I watched Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy during three consecutive nights three weeks ago. I’ve wanted to write about it because I’ve felt that I understood something, yet my understanding is vague enough to elude words. Now I am grappling with words to express a vagueness that I know about.

The trilogy has been called different names — Faith, God, Man-God, Religious Chamber, Silence. Some even argue that they don’t form a trilogy but two of these along with some other one do. I haven’t read or watched enough of Bergman’s interviews, so I only hope he amused his audience by keeping mum. To me it’s the Silence trilogy. After carefully arranging all my notes and reading numerous critiques and interpretations of others (most of them on the IMDB boards), I have decided to discard them all, acutely aware of their thoroughness and incompleteness. Instead I take to addressing two different questions.

Some great works are timeless, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. They embody powerful capsules of truth that make us gasp once they get to our bottom. Some others reflect the state of the recipient’s mind at the time of reception, like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Bergman’s movies — at least those that I’ve seen — fall in the latter category, thus offering a multitude of interpretations from different viewers and enriching the viewer through multiple viewings. I feel certain to draw different conclusions from the trilogy after experiencing some other things in life, or even the same things.

The urgent question, for which there is no single nor complete answer: How are such kaleidoscopes conjured?

The way this is usually achieved is through an unreliable narrator. Like a Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman uses Karin, a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics make wonderful narrators when they are not in the dock and when they are not like John Nash in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. Karin is played by Harriet Andersson whose teetering along the edges of sanity is as dizzying as Vivien Leigh’s Blance DuBois in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire. What does one make of a Virgin Mary’s apparently immaculate conception and a woman’s claims of being raped by a Spider-God? Who among the two women is mad and who isn’t? Which of the images is symbolic and which isn’t?

Another way is to use an introvert. In Winter Light we closely follow the life of a Doubting Tomas, but it is so filled with silence (his, God’s, and Bergman’s) that his doubts themselves aren’t clear (to him, to God, to the viewer), and when Tomas speaks one is not sure what to make of his words, like when he brutally tells Märta what he exactly thinks about her. This movie appears the most direct and simple of the whole trilogy, but it is this silence that is beguiling and thus seeds interpretations.

Another way of allowing multiple interpretations is through maintaining a strict distance from its characters, the way Bergman does in The Silence. In this movie he never tries to explain anything and allows the viewers to make what they can out of what is shown and heard, the way young Johan is forced to do all around the hotel. The actions are not always clear, and even when clear their intentions remain mystifying. This is not as easy as it sounds, neither for the director nor the viewer, and in addition to meticulous craft requires the director to trust the viewers with their intelligence.

Another question, one that is more commonly raised by Bergman’s fans is: Why incest?

As is perceived by many (not all) viewers of Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, and in a few other Bergman’s movies, incest is never shown nor even implied. But it is frequently hinted. As simplistic and incomplete as this seems, I think one can find answers in the Bible. This Jonah hasn’t yet read the book and is hopefully waiting for an Esther to handover a leaf of translations.

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The May 2010 issue of UTV World Movies Magazine carried an article I wrote comparing Bollywood and Mexican Cinema with urbanization as its underlying motif. I am not very happy with it. I think essays of such kind need a person with greater expertise about the subject matter and with greater skill. My article reads more like a generalization extrapolated from a very limited knowledge of Bollywood and Mexican Cinema. As several friends have expressed a wish to read it, and as it is past May the month of the issue, I am posting a version of the article somewhere between my final draft and the one printed. All good parts were suggested and/or directly written by my editors.

Mexico has a small film industry. About 350 movies are released annually including Latin American, European and Hollywood ones. Hardly 60 of them are produced locally. Billion-dollar Bollywood is twice as big with over 100 movies produced and released each year in theatres alone. Even as the world cinema makes inroads into the lucrative Indian markets, it still prefers Mexico when it comes to creative talent. Names like Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Arriaga, Guillermo del Toro, Gael García Bernal and Salma Hayek are a few examples. That may not be without reason.

Your God, My God
With over 85% Roman Catholics, secular Mexico is somewhat similar to India with its 80% Hindu population. Nearly half of Mexico’s population is estimated to be regular churchgoers and in India there are more religion-based programmes and dedicated channels and more temples and pujas than ever before. Gods, like their followers, prosper in the face of development. What is surprising is the steady decline in religiousness shown in Bollywood movies. Probably not so surprising.

