How do we appreciate the cinema of Johnnie To? Or the westerns of John Ford? To claim that focus on subjectivity is a necessary criterion for artistic merit is to both ridicule innumerable cinematic talents (directors, screenwriters, editors, set designers) and to elevate the Hollywood machinery, the one the author indirectly represents as non-art. It is quite standard to see hacks like Ron Howard or mainstreamers like Michael Bay using character subjectivity to pass-off their “crowd-pleasers” as verifiable stories. Moreover such a differentiation renders all of action cinema positively art-less, and that would make David Bordwell very angry.

“If the art film finds it difficult to reach wide audiences, the place where it thrives is the international film festival in which films that rarely get public releases are shown to a discerning public.”

I fail to understand the first part of the sentence, and unless I'm misinterpreting, which I think I am not, it contradicts the art film's intentions as defined in the opening sentence. Does this phenomenon lead a film to be defined art, because it is "unable" to reach the non-discerning wide audience? Should this have been the opening sentence? I don’t know, but the logic seems to have eaten itself.

The subsequent few paragraphs offer nothing but plot summarization, and hence offer nothing for us to argue. We jump to the fifth paragraph, which is still describing the plot, but offers two curious, if not interesting sentences.

“A Separation works by enlisting our sympathy for everyone in it.”

I hope the author intends this sentence to be an appreciation of the film's intentions. Because if it isn't, Jean-Pierre Melville goes for a toss, and when that happens I start frothing in my mouth. It gets uglier.

“She was hit by a vehicle when she was retrieving Nader’s father from the street the previous afternoon and that actually caused the miscarriage.”

The film never ever resolves this, and although I am willing to give it to any viewer/reader to assume that the accident is the cause I refuse to accept that the film provides complete unquestionable evidence. Any such assumption on our part is rather evidence of the skill Mr. Farhadi displays in making us the judges, which for me is the film's central purpose rather than some socio-political rhetoric. The judiciary in the film has a subjectivity, much like us. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The sixth paragraph. I take the liberty of arranging sentences together so that I can tackle them a little conveniently and eliminate any redundancy.

“A Separation is brilliantly made; it has the authenticity of real life and no one in it even seems to be acting.”

Thank you very much, but should I assume “authenticity of real life" as another of those descriptions of the film as being realistic? As I have , that is quite debatable, and to plainly assume that is to look away from half of what is on display. And "no one seems to be acting"? I used to hear these arguments in my tenth grade, as a testament to a good film, or an "art film", and this underlying assumption of acting goes very much with the other binaries that seem to run through the author's arguments, which constitute the framework for a very narrow/rigid view.

“But there are some aspects to the film that cast doubt on its value as a serious work of art. While the film includes a large amount of detail – how a certain part of the populace lives and even on some legal/ social issues in Iran – one does not get a sense of how Iran’s society is constituted – its social structure, the exercise of power etc….. If Rajieh and Nader belong to different classes, the classes themselves are not in conflict although individuals belonging to them may squabble.”

This is the problematic part (heart) of the essay, and probably the very foundation of the author's stance. Forget that the basis of this class struggle between the middle class and the poor, between the former's belief in democracy to the latter's religious manipulation through theocracy is entirely debatable (the protests of 2009, when the film might have been made contained a huge percentage of youth), so much so that the Class wars could be argued as a false dichotomy. My point is WHY should a work of art have depiction of social constitution on its checklist? Why should a work of art try and be a representation in the first place? There's plenty of politics to be had beyond the mere socio-political equation, and the author by looking for rhetoric is ignoring a whole lot of messy stuff. He describes Nader as good in one of the paragraphs, but is that a description or just a throwaway judgment? Nader is a gentle mixture of traditional and liberal thought-process, having both a set of beliefs and a set of ideas. The author doesn’t even touch upon the gender equation, or the universality of the parenting equation, and the kind of mess it creates. My aim here is not to describe the film though; my aim here is to describe how the author's short-sighted vision is causing him to overlook matters.

“The portrayal of the court (as in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up – 1990) virtually establishes the Iranian state as the most reasonable of arbiters.”

Oh please, what do we want here? That the filmmaker present evidence of what the media feeds us so that we get a chance to exercise our kitschy political reactions? This is exactly like the situation in Dogtooth, and what we fail to understand is that there is a certain internal logic that better not be judged from armchairs. The filmmaker rather presents evidence, whether it is his belief, whether it is doctoring evidence, whether he is a right-winging orthodox cleric, does it lessen the work of art? The author himself claims that the film enlists our sympathy for everyone, which is so considerate of a filmmaker. So I fail to understand why should a film be anti-establishment, or rather conform to our beliefs and our politics and our world-view. Is our world-view a fact and the film's fabrication?

“Rajieh being unable to swear on the Quran about the cause of her child’s death is also problematic, not least because it furnishes the film with a moral resolution. When we accept it in the film, shouldn’t we also wonder if we would have accepted a similar resolution in a Western film in which a lie is exposed because someone cannot swear on the Bible?”

But it doesn’t provide any moral resolution. Rather, it does the very opposite of it. The central problem with Nader is his rigidity, and his conscience is his daughter. He deliberately lies. Rajieh's conscience is her God. The film doesn’t state that she is lying; it is that she is merely unsure. To claim that she is lying is twisting the facts, and again an act of judgment. She backs out even in the face of all the financial upheavals and achieves grace. Termeh looks at Rajieh's poor little girl, ever-shrinking in the corner. Probably the money might have given her a peaceful domestic life, but Nader had to appease his own guilt and justify himself. Rajieh's decision not to swear absolves him of the crime but causes him to slip further down in the eyes of his conscience. He is corruptible as has been proven. So, where is the "moral" resolution? The author seems to be mistaking the crime for the guilt, but the film is actually using that crime to reveal moral fallibility in everyone. This, if anything, is an irreconcilable view.
What we’re accepting, and respecting, as viewers, is Rajieh’s right to her beliefs. And as for the final question, I present to you Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, where the father played by Robert De Niro is asked to lie to protect the friends. And after resolving his moral beliefs, off-screen and off-screenplay, he does that. Would that count, Mr. Author? Or The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

The next paragraph has nothing about Mr. Farhadi's film, except for the last couple of sentences.

“‘Censorship is the origin of metaphor,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges but A Separation does not even use metaphor in the service of social truths about Iran. It seems to have its eyes focused entirely on the international arena and the approval of audiences that decline to relate the film’s portrayal of Iranian society to whatever they know about politics and society in Iran.”

I believe the author ought to use "rhetoric" instead of truth. And he is looking for a film that confirms to his view of Iranian society. In all probability I do not have even a fraction of his socio-political knowledge of that country and in my ignorance I claim that the social view in A Separation felt true, and the moral truth felt profound.

His next paragraph introduces Mr. Zvyagintsev's Elena, a filmmaker and a film I absolutely love, but it is the comparison to Mr. Farhadi's film I am presently concerned with.

“Where A Separation has an intricate story filled with superficial detail about life in Iran, Zvyagintsev’s Elena is straight and flat – not because it lacks local detail but because it assumes that audiences will recognize what it is dealing with, without them being deliberately informed. Where A Separation abounds in elements which are intended to enlighten international audiences but could be commonplace to most Iranians, Elena seems, largely, to be addressing an audience inside Russia.”

Okay, here is the catch. A Separation won the audience award, and swept all the main categories at the Fajr Film Festival. Unless Mr. Farhadi's film is state sponsored, or if the film festival is being rigged by the state, I don’t think there is anything to comment upon.

I admit, I am getting a little tired, and so I lump together everything that is left and that is remotely worthwhile.

“The general sense to be obtained in A Separation was of a society knit together by universal faith, even if God hands out different dispensations to different members of the Faithful. The film apparently portrayed a simple society united by a common set of beliefs with no underlying tensions between any of the groups or classes constituting it. But even apart from the known problems facing Iran today, the issue here is whether there is not something dishonorable in presenting a society in terms as uncomplicated as those informing A Separation. The differences between A Separation and Elena cannot be made clearer than through an understanding of the single factor which apparently brings them together – their open-endedness. From my description of the film it should be evident that Nader and Simin’s divorce is not the central issue in A Separation. My sense is that it is made the central issue to distract us from the fact that the conflict between Nader and Rajieh is irresolvable – except in a trite way. If this conflict had been admitted as the central one, the film could have hardly concluded in the open way in which it does because it would have ended with Rajieh being unable to swear on the Quran – and therefore affirming the moral authority of the theocratic state. By subordinating the more important issue to the less important one, the film is playing up to film festival audiences/ juries, which demand ‘ambiguity’ as a primary requisite of art.”

I again put it here – the Rajieh case is not resolved, at least not morally. It is a situation where everybody is right, and everybody is fallible. And that is what manifests itself into the film’s central dilemma mirrored through Termeh’s. The film is not being ambiguous for no reason. Amidst all the fallibility, can Termeh truly decide? How does she learn of these ethical defects? Through the Nader-Rajieh case, which if truly had been resolved, at least morally, would the ending still be ambiguous? And that's my argument.

Oh yeah, as for affirming the moral authority of the theocratic state, I again present to you ladies and gentlemen The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which actually takes this issue head-on.

HASHOTER (POLICEMAN): MOVIE REVIEW

2011-12-22T07:56:00.004+05:30

Cast: Yiftach Klein, Yaara Pelzig, Michael Mushonov, Menashe Noi, Michael Aloni, Gal Hoyberger, Meital Berdah, Shaul Mizrahi, Rona-Lee Shimon, Ben Adam
Director: Nadav Lapid
Runtime: 105 min.
Language: Hebrew
Country: Israel
Verdict: For topicality alone this is one hell of a film. Comparisons to Full Metal Jacket wouldn't be misguided. And in Mr. Lapid it is some talent we have here.
Genre: Drama, Thriller

        The film opens to a bunch of cyclists, five of them I guess, peddling down a hill, and I wonder why are they even bothering when they can just glide their way down. The central guy, strategically placed within the frame, pedals his way into a close-up, and with his pursed lips and sunglasses he immediately reminds me of everything that is going on with the personality of Salman Khan in Dabangg.

He is Yaron (Mr. Klein), a member of an elite anti-terrorist squad, which we later come to learn but already seem to know, courtesy the title and the opening few frames. These guys stop to have one of them echo-sessions, and also declare the land as the most beautiful in the world. In their broad shoulders there is a certain surety, a righteousness that is palpable. You might even call it vanity, and I would agree. When Yaron comes out of the bath and looks at himself in the mirror (a marvelously precise and un-flashy moment), our perception from the opening close-up is transferred (or reflected) into the film via the mirror. We do not need a second invitation to conclude that in Mr. Lapid we have a tremendous craftsman we better keep a tab on.
        Moments later, we see him dance for his pregnant wife towering over his wife (courtesy the masterful low-angles), and provide her with a labor-helping massage – a parental action that also doubles up as a sexual interaction owing to the position (read alpha-male). The wife’s a kid to be taken care of – a classic macho (as opposed to patriarchal) behavior, and later in the film he carries her in his arms as they climb two floors. Mr. Lapid pays special attention to the numbers here – the number of floors, the number of kilometers, the number of push-ups, the number of birthday bumps, the number of catches. God knows how vital numbers are as a goal to be achieved for the macho, a virtual aim (peak) in the absence of the real. A set of five 40-set of pushups is what I need to feel good about myself. The audience is me. While in a lift, Yaron does some pull-ups. Little targets turning into little triumphs for the ego turning into little reasons to feel good about the self. That Yaron and his buddies are members of the anti-terrorist squad only fortifies their righteousness, or masculinity.
        Or, virility. Mr. Lapid seems to view this virility as an offshoot of boyish behavior. They cycle, have courtyard barbecue parties, fight out in games, wear uniforms but walk out in the sun as opposed to being hinged to the interiors of an office, sit at cafeterias and drink beers and judge female posteriors, and in the case of Yaron even flirt. They always walk in groups. One might argue some of the behavior is downright caricature-ish, and I would only reply (not defend) that Mr. Lapid’s film is intensely political. On the scale where Cristi (Politist, Adjectiv) represents the average working middle-class, Yaron and his buddies seem to be the privileged elite (he has a super-sized LED and remote-operated blinds). Not a single shot presents them doing anything like work, except indulge in "action" involving guns. Maybe, the long period of relative peace (since Lebanon), the anti-terrorist squad has precious little to do. As far as topicality is concerned, this period is Policeman’s jumping point. Yaron wants to buy a house with a courtyard for his soon-to-be-born daughter, and that gentle reminder of the Israeli housing-bubble sort of works as a hint for the film’s inclinations.
        Those inclinations formally introduce themselves through Shira (Ms. Pelzig), whose car is kicked and punched and shattered by one of them adolescent gangs whose economical marginalization has given them the certainty to carry out hate crimes. Mr. Lapid is shrewd here, immediately cutting to Shira and her friends indulging in a shooting exercise in the mountains, and for a moment we assume that Shira and her friends would seek revenge. This momentary assumption on our part is probably not unintentional, as we later learn in a bar, where Shira confesses a rather different bend to her ideological stance – much less Marxist in its leanings, and pro rich. It is an abrupt shift in the narrative, fromhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Yaron to Shiri, which Olivier Père compares to Mulholland Dr. and Certified Copy, a shift which opens itself to a description that is a whole lot messier than a straightforward Yaron to Shiri. From the very first frame, Yaron, as a (super)hero does in every such film that has ever been made, has this uncanny ability to hog the camera, best represented in the little fight-game the buddies play. He is popular, and in the barbecue party drops in every group to resounding hi-fives and shoulder hugs. The film’s narrative until this shift is all about Yaron, and his presence in every frame of the film until then, the camera either tracking with him or fixed on him.
        Any such assumptions about Shiri being the central figure of the film post-shift is slowly dispelled by drawing parallel narrative strands for each of the members of the group, making each of them distinct individuals and despite the plot diffusing any notion of a central figure. These four youngsters, or let us just say misguided comrades for convenience, are neatly placed around the frame, or compartmentalized within the frame, and the motivations and relations are slowly drawn out, or exposed, thereby decentralizing the center of power (or distributing our center of attention). A moment in particular achieves some spectacular political connotations, where two of the comrades – one the supposed leader Nathanael (Mr. Aloni) and the other I forget the name of – walk by a street violin player and the latter is critical of his abilities. The leader dares him to take his position and play, which he does thereby impressing his leader, and at that moment this misguided youth brigade both literally and figuratively assume the responsibility of the economically challenged. It is a strange sort of music he plays (although I scrape the bottom of the barrel as far as taste in music is concerned), and I wonder what they do with the money they collect afterwards.
        Mr. Lapid doesn’t mock the ideology but the confusion and the silly roots of such a revolution. These kids are in search of an aim, a target themselves, and when Shiri reads out figures (the worth of three billionaires) it draws a stark reminder to Yaron’s need for numbers. There is an order in and around Yaron, that contrahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsts to the arbitrary nature around these revolutionaries, who in a way are themselves vying for our attention, like say Carlos. It is need to prove to themselves more than any belief or ideology. I’ve read elsewhere that slogans from the film were chanted during the , and one can easily look for motivation from what happened at Tahrir between the cops and the crowd. Yet, probably because of the numbers, because of the order, because of the machismo, and because of the pride, Israeli forces are reputed to be a different breed. In those final moments, when Shiri’s comrades fall by the wayside, and the desperation of her belief finally brings within her a surety, Mr. Lapid discovers a moment as true and fragile as anything. Looking at that non-Arab face, Yaron’s certainty is rattled. It is a historical meeting, when these two narratives collide, and a defining moment for any nation.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-12-14T06:26:00.006+05:30

