The 14th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF)
organised by Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) was my first full-blown film
festival experience. Here, I revisit some of the highlights of the festival in
the futile hope of continuing to live it.
Stories we tell: Dir. Sarah Polley
(Canada)
This one was a devastating start to the film
festival. All the stellar reviews and repeated allusions to its shattering impact
could not prepare me for what I saw in those 110 minutes. Sarah Polley, an
actress herself, directs this documentary about her parents and family, using
interviews with them, her siblings, their friends, old photographs and Super-8
footage, reconstructions simulating Super-8 footage of her parents’ youth. Memory,
love, desire, art, laughter, freedom, loneliness, regret, fear, bitterness,
rage coalesce to form one of the most human stories I’ve seen on screen.
Amazingly, in addition to all this, the film works like a mystery, in so far as
pulling the audience along in the search of an elusive truth. In the process,
it re-examines the very nature of truth and its uneasy relationship with us. No
one is spared, no one is judged. Polley even chooses to include footage of
herself, in the act of experiencing, what we, the audience do. It is as much a
journey of painful, honest revelation as it is of self-discovery. The narrative
form Polley chooses is so synergetic with the subject matter at hand, it is
what lends the film its quietly catastrophic, heartbreaking beauty.
Miss Lovely: Dir. Ashim Ahluwalia (India,
Hindi)
One of the most eagerly awaited films at the
festival owing to its selection in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, the premiere
was a bit too well attended, leaving the film’s cast and crew (who’d turned up
fashionably late) struggling to find seats at their own premiere. Thankfully,
the director and the great Nawazuddin Siddiqui were spared this minor ignominy
as they were absent.
Set in the world of the C-grade sex-horror film
industry in Mumbai of the mid-80’s (Pyaasa Shaitan, Hawas Bhari Chudail and the
like), the story follows two brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin)
who make such films and a mysterious girl Pinky (Niharika Singh) between them. This
film is a rarity in that it does not have much of a plot, (whatever it does can
easily be predicted), but depends almost entirely on the creation of an
atmosphere to create an impact. The use of this approach is a masterstroke, for
it does not quite concretely confirm our worst assumptive fears about such a
world, yet greatly magnifies every such fear that is realised. For instance, elsewhere,
the sight of a man, hands bound with blood flowing from a cut lip, would not
make our skin crawl as much as it would in this film.
It is a dread-heavy film, one whose opening shots,
in a mocking, spoofing way, portend the imminent doom. The darkness that
pervades the film goes beyond the sleaze, bloodshed or the wretched lives of
the characters. It just is. We look at the characters laughing and making merry
and wonder how they do it in such a world. We look at them suffer and wonder
how they survive in it. The dialogue is so everyday and muttered, it is as if
one were eavesdropping on the characters. Yet the sound-design is layered,
hypnotic and sonorous creating a closed world in tandem with the claustrophobic
locations and the extremely tight photography (Mohanan). The swirling, eddying
background score and the garish, baroque set-design and makeup provide a weird beauty
to the decaying, noisome world of the film.
A really unique experience, but one you would immediately
want to wash off your skin. You can’t.
Ship of Theseus: Dir. Anand Gandhi
(India, English/Hindi)
To watch this film is to gulp down breath after
breath of pristine, mountainous air, heady with the scent of pines. You feel so
alive and enriched after watching it, you almost feel it has healed you in some
way. The title refers to an ancient Greek conundrum that asks if a ship may
remain the same one after a few or all of its planks have been replaced by new
ones or those from another ship? In the latter case, which one, if either, would be
the original ship? The film uses this as a springboard to jump into three
stories, each one uniquely moving and stimulating. Along the way it asks, posits,
debates, philosophical questions and struggles with answers. In spite of these,
the film is not weighed down by them and remains ethereal, luminous, humorous
and completely in the here and now of things. Fantastic performances by an international
cast most of which is little-known. The cinematography by Pankaj Kumar (in his
debut feature) is jaw-dropping, consisting of visually stunning compositions, lyrical
lighting and long, continuous takes. It sets a new bench-mark in the field. After
hearing a lot of the rave reviews both at home and at the Toronto Int’l Film
Festival, this is one film I feel lucky to have watched along with the cast and
crew. It received a standing ovation at the Jamshed Bhabha Hall, NCPA where it
was screened. Now my only hope is that it gains a commercial release as soon as
possible.
