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The Hunt for Veerappan (2023)
MASTERPIECE DOCU. ON DREADED DACOIT VEERAPPAN
"There has never been a set of developments like this in the history of the modern world." "There never ever has been a man, a criminal, like Veerappan." With these proclamations of formidable foreboding, so opens the explosive documentary on dreaded dacoit Veerappan by director Selvamani Selvaraj, another visionary production by Netflix, featuring a spectacular cast of interviews with top police chiefs, a journalist with an impressive baritone voice anchoring this epic narrative, and a whole slew of insiders who spill the secrets on this rip-roaringly dark Indian chapter.
Director Selvaraj's thrilling four episode series fuses the best of documentary and cinema in a dazzling feat of true-life story-telling, requiring not one, not two, not three but all four writers - Forrest Borie, Apoorva Bakshi, Kimberley Hassett and the helmer himself. What is seared into consciousness is the blood-'n'-bombs saga of a legendary forest brigand who butchers elephants, cuts down and smuggles a whole forest's worth of precious sandalwood and mounts daringly barbaric attacks against the police whose STF (the custom-designed Special Task Force) rips apart people in their equally blood-thirsty pursuit of him.
You'll be hard pressed to find another documentary where every single interviewee is impressive in their riveting soundbites and unique personality - whether it's the assortment of villagers whose names are shown in marquee XL font, the phalanx of police officers each different and yet each offering their own slice of cutting insight into this forest nightmare, and Veerapan's wife Muthulakshmi and gang member Anburaj who humanize the monster.
You have the Milieu and the Music. The milieu, adroitly lensed by Udit Khurana, is the magnificently dense jungle straddling the state borders of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, often covered by painstakingly getting up before dawn for stunning mist-shrouded shots. The Music by Jhanu Chanthra, crackles, snarls and laments, in a razor-sharp value addition. Full Review @ Upnworld.
Jawan (2023)
THE WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR
'Jawan' is a terribly made film about a group of vigilantes who hold the government to ransom and then surprisingly make it do good deeds. All this is just re-treaded territory, first ignited by visionary mass director S. Shankar, and now Atlee, his former assistant director, who does his usual lazy shtick by simply rehashing the old stuff with overboiled, done-to-death, screamingly melodramatic direction - I badly wanted to exit the theatre at the 1.5 hour mark but forced myself to finish the nearly 3 hour punishment.
It is painful to see storied superstar Shah Rukh Khan degenerating so badly in the later decades of his career. This artiste who toplined such excellent movies as DDLJ, Dil Se, Devdas, Asoka, Swades has stopped caring about quality from a long time and only lusts after more box office triumphs no matter how shoddy his recent films are. Notice he has long since stopped working with good directors and the few good ones he has recently worked with have been compromised by poor collaboration (Imtiaz Ali - 'Jab Harry Met Sejal').
Vijay Sethupathi's acting deficiencies are severely exposed, while the performances across the board are mediocre. Good taste and cinematic quality are repeatedly butchered in 'Jawan' in the relentless hail of gunfire that drags on here - SRK meanwhile has his champion sights firmly fixed on the Rs.1000 crore box office mark. Upnworld.
Dunkirk (2017)
Nolan misses the Slam-Dunk(irk) on this one
With his newest release 'Dunkirk' , high-profile director Christopher Nolan ensures that I've seen more duds from him rather than successes. In fact, if I hadn't known Nolan directed 'Dunkirk', I'd never have suspected it after the movie , aside from soon forgetting the film anyway. Here's a fabulous example of how to spend a big fortune on a war movie, with all the sound and swooping visuals, and yet ultimately leave the viewer with precious little to hang on to after it's all over. Pic is based on the eventual evacuation of more than 330,000 British and allied troops from France's Dunkerque coast where they were trapped after the Germans pushed them there in 1940 in WWII. The Nazi's bizarre decision not to advance full-throttle on these cornered troops is perhaps not relevant to the movie but Nolan commits other glaring omissions - afraid perhaps of upsetting his current-day German pals, he uses the non-specific word 'enemy' instead of Germans ; more disturbing is the fact that he refuses to show even passing footage of how in real life more than 30,000 French soldiers gallantly assisted British evacuation while themselves having to surrender to the Nazis. Forgetful that he's directing a movie and not a mute show-'n'-read- out picture show, the movie's preamble informs us of the above background in print instead of having characters tell the situation to us with simple dialogue.
Nolan seems to have held his background-score composer to rifle- point and warned him of impending strafing if he ever stops the music - the result is non-stop keening from the foreboding cellos. The relentless background music, even if it is not that loud, ensures that there is barely any moment of reflection, perspective or poise in this hectic collage. I often accuse Indian mainstream film-makers of BGM overkill - Nolan here seems to tell them 'Don't worry, I'm with you'. The lens refuses to dwell on any given situation or character at length ; resultantly very few scenes pack emotional gravitas and I will be genuinely stunned if you remember in later months the sentimental impact of any character from this movie. A character comes to an unfortunate end unrelated to the direct strike of war but the story-teller here is unable to extract wrenching impact from that turn. Emotional force and even poignant throb was indubitably present in Nolan's genius 'Memento' and the monumental 'The Dark Knight' but the same conceptual somersaults hamstrung by an inadequate emotional core which afflicted his 'Inception' and 'Interstellar' are on unfortunate evidence here. Caught up in large-scale logistics again, the director fails to present an adequate supply of absorbing dramatic scenes as if to imply that the bare-bones appeal of elemental theater do no interest him.
But this is a war movie with a lot of action which is more important - some might say. Sure why not, I greatly appreciated the no-hold- barred carnage exploding in 'Saving Private Ryan' but that focus is missing here. The soldiers on the beach and wharf taking a pounding from the overhead planes is initially impressive but soon that is frittered away in shifty scene planning. Point of View shots from the fighter pilot's plane admirably show us how difficult it is to aim at the constantly moving enemy planes in contrast to easy video games, but that vicarious whiz-'n'-danger of those zooming fighter planes is not fully realized, with the editing of those aerial scenes not generating any thrilling continuity either.The ending is quite anti-climactic - I barely cared who lived and who did not. When you spend $150 million on a movie, such things should matter, I think. By UPN/EarnesTaster
Bãhubali 2: The Conclusion (2017)
The Forefather Of Rajnikanth !
People come in to watch 'Baahubali 2' for different reasons. Some have no clue what's going on, dragged in by their friends who became fans of the first blockbuster film. Others, their heads done in by swirling tertiary-level conspiracy theories about why the hero was treacherously killed in the first installment, expect no action sequences at all but rather CIA-NSA-FBI-style back-to-back scenes of intrigue, stealth and chicanery. "Baahubali : The Beginning", set in ancient India, told the story of a great darling of the masses whose throne, wife and life are all lost in a spiral of betrayal and whose son then rises from exile to reclaim the crowd-cheering legacy of the great 'Baahubali'. Made with Rs.180 crore and then going to gross Rs.650 crore (US$110 million), it rocked all kinds of rafters , with "Baahubali : The Conclusion" capitalizing on the hoopla by being sold to the market for Rs.500 crore even before release.
So does it cut the royal cake satisfactorily considering the heavy expectations weighting its sword ? The good news is that it does indeed, with director and co-writer S.S Rajamouli offering something for everyone, and thus audaciously fulfilling the promise advanced in the first movie. The former film's biggest asset was the lavishly mounted , strongly executed battle sequence in the second half , the likes of which was unattempted before in Indian cinema. Bursts of boiling drama aside, Rajamouli's uses his forte in imaginatively choreographed action direction to power much of the second film.
An early sequence starring a marauding elephant is mostly hot air, but the narration quickly recoups. A boar hunt is not extraordinary but Rajamouli uses a cheeky story-track of stealth and competition to keep the sequence whirring along. Then a horde of fire-horned bulls and how Baahubali deals with that rampage again makes for engaging viewing. The action peaks with a thrillingly choreographed "three-arrow" firing sequence where the hero launches a brave-heart counter-attack, while simultaneously firing much more potent darts into the heart of his poignantly impressed heroine whom he saves from doom. The intermission is even more special, using indirect action to drum up a mystically powerful sequence. The climactic fight loses some steam in the very last stages and the film's last scenes seem hurried in their conclusion but by then, like an inspired charioteer driving his megalithic carriage past every storm and cataclysm, Rajamouli has reached the finish line in one piece.
So we have Mahendra Baahubali (Prabhas) arising from the provinces to dazzle the public and reclaim his throne in the great kingdom of Mahismati. The flashback shows us how his father, the original Baahubali (Prabhas in a double-role), a great and noble fighter relinquishes his throne and meets his downfall in a whirlpool of treachery. Junior Baahubali's mother Devasana (Anushka Shetty) spends twenty-five years enslaved in chains in the palace courtyard. Evil King Bhallaldeva (Rana Dugabatti) presides over this unholy state of the nation , a man so wicked that he uses his majestically commanding mother Sivagami (Ramya Krishnan) to achieve his ultimate goal while secretly considering her all along as just another disposable commodity.
The script to its credit somehows rolls on as a juggernaut, but intricate detailing of characters is sacrificed at the altar of booming drama. Ramya Krishnan, aging but still voluptuously smoldering , is again powerful as the imposing royal mother Sivagami but the script in Part 2 makes her commit a lot of impulsive blunders. On another note, you are gravely mistaken if you expect to find subtlety in this opus. When Rajamouli jettisons the crudity of excess melodrama and elects to blend indirect gesture into his habitual power-hitting, the effect is vastly better as in the scene where the gathered soldiers and public thump the ground to show their solidarity with the second-in-command rather than the first. The cascade of its awesome consequences , both physical and symbolic, is a fantastic example of powerful frisson-generating film-making.
Rajamouli knows his overall audience goes for the bigger effect and he ploughs on with giant steps crushing concerns of delicacy. In a massive court with a full audience, a man is suddenly beheaded. I thought this scene was shamelessly gratuitous rather than being plain bad, but the audience around me thought neither - with gasps of admiration and even some vocalized admirations heard all around. Heads falling off after being severed , in not just one but multiple instances, has never before been shown directly like this in blockbuster Indian cinema. I'm not praising it , nor am I damning it nor am I fence-sitting. Rather I see it as how much Rajamouli is able to make his audience go along with him for this ride.
When the cinematography slows down for the shot of the ruptured carriage occupying the whole screen with the enraged Bhallaladeva poised with a spear from his besieged seat while the screen's other side shows Baahubali landing with a mighty jump crushing the heads of the harnessed bulls, one of my lady friends sitting nearby said 'That's a nice shot!'. She usually likes films like 'Dear Zindagi' , so if Rajamouli could interest her with his visual composition in the midst of hellish battle, I suspect he's got most of his market cornered.
S.S Rajamouli has smartly harvested his ideas from the Indian cornucopia of magnificent mythology, and snowballed them into a grand unashamed explosion of myth and cinema hitherto unwitnessed in Indian films. With his command over large-scale technical logistics and ensuring a story that almost always hits its narrative turns strongly, Rajamouli has fully accomplished the landmark act of shaking up the scope of the Indian blockbuster - we wouldn't be one bit surprised if Aamir, Shah Rukh and Salman are now doing respective team-huddles on how to pull off a 'Khan-Bali'. More such @ Upnworld
Kaatru Veliyidai (2017)
Ratnam's Retirement Package
A wide-angle lens slowly weaves through the chilly vista, gazing at a snow-blanketed mountain flanked by nothingness, at the centre of which a bus wends through the lone road. From the vehicle's window a young lady leans out, the sun catching her brunette-bronze tresses as her glowing face smiles at the dazzling scenery. She reaches the hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir to convey pleasantries of arrival, and as it often happens in subcontinental hospitals, her day of joining as a duty doctor hasn't even commenced when she is thrust into the storm of dealing with smashed heads and bleeding limbs.The young military pilot she bravely brings back into rude good health scoots before formalities, but they again find each other (as pairs inevitably do in Ratnam movies).
The cold air glows giddily warm in the chemistry of their togetherness. He ( Varun a.k.a VC portrayed by Karthi) steals her (Leela, essayed by Aditi Rao Hydari) and they go a plane ride through snowy paradise - a sequence remarkable for the way it captures the dizzy untramelled joy felt by Leela. Varun may not match her in charm, but with his Aviator sunglasses and sculpted physical contours, he initially pulls off the cool, strong, calm look with elan. One senses rather early that this film may not have the most imaginative of story-lines but never mind - Ratnam strikes pure gold with casting the brilliant Aditi Rao Hydari as the queen of this story.
With her radiantly delicate face and marvellously expressive, limpidly light-hued eyes that convey everything from romantic thrill to aching vulnerability with exquisite effect, the film blooms like a stunning Kashmiri vista every time Hydari holds court. She is the one definite reason why anyone should bother watching this film. One cannot recognize her from her simple get-up in 'Rockstar' six years ago, but here she is in fairy-tale princess mode, with wondrous screen presence and award-winning emoting.The last time a young Indian actress dazzled so much was in 'Ishaqzaade' (2012) with Parineeta Chopra.
Those early "simple" sequences, which soar on strong direction and inspired casting, herald a securely auspicious start to 'Kaatru Veliyidae". Trouble looms in paradise when the recipe for the continued story goes awry both for the characters and the narration. Varun turns out to be a Jekyll & Hyde jerk - he'll sweep you off your feet today, then yell and sulk like a thug, then serenade again tomorrow, and betray you most humiliatingly before again acting the consummate Romeo. Leela too betrays her intelligence by repeatedly falling for this flawed fool who passes for a brave charming hero in public life. It turns out he has an abusive father which explains why he sports the psychological defence mechanism called 'displacement' or 'transferential displacement' where he in turn abuses Leela to come to terms with his damaged past.
We still have a promising story but Ratnam, who's also the scriptwriter here, then goes slack in further fleshing out the persona of Varun. The Varun we see in this film is a realistic person admittedly - a two-timing supposedly charming capricious jerk whose real colours get better manifested towards those who know him better. But in a film like this where he is positioned as a central character, Varun deflates expectations. The deception in his deviousness is not given a smoother, more sophisticated spin. His behavioural palette of broad mostly witless strokes, in qualitative numbers, directly jumps from 50 to 20 to 10 or 50 to 70 to 100, whereas Leela's emotional acuity deftly touches over each integer in going from 1 to 100. After his most public and humiliating betrayal of her, when she confronts his blissfully oblivious self in a bar, he cites forgetfuless and then attempts to woo her again clumsily. Resorting to an earlier tactic, he harks back to his friends and proclaims 'Pals!!, she's leaving me! Oh come on, don't do this to me Leela..." as if he has nothing to hide. It is likely a reflection of both Leela's deep infatuation towards him and her innate nobility that she does not slap him resoundingly for this patently dishonest farce.
The sequences purportedly set in Pakistan are a shocking example of poor story-telling, all the more so because they come from a distinguished film-maker. Would a Pakistani watching this movie come away with the impression that the film has presented an interesting slice of his or her own country? Hell,No! Ratnam does not bother to think perceptively for this part of story - rather, this track runs listlessly as a token vessel which to make hero cover some supposedly heroic terrain.
When I asked an acquaintance whether he would watch this newly released film, he evinced little enthusiasm, citing the long slew of Ratnam's disappointing works over the years and then averring that he now prefers to remember Ratnam as how he was in his vintage form of the late nineteen-eightees. I found little in the way of countering that perspective. Like how 'Kaatru Veliyidae's heroine gives doomed consideration to the mercurial "hero" time and again, flailing admirers of Ratnam like me keep returning to the tiring auteur with fading hopes mired in a lost past, changed present and bleak future. More such @ Upnworld.
Io sono l'amore (2009)
That WMD called Love in Lush Milan
Few countries make, nay, have the style statement that Italy embodies. A tourism paradise with scores of stunning locales inland and by the sea, magnificent old-world architecture, cool couture, luscious cuisine, luxury furniture and more... "I Am Love" by Luca Guadagnino is that rare achievement unites almost all these elite elements into an impossibly beautiful masterpiece.
It focuses on a very wealthy family in Milan that has woven its riches from the textile industry. There is emotional turbulence in the very first sequence - a lost horse race which the family always previously won, and a surprise decision in a declaration of power transfer from one generation to another. The subversive influences, in an impressive array of forms, never stop from there onwards , taking apart the family in multiple ways.
This exact same story could have been told by a lesser director in a fairly pedestrian way, but the story-teller here uses the high-end setting as a launching board, to wed everyday behaviour and feeling with an agile tendency to naturally sculpt and let soar scenes of hypnotic intensity and operatic grandeur. Guadagnino directs with such beauty and controlled flamboyance that even if I were charged not the usual $20 that is the price of a movie ticket but $400 that is the tariff for a high-profile opera (that 'I Am Love' effortlessly often simulates) I'd have left satiated at the end of the performance.
Guadagnino aces the score on two invaluable fronts. He selects and inserts John Adams' orchestral compositions which were already cemented much before the film's idea was conceived, and five-star cinematography by Yorick Le Saux. Their dual magic, further elevated by the director's visionary wand, manifests in various showpiece sequences.
When Emma, her glamorous, augustly catty mother-in-law Allegra and Edoardo's fiancée lunch in Antonio's restaurant, he sends out the best of his modernist cuisine flourishes for them. The way he synthesizes a gorgeous deconstructionist version of the 'Leghorn style Cod' is a joy to watch in itself. On tasting it, Emma gets the first frisson on what's to come. There's even a sneaky meaning in the main course for the senior lady (an egg yolk and pea cream dish that a man would probably scoff in one bite), a relatively mainstream "mixed fish and crunchy vegetable" for the pleasantly full-bodied fiancée.
To Emma however, his presentation elides quantity (of which Emma has had no dearth of in her millionaire household) and focuses on profound pleasurable quality (which she may not have had enough of). Shrimp, of those intensely hued small Mediterranean ilk, and ratatouille (stewed vegetables) are placed in front of Emma. Her fingers holding the fork and knife attend to the task with gentle incredulous pleasure and on tasting the shrimp, her eyes close and her face and eyes slowly writhe... as though she's being caressed both inside and outside. The scene's natural pace slows down to join her in languorous ecstasy. Lights dim off elsewhere and create a soft spotlight around her whilst music carefully enhances intimacy and expansiveness in the background. Brad Bird would have approved. The scene is a key example of how cuisine (with a subtle consistent focus on seafood) is used throughout the movie as a device of subversion. After such a seduction, one wonders what the impossibly sated Emma can possibly do to fend off the flirtation...
Perhaps the most bravura and executively challenging of the sequences, ensues as a pair of lovers, who couldn't sustain their togetherness on the plains, journey to sun-kissed hills where their love-making is illustrated with the eye of a top artist. John Adam's agile orchestra and panting violins are expertly calibrated to highlight the throes of bare lovers as they carnally celebrate. Imaging, in an inspired move, cuts between scenes of nature and the rapture of their bodies. Making love, has rarely if ever been touched upon with such a unreservedly intense yet deeply artistic vision.
As the epicenter of this movie's flux, Emma as portrayed by Tilda Swinton is a landmark example of atypical casting. In a superbly understated performance , there is vulnerability, a genuinely tender heart and innate grace in her layered portrayal. As the middle-aged mistress of the house who was transplanted decades ago to this very rich family, Emma remains polite, sincere and down-to-earth, gaining trust and acceptance of its insiders. The opening sequence is a splendid summation of her temperament. Though she is the queen of the mansion, she calmly and keenly attends to the planning of the momentous family dinner thus showing her commitment to the nitty gritties. At the dinner when her father-in-law (who is fond of her) makes a good natured jab at his grand-son,she looks at her ward with a special blended expression of amusement and sympathy that does not go overboard. To mollify her daughter for whom the rest of the family also claps in sympathetic encouragement, she holds and kisses her and then with delicacy and feeling utters some words inaudible to us, in a fashion uncannily similar to how the "royals" make seemingly involved small-talk with the ballboys-'n'-girls in Wimbledon pre-match ceremonies. Towards the end when grieving Emma, her formal gown unchanged, slumps into bed in a small spartan room set away from the rest of the grand house, and Ida wakes her up next morning with a gentle 'You have to get up' and Emma slowly awakens with a beleaguered face, throughout this ordeal there is never any forceful sorrow displayed yet it is easy to sense the deep ache in her bones and soul.
Technically, the film proudly establishes entry into the international textbook of how to make a film. And on a personal level, lo Sono L'Amore will last as an elegant anatomic detailing of that invisible weapon of mass destruction called love. More such @ Upnworld
The American (2010)
Corbijn's Masterpiece
Is the gentleman in "The American" exclusively an assassin? Leaving aside the template novel by Martin Booth, glimpses of the protagonist's life offered by to us by this pic, make it hard to tell. But there's no doubt that Jack (George Clooney in an iconic performance) has professional duties which include top-tier sharp- shooting. There's no famous world-leader to assassinate, but a bigger inward battle inveigles his target-sight. He spends his arc in this story like a stealthy alpha beast haunted by prescience of its doom - the hunter being the hunted.
Director Anton Corbijn takes this slowly simmering thriller and sculpts it with exquisitely pared-down beauty and a gnawing sense of unease. Pic is a marvel of silences and reflective oases interspersed by vistas of a postcard-pretty Italian countryside town. There are only a few characters - all of them memorable. The plot crescendoes to a climax worthy of legendary stories - it's what happens when an European and an American work towards the universal good.
The nudity in this movie is a stellar example of how it can be used to superbly seductive effect , rather than being a gratuitous display of private parts. There's a rouge-lit scene in a boudoir that is stunningly erotic , as the stationary lens looks from the bed-side at the upper bodies of gently writhing lovers. Interestingly, that same celestial nudity of Violante Placido (the real-life daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli who had slayed Michael Corleone with the 'thunderbolt' in 'The Godfather's Sicilian countryside) is put to different use in a secluded brook-side setting where she happily partakes of the sylvan waters and then beckons to her lover Jack uttering "Come!!" with child-like joy. Her body adorned only by itself, gels seamlessly with the au naturelle verdant world around them, but Jack, instead of plunging into the infinite frolic of carefree lovers in a private paradise, stands frozen. Haunted by past incident, he burns inside with sudden-onset doubts of whether this nymph is his lover or his enemy.
The other lady who taxes Jack's attention is the afore-mentioned Mathilde - a spectacular specimen of the very rare breed which is the female assassin. Her seeming affiliations to a haute fashion ramp melt in a cool flash when she adjusts a rifle's screws swiftly and then proceeds to sharp-shoot like a champion. Sensing something in her, Jack displays not even a flicker of emotion towards her , always maintaining with Mathilde a cool business-like demeanour. When they're done with the job at hand, Mathilde reclines by the grass and breaks the ice for the one and only time when she teases him whether he's in the habit of bringing his woman here.
Students of background music would do well to educate themselves in the subtle nuances of the minimalist masterpiece that is Herbert Gronemeyer's background score. Often you're barely aware that there's any music at all but the narrative flows flawlessly. When Jack asks Clara "Will you go away with me....forever?", it is a suddenly formed scene of great and moving romance - and Gronemeyer uses touches of good ol' violin in the background to achieve blockbuster emotion by the bushel. And at the end, the maddening agony of speeding towards your lover is captured with exquisite restraint by a piano (compare and contrast this with another style of music, also accompanying a car perilously careening towards the finish line in 'Rififi').
What Anton Corbijn accomplishes here , is commensurate on some key levels, with what Ashok Mehta did with a differently designed film - 'Moksha' : a career lenser assuming the directorial baton to engineer a dazzling fusion of suspense and romance. When the anatomy of an uncompromizing thriller eventually dovetails into a devastatingly poignant love story at the climax, you know that it is a story- telling triumph, that we witness only once in a blue moon. More such @ Upnworld
Duvidha (1973)
Genius In The Hinterlands
Directed by the uniquely talented Mani Kaul, 'Duvidha' is a cine- story about a young couple marooned in the hinterlands of Rajasthan. Rajasthan is famous for its forts and palaces - but we don't see any of that here , in fact we see very less of the outdoors.The action lingers on, in an old white-washed house which cages a young lady (enacted by Raisa Padamsee). Even inside the house, we don't see much of her, swathed as her body is in a sari that is perpetually draped over her head. It's an orthodox household, made worse by the fact that this newly arrived bride is virtually abandoned by her useless young husband. Acceding to an auspicious time-period that mandates him to leave right then to a distant land to trade and make money for five years, he drily consoles his wife that once he returns after five years , they can have all the time and intimacy in the world to themselves.
He's soon gone, but a ghost mimicking him to the fullest, takes his place by fooling the family with a seemingly convincing story. But it tells the young bride the truth. Will she accept this ghost as the perfect physical and mental impersonator of her husband for the next five years ?
One suspects that even if Kaul had directed the same script with a conventional narration, he would have made an interesting picture for the full extent of its crisp 84 minute runtime. But then it might not have made the film uniquely memorable. So he would have thought - what techniques can I use to jazz up this narrative ? How can I do this without boring even the discerning viewer out of her or his skull?
Of all the films I've seen, no other picture comes closer to simulating the effect of reading a comic book (a serious one) and watching a movie at the same time. Kaul subtly detaches video from audio almost always - the characters speak, but the dubbing is purposely left a little desynchronized while the voices are projected a little louder. There are no whispers or any barely audible talk in this movie. The camera, though very careful in aesthetics, is mofussil in its images with high-resolution pictures deliberately unreached for, and that coupled with the speech-bubble- like talk, heightens the illusion of perusing a work of graphic illustrations. Every sentence, with the requisite modulation of course, is like a declarative one. Irony abounds, the magical reality of folklore is tacitly accepted while chaste Sanskrit- centric Hindi is rich in redolence.
Sometimes whilst the dialogues carry on, Kaul shows a static frame, and then switches to another. All this is done so artfully that it does not come across as gimmicky or disconnected - rather the images and the audio each register with crystalline impact. In an early scene of the ladies welcoming the young marital pair, we see a high overhead shot and then realize it is the best and the most vivid angle for covering the colourful different saris of the ladies all closely grouped together.
There's a sequence of the un-named young bride enjoying a ride in a swing outside. But then she doesn't seem to be really enjoying it - the pallu of the sari covers her head like a dark funeral-sheet and her head leans sideways in dolor. The scene, coming nine years after a similar much more famous one, is a clear nod to Satyajit Ray's Charulata but Kaul shows, a short while later, another gesture in his doff of hat, when the angle of camera asks whether this woman on the swing is being hanged to death.
As for the performances , their backbone is good, but finer nuances are obviated by Kaul's Bressonic approach where the actors are only required to be vessels at most, to convey the directorial plan.
Folk vocals and local instruments are employed in inspired fashion to lend bracing underlines and mystic undertows. The tone of the commentaries in the film is equally riveting. Female or male, the dialogue sparkles with native purity and emotional perpicacity. The girl's voice, virginal in its innocence and plain texture, has less screen-time but is given a cutting little soliloquy where she says " In the eyes of parents , a heap of rubbish takes more time to grow than the body their daughter ; I was barely sixteen when they began worrying about giving me away in marriage. I was able to flourish in my mother's womb but not in my father's courtyard".
The young male voice-over is utterly riveting the more one listens to it - please forgive the chauvinism in this as it is put to wonderfully quiet service - not cloying but utterly ironic - in honour of the martyred female's plight. The tone in this voice-over is gloriously inscrutable, as though it had died, and is now re-born and has remained young but omniscient, much wiser, a ghost virtually, but with the poignancy brimming over its seemingly nonchalant tone. Elocuting in splendidly pure Hindi, its achieves its finest moment when it soliloquizes on the bride holding her baby and climbing up the stairs to her husband awaiting in "sweet expectation" in the aftermath of an incident.
By its beautifully subtle depiction of how a society treats its women and by its invigorating take on cinema itself, 'Duvidha' sculpts a compact but unshakeable landmark, not just in the Indian pantheon but also in world cinema. ***** More such @ Upnworld
Seppuku (1962)
Slaying Faux Honour...
"Who can know the depths of another man's heart?"
- Hanshuro Tsugumo
Apart from its sheer story-telling gravitas and technical splendour, Kobayashi's Hara-kiri is especially lauded for its plea to look closer, to examine a little more deeply the troubles of those not as fortunate as us. When I watched it for the first time, I was blown away by the arresting wallop of this tension-saturated story's narration , and it was on the second viewing years later that I registered with more delicate acuity, its eloquent entreaty for a more compassionate look at the surface issues of our brethren. Particularly in Japan, the practice of bowing to the larger system and the concept of "honour" being maintained at all costs, looms especially large but of what use is honour if it makes us lose everything dear to us? Hara-kiri takes on the form of a formidable Samurai drama and builds this visceral sentiment with inexorable power, the vise of its narrative swirling and tightening until the physical carnage at the end isn't necessary - the foes have already been annihilated with gentle words. World-class cinematography and flawlessly strong acting further power this monochrome scorcher.
Pic opens with a wide-angle black-'n'-white canvas , the neatness and sparse beauty of which is the trademark of director Masaki Kobayashi. Notice how clean these compositions are, whether it is the large ground ouside a chieftan's house, the inner courtyard with its settled pebbles and carefully coiffed platforms for sitting, or even a poor man's wooden house bereft of much conveniences and yet almost spacious in its tidy gestalt. The framing is immaculate when Motome Chijiwa (Akira Ishihama) - a young Samurai struggling for survival - sits with folded knee - in a martial lord's house in front of a tough-jawed warrior who listens to his case. It is 1630 in the Edo region of Japan - peace has been declared in the land but it has devolved into internal war for the highly trained swordsmen called Samurai - they find no employment now, jobs are scarce with workers pouring into any open job-site and Motome is pushed away by a supervisor who cries out that the supervisor will be punished if authorities find out that the formal warrior class is being employed for menial jobs.
Motome reports to the House of Li , as other Samurai have done before him, that this utter penury is so dishonourable that he would rather commit Seppuku by disemboweling himself with his own sword in this martial house's courtyard as a final act of honour. The House of Li, manned by fierce-looking superiors, is fed up with this pattern of supposedly suicidal Samurais - they see that many such applicants are willing to accept some money and go away without killing themseles as they initially declared to do. At this stage, Kobayashi racks up the sense of foreboding , panic and icy fear with such elan that the ensuing twenty minutes ranks as one of the most implacable turn of events in black-'n'-white cinema. A few days later, a middle-aged man named Hanshuro Tsugomo (Tatsuya Nakadai), bearded and rather emaciated-looking, shows up at the House of Li with a similar request. He is told the story of Motome Chijiwa as a warning - but Tsugumo, with a wry expression that is beyond gallows humour, calmly states that he will indubitably execute as promised.
As great as the previous tightly coiled sequence was, this succeding chapter matches it with its slow burn and unbearable tension which Tsugumo stretches far past breaking point with a story he unspools. Counsellor Saito (Rentaro Mikuni) , heading the house in the absence of the martial lord, is , to put it presisely - driven nuts - by this seemingly interminable narration by the grave-faced Tsugumo but I never got tired of hearing it as the latter lays one dialogue upon another like one revelatory card against the next one till the stakes indicate not just one death but many more. Saito , his strings plucked like a hen stripped to the bone , retreats to the house unable to take more.
In other jidaigeki (period-films) like Kurosawa's great "Throne of Blood", the performances though solid do not evoke my specific praise but in Harakiri ,the thespian finesse is on prime display - this could very well have been a starkly lit theater-drama. One can almost feel the cool breeze of happiness coursing through Motome's smiling immensely relieved face after the stifling humidity of despair, alas later , stomach-churning panic sets in to seize his mien. Tsugumo's nominally amused ,mostly dead-serious physiognomy never ever raises its voice but the prosody of his message undulates with the timeless meaning of great scripture. And then there's Saito , more c**t than counsellor, who's so drunk with power and delusions of tough wisdom that his sobriety is nullified by incurable hauteur.
I was vastly disappointed by the fight at the end on my first viewing - having brought me to the very peak of expectation, Harakiri's climactic sword-fight seemed not even close to the supremely choreographed ahead-of-its-time bristling magnificence of Daibosatsu toge's finisher. But then as Saito himself says , Tsugumo is a "half-starved" Samurai who's already been through many hells so it is perhaps unfair to expect him to again fight like Japan's greatest champion. The denouement is a sobering indictment of the way history often operates, and the film eventually reclaims its spell-binding emotional and technical territory . To watch Hara-kiri , then , is to acknowledge that even in 1962 when so much of the rest of the world was learning the ropes of top-tier movies, Japan was already capable of engineering peerless cinema.
Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa (2010)
Answer to the Title's Question : Yes, provided you yourself don't fly back to the other end.
What commenced the catamaran towards the Tamil picture for me, was 'Omanna Penne' - one of the greatest video songs in the history of Indian cinema. And ten minutes into watching 'Vinaithandi Varuvaya' , not to mention witnessing the simple yet splendid arc of the camera in the opening credits , was enough to hint that Gautam Vasudev Menon had a special project going on here.
Manoj Paramahamsa's world-class cinematography tells us the story , with stellar esthestics in the camera's framing , glides and arcs. The plot line is great enough to stretch from the beginning of mankind to its end but, Dear Reader , I'll cut it medium short just for you. Hindu Boy meets Christian Girl, goes nuts over her ,hops over a gate ,sings a snazzy song and obsessively woos her in the grand tradition of Tamil cinema's young male bravehearts who are the finest antithesis of pyrrhic victors. Girl actually is interested, even manages a smooch but Boy wants much more but Girl's Daddy is a baddie due to orthodox reasons. Well-educated Girl is all set to tie the knot with San Francisco-based vice-president-of-something while Boy is sneered at because he is doomed to start off electively as an assistant film director (more understandable in India wherein thousands of trashy films domestically made, have disillusioned so many). But Girl then says yes then says no, then says no then says yes ..and repeats cycle on oscillating loop till frenetically persevering Boy is so confused that he seeks deliverance of a different kind...
Unexpected pleasant surprises stud the film. Alleppey district of Kerala is introduced by a smartly telescoping succession of brilliantly cut scenes compendiating the milieu's beauty and details, both municipal and pastoral. Editor Anthony superbly executes the brief given to him. In another scene notable for a different kind of cinematic narration, it is early morning with light barely coming through and we see the hero on the bike with a girl on the backseat - when he hears depressing tidings, the screen darkens progressively as a reflection of the sun within him setting before it has even arisen, and then a red light is seen emblazoned against the white bands of his shirt when he stops the bike at a traffic signal, as though his heart is as redly inflamed as it could ever get.
No study of the select examples of Indian films that seamlessly splice songs into the narrative, would be complete without an inclusion of VV. The film's initial such examples - of boy and girl meeting for the first time (Hosanna), of boy and girl scheming a joint journey and then canoodling in an Indian first-class blue- cushioned train compartment (Omana Penne) - reveal an auteuristic finesse in making the sings effortlessly flow into the story.
Trisha is deceptively good at portraying the torn-between-two-worlds Jessie. What shows on Jessie's face and behaviour does not quite indicate what decisions she will eventually take. Menon pushes her close to the level of the maniacally oscillating dame of 'Jules et Jim', to which crux she might have well descended to, had this story been a fully reciprocative love triangle.
Silambarasan does not reveal great nuance of acting in this picture but his keen delivery of all the broad emotions amply redeems his act. Some his outbursts are indubitably terrific - I clapped without stopping like a shamelessly stoked vulgarian, when in response to Jesse saying that their prospects of being together are further weakened by her dislike of movie-watching, he snarls "What the f***ing kind of logic is that?!" (the Censor Board bleeps out the adjective - apparently it is alright for the nation to f*** its way past China to become the world' most populous country but it's not alright to utter the dirty word). Besides, Silambarasan can physically fight like a mean professional , and dance with slick grace - you don't need much else to be a hero in India, or for that matter in many other parts of the world.
The way the ending reamed around , repeatedly, with the true nature of what transpires, had me exasperatedly whispering slangs while watching the fag end. But Menon ultimately needs to be commended for daring to toy around that much with his audience. Still, the denouement is too frothy - a potion like what this movie promised, drunk to the lees, ought to have an aftertaste that is less forgiving. But this gripe should not detract from what has been achieved both technically and thematically overall. Menon inserts a line at the end that clearly conveys the autobiographical nature of this work. It must be a unique feeling to lay bare your heart in front of a cinema mass audience ...and fortune favours the brave. His luck was that he made the original film in Tamil Nadu and it succeeded on all fronts . I concede that even if it was a flop he might still have derived some satisfaction, but it remains a pity that re-making the film in Mumbai confounded him so much that giving the film two different endings (to purportedly appease an infantile nation-wide audience) still wasn't enough to have the Hindi version slammed by both critics and audience alike.
Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015)
One More Sucker Realizes Ultimate Tolerance.
Rating : 4 & 1/2 stars out of 5 : Outstanding (a disconnected dishonest finale still cannot undermine the overall merit of this natural and remarkably sprightly picture)
Dumb Laga Ke Haisha ( "Heavo-ho! Carry that load" to quote directly from the film's excellent subtitles) is a title that sounds like it is going to be a flippant ride but this film is not a romantic comedy that it is wrongly promoted to be - its nuances are far more meaningful than what is permitted within the scope of a comedy. Sharat Katariya , who has both written and directed this film, has accomplished what very few of his compatriots have done : crafting a socially incisive beaut that is smoothly studded with as many serious moments as deftly lighter ones.
Cut to plot : It is 1995 in Haridwar made beautiful by the artful camera-work of Manu Anand. Prem (Ayushmann Khurana) is a handsome young man who's in charge of a cassette shop that will soon give way to the era of CDs. This time of flux is also mirrored in Prem's last days of bachelorhood. His father (an excellent Sanjay Mishra) terrorizes his son into marriage with an obese woman despite Prem's loud protests. His wife Sandhya (Bhumi Pednekar) is a sweet-hearted girl whose womanly charms would have received much better scope if she was twenty-five kilos lighter but the reality is that she's not. Prem ignores her very often, tries to hide her from his social circle and eventually reaches a flashpoint through a series of loud public scandals at which point Sandhya, who has been patient and understanding all along, is so upset with his rejection of their marriage that she files for divorce. The court accedes but asks for six months of their marital life to elapse before it is done.
The film is more direct and blunt than yesteryear Hindi films which showed a similarly woebegone husband , and DLH is all the better for it because its cheek and shameless vigour unearths truths that the former films neither had the gumption nor the talent for. A scene of implied sexual intercourse acquires unexpectedly bawdy shades that are nevertheless delightfully wicked. Prem is no silently suffering martyr and his friends are not the wise caring types who will expery support him through these trying times - he violently reacts to their insensitivity with shocking declarations that though nakedly true, disqualify him resoundingly from gentlemanliness.
Prem's family adds to the circus. His father , despite his several endearing shades, is still a domineering moron who coerces his son into a disastrous union. There are two senior women in the house neither of whom have the brains or the heart to support their young ward in declining an alliance he clearly hates. Repeatedly the film shows us a pattern : family togetherness however artificial it may seem, reigns supreme while individual choice is routinely slaughtered. This central systemic conceit that throbs through the disturbed heart of DLH is exactly what has killed countless marriages and lives in India down the millennia.
Like an experienced effortless thespian, Bhumi Pednekar essays Sandhya as a young lady whose sweet temperament is unbreakably married to a stout heart that can withstand the societal taunts at her bulk. Ayushmann Khurana is no less accomplished - hurt, humiliation and rage relentlessly swims beneath his troubled visage. When he lashes out , the anger is palpable and when he breaks down, sympathy springs forth naturally.
Songs by Anu Malik deserve the mention of only one composition - 'Yeh Moh Moh Ke Dhaage' - elements of its sparkling melody recall Ismail Darbar's "Jhonka Hawa ka" but there is no doubt whatsoever in the singing by Monali Thakur whose exquisitely beautiful rendition rivals the best of Shreya Ghoshal and Madhushree.
Dumb Laga ke Haisha essays a painfully honest journey till its eventual moral cop-out , while a film from the same industry like 2014's 'Queen' also has a genuine beginning which then candy-flosses its way towards a climax that is thankfully bold in its moral choice. But I liked DLH much more than 'Queen' despite the fact that the former lacks the latter's thematically genuine ending. The difference 'lies' in virtuoso story-telling.
Tamasha (2015)
The Fun of Mucking Around And Still Making > Rs.100 Crore
"Wat Wat Wat!!!" which was aired as pre-release teaser serves as a terrific introduction to the frisson-filled promise of "Tamasha" , the new picture helmed by one of India's hottest directorial talents, and starring Ranbir Kapoor who suffice it to say is doing Daddy proud by continuing the tradition of handsome looks and gifted thespian chops (gender-bias aside, we'll talk about Deepika soon). Imtiaz Ali had trundled out a sophomoric tit-for-tat love story in "Jab We Met", then collapsed the rafters with his masterpiece "Rockstar" before again going on to hit a lot of deliveries clean out of the park in last year's brave-heart road movie "Highway". What new avenue of bravura story-telling has he managed to rustle up this time?
Auspiciously, both content and style not just ride but fly first- class in this newest vehicle of next-gen Hindi films. Girl & Boy - Ved et Tara - happen to meet in the post-card pretty locales of Corsica, France and rapidly strike up a clever chemistry followed by the physics of liplock (biology also ensues). I said "clever" because Ved (Ranbir) right from the get-go whips up a confab dipped in filmic yore and parodic style while Tara (Deepika) sportingly responds in kind. The Imtiaz Ali imperative of the separated-lovers phenomenon then sets in. But you can't keep star-crossed romantics away so in a chic social space hidden somewhere in Delhi's quagmire, hearts coalesce again but alas the flamboyance mafia of Corsican naughtiness that killed their tedium in France seems to be in short supply amidst Delhi's diktats.Tara is disappointed, Ved is crestfallen and lo we get the crucial dramatic conflict that is needed to resurrect their flagging flames...
A pal of mine posted on Facebook, before I saw the film, that he slept off during the movie - knowing him, I interpreted this as a good sign for the movie's quality. Prose is interspersed with ballad to enliven the atypical but refreshing narration of Tamasha. And oodles of humorous mockery perk up this unique effort. Ved and Tara's interaction kicks off as I mentioned above with dollops of mock-talk recalling yesteryear Hindi classics. This oblique stylized exchange was beginning to wear thin on me when I laughed heartily at a bedroom scene that occurs early on, in which Deepika's dirty slut- talk bounces off the mattress and brings down the roof with its wickedness. Rahman then superbly follows Ali's brief to compose a tongue-in-check foot- tapping folksy zinger that colourfully tells us why Heer is "badi" sad after she leaves Ved for the first time.
The resumption of their affections in India is coolly captured - there's an unforced unhurried sense of humour and we note the unreal ease with which things seem to be coming along swimmingly.Ved's lyrically flowing and charming story-telling we have seen earlier, is transplanted by a polite and assiduous corporate mama's boy nature that puts him into deep trouble from unexpected quarters. What happened to this carefree ditzy story-teller so as to make him so staid and predictable? Did his monied Dad never listen to his pleas to be allowed the luxury of ditching maths-'n'-engineering which he just can't figure out, and plunge full-time into drama- slinging that he dearly loves to practice?
Many narrative choices impress while justifying what Ranbir said apropos Ali when he declared him to be an "Ustaad" of story-telling for his work in last year's 'Highway'. When Ved returns to the story- teller of his childhood , we don't exactly hear the warm grandfatherly prophecy that lesser films would saddle their audience with. I don't know which real-life corporate boss Ali is mocking, but Ranbir's last scene with his employer is an absolute hoot that few directors in Mumbai would have the chutzpah to picturize (Ali has also done superb work in scripting this movie by himself). But Ved's father's eventual perspective regarding his son, and the oh- so-happy finale atop an applause-flooded stage did not warm my cockles - and Ali again retrogresses into his same old habit of sprinkling sugar onto his film's endings (I never liked his petit- fours).
The Indian press has cottoned on and labelled Ali's latest enterprise as "nouvelle vague" , aside from the fact that the movie has already made Rs.47 crore by the five day mark in India and looking all set to cross Rs.100 crore world-wide shortly. I have to concede that the much-maligned Indian film audience has redeemed itself this time. Yes this film has a 'message' (to use that dreaded word) but Tamasha's true triumph lies in its style of story-telling rather its content. And Ali despite commanding the ability to get attract stars and big budgets, takes a massive risk with a challenging narrative style that has ultimately paid off both literally and figuratively. He has now made three memorable films in a row - in an eminently fickle market like India, that is a minor miracle.
Titli (2014)
As Unadorned As A Titli Without Wings
Titli - named after the perpetually half-scowling zonked-looking youngster who somehow survives through this hell-ride of a movie - is the Hindi name for butterflies which have a good chance of flitting through your stomach during some choice moments of this bruiser. It is a unflinching biopsy of Delhi's worst - a companion film to B.A Pass (another Behl there), Love Sex Aur Dhoka and Khosla Ka Ghosla all of which expose urban degeneracy-'n'-corruption without the trappings of mainstream fluff. Powered by debutante Kanu Behl's unfettered direction, scripting help from Katariya & Stewart, and a powerhouse loose-canon performance by Ranvir Shorey , this is Indian art-house pounded through the pulp of brutal reality.
The ugly concrete underbelly we see so much of here, poor criminals who are a far cry from rich gangsters of fantasia , languid-dreary real-time captures and long bike rides all evoke another memorable crime saga - 'Gomorra' (2008, by Garrone).
As pic starts, we see Titli making a plan for his future and then slowly wading into a slum - the single-take sequence accompanies him slowly walking down a lane and towards his elder brother Vikram (Ranvir Shorey). The remainder of that early sequence is enough to show us the kind of creature that Vikram is - a physically violent emotionally volatile animal who is separated from his wife and daughter but who still continues his aggressive no-holds-barred insanity. Vikram now lives with Titli, another younger brother and their father in a hovel. For a living they waylay cars on deserted roads and it is anybody's guess whether the victim's skulls they hammer will survive or die. As his ex-sister-in-law caustically tells him, Titli hasn't been a paragon of virtue thus far, but as we steadily see, this isn't a way of life that he aims to sustain...
Produced by the clout of Yash Raj Films, the true moral godfather of Behl's first cinematic child is co-producer Dibakar Banerjee (one of the opening credits's frames spell out DBP as the only characters on the screen while the word 'debut' is inscribed within the trunk of 'P') . The parallels between this picture and Banerjee's auteuristic ouevre are conspicuous - a Delhi which has become infernal, police inspectors outclassing the thugs in criminal caliber, cars waylaid with murderous intent (cf. 'LSD'), and a widepsread malignancy of morals in the picturized populace.
The most gut-churning scene by far is what happens in the aftermath of Titli and his female partner's first major shopping experience. Behl doesn't pull his punches and the result is a vicarious view of a terrifying nightmare occurring in broad daylight. Another superbly picturized scene happens in the couple's makeshift bedroom after Titli's brothers decide to get him married so as to get some help in domestic duties. Employing two camera angles - one right above the wife and another a medium-length capture from the other side of the bed - it is a scene devoid of gratuitousness and chockful of reality-bites as Titli realizes all the possibilities a 'first night' can entail.
And it's a rotten mix of people who populate this tale. Vikram , the raging bull of this story , is a remorseless criminal I will hang at the earliest, but the pic paints even a monster like him in redemptive shades especially in the scene when he tenderly treats his young sister-in-law as if she were a child. The other older elder of the family seems decent but his subtly devious personality comes through in sporadic but definite hints. The police inspector in this story is a certifiable bastard who not only sanctions heinous crime but also filches a large amount from a person he's arrested ,thus preventing the latter from escaping to a crime-free life. Even the young girl whom Titli is wedded to by arranged marriage (Shivani Raghuvanshi : nice but intermittently wooden - more on that later) initially seems very much a martyr, but that label gets diluted as the pic progresses.
Kanu Behl purposes chose some greenhorns for acting, as he wanted 'natural' performances but his decision unwittingly generates a lot of average acting which didn't really seem the pinnacle of verisimillitude for me. When Ranvir Shorey's brilliantly charged performance goes off-screen, the pic loses that much gravitas which it doesn't reclaim at the end. The finale, despite its logic and moving sentiment, lacks the punch that carried the movie through its start and body. But Behl, with the auspices of Banerjee and Chopra, still scores a sparse gritty victory, by carving out and displaying an urban slice that is as unadorned and piteous as a Titli without wings.
Leviafan (2014)
Russia's Khosla Ka Ghosla
'Leviathan' , the relentlessly realistic and vital film by director Andrey Zyagintsev , fuses the systemic with the personal in such a coldly objective way that it raises a very powerful question about why the Russian state is such a failure. When one goes back to track the history of this land, very few niceties reveal themselves over the ages. At 17 million square kilometers this Leviathan is the world's largest country straddling Asia and Europe while socially featuring the worst of both continents. Descended from the Slavs, they founded their first united state, Kievan Rus in 882 - a confederation that formed the first law code for its subjects. One law for the masses and another for the rulers persists to this day. Mongols attacked it in the 13th century - they left but infected the Tsars with the same habit of territorial aggrandizement and disregard for social welfare: the early period of this era is tellingly depicted by Tarkovsky in "Andrei Rublev" - a companion film to 'Leviathan' in the context of Russian oppressionist portraits. Serial Tsars were no better , falling to the revolution centuries later in 1917. The Communists were supposedly birthed to rescue Russia, but it became equivalent to leaping from the frying pan onto the fire.
Opening frames show a sea-side location holding the house of Aleksei - a lean middle-aged man of average height and weathered peasant visage. The air is cold and bleak - to an extent because this is the shore of the Arctic ocean's Barents sea on the north-western coastal edge of Russia. Aleksei is one of those people whose continued survival is a matter of luck - he is mercurial and saturnine, and lacks the smarts and cunningness to live and flourish especially in a corrupted state. His property is under threat of being taken away by the town's corrupt fat mayor for the purpose building a telecom mast. Aleksei has a son who is in early adolescence, with little bonding between father and son, this being made worse by the fact that the boy refuses to accept his father's second wife - a relatively young, nominally attractive lady (the first wife is never in the picture). The protagonists's brother arrives from Moscow supposedly armed with his big-city smarts, barrister bonafides, and political connections to blackmail the mayor - but little does he know the way of these boon- "docks",especially when Uncle Putin, whose portrait is prominently featured in the mayor's office, isn't in a mood to show support from the capital.
"Let all flowers grow, but we will only water the ones we like", Russia's Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky said apropos Leviathan, while trying to suppress the film's screenings. Zyagintsev retaliated by saying that minister should be immediately fired. The Minister will remain in office sadly, but what does get a healthy deal of firing is the entire Russian establishment in 'Leviathan' - writer Oleg Negin and the pic's helmer do this not in a preachy way but with an inexorably sardonic technique that is actually bracing despite the film's enervating ethos. The camera zooms in slowly as a judge flanked by black-coat-donning judicial colleagues rapidly reads out a judgement that outlines the facts before eventually saying that the mayor is right and Aleksei is wrong. This uni- directional framing and movement - as we come closer and closer both spatially and temporally to the verdict - is impressive while the "legal" lady's accelerated speech actually comes across as a parody. At a later juncture, Aleksei - his world slowly crumbling apart - travels in a police jeep and we get a static-camera view from the backseat looking at the front windscreen as the vehicle keeps rolling over uneven terrain, and we wonder what further horror these authorities will bring him to.
Aleksei asks a priest "Where is your merciful God?", but like the tortured souls of Ingmar Bergman's realm, this man does not realize that that the eternal essence only reveals itself to evolved minds , not to those still languishing in thankless physical corpora. We gradually see that almost all of Leviathan's adults have serious faults of character - and these schisms ultimately coalesce to create the bigger rupture. It's a rotten town, with the judge and police chief shown in a team huddle with the mayor on how to tackle the peasant : and when the latter's group goes to town to complain, all the supposed authorities seem to be out of office with nobody to register the complaint. Zyagintsev goes on to muddy the narrative waters a fair bit - an outing of rifle-shooting and kebabs in the countryside ends in a off-camera fight but only much later are we shown what actually happened.
Compare this story of land-grabbing to "Khosla Ka Ghosla" from India - another nation in deep doldrums; this picture, helmed by a similarly powerful social analyst - Dibakar Banerjee - has a lighter tone and a different ending but both films cover roughly the same social quandary while flinting their strong impact with differing techniques. Zyagintsev shows how to use the cold dark hammer here. We see warm lighting in a church at the end - the mayor bends to whisper in his boy's ear "God sees everything". With a God like the mayor's, we need more Satans.
Spectre (2015)
Good but still not up to Casino Royale's mark.
First the bad news : Monica Bellucci is seen for less than ten minutes of the runtime. Normally, such foolish under-utilization of Madam Monica is enough by itself to sink a movie, but remember that this is Daniel Craig's vehicle - this Bond has a illustrious history of moving on after being obliged to leave the sort of ladies whose absence is enough to traumatically cripple lesser lovers. Sam Mendes realizes that studio dictates will not permit him to cast a cougar however immortally young the legend of her allure may be.
So Bellucci not just warms up but also heats up in record time to lucky James. Fortified by that night of celestial intimacy, Bond 2015 buckles up to meet the most socially networked of all his nemeses. Rip- roaring escapes later, he brings roofs down by "driving" a plane in Austria, has an incredible train fight with Goliath before a well deserved round of trophy sex, then almost gets a ticket to rebirth inside a 'dessert volcano' , before eventually landing up in London for the finishing rites. So beneath the Sturm und Drang, how does he actually fare?
"Bond" opening sequences are known for their thrilling action choreography but Mendes - determined to jazz up the paradigm - makes SPECTRE's opening salvo , wittingly or otherwise, a technical triumph rather than an action hoot. I refer to a fantastic tracking shot that slowly glides into a Mexican fiesta, wends through its colourful beasts, goes up an elevator, past a seductive senorita's bedroom ,and through a terrace before climaxing explosively. The helicopter fight that then ensues does not measure up. Later, the violence gloriously peaks inside an Orient Express train : James fancies a saucy finish as follow-up to his dinner especially since his woman is is communicating most articulately with her body language, but an orgasm of violence instead ensues before he can get any quality time with her. That fight, with a rampaging suited giant ramming into him, with all its skull-smashing force and sheer animalistic brutality is a masterpiece by itself. Often in other movies, we see either action choreographers being too lazy and timid , or the editors - compelled by ordinary footage or otherwise - using their scissors with hyperkineticism . But in this sequence both these departments perform a spectacular job. I fully feared that Bond, even a rock-solid one like Craig's 007, would get killed by a potentially fatal spine-crack or crash of head.
After Monica Bellucci exits, Lea Seydoux is unable to erect similar hopes. A bigger mistake lies in Chris Woltz's acting. The blame here likely falls on the director rather on Woltz. When the latter sat in a WW2 era French peasant home in a sunny countryside sipping his milk and cheerily chatting for Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, his Jew-murdering maniac act went on to become a chilling icon of villainy. But in SPECTRE , Woltz is not sufficiently spurred to essay a new breed of worthy mega-evil.
Mendes, to give him credit where it is due, maintains a tight narrative hold, allows the percolation of frequently sparkling dialogue and gets stalwart help from Daniel Craig who is asphalt- tough and likeably bracing as usual (there's also a superbly sharp act by Ralph Fiennes as Bond's supervisor). To franchise lovers who may accuse him of not roping in enough gadgetry, he replies by supplying Bond with two vital toys that save his hide both times - an ultra-modern 007-equipped Aston Martin and an old fashioned watch that does the job just fine.
Writers Logan, Purvis and Wade add Butterworth to lubricate their screenplay this time, and brainstorm well for considerable stretches but again err by not engineering an inspired finale (and Mendes does not pitch in to tighten carelessly constructed sequences such as an escape from the dessert wherein all of Bond's sprayed bullets effortless fell dozens of attackers). Hoyte Van Hoytema's filmic CV features a wide array of visual worlds all of which his lens captures neatly ,and for all the wide-angle assiduous work he does for this film, his colour scheme is a little less alluring than what I like. Long-time Mendes collaborator Thomas Newman loses the plot and frequently makes his musical underlines too bombastic.
So this is eventually a very well constructed action picture but when considering the sky-high demands of the twenty-fourth 007 film, Sam Mendes again does not measure up to Martin Campbell's Casino Royale. But I'm not cribbing about him anymore, I'm just calmly stating facts - he has done what he could have, only next time please give me another helmer for the series.
Bajirao Mastani (2015)
INTOLERANCE breeds great love stories...
With each new movie whatever may be its outward garb , Sanjay Leela Bansali proves his core gift for gracefully depicting the ravages of romance. Be it old feudal Bengal refracted through Bansali-land, Havelis in hyper drive or Twitter-age Gujarati fantasia, he gloriously re-enacts his yen for casting star-crossed fate-slain lovers whose endings don't exactly follow the diktats of play-it- safe-rubber-satin-cushion-it-Mumbai-mainstream-pictures. When he would rifled into archives of Ithihaas, I'm not sure he would have been exclusively thrilled by finding the real-life legend of Bajirao I - the early 18th century hero and greatest of the Maratha commanders who knocked the stuffing out of the Mughals while winning his people's hearts and making British profilers like R. Temple declare him "the incarnation of Hindu energy". But the minute Bansali saw Mastani in the mix, that train of multicolour thought might have culminated in a series of phone calls to production designers and choreographers who are needed to erect SLB fiestas sugared by song and dance.
The good news is that the triumphs outnumber the snafus. I was puzzled by the rather pedantic concern about these Maratha brave-hearts repeatedly cutting their flesh with swords to generate red ink (they must have had fantastic doctors who injected all in the land with special-life-long-protection-vaccines otherwise we might lose count of how many here die of tetanus) but then I'd be wooed along by how smoothly Bansali etches his traditional Bharatiya Mills & Boons. One is not exactly transported to early 1700s Maratha soil and walls by the designer sets we see here,but there's no disputing the wide-angle splendor of a shot of the Shahu's palace spreadeagled above a lake ,or better still a beautifully overcast canvas of grassy plains grading into a lake in which the hero lashes about in magnificent tragedy.
The biggest misfire in 'Bajirao Mastani' lies in the action choreography that jars the eye and mind. Bansali unwittingly proves that his dramaturgy is a million times superior to his attempts at metallurgy. When swords swing, arrows are fired , flesh is ripped and men tumble, neither the special effects nor the cinematographic captures make us inhale the brutality of battle . There's just an impression of mediocre action sequences propped by bombastic background music ,with the editor seeming hapless. In the movie's first battle scene , the sequence where Bajirao crescendo-leaps over the heads of two successive soldiers before launching himself at the enemy atop an elephant, is one of the better action scenes, but even here the montage could have been more thrillingly composed , moreover the enemy's fall from that high seat is awkwardly shown.
Yes, this is principally a love story rather than a war film but Bansali should have paid better attention to capturing what made Bajirao set an amazing record of forty consecutive battles won. Bajirao did this in real life with large-scale cunningness and insight like in the instance where he tempted the enemy further and further inland so as to negate their strong naval artillery, and on another occasion in his sacking of Delhi where he divided his army into two and foxed the Mughals with the weaker contingent. He most likely did not do it by what this movie depicts by showing him as a Hulk-like one-man army, or by him telling a simple white lie and expecting a Nizam to be moronic enough to believe it.
When it comes to sentimental violence however, Bansali finds his element by hurling the cake with face-reddening force. Mastani's plight, wherein she is repeatedly given the cold shoulder by her husband's family, tellingly comes through - Pune's priestly Hindu big-shots couldn't show the depths of their Godly hearts when it truly mattered and saying that the Islamic overlords were no better is not the kind of defence the Vedas advocate. Prakash Kapadia's excellent dialogues adroitly mix in snippets of Marathi into Hindi confabs ,and the story's characters neatly avail of his verbal whips when needing fitting answers (the English subtitles are no less, what with lines embroidered such as "Delhi lies submerged in a haze of debauchery"). Never one to forget the predicament of other aggrieved ladies in his movies, he effectively gives acreage to the betrayal and unexpected shades of Kashibai. Even to the doubly satisfied Bajirao, he affords a complexity of despair when Ranveer's voice and quill both sigh softly in amused wan submission that the demands of battle often pale before strife of the heart.
Left to his own devices , Bansali may even make Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton do a disco together (while Bill Clinton wallows in despair in a corner). Here , just as he did in 'Devdas' by making two glittering icons Madhuri and Aishwarya shake it together big- time, he arranges Deepika and Priyanka (another A-list pair of good dancers) to perform excellently contrasted hip and leg shakes to the beat of 'Pinga Pinga'.
Priyanka Chopra's acting arc in this picture sports an admirably sly upswing in complexity. Deepika sparkles no less in one of her career-best performances, I could never witness the formidable physiognomy and personal magnetism I had come to expect in Ranveer's role. That aside, Ranveer shoulders the film well, embodying a young commander who fearlessly rages into battle like an unstoppable inferno, whose steel is naughtily tempered by light-hearted darts, and who never bows to his family's disapprobation of a Muslim wife.
Bansali , I fear, may never ascend to being a true auteur but he remains a high-quality orchestrator of melodrama who elegantly marries pageant with substance.
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Masaan (2015)
Bedrocks Boondocks and Arising from Ashes...
Banaras doesn't really stand a chance when it comes the nation's top film-makers , does it? From Ray's 'Aparajito' to Mehta's 'Water', this holy cradle of Hinduism has been imbrued with a decidedly unholy miasma. Employing two tracks , one a story of police corruption and victims' cowardice, and another of a young funeral- pyre attendant aspiring to be a civil engineer, Masaan will not inspire you, either, to instantly book a train to this sacred town but holy cow! it does chart a riveting story of loss and hope that mirrors the rebirthing ethos of those stony steps and waters. It neatly slices open its own layers of social milieu to reveal that while the larger whole still seems hopeless, its young rebels calmly persevere to buck the trend. Produced by Manish Mundra and the Phantom Films triumvirate of Bahl, Motwane and Kashyap, 'Masaan' marks the auspicious directorial debut of Neeraj Ghaywan. Most of India will not hear of this film, despite its international accoldes and inherent caliber, but the picture will stand as an emblematic triumph of cinema neatly filtering the modern reality of an ancient epicenter.
One of the pic's strongest assets is the airy light that pleasantly suffuses its wide canvas - I appreciated this better on a 60 inch screen than on a laptop. Cinematographer Avinash Arun Dhaware frames Banaras in clean composed frames that dignify its actual shabby sprawl. There's a superb night-time shot of a boat motoring through dark waters while yellow light silhouettes hives of activity along the town's shores - what's more the on-board narrative continues with similar understated beauty. A terrific medium-length static capture stands tall later in the story when a person enters a house and an uproar ensues inside but the shot maintains the visual hygiene of remaining unmoved outside the gate , gazing at the house exterior. And there's a completely soothing canvas of a boat nearing the survivors of this tale, as it traverses a beautifully sepia mirror-like surface of the Ganga.
In the first story-track, a young couple caught in the act of secret sex are blackmailed by a malignant police inspector , while the other thread revolves around a youngster from a small-town underprivileged background aiming to make it big and the arc of his dalliance with his sweetheart.
The undeclared just-below-the -surface script here narrates how the new gen calmly fights the sclerotic demeaning mores which have robbed the spirit and happiness of their ancestors. Attending to and tidying up funeral pyres his whole life only affords Deepak a meager salary and a depressing hellish job day after day year after year, and his supposedly low-caste birth and position means that he can't carry out the the luxury of courting just about any pretty girl he sees but this does not stop Deepak. On the other track, the traumatized girl Devi Pathak is initially shell-shocked as any girl would be , but steadily we see her true spine (in response to a savage blaming her in public, she retorts "Whatever we did, we BOTH did it!"). Her father persuades her to accept a measly Rs.5000 per month ($100) job from an employer who was his student ,but when she stares at him in cold anger at the recruitment table, the father says in defence - 'But look how much respect he gives us!' (obviously his daughter has moved on from the peanuts gleaned from such token respect).
The film's several producers notwithstanding , I find Anurag Kashyap to be the true moral guardian of this film. Debutante director Neeraj Ghaywan shows an European aesthetic and reserve in depicting his canvas , and a fine temperament is telling a tough story without melodrama. With a producer-director team like this, it is no surprise that 'Masaan', steeped in boondocks bedrocks opaque waters malignant lawkeepers failed fathers ruptured lovers and eternally burning hells , emerges beautifully from the ashes.
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Highway (2014)
Roadblocks Don't Matter: Pure often brilliant Film-making redeems this Highway Odyssey
When I first heard of 'Highway', my first instinctual query was whether director Imtiaz Ali would replicate the magnificence of his previous film "Rockstar". I had seen 1993's "A Perfect World" years ago, and there was no doubt that both films had a similar storyline. But this film transforms the original inspiration and trashes box-office concerns to essay a complex odyssey that fuses personal trauma with a bold exploration of societal cancer. Tilting sometimes into gratuitous emotion and filled with Ali's recurrent narrative motifs, it nevertheless amply compensates with assets like exhilarating video songs and a great tour of North India.
A young girl barely past twenty-Veera (Alia Bhat showcasing delightful chutzpah) is abducted from Delhi by a gang of criminals, just days before he impending marriage to a moron. The gang later realizes that she is the the daughter of a national-level VIP who will wreak punitive hell on them. But the fearless leader of the pack Mahabir ( a formidable Randeep Hooda) trashes aside any misgivings and decides to go ahead with the abduction. Veera ( Mahabir never utters her name throughout the story) slowly realizes that she is not hell-bent on escaping from this gang. Mahabir may be an enraged, unflinchingly efficient wolf who repeatedly snarls and bristles at this feisty fawn ,but she calls his bluff and carves a passage with outrageous audacity into his heart. There are deep personal wounds to nurse....and soon all pre-decided plans melt away as a unique journey is advanced into exquisite heartlands
Note how liberal stretches of the film have no background music.Songs are naturally integrated - a full song from the album is almost never used, and lip-syncing is chucked out. Dialogues often register with their naked effect. Ali was never afraid to depict emotions - in Highway, he sometimes employs them dazzling discretion, but at other times lapses into overdrive. The former is demonstrated when Mahabir smiles for the first time in the film. Regerttably,the denouement despite dramatic fireworks ,loses its tight emotional grip. Anil Mehta's coverage through six different North Indian states, past wending lonely highways hemmed in by monstrous rock and especially a Tibetan monastery's balcony directly facing vast snowy heaven is a terrific advertizement for unadorned Indian outdoors.
'Highway' is a top example of how even a tier-two A R Rahman can provide first-class joy. Patakha Guddi Male Version has bravura staccato rhythms that bolster this song past kaleidoscopic styles: rock & hip-hop groove in sync with folk and devotional-mystic -all woven together by Rahman's inspired voice. The fusion fireworks are lesser but still remarkable in the rustic-chic Female Version. For a perfectly winsome exercise in sweet young folk complemented by orchestral bouquets ,look no further than "Heera". It is an Indian composer's evocation of a Disney spring in which cherubic creatures cluster around a lovely Snow White. Groovy heavy beats of "Wanna Mash Up" may make you vacuously remember your favourite nightclub, but the film reacts to this by letting loose an impromptu sensuous dance that spellbinds two men in the middle of desi boondocks.
'Highway' is neither original nor a masterpiece, but it is a damn fine example of Hindi cinema striking out once more to create the exhilarating phenomenon that is pure film-making.
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Aranyer Din Ratri (1970)
Four urban men go into a jungle retreat to have carnal fun with tribal women but by the end they receive more than just fun.
Film opens with a shot of paddy fields while a man traveling with his pals in a car ,reads the following " Bengali people are as happy looking at seasons and nature, as they are at looking death in the face". Now I'm not very sure whether this statement is true, but I suspect that this kind of cultured stoicism aptly applies to the director of this movie - Satyajit Ray. Four friends - all young men from Calcutta- go into a forest and plan to stay in a rest house there, while aspiring to have sexual fun with tribal women who are presumed to be liberal in such matters. Of course, this sort of plot is not standard territory for the said director but even with this unlikely template, Ray directs his masterly rays of perspective to illumine the hinterlands and give larger wings to a fledgling premise.
Though it is not set in the city or even a village, the film is a composite shot of civilization in decline. But in Ray's world, there is always hope, a calm sense of being obliged to emerge from the ruins, and in A.D.R we also see a beautiful example of strong but tranquil feminism.
This latter aspect emerges in the form of Sharmila Tagore who registers a great performance in this movie. In Ghare Baire, Ray made Victor Banerjee essay a model man, and here he has Sharmila Tagore giving us a portrait of the model woman. Kohl-lined beautifully curving eyes, luxuriant hair coiffed into a bouffant, and a softly contoured figure clothed in sari ,all set off a face that can essay feminine mystique as smoothly as it can show child-like amusement. Aparna (Tagore), it is steadily revealed, is gifted intellectually, bears the weight of the past, nurtures a humane mind and yet sequesters all these facets beneath a regally controlled visage that can hint at displeasure as beautifully as it can sport a smile.
Technically too, this is an accomplished film with superior camera-work by Soumendu Roy. There is a famous static shot in which the lens stands just outside the car window and looks inside, through the car compartment, and past the other window into the background -4 visual planes hold four different people ,all sporting a range of interesting expressions and emotional dynamics. The other memorable sequence is the Memory Game wherein all the players are seated in a circle, and the lens flicks from one face to another as they play the game.
Starting with this script, countless other story-tellers might have produced a work of dissipated effect, but Satyajit Ray makes fine use of the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay to present not just a sylvan jaunt enjoyed by four young men, but also an elegantly presented humanist tapestry. Some directors don't need the Midas touch, they possess something greater.
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La vie d'Adèle (2013)
Adele - a teenage girl - goes through the hell and heaven of lesbianism and adolescence in this rigorously observed scorcher
Sometimes it is impossible to draw the line between pornography and artistic requirement in a movie. "Blue is the Warmest Colour"'s non-sexual content is enough to make this an outstanding film, what with the languorous yet mordant microscope with which director Abdullatif Kechiche looks at the life of an adolescent girl. Adele (Adele Exarchpoulos in a once-in-a-lifetime role) - the central character who courses through this movie like a sensuous reflective breeze- is a remarkable high-school girl to begin with: she's intelligent, spunky and attractive, with intellectual chops to boot. She's presented to us with such a sense of balance and honesty that I could never label her fake or labored. The hitch in the craw erupts for her when she discovers her lesbian tendencies.
That's where the boyish-looking Emma (a well-calibrated Lea Seydoux) enters the scene -her blue hair grades into her natural blonde later in the film and that change becomes confluent with the changing tide of this magnificent 170 minute picture. And then there are the graphic sex scenes: flat-out shameless and so devoid of artifice that it knocks out any remaining curtain of modesty. It is this blend of physical boldness and emotional wallop that makes "Blue is the Warmest Colour" a very rare picture. No wonder it won the Cannes Palme d'Or 2013.
I thought Adele by herself was a nice mix of Jack and Ennis of Brokeback Mountain (a greater film and one which has no graphic scenes) Her answer to "What's your favorite subject?" is a gem, comparable in simple but perfect wisdom to what Marji of 'Persepolis' says when asked "Is sex really what it is made up to be?" Kechiche also takes a running kick at the classes of abstract literature that Adele attends. The female-female dynamic plays in wonderful off-key notes compared to a typical male-female relationship.The assiduous mostly hand-held camera only rarely calls attention to itself, and when it does it is praiseworthy -from hectic tracking shots to sharp whip-and-focus.
Few movies have watched a girl as intently as this one does. Short of showing her in the toilet, the director lets us witness all other facets of her life - even the day to day putatively banal scenes that several other film-makers would have ignored -but it is always interesting, in fact it is a privilege to watch this acutely followed record of her life. Adele writes a diary which she shows to no one, but we are able to to continuously see the real life that dictates that diary's contents. That is a pleasure which is beyond voyeurism.
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Pépé le Moko (1937)
A charismatic gangster hides out in a French-Arabic multi-ethnic demi-monde that is the Casbah, while cops and double-crossers vie to snare him.
Employing dozens of shots and montages to bring to eye each of the words in a riveting description that describes the multi-ethnic demi-monde that is the "Casbah" (a sea-side teeming hill of French-Arab settlements) this film opens its eminently charming folds. A team of policemen, in another expertly filmed scene which follows the first one,, discuss the man they want to catch -Pepe Le Moko who's hiding out in the above-described warren. I watched this 1937 French film with the help of excellent English subtitles provided by the Criterion collection, and realized that even in the 1930s, the French could outclass Hollywood.
Pepe (an effortlessly confident Jean Gabin), it quickly becomes clear, is an enigmatic criminal, wanted for a litany of transgressions. The camera when it first shows him tricks us into looking at someone lesser but we soon realize this is not the (anti)-hero. The lens eventually displays him holding a pearl in the oyster of his hand, clad fully in suit and tie, his light eyes flashing like the said gem. Pepe floats in a sea of relentlessly wonderful dialog both within and around, hounded by treachery, and drawn magnetically to shifting romance and serious complications. He never loses that sartorial armor of suit and tie- it's with him whether he is firing a gun,cradling a dying brother, holding a lady in his arms, or coolly snacking on a kebab off the streets.
The picture is also a great example of why black and white cinematography is such a strongly atmospheric device - color would robbed this film's terrain of much of its uniqueness. Henri La Barthe's novel and Henri Jeanson's terrific dialogs help to fuel the drama, romance and intrigue surrounding the hero. He appears to be in early middle-age, has been hiding out in the Casbah for two years, is rapidly growing sick of its medieval confines ("I'm like England,my future is on the waves") and actively angles for new love ("home is wherever he finds a woman","when he is dead there will be three thousand widows at his funeral").
Even under duress Pepe separates the wheat from the chaff and proceeds to hatch a really neat plan. His dialog from earlier in the story, regarding the ladies, then comes to mind - "I give them my body,but I keep my head". That is no doubt a good plan but it is not a perfect one. The heart is still in the body.
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Barry Lyndon (1975)
Kubrick's Best Film
Stanley Kubrick was born to direct "Barry Lyndon" - a complete masterpiece. It is classically British in its quality, penned by William Makepeace Thackeray as a serialized picaresque novel that was cast into public view in 1844, and it took the next century for a man of the same soil to emerge and decide to bring the words to suitable life. A vital asset is Michael Hordern's voice-over: one of the best ever in cinema: possessing a measured, witty and omniscient nature .
By the film's end, it is very difficult to sympathize with Redmond Barry (a pitch-perfect Ryan O' Neal) who rises from a tough beginning in rural Ireland in the 17th century, to eventually come into receipt of a greatly comfortable life. But the central triumph here is that we receive a "God's Eye" view - with a perspective like this, the protagonist does not matter that much. Exquisite visuals inform the story from the get-go, and the background music is elegantly orchestral.
All the conflict and perspective in the first half is peppered with considerable humor .In the second half, the dramatic force comes from the vehement, articulate anger of a severely insulted heir and Barry's delusional belief that he can merrily tap-dance through high society while slaughtering all its unsaid edicts. Through all this, the calm observational tone is paired with John Alcott's beautiful framing and vistas of stately splendor -one scene after another presents like a thoughtfully played card. What remains rock-steady is the lovely perspicacity of Kubrick's directorial vision and tenor. Kubrick has rarely shown skill in depicting sentimentality but in Barry Lyndon, empowered by a narrative that awakens the genius in him, Kubrick is roused to effectively depict emotional depth - watch the last scene between Barry and his son - there is so much of tenderness in the father's "Of course I will" reassurances that it is nearly enough to atone for the butchered sentiment in his other movies.
As for sheer raw power, witness what transpires in a scene where the little son walks with hammer-soled shoes into the hall of his mother's piano performance. Kubrick takes the sac of the period drama and blows it up so rapidly that it explodes in a savage dazzling rupture of the genre's staid conventions. If all this has interested you, and if you'd still like to "demand satisfaction", it is quite likely, Sir, that 'Barry Lyndon' will give it to you.
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