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, John C. Reilly
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Runtime: 112 min.
Verdict: The year’s most unsettling film.
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Horror

An excerpt from Mr. Ed Gonzalez’s review down at Slant Magazine:
“Ramsay both sets the film's incoherent tone and states her stale feminist agenda immediately with a shot of Eva (Tilda Swinton) being hoisted by a throng of tomato-doused revelers at Buñol's El Tomatino festival. Just as there's no sense of this artfully photographed vision as memory or fantasy, Eva's unmistakably Christ-like pose makes clear who the victim is in this story about a troubled mother-son relationship.”

Mr. Gonzalez is considering the opening of the film, wherein we’re introduced to the whispering silence of, what at first sounds like a ceiling fan and later turns out to be the lawn sprinklers, and a “white” curtain gently blowing. It is dark, except for some faint light from outside. The movies have taught us over the years that when the lights are out, the door’s open, and a white curtain is at the mercy of external forces, we need to be worried. It is a slow zoom, heightening the eerie silence of the moment, and Ms. Ramsay cuts to an overhead shot of the El Tomatino festival Mr. Gonzalez is talking about. Eva (Ms. Swinton) is drenched in red and with her arms outstretched she’s reveling in it. It’s bliss. Not for a moment did Jesus ask me to consider his presence amongst all this, because that pose of his on the crucifix, howsoever iconic in our culture, is not registered against his name. I see Eva, I see a slow-moving camera, and I see a woman intoxicated with the experience. This woman is an adventurer. She is a traveler, and Mr. Gonzalez probably recognizes this aspect of the imagery when he categorizes it under the tag of “feminist agenda”. That’s his reaction, which is fine.
        What’s hugely debatable is the blunt judgment at the beginning of his final sentence when he empowers his reactions with the authority of objective truth, and claims there’s no sense of “artfully photographed vision as memory or fantasy”. On the contrary, if one were to take the aid of traditional narrative techniques, like in the opening of L’Affaire Farewell, or more suitably Saving Private Ryan, where an opening burst (former) or the calmness (latter) is contrasted with the subsequent imagery, conveying a shift so to speak, we know 9 out of 10 times it’s got to be a flashback. Or in the case of The Aviator, where a similarly whispering moment of a mother warning a child is contrasted with the cacophony of Howard Hughes right in the middle of a shoot, a flash-forward. The point to note is that such a sequence, especially in the case of We need to Talk about Kevin, where neither the tension nor the drama has been resolved, provides for a fulcrum, a sort of center so to speak, and which needs to be returned to at some point of time in the narrative. Ms. Ramsay exploits this with the skill and precision of a seasoned exponent of genre. The contrast, the abrupt shift is the key. And just because we do not have a face at that moment to which we attach this flashback (memory) doesn’t mean the filmmaker ought to be blamed. As I shall claim later this strategy is intentional.
        This empowerment on Mr. Gonzalez’s part leads to further problems, and owing to his assumption regarding the film’s supposed intentions he shifts the blame further on the film:
“I haven't read the novel by Lionel Shriver on which the film is based, but in a recent article for Slate, the author speaks of pregnancy, to Eva, as "an infestation," and her world travels as a means for the character to assert her superiority over others. From this we may glean that Eva possibly did travel to Buñol at one time, that the cartographic wallpaper inside one of the rooms in her luxe manse, like the job she takes in the present day at a travel agency, expresses her search for worldliness, but we shouldn't have to look to the book to help us make sense of the film. Because We Need to Talk About Kevin fails to articulate Eva's desire to travel, it means nothing that the walls in her favorite room are covered in rare maps instead of, say, pink elephants when the malicious Kevin charges into his mother's study with a paint-loaded squirt gun in hand.”

Dear reader, you would observe here how Mr. Gonzalez realizes that “Eva possibly did travel to Buñol” only later, and that the film, by not presenting a face establishes a fact about Eva’s presence there at the very beginning. Had we had a face, a question of fantasy might be worth a consideration. But at that moment during the narration, because of a lack of any hinge, because of Eva’s introduction within that moment, it comes across as a fact. The narrative is framing the subject and not the other way, and we audience respond to that accordingly. Mr. Gonzalez’s confusion is probably a result of the ensuing shift in time, to the present day, where a ragged looking Eva lay on the bed, in which case this edit firmly installs the preceding moment as memory or fantasy. Personally, it was a bit of both, and that is how our most pleasant memories live within us.
        But, again, what’s wrong is Mr. Gonzalez’s conclusion that we need to read the book to make sense of those images and connect them to Eva’s love for travelling. Again, on the contrary, it is pretty obvious, and had Mr. Gonzalez shown some flexibility in reading the El Tomatino posturing beyond the symbolic Jesus-on-the-crucifix, he might have left some space to let the joy of the moment affect him. I haven’t read the book either, and yet I would want to claim that We Need to Talk about Kevin quite economically and quite magnificently articulates Eva’s desire to travel. This little tomato moment is as much a synecdoche for Eva’s free-spiritedness as much as it is about a woman’s worldly desires beyond the household stuff. One can label it feminism, sure, but I would want to resist the presence (explicit or implied) of quotation marks around it. The mere presence of Ms. Swinton, who is too specific to be a stereotype, discourages any such intention. So yeah, when Kevin squirts colored-elephants all over the rare maps in “her room”, it really boils your blood. The skillful framing of our frustration through Ms. Farmiga’s in Orphan sure comes to mind. And Mildred’s. So yeah, when Mr. Gonzalez suggests that the film is a snide art-house take on The Omen, I begin to question where the boundaries of “art-house” end and mainstream Hollywood fare begin. I mean, the modern horror film has been known to adopt mainly medium shots and close-ups and shallow focus, and the present tense here contains shots that show only a portion of the action. Such framing, like the close-up of a hand using a brush to wipe the floor, of eyes blinking behind the shades, of fingers taking egg-shells out of the food, is too claustrophobic for comfort. There’s a certain manic energy when we see an act this closely, when it fills our vision, and we probably perceive it an excess. Obvious comparisons to Roman Polanski’s chamber films further serve the point that Ms. Lynne Ramsay is using the tropes from the horror-genre. Everything around Eva, every eye around her, the walls, the confines of her car, everything that the camera manages to frame, every inch of space around her is her own personal chamber. So yeah, I guess “snide” is a little uncalled for, because this film here, much like a film like Mulholland Dr., is what distinguishes horror from scary.
        This here is the problem with some of the criticisms being leveled against the film from various quarters, a recurrence of what one might label as award-season bash/backlash, and I pick Mr. Gonzalez’s review only because it at least presents itself as a criticism worthy of being analyzed, and which acts as an example for the assumptions and a reluctance to engage with the image other than in its symbolic form, thereby categorizing it under the same section as that of hack-jobs like Black Swan, films which not only strip their images of everything else, but move ahead with little sense of respect or consideration for the moment, rendering themselves absolutely lifeless.

        We need to Talk about Kevin, with its reds and yellows and blues and sauces and jams is not symbolic but expressionistic, and Ms. Ramsay imbues its each moment with such specificity and narrative energy, much like There Will Be Blood that each of them – the literal, the narrative and the symbolic – co-exist within the same frame and support corresponding interpretations. Let me take three examples, each related and building upon the other, and each of them easy targets for the “in-your-face-symbolism” accusation. We begin with the interiors of Eva’s house, the walls and the panes all smeared in red, and when Eva moves out of the house to see the cause, we see red splashed all around. Including the car. The narrative has barely begun so much so that this moment is part of it, and we’ve no idea what’s in store. The way Eva drags herself out of the house suggests she is some sort of crazy wanderer, or lunatic, and that the red has been sprayed by external forces. Who? Naughty children? Some festival? No idea, but its presence is foreboding. We fast forward to a moment where Ms. Ramsay provides for one of those extra-tight close-ups, as Eva is cleaning bits out of her hair, and we not only draw connections to the red sprays and the El Tomatino festival, wondering where the residual bits have come from, we also draw conclusions that Eva’s life is, in a general sense, haywire, and that her perspective of the world around is skewed. The red is residual for guilt of some sort, a symbol for blood, and an indicator of a messy/crazy way of life. And when we find Eva in the aisles of a superstore, hiding from a woman, with cans of tomato soup filling the background, both the symbolic thread and the narrative thread have accumulated to support their own little threads. We’re not merely thinking of those soup cans, but also the woman beyond the frame, and who could walk into it anytime and confront Eva. Within that frame, the soup cans leave no room for any air whatsoever for us, or Eva, to breathe, transforming what is technically medium shot into a super-tight close-up. As I said, the frame is the chamber.
        The big question – what does the film have to say about parenting? As much as easy answers are being provided every which where, there’re two specific moments Ms. Ramsay provides us with, which when contrasted with the third would obviously account for those easy ones.

        And yet, as much as those moments are synecdochical, presenting a very specific image as shorthand for parenting problems, Ms. Ramsay is shrewd enough to fog this moment with tension and ambiguity. We first hear the sound of a wailing child, and we see Eva holding him. The narrative until here, especially the preceding moment, where she lay in bed in the hospital, in a state of shock more-or-less, considering this abrupt shift in life, and her husband holding her son, impresses us with the notion that Eva isn’t too good with kids, and that she’s holding a time-bomb.

Yet, the kid is crying when the father is holding him in the hospital and his wailing pierces two time-shifts so as to present at least the notion of a demonic child and a helpless inept mother. As with most things in the film, it is a bit of both, and it is this ambiguity that lends the film its structure.
        I’m a plausible, and when a film (ca)uses a temporal fragmentation I need a dramatic/thematic justification. It is probably a reflection of my need to find logic, and when I demand a reason from a film, it is more to appease to my narrow view than to analyze/criticize a film, asking of it to shred every bit of gimmickry and exercise subtlety. There’s also the contentious issue of morality, the presence of which greatly relieves me, and I ask myself if the film’s central structure, with its opening moment setting up the big reveal at the end is some sort of money-shot, one of those twist endings horror movies need to have. I want to like the film, and don’t want to feel betrayed by something sensational. There is the big scene at the school, which is merely another event and not the film’s focal point, for Ms. Ramsay conveys to us, through those horrified kids and Eva’s stunned reactions and the slaps and broken eggs, its foreboding presence well in advance. I wonder to what dramatic end the narrative would structure itself thus, and the final moment, where I felt the tension between the mother and the child finally giving away to tenderness, I could not help but recollect the one preceding moment, where the child is sick and the mother is taking care of him, and the father comes in and the child asks him to get the hell out of there. As in a good suspense film, the ending is not what it is about, but what it represents, and how it surprises our assumptions. For all its running time, we feel that Kevin has robbed her of her worldly desires, and that her decision to give birth to a daughter is merely to pad herself from father and son. And because of the fragmented structure, where camera eye movements in the present are mirrored in the camera movement of the past, where both of those places merge together to make one continuous quest for Eva to come to terms with her loss, like that of White Material, we learn layer by layer, up until the final reveal, how Kevin’s killer blow is to wipe out that personal life Eva has accumulated for herself. Until then, it is only the angry eyes of the without that she needs to escape from, and that she is probably safe inside the walls with her guilt as the antagonist. But as she hugs her son and walks the corridor at the end, all those moments inside the walls of her house present a life destroyed from within. Where does Eva go, other than to be caught up between both? Could she run to France, or another country? The early parts suggest her financial life is a mess. But more importantly, she probably cannot leave her kid, that they share a unique form of affection, and that they are the only ones closest to each other. This is the sort of unresolved stuff horror movies are made of.

