THE FILM POLEMICISTS

PROLOGUE: ANOTHER ‘GENERATION’ OF BLOG POSTS, OR, A NO-NONSENSE PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HOW TO LOSE YOUR READERS EVEN BEFORE YOU START TO WRITE

2012-02-15T17:28:00.002+05:30

It is difficult to characterize my latest attempt at starting to post my write-ups on, about and around cinema once again on this blog as a ‘rebirth’. You do not get out of your grave after more than three years; even by “Twilight Saga” standards, that is highly unhygienic (and let us—civilized and decent people—not talk about the supposed real-life lack of personal hygiene of the uber-famous male star of the franchise—please!). Rather, this is the second ‘generation’ of this blog. Well, first of all, generation because my monomaniac ego is tickled by the prospect of trans-generational hyper-activity. There is also the minor glitch that even craps—that too of my standard, or the utter lack thereof—need to be ‘generated’ (see, I refrain from becoming scatological already!). And lastly, I hope and I fear that the newest ‘avatar’ will denote significant shifts from the older mode of looking at cinema. My purpose here is mainly to provide a tentative road-map of these potential changes.

But before that, I—in all honesty—need to provide the subjective background that pre-empts this change. And the simple matter of the fact is that when I last posted on this blog, I was truly and pathetically caged and repressed within a ‘corporate’ world (note: in third-world countries, that word actually stands for corporeal punishment), and hence, I was trying my pathetic best to please all parties concerned in the reviews. I did not want confrontations beyond a certain tolerable level; I was being house-trained in finding garden-variety ‘positives’ everywhere (Think positive!). Now, more than three years later and living in a very different city, I cannot possibly—even in my worst nightmares—begin to imagine doing that again. Three years ago, cinema was my escape; today, it is a part of my profession and everyday thought (which does not denote intellectual advancement at all; simply, now I am a student of films). Hence, I am afraid, the very tonality of my readings of films will be different. Secondly, I fear that more and more my thoughts will tend to move from the particular to the general, and readers will often find me looking at films as symptoms of the very health of the society to which such artefacts belong. Thirdly, and most importantly, I shall from now onwards also include a lot of analyses of Bengali and Hindi cinema, and—if the chance arises—other Indian cinemas from other industries.

There is something expressly maniacal about a blog-writer starting his blog: he writes presuming an absent readership, with the attendant existential angst of an egg behaving like a chicken. Thankfully, however, I belong to an utterly schizophrenic field called academics where things are presumed that can make Norman Bates blush. I am blessed. Anyway, there are two ways in which a blog-writer’s mania operates: either, he tries too hard to please his—absent, at that—readers, or, he tries to use pass Esperanto for English. Orson Welles once said that he found it disturbing that his younger generation used such long words; the younger, the longer the word got. My generation is even more absurd. Take this favourite cuss-word of film students for example: HETERONORMATIVITY (if you thought it is a horror movie in the league of ‘Arachnophobia’, you are profound). I first heard this word at a classroom from a hyper-urban, metro-sexual woman whose dimensions can easily challenge a strip of spaghetti; I came out with my castration complex in hand! I solemnly vow I shall not use such secret codes; and indeed, one of the pleasures I want to derive from writing this blog again is to enjoy the freedom of speaking simply. Which does not mean things will be simple; simpletons and simplifications are two of my pet allergies. However, even complex arguments can offer an equal chance of decipherment to everyone; I can and want to promise any and every reader that and only that.

More alarmingly, the readers of blogs can be even more maniacal. There is a whole dictionary of new codes that designates these new cyber-beings; for example, trolls, moles, snots, globs, gluttons, sea-calf-chattering-at-basso-profundo etc. I do not need them. If I have explained why I have found some actor’s work tedious, please do not comment to the effect that you love him/her and think that the sun comes up his/her...anyway. That is not a debate; it is basking in ‘contraries’. I do not like to wallow, and worst of all, I do not like to watch others wallow. If—let’s say—I have presented a critique of ce

rtain kind of ‘Art Cinema’ as politically and/or creatively dangerous, please do not comment that you love such films and you find them profound. I know that. I have been to Film Festivals. I am working my ass off here to present arguments; if you need to engage in a conversation, try to reciprocate that gesture. I believe I can demand that in all fairness. And, please, if you expect political correctness here, I am an impenitent criminal. If you are looking for a fellow traveller, try communicating with the ghost of Mr William Hayes (and convey our regards).

But then, why write the blog at all? In other words, what is the relation between maintaining this blog and the work I am expected to churn out within the field of film scholarship? Well, I personally hope that the relationship will prove to be complementary. Film Studies, as a discipline, is clearly the result of a historical sundering from the field of firstly film criticism and then film activism, and this division-of-labour has been global. Consequently, these are things one can and cannot do within the field of academics. Worse, there are things one cannot say within the field of academics, at least in certain forms. For example, one cannot really judge a film anymore; even if one can, one cannot condemn. The self-assured inferiority complex of a practice-less field necessarily wallows in false humility; my attempt here is to find out whether it is still possible to short-circuit the division. To do so is precisely to write a different language. It cannot be simply the language of the academia or the language of a half-baked rancid Bollywood “Adarsh Critic”; one needs to find a synthesis, one needs to envision a change in the diction in both directions. Is there a possibility of a ‘public sphere’ of film criticism that can maintain a relative autonomy vis-a-visthe simplifying language of th e contemporary market? Can we envision a community of people actually thinking (and not fact-finding, collecting, obsessing, culture-bashing, author-worshipping) in/of/about cinema, anymore? These are the loftiest expectations of my limited attempt;

I am almost convinced that it will fail. But there is a satisfaction to be derived even if one freely chooses the losing side, even if the hand in the game is forced by fate.

I have reserved the last words for the fans of the “Twilight Saga” movie fans. We will—I swear—talk about your favourite movie series and your favourite stars all the time. Indeed, it might seem we are obsessed with them. They will be our favourite garden-gnomes, goitre-d ghouls, etc etc. We will compare their flavours with ten-day old dry bogies. So, repressed boys-&-girls, would-be-spinsters-with-rolling-eyes, fake-leather-sugar-candies, chastity-fixated virgin-seekers, stick to this page, although your mental health will hereafter not be our responsibility.

I do not believe in copyrights, and shall be using relevant pictures from the internet. Please note that these will not be used for any commercial purpose whatsoever.

Lastly, this is a slightly belated birthday gift for Chandrika Acharya. I hope she will approve of it.

Amen.

APOLOGY

2008-08-02T19:29:00.000+05:30

It has been some time since I have published anything on this blog. For that, I must apologize to everyone, with all sincerity. I have an excuse though. I have recently relocated to Hyderabad, and I am living in a hostel. However, new reviews will be put up very soon. Tentatively speaking, I will be reviewing "The Other Bolyen Girl", "Werkmeister Harmonies", "THere Will be Blood", and probably "Batman: Dark Knight". Keep in touch. Adieu for now.
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Fracture (2007) by Gregory Hoblitt; Rating: 2 in 5.

2008-06-03T16:52:00.000+05:30

May be I am not the best person to review a film like “Fracture” (directed by Gregory Hoblitt). It is a crime thriller cum courtroom drama, and I solved the mystery within the first seventeen minutes of the movie! So, may be I am not the right person, maybe someone a little more gullible would have liked it better. From the very outset, it proved to be an inept thriller; but, even more disastrously, it desperately tried to make everything look very, very smart. The result is a pitiable show of ineptitude.

The plot is simple: Ted Crawford (played by Anthony Hopkins) is a very rich aeronautics engineer, who is married to a much younger wife, Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz). Jennifer, surprise, surprise, is having an affair with a police officer named Rob Nunally (Billy Burke). Rob does not know her last name, where she lives; they call each other ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’! You can see that the trash has already begun to pile up! Well, obviously, Ted comes to know about his wife’s infidelity, and kills her. Willy Beecham is the state attorney; he is the I’m-so-cool-and-the-best-lawyer-in-the-world hero. Throughout the rest of the movie, we see a cat-&-mouse thing going on between Ted and Willy; and at the end, the hero, obviously, wins. The whole plot hinges upon one little secret, a very obvious secret; there is no psychological angle, no character formation, nothing. After the murder, we see our hero and others scratch their heads for almost two-thirds of the entire length of the movie. Meanwhile, Ted, played by Anthony Hopkins, tries his enormous best to drag the film on by making the shallow eccentricity of his character believable. The solution is revealed five minutes before the end, and, by then, if you haven’t solved the case, well, buy more Agatha Christie-s and study hard.
The amount of juvenile, puerile stuff present in this movie is completely mind-boggling. I have already mentioned about that ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ thing; there is a scene where a judge tells our hero “thank you for being so concerned about the dignity of the court, double o’ seven”! I mean, give me a break! The fundamental problem with this movie is it does not know what it really wants to be; --- a courtroom thriller, a Bond offshoot, a glamorous Dolce & Gabbana spectacle, or a Hannibal Lecter spin-off. Willy Beecham is particularly trashy: he mumbles, makes fluid hand gestures with half-closed eyes, and smiles as if he is Brad Pitt playing a womanizer. It is so disheartening to see a somnambulating, overgrown munchkin trying to be honest and intelligent all the time. And then, Willy and his would-be boss at a corporate law film, Nikki (played by Rosamund Pike), gets into an affair that is one of the worst love affairs I have ever seen on the screen, and that includes B-movies. Willy, with his half-moon smile, goes to a party, is immediately seduced by none other than his boss (!), manages to look at her (probably her assets) all the time during an opera or some recital (shows the taste these characters have got), and by the end of the evening they are in love. Without one damn meaningful conversation, two corporate lawyers are in love! And we tend to blame Bollywood here! The whole episode of Nikki and Willy stinks of shit, is completely inadequate, and utterly unnecessary for the plot. Willy Beecham does not feel like a lawyer; his competency is not made very clear too. All he does is to mumble, look perpetually astonished, give seductive grins, and scratch his head most of the time. Ryan Gosling, the Prince of Indy films, is hopelessly out of water; it seems he was told to show all the mannerisms he can show within the given timeframe. Rosamund Pike is an ex-Bond girl, which is not a good thing for a serious actress; I haven’t seen her in any other movie (although I am impressed by the fact that she is a skilled cellist, and can speak French and German fluently. I am obsessed with cello), so I cannot possibly judge her completely, but in this film, she plays the dumbest of ice queens. Over all, the film-makers exhibit a preposterous overconfidence in believing that does not matter how incredibly inane their characters, dialogues, and plots are, people will still be seduced by the charm of glossy style and big names.
The film has a notched-up ambience of a particularly glossy television thriller, which is not surprising given the director is a well-established television director. The film lacks the gritty mise-en-scene that could have created a more authentic cinematic ambience. Instead, what we face is a hopeless jungle of tasteless decors. To heighten up his shallow eccentricity, Anthony Hopkins’s character is shown building a certain sort of entrapment made of shining brass (it’s a kind of toy where little glass balls keep rotating around meandering tracks due to their momentum); it adorns his home, office, it is everywhere. Hopkins poses menacing through the grid of the toy, obviously reminding us of his famous refection in the Riddley Scott film “Hannibal”. Well, I can give you a film that uses the same entrapment, although a cheaper and more believable version, far more effectively; it is called “Blown Away”, it showcases the histrionic talents of two really good actors ------ Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones ------- by setting them against each other. The film wastes serious talents in no-good side roles: someone as good as David Straithairns and Fiona Shaw are seen in roles without resolution or growth. By making the villain reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter and by roping Hopkins in the role, the makers (presumably) tried to cash in on the Hannibal magic; -- that fails too. One of the reasons why Hannibal Lecter was so mysteriously believable and completely scary was the small details that defined his character. Lecter was a gourmand, he read Marcus Aurelius (Meditation; I can bet most of the people who saw the films never read it), he specifically preferred Glenn Gould’s recital of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (how many of you are aware of the significance of this allusion?), he quoted serious poetry. What was scary was not Lecter’s cannibalism, but his astounding refinement. On the other hand, Ted in “Fracture” is a character you cannot pin down; despite his refined behavior and suggested brilliance, what we see him doing is to build a toy, finding cracks on eggs, or on an X-ray photo. Of course, Anthony Hopkins does what he does best: he under-acts. He is not only one of the living greats, he is a rare breed of actors who believes not in method acting but in proper usage of dialogues, a descendant of classic British stage actors such as Lawrence Olivier. Still, an actor can do this far and not beyond that. This film fails despite Sir Hopkins.

I told you at the beginning: I am not the best person to review this film. When you solve a film’s mystery even before it has begun, it becomes very hard to praise the film nonetheless. However, the film does not even work at the level where characters take on a believable nature, and we start to feel empathetic. The script is sketchy, the characters are overdone, and the mystery is inane. What is surprising then is the fact that this film has received a few good reviews here and there. I would have liked to see how Roger Ebert would have rated this; however, due to a broken hip-bone, he has not been able to do so. With a gesture of homage towards him, I will borrow a few of his famous words and say “This Movie Sucks!”
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

The Tracy Fragment(2007-08) by Bruce McDonald; Rating: 4 in 5

2008-06-01T15:02:00.000+05:30

“The Tracy Fragment” is a very demanding film; you would have to completely commit yourself to its cause. Most of you will invariably find it irritating. Some will say it is an unwatchable film. I will say it is a very brave and a pretty good film. I liked it; I was challenged by it. By now, you might be interested: why is it ‘unwatchable’ or ‘irritating’?

The movie not only follows a scrambled chronology and fragmented narrative (is that surprising anymore?), it uses split-screen on virtually every frame. The result is a challenging visual kaleidoscope: the viewer effectively faces as many as eight different images at once [watch the pictures here to get an idea]. It demands an active participation too: you would have to piece the fragments together and create a meaning out of it. It is undeniable that most viewers will not be prepared to face such a challenge; some will ask why they should even try. Well, I can give you an answer, it will be up to you whether you accept this or not. See, we all have different tastes of books, -- given a chance, some will read Dickens while I will read Joyce. Now, I cannot really criticize someone for choosing Dickens over Joyce (however, if one chooses Mills & Boons or Anne Rice over Joyce, I will accuse him/her of puerile taste); I can only tell him/her that he/she is missing something really great. Sometimes, to experience great things, you need to first cross difficult hurdles. It holds true to all art forms, including cinema. There are levels of film-watching: you have to graduate from one to another, just like school. You may refuse to try; the one that will lose out is you. However, a more relevant question is whether the film is worth that much of attention. This is a vital question, and we will come to that later.

