Happy New Year

'That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.'
- David Wooderson, Dazed and Confused

IFFK 2009: The Blow-Out

Today at around 5pm, as Raul Ruiz’s ‘Nucingen House’, a fantasy filled with the fluid that makes time-space of memories and experiences, ended with ruminations on journeys against a black screen, the curtains went down on IFFK 2009 and all the faithful that had gathered and stayed till the lag end called it with wolf whistles and loud applause. And that was it. The delegate IDs went off the necks, the stalls disappeared, the flag and festoons came down. There was no drama, no comedy, no sentiment. The depraved and the perverted went back to their homes and their offices- tending kids, writing checks, providing tech support, booking tickets for ‘Avatar’ and ‘Vetaikaran’. If you asked us, we’d probably plead innocent and refute all charges. But the fact remains that ‘Antichrist’ played an unprecedented five packed shows. 4 of them scheduled and one put together exclusively ‘on public demand.’

Divine

My second Arturo Ripstein film of the festival and while like the first it wanders bravely into scandalous territories, it lacked the ingenious structure and deranged firmament of ‘The Realm of Fortune’. Also, as yet another critique of organized religion and particularly blasphemous of Christianity, I reeled with fatigue. There had been one two many films in the last few days that did just that. But as powerful director of surrealist imagery laced with sepulchral humor, Ripstein’s shock to the tender modern psyche continues to register with brute impact.

While ‘The Realm of Fortune’ was a dark pyramid built in the mind, ‘Divine’unfolds like it were a religious book or even, a religious movie for the dark ages of the new millennium. It takes around the turn to the 2000s and chronicles a religious cult in Mexico started by a deluded old couple who worship at the altar of Our Mother of the End of the World and keep awaiting for the return of the messiah and live in a commune that goes by the name of ‘The New Jerusalem’. Barbie dolls, Cecil B. Demille moves starring Victor Mature and Charlton Heston, Video Games, Television- these are the new totems and mediums through which the members of the church receive their communication from God. Once again, Ripstein plays broad comedy with sick strokes and catches the viewer off-guard between apocalyptic grimness, brutal excess and broadly funny satire.

‘The New Jerusalem’ is populated by society’s rejects- drug addicts, abused teens, the repressed, the homeless and the wretched. Unfolding chapter by chapter which Ripstein titles as ‘The Mystery of the Wrath of God’ or ‘The Mystery of the Second Coming’, he deconstructs religion, its paraphernalia, its allures, seductions and dangerous delusions and casts a shadow of doom, before ending on a beguilingly ambiguous note.

Nucingen House

‘Nucingen House’, a last minute replacement for Jacques Rivette’s ‘Around a Small Mountain’ as the final film to be screened at IFFK 2009 was my first experience of Chilean art house legend and cinephile-intellectual Raul Ruiz. The synopsis seemed to indicate a Victorian horror film but as the movie began I was thrown away at once by the fact that it was a period film shot digitally with the most pedestrian results. The aesthetic seemed to jar with tacky TV modernity when the material seemed to call for the thundering atmospherics.

Then the camera moved. Glided rather, on rarified air like Dracula’s brides. It showed you a scene, paused to take in the mis-en-scene and then moved back or turned away to reveal or confound with yet another secret. The gaze itself seemed as certain of the end of the corridor as it was uncertain of the ghosts that stood waiting at the turn. The narrator of the story seemed equally unreliable equally on terms and at odds with the flow of the camera. Was the story the overheard conversation at the dinner table where the protagonist sits; or was it the narration of the protagonist himself or is it director Ruiz? Flashbacks are confused with dreams and dazes. The fantastic is juxtaposed with the human and the seemingly real. The absurd turns into terror and terror back into comedy. The digital aesthetic which at first seemed unfortunate begins to yield into an atmosphere of its own. Blonde hairs dissolving in sunlight, the smudges of the candle stands, the blurs, the occasional color- a new aesthetic of beauty and ambiance is formed. And it blends seamlessly together with orchestral score played by one of the film’s characters on a piano that he seemingly created from the memory of a snatch of Debussy’s ‘Sunken Cathedral’ and was completed with the specter of the haunting quality of the piece serving as the muse. An inexplicable connect pulls it all together and like the best of Poe, Bierce, Hitchcock, Cluzot, all masters of thrill and suspense, it is this mysterious all-too-human stuff that haunts the film. The absurd fear of the vulture eye in ‘The tell-tale heart’, the obsession in ‘vertigo’ and the madness of ‘le corbeau’; they need not be explained and they cannot be but we know them more than we know the streets of Paris and San Fransisco.

Through the most generic of pulpy tale, Ruiz poetically and subtly distills this ‘human stuff’.

And with that it all came to an End.

In Trivandrum Avatar news, the release of the film has been postponed to Saturday evening on account that the prints are not yet arrived. 'Sreepadmanabha' the theater screening the film was mobbed all day today when members of the public undeterred neither by the hot sun or the fact that the IFFK had just come to an end stood in endless cues for tickets to the film which will reportedly change the face of cinema forever.