THE IDES OF MARCH: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-12-06T14:31:00.002+05:30

Cast: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, Marisa Tomei, Jeffrey Wright, Max Minghella
Director: George Clooney
Runtime: 101 min.
Verdict: Thoroughly gripping. And one hell of an acting show.
Genre: Drama, Film Noir

        The general word is that this here is film is about loss of innocence, about Steven’s (Mr. Gosling), a young and bright Junior Campaign Manager, shift from the pink of idealism to the gray of realism, from being a patriot and a gentleman to being a manipulative asshole. Can one notice a general movement in the above sentence, a gradual shift that seeks to collect the blame from everyone around and land it on the protagonist? I hope your answer is yes, and I love indulging in a simultaneous critique of myself. The thing is, Mr. Clooney’s film serves as a, what can I say, a depressing antidote to his ’05 masterpiece Good Night, and Good Luck. It is not so much about Steven discovering lies and treachery and deceit in politics as much as it is about him discovering, or unleashing, those necessary (apparently) qualities lying dormant within. Coming from Daniel Ocean, whose team member gave us an adolescent and cheesy “Yes, we can”, I find The Ides of March strangely reassuring.
        The question though, in an expressively (read awesome) acted film as this, if Mr. Clooney sets the chain of events so as to justify (if not glorify) Steven’s actions, i.e. his vengeance, or should one read them as a condemnation, and hence a classic implication of the viewer’s own desires. (Aside: It might practically be impossible to not view Mr. Gosling as an incarnation of The Driver, and when he walks into Duffy’s (Mr. Giamatti) office late in the film, I couldn’t help myself from remembering the hammer.) The thing is, there’s a petite young lady who almost opens the film, offering, at least in hindsight, a narrative counterpoint to Stephen. She‘s the archetypical blonde bombshell, and she’s played by Ms. Rachel Wood, who seems to have the very demeanor that makes me entirely suspicious of her intentions. I might be out on a limb here, but she comes across as a, how do I say it, uhm, a manipulative bitch. In her glossy but pursed lips, through those cold eyes, there’s a certain silken smoothness that makes me instinctively wary. Hitchcock would’ve had a field day with her. She’s not all-out Marlene Dietrich or Tippi Hedren, and by God I would’ve had been comfortable with that. She plays Molly, a young intern in Mike Morris’ (Mr. Clooney) campaign, and when she brazenly “invites” Steven for drinks over to her hotel, one cannot help but wonder. I know I know, I’m aware of the orthodoxy in my arguments (remember I’m on a limb), that numerous actresses have been “out there”, and that includes Ms. Naomi Watts in Mother and Child. Yet that bouncy “cat-walk” and the confident smile (arrogance?) through which Mr. Clooney introduces her to us, and which eventually leads her to Steven’s door, both office and hotel, I perceive her as a threat. Makes me want to label her a schemer. Especially in the light of Mildred Pierce, and it is often tough to look at an actor past their previous role, and more so when they seem to intertwine. Ms. Wood’s facial features are very economic, very terse, and that probably reflects in the way we perceive people. Sizable features (big eyes, pouted lips, chubby cheeks) probably feel accessible. Oh boy, I don’t know if all this is speaking about me, or the film, or the way we draw a pattern, or if the film is drawing leverage out of it? I wish I were writing about a Martin Scorsese picture, I could comfortably shift the blame. Best to change the paragraph.
        In bed, Steven learns of her secret. It is one of those spectacular acting moments, with Mr. Gosling’s split wide open, and you want to applaud. We learn a little later she has been at somebody else’s “door” a while before, and that initiates, or highlights, a thematic parallel. There are hell of a lot of these parallels caused, both by way of screenplay and intercutting, to drive home the point – what goes around, comes around. The order is important, I suspect. When it goes first and comes back, that’s karma, when it comes first and goes back, it is justification. The trouble is, courtesy the film’s masterstroke, its central contrivance is both the cause and the effect, is both what “goes” and “comes”. Steven walks into his campaign office, sits in his cabin, and scans the breadth of the room. It’s shattering. His cabin suddenly becomes a manifestation of his inner disillusionment and the detachment that brings. In a film of several authorial masterstrokes, this finds Mr. Clooney at his classical best – a simple pan drenching what seems like objective reality with expressionism. One ought to be reminded of Martin Scorsese’s slow pans in Goodfellas, and here Mr. Clooney uses his to color the surroundings in a character’s inner turmoil. Morris belongs to the public, right at ease when surrounded by them, and when he gets a call on his phone late in the film, it is another master pan. Jaime N. Christley speaks of Mr. Clooney’s methods as that of pitting a conventional movie (Lumet) against an observational one, and this is where one derives a hell of a lot of pleasure from The Ides of March.
        The question, about the nature of the film’s manipulation, still remains, and if it is implicating us in the way some of those revenge films do. Or, is it about the frailty of our untested morality? Steven refuses the invitations of the opposing camp’s campaign manager Duffy, and yet walks first thing when the tide turns against him. There’s one Senator Thompson in the mix too, the plot throwing him for maintaining the flow of parallels. The thing is we all rationalize, and that’s how the conscience is assuaged, and that’s probably how a realist is born. It’s often a cliché in most films, but by stacking his characters one behind the other in a circle and asking them to pull the trigger, Mr. Clooney both implicates and absolves. The final moment finds us looking at Steven into his eyes, while words like “integrity” are heard in the background. As we zoom closer and closer, are those words fading away? As melodramatic as it sounds, are those words being heard from within him? Is the conflict still raging? When asked if he would run for office, Mr. Clooney says – “No. I've slept with too many women, I've done too many drugs, and I've been to too many parties.” I imagine if this here is an autobiography of sorts.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-11-30T09:34:00.004+05:30

Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates
Director: Woody Allen
Runtime: 95 min.
Verdict: Metaphorically speaking, it is neither about midnight nor about Paris.
Genre: Comedy, Romance

        The principal failure one might attribute to Mr. Allen’s film is that he doesn’t manage to convey a cinematic city that is a product of time, or rather a period. His temporal space, which is Paris in the 1920s, is more a product of figures rather than the city itself, and in a way it probably reveals that the nostalgia shared by Gil (Mr. Wilson), his proxy here, is not that for a phenomenological space frozen in time (which in fact is timeless), but for a rather loosely sketched era which doesn’t seem to offer much other than a few set of names. There’s a lack of details, which in the case of an era of a city amounts to a lack of character. The thing is, a period is rarely defined by its people, I guess, and more and more of that definition is better served when it is strung around an order of objects. Here, 1920 is only defined as when Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Dali and Bunuel and Gertrude Stein and Picasso moved around each other, and sometimes about each other, within what feels like a sector/block.
        One ought to argue that Mr. Allen is doing it out of intention because, hey, how difficult is it really for a man with a camera to give a city a context and a history? I mean, I could pick my camera and take a picture of a few houses with “For Sale” boards, or a few office complexes with “To Let” boards and lend a context for Dublin (believe me, one finds such boards every few meters), or pick the same camera and run it around the hoardings in Bangalore and give a context to the sustained momentum to the real estate here. Which makes me realize that the space here, i.e. Paris in 1920, is merely a manifestation of one’s own fantasies, fantasies whose nature I wouldn’t want to judge, although when critics remark upon the film’s central conceit as some new concept or a product of charming imagination, I might have to shrug and lend a clichéd observation of my own – this is what cinema has been doing all its life a.k.a a metaphor for cinema. Case in point: another film Mr. Wilson starred in, which roughly travelled the same time period, missing it by a couple of decades, and introducing us to not merely Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but a rather young Charlie Chaplin. I mean, movies do it all the time (I almost want to use “duh”). So yeah, one could very well label Mr. Allen’s escapades here Gil’s midnight show, and that show has less to do with a city and has more to do with a generation.
        Here it would probably be beneficial to consider the extended opening montage. The images, deliberately shot without any depth, deliberately still, truly establish this Paris as a city not of details, a city that doesn’t seem to lend any influence to the people walking in the foreground, a city that seems to be a part of the sky and the clouds and the trees and content to be pasted to the background, a city that’s not standing the tides of time but that is dead and beautiful and just as kitschy as mountains and meadows. Picture-postcard stuff. Neither do the streets feel designed, nor are they a lively system of modernization; they merely exist. One might even go as far as to claim that Mr. Allen has tried his very best to create the feel of a two-dimensional city. The montage creates a city that exists out of context, out of history, that conveys nothing, whose only purpose is to create a fantasy. One would assume that nostalgia for a space and time is a direct variation of the information one possesses, because, hey, nostalgia needs to be about something, right. In Bruges is a simple example that conveys a place, or rather the feel of a place, and whenever it is I happen to be there, I would be searching the Bruges that exists within the frames of that film. So, if one were to assume that Mr. Allen’s midnight show is merely a reflection of one’s notions and not an actual space-fragment (and Gil’s are understandably built around writers and filmmakers and painters), then Mr. Allen exhibits a rather curious indifference, or rather a condescending distrust towards any form of information and any pursuit of intellect. His camera focuses on Gertrude Stein while she makes her opinion about Picasso’s new painting known to Gil, and we only get momentary reaction shots of the painting itself juxtaposed alongside Mr. Wilson’s very own “what the hell”, thereby rejecting it all as formal (meaningless?) “nonsense”, or at the very least bracketing it all as the interest of “art groupies”. David Edelstein mentions the absence of a Kubrick fussiness, which makes me feel that somewhere Mr. Allen is rejecting such “nonsense” from his filmmaking too. He is a lot less kind on Paul (Mr. Sheen), outright mocking him while he provides information, or context, using that same time-tested strategy of “focusing on the blabber”, which sort of aligns him with the shallow (and very much Hollywood) idea that everything, including art and intellect, ought to be calibrated as per the proletariat, and that the artistic or the scholarly form the oppressive establishment. Such a belief assumes that the intellectual are somehow detached, and fantasizes, much like Cinderella, that they would be the chosen ones. Other analogies – (a) fantasizing about an alien abduction, which rarely happens to astrophysicists or scientists (b) fantasizing about a visit from God himself, answering one’s “true prayers”, while the local priest, who is a false prophet anyway, is busy making a fool out of himself.
        The problem with Gil’s fantastical experience is that the Lost Generation could’ve existed anywhere and in anytime without being a product of their times, just as Adriana’s (Ms. Cotillard) folks from the Belle Époque didn’t necessarily have to live during a period of cheap labor or technological advancement. They’re free floating entities, and owing to scenes that for the most part contain partying, the space around them seems to have no historical or cultural significance. It is probably equivalent to, well, current vernacular would call it names-dropping, and I suspect that makes Mr. Allen every bit as guilty of “pseudo-intellectualism” as Paul, one of those stock characters he has always wanted to punch. I mean, I would understand Mr. Bertolucci feeling nostalgic about the 1968 student riots (a real historical era), or even Mr. Abrams for a fantastical world (Super 8). But Gil’s I find pretty meaningless. Not even Crocodile Dundee. Or at the very least, not worthy of the right to label Paul pedantic. I’m wondering now if I missed any details.

A SEPARATION (JODÁI-E NÁDER AZ SIMIN): MOVIE REVIEW

2011-11-25T16:48:00.004+05:30

Cast: Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Sarina Farhadi, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Runtime: 123 min.
Language: Persian
Country: Iran
Verdict: A movie that puts our judgmental nature on the anvil.
Genre: Drama