Although “The Tracy Fragment” uses split-screen throughout its 77 minutes, it is not as maddeningly art-house as Andy Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” proved to be. It has a palpable story, characters, and events. The film is a cinematic monologue delivered by the protagonist, 15-year old Tracy Berkowitz (played by the one-and-only Ellen Page). The fragmented narrative and the split-screen technique are analogous to the literary strategy of Stream-of-Consciousness. The film does not differentiate between the truths from the lies or exaggerations Tracy is fabricating, and leaves the decision to the viewer. For example, Tracy’s parents seem a bit theatrical and too cruel to be true, but then, it might be the way Tracy is projecting them. Every image is subjective here; they can be interpreted in thousand ways. But, before we go any further, I will quote the gist of the plot from Wikipedia ------ “15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is naked under a tattered shower curtain at the back of a bus, looking for her little brother Sonny, who thinks he's a dog. Tracey's journey leads us into the dark underbelly of the city, into the emotional cesspool of her home, through the brutality of her high school (because she is flat-chested, everybody calls her “It”. ---Author.), the clinical cat and mouse games with her shrink and her soaring fantasies of Billy Zero - her boyfriend and Rock 'n' Roll savior. Her travels also put her in contact with the seedier inhabitants of the city. Like Lance, her would-be savior who ultimately puts her life in jeopardy. Tracey's stories begin to intertwine truth with lies, and hope with despair as we move closer to the truth of Sonny's disappearance.” I am quoting from Wikipedia here because it almost gives you no concrete inkling about what the film might be, whereas, I often tend to spoil a bit too much information here. The film is an adaptation from the novel of the same name by Maureen Medved (she wrote the script too). However, veteran Canadian Indy maverick Bruce McDonald makes something purely cinematic out of an evidently average teenage story. By his split-screen narrative strategy, McDonald, to a large extent, manages to eschew catharsis; what interests more is the movement of Tracy’s psyche than the tragedy of her life (as she herself is responsible for most of them). However, the biggest weakness of the film lies in its weak script.

Even the innovative narrative structure and brilliant acting fails to hide the paucity of good script material. The basic story is all too common, with embellishments typical of those teenager-y books that the young ones prefer so much. There are certain episodes in the film -------- like the episode with a crow, and where Tracy encounters a druggy woman who claims she has been robbed -------- that are completely unnecessary and not brilliant in itself. Some try to establish a completely uncalled-for and trashy sympathy for the main character. Evidently, these weaknesses stem from the script (can you deny a novelist who is also writing the script?); but, still by large, despite the occasional MTV-ish-ness, the film-maker manages to overcome such puerility through his cinematic narrative (didn’t Godard once say that bad novels are exceptionally good material for good cinema?). What we confront on the screen is a kaleidoscope of mental-images (not images of mental state, but an image that functions as explanatory conjunctions like “like”, “because”, “as” etc. A simple portrayal of mental state would have been affection-image or action-image) that reveals the complexity of psyche, the terrible game that goes on inside us between guilt and self-delusion. The film does not present a closured meaning, but offers us free interpretations. In this respect, this is an oppositional cinema that challenges the ‘let-me-tell-you-a-story’ tradition of classical Hollywood films. It is extremely brave in its oppositional nature; more films like this might mean the ultimate redemption from the despicable redundancy of contemporary mainstream films. It is a flawed film, but it is worthy of judicious applause and appreciation.

Another weak point is the ending. It is hard to end a film like this, and the ending does seem a bit simple, and quite inadequate. Again, we must blame the script.

There is something deeply obnoxious about this film. Except Tracy, almost every other character is blown a bit too large. A linear reading will come to the conclusion that the film fails to portray the characters believably. But look closely, and you will realize that whatever you are seeing is the projection of Tracy’s mind, tainted by her angst, frustrations, and attitudes. Nothing that you see onscreen is just what you see, but a hint at that thing that lurks at the background, that what is not on the screen. It is a game you have to play with this film; without the game, you will not grasp a thing. I truly enjoyed playing it.

The film is almost entirely shot with handheld HD and 35mm cameras; the color scheme is largely blue and gray, with a few, occasional bursts of orange and red. The wintry mise-en-scene is very, very bleak, so bleak that it might make your heart feel like a particularly heavy stone. The shooting for this film was done in only about 19 days, but the post-production (mainly editing) went on for nearly nine months! To achieve the kaleidoscopic effect, McDonald employed three editors who contributed their individual versions that were then integrated into the split-screen frames. The background score is especially worth a mention. Scored by the Canadian Indy rock group Broken Social Scene, the soundtrack features Peaches, The FemBots, Rose Melberg, and a particularly beautiful track by Patti Smith.

There are two things that work for this movie, --- the director, Bruce McDonald, and the lead actor, Ellen Page. I know I am repeating my statements here, and you might think I am a gormless fan of her, but Ellen Page is a frightening genius. She is only twenty-one, and already she has made at least three movies that stand their ground only because Page has triumphantly managed to carry them through (Hard Candy, Juno, The Tracy Fragments, and I have heard that she has given yet another amazing performance in the film “An American Crime”). I am challenging you; --- show me another actress in last ten years who has managed to accomplish what Page has managed to do. When most female actors look to do Hollywood teen comedies, and so-called soulful ones, she has bravely got into the world of Indy film-making, and has been creating strong, dynamic characters that go through the hell-est of hells. Even in Juno, I noticed something flinty, cut-off-thy-balls in her eyes; ----- it seems she is hell-bent on taking up the most impossible of challenges she can possibly find. Not aided by the evidently weak script, she puts every ounce of her soul into the character of Tracy. Watch her scowl, growl, curse, cry, deliver deadpan monologues, and watch how subtly she conveys anguished guilt. There is something of the young Brando in her: the sheer force of their performances is enough to take your breath away. No one can predict the vicissitudes of fate, but if she manages to go at this rate, she will surely be hailed as one of the greatest of all time. She is trying new things too; --- after this impressive bunch of angst-ridden teen characters, she has signed up to portray Jane Eyre, an obvious attempt to venture into more nuanced and understated acting. She is already by far the best actress of her generation, even when we keep in mind such talented ones like Natalie Portman and Julia Stiles. Hopefully, Hollywood would not be too ‘aroused’ by her; she is not a ‘beauty’ by any standards. Good for us.

This film opened the Panorama section of the 57th Berlinale, and it gathered mixed applause from critics at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is being distributed in USA by THINKFilms, and was released on May 9, 2008. “The Tracy Fragments” is also revolutionary in one aspect; right after its theatrical release, the film-makers released the rush footages of the film on the net so that viewers can download them and edit them into their own films. This is a first, and obviously it will meet a lot of paranoia from critics over-worried about authorship. However, I personally feel it is a great move, a truly brave move that acknowledges the importance of viewer participation in building cinematic narratives, and happily affirms the multiplicity of the medium. Truly, “The Tracy Fragments” is a worthy postmodern (I am using this word as a time-frame as well as an epistemological era) film, despite its faults. I am happy I have watched this film, and I will hope (however vainly) for more such brave and honest experiments.

I will award this film a 4, its weak points being the script, the conclusion, and slight slips that hurt.

In my previous entry, I was talking about the advent of a new genre. The significance of films like “The Tracy Fragments” lays in the fact that the filmmakers are finally liberating this genre from the iron grip of Hollywood. There is tremendous potential in this genre, and it might prove to be a refreshing change for world cinema (as I have commented before in the entry about “Elephant”).

In my next entry, I will be reviewing “Fracture” (Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling).
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Paranoid Park (2007) by Gus Van Sant; Ratings: 4 & 1/2 in 5

2008-05-31T03:12:00.000+05:30

"Dude, I don’t think I’m ready for Paranoid Park.”

“Hey, nobody is ever ready for Paranoid Park.”
-----PARANOID PARK, GUS VAN SANT.

If you are expecting plot, suspense, story, conclusion, analysis, curious dialogues, don’t ever watch Gus Van Sant. He eschews all narrative conventions that he thinks are redundant, and what remains is purely, dazzlingly cinematic. His recent movies ( “Gerry”, “Elephant”, “Last Days”, “Paranoid Park”) are pure cinemas, and cinemas that are unmistakably his own. America has seldom seen such a strong auteur film-maker in recent years, and it pays far less attention to his genius than what he deserves. Van Sant started as a major member of the Queer Cinema movement (“Drugstore Cowboys”, “My Private Idaho”), then had a brief and eventful foray at Hollywood, where he made one Oscar-winning film (Good Will Hunting), and managed to make an absolute shot-by-shot, angle-by-angle remake of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” that proved to be the most mordant joke anyone ever cracked at Hollywood’s practice of making remakes and so-called ‘adaptations’ (the studios and majority of the critics did not enjoy the joke at all; people with power are exceptionally touchy about their skins!). Predictably, Hollywood threw him out after that. What followed is the second phase of Van Sant’s film-making; taking a little something-s from a diverse array of influences ranging from Tarkovsky, Belá Tarr to Cinema Verité documentaries, he created a style permanently his own. His ‘Death’ trilogy (“Gerry”, “Elephant”, and “Last Days”) has been one of the major cinematic discoveries of the last decade. “Elephant” won the Palm d’Or at Cannes [for details, check the review of this film published on this blog]. “Paranoid Park”, written (loosely based on a novel), directed and edited by Gus Van Sant, is a companion-piece to “Elephant”. It has won the 60th Anniversary Award at 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Although not as overwhelming and major as “Elephant”, it is still a small, beautiful, and original film that almost forces its viewers into a hallucinating, tranquil trance.

“Paranoid Park” is visually stunning, and I am understating here. It has the barest minimum of a plot: in Portland, Oregon, a teenager, called Alex (played by Gabe Nevins), goes to a skateboard park called the “Paranoid Park” (which is the Mecca for all Portland skateboarders), meets a freight-train-hopping guy called ‘scratch’, takes a ride on a freight train, when a security guard intervenes, he hits him with the skateboard, which causes the guard to fall under a train and die. Coming from a troubled family where the parents are in the process of getting divorced, Alex faces his first existential problem: guilt. The film only studies that and nothing else (Police does come to know about it, but they never zero in on Alex; in fact, the police angle is only perfunctory). No one gets caught; no one comes to know about it, no catharsis, no conclusion. It uses real-life non-actor teenagers who really, for once, sound like teenagers. Dialogues are sparse: cinema talks through images. Alex goes through his voice-overs as if he is reading his creative writing project in front of a classroom, while he is actually expressing the innermost crisis of his life. Nowadays, many films use hop-scotch chronology and fragmented narratives just as a trendy fashion style (the Bourne films and “Crash” would be a good example); it makes the film look better than what it truly is. “Paranoid Park” is not one of those; its fragmentary and elliptical nature is the direct consequence of how Alex deals with his inner crisis: he sways and wavers, like the motion of a skateboard, facts and impressions come out in bits and pieces. Reminiscent of “Elephant”, Alex walks down the school corridors that look severely antiseptic with a lost look as if he is under a coral reef scuba-diving. In fact, the whole teenage experience in Van Sant’s films has the feel of an underwater life, ---- an original ambience of alienation I find subtle and breathtaking. Van Sant has a sympathy for these young men that transcends the boundaries of the teenager archetype, and gets him across the very dangerous waters (infested with squirming archetypes) of the teen-flick genre. He finds an unconceivable amount of depth within teenage boys who still wear elastic friendship bands!
Skateboarding is the major metaphor here; it is the teenage mimicry of the adult world. Throughout the film, we see various skateboarders performing tricks in front of an 8mm handheld camera: they are practicing the next, big steps. To the urban, cosmopolitan teenagers of Van Sant’s movie, adulthood is ‘high’, it’s ‘cool, dude’, its ‘paranoia’. There is an amazing sequence in the film that frames this with quaint humor. A police officer (played by Daniel Liu) talks to the skateboarders of Alex’s school to learn about the ‘skateboard’ community that hangs around the Paranoid Park. The officer repeatedly refers to it as the ‘skateboard park’ while the students rectify his mistake: it is “PARANOID PARK”. What looks like skateboarding to adults is in reality a paranoid ritual, the hyper-active, hyper-alienated oscillating mimicry of the futility of life. No one is ready for the Paranoid Park; life always shocks. The cool alienation of the teenagers is so intense and profound it might give you a chill. Van Sant’s world-view closely resembles that of Jean Baudrillard (at least I think so); he is one of the very, very few film-makers who can really feel the pulse of the post-modern situation. “Paranoid Park” is a landscape of the post-modern teenage alienation.

The film can be read in other ways as well; it alludes to the train-hopping generations of the old Great Depression days, it discourses on certain sexual politics. By being slow and introspective and by avoiding conclusive scenarios, it leaves a discursive space for the viewers, a time-&-space that enables us to think freely. There are many viewers who prefer a definitive and conclusive story instead; they should not feel proud of that, -- aesthetic backwardness, gullibility and pseudo-innocence are not virtues.

However, this is neither a prefect film nor a great one. There are hitches; the gory train accident scenario looks out of place, as if someone is trying to insert a Takashi Miike film within one by Ingmar Bergman. Despite its non-cathartic staunchness, the end effect feels a little too small, little too tame. It does not pack a hefty punch the way “Elephant” did. But then, small things have their own intrinsic values we often tend to neglect: Beethoven’s Sixth is by no means inferior to his Fifth or Ninth. However, when I compare it to such ‘small’ films as Kieslowski’s “A Short Story about Love”, it falls just a little short, feels just a little shallow. Then again, films like “A Short Story….” happens once in a blue moon; it is futile to expect such miracle every time. I am detecting these faults only because it comes from the hands of the man who made “Elephant”. For anyone else of lesser caliber, it would have been a resounding victory.
The music of the film is interesting, to say the least. Unlike the ascetic and minimalist score of his previous “Elephant”, here he throws the whole kitchen sink at us; he uses Beethoven symphonies, oldies, bluegrass, country, acid-rock, and an abundant amount of musical quotations from Fellini’s films (mainly from Nino Rota’s score for “Juliet of Spirits” and “Amarcord”). At first, I was shaking my head, “no, no, this is all wrong”. Yet, the music was simultaneously disturbing and arresting my attention. It took me a while to make sense of it: Van Sant is using it as a discordant note. He places a part from Beethoven’s Ninth right after playing a country song, and just about when you are on the verge of recognizing the symphony, he abruptly cuts it off. Watch that beautiful sequence where we see Jennifer (played by Taylor Momsen), Alex’s girlfriend, is being ditched by Alex; we see a close-up of Jennifer talking incessantly while the only thing we hear is a beautiful, French-like nocturne by Nino Rota. The satire is devastating; you have to see it to believe it. There are those quintessential Van Sant moments that are so profound yet completely inscrutable; watch Alex’s younger brother recount a part of a film verbatim to his brother. Watch the slow-motion shot where all the skater kids of the school stride down the hallway like a slightly unhinged, teen-age “Wild Bunch”. Watch the mesmerizing sequence shot with an 8mm handheld where the skaters skateboard at Paranoid Park. Watch the title scene: it has no direct link with the narrative, yet it is what the film is. If you can make sense of the first shot after watching the film, then, don’t worry, you have got the feel.

I will rate this 4 & 1/2 because it is a Gus Van Sant’s film. I am giving this a 4 & ½ because 5 is for “Elephant”.