The movies that travel across the world are often those set in urban milieus . They are the kind which portray the progress and problems of the shining economies and thus resonate better with the higher income groups at home and overseas.

Today Bollywood rarely makes movies where religion plays a major role, other than when it takes up its favourite themes of relationships beyond religions, of communal riots, or of terrorism. The clichéd scenes of a mother or a wife visiting a large idol of Lord Shiva, a Muslim stopping himself from committing a crime on hearing the echoes of a namaaz recital, or a joint family merrily standing in the mandir wearing white are mostly a thing of the past. Neither are these days for mythology, nor for atheist militancy. While increasingly large numbers of youth aimlessly vacillate between religious fervour and agnosticism, recent movies that address faith as a concept and not merely as a category hardly come to my mind. As if drowned by the din of modern machinery, conversations with God – blameful, remorseful, and thankful ones – and externalised internal debates have become antiquated and not yet upgraded.

Sins (Vinod Pande, 2005), set in a coastal town in Kerala, is one recent movie in which religion played a central theme, but it sank to such abysmal depths that its director chose to make Red Swastik (2007) next. Reincarnation is central to Karzzz (Satish Kaushik, 2008), but it is only a remake of Karz (Subhash Ghai, 1980). Interestingly, Sins may have borrowed a thing or two from the Mexican Oscar-nominated The Crime of Padre Amaro (El crimen del padre Amaro, Carlos Carrera, 2002) which was itself adaptated from renowned Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queirós’ novel of the same name. Both movies are about a small-town Catholic priest who becomes infatuated with a young girl. The Mexican movie became the biggest commercial success of all time in Mexico, even after the offended Catholic organisations emphatically asked the government to ban it and the people not to see it. This is not an exception. Acclaimed director Carlos Reygadas is most known for Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (Batalla en en cielo, 2005), and Silent Light (Stellet licht, 2007), all of which examine Christianity and its myths.

Sex and Other Stories
Unlike the controversy surrounding the “sexually explicit” topless scenes of Seema Rahmani in Sins, the controversy of El crimen del padre Amaro only had to do with them involving a Catholic priest. While exploring sexuality more “openly” is fast becoming a favourite among our directors demonstrating the urban leap of faith in movies, unabashed exploration, depiction and even reception of sexuality has been common to Mexican mainstream movies and audiences. In the coming-of-age movie And Your Mother, Too (Y tu mamá también, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) two teenage boys learn about love, friendship, sex and life during their road trip in company with an older woman that they both become attracted to. The movie set a record by getting the biggest ever opening in Mexico and went on to become a cult classic around the world.

The apparently progressive views of the urban youth, the controversies about the morality of pre-marital sex, a greater and more open dialogue, and most importantly the emergence of the multiplex crowd have all laid a foundation for “bolder” experiments. Love’s a Bitch (Amores perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000), one of the most well-known Mexican movies in India is an anthology film in which one story deals with the forbidden love between a man and his brother’s wife, and another with the extramarital affair between a family man and a much-younger supermodel. Showcase it beside Bollywood anthology Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee, 2010) which dealt with love and sex (although between unmarried adults) like no other Bollywood movie before it. It is common knowledge that CBFC India bisected a sex scene in LSD because it deemed it too long for the Indian audiences.

Mexican cinema enjoys a vastly more liberal censor board and a protective government. Mexico decriminalised homosexuality in 1871 — an achievement for a country with such a great Catholic majority. Violence against members of the LGBT communities (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual) remains a serious issue in Mexico, but movies have moved beyond the derogatory comedian “marica” (sissy) stereotype that was common till the seventies. Julián Hernández, for instance, is making a name for himself by writing and directing movies about homosexuality, like A Thousand Clouds of Peace (Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, 2003) and Broken Sky (El cielo dividido, 2006). The Mexican government not only protects these movies for frictionless screenings, but it also supports efforts toward greater sexual tolerance and AIDS awareness through MIX Mexico, an annual LGBT film festival held in Mexico City.

More than a decade after venues and posters of Fire (Deepa Mehta, 1999) had been set afire by fanatics and thugs in broad daylight, Bollywood is yet to produce a movie that does more than running ludicrous gags about a couple of characters pretending to be or wrongly perceived as homosexual. Indian cinema and audiences (including the multiplex crowd) continue to squirm when a movie explores sexuality beyond the consensual intercourse between an Adonis and a Venus, with strategically-placed props and camera angles. On the other hand, Indians have for long been comfortable with graphic violence.

In the Thick of Action
The claim is undeniable. Many Indian parents take their children to theatres showing “fighting movies”. Action blockbusters are broadcast on television channels during primetime hours. Bollywood has always banked heavily on “action”, though its renditions have evolved dramatically. Extravagantly choreographed stunts featuring risk-taking heroes and their doubles have replaced dishum dishums. Cold silvery handguns which can bore neat holes or make messy spaghettis off a skull have replaced cardboard machine guns. Cavemen villains operating from beeping, kitschy hideouts have made way for the chic face of evil. Besides, even the nature of these crimes are now more urban, more sophisticated. Stories are being drawn from real-life inspirations and movies featuring the increasingly dangerous cities rife with extortion, kidnapping, corruption, the omnipresent underworld, sex crimes and now terrorism are being abundantly made.

The appetite for violence in Bollywood and Mexican cinema and of their audiences is comparable. In Without Name (Sin Nombre, Cary Fukunaga, 2009) two men force a child to carry out the execution of their prisoner, and then feed the prisoner’s viscera to dogs. In Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) the protagonist of the first story primarily earns money through brutal dog fights, and pissed off bad men shoot their defeated dogs in Bollywood ishtyle. While crime in Mexican movies is usually about the drug cartels, corruption in the Church and the government, and illegal emigration, they have also started scratching beneath the surface with movies like The Zone (La Zona, Rodrigo Plá, 2007). La Zona is an unsentimental critique of the urban society, of the great virtual wall between the rich and the poor, and especially of the changing realities and requirements of the well-to-do to live peacefully within the confines of their secure, gated communities.

People, lives and stories will keep changing till they reach stable ground during urbanisation. Both Mexico and India are in that stage now where the past is a powerless patriarch, impotent but an influence nonetheless on whatever the future is to bring. Change is imminent and exciting. Especially for filmmakers hoping to tell riveting stories of a generation caught in conflicts, external, internal and liminal.

Around the same time that Alain Resnais portrayed the innovative use of flashbacks in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Jean-Luc Godard discovered jump cuts with Breathless. I haven’t watched Breathless, but his Crazy Pete serves as a good enough example for understanding jump cuts. Other than that nugget there is not much I can write about the movie.

In an attempt to placate my inability to articulate much, I quote Roger Ebert from a review in 1966:

Godard never sticks closely enough to this plot to make it important. He does a curious thing. He will have a scene that is perfectly conventional, like a scene in a Hollywood gangster movie. But it doesn’t come out of anything or lead into anything; it is important because of its tone, its texture and not because it advances the plot. Thus a Godard movie becomes a montage of pure technique; the parts don’t fit together — but they add up to an attitude. Does this make sense? More than any other director, Godard resists being written about.

Crazy Pete opens with Ferdinand sitting in a bathtub reading some heroic account of a Spanish conquistador to his daughter who may not even be ten. Thrown out of his job in television, he abandons this young daughter and her beautiful Italian mother, his affluent father-in-law and his connections with prospective employers, and runs away with his daughter’s new baby-sitter with whom he had an affair several years ago. “Gay abandon” is the phrase that strikes me.

We soon learn that the baby-sitter Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot, is a free-spirited woman who murders men and midgets as easily as she breaks into song and dance. And she does the latter as easily as Julie Andrews does, though not as often.

Ferdinand (aka Pierrot) and Marianne become public enemies like Bonnie and Clyde, and anarchists like Thelma and Louise, and to their credit remain unique. Incidentally, “Crazy Pete” is the namesake of France’s first “public enemy number one”. The two lead a vividly whimsical life, with major events like abandonment of family and murders and threats to life seeming inconsequential. They alternatingly keep an upperhand on each other, identifying themselves as personifications of ideas and feelings. They are more like personifications of atomic units of ideas and feelings respectively, for every two successive states seem separated by the jump cuts.

The two for a while live in a cabin on the seaside eating fish and fruit. Ferdinand is scribbling fragmented sentences in a notebook, eagerly obsessing with his free verse poetry, which he believes is a game of loser-take-all. Marianne, on the other hand, is mostly bored. The two are digital characters, with their only states being boredom and adrenaline-pumping frenzy. They lived where they did because they reached the place and suddenly got bored of running away from the police and gangs of weapon smugglers. I can’t help thinking what Thoreau would have made of them, who “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Pierrot and Marianne are the antithesis of all and any purpose in life. Their nihilism is strangely liberating.

Godard’s success can be attributed in his ability to make his actors believe that he knows what he is asking them to do, and in making his audience believe that there is a method to this madness. More recently, Ebert wrote of the same movie again:

I once wrote of it as “Godard’s most virtuoso display of his mastery of Hollywood genres,” I now see it more as the story of silly characters who have seen too many Hollywood movies.

There are too many references to cinema, art, literature, even to political events. That was how Godard made his movies. But I wouldn’t call those characters silly. I wouldn’t call them anything as they are too volatile to be called that.

Image Source: Crazy Pete on IMDB

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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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Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire starts with a confidence, maybe certainty, that the readers of his previous book will hold on no matter what. Lisbeth Salander gets a lot of pages. This is her book. She travels the world; reads Principia Mathematica; tries proving Little Fermat’s theorem; and gets her breasts enlarged, which is possibly as gratifying as it could get in her life.

Although Salander occasionally thinks aloud about “All The Evil” and we eventually find out everything worth knowing about her past, for more than the first quarter of the novel, nothing more sinister than the vignettes in a dull crime beat section of a newspaper takes place. I felt the writing even getting sloppier in a few corners. Nevertheless, old readers will have stayed, are duly rewarded, and will in all likelihood like this more than the first book once they reach the end.

A double murder and another seemingly unconnected murder in which Salander becomes the prime suspect, a manhunt (more like a modern witch hunt), and three parallel investigations suddenly swallow the reader in a storm much like Matilda in the Caribbean. Larsson does something brilliant at this point: he hides Salander for more than another quarter of the book, essentially conveying the exasperation of Mikael Blomkvist (whom Salander has ignored for more than a year now) and of the Swedish Police to the reader.

Although Larsson made it look convincing, I could not help noticing the incompetence of the Police during their investigation. It is understandable for them to chase in the direction shown by the most apparent circumstantial evidence, but their negligence in following up some crucial matters like the works of the dead “conscientious couple” and the interrogation of Salander’s previous guardian Palmgren made them “lose face” once again. Perhaps I was expecting more from Inspector Bubble and his team – which I can’t be blamed for – but they mostly failed me.

Larsson created even more characters than he did for his previous book, and these are livelier, possibly because these are mostly alive. The underlying debate between blaming the society and blaming the individual for a misdeed is fiercer, and it is clear where Larsson’s own feelings lie. He highlights the failure of social welfare systems through their appalling treatment of Salander herself. Continuing pointing at the atrocities against women, this time he chooses human trafficking as the background, ironically calling it From Russia With Love, and suggests the government’s apathy for underage illegal immigrants. I was amused by Larsson’s caricature of the Swedish media, which to some extent provides good company to the Indian media. Homophobia is an additional theme, and having occasionally heard and read about the Swedish comfort with sexuality and having watched Fucking Åmål, I was surprised.

In The Girl Who Played with Fire Salander arouses more pity than before, especially during her grief about Mirriam Wu towards the end (she cries!), and of course in the devastating final scene, while Larsson has fun by getting explicit about Salander being based on the legendary Pippi Longstocking. While reading this book I was suddenly reminded of my math teacher in school, who was similarly diminutive and quick.

At the end it is clear that Berger may be sidetracked, advokat Annika (Blomkvist’s sister) will play a major role, and Salander will spend more of her time in you-will-know-where in the next book. I could stomach that, I am preparing for the worst, but I am completely unprepared for the unavailability of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest in Indian bookstores.

P.S. I discovered that I don’t like “Jesus Christ” being used exclamatorily more than once in a book.

Image Source: Euro Crime

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