        Razieh (Ms. Bayat), panic-stricken, is standing on one side of a road. She is pregnant, four months in, working as a housemaid, and the old-man of that house is suffering from Alzheimer’s. He stands on the other side, seemingly having the comprehension of a wooden plank, trying to cross the road as vehicles run left and right. She is new on the job, has a little daughter, and if something were to happen to him hell would probably break loose; humanity comes a little later. Such situations make me cringe, make me cover my face and open a little slit to check if everything’s alright, or in desperate situations exercise my rights as a viewer and even do a little fast forward. I did, only to find that Mr. Farhadi cuts through that moment, cuts through that tension, and rams straight into a happy game of foosball. “All’s well”, says that cut, and greatly relaxes the body. That ithttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif is lying, that it is hiding information only to reveal it later and further complicate the “reality”, is a narrative strategy that bothers me greatly. Numerous voices are describing A Separation as a “realistic” drama, which in some ways is true in that whatever happens on-screen is a documentation of that event, and that these events are unfolding in plain sight. Yet, the organization of these documents, i.e. their presentation, especially the “invisibility” of some of these cuts as they jump through time, may not exactly conform to that description. On the contrary, Mr. Farhadi seems to be willfully distorting the reality, and causing deliberate obtrusion in our understanding of this drama.
        Madeo caused me similar troubles a couple of years back, and I might be tempted to label such obtrusions reductive, or maybe even dishonest. But then, I need to, at least for my sake, understand the nature of this obtrusion and ascertain why when a film like Memento distorts the truth, I do not feel offended. Is it because of the integrity of the very structure, or a film’s strict adherence to rules it lays out upfront? Is it because of the aesthetic here, involving traditional notions of reality – a mobile camera, real settings, no background score – a sense of life as it is, although most frames, if not all, offer a shallow field of view? I don’t seem to have an answer at the moment, yet such a cut makes we question a film’s integrity, and seeking justification in the intended ends. A consideration of A Separation’s opening might provide some relief here. Nader (Mr. Moaadi) and Simin (Ms. Hatami), a married couple, are facing us in a two shot, and the very composition shouts “Brechtian!” Having been conditioned on numerous previous occasions, such a shot, asks of us to assume our moral responsibilities of a listener (Alfie), or a judge (Rashomon). Yet, the first words are spoken by the judge, and the words spoken are inferential/judgmental in nature, thereby rendering any authority we have null. We are merely an audience, and the film is constructing for us what I would call a false moral dilemma, these dilemmas seemingly judged from various perspectives exercising their authority as our surrogates. These judgmental figures (moral/ethical/religious) are introduced, or rather deposited in like sediments, one on top of the other. We judge Simin through the eyes of Nader and Termeh (Ms. Farhadi), as she leaves her house, her husband who has an invalid father, her daughter Termeh, to find a future in another country. She is the cause of a feminine rebellion within the harmony of this patriarchal system, and the film gradually traverses the road – from Simin through the teacher through Termeh through Razieh – to lend credence to this movement of questioning this system, if not outright rejecting it. The principal patriarch of the film, a judge looking over the central case of possible homicide, is, not impassionate, and yet while he sips his tea, he seems to be wise and mostly gentle, not susceptible to any moral corruption. He doesn’t seem to share either the condescension on the lower financially-challenged class, as might be suspected of the teacher, or the envy for the more privileged class, as is the case with Houjat (Mr. Hosseini) and some of our judiciary systems. The justice system as personified by the three judges, who feel efficient and personal, and a verdict feels subjective rather than processed through a set of inflexible rules, primitive and accessible, not a symbol of a distant and aloof establishment. There’re several such fatherly judgmental figures – through Nader, through the two judges – and the film doesn’t really undermine their credence as much as it examines their pragmatism and seemingly understands their fallibility.
        In many ways, the judge’s job seems to be what the film probably intends ouhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gift of us – to look over the various pieces of reality from the various perspectives and arrive at the truth, a truth that is unprejudiced, fair, reasonable and honorable. Srikanth does an estimation of the visual technique Mr. Farhadi uses here, employing glasses and separations of all kinds – tangible and intangible – and the fact that we’re watching these folks through our very own separation makes us all the more mindful, and in turn implicates our imperfect vantage point and our need to judge. Before judging we’re to question the veracity of the documentation itself and our instinct to take the situation in plain sight (on-screen) as the truth, keeping in mind that two of biggest lies happen out of the sight of the camera – one off-screen, and one that’s been cut. The distortion on Mr. Farhadi’s part then becomes quite reasonable in that regard, and probably even necessary, considering an outright distorted structure might draw attention to itself. As it is, the film is being hailed as a screenwriter’s triumph, to which I only hold Srikanth’s frame grabs as evidence to the superficiality of such claims.
        It is quite interesting the way Mr. Farhadi chains all of these events together, often using jarring jump cuts to sort of pull the events to around this house. Razieh and her daughter are waiting for the bus and the scene cuts to them running and climbing the stairs to the house. Nader looks at his father and goes for the door, and as the camera cuts to the other side we’re in a different day and time. Events smash into each other and pile the complications on. It is all continuous, caused by the principal object of the film, and in many ways its MacGuffin, the Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandfather, who is behind almost every event and every decision within the film, a sort of sacred monolith against which sins are committed and guilt confessed, and he seems to take everything in. Is he the conscience, a sacred relic to be protected, or is he the vestige of a gradually failing present, to be done away with? The film’s final moment has Nader, Simin and Termeh dressed in black, and obligation that is observed for 40 days after the death of a principal member of the family (although Mr. Farhadi says nothing to that effect but his film has made us wiser), and yet the separation goes ahead. Would the past always remain, you know, as a separation between the orthodox (conservative) and the rebellious (utilitarian)? Maybe it does, and Termeh is asked to choose between the two. I suspect even Mr. Farhadi cannot make up his mind.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-11-15T08:52:00.005+05:30

Cast (voices of): Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig
Director: Steven Spielberg
Runtime: 107 min.
Verdict: An amusing yarn. The real story is that 3-D is a bother.
Genre: Animation, Fantasy, Adventure

I guess I’ve to do an about turn and finally admit that 3-D is a mistake. I still am optimistic, and Mr. Spielberg’s experimentation only fills me with hope. Yet, this exercise of declaring a film as the next 3-D champion is getting a little tiring, especially when tracking shots filming the action feel as if the camera were “outside” this holographic frame. The action itself feels like a projection, or a reproduction of the action, and the figures in the foreground feel especially translucent and hollow. I guess you’ve all had enough of those complaints, but they are true. The colors render the picture slight. The unfortunate thing is the movie in my memory is feeble and silvery like those 2-D holograms our textbooks had, the only brightness being caused by a two-dimensional portrait of Tintin Mr. Spielberg winks at us with (the painter is a look-alike of Herge). He winks at us a lot actually, nodding almost every Indiana Jones film, and embedding within the material the relation between Herge’s Tintin and his own treasure-seeking adventurer. A critic once compared Raiders of the Lost Ark to Tintin, and Mr. Spielberg’s intention is to not merely to nod in approval but to re-present the lad as Indiana Jones for kids. Not surprisingly, The Adventures of Tintin is one big chase sequence, effective and efficient. From start to finish a big amusing ride. This, in some ways, is a problem. A set of scrolls, like the infamous crystal skull exchange hands, and even claws, and after you had an exchange too many you just stop caring. The characters, and as a result the frames are in constant motion, not even for a moment taking the time to soak in the atmosphere. Adventure films usually have a quite moment of reflection, a moment where the motion simply stops, a moment that provides contrast, a moment that acts as a delimiter between the set-up and the climax. It is an odd world here, made of real benches and buildings and desert, and yet the bulged noses do not feel like an oddity. A study of the nature of the pact we sign with the animated film and the way we start to assimilate these oddities as norm would be a hugely interesting exercise. The motion capture, though, way better than the ones rendered in The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol still leave a character eyes feel as if they were suffering from cataracts, or really drunk. One is not sure precisely where the focal point of Captain Haddock’s eyes really rest, while Tintin’s eyes seem to be looking far and beyond. I suspect it is this inability to reflect upon, an inability to savor the moment, that causes most of the animated fare to be constantly on the move, to overcompensate.
Mr. Spielberg seems to be liberated by this foray into the animated medium, probably a trifle more than one would like him to be, the camera literally taking impossible flights of imagination, swirling and gliding and floating and swooping around the action, but never, not even for a moment, inside it. His intent seems to be to use the technology to create continuity through space and homogeneity through time, his on-the-run camera performing the function of the moving red line in the Indiana Jones films, the 2-D map becoming a 3-D globe here, a grand marriage of Herge’s ligne caire and the motion capture 3-D, the straightforward nature of the pencil lines drawing the plot being reflected in the continuous nature of the events. A climactic sword fight, fought by the clashing arms of two cranes, between the descendents of foes from a time gone by, is otherwise a bland little exercise, but when looked at through this prism of nostalgia achieves thematic substance. It is this “holographic” prism, steeped in the nostalgia of a different time and place, that Mr. Spielberg’s camera seems to be swooping and swirling about, these movements suggesting Mr. Spielberg might as well be the co-creator of Tintin. David Bordwell here analyzes the economy of Herge’s illustrations, and when one looks at Mr. Spielberg’s multi-planar action, where seemingly innocuous and amusing events in the foreground lead to an important lead later, it is tough not to imagine Mr. Spielberg working out his holographic “frames” as Herge’s panels, packing them with detail after detail. And while working that out, one feels, his brother from another mother liberates him from the compulsion to include the Nazis while picking up on storylines that were published around their time, and to play around with an antagonist who, more than anything else, is merely a madman driven by a need for vengeance. That makes him and his bumbling henchmen a little cute. And when Tintin and Captain Haddock do not dispose them off, but are considerate enough to pack them at the back of the plane, allowing them the opportunity to a sweet escape, it is, well, sweet. I guess Herge would’ve been relieved.

IMMORTALS: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-11-14T06:06:00.004+05:30

Cast: Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto, Luke Evans, Stephen Dorff, John Hurt, Isabel Lucas
Director: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar
Runtime: 110 min.
Verdict: On the pleasure scale there’s been nothing like it for a long time.
Genre: Fantasy, Mythology, Action, Drama

        Immortals is overwhelming. It is the exact sort of movie I would want to buy and watch at home while thanking technology for the pause and rewind buttons. It is quite remarkable the way Mr. Singh flushes all attempts at motion to create exclusively static frames. Often he uses motion to complete his compositions, and we chuckle at this exhibition of flamboyance. Often there’s no aid, no lines to aid the perception of depth, and his frames almost recede into painting. The Priestess Phaedra (Ms. Pinto) wakes up from a nightmare, and since she’s the Oracle the nightmare ought to be promoted to a vision. I’m incredibly bad at this, but she is wearing a silken red garment of some sort. Behind her on the wall is a mural depicting the Titans locked inside the Tartarus. A figure from the left of the frame wakes up, and then one from the center, and then one from the right, and although I might be wrong with the order each of them feel like the petals of a flower. There’re dozens of overhead shots, considering that the Olympian Gods Zeus (Mr. Evans), Athena (Ms. Lucas) and others of their ilk are looking at the action from above, and not one of them is as awesome as that of a boat belonging to King Hyperion’s (Mr. Rourke) army is made out of the same shape as his jackal headgear, which, in a medium shot, for a moment or two against that backdrop of calm waters, feels like his headgear itself. You see, his stamp is everywhere, and these folks here are not without an appreciation for the manifold virtues of theatricality. Neither is Mr. Singh. Here’s that rare film that has been made more with the camera and less with the scissor, which, when it comes to a fantasy picture, is more often than not a good thing.
        Not that the kinetics is completely sucked out of Immortals. The Titans, for some curious reason rendered as a mummy version of the guys we’ve come to know over the years with charred bodies and savagery flowing through their veins, are swift. The Olympians are quick. Their battle is a clash of the immortals, and Mr. Singh, for all his fantastic escapades, seems to be building an oeuvre that examines the tensions between the real and magical. I even suspect, Mr. Singh might be a borderline plausible. His ultimate action sequence clearly draws the line of demarcation between the mortals and the immortals, and while the former are shot through natural and often preternatural (slow-mo) action sequences, the latter are battling entirely through supernatural imagery. While 300 merely played around with the speeds of the frame, Mr. Singh lays out multiple planes of action at different speeds leave me convinced to declare it a game-changer. A sequence inside a tunnel against Hyperion’s rampaging army reminds one of Oldboy. Mr. Singh uses exclusively classical composition, even during the battle sequences, and not even a single action shot is a result of an edit. In its grand-standing and violence it feels more like the marriage of those 60s Biblical features and our post-Gladiator sword-and-sandal world, which it saves from all those Saving Private Ryan influences that had got a bit out of hand.
        The genre had lost its belief in its mythology, intending to make the proceedings “grittier” and “realistic”, sort of like Mr. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood film. The Gods were completely cast out of Troy. Here, the mortal kings and peasants do not believe in the existence of such beings as Gods, or any mythical creatures, and when Zeus and Aethra and Poseidon and the other Gods land on the earth, it is not merely here but within the genre where Mr. Singh has summoned their presence. What’s more, with The Cell and The Fall, and now Immortals, he seems to have completed a trilogy of sorts, where two clearly demarcated realities freely intermingle with each other, and affect the outcome of the other. One might not be stretching matters if he were to coin the term “The Dual-Reality Trilogy”.
        The fact of the matter is I feel completely inept at the moment. The silken robe flowing over Phaedra squatted thighs, inwards whilst her legs are gracefully arched is as simple and as erotic a set-up for a love-making scene as there can be. The pleasures here are that of pure cinema and I suspect if one hasn’t watched Immortals twice or devoured each one of its frames over a long sitting, one hasn’t watched it at all. More so in my case, where the first viewing of the film has been more or less spent masturbating to those pleasures. So I shall wait. For my second viewing. Consider this an instant reaction.

