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PIFF 2010: What do you think about Elly?

Feb 8th, 2010
by cinecynic.
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Asghar Farhadi’s Darbareye Elly opens with a small group of friends starting on a reunion vacation along with their families and a guest Elly. Even those who are not friends are friendly. But the truth is, even the close friends are only friendly acquaintances now just the way most once-close relationships transform from friendships to friendlinesses with each passing chapter of life.

They all make their way to a beach-side villa and begin having fun the giddy way grown-ups do. In a peculiar scene, the close-up of a stranger boy’s unreadable face is shown as men dance merrily. The fun ends abruptly on the next morning, when first one of their children almost drowns in the sea and then they discover the disappearance of lovely Elly. From then on they go through hell as they search for her, make some meaning of her actions based on what they know of her, and try to inform her folks.

In the middle of the movie we hear the quote, “A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness.” We get the bitter ending, and the characters an endless bitterness.

Elly is judged throughout the movie. Whether she can make a suitable wife, during the first half; the breadth of her character, during the second half. The movie’s merit lies in engaging the audience in two ways — in getting us deeply involved with the search for Elly, and in unconsciously tempting us to judge Elly and all those characters judging her.

Elly very much wanted to go home, which her hostess wouldn’t allow. She may have abandoned the playing children and left on a whim without informing anybody. She is a kindergarten teacher who possibly loves children. She may have drowned while trying to rescue Arash.

Sepideh’s husband Amir hit his wife. As the IMDB plot keywords suggest, he may be a wife-beater as that very well suits the oppression that we associate with everything Iran. He ruefully cried that it was the first time he hit her. Given the enthusiasm with which Sepideh arranges events from reunions to matches, Amir may be a husband who gives his wife the freedom that spouses deserve.

Sepideh conspired to fix Elly with recently divorced Ahmad through the reunion, told lies beginning with the white lie to the villa caretaker that Ahmad and Elly are newlyweds. Sepideh may be a dishonest woman mindlessly playing her own immature games. She brought everybody together, knew the past of Elly. She may be a person who loves the company of others and may genuinely be trying to help both Elly and Ahmad.

Ahmad… Shohreh… Peiman… Naazi… Manoochehr… all characters lie or withhold information, for their own reasons. The movie can be used as a good case study of writing withholding information.

As the director brilliantly orchestrates each of his characters in their chaos in an apparently effortless way, he also manipulates the audience into judging, that which all the characters themselves do. The judgments are often proved wrong, as imminent in cases where all facts aren’t uncovered, and as when convenience and expedience take priority over conscience. His characters do not stand out as personalities, but as different kinds of general characters each of whom we very well know. He seems uninterested by the inanimate and allows only the people, the sea and the kite to be seen on the screen. I suspect none of this is unintentional.

Having seen only a handful of Iranian movies and read very little about Iran, I am tempted to take the movie as a portrait of the Iranian society. Through some of the themes are applicable to all mankind, I could empathize with all the characters, making me speculate that the modern Iranian society is not very different from the one I live in.

One last word. Democracy may be the dream of modern Iran. As if to highlight the fallibility of collective judgments Asghar Farhadi shows his characters democratically doing what the majority decides. “A government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it,” wrote Thoreau in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. “Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?”

Image Source: About Elly Official Site

Trivia: The movie is the last Iranian movie in which Golshifteh Farahani (Sepideh) acted, and it may remain that way. Almost half the movies she acted in have been banned in her country. Peiman Ma’adi, who played Peiman, wrote Cafe Setareh. Taraneh Alidoosti, who as Elly asks Ahmad to translate the quote from German to Iranian, speaks German fluently.

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Posted in: Characters, Foreign, Reviews, Writers.

Avatar is no Star Wars

Feb 1st, 2010
by cinecynic.
4 comments

I read and heard a lot of superlatives about James Cameron’s Avatar in the last two months. Some from well-known critics and mostly from the gen-pop — “awesome”. I knew very little about the story itself and that may have helped ground my expectations closer to Earth than Pandora. I waited for the opportunity, and now having watched it on IMAX 3D, I am not gushing.

Avatar has the best CGI ever, ably enhanced by 3D which itself is not great but sufficient. Cameron wasn’t trying to show how good the 3D can be; he knows most of us have experienced it by now. What he seemed to be saying was, “I have a great technology prototype for making movies, and this is a demo.” And thus, while great care has been taken in displaying the technology, the demo itself got little attention.

In one of the opening scenes, Jake Scully the paraplegic is shown wading past large vehicles and heavy machinery in his wheel chair. It is a clever scene where for a moment the protagonist and the audience feel alike. It may have been a scene to establish some quick bonding. The movie starts with a narration that reminded me of hard-boiled crime novels and gory computer games, more bonding, but its standard fell with time. That is true about several other things.

We hear about greedy corporations exploiting exotic lands on Earth all the time. We don’t give a shit. Cameron, who apparently does, transported the exact situation to Pandora. I probably could have gotten more engrossed had he stuck to one of those exotic lands on Earth as I couldn’t buy the premise on a different planet.

Could this really happen 150 years from now? They are on a new planet with a new species that has striking similarities to humans, but is not just another leaf-clothed tribe hugging trees. With the extremely dedicated folks of SETI, and the popularity they enjoy, it seemed to me that science would venture into a space before business, and explore it satisfactorily enough before the other plunders it for prosperity. Forget the military pumping megatons into an apparently superior (greener) planet, the Jill Tarters would be allowed to take all the samples they need unlike the Grace Augustines here. I hope. I admit it is entirely my disability in satisfactorily willfully suspending disbelief.

The Na’vi are an interesting species about which we get to know little, like their body colors, dressing sense, agility, luminescence, and that thousand-word vocabulary developed by Paul R. Frommer. When Jake Scully’s avatar gets seamlessly accepted by one of their tribes, it comes as a terrible disappointment considering that the movie was close to three hours long. Throughout, Scully like Cameron is more in awe than curious. For a man who got accepted and lived with them for months, and who got tutored by one of them, what does he know? We don’t know what he knows. How do they select the tribe leader? Are they matriarchal or patriarchal? Where are the children? How are the women treated? How does any woman other than Neytiri and her mother look like? At least the ones who we are told sing or dance or hunt better than all others? Even the one love scene could have been filmed carefully enough to further satiate my curiosity about their peculiarities. Instead, Cameron gave us an awesome scene where Harry Potter tames his Norwegian Ridgeback.

Greed, curiosity, faith, even slavery and white man’s burden are a few themes that the background could have been wonderful to explore. Of course, what Cameron chose to touch upon, rather not to touch upon were different. He chose awe. For about 250 million dollars money and decades of hard work it seemed to me like a great opportunity wasted, despite the fact that it already grossed over two billion dollars.

In the aftermath of Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Roger Ebert may have felt about Avatar the same way he did after watching George Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977 ( or it’s been so long that he may have forgotten) and Cameron may be warming up to make the sequels, but Avatar is no Star Wars. Sure, Avatar is the most technologically advanced film of its times, but Star Wars became what it did for more than the technology, and more than the clever merchandising of lightsabers and stormtroopers. Fans still remember the music score by John Williams, R2D2 squeaking, Chewbaca growling, Han Solo and the Skywalkers stepping on each others’ shoes, and Darth Vader breathing through that respirator. They made James Cameron quit his job as a truck driver to enter the film industry.

Image Source: IMDB

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Posted in: Hollywood, Reviews.

Our Passive Classrooms

Jan 31st, 2010
by cinecynic.
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I changed school thrice between kindergarten and tenth. The majority of my schooling happened through two public schools (which are actually private, not government). Later in college, whenever friends shared their pasts and compared their accomplishments I always spoke highly of the first school. Even today I am biased towards it.

The first school was a tiny remote one and didn’t have a real playground. It was very good. I owe my basics to it. The teachers taught the textbook lessons and didn’t spoonfeed. The examination papers weren’t filled with stuff at the end of each lesson and we were free to answer them in our own words. All students were encouraged to participate in various extra-curricular activities.

The second school was comparatively famous and had a large playground. It wasn’t as good though. The majority of the teachers went through the textbook page after page and spent lots of time in having the students answer the questions and exercises at the end of each lesson often through dictation or copying from the blackboard. Examination papers only carried questions from those stuff with a new concept of choice, and answering questions on our own (without using the dictated answers) was frowned upon, in some cases even penalized if not punished. The teachers seemed to confuse between encouraging and forcing, which on the upside introduced me to the rebel in me.

Even though the first school didn’t spoonfeed, of late I have come to realize that that was not enough for me. There was so much more that I could have benefited from, some of which I am fortunate enough to have picked up from other sources.

Literature. The language textbooks had stories by Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain, essays by Sri Sri and Stephen Leacock, and poems by William Blake and John Keats. We read those stories and essays and poems, and the teachers did their best to explain them to us. But we never analyzed them, never dissected their merits and de-merits, nor discussed their significance. Heck, I reached college without even knowing the broad categories called fiction and non-fiction.

Sciences. Seeing blue-green algae under the microscope, and seeing the teacher measure the weight of sucrose under a sensitive balance more or less completed my lab experience. There are so many science experiments mentioned in the textbooks which need no specialized equipment, that we didn’t try.

Social Studies. We never took a moment to digest the atrocities committed by man over the history of mankind, never debated the populist policies of political parties, nor even compared the traffic rules in the textbook with the traffic sense of our parents.

Moral science. It was a vague free period in primary classes, and wasn’t really a science. That may be the reason why it was dropped as students gained seniority.

Whenever I see a classroom of a public school (not private, but government) in a Hollywood movie, it is a scene of active discussion. When the teacher is especially good, they even attempt to apply what they’ve learnt to the world outside. Good for them. I can only imagine what goes inside an Indian government school. Of course, even the Americans are crying out loud for school reforms.

The schools don’t sign an affidavit nor give any guarantees, but we have some expectations from them. I think that schools should not just prepare students to be tomorrow’s citizens but make them conscious of the human nature, that they should not just instill values but inculcate independent thinking, that they should broaden the horizons of the young minds. Making children dream of becoming doctors and engineers is less important than making them curious.

Our schools, however, are mostly interested in completing the syllabus, ensuring that their students perform well in the exams, and maintaining a good reputation. To add to the woes, the Indian education is not helping with its apparent extraordinary emphasis on math and science. It may be ultimately paving way to more engineering graduates who can be “absorbed” by MNCs, but education is not about employment and much less about improving literacy rates.

Posted in: Indian, Ramblings.

Welcome to Cine Cynic

Jan 2nd, 2010
by cinecynic.
1 comment

Having publicized a little about this on my personal blog and elsewhere, I am expecting a few visitors. This link love is a primer for all first-time visitors.

Thank you for stopping by. Feel free to navigate around using the links on the sidebar. You can start with a little further from fact, one of my recent posts where I tried a little House-ish humor by spicing up my personal experiences; or my unique movie watching experience with an indie movie, which I hope can happen again; or my review of McG’s Terminator Salvation, which is among the most amusing reviews that I wrote thus far. If you have a little extra time that you won’t mind wasting here, you can follow the trip down memory lane that I take you through and find a few more posts.

This blog was first created on blogspot, opening with a review of K Raghavendhra Rao’s Sri Ramadasu, a movie I very much disliked. I soon ventured way above my scope by ambitiously trying to write about the Telugu Cinema in 70s. I discovered that I am not knowledgeable enough to attempt such a thing and abandoned it.

I shot down my friends’ tastes when I wrote about comedy in today’s Telugu movies in general by using Puri Jagannath’s Pokiri as the example. I also expressed by concern that the current CBFC ratings of U, U/A, and A are inadequate.

I wailed that Telugu is slowly dying. I no longer feel concerned in this extreme way, and accept all dialects and the everyday changes in the vernacular that happen due to various influences. This is not bowing to the current Telangana pressure, but a transformation that crept in after becoming a regular reader of the Language Log.

Knowing nought about editing, I wonder whether I had made some sense about it from one particular angle.

I got nostalgic about the bad boys in A Kondandarami Reddy’s Abhilasha and in turn cursed the current crop of villains.

My first review of a Hindi movie, Dus Kahaniyaan was a thorough summarization of all the ten stories.

I then started writing for Desicritics. I couldn’t sustain it very long, partly because it felt like too much of a pressure to perform, and partly because I was not able to reply to any of the comments on my posts for mysterious reasons. I haven’t done anything great during that period, though I have raised the thorny question of whether every child really is special.

I criticized acclaimed director Shekar Kammular because my college days were not Happy Days, because that particular movie was not what I had hoped, and because his modern heroine came across as a partial prude. I also criticized the Indian media again and again. Especially until this point, anger and condescension seem to have been my primary motives. I think that has gradually changed.

When I reread about my woes in Pune I was reminded of the current troubles that Hyderabadis face, and when I reread an explanation of impersonal hatred I went awww!

After reading Tana French’s In the Woods, which is one of the best books I’ve read in over a year and which is one of the books that involved me like few others, I realized that I didn’t want to leave writing about books. I later discovered yet another highly successful writer whom I dislike for his crappy writing, and recently fell for the anti-social bisexual geeky genius Lisbeth Salander.

When I reviewed Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, I barely mentioned AR Rehman’s Oscar-winning score and even after that trophy I stick by my verdict. I introduced myself to Guru Dutt, and more importantly Meena Kumari during one weekend. But the majority of movies that I watched and reviewed in the last year were from PIFF 2009. From those who have already watched the movie I am interested in reading your thoughts about my interpretation of Three Monkeys.

I indulged myself by making an inevitable comment on the specially-abled, by disregarding the dead twice, and documenting some language peeves.

Posted in: Ramblings.

Moving Past PIFF 2009

Dec 14th, 2009
by cinecynic.
2 comments

What disappointed me the most about PIFF 2009, more than the occasional sub-title glitches during the screenings, was the catalogue. NFAI (I know) and FTII (I presume) have wonderful libraries with lots of literature about movies. Whether the catalogue had been put together using assignments to students or not, it shouldn’t have used the content on Wikipedia so liberally, especially not without acknowledging it. Whether or not Indian film-makers largely continue to ignore acknowledging their “influences” and “inspirations”, it is imperative that the students be taught the significance of acknowledgments and originality.

I had a few shallow thoughts during the film festival like the ease with which European actors strip, and the applause we deliver for every half-decent foreign movie, but I will spare you of further details. Not out of concern for you but because eleven months is a long time to recall thoughts from.

I watched seventeen movies in six days of PIFF 2009. On two of those days I watched five each. It was not easy. Neither on my mind nor on my eyes. I wish I watched more. The trouble with watching those many movies in such a short span of time is remembering. Had I been more disciplined in collecting, noting and analyzing my thoughts about each of the movies — not just in my notebook but also on this blog — I perhaps would have been able to remember and appreciate more.

I hope to watch more and write more during and after PIFF 2010.

Rounding up the PIFF 2009… I already wrote about Divorzio all’italiana, Katyn, Die Fälscher, Portret podwójny, Fame Chimica, Meurtrières, Drifting Clouds, Three Monkeys, and Emotional Arithmetic. There are eight others that I didn’t write about:

Saimir can be categorized with Fame Chimica, and rated above it. It deals with themes like poverty, unemployment, illegal immigration and human trafficking, as seen through the eyes of a teen during his transformation into an adult.

Persepolis, some may have heard of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels and the Academy Award nomination. It is eye-opening about the Iranian Revolution and to me more precious than Ratatouille which stole the award that year.

Hiroshima Mon Amour. I regret not writing about this movie the most and now I cannot without watching it again. A groundbreaking work from the initial days of the French New Wave, it treats the theme of memory like no other, evoking in its viewers the elusive and delusive nature of memories. Unfortunately, most viewers during PIFF 2009 walked out of the theatre within the first thirty minutes.

La Zona is one of the few thematically rich edge-of-the-seat thrillers that I watched in the recent past. Set inside a wealthy gated community in Mexico, it explores the depths of humanity and bestiality while introducing us to the contemporary Mexican society.

Stavisky doesn’t live up to the expectations of the admirers of Alain Resnais (fresh from watching Hiroshima Mon Amour). As a stand-alone historical account of a true political scandal, there is little to complain about except the runtime.

Cafe Setareh uses a clever screenplay to narrate the not-so-delightful stories of three delightful Iranian women. It was one of the movies that I hadn’t planned to watch and am immensely glad that I watched it.

In Carne E Ossa or Il Tuo Disprezzo reminded me mostly of Mike Nichols’ Closer, by the way the members of a nuclear family treat each other with shocking cruelty, increasingly to win the impression of an outsider.

Les Témoins is set in Paris during the first outbreak of AIDS, portraying among other things the fluidity of sexuality that I suspect only the French are capable of.

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Posted in: Ramblings.

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