Capsule Reviews:


'Monrak Transistor' is an absolute joy.
'Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl' is exactly that.
‘Seasons’ is definitely not ‘thegreatestmalaylamfilminthelastfiveyears’. It checks in just about okay.
‘Ek Tho Chance’ is an absolute wash-out.
‘Harishchandrachi factory’ is a classic of our times and should be given an all-India tax-free release.
‘Antichrist’ is passé.
‘The Last Supper’ is one of the greatest political films of all time.
Mrinal Sen deserves a greater focus.
Raul Ruiz is some kind of master.
Arturo Ripstein is as supremely fucked up as it gets.
And
Everbody should watch Fransesco Rosi.

Acknowledgements

Dr. Fun Man Chu and Hard Ed


The place I come home to


The Festival and its organizers who make it happen every year


And to beautiful, debauched Trivandrum you should really stop pleading innocent for the rest of the year.



(Cross-posted at www.passionforcinema.com)

IFFK 2009: Alcoholous Anonymics

Dr. Fu Man Chu got on the boat today. He received a brief message in the morning underlining that it was most imperative for him to return to his laboratory at once. The message was simple- ‘The albino gorilla has given birth (stop) It is a boy (stop).’

His time was up. His time had just begun.

Next stop: Genetic modification, anarchy and world conquest.

This unholy night, I think of him in his boat and as a concerned tax-paying citizen I am most worried about the condition of the good doctor’s mind. A daylight nightmare brews in his brain. Contorted noises. Strange Faces. Ancient mazes of terror and darkness. Desecrated temples. Debauched women. Utter lunacy.

You might just want to call it ‘innocence lost’. But we’re not talking ‘Paa’ or ‘Khan’ here, simple jack. This is the full retard.

Before I start out writing my capsules of day 3 & 4, I apologize to the three of you for not publishing my post yesterday when it was due. But dear readers, you will be happy to note that the good doctor, myself and local Brando- Hard Ed were sufficiently decadent and that the breeze blew beautiful, there were intermittent showers and at dusk, the colors began to flow across the horizon, liquid as wine.

And now, Back to business.

Day 3

More Than a Miracle


On day one I promised more Francesco Rosi and here it is. Atypical it may be, as produced by Carlo Ponti, the genius huckster of the psychedelic art house of the 60s (Antonioni, Godard, Varda, Menzel, Warhol… you name it.), the robust rush that possesses the movie is pure Rosi.

A slight digression on the awesomeness of Hot Shots:-

Hot Shots, the Charlie Sheen starring, Top Gun-Rambo-Casablanca-Lady and the Tramp skewering madcap Zucker-Abraham collaboration is something of a classic. It is immensely rewatchable, crazy-side-splitting funny and takes on the harebrained tropes of Hollywood with a cavalier sense of lampoon and plays it as broad and as madhouse as it gets. And Charlie Sheen is THE SHEEN. The Hollywood spoof once a rare beast has now in itself become part of the system. Without going into matters of quality, let us just assume that it has become a major genre with elements which now cross-over into other genres. For example, ‘Shrek’, ‘Ratatouille’, ‘Inglorious Basterds.’ If the spoof genre has to be reckoned it needs atleast one canon film. Something must do for the genre what ‘Bicycle Thieves’ has done for neo-realism and ‘Blade Runner’ for dystopian sci-fi. You have these classics- Airplane!, Kentucky Fried Movie, Hot Shots!, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz etc. But we’re looking at canon material here. We’re looking to inform dialogues and rage dialectics and publish large hardbound books.

I’m suggesting Francesco Rosi’s ‘More Than a Miracle’.

End digression.


Produced by Carlo Ponti. Directed by Francesco Rosi. A Lush background score by Piero Piccioni (the memorable ‘Traffic Boom’ on the Big Lebowski soundtrack). Written by Tonino Guerra, poet and screenwriter for Fellini, Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Angelopoulos. Starring and now, you’re probably wondering- ‘what could beat THE SHEEN?’ You don’t just say Omar Sharif. You say ‘the legendary’ Omar Sharif. Charlie’s got time yet. And opposite the dashing Egyptian, you have the swoon, the brass goddess, the verve, the moxie, the lady among ladies, Mrs. Ponti- Sophia Loren. And seen through the gaze of Rosi and like the mesmerizing Brenda Lee in ‘The Weavers’, your senses shall be transfixed.

This is arch-subversion. Poker has never seemed so straight before.

Rosi and Co. pick a children’s fairytale. Princes. Princesses. Magic. Gods and Angels. Quests with Happy Endings. The little illustrated stories you read as a kid that in some way shape the values you believe in and then Walt Disney and Co., ever so sweetly whistle their way to the bank.

The film starts quietly. Pretty soon you see a flying monk. Then Sophia Loren slips her tongue in a lock and Sharif gets paralyzed with a chicken drumstick in head. Then there is a barrel that floats across to faraway kingdoms with Loren trapped inside. Then a donkey that is a bank- a sequence that has to be seen to be believed. The ante of absurdity is progressively raised. A 3000 egg omelet, a proud French chef who had Henry IV licking his fingers who condemns his rejected dinner to be placed in a hole and buried. But it is not all over until you wash the dishes. But there is treachery in that. Will the Prince find true love with the peasant women or will he marry the wicked princess? And the lumpen proletariat of the village- what will they eat?