SENNA: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-11-08T19:42:00.003+05:30

Director: Asif Kapadia
Runtime: 91 min.
Verdict: Quite probably my favorite film of the year. For whatever that’s worth. Could be the greatest sports movie ever.
Genre: Documentary

        Perspective is pretty much a function of time and memory. Xuxa Meneghel kissed Ayrton Senna and wished him a happy new year for each one of ‘89, ‘90, ‘91, ‘92 and ‘93. Watching an incident unfold right before us, in the present, we’re scarcely aware, until we seek the aid of time and memory and realize the nature of the event that exists beyond the mere facts. This medium, more than any other form of art, because of its images, because of its motion, because of its ability to move back-and-forth through time, because of its ability to marry its images, because of its ability to make itself heard, is that aid. Oliver Stone’s Jfk is on the board of directors when it comes to my relationship with the movies. The opening particularly, with its mesh of images (real and doctored) and sound seemingly fired out of a bunch of machine-guns, is intense in the way it overwhelms you with what “appear” to be facts (simply because they seem to have been “captured”), and which to me represents cinema at the peak of its powers to persuade and manipulate. We see Senna against the backdrop of a Brazil that doesn’t seem to have many other reasons to smile. We see him lock horns with the establishment personified by Jean-Marie Balestre and Alain Prost, both seemingly the real-life variations of moustache-twirling villains. We see him referring to God and we feel we’ve amidst us a popular revolutionary. Mr. Kapadia’s Senna might even be mistaken, especially at that juncture, as some sort of a political statement against the governing body. And yet, when we see images of their last appearance on the podium, when we see Senna embracing Prost after the latter’s final race, when we feel the air of sadness around the San Marino GP, when we see the drivers and officials and commentators under that atmosphere after Ratzenberger’s death, when we hear the voice of Pierre Van Vliet use “everybody” to unite the F1 community, when we see Prost visibly shell-shocked after Senna’s final crash, when we see Damon Hill sitting by the track, when we see Prost and many others carry that coffin, it is the humanity that overwhelmed me. Alain Prost was just as much an integral part to the Senna story as his parents, as McLaren, as the sport, and as Brazil itself. I cried like a chil9d. More than propaganda it is this ability to unite the greatest treasure of the movies.
        To claim that Mr. Kapadia’s film is something of a live-action drama unfolding before our eyes is to describe the film in terms of a tense it rarely, if ever, exists in. That unfortunate day in May ’94 looms large right from the elegiac tone that announces the opening frame, and although the fact that my memory of those days is still fresh can undermine my claim, a close-up of Ayrton Senna as his mother speaks of God and danger is foreboding enough. Even in its form, as it cuts through events, as it cuts through moments, it is not an unfolding but more of a highlights package. That Mr. Kapadia layers it with voice-over and joins one event with the next automatically causes it to be a product of perspective. And it is the discovery of the nature of this perspective – political or humane – or rather the shift from one to other that informs the central drama within the film.
        And just as well three tracking shots chart this shift. It is probably impossible to overstate the significance these tracking shots assume in a film as this, especially when they are historical artifacts as opposed to ones created artificially. A tracking shot as any F1 race unfolds (present tense) is just a POV shot that gives us the excitement of a first-person account. Here, with my own knowledge of past and future, some of it aided by the preceding images, a million thoughts started going through my mind transforming them into some sort of an exercise in contemplation. And yet it doesn’t, in any way, dilute the purity of that act, which at the end of the day is to drive the car as fast as possible. The ’88 Monte Carlo GP announces the central political conflict and Senna’s metamorphosis from a smiling boy-wonder to one who takes on the establishment and becomes somewhat brutal himself. It announces a fighter and at the same place announces something that isn’t entirely pretty. The ’91 Brazilian GP helps him to discover himself, make him a man more at peace, a wiser person, and move over the conflict of the preceding years. Forgive and forget. During their final ever podium finish, Senna pulls Prost into the frame. That there is everything beautiful about sports.
        And that is when Senna introduces the film’s central fear thereby making the politics and corruption absolutely insignificant in comparison. That threat unites the F1 community. The San Marino GP is a monumental cinematic artifact, sure for its aesthetic but primarily because of its historical significance. Mr. Kapadia doesn’t lend it anything, no music, no voiceover. A million things went through my mind. As Senna’s car took one turn and then another and then another, and the gloom of the preceding two days are cast all over, and the inevitability of the facts awaited me, I was completely shattered. That tracking shot is a painful experience. I never saw it before, I do not know if the footage exists beyond what is shown within the film, and yet I deeply respect and applaud the compassion to shy away from sensationalizing the event, whether it is from the filmmaker or the source itself. It is a great shot followed by an even greater edit, switching from within the car to a remote viewpoint. This one-two of the tracking shot and edit lead our turmoil to witness an accident that shook the F1 community and probably saved many lives.
        Back in those times when I and my brother were kids, Ayrton Senna was just as much of a sporting hero for us as Diego Maradona was. We didn’t know anything about racing, and we never probably ever even watched any race at length except for to get excited when someone crashed. Those were the times when racing cars crashing used to serve as sensational footage for introducing sports shows. And yet we loved Senna. Just as we loved Sergei Bubka. Maybe it was because the way he looked, or maybe because he won so much. I cried when the Brazilian soccer team dedicated their World Cup to him, although that is when I realized Senna hailed from Brazil. Maybe it is the purity of these actions. Senna doesn’t leave us on a note of death or with any shattering sense of tragedy, like for instance Into the Wild. It leaves us with the knowledge of Senna’s greatest competitor from his karting days. It leaves with images of Senna having fun in the waters. It shows him jumping out and probably saving Erik Comas’ life. It shows him racing. It shows him living his life. And that leaves us at peace.

DRIVE: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-10-17T12:18:00.004+05:30

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Bryan Cranston
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Runtime: 100 min.
Verdict: The pleasures of it are immense. And The Driver’s nomination into the Hall of Coolness has been rejected.
Genre: Action, Drama

(Note: My observations are drawn from both the leaked work-print version and the theatrical version. I have taken the liberty of choosing the best of both to be archived in my memory.)

        Tom Stall is a restaurant owner in a small town. He has a wife and two kids, a son and a daughter. He is also one of the great characters at the movies, specifically the action movies, representing not merely the complicated psychosexual desires of its most potent characters, but of the genre itself. A History of Violence is in some ways a history of the action picture, and by borrowing the narrative structure of Unforgiven it automatically assumes an apologetic stance, seeking a “revision” of the genre and confessing its perverse pleasures. Mr. Refn’s Drive works as some kind of a revision of that revision, an effort to restore the mythology of the action hero despite this awareness, and when The Driver (Mr. Gosling) always ensures to be neatly packed in a satin jacket one cannot help but wonder about Patrick Bateman and Mary Harron’s American Psycho, another film seeking the perverse cultural pleasures of the 80s. Some of the genre’s coolest characters never ever worried about their dress(exception: Le Samourai and his fedora, but is it really?), and although their respective films lent them a wardrobe worth spending a million bucks for, the camera’s and in turn the character’s scant regard conveyed a rather old-school ranch-grown masculinity.
        A rather salient feature of the archetypical cool guy at the movies has been is his predominantly “practical” disposition, his respect for both money and personal safety, which in essence makes him a “businessman” (right now, I can’t help but remember Gabriel Byrne’s Dean Keaton), and into which the filmmaker sneaks in the feminine – a little girl or a full-blown woman – or the masculine – honor, a betrayal’s payback – via the mechanics of the genre/plot. A filmmaker like Michael Mann often contrasts these two, even attempts to undermine the former through the latter, and draws a whole career out of it. Mr. Refn introduces us to The Driver through a map, an empty room and a bag. It is a life of acute minimalism, and when we overhear The Driver laying out his rules about the 5-minute window, an image morphed out of all the monks in action film history starts condensing within us. And yet, there’s a strange tension within this pan and the way its gaze follows. The Driver is looking through the window, and our vantage point is able to see his reflection better than the world outside. Who, or what is he looking at? More specifically, what is Mr. Refn looking at? Let us have a look at two of the calmer, considerably less conflicted images the movies have thrown at us, or more specifically two images I’ve been in love with for a considerable period of my adult life.

        Here, there is the satin jacket with a golden scorpion staring at us, elevating the artifact to an attribute, and one might even wonder if The Driver is appraising himself in the mirror. They come thick and fast, these reflections, through rear view mirrors and car windows, elevating themselves to one of the film’s prime motifs. Mr. Refn, I believe, cannot stop staring. Neither can he stop worshipping. And although he is working with metaphors just about as slippery as Mr. Aronofsky’s (say, masks, which doubles as a neat movie reference when teamed with a cliff and overhead lights), he sure as hell is not nearly as obvious and suffocating, and in The Driver, through Mr. Gosling, he is working with something of a “black” scorpion himself, or in other words an archetype. The framework is all there, with the satin jacket, with those gloves, with that toothpick, with that hammer, all attributes and without which The Driver might as well be anybody, you or me. The effort here is then, as in many such films, to attach specificity to these attributes, to maybe understand who Tom Stall might’ve been, to somehow identify him through the choices he makes, or let us say the turns he takes, a motif that doubles as a metaphor. Mr. Refn lays down this metaphor with a simple cut, a jarring one that intentionally calls attention to itself, where he links, through a reverse-shot, The Driver driving to him walking through the alleys of a superstore. Mr. Refn seldom lays out the geography of his territory, and his camera is more intent on watching The Driver than everything around. It is his gaze that it follows, it is through his windshield that the world around opens up, like for instance the superstore, or a car-park where a space opens up within the film, both literally and figuratively, with no prior establishment.
        The thing is, because of this satin jacket, because of this toothpick, because of these gloves, because of this navel-gazing the self-righteousness within the film’s perspective might as well be read as Travis Bickle’s world. That Mr. Refn and Mr. Gosling are aware of this – the former’s editing choices and the latter’s performance are sufficiently post-modern in this regard to lend the film the benefit of the doubt – shouldn’t take us away from the fact that they are indeed reveling in that awareness. Mr. Gosling sits in the café like Travis did years ago, and in an interesting reveal about his rather devious traits he questions Irene about her husband’s well-being knowing fully well the situation at hand. He is so laconic his blinks take a complete second, and yet in a moment of crisis that seemed to have not merely betrayed the archetype the film has built but almost destroy the illusion of his performance The Driver is agitated enough to be completely animated and even grabs his boss’s collar. Mr. Refn, in turn, edits (an exceptional use of dissolve that reminds us of David Lynch) this sequence with The Driver essentially driving and calming himself, and slowly regaining his cool-performance. A second viewing helped me immensely, especially that it comes right after an elevator sequence where an almost constipated Driver is drawing heavy deep breaths, and it occurred to me that his closest cousin had to be Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman. Where the latter’s film (belonging to the slasher genre) is probably running within him, the former’s film (most definitely belonging to the superhero kind) is running around him. Consider Wolverine and Sabretooth, or say Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe.
        Mr. Refn highlights this in an amusing manner, with music playing in an apartment nearby filling The Driver’s room so much so that it is playing within him. As is the case with some of us, The Driver was drove into the movie of his life. He is the hero of it, and a hero always demands of himself to not merely be under control, but be in control. Controlling the steering wheel and driving anywhere he wants to and taking any turn he chooses to. Mr. Refn’s command of montage here, to highlight The Driver’s desire to be in control, is quite exceptional here. Twice he foreshadows events, suggesting The Driver anticipating and planning, and once, through the lone moment where The Driver is agitated, he allows him to reflect, suggesting a loss of control. The only other place where the driver seems to have lost control over proceedings is during the shoot-out and failed heist. The violence then lies in the manner in which he retaliates to gain control. Mr. Refn reveals this retaliation, or this violent streak, in gears – a dolly and a verbal destruction of a potential threat, a surprising almost shocking slapping of a woman complete with a fellatio-position (this is probably the moment of revelation), and the complete physical destruction of an insurgent – after which the Driver smashes into the enemy territory.
        It is in those final moments where I benefitted from seeking the theatrical version, and where my relation with The Driver was completely and utterly destroyed. There’s a bag full of money in question and as the Driver drives away in the work-print version, I had assumed (because the trunk is never opened and the bag never makes an appearance) that he has finally learnt to be all about business, or at least was cool enough to align them with his personal desires, as Porter did for his 70 grand. I was satisfied. And the theatrical version destroyed that satisfaction. The bag does make an appearance and The Driver leaves it behind. Maybe he was wiser than me. Maybe he learnt that he ought not to touch the mob’s money. Maybe he shall learn from here and never again lose control. But until then his election into the Hall of Coolness shall have to wait.

Note: Consider the work-print as a different “studio-approved” version, and the theatrical release as the director’s cut. A list of some of the differences could be found here
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780504/board/flat/188903427?p=1

MELANCHOLIA: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-10-07T06:42:00.006+05:30

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Alexander Skarsgård, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling
Director: Lars Von Trier
Runtime: 130 min.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Verdict: This is not Mr. Von Trier saying I have been depressed. This is him saying I know f***in everything.
Genre: Drama, Sci-fi

