The day after the big night. The day after a decade of Oscars. This is a better time than most other to air my mixed feelings about awards in the acting categories (hereafter called acting awards) given my interest in fiction.

While the deservingness of awards are eternally debatable, awards play a role in reminding us of some notable events of any year. I tend to remember the acting awards more than any other awards. Because I love and root for the stars who bring those characters to life. Because I can appreciate and prefer character-driven stories to plot-driven and drivel-driven ones. Because I can more easily imagine myself having a conversation with them than imagine myself pondering great ideas or themes or crowds or angles.

I have watched 32 of the last 40 performances that won acting awards. The ones that I haven’t watched yet — including three that were announced last night — are from the movies Iris (2001), Monster’s Ball (2001), Dreamgirls (2006), La Vie en Rose (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Precious (2009), The Blind Side (2009) and Crazy Heart (2009). I have watched many others that won just the nominations, but it would overwhelm us all if we went into those statistics.

Anyway, as I thought about all those 40 characters it struck me that only 4 each from the leading actor and actress categories are fictitious. The remaining 12 characters are based on real people. Why is that? What does it mean? Every year Hollywood makes several biopics. Several, but a minority. Then how come some of these not only manage to get nominated but also win?

Apart from the given fact that the actors must have acted well, real characters have a great advantage. The writers and the actors start with a lot of material, from costumes to quirks to voices to unexplored depths. The actor can push limits to a great extent, lose or gain a few stone, grow hair or go bald, spend hours with the real fellow learning to play the piano, wear the underwear of the same brand that the real one did, do outrageous things that they wouldn’t normally do for a fictitious character. This gets the actor and the audience to believe that he or she has immersed into the character. The actor and the audience alike are willing to accept that there is something about this character that is unique, that is inexplicable, that is the way it is. And if you get it right, you get the award right?

I don’t mean to suggest that this is undeserving. Hollywood has got that part right about making biopics, about making in-depth character studies. Whether it is the writers’ inability to identify worthy protagonists, or the lack of freedom for them to do such things without getting into serious troubles, I haven’t yet seen that culture of making biopics take off in Indian cinema. I only wonder whether the award has been given to the actor because he or she has acted better than all others or because the actor has successfully delivered what we knew and expected from the character.

On the other hand, only 5 supporting characters of the last 20 that won are based on real people. If an original screenplay writer has a great character, they should probably write it as a supporting one.

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There are two aspects to religion: faith and affiliation.

Faith is the aspect that has to do with the tomes of literature owing to the perpetually fecund imagination of people throughout the history of mankind. It is fun, like it is when a million fans filled with Pottermania cast spells on each other and go back home tired. It provokes our imagination, like the Harry Potter series did with the fanfiction world woven all over it. It provides scope for interpretation, like the debate about whether Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore is a homosexual or not. And it gives food for thought, like about the place and purpose and justification of the Dark Arts. People can keep or lose faith, be faithful or faithless, be unfaithful or marry multiple faiths.

Affiliation is the aspect that has to do with the thriving economies built around religion. It creates the rituals that come and go out of fashion. It deploys brand ambassadors to convert easy prey through fear and freebies. It tracks its growth rates (and methinks thus its desperate orthodox wings are against abortion and family planning). It declares tolerance and pockets of it persecute non-followers. It is the ugly gigantic monster.

Besides the benefits of livelihood to a few that these affiliations create and more importantly the problems they perpetrate, the most unethical and unfortunate cause of their growth is birth. You may not know whether a foetus is that of a boy or a girl, whether it has all its sensory organs functioning or not, whether it will survive to come out or not, but there is little doubt as to what religion it is affiliated with, and that blind certainty makes me sad.

As a human right, secular governments and religious states alike proclaim the grant of freedom of religion and the tolerance of non-followers, but the freedom is of faith and the tolerance (which itself is self-flattering) is of affiliation. Officially changing from one religion to another is possible. None of this is enough. What I hope is for people to have freedom in a greater sense. Freedom from religions, from affiliations. I couldn’t figure out whether that is even possible where I live, but I think it should be and should be easier.

Can a newborn not grow up without being affiliated to any religion, consider various choices and their varieties in the market and pick one if it so wishes to? Will it make a difference?

Online social networks allow the options “spiritual but not religious” and “atheist”. Imagine an official census body allowing this option and making it effortless. To adults. All religions will lose a small portion of their population. Now imagine the body resetting the religion entry to null, and asking people to voluntarily come forward and have that entry updated with their choice if they wish to. Then?

Then, people will not only have a freedom of religion, but also exercise it. Affiliation to a religion becomes truly a choice. A voluntary affiliation is a closer indicator of practice and adherence, is more than a vestige. I resist my temptation to speculate how the statistics will then look like. Today people belong to the religion they belong to mostly because they were born with it, not because they chose it.

[This, of course, is true about other social requirements like citizenship and caste as well.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Source: IMDB

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