2007 has been a great year for teen movies. With such commercial efforts like “Juno”, offbeat-s like “Tracy Fragments” (I’ll review this film next), and with such mature films like “Paranoid Park”, the teenagers are finally getting a depth they deserve in films. Who knows, may be we are watching the birth of a new genre here, the “Neo-Teen-Drama” genre. There is a possibility that the cosmopolitan hyperreality of our postmodern times is seeking its expression through these films. Films like “Paranoid Park” are ultimately significant due to this final reason, because there is no time more important than the present.
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy (2007); Rating: 4 & 1/2 in 5

2008-05-30T02:29:00.000+05:30

In recent decades, the film fraternity (forgive the word) has started to take the question of genre seriously. It signals good health: finally, we are out of the mist/mystery of the celluloid sheen. It means we are treating film-making as an exercise and not as a personal whimsy. Of course, our genre-awareness is a definitive product of our ever-increasing obsession with Hollywood, THE play-ground of genres and sub-genres. Very interestingly, genres came into existence almost always due to the financial “dark underbelly” of cinema as an art-form, but we will not get into that here; let us not digress. Within this area of genre, I often came across a nigglingly incommodious term: Neo-noir. Noir, as we all know, is an urban, American genre that used to rule the silver-screen during the 1940s and 50s. A perfect example of this genre would be Polanski’s “Chinatown”. Anyway. But what is “Neo-noir”? Is it a distinct genre? I never found any evidence to that. Is it a sub-genre? What exactly is “neo” about it? Deeply suspicious, I have always denied this term its existence; for me, it was always noir and that’s about it. Michael Clayton, the 2007 film made by debutant director Tony Gilroy, for the first time, has made me aware of the possibility of the existence of something called Neo-noir; -- that is my grateful indebtedness towards this film. However, I am still not flattered by the term; --- it does not signify a separate genre, or a sub-genre, it simply means that the essential requirements of the original genre, the Noir, is stripped down to the bare minimum. Out goes the detective, night chiaroscuros, femme fatales that always make the wrong choice; only the troubled masculinity, empowered (a very nasty word, but I am using it due to the lack of acceptable alternatives) women who always pay the price at the end. From that perspective, Michael Clayton is a perfectly executed Noir, and that’s no meager compliment: Noir is the mother of all “New Wave” cinema movements ever experienced by us.

Strictly speaking though, Michael Clayton is a legal/court-room thriller, a genre that has grown on John Grisham novels and Michael Douglass characters. At the centre of the narrative, there is this typical American pharmaceutical company named U-North that is facing a huge lawsuit filed by hundreds of small farmers who have been suffering from cancer due to the strongly carcinogenic content present in a certain U-North product. At the court, U-North is being represented by Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, one of the greatest law farms in the world. The case was being handled for six years by Arthur Eden (played by Tom Wilkinson), the senior-most and the most brilliant litigation lawyer and a partner of the farm. He is a manic-depressive and a close friend to Michael Clayton (played by George Clooney). Clayton is the “hidden ace” of the farm; he is the “miracle worker”. By definition, he is a janitor, but he is so great in his job, he can be compared to those too-famous-for-their-own-good heart surgeons: they all get cases with 5% survival probability! What exactly is Clayton’s job? Cleaning up the mess: a client hits a man on the road, he is there to clean it up with the police in ten minutes. He is a realist; he enjoys breaking the illusions of rich clients that they will be cooed and soothed for what they have done, they will be told they have “options”. He has ‘connections’ all over the country; he used to be an Assistant District Attorney during the eighties in Queens, New York. He has a big debt of 75,000 dollars he will have to pay within a week, and he is bust up to the wall, although he looks prosperous. Following a bad advice given by his alcoholic, druggy brother Timmy, he bought a restaurant that went up into smoke even before he could utter the word “restaurant”. He would not let it reflect on his brother though; he is determined to pay it back by himself. He has a dark side: he is a high-roller in poker played at a certain basement in Chinatown.

Arthur Eden is skipping his medication, and losing his grip on reality. During his six years of research on the case, he has gathered evidence of the tremendous crime U-North has been committing for years, the crime he is paid to protect from exposure. In his manic righteous zeal, he decides to go against U-North all by himself. While the testimony from a plaintiff was being taken, suddenly he starts to strip, offering his clothes to the plaintiff, whom he calls “perfect Anna”. U-North is horrified at this turn of event, and at the forefront of the reaction is Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton in her Oscar-winning role), the Chief Legal Advisor at U-North. In Arthur Eden’s briefcase, she finds something so incriminating that she realizes the future of the company, and with that, her own, is on the line. Thus starts the cat-&-mouse game; bodies pile up, cars get blown into pieces. Enough of the plot for now. You have to watch the film for that.

The first good news about this film: -- it is NOT a message film. I cannot describe my relief when I realized it is not so: there is absolutely nothing worse than a message movie. I would rather watch a B-movie than a message film. [Anyone with enough brains will be able to figure the reason of my repulsion out, but still, I will present a short explanation. The so-called ‘message’ is actually a ‘preferred reading’ films often force upon their viewers; it teaches us the ideology (most often and most obviously, it is “Love America”) of the ruling class, nation, or party. For example, Spielberg’s “The Terminal” ‘teaches’ us that, does not matter how much terrorism threatens and how barbaric the Americans really are, by mimicking the ‘eternal goodness’ of the Americans, everyone from the Third World can ingratiate themselves with the ‘civilization’ a.k.a America (hence, mirroring the politics of Frank Capra); his “Munich” clearly tries to revisit 9/11 (a signature American death drive/wish), while willfully obscuring the boundary between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a difference that enables him to keep his democratic position intact (and thus no becoming completely a Bush’s pet), while remaining American. Of course, all films carry, to different extents, the propagandas of the rulers; however, ‘message’ films do that without an iota of shame.] In fact, the corruption of U-North is openly shown from the very beginning; it is not a matter of revelation. The chief conflict in the film is between a powerful woman masquerading (have you seen anything more unabashedly masculine than Chanel suits?) as a masculine symbol succumbing to the dark sides of the power structure, and an equally powerful man, all too aware of the ruthless compromises, who is trying to go against the stream just this once. Femme fatale loses noir-man wins. However, as feminist critics have often pointed out, noir is a genre that exposes the weaknesses of masculinity more potently than almost any other genre. Should we read it as a film that ‘justly’ punishes the ‘wrong’ woman who tries to control masculine power; or should we read it as an exposure of the patriarchal corporate power-structure that forces a woman to ‘become’ a man and do its dirty business, and then ‘punishes’ her exactly for that? The film, clearly, can be read in both ways without using too much imagination. The responsibility of the reading will lie upon us, and not on the director; choice of the version is completely ours, and it will only expose our own hidden politics as a viewer. Those that will read it merely as a morality tale or as a thriller will do it at the peril of being exposed as a closet misogynist. The mise-en-scene is the true protagonist here: it is all about the inner ugliness of the patriarchal corporate structure.

Michael Clayton is the quintessential noir-man, sans low fedora and colts under armpits: his morality is not exactly top-notch (he does not show any qualms while covering up the road accident early in the film), he has troubled personal life, -- divorced, no girlfriend (apparently), trying hard to keep in touch with parenthood, loosing a lot of money because of a brother. He is not macho in any, even far-fetched, way; in fact, like a lots of corporate people, he is so cool that he looks and seems asexual. He is not in control of his life: his daily, expert dabbling with high-stake issues forces him to enjoy danger and risk in some small, albeit very harmful, way, by gambling away serious amounts of money. Like the noir-man, all he has is his job, the offices, leased Mercedes and Lear jets. There is one big, thwarted love in his life, a love that will finally become the crisis of his life: his friendship with the manic-depressive Arthur Eden (a hint at homosexuality? Clayton is closest and most personal with Arthur; in fact, one of his messages sound like the apology from a lover; also, eight years earlier, he had seen Arthur through his first attack of manic-depression). It is for Arthur Eden he puts everything on the line, although he does it still pretty reluctantly, only after his own life is threatened. Karen Crowder is the mirror-image here: what Clayton misses in life (being back in the litigation team), what he could have been, what he escapes from (being caught red-handed), what he truly does (play the ruthless game of percentages). As the name of the movie suggests, the film is also a character study, with no hero, or a villain.

The first big strength of the film comes from the script: it is trim, non-judgmental, terse, precise, without bravado dialogues while refusing to become drab; in short, effective. The script is written by the director himself, and he is a star scriptwriter; his scriptwriting credit includes all the three Bourne movies, Extreme Measures, Proof of Life, and Devil’s Advocate. As a director, however, it is hard to judge him by this debutante film. To his credit, he is economical, and prefers the classical slow tracking shots, understating the presence of the camera and thus heightening the tension between the characters. Working with the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit (“Syriana”, “Magnolia”, “Good Night & Good Luck”; I specially enjoyed the last one), he managed to create brooding establishing shots (one memorable one would be where Karen Crowder is introduced. We see Tilda Swinton sitting on the commode of a claustrophobic cubicle while she discovers that her shirt is wet with sweat at the armpit), perfect ambiances, color palettes, and hues that works perfectly in this film. I found the background score pretty run-of-the-mill though; James Newton Howard provides a score that barely manages to work fine. However, these do not prove the mettle of this director; we see no sign of a style or idiosyncrasies. For now, he is a competent ‘director’ but not yet a film-maker for me. Let’s hope he will not become another Ron Howard (before going to bed, I pray to God every night, “do anything to me, I’ll not mind, but please, please, don’t make me watch another “Da Vinci Code” again. I’ll not survive the ordeal!”). It is always better to be optimistic.

The best thing about this film is its acting and casting. The quartet, around which this movie revolves, ---- George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, and late Sydney Pollack---- gives brilliant performances. Switch these four, and the film will collapse. Tom Wilkinson, the veteran character-actor, portrays the manic-depressive Arthur with a tremendous gusto and unabashed, zany, manic incoherence; his performance is like the insane force we experience while listening to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. He has the difficult task of delivering long and precarious voice-overs, and he passes the exam in flying colors. Tilda Swinton, although unknown to Hollywood, has done enough work in British cinema to remain forever among the great British leading ladies (she was the fetish-star for late director Derek Jarman, one of major directors belonging to the queer cinema movement, and certainly a British great). However, Hollywood is famously incestuous; only after this film, let us hope, it will start noticing this brilliant actor. There is something unnerving in the way Swinton portrays Karen Crowder. She is a tremendous physical actress; her merest body movements will tell you the story, most of them will invariably give you a slight unease. Her low-key, sugary viper-voice is mesmerizing. She manages to make her character touchingly three-dimensional within very little screen-space: she manages to remain simultaneously steely, and twitchingly nervous within every single frame. She absolutely deserves her Oscar and many things more.

I am terribly late at reviewing this film; it has already become a thing of past. However, one of my intentions behind writing this review was to pay my tribute to the great actor, director, and producer Sydney Pollack, who has just died from cancer. In this film, Pollack plays Marty Bach, the head of the law farm, under whose direct orders, Michael Clayton operates. In this character, Pollack gives a strong, assured performance that will look authentic from miles away. Pollack as a director has never been an auteur in the true sense, but he has been an excellent middle-brow director who believed in that ancient Hollywood tradition of no-frills story-telling. He showed that honest middle-brow films like his “Out of Africa” and “Tootsie” can be quite as effective as Indies. Hollywood will sorely miss him; his dedication and involvement was complete, he never preached banalities, never left ‘messages’ through his films. With this Spielberg-Lucas-influenced Ron Howard generation, the ancient Hollywood tradition ------ starting from King Vidor to the Sydney Pollack-s of our days ------- of honest middle-brow story-telling is facing extinction. We would prefer a Sydney Pollack thousand times over a Spielberg or a Howard. Directors like Alexander Payne will, let’s hope, keep this tradition alive.

And, here at last, we come to George Clooney. Clooney is one of those tragic actors: horribly typecast by the industry, and having too big a persona to be not typecast by the studios, he is still desperately struggling to find original and challenging roles. After a few initial debacles, he has resolutely avoided typecast roles with one notable exception (the Oceans franchisee), acting in films like “Solaris”, “The Good German”, “O Brother, Where are Thou?”, “Syriana” etc. As a director, he has impressed me; although “Crash” took the Oscar home, “Good Night, & Good Luck” was, by far, the second best film of that milieu, coming second only to “Brokeback Mountain”, which is undeniably a great film and an exceptionally brave love story. Unlike other male heart-throbs, George is a thorough actor: he knows how to remain within the role and not become bigger than the character. There is a scene in the movie, where Clayton, at the crack of dawn, stops the car by a hill and sees three horses standing at the top of it. He comes out of the car, and slowly makes his way towards the horses. The scenario is precarious: it runs the risk of becoming horribly mystic (which would have ruined the noir suspense), or a mere vehicle that showcases the charm and charisma of the ‘big star’. While watching the scene, I was thinking what other big, Hollywood heartthrobs would have done with this scene. Brad Pitt, he would have invariably tried to show existential angst, looking broodingly eccentric and orgasm-generating-ly dangerous, chewing his nails, and then, suddenly, flashing his million-watt smile that comes right out of “Legend of the Fall” (Brad Pitt is a good actor, but he has become ensnared by his public image). Tom Cruise would have lit up the screen with his over-enthusiastic histrionics and dental brilliance (those teeth! My god, there are the worst thing that has happened to Hollywood since Stallone’s mumbling speech and Arnie’s Biceps!); Johnny Depp, although always unpredictable, is fundamentally too mannered to be a good noir-man. In George, we have a method actor good enough to to carry out such precarious scenes; if you are a student of acting, watch the dour face of Clooney during this scene, and learn what cinematic acting is all about: under-acting (you can also watch Gabriel Byrne in Coen Brother’s “Miller’s Crossing”, another tremendous example of the noir genre). If he had done one notch more, it would have become the worst scene of movie and marred the complete effect. I sincerely hope that the teenagers and tabloids will forget him quickly and, finally, he will be able to enjoy the status of a genuinely good actor.

Now, I must rate the film. Before I rate it, I must speak a word of caution here. In this page, if a film gets a 5 and another gets a 4 & ½, it does not necessarily mean that the first one is better than the second. I judge the film within its premises, its set expectations, its details, its genre, and its predecessors. When Todd Haynes is making “I’m Not There”, he is following the monumental examples of Frederico Fellini and others; I gave him 4 & ½ while comparing the film with those unforgettable ‘prefect 5’ films such as 8 &1/2.

I will give this film a 4 & ½. It is not exactly a great film, but it works very well within its limitations.

I started this article with Neo-noir; I will end at that note too. I am still flummoxed: what is Neo-noir? It seems to me to be a supra-disciplinary exercise. For example, this film is the exercise of the barest minimum specifications of the noir genre within the broad structure of the legal/courtroom thrillers. Similarly, Coen Bother’s brilliant film “Miller’s Crossing” (1991) is the exploration of the noir principles within the broad framework of the gangster genre. But is that it? That’s all? What gives this term the legitimacy to stand alone and distinct? What is so “neo” about it? I am still deeply suspicious of the term. If any of you have any input that can help me get the idea, please send it to me. That will be really helpful.
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Great Films:All About My Mother; by Pedro Almodóvar (1999)

2008-04-16T20:37:00.000+05:30

Pedro Almodóvar’s “All about My Mother” ends with this dedication:

"A Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider.... A todas las actrices que han hecho de actrices, a todas las mujeres que actúan y se convierten en mujeres, a todas las personas que quirren ser madres. A mi madre." [To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider….To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To men who act and become women. To all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.]

They represent the best short description of this film: it is about actresses, mothers, transsexuals; women in general.

Pedro Almodóvar is certainly the most famous son of La Mancha, Spain after Don Quixote. Son of an illiterate villager, and completely self-educated in the craft of film-making, Almodóvar is the proof of the miracle called cinema. His directorial career has been one roller-coaster ride, where he has succeeded to break down almost all the taboos imaginable, transgressed every norm of film genres. He is, by far, the most significant ‘women’s director’ alive and working among us: despite the plethora of women directors in the scene, none have achieved the extent of womanhood Almodóvar has encompassed as an Auteur. His films constitute the canon we must study to understand the ‘feminine position’ of our time. His films are replete with homosexual and transsexual characters, who, unlike the Hollywood stereotypes, are quite happy and well-placed within their own sexualities. His films exude a florid joyousness that is truly his own. But, enough of Almodóvar for now. Let us get back to the film. “All about my Mother” [Todo Sobre mi Madre, 1999] is arguably his most mature and poignant film to date that deals with womanhood, motherhood, sexual identity, and existence in general. It garnered more awards and honors than any other film in the Spanish motion picture industry; Almodóvar won the Best Director award at Cannes, the film won Best Foreign Language Film Award in the Oscars, and it was a surprise to everyone that Cecilia Roth, the lead actress of the film, did not win any awards at the festivals.