        Mr. Von Trier’s episode in Cannes shall forever be the stuff of legend. So shall be the ridiculous interrogation by the French police the day before yesterday regarding a possible violation of prohibition in French law against “justification of war crimes”, as a result of which the filmmaker has declared a self-imposed exile from the media. Which is fair enough, considering the fact that Mr. Von Trier doesn’t really need the mike all that much to express his distastes, if any. I mean, there’s a horse here called Abraham, utterly innocent and totally defiant, and it receives a rather fine beating from his mistress Justine (Ms. Dunst). The cause of the defiance here is a little bridge, which Abraham refuses to cross, and the bridge seems to have a forest on the other side. Neither her sister Claire (Ms. Gainsbourg) nor Claire’s horse seem to have any of those problems while riding their way onto the other side, only to stop and look behind Justine and Abraham struggle it out. One might remember Ms. Gainsbourg’s She running across the bridge in fear and into the forest where evil nature was waiting to completely possess her. That Claire, and Justine, and Abraham, and Melancholia do not get sucked in, and instead struggle it out within their “own” world is probably a reflection of Mr. Von Trier’s attempt to discover the “significance” of humanity amidst the kitschy demonstrations of it, rather than merely bitching as he did in Antichrist. One might be reminded of Doc Manhattan from Watchmen, his general disinterest in the ways of humanity, his fractured perspective of time, and his great respect for everything cosmic. That these attempts tend to sprinkle around kitsch themselves is not merely ironic but revealing in that they feel, in a lot of ways, incredibly heartfelt.
        And yet, everything in Melancholia is carefully calibrated, so precisely that questions and criticisms trying to raise their arms are quickly supplied an answer, or an argument, only moments later. Melancholia’s formal choices might reveal, to a viewer, motivations of a Nietzschian kind (Doc Manhattan), and through its editing, which here happens to be Mr. Von Trier’s primary and most significant tool of expression (calibration), he doesn’t merely destroy time but makes us lose any interest we’ve in the passage of it. And by removing that passage, Mr. Von Trier seems to suggest how contradictory and flawed and predictable and thereby uninteresting most people and their actions are. In a moment displaying supreme skill, and revealing flat-out condescension, Mr. Von Trier destroys, in three cuts, all that Claire stands for. Consider Claire the quintessential person-in-control, or for reference sakes, let us hurt me by recalling Rachel (Rachel Getting Married) here. She’s concerned that the house butler has not checked in for work, upon which Justine, sitting behind the table, remarks this is the time he probably needs to be with his family. The talk of doomsday is everywhere (off-screen), and this casual remark causes Melancholia to catch Claire in a close-up, reflecting on the implications, and her movement towards the table suggests she might want to convince her sister and be the one in control. The film cuts through that movement, and finds her, head pushed forward, in a persuasive stance, claiming Melancholia, the planet, is going to pass us by. Mr. Von Trier doesn’t cut to Justine and instead stays on Claire for a moment, as if raising his eyebrow, and the next cut has Claire framed from a different angle doubting herself. She is exposed, naked, and her hitherto calm façade revealed to be merely a performance, not a character trait. Justine is calm on the other side, growing progressively calmer. The sequence goes on to completely destroy our perception of these characters, and just when we start to question Justine’s transformation from that of a helpless medical condition to one who seems to be remarkably strong and in control, Mr. Von Trier draws leverage from a piece of information that had been branded trivial earlier (thereby revealing it to be, in a curious way, not trivial at all), and elevates her to the status of a prophet. He ties every piece of information and stray sensation we’ve gathered until now – right from the illustrated books on the shelf to those super-slow images of destruction upfront – to Justine, thereby reining in an amazing level of narrativization and commentary to the proceedings, and probably robs the opening of its purity. Claire, realizing the impending doom, seeks to have a little party on the terrace, to hold hands while Melancholia embraces earth, and it is Mr. Von Trier’s further condescending on these bourgeoisie values, the same ones that seem to inspire such alarm at his Cannes’ comments.
        Nevertheless, the opening is one of the more remarkable pieces of filmmaking doing the rounds, and there’s a shot here that portents the finitude of our earth with an angle of view and lighting that probably has never been committed to us before. I ask of you, dear reader, to summon your memories of Last Year at Marienbad and the second monolith on the moon in 2001. Remember the lighting and the angle, and what we have here is this.

        It is a remarkable shot, and for some reason (the knowledge of the film’s premise?) this angle that is always committed in science fiction to render the boundaries of the moon, where we can clearly see the space beyond, is probably never used for Earth, which to the naked eye feels infinite. Maybe we’ve seen its cousin in The Mummy Returns, and my memory isn’t serving me well here, but the shots of a clear sky during the night from the sea (Titanic) do provide for a cosmic perspective. This shot, by making the earth seem flat, with definite edges, sort of like a shore, or an overhead shot of a stadium surrounded by darkness, provides for a similar feel, and by providing two invisible light sources Mr. Von Trier quite stealthily reins in the duality that is at the heart of his film. The duality that Justine and Claire stand for, the duality the presence of our moon (familiarity, complacence, infinitude) and a planet (stranger, finitude) causes within us, the duality of the optimist and the pessimist (who is more or less used interchangeably with the cynic). Quite remarkably, the duality of St. Elmo’s fire, whose mythology has been so thoroughly destroyed by a simple scientific explanation, exemplifies Mr. Von Trier’s stance, and where we view it as a supernatural phenomenon in those opening moments, the blunt facts of the closing images destroy any such optimism. What destroys The Hunters in the Snow destroys Melancholia. Any meaning we’ve attached, any significance we’ve learnt is pretty much meaningless. The painting is less a mood and more an artifact, an object, and Mr. Von Trier, by narrativizing, renders everything trivial. One might even say Mr. Von Trier (Justine) has answered Mr. Terence Malick (Claire).
        The film begins on a surprising promise of humanity, though, with Justine’s very face glowing with optimism. She tries to maneuver a stretched limo through a narrow turn, seeking adventure in life’s tiniest moments. It is the evening of her wedding, and as she arrives with her groom Michael (Mr. Alexander Skarsgård) she runs to the stable to greet Abraham. Mr. Von Trier uses the handheld camera aesthetic, at first to feel everybody around and finding meaning (humanity) in the most banal of actions, like a man playing naughty with spoons. It is him indulging in the specifics. The speeches come, they feel perfunctory, since every wedding movie ever made has one, and yet because of the dynamics around the table, and because of interesting actors, we’re still feeling the evening. And then we have the speech from the mother, and it feels as if the filmmaker inserted there himself through her, and shakes Justine off her little illusion. The very aesthetic Mr. Von Trier has been employing to find some meaning is now used to distance us, and he cuts right between actions, reflecting Justine’s wandering attention. Events become more and more uninteresting, and Justine meanders along unmotivated. To her the people around feel like characters out of a television soap, walking meaninglessly and trying to find meaning to their little worlds. A tired Justine tries to loosen her gown and Michael hurriedly undresses himself, scarcely caring for her emotional state and more interested in impressing her and getting some sex. It is an amusing moment; she excuses herself, and gives it to a guest on the golf course. Nothing here feels worth investing, and no person seems any less than evil, most of all Justine. Mr. Von Trier is implicates everybody, and everything.
        Into this unmotivated world of hers Mr. Von Trier introduces Melancholia. It becomes the only thing that matters, the only object that hold Justine’s attention. Oh that, and Claire’s little kid Leo (Mr. Spurr). Unlike Antichrist, where he sucked the kid out of the world, he leaves him here, in this world, and time and again, Justine finds humanity through him. Does Mr. Von Trier believe that mankind’s purest moment is its innocence, its nascence? As the moment arrives, a panic-stricken Claire picks her kid and despite Justine warning her not to she tries to ride the golf cart into the village, only to meet the godforsaken bridge and hail. It is a terrific moment of discipline and borderline coldness, when Mr. Von Trier’s gaze doesn’t even for a moment wander off Claire and onto the kid, who feels like an inanimate object. No close-up. And she returns, only to find Justine sitting on top of a wall, the prophet she is. We might’ve raised a little objection for the kid’s sake, and Mr. Von Trier most promptly discovers the purity of emotion through him. What I find amusing is Justine indulging herself in a stick cave for Leo, after having completely shitted Claire’s plans to display “control” on the terrace. The three sit together, hand-in-hand, and as Melancholia approached for its warm embrace, I couldn’t help but wonder about Leo, and if he would open his eyes look at Justine (or towards the camera) and remark – “You know what I think of this stick cave? It’s a piece of shit.” That there would’ve been a masterpiece, or my kind of masterpiece.

LE GAMIN AU VÉLO (THE KID WITH A BIKE): MOVIE REVIEW

2011-09-30T22:18:00.003+05:30

Cast: Thomas Doret, Cécile de France
Director: The Dardennes
Runtime: 87 min.
Country: Belgium
Language: French
Verdict: Wish it were real.
Genre: Drama

        Samantha (Ms. France) is driving Cyril (Mr. Doret) to meet his father, who seems to have, by the looks of it, abandoned him in a children’s home. He is a silent fellow, this Cyril, a 11-year old with a gangly sort of presence and it sort of reminds us of the younger Jack in The Tree of Life. He is tough too, not wanting to betray any sense of emotional weakness, and when Samantha cautions him that his meeting with his father might not pan out the way he dreams it would, he quite stoically replies he isn’t dreaming. The Dardennes capture this exchange through a shot-reverse-shot routine, and with Cyril sitting deep towards right the gap between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat couldn’t have been wider, seemingly tough to bridge. Or let us say, tough to get through this little kid. Samantha looks at the kid. She asks him if he needs some water, and he replies, with the same stoic formality – “Yes, please”. She picks up the bottle and extends it to him, the camera following this action, and Cyril grabs it with an obligatory “thank you”, and Samantha tries to break in through this connection by playfully pulling the bottle, and the kid responds shedding his guard and doing some pulling himself. It is all without a single edit, from Samantha to Cyril back to Samantha, and the gap has been bridged. And In times like these where Belgium is fourth in line, a fascinating observation has been made. An observation of what, one might ask? I don’t know, what do we call stuff like a soft-drink can, or a bottle of mineral water, or a bottle of peach juice, or a packet of paprika, or a gamestation’s handle, or a football, or a movie, or barbecue in the backyard. In our consumer culture we usually seek their service to serve our guests, or make new friends, right? Sort of disposable, but valuable disposables, wherein the value is directly proportional to the relationship we’re serving, or making. Like chewing gum. Or biscuits. It is quite remarkable the way The Dardennes build their film around these objects, these commodities, or let us call them valuable disposables shall we until you supply me with a more appropriate term. Everyone here has one of these valuable disposables to offer, to make an emotional connection, to show an act of kindness, or an act of affection, or an act of manipulation. Little Cyril is innocent enough and pure enough to respond to them, to believe in these gestures, and in his turn even consider a few thousand Euros just the same. The humanity in the Dardennes’ new film believes in these gestures, these gestures of a fairly pragmatic world where both the pleasant and the unpleasant co-exist.
        Starving for the warmth of a hug, or at least some contact, what other option does Cyril have? Having bunked his school to try and find his father at his old apartment, with the caretakers from the children’s home right behind him, Chttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifyril runs into a clinic and latches onto a young woman. It’s Samantha, but we don’t know her then yet, and she only asks him to not grab so tight. So unsurprised and yielding is she, that stranger, readily providing her body as some kind of tree trunk for little Cyril to hold on to and so pure is that moment in its humanity I wish she weren’t Samantha and we never ever got to know her, and that Le Gamin au vélo was not so much of a fairy tale, where people weren’t Leigh Anne Tuohy and were capable of love without wanting to gain some sort of satisfaction from it. A moment where Samantha is crying is telling, in ways more than one, and one might even question who has come into whose life. . But then, I wouldn’t forget Cyril finally giving in and hug Samantha.
        There’s a certain degree of ambiguity Ms. France’s (High Tension, Mesrine, Hereafter)presence lends to the proceedings, and most of it has to do with how stunningly beautiful she is, and how difficult would it be for somebody like Cyril to hold himself from going all Malena on her, especially after watching her naked body sleeping. The Dardennes, in their turn, take great care to not frame Ms. France below her hemline, and not let our attention wander. Or maybe it does, and I did wonder once or twice how long that skirt was. Oh, but Cyril isn’t no Renato, and he is way wiser. He does understand a whole lot more than he would like us to believe, even accumulating guilt, and he sure as hell does understand there are doors he better not try to open. Sure, some he can, but others he better not. He is composed, remarkably composed, almost at peace in the film’s final moment. Learnt his lesson has this sweet boy, learnt his lesson that life is not all sweet.

MILDRED PIERCE: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-09-27T06:33:00.004+05:30

Cast: Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood, Guy Pearce, Morgan Turner, Brian F. O'Byrne, James LeGros
Director: Todd Haynes
Runtime: 5-part mini-series
Verdict: It’s ridiculously annoying and hateful, and that is its virtue.
Genre: Drama

