The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Martin Ritt’s fabulous adaptation of John Le Carre’s
renowned novel and a personal favourite of mine, was that rare spy thriller that
succeeded in painting a thoroughly realistic picture of the grimy and shadowy
cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, with its share of lies, betrayals, secrecy,
realpolitik, ethical dilemmas, psychological tussles, existential crises, and
above all, utmost loneliness. The film begins with a brilliantly choreographed
long take that places us right into the last assignment of Alec Leamas (Richard
Burton), the station head of the West Berlin office of the Circus, where a
German double-agent working for them, is killed while trying to cross over to
the West. He is called back to London, and is asked to be part of an elaborate
plan, wherein he would need to convince the Germans that he is depressed and
frustrated with his job and life and is ready to defect, upon which he would
need to supply information that would bring down Mundt (Peter van Eyck),
Leamas’ feared counterpart in East Berlin. However, as it turns out, he was just
a pawn to begin with in a complex and murky game of deception and one-upmanship.
Meanwhile Leamas falls for a pretty, lonely lady (Claire Bloom) who too gets
dragged into the dirty business. Burton was superb as the cynical, disillusioned
and detached protagonist who has long stopped believing in anything. Ritt made
terrific use of intricately composed long takes using gently roving cameras,
moody B/W photography, cold and bleak environs, and a fine jazz-based score, in
order to perfectly create a brooding Cold War atmosphere and zeitgeist where
there was no right and wrong, and nothing was as they seemed.
Director: Martin Ritt
Genre: Thriller/Spy Thriller
Language: English
Country: UK
The Time to Live & the Time to Die, the second chapter in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ‘Coming-of-Age Trilogy’, was the movie
that catapulted the Taiwanese filmmaker into the realm of international
arthouse acclaim. This semi-autobiographical film about the childhood and
adolescence of Hou as first-generation émigrés in a small Taiwanese town, can
be clubbed, from stylistic and narrative aspects, with Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Zhang-Ke’s
Zhantai. Hou's stand-in, nicknamed Ah-Ah, finds himself in a foreign land when, while he is still a kid,
his father relocates from mainland China in the hope of better opportunities. The
large closely-knit family, which also comprised of his mother, elder sister,
three brothers, and grandmother, live a modest life in the dusty little town
where hardly much happens. The immediate financial constraints, compounded by
his father’s recurring ill health, and the largely non-descript social environ,
took the forefront, with subtle political observations carefully placed in the
background. Chronicled in a gently rhythmic, quietly nostalgic and compassionate
tone, and shot using static long takes, the film, with its delicate,
minimalistic, non-intrusive and distancing formalism, beautifully covered such
themes as cultural disconnect, familial bonds, social uncertainty and the
process of maturation through a series of mundane and unspectacular processes. When
the leisurely paced film comes to its finale, it would compel the viewers to introspect
at the journey covered, filled with moments of both joy and poignancy. The most
memorable character was easily the doting, loveable and increasingly
forgetful grandmother, who reminded me a lot of Indir
Thakrun's character in Ray’s Pather Panchali.
Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Coming-of-Age
Language: Taiwanese/Mandarin
Country: Taiwan
Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho!, an important work of the 80’s ‘Parallel
Cinema’ movement in India, was a trenchant satire on the plight of middle and
lower middle class tenants in the Indian metropolises as well as on the
ridiculousness of the Indian legal system. On a broader scale, though, this was
a decidedly socialistic film that superbly portrayed the incessant urban desire
for growth and development at utter disregard for those at the bottom of the
pyramid. The titular Mohan Joshi (Bhisham Sahni) is a middle-aged man frustrated
at the squalor and dilapidation of the old and decrepit apartment in Bombay he
stays in. When he approaches his wealthy landlord (Amjad Khan) with requests
for repair, he’s literally shooed away by him at the behest of two perennially
dark-suited and sunglass donning promoters, he, along with his ever supportive
wife (Dina Pathak), decides to take legal recourse, and engages the services of
a slimy, smooth-talking lawyer (Naseeruddin Shah) and his unctuous protégé (Satish
Shah). And thus begins a darkly humorous and unending odyssey where this
simple man and his family get painful doses of bureaucracy, apathy, legal connivances, corruption
and utter self-centeredness during his years of silent and hopeful struggle. His
tragic journey, in fact, turned akin to a game of snakes and ladders with the
former heavily outnumbering the latter, and provided a blistering metaphor for
the harsh realities for a common man. The marvelously etched script did a
perfect balance between ironies, parodies and sarcasms on one hand, and anger
and poignancy on the other, while the acting of the ensemble cast, which also
included Deepti Naval, Rohini Hattangadi and Pankaj Kapur, among others, was
uniformly brilliant.