The film tells the story of a nurse named Manuela (Cecilia Roth) who works in Madrid and lives with her teenage son Esteban, who never knew his father, and wants to be a writer. One night after watching a stage production of Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Esteban is running after the car of Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), the actress who plays Blanche DuBois in the play, to get an autograph when he is hit by a car and dies. Manuela sees the accident and, despondent, leaves Madrid to visit her son's father, Lola, who is a transvestite and a prostitute in Barcelona, and inform him of the existence of the son he never knew existed. While in Barcelona, Manuela reunites with an old friend, a warm and witty transsexual prostitute named Agrado (Antonia San Juan), named so apparently because she wants to make everyone else’s life agreeable, chiefly by telling quirky jokes and giving blowjobs. She also meets and becomes deeply involved with Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a young, pregnant nun suffering from AIDS who has been impregnated by Manuela's ex-husband; and with Huma Rojo, the actress her son had admired. In typical Almodóvar fashion, the film moves through segments of unabashed melodramas, yet never losing the grip, never becoming cheap, and never overdoing the sorrow. It is almost magical to watch Almodóvar making these tight-rope walks again and again, and succeeding in making something that cuts still too deep. Almodóvar, in his use of melodrama, does not expose, but de-centers it, not allowing the narrative to reach its cathartic climax. The end result is a fragmentary landscape of human emotions that feels heart-rendingly sincere.

This is the second Almodóvar film I have seen; the first one was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios). Unlike the earlier hilariously funny, sarcastic, internationally acclaimed film, “All about my Mother” is far more serious in tone. I certainly liked this film more than the first one. The mise-en-scene of Barcelona, the color schemes, the theatrical interludes works almost damn perfectly. This is as perfect as such idiosyncratic film can get.

The mothers of this film are not like the American ones, dropping their children at school and making French toasts, wearing their veritable Joan of Arc faces like enchanted talismans. Here, motherhood is a desire, a source of light that breaks through tremendous amount of pain and suffering. There is something Beethoven-like in the way Almodóvar expresses the joyousness inherent in womanhood through layers of deep agony. Yet, his treatment is not that of Beethoven, it is rather Schubertian in texture.

Yet, what is even more present through his absence is The Father: in the film, Manuela’s son writes in his notebook,

“This morning I looked through my mother’s bedroom until I found a stack of photographs. All of them were cut in half. My father, I suppose. I have the impression that my life is missing that same half. I want to meet him; I don’t care who he is, or how he treated my mother. No one can take that right away from me.”

In Almodóvar, the father is the supplement, the absent presence that haunts everyone. Sometimes the father may seem to be an utopia, even, but in totality, Almodóvar manages to keep a very subtle balance. In fact, the greatness of Almodóvar lies in his almost inhuman sense of balance: balance between utopia and dystopia, between melodrama and its extreme opposite, between feminism and its opposite. Only if every one had the subtlety to be so!

Cecilia Roth is simply brilliant as Manuela; standing among many exceptionally well-acted female characters, her character seems to be the strongest, one closest to the heart of the film, yet vulnerable and fragile like any other mother going through the loss of a son. An actress of lesser skill and understanding would have overdid the sorrow of this character and marred the film; on the contrary, Cecilia manages to show the humor, the strength, the intelligence of the character within that realm of sorrow. In short, I have discovered here in Cecilia Roth, an Argentinean actress, an able actor of flawless potential. Early in the film, after Esteban, Manuela’s son, is hit by a car, we see Manuela running towards him in a perspective shot. It represents the most difficult and the most pivotal moment of the film: although treated in a conventional albeit technically brilliant manner, it conveys something so intimate and passionate that seems disturbing. It represents the precarious chance Almodóvar takes by placing utmost importance on the acting skills of actors. Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz, and Antonia San Juan, deliver tremendous salvos of acting prowess, creating rounded characters that not only carry the film, they create it. In our days, there is rarely another film director who puts such weight on actors' abilities.

There are many more things to be said about this film: it has the potential to be widely discussed in cinema study courses across the world. But that will entail more exposure of the plot, and that will mar the delicious exuberance of this film. It is a great film, a near-perfect film, I can say this without any hesitation; it represents the pinnacle of one of the most original directors of our time. Recently, the film has been adopted for stage in London; people are flocking once again to savor the marvel of this narrative. The film is available in India through pirated Penélope Cruz collections; if you get a chance, DO NOT miss this film. It will be an unpardonable sin.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

A DESPERATE CAUSE: AMERICAN HOMOGENIZATION IN FILM DISTRIBUTION

2008-04-16T04:43:00.000+05:30

What I write today is not an article or a review, but a desperate plea to the cineastes around the world. This is but a small, insignificant voice, and dreaming of any palpable result to come out of this would be an act of sad delusion. But, since, as a cineaste, I tend to experience a pang of conscience every now and then, I will, with little hope, try to expunge my misgivings. Please do not take it as an attempt to wash my hands off through words and persuasions: I am no Pilate, and my position is not so comfortable. I am only striving towards a small pocket of resistance in my own undersized, even ridiculous way against a dangerous trend of homogenization recently seen in the field of film distribution that will, in the long run, prove to be disastrous for films.

Even the most hard-core film enthusiasts tend to overlook the production side of a film. We do not realize how the success, and even more significantly, construction of the text of a film, depends on how it is produced, how it is distributed, when, and where. We tend to overlook the wide variety of tastes that exist across the apparently homogeneous region of America and Western Europe. The fact is, the Continental and the British film industry, to certain extent, has provided a niche for some of the most idiosyncratic and original film directors of Hollywood. Woody Allen acknowledges that he “survives” on European market:

“In the United States things have changed a lot, and it's hard to make good small films now……….. The avaricious studios couldn't care less about good films – if they get a good film they're twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500 million" [From a 2004 interview. See http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpa ges/0,6737,1278451,00.html].

Films of Woody Allen, Wes Anderson and others still exist and are being made because there is a culturally superior space called Europe. From a broad perspective, third world countries still strive to make good, personal films in hope for recognition from the European continent, especially from the festival circuit. It is these recognitions bestowed by the festivals that generate a small, niche market for such films. Of course, they can be criticized for such Eurocentric attitude, but we cannot deny the fact that we, as nations, generally fail to provide a market for such films. In short, without the European market, the existence of Iranian or East European films will be in terrible jeopardy. There is more in stake here than most of us can imagine: the whole phenomena of ‘cinemas’ depend on such markets. If they collapse, we will see only ‘cinema’ the way personal computers mean Windows and Microsoft to us.

By now, I might have made you impatient. So, what exactly is this story about? It is about a Hollywood attempt to break down such distinct and individual markets, and create one big, shopping-mall-&-Christmas-movie market throughout the world. I agree that this is an old story that has been going on for some time, but now it has reached an acute stage never experienced or imagined before. Let’s start with some examples.

From January 1, 2007, United International Pictures stopped functioning in 15 key countries across Europe. What is UIP? UIP was established as a European film distribution conglomerate by Paramount, Universal, MGM, and United Artists in the year 1981. It might sound strange that three of the major, fiercely competitive Hollywood powers had agreed to work together, but their reasoning was sound and simple at the time. Before the Age of Digitals ---even before the faxes were efficient—maintaining a distributing office in Europe was costly. They needed expertise to judge the pulse of the European cine-going audience. For these, and other practical reasons, such as, dollar exchange rate, they launched UIP. For last twenty-six years, UIP has been distributing American films in Europe. Its distributing choices have been according to the European taste, where a Sylvester Stallone movie has less chances of achieving the same scale of success it generally achieves in the States. They also distributed niche films from Europe as well. Now, both Paramount (with its acquisition of DreamWorks in 2006) and Universal feel (with MGM being sedate for quite some time) they no longer need such an operation. Both the companies have already opened their branches in the Continent, releasing films simultaneously in USA and in Europe. The logic is simple: since the overseas market is the biggest income-source for Hollywood studios at this point, why not try to hit as many targets as possible with one, big publicity campaign? We are not far from seeing a “Paramount Asia”, or a “Universal India”, but the problem is, they will only be “Universal” or “Paramount” a la United States only.

It does not look all that scary at first glance, does it? You need to look deeply then, mate. Ever heard of something called ‘cult films’? They are typically films that got panned by the audience at first, but then, slowly but steadily, through peer-to-peer recommendations, they got known, seen, and appreciated. With this uniformity in film distribution and release, such peer-to-peer recommendations go down the drain. With several hundred prints opening simultaneously at major locations of the world, movies will have only a week to prove themselves. Have enough glitz and spectacle in the movie, or land in the scrapheap with the speed of an unfortunate asteroid. This spells doom for small films, risk-taking etc. Without big movers backing a film, there is no future in experiments any more. Now, does it look scary? This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Let us read between the lines. What gives the confidence to these studios to directly handle a potentially alien market, such as, Europe? I think there are sufficient signs in the market to convince the studio Moguls that the European market has become similar enough to the classic USA market to risk such a venture. Hollywood, for some time now, has been as closed and as make-belief an eco-system as Disneyland or Wal-Mart is. Hollywood, by a thumb-rule, works on the lowest common denominator, seeking out the surest and drabbest movies of all. What is truly scary is the fact that audiences throughout the world are demanding such drabs with alarming intensity now-a-days. This is the debilitating disease of cultural globalization: it has the omnipotent power to glamorize the lowest dregs human civilization has ever had the misfortune to produce. Jean Baudrillard must be nodding up there in heaven, saying “I told you guys. You didn’t listen”. We never listen. Not until it is too late.

Like any other art-form, cinema is thwarted by homogeneity. It is the death of all art-forms. Yet, because Cinema is more market-oriented than any other art-form, it runs the risk of becoming homogeneous all the time. Thus, film criticism has a bigger role to play: it has the imperative duty to construct taste. Taste is about difference and diversity. Without a niche out there in the market where such differences can flourish, there can be no future to cinema as an art. Yet, such niches are detrimental to the economic aspirations of a big producer. A producer does not need many ‘small’ films, he needs a Jurassic Park, so unlike a film that show it at a science show, and kids will believe it’s a school project! This conflict between commerce and art has been going on for ages, and the burden lies on the audience to decide which side he/she is on. We live in a radically dangerous age, where every image we see on the TV, every word we read on the web can be propaganda to render us into Wal-Mart shoppers, big-film worshippers, tasteless zombies looking for spectacular voids. The whole communication system is such a huge ideology-proliferating machine that we fail to realize it is so. It is immensely difficult for us to distinguish such snares, and still crave for diverse tastes. We must be paranoid about accepting any 'given' truth on its face value. The onus is on us.

Big studios don’t need differences, they can simulate them. They will tell you that their film is not a run-of-the-mill action film because it has a ‘humanitarian message’, and you will gobble it up gladly! There are enough indications around us to prove this to be the truth, and not some wishful nightmare. Studios have been trying to infiltrate the Indian film market for quite some time now. Indian film-makers have been vying for such attention: the Sanjay Gupta-s of Bollywood are making films that can be sold as American B-movies without much dubbing. Once the studios start controlling our market, we will seldom see films like “Manorama 6 Feet Under”, “Mitthya”, and “Swaas” etc. No one will take such risks. Elite film-makers such as Belá Tarr and Buddhadeb Dasgupta-s will retain their positions: they are specialized and elite enough to not disturb the globalizing process. In fact, cultural globalization needs such film-makers to simulate a prop to prove that ‘difference’s within the film market still exists. It is the Woody Allen-s, Gus van Sant-s, Sudhir Mishra-s who will forced out of the business.

Still, there is a hope, small, but not yet impossible. The sheer bulk and repressiveness of such global homogenization creates pockets of resistance at the fringes. Video films, independent animations (as shown in Japan), B-films contain the germ of this resistance. Subtle subversions of the studio rules by great and brave film directors from Hollywood (like the Coen Brothers) contain the germ. As a film audience, we must keep our faith in such marginal efforts, such ‘virus’es, such subversions. Subversions are our goal. Margins are our homelands. If we fail to recognize the necessity of doing that now, the future will be bleaker than imagined in psychedelic nightmares.

For this article, I am greatly indebted to Nick Roddick of Sight & Sound; it is his regular column "Mr Busy" that made me aware of what was happening to UIP, and set my thoughts on the run. For his article, see Sight & Sound, June 2006, page 12/6.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Juno by Jason Reitman (2007); Rating:5 in 5.

2008-03-30T02:38:00.000+05:30

"As boyfriends go, Paulie Bleeker is totally boss.He is the cheese to my macaroni. And I know people are supposed to fall in love before they reproduce, but....I don't think normalcy is really our style."
Juno Mcguff, the last monologue from the film "Juno".

"Juno" is simply the brightest film about a teenager I have ever, ever seen. Anyone with nominal conversational skills, don't watch this movie, because it can give you a frightful, sinking feeling in your stomach, which, in reality, will be a huge, massive attack of inferiority complex. And, anyone wishing a nice, little teen movie is up for a real surprise here. You know, I cannot even get serious about it yet, I am just so freaked-yanked-bombed out of it. It's one freaky big Martian hoopla put always sunnyside-up.

This movie transcends the limits and the very notion of teen movies in a dazzlingly positive way. This is the other side of films like "Elephant", "Paranoid Park", and "Election", which succeded to do the same, albeit "through the glass, darkly", so to speak. It is hard to imagine a teen movie being original; we are so accustomed to familiar scenes, facial expressions, boy groops, sorority sisters et al. Yet, "Juno" effortlessly moves out of that planet, and creates something exhilarating. And the first and foremost thing that works for this movie is it's dialogues.

The original screenplay for this film is written by Diablo Cody, a ravishing-looking ex-exotic-dancer-turned-scriptwriter. I have known her as one of the best bloggers out there before her script-writing days; her "Pussy Ranch" blog was something worth going back again and again. She brings her own, straight-for-the-punch humor to the dialogues. This film is really about dialogues. Take them out, change them an iota, and the movie will be gone. American films, well, a certain type of American films, have already taken the craft of "American" script-writting to a very high level. This film is the culmination of all those fabulous dialogues by Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, the Marx brothers, and many more. This is the first of her scripts to be filmed, and she has already won an Oscar. We will wait anxiously for her next efforts, but I have a sinking feeling that hers will be the case of Charles Dickens and "Pickwick Papers". Let us hope she will prove us wrong.

The medium of film is simply brutal towards people who overdo a thing on screen. If the director of this film (Jason Reitman) had tried to show some of his "craft" to prove his virtuoso talents, this film would have been a spectacular ruin. The credit of the film-maker as far as this film is concerned lies in the fact that he continuously underplays the role of a director. The camera remains neutral, unnoticed, and lets the dialogues do their work, take their own life and do their tap-dances. Also, this film has one of the finest title sequences I have seen in a long time.

