Motherhood became the common theme of the movies I watched in the 9th Pune International Film Festival. Among the 15 movies were my first Australian, first Ecuadorian, first Danish and first Russian (talkie) movies. The absence of subtitles for the English movies was refreshing. Overall the movies were better than the previous year’s, both in terms of scripts and production values.

The festival organizers have once again failed to acknowledge IMDB and Wikipedia for sourcing numerous plot synopses and bios (Retrospective) in the official catalogue, though I’m glad they acknowledged IMDB for the newsletter trivia sections. Ironically, a workshop on Copyrights was held as part of the festival this time. I was also disappointed by the selection of several popular Indian movies that TV channels screen from time to time: Anbe Sivam, Bandit Queen, Caravan, Chashme Buddoor, Dasavatharam, Jodhaa Akbar, Mughal-e-Azam, Prahaar, Raavanan, Saagara Sangamam, Taal. Jodhaa Akbar and Taal especially hurt because of the delays they caused to a couple of movies I and a hundred others were waiting to watch. The magic of international film festivals is to discover movies that people most likely have not already watched.

The Tree: Happy family of father, mother, three sons and one daughter. Father dies. The usual conflict of the grieving members struggling with their lives and the family falling apart was let go. Instead here is a loosely functional family, the members more distant from one another due to their different ways of adapting to the tragedy, where the mother (who had never worked before) and the elder son (still in high school) gradually become more responsible and are keener about moving on. The movie allows them to be more than mourners. They are all sad, they all miss the father very much, but they try to live with it, together. The young daughter poses most problems with her vehement belief that the huge tree beside their home, which is on the verge of uprooting their house, is holding the father’s soul. The tree is symbolic. They won’t forget the tree, but they cannot continue living with the tree for their own sake.

My Time Will Come: The movie centers around a government hospital, largely its morgue. Many people are impacted by the several murders and other crimes that take place, most of them in a single day. None of the crimes are investigated beyond the filing of an autopsy report, nor is there an iota of outrage. The farthest that one crime, a rape-murder, gets investigated is when the coroner visits the crime scene out of curiosity. The people simply hope, pray, accept, attempt to forget, and get on with their lives. At the wisest of moments they comment on the government, the police, the society, and their own apathy. All this while seeming entertaining. The movie is a bleak portrait of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, a portrait that reflects a scary image of urban India.

Puzzle: Happy family of hard-working husband and equally hard-working housewife, and their two grown-up sons. The housewife is finally bored with the daily chores, anxious about the generation gap, and discovers puzzle mania. She steals time whenever possible, while hiding it from the husband because he can’t understand the new fascination and is even insecure about it (he suddenly gifts her a cell phone, a thread that’s never carried forward). Why does she like these puzzles? Perhaps for the first time in many years she is doing something entirely for herself, without the judgment of people who count. The abuse of close-ups, odd camera angles, unnecessary background score (while playing puzzles), and one cliché were the disappointments. The smiles and laughs were created through many many subtle observations of familial relations. Last year’s Argentinian movie Empty Nest dealt with similar themes in a more cheerful and less memorable manner. Both the Argentinian families are strikingly similar to the Indian families that I’ve known. Indian and Argentinian mentalities resonate well, and that may be the reason why Puzzle’s director Natalie Smirnoff bagged the “Special Jury Award”.

R: Two new prisoners arrive in a correctional facility filled with hardened criminals, and both their names begin with R. That’s the only relation to the title. The movie was made because someone thought they could, and not because they thought they had to. The catalogue called it an “anthropological study” and it may well have been a program in the Discovery channel, the creatures of which I could hardly empathize with though they occasionally are interesting. It was the most tiring of PIFF 2011. Like many others I watched this because another movie I had been planning to was suddenly cancelled to make way for Taal, presumably because it was the only convenient time for Subhash Ghai to attend.

A Fugitive from the Past: The movie could have been inspired by Rashômon and High and Low, and possibly a few other Kurosawa movies. Three lowlifes set a factory afire and run away with a lot of money, while the surrounding world tries to weather a storm. Only one survives, escapes into the society along with the money, and manages to rise in it over fifteen years. A geisha falls in unrequited love with him after a one-night stand, and changes her life and lifestyle in search and protection of him. A good old-fashioned homicide detective remains hot at heels, all the years. The movie has a neat structure, specific points of view, and a labyrinthine screenplay (not exactly) that touches upon numerous aspects of society in an epic manner. It must have been very good. Unfortunately, inexplicably, a good 30 minutes from the movie were cut, and we ascribe it to the preceding Taal and Subhash Ghai for taking up far more time than was allotted them.