        One of the great indulgences of watching movies is to chance upon stray connections, often caused due to the presence of certain actors playing characters who seem to be psychologically or emotionally or thematically connected. One might derive a certain satisfaction from this exercise for having discovered what the cinematic universe validates as an evidence to understand the emotions in question. Ms. Winslet plays Mildred Pierce, and she played the Young Iris Murdoch in Iris. The older Iris, suffering from the early effects of Alzheimer’s was played by Ms. Judi Dench, and she of course played Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal, an old spinster hell bent upon making a woman completely dependent on her. Ms. Winslet’s Mildred seems to be Barbara when she might have been young and desirable. This cheeky sort of argument should of course not be extended to the presence of Ms. Evan Rachel Wood, who happened to play the young daughter of Ms. Cate Blanchett in The Missing, who in turn played Sheba, the victim of Barbara’s monstrous manipulations. Who says one cannot torture evidence, especially when the dots are in your mind.
        Mildred Pierce, the mini-series currently airing on HBO from uber-academic filmmaker Todd Haynes (I’m not Here, Far from Heaven), doesn’t need you connect any dots though, and probably doesn’t even need you to read James M. Cain’s novel, or watch the Michael Curtiz adaptation. If ever there was a film where the term illustration could be used not as a criticism but as a virtue then this is it. Mr. Haynes’ mini-series doesn’t show as much as it tells, asking of you to read, and often even re-read every single dramatic aspect of a relation in every sequence. The compositions are so rigorously academic and the camera often so steadfastly static, one might even suppose cinema to be prose and Mr. Haynes’ Mildred Pierce a novel all by itself, more read than watched. Often, characters would be framed within a window, and separated by the panes into little blocks, or sometimes an umbrella would divide the space between them. Two characters sitting across a coffee table would be incapable of being in the same frame, despite the best of their efforts, and sometimes they are pulled together in one corner of it, making a little world for themselves. In one memorable moment, the camera virtually closes the door. The drama here, then, is not so much as felt as understood.
        We open to Mildred, a housewife seemingly in her thirties, and since the text below reads “1931” we know that The Great Depression is just around the corner. Her husband, Bert Pierce (Mr. O'Byrne), a failed real-estate developer, is revealed to be unfaithful within a matter of shots, and he walks out on her, leaving Mildred to take care of their two young daughters, Veda (young Ms. Turner, old Ms. Wood) and Moire(Ms. Quinn McColgan). Increasingly feeling the pinch of strained finances, Mildred is forced to run door-to-door in search of a job, not only to survive but to keep her daughters happy.
        The premise, if one hasn’t read the novel or watched the 1945 film, would seem a straightforward story of middle-class survival in a decidedly patriarchal world, especially in Part I, which basically serves as the set-up. Quite frequently, Mr. Haynes employs slow rhythmic tracking shots, slow pans, slow to the point of being deliberate, so slow they pull us right out of the heat of many a moment, and leaves us as observers. Not to feel as much as to see, and know, and probably learn. We observe them through windows, from behind cars, between pillars, across furniture, and by virtue of these “layered” compositions we gradually accumulate the sensations of a materialistic world, where elaborate deceptions worthy of a hard-boiled fiction are part of the bourgeoisie’s struggle not merely to survive but to prosper, and realize the great American dream.
        "Mildred Pierce is set during the Depression," observes Haynes in an interview, "but not the Depression of dustbowls and breadlines. The crises it explores are those of middle-class privilege--issues of pride and status, the struggle first to regain one's standing and then to persevere through hard work and ingenuity. This feels very much like the particular struggles of our current economic crisis, coming out of a period of unbridled consumption." In our times where many bank managers and vice presidents have been forced to accept janitorial jobs or driving cabs in the face of ever-eroding savings, the crises at the heart of Mr. Haynes’ mini-series feels especially real. Not that the significance of this naturalism is lost on him, and to a viewer familiar with Mr. Haynes’ filmography the significant departure in tone from the other ‘50s melodrama centered around woman Far From Heaven would be pretty apparent.
        “Mildred Pierce is different from traditional domestic dramas that usually explore women who are somewhat disempowered and who are more in a domestic space and don't usually trespass beyond that”, continues Haynes in the interview. Sure enough as we progress through the parts, darker truths are revealed from behind these materialistic layers, almost making a mockery of the menfolk and their banal flaws – greed, lust – through which they are manipulated to any lengths. It is a society that seems to be unknowingly undergoing an evolution, where the power seems to be changing hands ever so discreetly, and where the incumbent is only left with an empty belief that he is still in control. Mildred Pierce, at least until Part II, is about the womenfolk taking control, and just so that we do not miss this tipping point Mr. Haynes lends us a metaphorical image of her grabbing the wheels of her car. From then on things descend into a power struggle within them, within these “flawed” individuals, and the men are left to serve as mere pawns in those schemes.
        Mr. Haynes plays this struggle from Mildred’s corner. That Mildred is unlikeable is merely a description of her "flawed" character, that Veda is pure evil a decidedly pejorative stance by the mini-series. There is little to no ambiguity here, no empathy intended, and Mr. Haynes trades the virtues of these humanist angles to gain on the narrative front, cleverly manipulating us to “understand” Mildred and use Veda’s pure villainy serve as a mirror to Mildred’s more manipulative traits, thereby asking us to rethink our readiness to rationalize the actions of our protagonist just because we are privy to her side of the story. "In a weird way, she's almost -- it's almost like she's an outsider to herself”, Mr. Haynes observes in an interview. Not one character apart from Mildred has a moment of their own, relegating them to people in Mildred’s story as she muscles through with little to no degree of self- awareness. Some she uses to advance in life, and Veda whom she desperately wants to be useful to. Her desire to find love and approval in Veda’s eyes is more of a need, a purpose in life. Otherwise, there’s little motivation for her to wake up in the morning and make the bed and clean the dishes.

Why the chase sequence works, Jim?

2011-09-22T17:44:00.001+05:30

        Jim Emerson has, in a wonderful and now famous dissection job here, analyzed why the big chase sequence in The Dark Knight doesn’t exactly work. But more than that, he does what a film critic ought to do, he inspires us to see and ask ourselves questions. Joseph Kahn has provided a fantastic and mostly technical rebuttal here, rightfully called Analyzing Action, and it has only made us smarter. Another essential read: Matt Schneider’s thought provoking essay on the same, titled in true IMDB-generation’s style – Malick versus Nolan.

        And being someoneone who loved the chase sequence, I would want to borrow some arguments from Matt Schneider, some from Joseph Kahn, and some from The Tree of Life, and document what my reactions were. I distinctly remember the first time I watched the chase sequences. Images have been burnt into my memory, and maybe some have been added. I would want to seek the liberty of drawing extensively from that experience, and my memory of it. At the same time I would want you to summon your memories too.

        The Dark Knight has been assembled like a juggernaut. Innumerable sources have stated that in different ways – some saying they get two movies at the price of one, to some saying it is extremely rushed and not pausing enough. I would say to both, fair enough. The thing is we need to bring that into context, and understand why the sequence works. As much as Jim's opinion that the sequence is mostly lazy and messy is to be respected, the very fact that it is mostly loved is something to be looked into. As in, despite all the apparent grammatical mistakes, we still have a chase sequence that is probably the most celebrated this side of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (the champion in this category for me, followed closely by The Road Warrior).

Context:
        The sequence occurs at a time in the movie (middle) where the audience has already gone through the dramatic rigors of a standard feature length blockbuster. I wouldn’t waste our time on those details.

Cut to, the Chase:
First question: Where, and when does the audience get the memo that a chase sequence is right around the corner? Not when the Harvey tosses the coin, and that mushy music plays in the background. That is just the final dramatic moment, the dramatic contrast before the actual scene is about to come. We’ve seen that sort of contrast many times.
        So yes, as much as I can say, the viewer does not take that as the reference/orientation point. We’ve been trained to do that. An action sequence comes with its own establishing shot, and any changes made from a previous set-up are automatically digested.

        The action scene is established, and the viewer receives the memo with the shot of the convoy. A lower angle, and Nolan and DP Wally Pfister use a hell of a lot of low angles here, and the city leaves a distinct impression. Blue sky, blue van, blue buildings, it all is so striking, and yet there is no exhibitionistic streak on display. The cue, is the convoy on the move, which as thriller-genre convention has taught us is that whenever we’re a witness to a process that process is fraught with danger. And if the music goes silent, and the process (chopper sounds) takes center stage, we know for sure.

Cut to: The cop and a reverse angle of Harvey Dent. As I have said earlier, it is not a two shot as Jim suggests but two static shots, “confronting” each other. Had it been a two-shot, it would’ve provided for a sort of harmony between Harvey and the Cop, since they’re in the same image, and towards the same side. Two static shots with two human figures looking at each other strike a classis confrontational position, and this is how I felt even when I watched the movie for the first time. This is quite important, in fact very important, considering that Harvey distrust of cops is one of the film’s major points. Now, I wouldn’t claim that Nolan’s editing installs that idea within us at that moment with that shot-reverse shot routine; rather, what it does is plant a little feeling (idea?) in the subconscious that these guys are at the opposite ends of the imaginary table and not on the same side. That is what Harvey’s look suggests too, and here the film is working with classic montage, crisp carefully planned images and editing doing the thing for us. And yeah, it also sets up the space within.

Cut to: The serene image of the convoy through the city, taking a turn. The Joker’s theme starts playing in the background, and everything is silent. We know that music is a sign of danger, or The Joker, because it has already been set up in the movie. I think this, and the next cut are one of the most brilliant images in the film, and rein in one of Mark Twain’s tenets – Say the exact word. This image has the exact angle, and it could be read as The Joker’s POV (in the final sequence, The Joker is watching the two boats from the top floor of a tower, and in Speed Dennis Hopper’s character is basically “looking from above” through his monitors.). The Joker is established here, even before he arrives. The background score is a monotone, like a note stretched. On a monitor, it would play a single line. And we cut to one of The Dark Knight’s finest pieces of filmmaking, and as I have said before I shall say again, the edit here has a terrific rhythmic quality here, Jim. This is, for me, one of those cases of pure cinema, the kind the aughties’ viewer responds to. Like departure from the predictable. This sudden spike is just pure joy, and that is my defense. As a matter of fact, Christopher Nolan uses this kind of sudden-tonal-shift quite a lot in the film. One might remember the volatility of The Joker torturing the Batman-impostor on television and its feverish tonal high is suddenly contrasted with a serene camera gliding towards the Wayne tower.
        What these few little moments also do is perform the function of a little breather, a respite, from the relentless information overload from the film, and as it turns out this serene convoy shot is the last moment before The Joker and the narrative engine take over.

Cut to: The next overhead shot sort of prepares us, and establishes the tension ahead. From here on, there are no overhead shots. It is a superbly designed reveal to, carefully taking us from serenity to explosion. It maps that journey. This simple overhead tracking shot with the fire at end of it reins a contrast, and as thriller mechanics go, it heightens our state of mind. Had the camera stayed with the convoy from the time of its establishment and tracking it to here, it wouldn’t have provided for any contrast, and we might have entered this action scene in a battered state of mind (caused by the relentless narrative engine), already looking around. The “action”, so to speak, would’ve started earlier. But with these two overhead shot, Christopher Nolan dissipates any resident exhaustion, and clears the air for any immediate action, thus providing for suspense rather than tension. With the truck-on-fire reveal, he reins in tension, and we directly cut back to ground level. The action scene has well and truly started. The information flow is on. We sit back in our seats, or for others, sit forward.

Cut to: This is the part Jim “edited” and analyzed out of the entire action sequence, but then THIS excerpt is itself not the action scene, and it is clearly not the one the audience or we viewers love so much, or thought was awesome. Its actual function is that of a primer of the set up for the little “battle” to come about. There’s no Hans Zimmer background score, and as much as I believe we viewers, at least for the first time, take a whole lot of mood from the tone and pitch of the score. That has been the traditional device, right from Raiders of the Lost Ark, to The Road Warrior, from the late 70s (blockbusters) to now. I mean, the background score has a most interesting distancing functionality, and the way the films do it is keep us at a safe distance where we are shown as well as given cues on how to feel. Without the score, we’re smack bang in the middle of the scene, with no aid, and we’ve mostly no idea “which direction” this all would go. The score gives us our bearings, without it we don’t very much to hold on to other than pure visuals. Nolan removes that cue, and we’re more or less in no man’s land, trying more to figure out what the hell’s happening. That is why Jim, most viewers are describing it as chaos. It sure as hell is, and just the same way we’re constantly latching on to pure visuals in The Tree of Life, accumulating moments and sensations without actively dissecting the composition, here we’re merely capturing movements. It is chaos, because it is intended to be chaotic. But not The Bourne franchise chaotic where we don’t even know what happened. Many other detractors are taking the chaos-filmmaking most literally, and that kind of chaos-making is very unimaginative. Because, even when we’re in the middle of such an event, like say a football match in a stadium (as opposed to in a television with commentary where the commentary is the cue), we know what’s happened but we don’t immediately register or index the chronology. We merely register the events, and our brain takes care of it later on, creating a completely new memory.
        Which begs the question – would Jim undertake a frame by frame analysis of The Tree of Life, where the whole movie is practically this, to understand it step by step. It would be something you know.
        This particular segment, which clocks around 3 min. in an action sequence of 10 min, is a stunner in that sense. It might not be a triumph as far as principal photography is concerned, but the way it has been edited does betray a certain strategy. What we register, and it all happens so quickly that we don’t even get to assimilate all the details is that we see -> truck crash car, crash another car, semi hits van, van into the river, The Joker makes an appearance (this is one impressionable image), The Joker shoots the car, shoots the van, Batmobile comes in between, explosion, tires screeching, bang, bang. We react to movements and register impact/shock. To people who claim that The Tree of Life would be the way movies will be made, here’s news for you – they’re already being made that way. It is the drama our decade of Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass deserves.

Jim, your question - How do these choices make it so good?
        If we remember the action sequences of Bullitt (where suspenseful music again becomes silent to take us in the middle of the chase) and The French Connection, where cameras mounted on cars, and cars colliding into cameras were done with the precise intention to remove all theatricality and rein in realism. The motivations here are basic Jim, to make this centerpiece feel real. But then, those chases had two cars, and here we have 3 cars, two vans, one garbage truck, one semi, and one tank. Again, how can so many vehicles feel realistically crystal clear and precise? I can see these motivations hanging in front of the filmmakers, and their adherence to basic clarity where audiences know what happened.
        In fact, to Jim's point regarding 2/3 cars, I distinctly remember being confused, not consciously, but merely getting the sense that, something is not right. What I was asking wasn’t why the car is behind, or why there is an extra one, but I rather asking why there seem to be more vehicles (simply, more vehicles) than the one that started the chase, and I remember getting the feel that there might more stray cars here over and above our convoy.
        And regarding the van in the river. It does obey the 180-degree rule, as Joseph Kahn suggested, when it takes the impact and moves to the right, and then the driver is pushed to the right, and then the van dives into the river right-ways. It is the question of plausibility here, and yes, I would agree that another cut of the motion would’ve made it clearer. But in there, in the moment, it doesn’t feel wrong. I distinctly remember this image from my first viewing, and on the big IMAX screen, there is a depth to it that is lost on a computer monitor. My memory is of a camera angle 30 degree from the bridge towards the incoming chase (facing south, north being the direction the convoy’s headed). That is because the screen is wide enough to envelope you, and because the length of the bridge goes beyond, a quick cut as this feels (and it can only feel) that the bridge is towards us, and the angle is more acute than even 30 degrees, and the truck is falling perpendicular to our vision.
It makes it good because it feels quick and frank without any theatricality. It feels dangerous because The Joker’s end of the bargain seems to terribly effective. I mean, Tuco said – “when you shoot, then shoot, don’t talk”. We don’t talk here. Just plain bang bang. Not that The Joker gang is successful and efficient, but that, in those three minutes, where cars and vans are eliminated within a couple of moments of each other, we get the feeling that we’re in a spot of bother. The film has already killed Gordon, and we’re in a heightened state at this moment. And precisely because things accumulate so quickly, we feel this could be it. Until the Batmobile shows up.
        So this primer Jim, and it reaches an end where the Batmobile explodes. We also get a visual aid here, when The Joker stops the truck and wants to drive. There is a “change”. The chase sequence will start above. All the vehicles exit the bridge.