Oh, and now, let's talk about the acting. Ellen Page is FRIGHTENINGLY BRILLIANT as "Juno". She is the next great thing in Hollywood for me, and I am ready to put my pants on fire to prove that. She, and Julia Stiles, are the next two women to watch for; a bit like Dianne Keaton and Mia Farrow. I am not going to describe even the smallest parts of this film, as it has become kind of a sacred entity for me, but I can tell you this. Ellen Page is as inevitable in this film as Marlon Brando was in "Last Tango in Paris". And that's the highest compliment I ever pay to any actor. J.K Simmons is perfect as Juno's father, Mac Mcguff. Jennifer Garner as Venessa delivers a surprisingly genuine performance. See this movie only to watch Eleen Page again and again. She looks like the "Actor's Studio for All Teen-age-Movie Acting Aspirants". She is encyclopediac in her role.

The music works brilliantly, working as a major 'misce-en-scene'. The film is so bright that it will hurt somewhere inside, if you still can feel a thing. Thankfully, this is not a 'Catharsis' movie, and it diligently avoids all the emotional pitfalls conceivable in such a film. "I'm Not There" was for me the best movie of 2007, but this is the most surprising movie of last year. I cannot help but give it a five. And, it should have won more Oscars. At least Ellen Page should have.
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

The Counterfeiters by Stefan Ruzowitzky[2007]; Rating: 1 in 5

2008-03-15T14:25:00.000+05:30

I said “slap me thrice and hand me over me momma” when, after watching this film, I recalled it is Austrian by birth. This is a stinkingly American film. It valorizes, eulogizes, extols, lauds, and sings “Ave Maria” to all possible clichés Americans, oh! so like about Nazi atrocities. How many films have you seen about concentration camps? From the early “Young Lions” to our veritable “Schindler’s List”, there is one and only predominant cliché about the Nazis: they were a mass of extreme psychopaths with an insatiable appetite for unexplainable cruelty. A complete society and race of Buffalo Bills and Tooth Fairies. And no one even remotely as interesting as Hannibal the “Cannibal”. Have you ever seen a movie from America that takes the pain to criticize Nazi ideology? The concept of genetico-racial superiority? Have you ever seen the broad picture? All you have seen are either psychopaths, or reluctant humans forced to go against their “conscience”, and of course, the win of the good one. Catharsis to the point of “Puking Pastille” [I thank J. K. Rowling for the phrase. It is one of her very few noble deeds]. You want to know, why is it so? I will tell you the reason: America has not yet come into terms with the reality of the Nazi era. In fact, a large and predominant part of the American society believes in some of the most fundamental Nazi ideologies: Genetico-racial superiority, belief in super-humans (if you don’t believe this, then you have not watched “Rambo”), belief in being the core of the world (have you watched their ‘World Series’?), and over all, a middle-class peasant political elitism that exhibits a violent, and self-righteous bigotry towards every other class. Hence, America cannot afford to criticize the politics of Nazis. And what else were the Nazis other than a political organization trying to make itself the society? As a result, all you see are faux-documentaries, and human tragedies that are blanker than blank. Still, I understand the American Dilemma, and kind of tolerate it. But when a director from a country physically and metaphysically abused by Nazi ideology reiterates the same void craps, it seems to be an act of abominable sacrilege. This movie tastes like a bowl of “two-minute” instant noodle. If you have seen your films seriously, you will be able to predict every forthcoming sequence without troubling your mind. It is a blatant copy of American concentration-camp films. Predictably, it won the Oscar. That has enabled me to re-discover my faith in Oscar.

The film centers on a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch (played by Karl Markovics), who is used in an operation to create lots of fake dollars and pounds by his old apprehender, Friedrich Herzog (played by Devid Striesow, and the spelling is not a mistake) at a Nazi concentration camp. The rest of the film can be guessed by anyone other than zombies: the guy Solomon becomes a copy of the character played by Sir Alec Guinness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”; he starts to compromise with everything and tries to survive. Bluh, bluh. There were potentially good sections in the film that remained under-developed: at the beginning and the end of the movie, we see Solomon, after the war, playing extravagantly at a casino. The character of Herzog had brilliant potential: he is an opportunist who happens to wear the Nazi swastika, and believes he will be “handling humans” after the war. I am amazed they never foresaw the potential of a film where a gambler and a crafty bureaucrat meet and we discover that the gambler was the prisoner of a concentration camp, where the bureaucrat used to be the jailer. Someone like Michael Mann would have done exactly that. But we are talking about lesser humans here. Frankly speaking, I am flabbergasted with these routine “Nazi” movies. And, like salt over wound, it uses one of the most disgusting cliches of contemporary cinema: jerky hand-held cameras, as if making a faux-documentary. It seems that the film fraternity has completely forgotten the characteristics of the genre called mock-documentary. it was the last thing, as a viewer I needed. Enough was enough.

I will instead give you a bigger picture. There is this lovely little 1969 comedy called “If it’s Tuesday, This must be Belgium” [Give me that lovely early morning bedroom romantic sequence with beautiful Suzanne Pleshette (the girl from “The Bird”, remember?) anytime, any day, in film or in life, I will lap it up gladly]. In it, there is this pair of couples in the film, one American and other German. Both the husbands use to brag about “the war” absurdly. The American part is at least true. The World War II is their moment of greatest glory, the point when they reached “humanity”; it is their counter-balance to their mass-inferiority complex about not having a racial tradition. It is the war when they became the messiahs of all the free men. They need such movies to boost their egos. I am not American; I don’t want to be one too. I do nod such craps. Not anymore.

This film is disgusting not because it is made by the worst director and the worst script-writer ever, but because it makes mockery of the medium of thought called film. Film is as much a medium thought as literature is. Anyone who insults that, anyone who treats like a piece of Weekly Easy-to-make Recipe for Tomato soup, deserves to be vilified to the limit. I demand a minimum level of intelligence from a creator, especially when he is pretending to be discoursing about “serious” matters. This film does not have that quality. It will get a 1 from me.

If you want to see a good film, and if you are downloading torrents (legal, or illegal, its up to you. It has nothing to with me), then try downloading Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park”. In him, we find a great director at the peak of his creative prowess. Twenty years from now, he will be counted as a creator critical to the development of contemporary cinema; his films will become standard canon at any film studies department. So miss at your own risk. And, if you are a devotee of Western Classical music, and also like romantic films, watch “The Competition” (with Richard Dreyfuss and Miranda-ish Amy Irving) on Sony Pix. The music and the characters will get to you.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Hitman (2007) by Xavier Gens. Rating:1/2 in 5

2008-03-10T16:37:00.000+05:30

The year 2007 has been exceptionally productive, as far as films are concerned. That enabled me to have one of my longest-running orgies of sheer audio-visual pleasure, which was exhilarating and dolorously sinful, I swear. Well, friends, that uninterrupted run has come to an end, due to two of the most fiendishly abominable films ever. I am kind of very glad to tell you, one of them is an Oscar-winner. La-dee-dah! Oscar has not changed! But I will come to that Oscar-winner later. This one here is about a 2007 action thriller based on the popular computer game “Hitman”. The film, predictably, is also called “Hitman”. The film is stupid, unimaginative, routine, badly made, badly acted, and badly conceived. If the director, Xavier Gens, goes on this rate, he will be a good company for Ed Wood [unanimously tagged as “World’s worst director ever”] in hell.

This film is a publicity campaign for bald guys. It tells you how heroic, blood-thirsty and yet sexually innocent they can be; it reassures you that a girl need not fear that a bald man will “do it” to her even when she sits naked on his lap. How reassuring! If a bald man feels like suing Fox after that, I will donate to his court expenditure fund gladly! The film starts with a long sequence with a kind of mushy-mushy spiritual hymn going on at the background, where loads of very good-looking children get their heads shaved and a bar-code tattooed at the back of their head. It might remind you of ISCON, and, of course, pedophilia. A website says that this sequence is taken from the TV serial “Dark Angel”. May be, I don’t know. It is ostensibly an explanation for the shaved head of the hero [Timothy Olyphant]. What is amazing is that all those guys up there making these crap-shits can even dare to think that viewers will give a damn about their over-zealous and under-imaginative explanation for, you know what, A SHAVED HEAD WITH A BAR CODE! The hero, Agent 47, is the greatest killer on the planet. He is sexually frustrated. His educational credits are solely made of his readings of cheap magazines where they advice men on the art of seduction. I have a suspicion that you can possibly shoot him straight through his head, and he will not be killed; he cannot have got more than an ounce of brain. He makes people eat a pound of C4 and send them into offices in Africa as human bombs. Yet, he is so stupid that he forgets to cut their tongues off so that they cannot tell on him! And, the Human Bombs, very conveniently, forgets to take an enema or a stomach pump! He can walk barefoot, and when he steals from a showroom, people fail to see him. Blah, blah, yeah, yeah. And, this was very interesting, he is a member of a group of similar “Hitman”s [all with shaved heads] who do not fight between each other with automatics, but short samurai swords. That is supposedly quite honorable. There is a fight sequence in the film where 5 or 6 Hitmans fight with each other; it is the dumbest action sequence I have ever seen. The scriptwriters who came with this idea should be awarded the Darwin Award for endearing stupidity. Unfortunately for us, the prize is only posthumous. Then there is this arch-nemesis of our hero [Dougray Scott], an Interpol agent, who relentlessly shadows him. Unfortunately, instead of playing “Cops and Robbers”, they really play “Who’s the Dumbest?” between themselves. And, aha, there is a woman [Olga Kurylenko], because otherwise there would not have been a woman. She displays her gorgeous body almost all the time; seem to have an allergy towards clothing; and her only wish, dream, desire, ambition and whatever-else such woman may foster, is to get fucked by the hero sore. Fine. I love sex scenes. But can you imagine what happened next? Seconds before consummating his first “you-know-what”, the hero injects the girl unconscious. Still fine. I like homosexuals too. But no, this guy is not attracted to a hunk, a horse, a dog, or even a lamp-post! Throughout the film, I was shouting at the screen: GIVE ME ONE INTERESTING FRAME AND I WILL FORGIVE YOU! They did not give me the chance. This film is far worse than a video game.

Salvador Dali once said “the guy who first said “your cheeks are like a rose” was surely a poet. The guy who repeated it was the sorriest ass ever seen talking.” Our world of film is unfortunately filled with such sorry asses, like all the people involved with this film (which includes Luc Besson). They have the habits of last-minute students who memorize essays from last-minute suggestion books. This film is like that half-burnt chocolate cake made by a fourteen-year old, who happened to have discovered the cookbook for the first time. It is even worse, it even lacks the enthusiasm. If one collects the cans of its rolls and dumps them at the Mariana trench, he/she will be doing an act of proper charity.

Some may say that it is a futile wish to find a mainstream action movie to be good cinematically. I absolutely disagree with that. Structurally, this genre has given us brilliant attempts [Bourne films, Blade Runner]. Some of them have been applauded by everyone [La Femme Nikita, Leon], some of them had a quirky intelligence and humor to them [The Last Action Hero]. All it needs are understanding, intelligence, and sincerity. But Hollywood never believed much in those. Some say that Fox has interfered with the shooting of this film, and toned down the violence. I don’t think violence can help this movie. Even with a lot of violence, this movie would have been the zilch it already is. This will prove to be a disappointment for the gamers as well, as it completely lacks the edge and movement of the game.

This is an abominable film. I give it a ½ out of pity that verges on self-disgust for watching this.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

I'm Not There by Todd Haynes. Rating:4 & 1/2 in 5

2008-03-09T03:33:00.000+05:30

If you want me to tell you what this film, “I’m Not There” is all about, I can’t. Because the film itself ain’t straight. It is about what Bob Dylan had been, could have been, should have been, shouldn’t have been, and may have been. Towards the end of the film, Jude Quinn (played by Cate Blanchett), an incarnation of 60’s Dylan at the top of fame and controversy, says: “yes….chaos, clocks, watermelon…it’s everything”. That’s the closest one can get to describe this film in a sentence.

There are six incarnations of Bob Dylan in this film; two of them (depends on how you count), Jack Rollins/Pastor John (played by Christian Bale) and Jude Quinn, are biographically and behaviorally partially similar to Dylan; others are, at best, reflections and, at worst, refractions of his character [I am not using the words “best” and “worst” as value judgments here]. Among them is a black child who fraudulently calls himself Woody Guthrie (played by Marcus Carl Franklin) ---an act of homage by the director---; carries a guitar that says “This Machine Kills Fascists” [a tag the real Guthrie used to keep on his guitar], hitchhikes the length and breadth of American railroad, ends up meeting the real Guthrie in a hospital, and is a state fugitive (for unknown reasons) in reality. There is this perpetually bored-looking guy who faces an interrogation team (it seems) and calls himself Arthur Rimbaud (played by Ben Whishaw), who talks about anything and everything, and does it with dazzling smartness [“I accept chaos…..I am not sure it accepts me”]. Then there is Robbie Clark (played by Heath Ledger), a “James Dean, Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac, all rolled into one”, who acts in the role of Jack Rollins in a Hollywood film “Grain of Sands” and becomes an instant hit, who is as erratic and as difficult in his marriage with his wife, a French painter, Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) as Bob Dylan the divorcee; the film goes through their love affair [“and the cat across the roof, mad in love, scream into drainpipes”] that stays as long as the Vietnam war, and at the end, Robbie, most probably, dies. The strangest of all incarnations of Dylan is played by Richard Gere, who really is Billy the Kid [ the only semblance of a reason given that explains why Billy the Kid can be Dylan’s incarnation is this dialog “we hadn’t spoken in a long while...I think he was involved with someone...actually...he said something to me on the phone about angels hanging out of buildings, which was frightening....I thought he was hallucinating...that's the last I heard....it was like what people say about Billy the kid...that he really just dodged the bullet and went on dying....and Jack, he always loved Billy the kid..], only older, who lives near a town called Riddle, where Giraffes and Unicorns roam across the American grassland; Billy faces his old arch-enemy, Pat Garrett (played by Bruce Greenwood), and defeats him, seemingly. Then there is Alice Fabian, played with deceptive effortlessness by Julianne Moore, who very clearly is Joan Baez, there is Allen Ginsberg, all the four Beatles, a model named Coco, harlequins, jokers, mimics, masked men, carnivalesque crowds, miners, passengers from tubes, paranoid reporters, hobos, Americans looking like period pieces, Lyndon Johnson proclaiming “ Its not yellow, its chicken”, etc etc. Do you get the picture? Of course you don’t. Like any good film, it cannot be expressed through words; it eludes literature. Major portions of the film is made like a mock-documentary; the part with Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) is a honest and strong reference to Fellini’s 8 & ½ (in black & white); and there are freeze frames and captions accompanied by rapid gunshots, which is again a clear allusion of Jean Luc Godard’s “Masculin Feminin”. The storylines are shot in different film stocks and styles. The scenes featuring Woody Guthrie, Robbie Clark and Billy the Kid are in color. The scenes involving Jack Rollins/Pastor John are shot on 16mm color stock, and are framed as a documentary with interviews from people who knew him describing his transformation. Arthur Rimbaud's scenes are shot on very grainy black and white stock. Finally, there is an abundant array of wonderful Dylan songs (many of them sung by Dylan himself) that work like a harmonic twin to the visuals. Altogether, it is an unusual film. In fact, although this is a film from USA, this movie is the grandson of that past cinematic moment where Nouvelle Vague and Frederico Fellini met. This is a European film, mate, and of the highest quality. Do you ask anyone, “What is it all about, Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou”? Do you ask, “Give me a synopsis of Fellini’s “Amarcord”? You will not dare, because you know that’s stupid and irreverent to the craft of film-making too. If you understand that part, you must not ask what this film is about. At the final judgment, this film is about films. You have to see it to know what it is all about. I am done with telling the story. Now I will tell you what I felt about the movie.