‘More than a Miracle’ calls the bluff on the fairytales and the morals and inane quietisms of religious parables. The prince here is an obstinate royal fool. The guardian angels asks the peasant women to not listen to the rest of the angels who will tell her it is her duty to suffer and that life is short and paradise eternal. We even see the rest the other angels and it’s all pretty ridiculous.

This kind of mischief is rare. It was plain sublime. Like THE SHEEN says it- “I’ve fallen for you like a blind roofer. My heart is falling down around my ankles like a wet pair of pants.”

And yeah… it was all at IFFK 2009.

The Last Supper

Tomas Alea’s ‘The Last Supper’ screened this year as part of the Cuban panorama was one of those films I had intensely anticipated over the years. On two separate drunken evenings that share no common shore other than that I was present at the same table as two gentlemen who seemed to have an excellent choice in films, had come up with the ‘The Last Supper’ and ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ as two films that any person who reckons himself a cinephile should be sure to catch. Having already missed my chance at the later film, I made sure I wasn’t going to be missing this one and the doctor and me were better sloshed and late than never. We arrived just before the grand set-piece of the title was about to play.

A count who’s inordinately worried about how his sins and virtues would add up in the great book outside the pearly gates fancies himself a chance at redemption and he wants to play martyr just like good lord Jesus Christ. To this effect, he invites the African slaves who toil at his mill for the titular feast and seats them across his table. The almost theatrical yet subtle and provocative conversational scene that takes place, rendered decadence with candlelight turns into one of most potent debate, that as it slides into inebriation takes on an almost feverish glow. Even if the characters start off as mere symbols, Alea first etches them human and flawed and after a bit of wine, brings out his tongs and rips apart the colonial corporate mindscape of the white master and speculates on the institutionalization of the slaves.

Alea calls religion’s bluff. For the white master it is a matter of convenience. He presides over the table, alluding himself with the son of God at his last supper and tries to impress his dark-age, racist ideas on his slaves as the word of God himself. As the supper proceeds, Alea shows the moral weakness of the master that relies on religion which is but an easy frameworks of beliefs and values for a businessman like him to fall back on. The hierarchy of a society religiously organized allows the imperial white man to propagate his supremacy. Organized religion is not presented just as a scam but rather as a delusion that the white man had to buy into not only for the money but also to assuage his own guilt. The slaves laugh when the master proselytizes about ‘sorrow’ being the greatest gift that humans can make to the altar of God. The slaves bring with them earthy stories not written in books- ancient fables and songs of sorrow. At the end of the supper, Alea exposes the white master as a weak and afraid. And finally, seeing their master up-close for what he his, the slaves begin to assert their voices.

The next day of the Holy Saturday, the slaves are promised a day off. When the manager of the mill forces them to come to work, anarchy reigns. The Manager and his wife are killed. The white master retaliates, forgetting all that he had promised the slaves the night before. He has but one plan to crush the uprising- to make an example of the 12 who sat across the table on Friday. Here the film picks up a trashy subaltern aesthetic. Music pumps. The camera supervised by Mario Garcia Joya moves like a cat through the jungle. The film thumps with suspense and action. The chase is breakneck and wild and the 11 of the 12 are swiftly and brutally murdered and their heads savagely stuck on poles by the civilized white man who promises to build a church in the memory of his manager. But the 12th man runs wild. From the folds of the white man, he returns back to earth and he is complete and strong. The film ends with vigor, fists pumping in the air. Viva la revoluzione!

It is not an empty headed call for machismo. Alea gently dismantles layers and gets into the heart of the truth. The call to arms and freedom is full-blooded yet tranquil. Truly, one of the greatest political films of our times.


Day 4:

In Search of Famine

For the good Doctor, the Mrinal Sen retrospective was one of the eye-openers of the festival. When I was soaking in the technicolor of ‘Monrak Transistor’ (Day 1), he was soaking in ‘Calcutta ‘71’ which has become some sort of a canon or reference point for all the films that he watches. He convinced me to get myself a DVD of the movie as soon as possible and that I must see it at once. When I catch my own boat back, I hope it’s one of the things I get to do real soon.

‘In the search of Famine’ is probably not one of Sen’s greater works. As a film it is complex, engaging in an introspection on the medium itself and on the ‘aesthetics of poverty and destitution’ and if ‘that’ means anything. It is an inquiry into values and morals in the context of the rural-urban divide. It is ingeniously structured- a film within a film and at first it is sheer joy to watch Sen adapt the New Wave aesthetic in an Indian context. But the stylistic flourishes, aided in no small bit by Sen regular and one of our greatest cinematographers- K.K. Mahajan, quickly tire as the films draws itself into knots and muddles and stagnates without much exploration. The story of the film crew and the story of the film they are making both seem to compliment each other too comfortably and with a kind of pretentious quietism, rather drawing out nuances with conflict and contrast. The film tries but perhaps not hard enough. The characters barely escape caricature and if they do it is because they’re terrifically essayed by the actors. Dhritiman Chaterjee exudes an easy cool as the director and there is an excellent turn by the actor who plays the villager who becomes the go-to-guy for the crew. The scene stealer is obviously Smita Patil playing herself. It must have been said before but that is how it is- she is positively radiant.

