The 14th MFF: A Retrospective

The 14^th 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.