Director: Saeed Akhtar Mirza
Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: Hindi
Country: India
The French romantic drama A Man and a Woman was a smash-hit upon its release, both commercially
and critically. It doesn’t stand the scrutiny as well today – it was an exercise
in style way over content, and its candy-floss romance hardly allowed space for
psychological depth or complexity. Yet, the very simplicity of this love story between two
matured individuals, as opposed to naïve teenagers that love stories overwhelmingly
favour, made it an affecting and refreshing watch. Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis
Trintignant), a race-car driver, and Anne (Anouk Aimée), a beautiful scriptwriter,
have both tragically lost their marital partners – his wife committed suicide
when he had a near-fatal car crash, while her husband, who was a stuntman, died
in an accident during a movie shoot. They are also doting parents to their kids
who study in the same boarding school. Consequently, when she takes a lift in
his car upon missing her train to Paris, it’s easy to guess that these two
lovelorn souls, bound by their shared tragedy, would be falling for each other
before long. The director made elaborate use of flashbacks to recount their
back-stories, in order to recount the commonality in their lives; though they
provided a personal peak into their pasts, they could have perhaps been
slightly trimmed. Nonetheless, the charming romance that developed between
these two likeable and easy-going individuals was heartwarming, and despite the
tad bland narrative, the renowned climax still packs an emotional wallop. The
film’s rapturous visuals, which frequently shifted from colour to B/W to sepia
and back, might make one scratch one’s head in perplexity, but the reason was actually
purely monetary. The lilting music furthered its gently lyrical feel.
Director: Claude Lelouch
Genre: Drama/Romance
Language: French
Country: France
Ashes and Diamonds
easily remains the most famous work in Andrzej Wajda’s ‘War Trilogy’, but the second installment in the trilogy, Kanal was possibly the best of the lot,
which also comprised of A Generation.
It provided a relentlessly grim, crushingly harrowing and incessantly bleak
portrayal of the last days of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising where the Polish
Resistance, despite their bravery and fortitude, suffered a trouncing defeat at
the hands of their Nazi occupiers. It was also an intensely claustrophobic
viewing experience – both physically and psychologically – on account being set,
for more than two-third of its length, inside the dank, grimy and labyrinthine
underground sewer system. The last few surviving members of the Resistance, led
by Lt. Zadra (Wienczyslaw Glinski), after the latest assault by the Germans,
must take to the sewers in order to escape. Courageous soldier (Tadeusz Janckar),
and his blonde bombshell lover Daisy (Teresa Izewska), who, ironically, happens
to be the only person who knows the way through the filth, are among those who
are part of the group. However, their best laid plans go haywire once they go
down – the complex catacomb-like network, and the lack of light, clean air and
food, coupled with the poisonous gases regularly tossed through the manholes to
flush out the rebels, leave the beaten men and women enmeshed by spatial
disorientation and fast sinking into utter hopelessness, thus taking them to
the very edge of embitterment, tolerance and sanity, with tragedy and death lurking
around every possible corner. The film, therefore, was not about courage or heroism,
but about debilitating defeat from every perspective imaginable, thus making
this incredibly desolate and nerve-racking.
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Genre: War Drama/Psychological Drama/Resistance Film
Language: Polish
Country: Poland
Woody’s A
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was another of his displays of Bergman-philia,
this time the source being the Swedish Master’s Smiles of a Summer Night. This was also his first collaboration
with Mia Farrow, Woody’s second muse after Diane Keaton. This amusing, verbose
and low-key, but tad uneven and largely unconvincing, comedy of manners would
place, in my reckoning, as his least directorial venture among all his 80s
works. Set at the turn of the 20th century, the story has Leopold
(Jose Ferrer), an erudite but arrogant scholar and his bohemian and much
younger bride-to-be Ariel (Farrow), being invited to the charming country house
of Andrew (Allen), an eccentric Wall Street banker-cum-oddball inventor and his
frigid wife Adrian (Mary Steenburgen). Also invited is Maxwell (Tony Roberts),
a womanizing physician who arrives with his brazenly saucy nurse Dulcy (Julie
Hagerty). Before long hidden strings start getting exposed and new
complications start developing – Andrew knows Ariel from before and realizes he
is still in love with her, Maxwell too falls head over heels with her, Leopold
wants one last adventure with Dulcy, and Adrian wants to take certain
uncomfortable advices from Dulcy. These parallel and interconnected
developments, dealing with themes ranging from infidelity and carnal desires to
unrequited love and marital guilt, were infused with his trademark wit, whimsy
and charm, and interspersed with campy doses of magical realism. The acting was
top-rate, with the various actor perfectly cast in their respective characters.
Though the film had its share of funny moments, it also had its share of
pretense and silliness, thus making this a watchable but a decidedly lesser work in Woody’s
oeuvre.
Director: Woody Allen
Genre: Comedy/Comedy of Manners/Ensemble Film
Language: English
Country: US