Mrinal Sen directs with detatchment, never passing comments on the subtleties while still taking a dig at the larger structure. In that, ‘In search of Famine’ is a success. He concedes and gives away his politics and ideas to the idea of being human. But in his larger questions, neither is there a sense of complexity nor does he claim disillusion.

As it is, the film is uncommon and ambitious. But the nagging feeling is that Sen was onto something that he really couldn’t pull off and run with.

I mentioned it to the doctor. He asked me check out Calcutta ’71. I’ll be doing just that.


Hands Over the City

There is a scene in ‘In the Search of Famine’ where a screening of ‘Guns of Navarone’ is being announced in the village and the village boys ecstatically run behind the vehicle from which the speakers boom and pamphlets are being distributed. There is a palpable excitement and clearly, it contrasts with the prospects of Sen’s own film probably destined for the film festivals and foreign art houses and at best, a run in Calcutta. It is one of the questions that the film merely grazes without probing deeper. But as I was watching my third Fransesco Rosi of the IFFK 2009, I think I was almost about to say,” Eureka.”

‘Hands Over the City’ is a procedural film, not one of those pulpy policers or courtroom dramas which can atleast rely on a plot of cheap pulp for the thrills. Rosi’s film is a Parliamentary procedural. Motions are passed, long debates are held, ballots are taken, there is a lot of talking and very little action. But the corridors of diplomacy have rarely been channeled with such fire. Every scene contains such momentum, such jazz energy that within the first five minutes whatever remained of ‘Michael Clayton’ in my head was reduced to ash and blown away. Every set-piece, every mis-en-scene was a giddy exploration of corruption and the modern corporate-industrial structure and the common man’s losing battle against the beast.

The movie is directly engaged. It lifts the perpetrators by the collars and sheds the spotlight right on them. Just like ‘The Weavers’ he crates the oppressive atmosphere of a noir, crisscrossed in white and black, reeking of greed and vice. He sets an honest man amongst it but the games within the corridors of power are exclusive to the avaricious and the power hungry. He captures the nuances of the balance of power, of coalitions, of the language of diplomacy, of the workings of the state that take the choices and information away from the people. He neatly delineates the seduction and authority of the system which can entrap the honest and innocent. He frames the corridors with a Kafkaesque flair, every frame seminal and the usage of sound is extraordinary and it contributes to the depth and emotion of the scene. There is an anger at the heart of ‘Hands Over the City’ and it is not just Rosi’s impeccable style but his unshakable faith and his love for the city of his birth and also that of the Mafia- Naples, that informs the energy of the film.

Once again, another Rosi film like nothing I had ever seen before. Like ‘The Last Supper’ mentions it is difficult to recognize the truth these days because it walks with the head of a lie. ‘In Search of Famine’ couldn’t seem to distinguish either. But Rosi rooted in native Naples calls it right. He calls a shovel, a shovel.

Rod Steiger gives of those legendary performances that command very inch of the screen as the corrupt Eduardo Nottola and Salvo Randone who was terrific in 'the weaversl gives yet another stellar turn as the honest and fighting De Vita.


Coming out the theater, I added to my list of Calcutta 71- Gomorrah and Il Divo.

Homero Manzi, A poet in the Storm

I walked out of this one. They changed the schedule and put this in instead of T.V. Chandran’s ‘Bhoomi Malayalam’. This one was about an Argentinian revolutionary. It was made by a director of commercials who probably considers ‘Amelie’ as one of the touchstones of cinema. Don’t cry for me Argentine. I’m okay with it. My only regret is that I missed a second viewing of ‘Monrak Transistor’ to stay with this one.

Well, that’s it for the day. And Dr. Fu Manchu. You got out while the going was good.

I’ve got tickets booked for Avatar tomorrow.

But before that I watch a Ripstein.

And Avatar is gonna change filmmaking forever! Really! Oh yeah! Goddamn Simple Jack!

(Cross-posted at www.passionforcinema.com)

IFFK 2009: Sickness in the Quiet Kingdom

The Indian Coffee House has all the acoustics of a wind chime. Everything inside seems to go ‘clang’. The waiter serves the water with one, brush against a neighbors table and ‘clangg clang’, and from the kitchen, a continuous tumble of clang, clang, clang and yet another, clang. The redoubtable Doctor and yours truly sit across a table amidst so much cling-clang and from the condition of our persons as is evident from our hangdog doorstop postures and glazed faces, expressions stuck at a go-between illumination and ignorance, that the proceedings of the IFFK 2009 have attained a critical disorientation.

And we were yet to see ‘AntiChrist’. Clang.