        And that is when we get a bearing, where The Batman sort of comes and saves us, and provides clarity to the proceedings. The score is precisely started with the arrival (or birth) of the Batpod, and it suddenly gives us relief, and is also an awesome moment. As Stephanie Zacharek said, a movie being awesome doesn’t necessarily mean it is great. But then, action sequences have always relied on such a moment, a wow moment, where audiences would be stunned, united and forced to applaud. I think everybody cheers when the Batpod is born. From here on, the sequence acquires the theatricality, the exhibitionism we tend to associate with blockbusters, thanks to The Batman. We know he is control, as he rams through glasses and walls and traffic. He is the hero, and through clever usage of contrast, Christopher Nolan and team have created the illusion that a great chase sequence has been experienced.

        I hope that explains our viewpoint, and why we find it engaging. I thank Jim, because now I have gained a greater appreciation for this particular sequence. But more importantly I thank him for asking us such questions, and making us better viewers. I guess a great film critic is one who inspires us to answer interesting questions, and after this exercise I say he's one. Thanks Jim.

HWANG HAE (THE YELLOW SEA): MOVIE REVIEW

2011-09-19T20:14:00.003+05:30

Cast: Jung-woo Ha, Yun-seok Kim
Director: Na Hong-jin
Runtime: 140 min.
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Verdict: Savage, brutal, pessimistic and aggressively cynical. And yet, deeply humanistic.
Genre: Thriller, Crime, Action, Drama

        A car drives in, while another stands astray. It is morning, from the looks of it, mostly because the preceding sequence was during the night, and partly because there’s no sunlight. A morning without sunlight often feels a little glum, don’t you think? Two men, not exactly impressing us with the tidiness of their looks, climb up a rather narrow staircase. The color palette of the actual frame is might be different, but owing to their black leather jackets and a generally dull morning, the memory of the scene is mostly washed in grey. A sort of washed out black and white. The apartment they walk into doesn’t have any windows open. The doors seem to have caught a lot of moisture. There are stains everywhere. The general state of the apartment could be best described by the word mess. Cigarette butts and bottles and heaps adorn the place. One of the guys walks into the toilet. The toilet is like one of those where you hold your breath and try to pee as fast as possible so that nothing out there latches onto you. He pees and doesn’t flush. And walks out to the room where our man is sleeping. They slap him and wake him up. And ask him to leave pronto and get started on the day’s earnings. He wakes up to…and instead they hand him his jacket without letting him, you know, fresh up a little and do the general unloading. Cut. He is driving his taxi. It is not so much a stubble on his mostly soft face as it is a few bits unevenly distributed. I wouldn’t want to be him. It is quite uncomfortable to be doing your daily stuff without doing your morning stuff, and although I was watching Hwang Hae after I had had my daily dose of workout and bath and breakfast, I could feel the stench in the air. This is what I would call a real dirty filthy unclean film, the kind after which I would want to take a bath or watch a Johnnie To, and it is remarkable how Mr. Na Hong-jin (The Chaser) conditions us for this depraved world, a place where you wouldn’t be surprised if people start eating other. And not one such word is spoken.
        The beards are interesting here, and it is fairly amusing to see how Mr. Hong-jin lends his “uncivilized” characters (the Joseonjoks) a beard, while the “sophisticated” a.k.a bourgeoisie South Koreans are clean shaven. They have their hair nicely combed too, each sporting a distinct style, as opposed to their “savage” axe-wielding counterparts who have everything prickly and haywire upstairs. One might even find grounds to suspect a certain primitivist leaning to the proceedings. Here, I wouldn’t bother you much with the plot, where a Joseonjok, Gu-nam (Mr. Jung-woo Ha), in order to get rid of his debt and to find his wife who he thinks is having an affair in South Korea, accepts a job to enter the country and kill a man. That is the basic premise, and if we were to think of Mr. Soderbergh’s Contagion, this here could be read as the virus. Or say, the rat with the plague.
        It is something of a juggling act Mr. Hong-jin seems to be pulling off here at first, with his narration, something like what Mr. Soderbergh has done so effectively in the past, moving across calmly and most assuredly, from the murderer to the men who sent him to the victim to the cops to the South Korean mafia, always wanting to stick to the details, to the process rather to the result. Here would be a good moment to link you to Matt Schneider’s insightful essay on A Bittersweet Life, and Mr. Kim Ji-woon’s concern with the physical act of movement. Mr. Hong-jin shares a similar concern here, and its nature is more personal than interpersonal, reflected in the physical act of landing a blow, or in the physical act of being locked inside a ship, or in the physical act of climbing the steps, or in the physical act of running away from the scene of crime, or in the physical act of driving a cab, or in the physical act of jumping into the water and then swimming to the pier and pulling one’s body over and running to a truck. There’s incredible physicality to the film, and that makes Hwang Hae an extremely visceral experience. The shaky camera aesthetic here, especially in the action sequences, is vital, not merely to the experience but to the overall narrative, which could be read as a deadly plague savaging the city. Which brings us back to the macro, and what Mr. Hong-jin actually does with his narration is pile things (events) on top of each other, accumulating mess until it all gives away in a primal instinct for survival. Everybody is running after each other. Mr. Hong-jin has made a zombie movie, or a deadly-virus movie, with neither the zombies nor the virus.
        The interesting thing here is, Mr. Hong-jin attaches a greater significance to this concern by linking this physicality with “intention” and often overlapping it with necessity, or need, thus establishing a complex moral predicament. Gu-nam’s needs the money, needs to find his wife for himself, and yet he reads his target’s movements for days, and repeats it for himself, moving in and out of the house. It is not an emotional reaction but a methodical process he indulges in. This is not a man engaging in self-defense or running around killing to find his daughter but a man who is planning a sort of perfect murder, and by charting this gray area between the need (emotion) and the intention (action), Mr. Hong-jin morally implicates him, albeit sympathizing with him.
        He further tinkers with our sympathies by doing the reverse – causing the need to be borne out from an act of intention – exemplified by Myung-Ga (Mr. Yun-seok), thus making everybody human and revealing the survivor within them. Myung-Ga gets into this with the intention of wanting to make some fine profit, and once he gets into this mess, the survivor he is, he goes full throttle. In a land of dogs, Myung-Ga is the top dog, and when found without a weapon he picks up a dog’s bone and bludgeons everybody in sight. In a chase sequence that is not exactly pretty to look at (and nothing should be in such a film), but incredibly effective in the way it reins in its themes, Myung-Ga and Gu-nam engage in incredible and intentional physical contact, by way of their cars, the latter the predator and thus with his intentions and the former victim and this with the need, and it is beautiful to watch the way Mr. Hong-jin maps out the mess here. Rarely has the face played a more vital role in a car chase. If ever there was a film that needed cars bashing each other out then this is it.
        It is tough in a film as this to cling to innocence, for we audience always start off innocent, and the only place we find some sense of right is the law, which in turn is human but helpless. It is remarkable how a simple thing like a cut to the random police guy chasing the protagonist reminds us of the fallibility running in the uniform. A cop mistakenly shoots one of his own, and through his reaction Mr. Hong-jin suggests tremendous humanity. And yet, the law seems to be more or less helpless here. Mr. Hong-jin takes this depravity even further by suggesting that his women are bitches (thank the lord the kids are spared!). But then, they are merely suggestions, and although these women seem to exist around the periphery of the film, they are revealed to be integral, all of them, one by one. This mess, this sort of deadly plague, seems to have been caused by helpless savages, and when the dust settles on the rubble, a deadly sucker punch awaits us, virtually turning the tables on our predisposition towards the source of the virus (which is always third-world), and revealing a greater sadder belief. Hwang Hae is an incredible film, brutal and epic, and I probably shall never watch it again.

Note: There’s a sequence after the credits, or before the credits, depending on the version you’re watching. It involves a train. It undercuts the tragedy and probably reduces everything to a joke, and I wish it weren’t part of the film. In fact, I’ve convinced myself it isn’t.

CONTAGION: MOVIE REVIEW

2011-09-12T08:33:00.006+05:30

Cast: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Runtime: 106 min.
Verdict: Seems like it’s a product of a resolve to be aggressively anti-Emmerich. Genre: Drama, Sci-fi, Thriller

        A virus running amuck is probably the least of the concerns here, one might feel, considering that Contagion diffuses the virus just about as simply as it introduces it. There’s a certain inevitability to the proceedings, which the melodramatic could very well interpret as helplessness, and Mr. Soderbergh manages to extend this finitude to the virus too. You might even remember Gita here – what comes into this world has to go – and the whole epidemic-o-rama is witnessed by us with this very same insularity. Not once, not even when the salesgirl in the Allen Solly section coughed on our way down to the parking, did the contagion jump out of the screen and threaten to enter our lives. Believe me, I was terrified after reading The Cobra Event, and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome was the topic of most of my conversations for days. I mean, for a film that is an epidemic procedural, Contagion is not high on details but exposition, with characters explaining each other’s reason for existing in the narrative, including that of the virus in our lives. Everybody talks, talks a lot, there’re hell of a lot of conversations, and yet there’re no details. There’s no process, or no events colliding into each other, just a series a series of obligatory milestones – the establishment keeping the thing under wraps, left wing forces trying to uncover it, people panicking, dying – on the roadmap to eventual vaccinestation and our eventual exit from the theatre premises.
        I know, I am reacting to the reactions rather than to the film here, and in fact, considering its temporal aspect, I suspect even the film encourages that insularity. There’s a certain inertness, or indifference if one might interpret it thus, to Mr. Soderbergh’s film, and although my singular viewing doesn’t fill me with authority, memory aides me with images of evenings seeping in through glass panes and rooms filled with them yellow glum lightings, the sort where you almost want to summon an extra bit of lighting and knock some brightness in. Not in the casino, not in the airport, and even when the lighting is not yellow, like in Mitch’s apartment, where it’s one of those greys that again seeks a little bit of illumination. Point is, the situation is bleak in America and that every Roland Emmerich is blinding bright. And what catches our attention in Mr. Soderbergh’s film is this effort – right from Mitch’s dry interaction with the doctor who has overseen his wife’s death – to try and be an anti-Emmerich film, almost making that its main objective, and serve us a film that is pretending to be completely devoid of cheap-thrills.
        And yet, the film itself might not be all that insular, although the film’s score might want us to believe thus. Adultery on the part of a dead wife (the micro) is as much a part of the tragedy as the viral epidemic reducing the death toll to a speculative statistic (the micro) uttered by newsreaders like, well, news. A virus spreading like crazy is as much a threat to the citizens as is a blogger spreading false rumors and installing himself as a prophet within them. A teenage girl’s yearning to be with her boyfriend is as much a part of the struggle as the race to the anti-virus. One ought to consider here that a major objective in the disaster-porn genre is to try and find an organic way of intertwining the micro with the macro, thus creating what we refer to as stakes, and finding a way into getting us hooked onto the proceedings. An academic exercise here would be to find out if Mr. Soderbergh’s film is also aiming for a similar sort of commercial prospects. A cursory glance at the nature of the characters, and one might realize that apart from Mitch (who probably “represents” the “gullible” citizenry), each one of them exists to serve either of two agendas – (a) to reveal something about the process of an epidemic, or (b) to cause a political statement. A stray human appears, in the form of a woman seeking forsythia, and her death is supposed to reveal a “darker” secret. Everyone exists to further the narrative, so to speak, and considering all the anti-Emmerich posturing, I don’t think that is going down my throat any easily. I mean, a C.D.C. doctor Ally Hextall (Ms. Jennifer Ehle) sitting by her infected father, whom we’ve never met before, explaining her inspiration to try the vaccine on herself to be her unselfish father who took to nursing the infected is as much a moment of melodrama as Mr. Emmerich’s films are capable of. The camera, or the film itself, seems to have as much as access to the virus as its characters provide it with, learning it all like a documentary, gaining information through surrogates like video footage, and one might suspect there’s a certain degree of “plausibility” Contagion is attaching to its formal choices. And yet it obliges us with a last minute revelation whose convenience completely destroys the narrative integrity it promised upfront, feeling like an appendage borne out of commercial necessity. It is strange, for such a “realistic” film, to be in the right place at the right moment with an unnerving precision. Aha, I know what you’re thinking. Convenience. Same pinch.
        But as I said, the virus is the least of the concerns here. It is people like me, hacks like me, bloggers you know, or rather opinion disseminators, whose main objective is to gain readers and followers and validity, and that proves to be Contagion’s most interesting thread. In keeping with cinematic traditions, Mr. Alan Krumwiede is a video blogger, and the left-winging of his kind is an epidemic is a million times more dangerous as any virus imaginable. You wouldn’t need to look too far into the past to find evidence – right from Egypt to the “intelligentsia” right here. Mr. Soderbergh’s biological virus is almost pushed to the background by the topicality achieved by Alan and his little thread. It did for me, and that is probably the only part I felt. You, sir, are the vermin.