Mamas and Papas: Some don’t want children. Some lose children and can never get over them. Some can’t bring up children and want to give them up. Some try hard but can’t have children. They all have their reasons, and their decisions will change their lives and their spouses’. The movie succeeds in narrating four such loosely-connected stories with warmth and light-heartedness. Strangely, not unrealistically, the stories are about the mothers. They are the ones who have their reasons. They are the ones who make the decisions. Not fathers. The fathers are only peripheral. Perhaps that is how it should be.

The Rowan Waltz: During the second world war there were international borders where fertile crops were seeded with landmines by enemies. Sixteen-year-old girls were given a crash course and burdened with unearthing the mines. It could have been that the men were mostly serving in the war, the boys were expected to be ready for their turn, the women were expected to do other important chores within households and elsewhere, and so it fell on the girls. The movie is set in one such village. When it could have been so much more, it chose to be another mushy romance with beautiful people in beautiful locales. As well-received as it was, especially by my unduly irritating neighbor and her boyfriend, the movie disappointed me with such limited utilization of its potential.

Another Year: It is another year in the lives of a happily old couple that has been married for decades, and a vain ageing woman desperately looking for anyone that is not readily interested in her. The happy ones maintain their happiness and the desperate woman remains unhappy. Whereas the old couple supports each other and anyone who needs help, adjust to their son’s moving on and a sibling’s mourning, the woman regularly tries to change her life by changing something big in her external life to no positive effect. It’s always satisfying to watch Mike Leigh’s actors leading ordinary lives and communicating subtly around the dining table. The desperate woman is not new to us, but the persona created by Lesley Manville is very refreshing. The director succeeds in portraying the apparent myth of a happy marriage, and Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen deserve much of that credit. [Roger Ebert’s Review]

The Trojan Women: Hector’s mother, Hector’s widow, Hector’s sister, all the other devastated women of Troy in the aftermath of war, and the Helen of Troy. I hadn’t watched a single Katherine Hepburn movie, nor a Greek tragedy. (Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy doesn’t count.) Having now watched this Greek tragedy made in English, I merely nod in agreement while reading Roger Ebert’s Review, and hope to watch Elektra some day, and some Hepburn movies this year.

Majority: Most of us watched the Turkish movie because of the number of awards it bagged in recent festivals (including the Mumbai Filmfest). It’s a depressing movie that made many in the audience laugh at themselves. A young man in a well-to-do family managed long ago to suppress his identity, knowing well his successful father has a plan for him already. He is not as passive aggressive as he is passive. He compromises at every point of his life. He is able, good-natured, and not without his own thoughts, but it is easier to be part of the group. He perpetually wears a slight grimace, possibly pissed off with himself most of all, and always holds back his thoughts. He gets a big chance when a “gypsy” girl befriends him, and he tries to fight for keeping her. It is probably too late for him to learn how to fight, but there is a hope that he might do it again in the future. I know people just like him. In the movie again is a mother frustrated with the insensitivity of her husband and now her son, partly blaming herself.

The Poll Diaries: Chris Kraus’ thirteen-year-old Oda Schaefer is precocious, curious, and adventure-seeking. She reminds one of Anne Frank, and she was fortunate to have lived and written till the age of 88. The movie refers to an important chapter in Oda’s life when she visited Poll from Berlin, learnt dark secrets about her father and step-mother, and protected an Estonian poet who became her first love. The story might be fictional. More than the deviant laboratory studies of Oda’s father in his quest to “cure evil”, it shows the artistic and affluent lifestyles of aristocratic families and their close ties across borders even at the verge of war. It’s the foot soldiers, strangers to one another, who kill each other in war.

The Sicilian Girl: Rita Atria is a national heroine in Italy who twenty years ago set into motion major Mafia investigations in Sicily. The movie is a biopic of this gritty girl. Since her childhood she had the unusual hobby of documenting Mafia-related incidents in her diary, going as far as surreptitiously taking their photos in the later years. After the early death of her father (a don) and later her brother (a Mafioso), she took her diaries to Paolo Borsellino who became the chief investigator of the case. The movie director admittedly took many liberties with the story, something that I first noticed with the ending. Whereas her suicide (at the age of seventeen) seemed to have resulted from the trauma and fear after the murder of Borsellino, the movie portrayed it as a heroic decision so as to give a greater credence to her testimony. The movie also ignored the thread of Rita’s sister-in-law Piera Aiello whose actions may have inspired Rita to approach the authorities. (Piera Aiello is now serving as the president of the Rita Atria Antimafia association.) After having to wait more than forty minutes (because of the delay caused by Ashutosh Gowariker’s unforgettable masterpiece Jodhaa Akbar) I and my friend had to sit on the steps of the theatre as the movie turned out to be the most crowded of the entire festival. The icing was the appearance of director Marco Amenta after the movie ended. While he spoke about the movie and awaited questions from the audience, many chaotic members of the audience shouted “Lights!” to the theatre boys. The director quipped that lights weren’t necessary, that he was just a director and not an actor, but whoever listens when there is a chance to see. No questions asked. (Last year Finnish director Dome Karukoski appeared in PIFF after the screening of his Forbidden Fruit, the only non-Kaurismaki Finnish that I watched.)