This movie has nailed Bob Dylan, precisely because it refuses to nail him down. The inanity of conventional Hollywood biopics like “Ali”, “Aviator”, lies in their futile attempt to create a private “human” out of celebrities; as a result, we see them crying, fucking, shitting in their pants, and ending up being the greatest hero of the humanity. No one dares to explain what we saw, what we heard, what we felt. This film does not try to portray humanity, it does not even pretend to believe that the phenomenon of Bob Dylan can be explained or even shown consistently through just one persona. That is the first hypothesis on which this film stands: “there he lies. God rest his soul.... and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness...and his phone numbers. There he lay--poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity; nailed by peeping tom...who would soon discover (Cate Blanchett--the problem is like a naked person) even the ghost is more than one person...”. Even the ghost of Dylan is more than one person. The film-maker took a risky decision in opting for six different Dylans; it proved to be a brilliant one from a true experimental formalist. At the end, there is not a single mention of Bob Dylan in the film, but he is everywhere; you might try to pin him down scene by scene, but then, he is just not there. The film is about the real Dylan because it refuses to essentialize a singular Dylan, and forget about all his anomalies, contradictions, betrayals. The film gets him where he is not. Dylan is there where he is not. Find it paradoxical? That is the first clue to psycho-analysis. We can consider this film to be a psycho-analysis of Bob Dylan. A brilliant psycho-analysis at that.

With this film, director Todd Haynes has established himself as a true “Auteur”. This is the first film I have seen of him, and I am terribly impressed. He shows his inheritance of Fellini and Godard with a frank show of strength that astounds. Any director of lesser skill, imagination or confidence would have made a complete frothing mess out of it. Now, here I must caution you people. There are and will be negative reviews about this film that will say “It is incoherent, tangled”, “art-house stuff”, “lacks a coherent storyline”, “it is cerebral and obscure”, “it does not illuminate Bob Dylan” [Illuminate! What a JOKE!!], etc. They are all true. I prefer this film this way. I do not want to see a “coherent” Bob Dylan who notoriously was never so. If you want straight lines and coherence, don’t watch this movie. Do not watch those great films of 60’s from France and Italy. Do not read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Do not watch Picasso, do not watch Jackson Pollack. They are all incoherent, lack unified meaning, they are often deliberately obscure, they are all art-house. Then the greatness of art-forms is not for you.

I will give you a solution that make you understand the film better: whenever you find yourself plagued by the “incoherence” of the film, whenever you ask yourself “what does it mean?”, ask instead that famous counter-question asked by Dylan himself: How does it feel? How do you feel?

“I’m Not There” is not only a biopic of many Dylans, or Dylan as an idea, it is a film about his world, his influences, and his thoughts. It is a film about Dylan’s, and consequently Woody Guthrie’s, America. It is a film about the history of film-making. This film can be seen as an attempt to answer that unanswerable question Jean-Pierre Laud’s character asks in Godard’s “Masculin Feminin”: “Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Bob Dylan?”. It can be taken as an attempt to relocate Fellini’s 8 & ½, or to reinvent it. It can be seen as a critique of those linear documentaries about Bob Dylan. It is something more as well, something I still haven’t discovered yet. May be I will when I watch it for the fourth time. I am afraid the students of Cinema Studies are going to be very busy writing dissertations on this one.

A film of such extraordinary intellectual complexity would have been dull without humor. Fortunately, the film retains the bitter, oblique humor of Dylan all the way through. Did you observe how many times I have a quoted a dialogue from the film? That is because I am in love with this film’s dialogs. They are sharp, moody, Dylan-ish, often very funny, and brilliant.

Yet, after all that, this film would not be standing on its feet today without such brilliant actors. I am particularly bowled out by Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire. She is as perfect in the role of Claire as Vivian Leigh was as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; she is a particularly strong-willed butterfly perpetually wounded. Christian Bale is spot on in his imitations of Dylan; there is a very thin line between imitating and monkey-ing someone, both Bale and Kate Blanchett manages to go deep into their characters even when imitating Dylan accent-by-accent, flinch-by-flinch. Late Heath Ledger, as always, went uncannily deep into his character. So deep in fact, it scares a little. And, of course, there is Cate Blanchett’s performance.

What Cate has done in this film is stuff of legend. Her acting in this movie has taken the craft of acting to a new level altogether. She is a neurotic, caustic, amphetamine-saturated character, a dazzling bundle of flinching nerves with an unpredictably ambivalent attitude towards everything. She takes a roll down the hill with the Beatles, cavorts with a model named Coco, and desperately tries to avoid a paranoid reporter from BBC. Cate follows Dylan so closely that some viewer might just sit back and mutter in discomfort, “Isn’t she crossing the line? Is she allowed to go that close? Is anyone allowed to go that close?” She unveils a pleading, feminine, insecure quality in Dylan’s rage that, I never suspected, was there, inherent in him. Cate Blanchett’s acting in this film should be equated with Orson Wells’ in “Citizen Kane”, Marlon Brando’s in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, or, in “Last Tango in Paris”.

The cinematography of Edward Lachman is cerebral, spot-on, and often dazzling. So is the editing.

Director Todd Haynes has won the Special Jury award at Venice for this film. He should have got the Golden Lion as well, which went to Ang Lee for his “Lust; Caution”.

I am not going to give this film a 5. That does not mean this is not a great film. I am deducting this ½ point as a gesture of optimism. I expect even better things to come from Todd Haynes. I am saving up my perfect 5 for that. Also, great films like this need a little time to gain their true stature. Just like good wine. So let’s say I am waiting for this film to decant a bit. I am not sure this is a perfect film; there is almost nothing to compare it with. May be five years from now, I will accept defeat and give it a 5. For now, I will remember it as an extraordinary film that proved to be a resounding slap over the cheeks of those ruddy little biopics Hollywood puke out in the market every year. I will remember it as 2007's best film.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

GREAT FILMS: ELEPHANT(2003) BY GUS VAN SANT (WINNER OF PALME D'OR,CANNES)

2008-03-06T14:24:00.000+05:30

When the tone poem “Don Juan” by Richard Strauss, the great German composer and not a relative of Johann Strauss, was premiered in the year 1889, half the hall cheered and the other half booed. This told Richard that he has found his own musical voice, and he wrote:

“I now comfort myself with the knowledge that I am on the road I want to take, fully conscious that there never has been an artist not considered crazy by thousands of his fellow men.”

After the controversy about his 2003 film “Elephant”, director Gus van Sant could have proudly reiterated that. This is a great film, this is an extremely unlikely film to be made in Hollywood, and it is a miracle that the film was ever completed. It unanimously won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; Todd McCarthy of Variety magazine said that the film is “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst”. Are you wondering why there was such bipolar disorder among critics? I will tell you. But before that, let me tell you one thing. If you want to know whether a film is really good or not, go to the Europeans (not the British), and stop believing the Americans (especially the critics). They are genetically impotent of anything higher than good mediocracy.

First, I must tell you how I discovered this film. It was 2:30 AM of stark, cold night; I was deep into a movie binge. Then I decided to go to bed. Before that, I switched the TV on. It was HBO. The next movie, they showed, was something named “Elephant”. I liked the cinematography from the trailer, so decided to go through the first few minutes, and then go to bed. I did not sleep that night. I was feeling like a new-born.

I am not kidding. That’s what a good film, especially when it comes as a surprise, can do to you. From then on, this film became a personal obsession for me. For the record, in last two years, HBO showed this film only once. Unfortunately for HBO, they sponsored this independent film. Well, enough of oblique talk, lets come straight to the point. Who is this Gus van Sant? All of you have seen at least one of his films: “Good Will Hunting” (1997). Do you think that is a great film? It is not, it is just a very good Hollywood film. You might have seen another of his movies at Z MGM of past: “To Die For”, with Nicole Kidman starring as a murderously ambitious weather-girl manipulating her husband and an unstable boy (Joaquin Phoenix) obsessed with her. Gus van Sant is primarily an independent moviemaker who made it big in Hollywood with “Good Will Hunting”. He made only two mainstream movies after that; he understood the limitation of Hollywood factories to be debilitating for a truly original director, and he left. Here is what he said, “I came to realize since I had no need to make a lot of money, I should make films I find interesting, regardless of their outcome and audience.” Gus van Sant came into his own with his later works, especially in his “Death Trilogy”. Elephant is the second film of the trilogy. What is “Elephant” all about? It is about a massive shootout inside a school, an event strongly resembling the Columbine School Massacre. The reason people got angry about this film is because it is only about the shootout; in other words, it does not provide any reason, background, or cure, it just states what it wants to state. It does not let you close the case shut, and move on after the movie. It keeps the problem open. The difference between “Elephant” and other inane “issue-based” “movies with messages” is the difference between polemic and sincere thought. The difference between political parties and Karl Marx. Between “kitsch” and “sublime”. The greatest thing about this film is that it refuses to essentialize anything and problematizes everything. It is unbearable for the American media to see someone thwart the “great” reasons and cures they have formulated and transmitted everywhere for years, unbearable to see someone denuding the mystic glamour of its favorite events, events that they cover inch-by-inch, second-by-second, deaths they have shown in all their glory; it is unbearable for them to see themselves naked and waxed like a freak. In its after-effect, “Elephant” is a destroyer of myths and myth-builders. If you conform to stupid ideas such as “Films Propagate Violence among Kids”, “Consumerism Kills You Spiritually”, “Charity will One Day Make Every Poor Rich” etc, then you will not like this film. But in that case, you should not like me. Because, if you follow a logical sequence starting from those quoted presumptions, you will end up at the statement “We Are Worse than Baboons”. In case you accept those oft-repeated statements I have put under quotation marks, please accept this as a truth. It might end up being self-reflexive.

Now, for the remnant, are you quizzing yourself why this film is named “Elephant”? There is no reference to any sort of an elephant in the film (other than a pencil drawing in one of the protagonist’s room). There have been many interpretations of the name of the film; some say it is a tribute to a BBC documentary made by Alan Clarke of the same name; I prefer a different explanation. The title is an allusion to the Indian fable “Blinds Watching an Elephant”. Most of you know the tale; blinds cannot gasp the reality of an elephant wholly. What Gus van Sant means here is that we cannot understand the enormity of a homicide only through analytical reason; whenever we try to interpret, we distort the image by essentializing it. “Elephant”, on the other hand, deconstructs the event [in the strictest Derridian sense. You have to see the film to realize how closely it reads the events]. In that respect, this film is truly post-modern (not in an “ism” sense, but as a time&space-frame), and a close relative to films like “No Country for Old Men”.

“Elephant” is one of the most poetic films I have ever seen. It is made of extremely long tracking shots filmed through SteadyCams. Harris Savides’ cinematography astounds even after watching it thrice. The film follows several students throughout the huge school on an ordinary day that ends up being the date of the shootout. There is violence in the film, but they are not violent. Gus van Sant strips the killings of their glamour, effect, convention and polemic by making them anemic; he shows what they really are: repetitions of video games, simulation of a simulation. The deaths in this film are “cool”, or even “cold” in a Marshall-McLuhan-Jean-Baudrillard sense. The film does not try to analyze its characters; instead it respects their privacy (when a student enters the classroom, the camera remains outside). One of the shooters, Alex (played by Alex Frost) is an accomplished pianist. He played Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” in a long sequence, and that music becomes the theme (the score is actually played by the actor Alex Frost). It is one of the most serene and memorable use of Classical music in a film I have ever heard. The cinematography in reminiscent of the great Hungarian director Belá Tarr, and in its empty uneventful nature, it reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni at his best. Also, one can say that such film-making signals a return of Cinema verité.

The film was shot in an improvisational way. There were no dialogs in the script; they were made up by the actors ad lib. It was an inspired choice, as it helps the film to avoid “meaningful”, cliché films. Everyone looks so real that it might scare you. In fact, all the actors in the film are amateurs; many of them were from the school where the film was shot.

Some people complained about some essentialisation in the film: the shooters watch a Nazi propaganda film; they play a video game where they shoot people. That disturbed me for some time: are they not trying to propagate a “message”? But then I realized where my, and other critics’, problem lies. We forget the fact that Americans are the largest consumer of Nazi propaganda products. We forget the fact that it is natural for a teenager to play a shooting game on his laptop (I do the same on my desktop). Film directors are not responsible for our thoughts, responsible for the conventions we unconsciously follow. It is a major lesion we often tend to forget.

Roger Ebert once wrote a very significant thing about Hollywood: “when it comes to tragedies, Hollywood is in the catharsis business”. It is not even a truth, it is troth. They are into other monkey businesses too. Hollywood is the pinnacle of professional, segmented film-making; but to be a true Auteur, you have to stop formalizing films. And great films only come from true auteurs and that too once in a while [that does not mean there are no auteurs in Hollywood]. This is one of those films. If you ever felt love towards the medium called film, you should watch this movie. It is a film that dwells at a different level of film-making altogether, a level rarely reached by filmmakers, rarely enjoyed by cineastes. See whether you like it or not.

N.B:--This film was produced by Diane Keaton. I am a big fan of her work, and I think producing this film should be counted among one of the greatest things she has ever done. Without a free leash, and without the producers not “peeing” [a word used by Gus van Sant himself] on the film, such movies cannot be made.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, by Tim Burton, Rating: 3 in 5

2008-03-05T17:02:00.000+05:30

As a film, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” has all the good and bad qualities of a typical Tim Burton film. Some will enjoy the good ones; some will overemphasize the bad ones. On my part, I am rather disappointed by this film.

From the very beginning, Burton’s films have shown how the atmosphere can become the most important factor of a film. Most of his films --- “Beetlejuice”, “Edward Scissorhands”, the “Batman” films, “Sleepy Hollow” etc ---- are “atmospheric” films; their virtues lie solely in their atmosphere. On the flip side, many of these films lacked coherence in the development of their story-line, which is essential for the kind of films they are. Same things hold true for “Sweeney Todd”; although the story does not suffer from completely unnecessary intrusions of characters like Michael Keaton’s in “Beetlejuice”, the story never becomes surprising or engrossing enough to make Sweeney Todd’s anguish, or his pained humanity seem true. May be the “spectacular” nature of musicals was always a disincentive for the film’s subject. At the end of the day, this film will be remembered as the bloodiest musical ever made on film that had a stunning backdrop of 19^th century London.

The film starts with CGI blood-drops that look suspiciously like diluted tomato ketchup running down blue-tinted gables of shanty houses. The symbol holds true for the entire film: it is mostly about blood ketchup and blue-tinted 19^th century London. This film is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s stage musical of the same name [the logo at the beginning of this article is the original poster of the musical]. Benjamin Barker (played by Johnny Depp), a barber, is falsely arrested, charged and sentenced to life of hard labor in Australia by a licentious Judge Turpin (played by Alan Rickman), who coveted Barker's "beautiful and virtuous" wife, Lucy (played by Laura Michelle Kelly). Returning 15 years later, Barker adopts the name of Sweeney Todd and says goodbye to his friend, sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who rescued him from the sea. He then returns to his old flat above Nellie Lovett's (played by Helena Bonham Carter) pie shop on Fleet Street. She tells him that after his arrest, Turpin tried to rape his wife, and she poisoned herself out of humiliation. After receiving this news, Todd vows revenge and reopens his barber shop in the upstairs flat. His method is simple: he cuts the throats of his customers and sends the bodies down to the basement through a chute. Nellie cuts the bodies up and uses the meat to make the best meat pie in whole London.