The Realm of Fortune

My first visit to the IFFK had resulted in a run-in with the films of Glauber Rocha. After the movie, I went right outside and threw up my lunch and spent the rest of the day hungry and sober. Last year, I was introduced to the cinema of Fernando Birri and promptly passed out in the theatre. This year, the tropical malady comes with the name of Arturo Ripstein. For all those like me and the good doctor who have so conveniently clubbed Latin American cinema somewhere between Buena Vista Social Club and Ammores Perroes, the IFFK usually serves up some obscure, bitter medicine that will burn the senses on its way down, torching all beliefs and pretenses, ratting soul against bone and on its way out will be coughed away in bile and phlegm.

All the way, we thought we knew what we were getting into. The festival brochure described Ripstein’s cinema as the ‘art of pain’ and seemed to cheerfully mention an exploration of the ‘aesthetic of hunger, destitution and decline’. ‘Why not?’ said I to the doctor. ‘But of course’, said the doctor to me and the cavalier duo began their descent into ‘The Realm of Fortune’ forarmed and forwarned. We knew Arturo Ripstein was a prodigy of sorts. We also knew that he had served as Buneul’s disciple before directing a Gabriel Garcia Marquez at the tender age of twenty one. So far so good.

The film begins with a howl screamed into a mirror in the early hours of a morning. The howler is the town’s messenger, a man who stands in a town square, beats his drum and screams out advertisements and messages for the people. He lives with his mother, an old hag. Within the first ten minutes, Ripstein systematically unmoors you from your sense of living and life and comfort and beliefs and plunges you into a parched Godless world. You are cast into a world that runs on the evil that men are capable of, where power rules with no limits of control or decency, where the weak are at the will and use of the strong. There are also people weaker still who are under the command of the mere weak. The town howler, Pinzon, even then at best a grey character, given to selfishness and delusion, seems to be our only guide through this vicious world.

A carnival comes to town and Pinzon comes into the possession of a wounded cock from the cockfighting arena. The cock becomes the source of all of Pinzon’s aspirations. Even as his mother succumbs to a slow death, he only seems to want to tend the bird back to health so it can go back into the arena from which it once barely escaped. The mother’s funeral is a protracted scene, tinged with the poisonous gallows humor supplied only by the depravity of humans that runs through the film. Laughter is evoked and stifled at the same time and the tumult is disturbing to behold. His mother buried, Pinzon returns to his bird to whom he feeds not just bread but also, pieces of fried chicken. The cock recovers and returns to the ring and Pinzon gets his first taste of success and power. As he continues to amass his fortune, we see his initial guileless gradually morph into cunning.

He falls in love with the beautiful carnival singer La Caponera who has already been claimed for by Don Benavides, a powerful man around town. The Don initially takes Pinzon under his wing, teaching him how to rig cockfights and card games. He learns quickly and the relationship, like all others, based solely on business thrives. La Caponera finally warms to Pinzon. The erotic sequences are bestial, charged with fervor and frenzy. The cock finally becomes the obvious symbol. Pinzon faces off with his old master The Don in a gambling duel charged with machismo and money that Ripstein terrifically satirizes and the tides turn as the erstwhile slave cleans out and turns his old master destitute.

The cunning now turns into cruelty. Don Pinzon now sits in his mansion and gambles with his friends. His wife is now forced to sit beside him at all time, she being reduced to a mere totem, what he calls his ‘lucky stone’. The second act leaves the audience helpless as the vicious cycle threatens to continue moving into darker realms of malice and for the weak, there seems to be no redemption in sight.


In true surrealist fashion, the labyrinth of the movie’s ingenious structure is pinned to our psyche. As the images get progressively frightening and depressing and the laughs get stifled further, a strange sickness takes hold of the mind. Even the silences begin to howl. ‘The Realm of Fortune’ begins to sprawl with a wicked will, now all its own. The humans begin to lose themselves, blinded by the excesses of hubris, pain, luxury, apathy in a maze whose foundations they themselves laid on the sunburnt soil. The tower of folly grows towards the stars in a grip of delusion, declaring itself the tallest structure ever built in a desert, never aware that it is coming apart at the corners. And that dust will return to dust.

There is no deliverance promised for the living; only the inevitability of finding ourselves in yet another labyrinth of sand and illusion that we build like it were our kingdom to keep.

Previously, the closest I had ever come to experience an aesthetic similar to Ripstein’s ‘Art of Pain’ was in the films of Marco Ferreri. Like Ferreri, Ripstein stages a slightly skewered reality where symbols come together to inform a prophetic allegorical truth. But where Ferreri’s apocalyptic humor is broad and witty, Ripstein’s ‘aesthetic of hunger, destitution and decline’ is the entrails and abscesses of the world.

Ek Tho Chance & Harishchandrachi Factory

Earlier in the morning, I had grappled with a minor case of loss of faith. The bad news I bear is that Saeed Mirza’s first film in fourteen years in an embarrassing washout that compares with the worst travesties of Bhandarkar. The problem with ‘Ek Tho Chance’ is the similar one that afflicted Shyamaprasad’s ‘Seasons’ that I had written about yesterday. Why do our auteurs who deal in cinema have to bend over backwards and concern themselves with the morons amongst the youth of today? We have music channels to do that. It is disheartening to see such august company dealing in trivialities of pop culture when they should be doing what they do best-make cinema.


So after the crushing disappointment dealt to me in shape of ‘Ek Tho Chance’, the much-talked about ‘Harishchandrachi Factory’ was all it took to restore my faith in Indian cinema. It is a film in vernacular but absolutely Indian in spirit. In the spirit of Chaplin and Tati and with the infectious vibe of young Marathi theatre, the delightful little movie not just rescues and reinvents a lost part of our cultural history but in the manner of ‘Valu: The Wild Bull’ offers digs and satires on history, etiquette and tradition. It is laugh-out loud funny, it embraces politics and most importantly, in the age of puke-puke-multiplex-cinema-puke-puke restores to the medium the dignity and magic that was in the danger of being forgotten.

Rest assured, if I had ever complained about the wholesomeness of the film, ‘The Realm of Fortune’ gave me more than I ever asked for.

With Valu and now, Harishchandrachi factory and other flawed yet interesting entries like Dombivali Fast and Devrai and Restaurant, Marathi cinema truly looks set to enter the proverbial ‘purple patch’.

AntiChrist


It’s all a bit said and done. And especially after Ripstein, Lars Von Trier’s prank cinema looks very much like the work of a huckster. There are interesting bits. There is enough provocation. But at the end of it all, it still feels like a very minor work of a contemporary master. Damned if I want to give my two bits. As far as all the reels and reels of dialogue and debate and breath spent on the film is concerned, it’ll just go ahead and add a few more ‘clang clangs’.

(Cross-posted at www.passionforcinema.com)

IFFK 2009: Amphibians and Aviators

The sun is out and she’s shining one hell of a scorcher on this particular Trivandrum December. Reptilian heat- one that crawls out your pores and creeps down the spine. The eyes declare fever- blurry narcotic colors, blind flashes, silver streaks, orange and green flares. The Swiss army knife Trivandrum edition comes equipped with a pair of cool green aviators. Screw design. We’re talking survival here.

It’s day 4 of the 14th International Kerala Film Festival and owing to unavoidable circumstances, day 1 for yours truly. The cold blooded cinephiles have already gathered and are running wild and depraved all across this once idyllic city that otherwise smacks of a quiet colonial hangover disrupted only by the pageantry that seems to accompany politics here. A pirate Mahindra Commander mounted with boom-boom speakers and party insignia was seen driving in circles asking one and all to gather and march in the name of justice. Flags and posters are everywhere but it is the festival banners that stand tall amongst it all and against the sun. For a whole week, the art house and the avant-garde will spill over the barricades and storm the streets.

My aide and comrade, Dr. Fu Manchu has already set up camp in the mouth of all this madness for two whole days. The good doctor has assured the situation had been excellent and that he had been experiencing mild delirium, hallucinations and the occasional rasp of poetry. He grins Cheshire as he says,”Mindfuck.”

Transistor Love Story



A Pen-Ek Ratanaruang retrospective. After Tsai Ming-Liang and Kim Ki-Duk, the mysterious divinations and calculations of the IFFK compass once again picked up one of the most original visions from across the map of Asia and the world. Cool, deadbeat, punch-drunk, lit by the same light that shines through the firmament of our own memories and longings, the time is indeed perfect to shed some spotlight on the eccentric filmography of the Thai auteur.

To all like yours truly, who hold Shaad Ali’s glitter shine ‘Jhoom Barabar Jhoom’ as some sort of a classic, ‘Monrak Transistor’ is one on the lists for all time top tens. Ratanaruang’s sophomore effort after his cult debut ‘6ixtynin9’ is a fancy firecracker of a film, one that explodes into colors and shapes and noise and thrill. He spins a cheaper kind of full blooded melodrama with wit, grit, style and a bit of Godard and the result is an ecstatic, genre-hopping fever dream. Inspired by the baroque melancholy of a pop song titled ‘Never Forget’ by a tragically short lived Thai singer, Ratanaruang fashions a tall tale of a man named Pan who leaves his wife and children behind and absconds from the army to pursue his dream of being a singer only to end up swabbing the floors of a studio. After almost two years of labor, he gets his first chance under the lights only for an unfortunate incident to derail his life yet again as he becomes a worker on a cane farm and from there to the streets and from the streets into lock up.

In only his second effort, one can already spot the mastery over the narrative that would define his two later films- that dreamy classic ‘Last Life in the Universe’ and the crazy hypercube that was ‘Ploy’. Deadbeat tableaus that could make Jarmusch proud, cocky intertitles (Sweet Talking Voice Over; Tits, Ass and Balls), breaking the fourth wall, a musical interlude, slow motions, fast-as-blur- he embraces the kitsch and the high emotions and goes jazz with it. Cinematographer Chankit Champnivikaipong bleeds the scenes with poetry capturing at once, the sadness and festivity of the neon smudges. The film may be a sprawling potboiler but it always seems to have time to stop all proceedings and stare in rapture at the rainwater twirling out the roof and the light hitting the surfaces or a towel blowing in the wind. It is in these small details that the Director makes a quiet comment on a changing world where all that is real and true and earthy is being replaced by the plastic and disposable.

The titular radio keeps playing forgotten songs.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl

Manoel de Oliveira, what could explain him? When a man lives for over a hundred years and keeps making beguiling and delightful art house films, I can’t deny the fact that I have some serious catching up to do on life. I have been enchanted even provoked by the grand old man’s films but I have never loved them as I think I should and I do confess to being slightly stumped by them. His latest ‘Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl’ is no different.

The film begins a la Bunuel’s ‘The Obscure Object of Desire’ as a young man narrates the story of his love to the interested woman in the next seat. ‘Eccentricities’ continues Oliveira’s Bunuel obsessions after his ‘Belle Trijour’, the sequel to Bunuel’s ‘Belle Dujour’. The tale is strange- old and new, young and ancient. The young man, an accountant falls in love with the titular blonde who appears before him, tantalizing with her exotic fan, across his office window. Gazes meet. There is seduction and young love. When the young man expresses his desire to marry her, his uncle disowns him and he has to travel to Cape Verde to make a fortune only to lose it when he returns. His steadfast love for the blonde-haired girl is about to set him once again into far off, dangerous lands when Oliveira pulls the carpet and well… Freud didn’t get it, Stephen Hawking confesses he can’t either and Senor de Oliveira charmingly seems to sigh- women! But it is exactly why we still go on loving them.

The film moves like all of the master’s films. Stately, mannered and poised. There is a musical performance on harp, then a poetry recital. Moments of quirk and mischief. Long static shots for all of the brief 64min. In the end, I was a bit confused. Sigh.


Seasons


First one has to remark that it was terrific idea to screen Malayalam auteur Shyamaprasad’s latest in an open air auditorium. At its best it was breezy, understated and all-too-human. It was sometimes unintentionally bizarre. And then there were the terrible times for which we could perhaps use the word- ‘Bhandarkarian’.

‘Seasons’ is undoubtedly the lowest ebb of the director’s filmography working only intermittently as the director engages with the larger pursuits of changing landscapes, relationships and politics as he satirizes the globalize corporate complex. Weaved into it is a coming of age tale, which is also a heartbreaking one of innocence lost. It is only when the director bends over backwards to appeal to a larger audience that he completely misses the pulse and steps into the territory of the plain ridiculous. He is at home when he gently unfolds a father-son and sibling relationship or a fabulous drunken party among old comrades, but in etching the dynamics of a techie office he resorts to tired clichés and stereotypes. The presence of a homosexual gay cartel stealing software and selling it on the black market is an idea as strange as it is jarring. The rock-muzak soundtrack seldom helps and not to mention a cop-out of an ending after he calls into focus all the complexities and politics.

One of best reasons to watch ‘Seasons’ was it features by far the most auspicious debut by any young actor in the last decade in Malayalam Cinema. Actor Nishant etching the role of the prodigal son Sarath brings a heft and easy sincerity as he wanders in the corridors of a new Kerala, the one that as his brother says is inhabited by so many Mr. and Mrs. Iagos. Even in the midst of much sap, the young actor holds his own and does it with much soul. As we reel under the spectacle of so many fat men jumping high on wire their ugly paunches tied in corsets (a spectacle called Pazhassi Raja), ‘Seasons’ with its young cast and many ideas offers a semblance of a relief. But just that.

The Weavers


It’s only the first day but if I was a betting man and a smart one at that, my money would go on Francesco Rosi as the find of the festival. Why isn’t the man mentioned more? Why is it that Dr. Fu Manchu and me, two not-too-lousy cinephiles have never heard of this grand guy before? Why don’t they mention him when they’re discussing Scorsese and why doesn’t his name turn up in one of those many many essays on the New Wave of the 60s? For all who have seen Scorsese’s first ‘Who’s That Knocking at My Door?’ and have been in awe at the macho dynamics and the bebop beat at play at the heart of it all- well, presenting the original- Fransesco Rosi.

I maybe excitable but this is pretty much what tends to happen at a Kerala International Film Festival. (Goa, you suck! You could never pull it off. Stop paying fat packets to the PR guys and then we’ll talk.)

A chronicle of modern corruption, ‘The Weavers’ has both swing and sting. Something Ray’s inferior ‘Janaranya’ could have done with in spades. A chronicle of group of Italian carpet salesmen trying to peddle cheap carpets in Germany, ‘The Weavers’ has it all- a style, a poise, a sterling sense of humor and morbid feeling of being human, broken and corrupt. The soundtrack rock and rolls and the Gianni di Venanzo’s deft camerawork frames the scenes in the crisscross Art Deco chiaroscuro of a true blue noir. I’m pretty sure Robbie Muller would have taken notice. The characters are etched with charm and grit. Alberto Sordi turns in an all time great turn as a conniving con guy/salesman and he is equal parts sweaty and suave. However, it is Belinda Lee as the femme fatale who takes the daggers to our hearts. Underneath her skin, what at first seems something feline turns out to be a quiet desperation and determination something she seems to share with the rest of displaced and dispossessed characters. Rosi frames Lee like only a master could capture a muse and never has a woman walking down a corridor or lighting a cigarette been a source of such seduction and mad delight.

Before I retire from this festival, there’ll definitely be another Rosi film that I’d have seen. With the way that she walks.


Fin

In other news, Rocket Singh was found last night under a street lamp near the Zoological Gardens with multiple bullet wounds on his chest and limbs. His condition is now reportedly stable and the police are on the lookout for a suspect, a man known only as ‘Pierre’. The only witness present at the scene of shocking violence refused to testify and when asked the reason, simply lit a cigarette and said,” He wasn’t any goddamn piano player.”
(Cross-posted at www.passionforcinema.com)

[screenings] Once Upon A Time

“The good news, on the other hand,
Is that schoolboys
And girls will not have to memorize me.

Who got the Nobel for literature?
Who the Booker?
Who won the cup at Wimbledon?

And who did Time magazine pick
As the Man of the Year?
I have already forgotten.”

- Man of the Year, Arun Kolatkar, Kala Ghoda Poems

It’s yet early December but we’re calling it an year. This year end, we think it means we’re calling it a decade. And like the good old, good times, we’re calling all bets off, all maps invalid, the chips are plastic, sand is the new stone and like Brautigan says, everything is after all- in watermelon sugar. Senor Edward Abbey, however, prefers the term ‘epicurean hedonism’ and Otis Redding sings,” I’m just sitting on the dock of the bay watching the tide roll away”. Les Paul accompanies on guitar and Chet Baker on saxophone. The picture is 30 x 60 in., oil on canvas. Signed by Edward Hopper.

All the good folks.

We would like to thank all the good folk who’ve been with us through the year, the decade and have been the real reason to the fact that we’re still around and doing our thing. Thank you all very very much. For more than just being there. So once again the lights will dim, the projector will flicker and we’ll all hope that the electricity holds on. Proudly presenting this December, ‘Once Upon A Time’- a weekend of three cinema classics, old and new, from right across the world. Music, Comedy and the Sentimental stuff.

That’ll be all for now. Next year we’ll be on Facebook.

Friday 4th December, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949/106min) Dir: Robert Hamer

"If fit opportunity offer in the hour of unusual affliction, minds of a certain temperament find a strange, hysterical relief in a wild, perverse humourousness, the more alluring for its entire unsuitableness for the occasion."
- Herman Melville, Pierre

It all started at the Ealing Comedies. In the late 1940s, the London-based Ealing Studios ran into something of a ‘golden period’ and satire and comedy on film were never quite the same again. And off all the Ealing Comedies, ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ is the greatest. Smart, sophisticated, impeccably acted and side splittingly hilarious, the movie is as the poster puts it ‘a hilarious study in the gentle art of murder’ as the charming Mr. Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price who would later go on to play P.G. Wodehouse’s eponymous valet Jeeves), ostracized from aristocratic society because his mother eloped with an Italian opera singer makes a determined and diabolical attempt for Dukedom. The problem- eight relatives in the way. And all of them played with classic thespian relish by Ealing’s go-to-guy Sir Alec Guinness.

Saturday 5th December, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989/102min) Dir: Hayao Miyazaki


“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

In the world animation, Hayao Miyazaki is an institution like few others, like Walt Disney or Chuck Jones. His films are meticulously hand crafted, preferring good old cell animation over CGI, and as cinema they’re closer to the films of Ozu, Satyajit Ray and Charlie Chaplin than the usual animated fare. As a chronicler of childhood and coming-of-age, he captures the essence of it like the best of Fellini or Truffaut. Hilarious, poetic, human and something like a good lazy yawn on a beautiful Sunday morning; ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ is a Miyazaki milestone, a bouncily told tale of Kiki, a thirteen year witch-in-training who has to leave her home with only her wise-cracking cat Jiji for company and truly find her place in the big wide world. (All Kids Enter Free)

Sunday 6th December, 2009 Time: 6.15pm
Night on Earth (1991/129min) Dir: Jim Jarmusch

"With mankind, forms, measured forms, are everything."
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd

‘Night on Earth’ is an incandescent film, a film of lights that glows and glitters and blinks against the dark like neon, not only with Jim Jarmusch’s beautiful twilight visions but with Frederick Elmes swooning cinematography, Tom Waits’ brilliant bebop waltz score and career best performances from a terrific star-studded ensemble which includes terrific turns from legends like Gina Rowlands, Armin Mueller Stahl, Rosie Perez, Beatrice Dalle, the late great Finnish actor Matti Pellonpaa and a bat-out-of-hell-mad-jazz performance from Roberto Benigni that has to be experienced to be believed. Chronicling five stories set in taxi cabs in five cities across the world from Los Angeles to Helsinki, ‘Night on Earth’ is at once and by turns a slice-of-life, comedy, drama and melancholy. All in all, it is beautifully human.

Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road cross, Op. State Bank of India

Tel:25493705/9886213516

Email:bangalorefilmsociety@gmail.com

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(Members whose membership has expired are requested to kindly renew their membership.)