Zeppelin!: The Hindenburg disaster which contributed to the shelving of airships continues to generate speculation. Here a young man seeks to solve the disaster for personal reasons, the disaster that killed his grandfather, and the consequences that culminated in the suicide of his father, and haunts him now. It is a beautifully-made movie, with black-and-white for the grandfather’s timeline, grainy camera footage (Technicolor?) for the father’s timeline, and Kodak Vision (?) for the current timeline. I didn’t find the movie as gripping, partly because Hindenburg disaster is too distant and the familial tragedy too impersonal. The occasional motionless or out-of-sync lip movements seemed intentional and jerky.

Somewhere: Good movies are often plot-driven or character-driven. Somewhere neither has a plot nor is its central character ever driven to do anything, and it’s a wonderful experiment. Hollywood star Johnny Marco is so buried into boredom that he falls asleep while making love to a stranger woman whom he impulsively desired (or deluded himself that he desired). Marco is a most passive of characters. He does nothing, but remains successful because he turns up wherever and whenever his publicist requests him to. Things happen around him if they do at all, much like when the make-up man plasters Johnny’s face and leaves him for a few hours with only the nostrils uncovered. And then we know: Johnny Marco couldn’t be said to be living, but only existing. Existing like his Ferrari. Towards half of the movie a reporter asks him, “Who is Johnny Marco?” Nothing. The movie is deliberately slow with good reason. It meticulously tracks the subtle changes in a character, not the spectrum from a downwardly-spiraling Hollywood star (which Johnny Marco is not) to a redeemed actor restored to his former glory, but a narrow band from a man lost to boredom (early stages of a depression, methinks) to a man who decides to come out of that stage. The changes are subtle and minute, but marked well enough to plot them on a curve. [Roger Ebert’s Review]

Certified Copy: I was looking forward to seeing Juliette Binoche more than anyone or anything else in PIFF 2011. This was to be the last movie. Fitting. In what turned out to be a major disappointment and the biggest irony, the box certified to contain Certified Copy had a different film inside it. I waited for about an hour before walking out, while the volunteers raked through everything they could in an attempt to find the film. The reason I waited till then was to eavesdrop on the adjacent conversation between a Marathi man and a Finnish woman. They were strangers. He spoke like an academic certain of the superiority of Indian diversity and heritage, including their film industries, all the while rubbing his sooty bare foot with his hand. She was eager to absorb whatever she could about this exotic land. I was glad for a chance to witness earnest cultural exchange.

I don’t track the movies I watch as diligently as I track the books I read. It possibly means that I don’t care as much about what I watch, about how I spend that aspect of my time, watching being more passive than reading. That is alarming. IMDB, Bigflix and a scrap book suggest the number in 2010 to be in the whereabouts of 100. Despite the large number, very few of them were thoughtless tripe picked only because they were there. Below are a few memorable ones, and not all are strictly movies.

PIFF 2010: 16 movies. I wrote about three of them. I realized while reviewing old notes that nearly half of them had a rape victim and more than half of them dealt with the abuse of important female character(s). Among those that I haven’t written about I call out the Romanian satire The Happiest Girl in the World. Only few movies were very ordinary and disappointing, but the overall experience was below that of PIFF 2009 for reasons beyond PIFF. What I like the most about PIFF (or any film festival), unlike the regular theatre-going, is the privilege to escape a national anthem, to watch a movie without the intervention of a censor board, and at times be a part of an audience and not just a fun-loving crowd. PIFF 2011 starts today.

Internet Movies: Early in 2010 I took the fancy of watching movies available legally on the Internet. Internet Archive, Openflix and Youtube Movies are good websites for such an endeavor. I watched a few decent movies this way before switching to Bigflix, which turned out be one of the best decisions I made last year.

Ingmar Bergman: I picked Bergman as the auteur to follow in 2010. Including the silence trilogy and Wild Strawberries I watched 7 of his movies, limited there by Bigflix’s collection. It is easy to become fond of his work. I hope to go to a Bergmanfest one day.