It is highly unsettling (I presume this. I have been a gore fan for long time, so it all looked lip-smacking to me) to see serial killers with operatic music. To heighten that effect, it is filmed differently than formal musicals: you do not see groups of dancers singing choruses, or anything of that sort. There is absolutely no dialog in the film, which is again very rare. Burton, surprisingly, makes the film more quasi-realistic than a musical fantasy. The London of yesteryears looks like Hell’s Kitchen in the film; it reminded me of the ghastly details I read once in a huge book called “London: A Biography”. Following recent [and deplorable to me. I have lived in one of the most notorious cities in the world for its poverty, Kolkata, throughout my life, and never saw a slum look blue in moonlight] tradition of showcasing any bleak part of a city through clod blue filters, the production design of Dante Ferretti and cinematography of Dariusz Wolski help create a dark, frightening and eccentrically skewed vision of London. Most of the characters have a larger-than-life and over-the-top feel of a Dickensian caricature. They all have deathly blanched faces, almost blue from lack of blood. One of the good things about this film is that all the songs are sung by the actors. It makes the words of the lyrics sound more clear and important, helping the story to grow naturally. It is something Woody Allen did in his musical comedy “Everyone says I Love You”. It also avoids the over-emphatic singing style of professional singers.

I wrote “Most of the characters have a larger-than-life and over-the-top feel of a Dickensian caricature”. The problem of the film is that even the principal characters are caricatures. It would have worked if the film showcased itself as a musical fantasy, but the quasi-realistic nature of the movie leaves us with a lot of unfulfilled expectations. Also to be blamed is Johnny Depp. Criticizing someone like Johnny Depp sounds sacrilegious nowadays, but I have no qualms in saying that his acting in this film has a sad after-effect of Jack Sparrow. I detected a slight backward tilt every time he delivered a major dialog. That backward tilt, strongly reminiscent of “you-know-who”, ruined my day. And at the end of the day, the character of Sweeney Todd remains a phantasmagorical caricature; his human emotions seem shallow, his ultimate redemption seems phony. Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow deserved at least an Oscar; if there was ever a performance that can be tagged “original”, that was it. From such a great actor, I expected far better performance. I expected him to frame the character of Sweeney Todd in a different manner. His acting in this film seemed to hesitate between sincerely enjoying the act of killing and feeling deep resentment for what happened to him in past. Too shallow by my standards. On the other hand, Helena Bonham Carter is perfect in her role. She is quite an actor; it is a shame that she still remains under-estimated in Hollywood. But the best performance comes from Allan Rickman as judge Turpin. You have to watch him to realize what a truly nuanced actor from English school of acting can do to such roles. His acting will stay with me for a long time.

There is a segment in the film that shows the true capabilities of Tim Burton as a director, though. Nellie, while butchering human carcasses every day, still dreams an insane dream of marrying Sweeny and making a good thing out of it. Her dreams are painted with heart-rending softness that stirs our compassion; it makes the character of Nellie surprisingly believable and familiar. Sadly, Sweeney does not seem to have such hidden chambers; it would have been a good thing for his character. He is either a chocolaty simpleton of a husband (in flashback), or a one-dimensional monster. I have a suspicion that Tim Burton wanted to create his own “Kill Bill”, but lacked the quirky appreciation of the genre that Tarantino showed.

The songs used in the film are highly complex; it is a miracle that the actors managed to do justice to them. It bears the signature of mid-twentieth century, urban style of music. A veritable Sondheim masterpiece.

The film has received tremendous positive reviews from critics. Why, I don’t know. Despite all the hullabaloos about this film, I found it to be a noble failure, and nothing more than that. I give this film a three. It does not deserve any more.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Eastern Promises [2007], by David Cronenberg. Rating: 3 & 1/2

2008-03-04T00:46:00.000+05:30

Before I give my opinion about David Cronenberg’s latest Oscar-nominated film “Eastern Promises”, let me quote the remarks of two critics:

“I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation…. (the film is) directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power.”

--------J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“What it's really about, more than sensitivity for displaced people or social analyses, is violence — hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence…. For Cronenberg, such cheap sensationalism is business as usual, and this far into his career, that business has slipped into artistic bankruptcy……(the film) isn't about Russian gangs so much as Cronenberg's own dark passions not just for violence but excruciating carnage, which he brandishes mercilessly…… (it is a) a stifling descent into grim shock and disturbing awe.”

---- Bruce Westbrook of Houston Chronicle

You need not take the second critic seriously; he belongs to a recent foolish trend of film critics (read politically correct priests) who stop seeing a film as it is, but as they expect it to be. If anyone goes to watch a film about Russian mafias and expect complete non-violence, then that man must be the sorriest buffoon ever seen inside a cinema hall! But in case you do not like blood and graphic violence, this film might not be your cup of tea. This film IS violent, but never over-enthusiastic about it. It also does not adhere to the genre regulations of Italian mafia movies.

The first critic is more to the point, but something is missing there too: this film is certainly not one of Cronenberg’s best, and, most disappointingly, it had every potential to be his Magnum Opus. It had the potential to be as influential a film as The Godfather is. It had everything in it to be remembered forever, but it just missed its mark. Despite all that, this is a better movie than most of the ones we are going to see coming out of the factories in the next few months. It is an original, engrossing, deeply disturbing film about identity, violence and the constant human degradation it causes.

The film is based in London, where Anna (Ivanova) Khitrova (played by Naomi Watts), a midwife at a London hospital, witnesses a 14 year old child, Tatiana, die in childbirth, while the child, a girl, survives. She finds a diary (written in Russian, which Anna cannot read) in the dead girl’s person, and checks it to find the home address of the dead girl. She finds a card for the Trans-Siberian restaurant owned by Semyon (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is in reality a powerful boss of a Russian mafia family, or Vory V Zakone. Anna meets Semyon and talks about the dead girl. Once Semyon learns about the diary, he immediately understands that the diary can be used against him. Here starts a very subtle, polite, but deadly cat-&-mouse game in which Anna gets more and more involved. Deeply involved in this snare is Nicolai LuZhin (played by Vigo Mortensen), Semyon’s driver and a soldier under Semyon’s son, Kiril (played by Vincent Cassel). Another big player is Kiril, a sad homosexual who must suppress his taste to survive, and expresses his masculinity by manhandling young girls and by remaining drunk most of the time. As Anna gets more and more involved, even the lives of her mother (played by Sinéad Cusack) and her melodramatic, but simple uncle Stepan (played by Jerzy Skolimowski) are in danger. There is a huge twist at the end of the film that will send you off your seat. The film is not really about how the mafia works, but about a “why”: why are they doing what they are doing? And you will not get the answer until nearly the end of the movie. The script keeps its secret very effectively, in that respect.

The film has a very authentic look and feel. No one in the film uses a gun. They use razors and curved knives which prove even more effective, and certainly gorier. Director David Cronenberg explained, “We have no guns in this movie. There were no guns in the script. The choice of those curved knives we use in the steam bath was mine. They’re not some kind of exotic Turkish knives, they’re linoleum knives. I felt that these guys could walk around in the streets with these knives, and if they were ever caught, they could say 'we’re linoleum cutters’.” Precise and logical. There is something in this film that is very rare: while watching it, you feel that there are other unseen events in these characters’ lives, you kind of anticipate how they celebrated last year’s Christmas, that girl’s marriage and this boy’s first communion. In this respect, it reminded me strongly of The Godfather. But, unfortunately, the film fails to become an epic.

The film revolves around the acting of Vigo Mortensen as Nicolai. Vigo is a tremendous actor. He seemingly has a sense of humor too; he told the press that he styled his character after Vladimir Putin!! Those who remember him as Aragorn from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy may not recognize him at all. He is so deep into the character that some of you might become disgruntled: WHAT THE HELL, MAN (!), that man is not ACTING! He internalizes the role, underplays it, making his Nicolai fascinating and scarily enigmatic. Years from now, this will be considered as one of the most memorable mafia characters ever, right there with Michael Corleone and Tony Montana. Armin Mueller-Stahl is brilliant as Semyon; he is scintillating as the apparently agreeable, grandfatherly Godfather. Vincent Cassel goes dangerously deep into his character, Kiril; if you find him a bit too abrupt in the end and a little inconsistent, or banal, it is not his fault but the script-writer’s. Naomi Watts, as always, gives a precise, economical performance. Howard Shore’s score for the film is very restrained and economical. But personally I have a feeling that a more rustic Russian, Shostakovitch sort of background music would have been more memorable. There is a knife-fight scene in this movie that is truly something never shown on the big screen. Roger Ebert commented, “Nikolai engages in a fight in this film that sets the same kind of standard that "The French Connection" set for chases. Years from now, it will be referred to as a benchmark.” I absolutely agree with him.

But let me come to the most important part: the shortcomings of this film. There are two distinct flows in this film, the main narrative and a voice-over of the dead girl reading from her diary. This second stream seems somewhat artificial, shallow and undercooked. Instead of becoming touchingly humane, most of the time it becomes a placard for cheap humanism. In a pivotal scene right at the end of the movie, Kiril refuses to throw the child into the Thames, crying “It’s just a child, papa!”. The whole scene looked abrupt and forced to me. I am not saying that such human angles are unnecessary. What I am saying is that the film does not allow its characters enough time to gradually build that side. It seems as if the director himself did not believe in the way he was presenting the solution. I said this before, and let me repeat it: this film had the potential to be as great an epic as The Godfather. Instead, it becomes a very well-built thriller with an abrupt and pretentious ending. The solution comes too easily at the end; the tragedy dies a pre-natal death. It should have followed the character of Nicolai a bit more; it should have traced the tragic destiny of such men.

This is a very good film, but a rather disappointing one. I cannot give it any more than three and a half points.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

No Country for Old Men, by Coen Brothers [Rating:5 in 5]

2008-03-02T22:25:00.000+05:30

When Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” was published in the year 2005, Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review, “No Country for Old Men would easily translate to the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left on the cutting room floor — a move that would also have made this a considerably more persuasive novel”. As it is often the case with literary critics, he was absolutely wrong. It is the monologues of sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) that holds the core of the movie “No Country for Old men”, this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. It is, at the end of the day, a post-modern (not in the hip sense) character study that believes in leaving more loose ends than answering each and every rational and inconsequential question about details. It hints at a dislocation that would have been unperceivable in any other era than ours. AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, IT IS A MIRACLE OF A GOOD FILM!

Let us look back at the words I quoted at the very beginning of this review. Kakutani thinks the novel was not adequately persuasive because he was regarding it as a Genre novel, which it, and the film, is not. No Country, as a film, is a subversion of a genre that is all too familiar in the American cultural scene: Psychopath vs. The Force of Good; it is also not a spoof or a critique; it works through the structure of thriller and chase movies, breaks through every single loophole, and at the end, becomes something completely different. It is a movie about something a little inconceivable, something that looses its meaning once spelled clearly, something that lurks just behind the our all-too-certain understating of contemporary society. May be that’s the only way of showing what is there to show.

In the film, Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brollin), a poor man hunting antelopes at the valley of Rio Grande, discovers the remnants of a drug deal gone-all-wrong. Bullet-ridden cars stand desolate; in this scene, not only the men, but even the dogs are shown shot dead. Moss finds a huge stack of drugs, and with his habitually cunning mind of a hunter, understands what is missing: the money. He stalks the trail of a wounded man and finds a satchel full of money. He was discovered later, and a corporation hires Anton Chigurh (with Javier Bordem in his Oscar-winning role), a psychopath with a “principle”, who goes around Texas with a tank of compressed air in hand and killing people with a cattle stungun, to kill Moss. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again; it can bust locks as well. Chigurh starts stalking Moss, which forces Moss to leave his childlike wife Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) behind. The sheriff of the town, played by Tommy Lee Jones, realizes the danger Moss and his family is in, and tries to help them. There are other characters, such as a bounty hunter who knows Chigurh well (Woody Harrelson) who is hired by a businessman (Stephen Root) to track down the money, and other nameless characters in motels, swimming pools, on the roadside. Yet, it is a curiously lonely movie, where none of the three major characters are shone together in a frame. And that brooding loneliness hints at a strange dislocation, something I was feeling continuously while watching the movie.

Take the scene early in the movie where Chigurh walks into a run-down gas station and talks to the visibly shaken elderly owner. Throughout the sequence, both the characters jostle with each other verbally with a stiff awkwardness, as if something was just not fitting in, something was just not right. It was like watching an English missionary looking at the orphan child from Blue Lagoon with a nasty feeling that he knows the language but cannot understand a word. Or something even more subtle. Subtle enough to elude the gasp of written words. Chigurh makes the man call head or tail in a toss to decide whether he should kill the man or not. The dialogs in this sequence are undoubtedly the best-written ones I have heard in a film for a long, long time. If you watch the film look very closely at this section, savor the strange tension such crafty screenplay can create [Coen brothers absolutely DESERVE their Oscar for Adopted Screenplay], and, if you can, try to feel that dislocation there. Can you feel it? There is a chance that you may not. That’s precisely the charm of such great films. Personally, I felt that the dislocation is the unspoken core of the whole narrative.

Before I went to see the film, I was apprehensive about one thing: Would the film be about nostalgia? The name of the film at least indicates that. The character of Tommy Lee Jones constantly feels outstaged by the capacity for violence of the next generation. One of his monologues sounds nostalgic too. But, to my great relief, the film turned out not to be so. We have had a bit too much of nostalgia lately, especially a sort of snobbish nostalgia about the innocent, “non-violent” days of the past. That sort of stuff makes a film stink of shit. Being a fundamental study about violence (among other things, such as, chance, self-will, unspeakable evil. Other critics have pointed those out before), No Country avoids all the cliché answers and solutions to violence (effect of consumerism, television, homosexuality and whatever-you-may-have-a-grudge-against); it only paints a cinematically sparse and austere landscape that hides hints that are only hints and not answers.

The cinematography of the film is remarkable: it refuses to be stylish (as an unfortunate after-effect of the film “Traffic”, every movie in Hollywood nowadays routinely depicts deserts through extremely grainy deep-yellow filter, dark sides of a city through blue, using the most bizarre angles a camera can possibly find. Apparently, they call it “stylish”), it gets to the core of the ambience the film uses, so much so that the landscape becomes one of the principle characters in the film. It again shows that Coen brothers are one of the greatest exponents of the dramatic capacity of a landscape; they did it before in “Fargo” (using a landscape of blindingly white snow), they have done it again. The editing of the film follows the same path: it is effective, precise, and self-effacing. Surprisingly for a Hollywood film, it uses only 16 minutes of music, which is minimalist in nature as well. It was an inspired decision. Such decisions have made this film such a great one. The actors down to the nameless woman by the swimming pool do a truly swell job; I have seldom seen such perfect casting.