De Martes a Martes (From Tuesday to
Tuesday): Dir. Gustavo Trivino (Argentina)
A tightly wound film, it is the story of a man during
a period of (as the title suggests) 8 days of his life. It’s a debut feature
with a tight budget that contributes to the overall tautness of the film. It
would be a crime to give anything away, except that the man is an absolutely
regular guy with a blue-collar job and a family. But he secretly nurses a
desire and, over the course of the week, is an invisible witness to something
that may change his life forever, depending on what he does about it. Or does
not. The director masterfully turns up the screws in little touches, subtly
supplies clues and creates a generally disquieting atmosphere through everyday
interactions and dialogue. Reminded me of ‘The Machinist’, oddly. A crackerjack
thriller. Oh, and with a bloody good
central performance.
Antiviral: Dir. Brandon Cronenberg
(Canada)
While most kids of great directors struggle to break
free out of their parents’ shadow, Brandon son-of-David Cronenberg goes the
other way. After watching this film, one would be forgiven for thinking David Cronenberg
made the film. The apple clings tightly to the tree.
But that is only so far as the subject matter is
concerned. The treatment, while reminiscent of the master, is amped-up with a
heavy, electronic score and sustained slow-motion hallucinatory sequences. Celebrity
obsession has reached such a peak as to warrant the existence of legitimate
companies that patent and sell celebrity diseases to fans who want to feel a visceral
connection with their idols. Not only that, there also exists a celebrity meat
market, where slabs of meat containing cells of celebrities are sold to
customers to provide them the satisfaction of literally eating their idols.
This piece of speculative fiction is based smartly on fact. The HeLa cell line, one
of the most famous malignant cell lines of all, is invoked to ground this
madness in a reality that is chillingly plausible.
This is only the set-up. The film accepts it to be
as normal as, probably, the sun rising in the east. The protagonist Syd March (Caleb
Landry Jones) works at just such a celebrity disease firm, and all hell breaks
loose when he breaks the one cardinal rule: he carries a celebrity disease
outside the premises of his company to sell it on the black market. And, as in ‘Videodrome’,
rival corporations jump into the fray too, with sides being changed,
double-crossed, people being hunted and punished in really uncomfortable ways.
This is one of the coldest films I’ve seen: watching
it is like swimming in waves of ice. Most of the film has been shot indoors,
yet the locations are all sterile, blindingly white, drained of all warmth. The
human beings are pale, seen through extremely tight close-ups, so that we can
see every throbbing vein, every freckle clearly. There is a purpose for all
this and it is revealed in the graphic displays of veins being pierced by
hypodermic needles and copious amounts of dark-red, warm, thick blood flowing
over those sterile surfaces and out of those bodies, making even hardened
horror fans queasy. Cronenberg Jr. has his father’s gift for icy atmosphere,
icy females and warm blood-letting down to boot.
Aqui y Alla (Here and There): Dir.
Antonio Esparza (Mexico)
This film reinforces the fact that just watching
human beings be themselves through a camera they are unconscious of is still the
most fascinating sight on screen. No, it is not a documentary and neither does
it feel like one. The camera is steady and, in most cases, static. But we see
lives, deep and rich in their everyday detail unfold before us, people who we
can almost touch and talk to and we are hooked, sucked in from one scene to
another.
It tells the story of one of the many Mexicans who
work legally in the United States. After spending several years in the States,
Pedro returns to his native village in Mexico to his wife and two daughters and
begins life anew. Through them, it simply shows us the mundane life of a
Mexican village with love, laughter and music. There is minimal drama; no one
even so much as raises their voice. Perhaps, this is a movie that defies complete description;
it simply has to be experienced.
I have said before that it is not a documentary. It
would scarcely have worked as one for it does not speak about any issue as
such. When the film ends, you just want to go up to Senor Pedro, shake his hand
and tell him, ‘You are a good man’.
Kurmavatara (The Tortoise, An Incarnation):
Dir. Girish Kasaravalli (India, Kannada)
Amidst all the new-age cinema endorsing value
systems that are more globalised (if at all they do endorse), it is refreshing
to see a film that speaks of Gandhian ideals in today’s times. The setting is a
lower-middle class household in Bengaluru, presumably, consisting of Ananda
Rao, an ageing government employee and his son, daughter-in-law and their son.
Ananda is a gruff workaholic who is approached to play the role of Mahatma
Gandhi in a TV production by its director. Initially turning him down, he
eventually accepts it at his family’s insistence and the continuing efforts of
the director. Being an untrained, inexperienced actor has its pitfalls, however, and
performance anxiety is the least of them. He is profoundly affected by Gandhian
ideals to his family’s delight, at first, but then to their chagrin. His popularity
is taken advantage of by several friends and acquaintances for their own vested
interests. One naively expects such a simple, old-fashioned, gently humorous
film to merely highlight the paradox of how we see Gandhi today and the contrast
between reel and real life. But the film doesn’t stop at that. Ananda does not
become more like Gandhi nor does he bring about a sea-change in others around
him by resorting to satyagraha. He
does try fasting once, but to no avail. The film betrays no such romantic
illusions about Gandhi’s methods and thus, reveals a wisdom seemingly at odds
with its old-world charm. Ananda does get in touch with his emotions more after
being required to emote for the camera. On the other hand, we see several
instances of Ananda questioning Gandhi’s own behaviour while being well in
character. This is the strength of the film: that it challenges and breaks
assumptions about itself even as we watch it. In a sequence in the film, a
situation has the potential to become a communally charged one. It is defused,
not by appealing to the common sense of the people, or their sense of communal amity,
but by giving in to the demands of the fanatics. In that sense, it is a
clear-eyed look at the paradox of Gandhian ideals not only in today’s day and
age, but also the very ideals themselves. This film provided me with a lot of
food for thought, and most of the conclusions drawn above, are in hindsight.
Xingu: Dir. Cao Hamburger (Brazil)
To be honest, I chanced upon this film only because
the screening of ‘Amour’, one of the biggest draws of the festival, was
cancelled at the eleventh hour. I went in disgruntled, without expecting
anything from it, given its title and the synopsis I’d read of it. I hadn’t
heard of the director too which was another minus. Yes, my hurt ego had
ballooned to an unimaginable size. This film not only pricked the air out of
it, but healed it too, restoring it to its erstwhile good humour. A classic
case of serendipity, this remains one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen
at the festival. It tells the real-life tale of three brothers in the 1940’s who sign up on a whim to partake of the civilisation drive of central Brazil,
hitherto unreached. The brothers are of the family Villas Boas, Claudio,
Orlando and Leonardo. They are well-educated but pass themselves off as manual
labour so that they may live life in the great outdoors at the mercy of Nature
alone. While exploring the jungles of Central Brazil they chance upon an
ancient, indigenous tribe with whom they successfully manage to interact
peacefully. After this first success, they are repeatedly called upon by the National
Government to aid the civilisation drives and make contact with other tribes.
In most cases, the brothers serve as a velvet glove for the iron fist of the
Govt. in displacing the tribals. The film documents the assiduous efforts of
the brothers to soften the inevitable blow- of contact between the white man
and the tribals- as much as possible. In
the course of their work, we also see their personal struggles, relationships
with the tribals and relationship with their own folk, the white men.
In doing so, it raises fundamental questions about
the conquest of nature, the neo-colonisation of the tribals and its globalised
nature, whether tribals should be brought into contact with white men at all,
and the wherewithal to do so. The herculean efforts of the brothers bore fruit
when, in the late 1960’s. the Government allowed them permission to build a
reserve park where different indigenous tribes might reside in peaceful
coexistence away from the sight of white men. The park bore the name of the
great river of the region: Xingu. The film benefits enormously from the expert
photography on location and extremely accurate recreation of those pages of
history that are often overlooked. The end credits showed the great Fernando
Meirelles as one of the producers. My day was made.
BMW: Aditya Bhattacharya (India,
Hindi/English)
It is a return of sorts for the director whose last
film Dubai Return (2005) with Irfan Khan and Divya Dutta never released. To
most people (which is not many) he is still known as the guy who made Raakh way
back in 1988, which pulled off a casting coup by getting a very young Aamir
Khan, Pankaj Kapur and Supriya Pathak together. And then disappeared. I haven’t seen those movies, so
I went in for this screening more out of curiosity than anything else.
It tells the story of a New York based journalist of
Indian origin, Nivedita (Sarita Choudhury) who is in Mumbai to shoot a
documentary on encounter specialist Dilawar Khan (Javed Jaffri). The titular
BMW refers to the car Khan drives, as well as becomes an acronym for Bombay’s Most
Wanted. For the film, she also interviews his informer Inayat (Chandan Roy
Sanyal) and, later, a former bar dancer Vanilla (Tannishtha Chatterjee). The
three subjects share a close bond from an earlier time. The journalist’s
arrival coincides with several synchronous changes in the city: encounter
specialists are now hunted and harassed by the new political establishment, bar
dancers have been rendered jobless due to RR Patil’s landmark decision and the
informer is on the run, hunted by both the sides he played and betrayed. Nivedita’s
attempt to delve into the encounter killing of the feared Pote Bhau (Vijay Raaz)
shifts the delicate balance between the three subjects, in addition to drawing
the ire of Khan’s former boss (Adil Hussain) now hell-bent on capturing him to
please his superiors. Amid this dynamically changing landscape, Nivedita struggles
to piece together the jigsaw of Pote’s killing.
The narrative is rather convoluted with different
versions of the same event seen through different eyes, certain events are
fractured and intercut with other events, characters and their motivations subtly
change with every retelling and fact and fiction intermingle freely to create
the uneasy matrix of life. Along the way, the movie doffs its hat to masterpieces
in this tradition such as Rashomon, The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, even
Ab Tak Chhappan. But at its heart, it is a whimsical film, with a uniquely
bittersweet taste, finely, though sometimes, unevenly, textured. The performances
are uniformly good, the humour is quite off-beat, the musical influences
eclectic, ranging from Italian opera and American jazz to Indian folk and Hindi
film music. The director has called it his blood-speckled love-letter to his
growing-up city, Bombay. In the list of worthy cinematic tributes to the city,
it surely occupies its own distinct niche.
Reality: Dir. Matteo Garrone (Italy)
It is said that the name of the director (given his
last work, ‘Gomorrah’ which I haven’t seen yet) was enough to draw audiences to
this film. Turns out it is far, far removed from the world of organised crime
explored in ‘Gomorrah’ and tackles the appeal of the reality show ‘Big Brother’
(its Italian version) to a fish-seller in Naples. This one, named Luciano, is
happily married with three daughters and a large extended family of brothers,
sisters, aunts and uncles who live together in a huge, crumbling mansion that
might have once belonged to a fairy tale. As the movie begins, we see him to be
infatuated with the reigning Big Brother winner and an ardent aspirant to the
show. He is a cheerful, forever optimistic family man, rather like Roberto Benigni’s
character from ‘Life is Beautiful’. However, as the film progresses he becomes
more like Robert de Niro’s character from ‘The King of Comedy’, a man so
naively optimistic that you worry for him, who smiles so hard and so long, you
feel uncomfortable and unpleasant, afraid when the smile might slip to be
reveal the inevitable ugliness beneath. In his obsession with the show, he
slowly descends into insanity, despite repeated attempts by his family members,
especially his wife, to break his fall. Stunningly directed, with marvellously long
Steadicam-held takes, during which the camera manages to watch the actors so
closely we can tell what the characters are thinking inside their heads, the
film is a technical tour-de-force. The ending is debatable and seems abrupt.
But this is a film that is more about the journey, which itself rushes by with
such headlong passion, that we may be forgiven for anticipating a fittingly
grand destination.