Sidney Lumet: Now is a good time to cheer for my favorite director. I became a fan of Lumet after watching 12 Angry Men and Network and then reading Making Movies. In 2010 I watched his Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Verdict. He also gave enlightening commentaries in all these DVDs, something that’s rare with directors. Given his prolific output I have a lot more to look forward to in the coming years.

Historical Significance: I touched upon ancient film history by watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Fritz Lang’s M and Metropolis. I can imagine how excellent those movies must have been in their times. Even today they aren’t boring though we’ve seen many things like those, inspired by those, better than those. I was especially impressed by M, both the movie and the titular character.

Boston Legal: I watched only the first season of this TV series (Bigflix limitations). It is hard to believe that it had to be cancelled. While the common reasons for its popularity are the cranky characters and the outrageous court scenes, I hold it special for showcasing the best portrayal of platonic love.

South Park: Season 14 wasn’t the best. I remain a fan for its ability to remind me of my hypocrisy and push my boundaries of humor.

TED Talks: After Google and Wikipedia, in 2010 TED outranked IMDB among my list of favorite websites. I must have watched more TED Talks than movies in 2010. Many of them twice. Several inspired me, some into action. Few changed the way I think.

Random Recommendations: These are many other movies that I remember vividly from 2010, and am thankful for watching them: Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Martin Scorsese’ Shutter Island, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan. I ended 2010 by rewatching Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, a movie that played a very important role in my life. A partial full list is here.

Few movies ever get made with old people as protagonists, for old age is an unpleasant and boring subject that we do not like to dwell on. “Happily ever after” is a delusion that obscures the loneliness following the death of a loved one in the arms of the other. “Old age is not a battle. It is a massacre,” wrote Philip Roth in Everyman. It is an aspect of life that I am curious about without looking forward to. Decades of mundane life, gradual withdrawal of old friends and family (themselves old), a heavy nostalgia leading to pessimism, all make old people difficult to cope. The importance that an old person has appears to diminish along with the frame of the body, at least in the old person’s mind. Neither loneliness nor debility are formidable, but together they become.

Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) is a movie that looks beyond the “happily ever after” (an unhappy marriage). It does so with occasional warmth and joy, and despite the gloomy subject it is optimistic unlike the Silence Trilogy. Dr Isak Borg is its protagonist, a septuagenarian (never used the creepy word before). I read somewhere and verified on Google Translate that his name in Swedish loosely means “castle of ice”. Isak is old, like castles even in 1950s were, and beneath his self-irony and charm is a cold unforgiving nature which he hasn’t leashed out on to the world but let grow and implode within.

From the beginning Isak is haunted by strange dreams, and as a man of science he chases them for significance. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was perhaps still a best-seller back then. The first dream, the most-discussed one, shows him alone and lost in a desolate street with the clock ticking in the background (sound) but a pocket-watch and a wall-clock both without hands. The wall-clock has large ominous eyes underneath, which I hadn’t noticed the first time. The dream perhaps resonates the loneliness Isak feels, and the uncertain but short time that he has left in the world. Then a horse-carriage pulls over and accidentally drops a coffin from which another Isak tries to wake up and grab the first Isak. This I think foreshadows the deadness he himself feels because of his cold nature, and a guilt-ridden attempt to wake up from it and make amends.

Strangely, this is a road trip movie. Isak and his daughter-in-law Marianne (Bergman’s regular Ingrid Thulin) decide to travel by their car instead of the plane to receive another honorary doctorate (of idiots, as he says). They warmly confess to each other their mutual hatred, and meet a few characters on the way who prompt further dreams in Isak. The dreams are about his first love Sara, who had married his brother; his dead wife and the coldness of their marriage; and his mother whose frosty nature he partly inherited (a little of which he passes on to his son).

The dreams are all fantastical, but they are firmly rooted in memories that Isak cherishes or can’t let go, and are triggered by recent events. Each of them individually is not without sense, the what and why, but towards the end Isak narrates that he saw an extraordinary logic in all the dreams together and they carry a strong message for him. I was lost in that desolate street. One reviewer on IMDB wrote that the movie is like a puzzle without any sort of urgency to solve it. I think it is the best description of the dreams that I could partially interpret and the relaxed pace of the movie that Bergman must have chosen so meticulously.

It is said that travel movies should be more than a series of events, that those events should change the protagonist. Some that I watched possessed that quality: growing up, remorse, discovering their ability to love, self-realization. Smultronstället was different in that the change in Isak is imperceptible. And who knows if the old man will still remember these events and the message the next morning or the one after that. Is that why he started writing them down and narrating?

The one other movie on oldage that I have wished to see for a long time is Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

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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.