In my last piece about the Oscars, I wrote “Javier Bordem as the Best Actor in a Supporting Role (for “No Country for Old Man”) was again a routine choice, Hollywood loves its psychopaths.” I do not intend to change it. Javier is a great actor and has done mesmerizing work in this film. But, like all great art, this film will be easily misunderstood by most people, I fear. Like they called “Brokeback Mountain” a “gay cowboy movie”. I suspect that after this Oscar, many will watch the film the way they watch “Silence of the Lambs”, counting “nicely” shown “cool” killings; they will come out of the hall trying to imitate Anton Chigurh’s grin. It will become the benchmark for a new-era psychopath. The film will be lost in a labyrinth of deliberate mass-censorship. We are not very good at handling our own violence, are we?

So if you watch the film, try to look in closely. Check what is scarier: the chilling acts of Chigurh, or how the scattered symbols repeat themselves in the path of both Chigurh and Moss, obscuring the line between the hunted and the hunter? Why, after all the obvious evil, can’t we make an ethical distinction between Moss and Chigurh? Why do we perceive only a forlorn sense of futility at the end of the film? Keep those questions afloat in your mind, but don’t try to seek an answer. You might see a truly great film.

Making such an astounding film is a feat that belongs to the order of a minor miracle; add to that the fact that Coen brothers have done it before with “Fargo”. If we still stop short of counting them among the first three directors in Hollywood, it will be an act of blasphemy. This film deserves a five by any standards.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

THE DRABBEST OSCAR OF ALL TIME!

2008-02-28T15:44:00.000+05:30

Man, it was boring! Positively, devastatingly, petrifyingly boring! Every single one of those major Oscars was a repeat of the BAFTA awards (and Golden Globe, to some extent), other than the Best Picture award, and that was an even bigger drab, because everybody knew they were going to do so! No one acted surprised really, no one did a summersault (like Roberto Benigni), no one expressed anger from past sufferings (like Halle Berry), no one cried uncontrollably. The honorary Oscar, as always, was an insult.

The whole award ceremony tasted of frozen floor-mops, to be frank! Shouldn’t we sing “Te Dium” to its amazing capacity at not surprising us?

The presenter this year, Jon Stewart, did share some pretty cheeky jokes (about Diablo Cody’s past, pay check, and her name, among others). But this guy has this Cheshire Cat smile of some thousand watts that he flashed at the audience every time he felt he made a good joke, and that, my friends, was a complete turn off for me. Well, yes, I agree, may be I am biased towards guys who do not laugh at their own jokes. But my point will still remain the same: Oscar is DULL without Billy Crystal! May be they should offer him a permanent job or something, but they should not let him go! Period. The star announcers were even worse, Martin Scorcesse appeared humorless (may be he was bored too), Danzel Washington sounded like an over-excited circus announcer. Helen Mirren kept her cool. Penelope Cruz, as always, sounded as if she was reciting an Alexandrine verse in Esperanto! How can she sound so incomprehensible after spending so many years in Hollywood (and dating hunks)! I still don’t get it. The only saving grace was the younger Coen; Ethan Coen’s first speech consisted of four and half words: “uhh…..thank you for this.”, and the next time there was no improvement at all! May be he was making a terse point, or may be he was dealing with the situation the way the brothers deal in their films: with no baggage, always understated, reserved. Hat’s off to him.

People who have not followed BAFTA and the GOLDEN GLOBE might find it surprising that Marion Cotillard won the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar. They should then, by now, know that her acting this year has swept virtually all award ceremonies (Cesar, BAFTA, GOLDEN GLOBE). Her performance as the legendary singer Edith Piaf is a type always favored by the American critics and audience: “authentic” biopic with a lot of make-up (makes the whole thing look more heroic) and tragic ending. It belongs to the tradition of movies like “Patton”, “Laurence of Arabia”, “Monster” etc. In hindsight, no one else could have been allowed to win the small-buttock man this year. Daniel Day-Lewis’ character in There Will Be Blood belongs to what I call “The Great American Acting Tradition”. He shouts, spits, smiles mischievously to a familiar effect of raw animal force, uncontrollable will power that feels like fate. It is sad for such a great actor to depend on such over-emphasized roles to win accolade every time. Hollywood, although never openly, always felt bad about underplaying characters; the greatest of under-actors had had a problematic relationship with Hollywood (remember Marlon Brando? Remember the fact that before “Silence of The Lambs”, Anthony Hopkins’ status in Hollywood was so miserable even after a film like “The Elephant Man” that he almost decided to relocate to London?). Intellectual acting is not something Hollywood adores. Hence the low number of awards won on memorable performances in comedies (I am thinking about “Sideways”). I have enormous respect for someone like Daniel Day-Lewis, and it saddens me to see how great actors are still forced to go through one, small, narrow type.

The Oscar authorities are famed for insulting great men with “honorary” Oscars when they are past their prime, post-prime, and post-post-prime! They awarded Charles Chaplin after they had successfully kicked him out of the country, and managed to not give him a single Oscar ever. They finally gave the honor to both Satyajit Ray and Frederico Fellini when they were about to die. This year is no exception. They gave the award away to 98 year old Robert F. Boyle, a legendary art director and production designer. Can you believe it! At 98 years of age! I mean, what the heck, check out this list of his major works, all of them were made at least 20 to 30 years ago! Here is the list: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur”, “North by Northwest” [Remember that breath-taking birds-eye shot of the United Nations Building?], “The Birds”, “Marnie”, It Came from Outer Space, Cape Fear, In Cold Blood, Fiddler on the Roof, Portnoy's Complaint, Winter Kills, Mame, W.C. Fields and Me, The Shootist, Private Benjamin, Staying Alive etc. What the hell, why did they not award him in the late eighties or nineties? Does it give them toothache? The old man took it apparently in all good faith, but God knows how he might be feeling about it now.

I am happy for Tilda Swinton (Best Actress in a Supporting Role for “Michael Clayton”) though. She is an exceptional talent, a consistent rebel; she wags an extremely sharp tongue and glitters with visible intelligence. That sort of an actress is becoming rarer by the day. She showed extremely bad dress sense in both BAFTA and the Oscars (in BAFTA, she looked like a psychedelic geisha gone loony!), she called George Clooney a “tremendous bastard” (I am quoting from memory though), and appreciated that slender butt of our UNCLE OSCAR. Hers was certainly the most memorable speech this year for me. I feel bad for Kate Blanchett though. Her performance as Bob Dylan in the film “I’m Not There” was remarkable by any standards. After watching her twice, I think Marion Cotillard sounds on the verge of crying almost always, which will, almost certainly, turn some men on; she has a very sweet French disposition, and she is certainly a very good actress (although, I have a suspicion, limited in scope) in her own way. Xavier Bordem as the Best Actor in a Supporting Role (for “No Country for Old Man”) was again a routine choice, Hollywood loves its psychopaths. It might prove to be a great thing for him, and help him get out of the zone where you only get type-cast dull Latino roles. But again, we must remember that the Oscar did not help Benetio Del Toro that much.

Best Director Oscar for Coen Brothers (“No Country…”) is a justified choice, but the award comes a bit too late; they should have won it for “Fargo”. They have been one of the most original directors in Hollywood for a long time, and no accolade will be enough for the work they have put in throughout the years. It is sad that many throughout the world are just coming to know about them because of an Oscar. They are great even without the golden statue.

I have a confession to make. When I first saw Diablo Cody (Best Original Screenplay for the film “Juno”) at BAFTA, I was more attracted to her amazing bust and her beautiful skin than anything else. It was very male chauvinistic of me. Many of you might recognize her as the author of the famous blog “The Pussy Ranch”. I have not yet seen the film “Juno”, but judging by other critics’ reactions, and going by the storyline and some of the dialogs; it seems to be a very well written film. I am looking forward to watch this movie, and specially watch the work of Ellen Page (Ms Cody called her “superhuman”, Roger Ebert called her “THE actress of her generation”); and I will also wait for future works of Ms Cody. She deserves a big congratulation.

Many of you may have noticed that all the major acting Oscars have gone this year to “non-American” actors. Some might call it an accident, I call it a trend. For years now, actors of other nationalities (specially the British) have given consistent performances in the industry; as a result, in the pool of contemporary bankable actors, you will find a major number of Britons, Spaniards and others. Maybe, just may be it is time for the American acting schools and the industry itself to rethink its lines, and check out where it is going wrong. As far as I am concerned, I feel that there is certain predictability in the acting of most American actors nowadays, especially the white ones. What do you think?

N.B.—In an act of tremendous bad faith, the Oscar authority failed to pay their tribute to the memory of the great German actor Ulrich Mühe, whose memorable acting as a East German interrogator in the film “Lives of Others” [winner of last years Best Foreign Language Film Oscar] is still fresh in many of our memories. They also failed to notice the deaths of Brad Renfro, French mime artist Marcel Marceau, acclaimed Taiwanese director Edward Yang (director of “A Bright Summer Day” and “Yi Yi”). Let us not be so obnoxiously ignorant about anything non-American, and pay our homage to these remarkable men. We will miss Ulrich Mühe sorely.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) by Wes Anderson [Rating:4 & 1/2

2008-02-28T01:07:00.000+05:30

Wes Anderson is a rare phenomenon in contemporary Hollywood; he directs, writes screenplays, and gets involved with almost every aspect of film making. In that respect, he is in a rather exclusive league with Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez (he "chops, shoots and scores" his movies) etc. Even more importantly, his films tend to deal with certain "personal" problematics of the director: identity, in general. So, at this point, we can call Anderson an "auteur". His latest film, "The Darjeeling Limited"(2007) is a well balanced, exuberantly whimsy, humane without being humanistic, engrossing film. In short, it is a surprisingly excellent film.

The film has a separate prologue, a short film of about 12 minutes called "Hotel Chevalier", starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman (by the way, anyone in love with Natalie's luxurious hair will be disapponted. Shot right after the movie "V for Vendetta", she sports a US army kind of a hair cut). In the film, Jack Whitman (Schwartzman) is living at "Hotel Chevalier" for some indefinite amount of time. He is surprised by a call from his girl-friend (or ex-girlfriend) (Played by Natalie Portman). She is in town and wants his room number. It is made clear very early that the relation between Jack and his girlfriend is not ideal; he clearly is trying to keep away from her, and yet, it is hard-to-do-so for him.Jack suffers her with a servile fascination, tinged with an inner force of repressed anger. Well, not as cliche as that previous sentence sounds, but something like that. Jack hurries across his suit, tidies everything up, bathes, dresses, makes another warm bath for her, and then waits. He even sets up a background music for her [Peter Sarstedt's "Where do you go to(My Lovely)!!Natalie's character is a mercurial tomboy, chewing a tooth-pick all the time. They talk, get to bed, and eventually have sex. She sports love bites and other bruises on her thighs and arms; they both ask each other whether they have slept with anyone else or not, and, both lie.Soon we perceive that this sex is a farewell act; the last nod before becoming forever estranged. She asks him: "Whatever happens, I don't wanna lose you as a friend"; he replies: "I promise, I will never be your friend, No matter what.Ever.". She whispers:"If we fuck tonight, we will feel like shit tomorrow".He says:"That's OK with me". She says: "I love you.I never hurt you on purpose."; he says "I don't care". And then follows one of the most beautiful slo-mo tracking shots I have seen in a long, long time. Natalie's character stands by the wooden bureau naked, looking like a condescending geisha (not by any coincident, one of "The Darjeeling Limited"s posters feature a Japanese wood-block painting of a geisha. Jack drapes her with a yellow Hotel Chevalier Bathrobe (the symbol will be repeated). The film ends with the couple looking over the Paris landscape from the balcony, to the tune of the song "Where do you go to(My Lovely)?". The whole film exudes a Fellinisque humor and a full-blooded, if not a little amused, embracement of life in its broadest sense.

I have spoiled the movie with this spoiler because there is a chance you will not be able to see this prologue in your theatre. Although it is not essential to see it in order to enjoy the main film, there are repeated allusions to the character of Natalie in the film. But now, let us concentrate on the main film.

In the film, three brothers, Francis(Owen Wilson), Peter(Adrien Brody), and Jack (Schwartzman), who have not been much in contact, have a reunion after one is almost killed in a motorcycle crash(Francis), another is expecting a baby in 15 days(Peter), and they take a journey on a fictional train (called Darjeeling Limited) through Rajasthan (Alas!If only such lovely trains were really there!).

The reunion is convened by Francis, whose head bandages make him look....well, strange, to say the least. Having nearly died (possibly intentionally), he now embraces life and wants to Really Get to Know his younger brothers. They are Peter, expecting a child from a wife he always expected to divorce any day, and Jack , who dials all the way home to eavesdrop on his former girlfriend's(Natalie Portman) answering machine(Jack knows the password). "I want us to become brothers again," Francis vows, "and to become Enlightened."

Francis is presumably obscenely rich, as he has a bald-from-birth assistant, Brandon (Wally Wolodarsky), who carries a printer and a laminating machine around in a different coach, creates detailed itinerary for the brothers and does almost everything for them. Francis is the compulsive type, which is something the younger brothers detest, they had enough of that from their long-lost mother (Angelica Houston) who has abandoned them long ago. Francis wants three of them to "become brothers" again. Francis also has a secret agenda: To meet their mother who is a nun now. They visit Hindu temples and pray in some of the most bizarre ways humanly imaginable.

Now, as you might be thinking now, if these three brothers really got changed by a silly train journey, then this film would have been a truly "THIS MOVIE SUCKS!!" contender. But no, the brothers sink even deeper into their deeply ingrained nature, only they start to accept it a tad better. The movie moves across scene after scene of whimsical humor and fun, with interludes of suddenly sobering experiences. In that way, one can say it does not have a tight plot, but the true charm of this movie in the very fact that it does not run like an arrow, but takes any course its engrossing self-absorption dictates it to take.

Another good thing about this film is the way it uses India as a backdrop. The makers of the film seem to have a good idea about what India is. As a result, India is not something exotic in the film, but a true backdrop with rather complex charms. The INDIAN STEREOTYPES are not seen; the "Sweet-Lime Girl"(Amara Karan, in a very measured performance for a debutant) from the train looks very Indian, but she smokes, talks in a "phirangi" accent, and is absolutely uninhibited about sex. Not very Indian, for some blunt-headed fanatics. But in exchange, she manages to look very believable.

The casting is brilliant. The three principal actors gel and conflict brilliantly. I suppose some will say that the film does not fly to the target. Well, the film does not have a target either. The film itself is the target. It does not have a plot either,in a strict sense.Wes Anderson, somewhat like early Satyajit Ray (by whom, he confesses, he was influenced), is deeply concerned about the characters only, and his camera focuses in to expose the humane vulnerabilities of the characters with a chuckle of understanding. If someone wants to see a routine drama or a screwball comedy, they better avoid this film. Wes Anderson, very clearly, does not believe in any semblance of such formulas.

The film uses music from various Bengali films, mostly from Ray's oeuvre, as background music with considerably success. The music works as companion pieces, sometimes as counterpoint, but never tries to dictate what we are supposed to feel.

All in all, this a very very good film, one of the most refreshing ones in recent years. It deserves a 4&1/2 rating for being such a good movie. But to get a 5,to become a truly great movie, Anderson's self-absorption needs to achieve a new height of sublimity. In a certain sense, Anderson reminds us of an young Woody Allen, exploring his own identity, vulnerabilities a little tentatively. In future, we might see an "Annie Hall" from him.At least, we can always hope.
BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI