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.

Interval. The director being a big Sergio Leone fan chose to include a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the shocking scene where Frank draws his pistol and slowly takes aim at a child. (The scene that may have inspired a similar scene in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay.) As fun as the homage may be, the particular scene was a bad choice here. It would have made a lot more sense to choose the opening scene at the railway station where three trigger-happy men wait patiently for Harmonica. That particular scene truly captures the pace of The American.

The main reason why Anton Corbijn’s The American is not doing well is that it has unfortunately been mis-marketed as an action thriller. Another reason is that it is not a movie for everybody. I often hear that one has to be in a certain mood to watch some movies, which I often disagree, but had I not been ruminating about solitude recently I wouldn’t have liked The American. After playing Michael Clayton it is easy to imagine why George Clooney may have been drawn to playing Jack the American. The movie is not so much a story as is a character study. It should have retained the novel’s title of A Very Private Gentleman.

Jack is a veteran in the profession of making custom weapons for professional assassins. Naturally his head is filled with doubts about what his dangerous customers, or any strangers for that matter, might be up to. In the opening scene, he is ambushed by Swedish gunmen for a reason that he doesn’t know. Perhaps he had built a weapon that was used to kill the enemies’ leader. As much as it is improbable it is also not impossible for his beautiful companion to be one of the Swedish enemies, so he shoots her in the back of the head.

We see three women in the short period of his life. He suspects all three. Two of them gravely.

As a skillful craftsman he is well-adjusted to a very long life of solitude, as may be best in his profession, but it is occasionally clear that he enjoys certain company. His solitude is at least partly a compromise. He must have trained himself to make his face unreadable. He rarely talks to anybody, never about his feelings, and he doesn’t show them on his face even when alone. Jack is alone on the screen for almost half the duration of the movie, may be more, and George Clooney made it an enjoyable experience for me. It is non-trivial because most of the scenes are not exactly what we consider “action”. But at no point does his mind seem blank. Unreadable sometimes, but never blank. There are moments when it is clear what he may be thinking, and moments when one can only guess. We see a man who is gradually getting tired of his life, who is getting desperate by the doubts eating his insides, who has allowed himself to feel guilt. There may be awards.

I have several complaints about the movie, much unlike what I heard from most of the audience in the theatre last night. Primarily the movie is not long enough. After the interval the second half of the movie seems rushed, abandoning the deliberate pace of the first half. (The righteous CBFC India made it worse by chopping several minutes of a crucial character’s role, presumably because she works as a prostitute in a bordello.) It is also possible that a cruel studio executive, no not the producer George Clooney, might have demanded some quick action before the movie ends. I hope to one day see the director’s cut, though it is unlikely to be much better.

It is only right that the movie is set in Abruzzo. The slow movement originated in Italy. Another irrelevant note that I can’t resist: Violenta Placido is one of the most beautiful names ever, as beautiful as the actress.

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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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The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about the limited means of distinguishing illusion from reality.

I watched Shutter Island on its last show in town, and lost the chance to rewatch. Inception, I watched its first show in town and then again five days later. I am likely to have missed and misunderstood several things in both the movies but as enjoyably ambiguous as both tried to remain I found the former more interesting.

The Kantian philosophy of subjective reality is not new to cinema. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary Baby and to some extent Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix are among the most celebrated and classic examples. I also recall Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, Joseph Ruben’s Forgotten and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, all of which have parents fighting desperately against some universal perceptions in order to save their sons or daughters. Shutter Island takes a very different approach than all these. By setting it on an island filled with certified mad men and untrustworthy authorities Scorsese directly brings forth the classroom discussion about the justification of a mad man’s perception of the world. The reason I find this interesting is because it is only an exaggeration of the mild differences between the perceptions of two uncertified individuals (sane or otherwise), something that is most exceptionally handled in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

I have never seen the Cartesian dream argument in cinema before. Inception uses another classroom discussion, about reality possibly being a part of an infinite dream sequence. Christopher Nolan’s biggest nod to the philosophy comes in the form of Mal/Cobb’s totem, a top which is to spin indefinitely within dreams but stop spinning in the real world. In a world following the laws of physics — dream or real — every top is to stop spinning at some point according to the second law laws of thermodynamics and thus Cobb’s totem will stop spinning in a dream just as in reality. There are things like seamless sharing of the dream environment (how?), gravity transcending dreams and the subconscious (what’s with that?), and a single global limbo (like 4chan is on the Internet?) which I found hard to digest. Even after willing to overlook these and some others I didn’t find the movie memorable beyond a level because Nolan — unlike Scorsese — himself overlooked a quote that Cobb makes, something about emotions being the vehicle of ideas. His investment in the emotions wasn’t sufficient to make me care about the motivations of any of the characters, including that of Cobb’s desire to meet his children. Even though I was thoroughly entertained by the plot, the subtle hints, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s lithe manouevres through the zero-gravity dream scenes, and even though I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again.

The reason why I care more about the Kantian philosophy than the Cartesian one is because of the significance of perceptions whether the world is real or not and because there is nothing much I can do about the latter. Not that I could or would about the former. Philosophy is one of my weak subjects, mainly because I never went through a GRE word list. I find the need to reach for the dictionary twice to read any given sentence tedious. I go round and round, looking for the same word again and again as much for the same argument. I haven’t yet the leisure in life to deeply think of such matters while chewing air.

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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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