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.
