If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’ luminous adaptation of James
Baldwin’s searing novel, is an affecting romantic drama, an elegiac
coming-of-age film and a poignant family ode; but, these were overriden by, and
added further meanings to, by an overarching theme that’s as universal as it’s
local, viz. racial prejudice, discrimination, abuse and injustice. The noxious history
of racism, the heroic civil rights struggle that attained fever pitch during
the 60s and 70s, and the accompanying zeitgeist, formed the film’s dominant canvas
and imbued it with a stirring sense of here-and-now; and this transformed the
story of its protagonists into a microscopic representation of the times
itself. The opening quote from Baldwin, viz. “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street”, and
the rousing B/W pictures that Jenkins sparingly used, emphatically underlined that
point. Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (KiKi Layne) are a young African-American
couple belonging to working class New York families. He’s acutely aware of the
systemic and collective racism surrounding them, but they love each other and
hope to carve a future of their own when, after multiple unsuccessful attempts,
they finally finds a deserted warehouse space which they can turn into an
apartment so that they can marry and move in together. However, their lives come
crashing when he’s accused of rape based on false evidences by a bigoted cop,
while she’s pregnant with their child. Filmed with empathy, sensitivity and deep
social concern, filled with soft visual textures and a melancholic score
interspersed with jazz, and comprising of exquisite turns by all (including the
terrific support cast), the film succeeded in counterpointing their personal
tragedy with the broader context.
Director: Barry Jenkins
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Family Drama
Language: English
Country: US
Turkish maestro Nuri
Bilge Ceylan’s magnificent The Wild Pear
Tree is filled with intriguing contradictions – deep intimacy that belied its
epic 3-hour length, a discursive and rambling narrative that was also curiously
engrossing, and seamless interplay between seriousnes and wry, brittle humour. Sinan
(Aydın Doğu Demirkol), an aspiring writer who’s just finished college, returns
to his hometown Çan where he hopes to publish his “quirky auto-fiction meta
novel” that he’s completed. As he drifts in a state of suspension, he engages
in a diverse mix of meandering conversations – with his father (Murat Cemcir),
a kindly man and ageing teacher addicted to gambling; his mother (Bennu
Yıldırımlar) who alternates between her weary and caring sides; the town mayor
who he approaches to help publish his novel; a greasy “patron of arts” who
prefers books trumpeting the town’s historical angles instead of a low-key chronicle
of its people’s mundane existence; a couple of demogagues with their
interpretations of religion, etc. His interactions with his misunderstood
father, with whom he finds himself at odds, and his embittered mother, formed
the film’s most powerful crux. And, while every conversation added enriching
layers to the film’s thematic excursions and Sinai’s complex nature – which
alternated between sober, melancholic, cynical, passive-aggressive, arrogant
and even vitrolic – two stood out in their brilliance and seething volatility –
with a striking former flame who craves for freedom from the rut around her,
and a well-known writer with whom the conversation powerfully imploded from
besumed banter to an increasingly lacerating, provocative and confrontational
argument. Stunning overhead and panoramic landscape shots, and mininalist
usage of a gently elegiac score, deftly laced the film’s quietly afecting
undercurrents of disillusionment and reconciliation.
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama
Language: Turkish
Country: Turkey
Hong Sang-soo, as is often
joked, makes the same film over and over again; yet, interestingly, this
seeming repititiveness has been the canvas for his subtle formalist
explorations on the medium’s narrative and meta-narrative nuances, including
the relative nature of truth. Right Now,
Wrong Then, therefore, brilliantly served as an ingenuous, deadpan and disarmingly
self-reflexive gag by the Korean auteur, along with being a cheeky subversion
of cinematic possibilities, through staging the same eventflow twice, but with
increasingly perceptive differences and divergences so that, by the end, the
two versions couldn’t be more disparate and distinct despite the broad similaritites.
An arthouse filmmaker (Jung Jae-young), who’s visiting Suwon to present his work,
strikes conversation with a lonesome young woman (Kim Min-hee) – a paintern and
former model – who’s caught his attention; over the course of the day, they
chat about themselves at a café, visit her garret to see her attempts at
painting, casually flirt while getting drunk at a tavern and attend an intimate
get-together later in the evening. There was, evidently, a sense of fakery in
the man in the 1st version which got stripped off to her eyes at the
evening party; in the 2nd, on the contrary, he was blunt and
unpredictable, which, ironically, also quietly enhanced their intimacy. The
film’s formal playfulness was reminiscent of Virgin Stripped Bare by her Suitors – just that, while in the
latter the narratives diverged based on the character’s POV, here it was the
director’s own perspective at play. And yes, it had liberal usage of Hong’s
trademark pan-zooms and a number of unobtrusive long single takes, including couple
of enthralling ones capturing their rambling yet pivotal café conversation
sequences.
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Avant-Garde
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea
Sam Mendes’
flamboyantly mounted WW1 epic 1917 is
packed with cinematic extravaganza, in its penchant for dramatic storytelling,
operatic picturization of war and also befuddling viewers with technical
wizardry. Consequently, the intent for immersive viewing experience got muddled
with predictability and gimmickry. The narrative kicks off when Lance Corporals
Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) are entrusted with
delivering a message to another battalion to halt their planned attack against
the Germans who’re mistakenly assumed to be on retreat, but essentially waiting
to wreak massacre; the fact that Blake’s elder brother is in that battalion made
this as much a personal mission for him as a patriotic duty (the premise was similar
to Saving Private Ryan). This inanely
absurd task, albeit one bound to end largely in success despite the outlandish
challenges, was taken into the realms of a video game through deliberately
placed hurdles, including a German bunker sitting on a ticking bomb, a dogfight
ending at their footsteps, foot chase through a town straight out of Dante’s Inferno,
and surviving a raging waterfall. And then there’re oodles of cloying sentimentality
thrown in too, thus conveniently amplifying Blake’s humanist idealism and
mellowing Schofield’s cynicism. Making use of stunning SFX wherein multiple
shots weare artificially stitched into a seemingly unbroken single-take lasting
the film’s 2-hour duration, it therefore turned out as a spectacularly shot war
movie providing a typical rehash of “heroism” and “duty before self”, instead
of one that delves into the madness, senselessness, moral ambiguities, ironies,
banalities, and other gray complexities therein. That said, the initial part of
their odyssey painted a visceral and disorienting vision of purgatory, which strikingly
captured the urgliness and brutality of war.
Director: Sam Mendes
Genre: War/Epic
Language: English
Country: UK
Agnès Varda had
resided for many years in Rue Daguerre, a lively market street in Paris’ 14th
Arrondisement and Montparnasse district named after the pioneering inventor of photographic
process Louis Daguerre, since moving in here as a young photographer herself. Awash in
nostalgia and amusing reflections, Daguerréotypes was her loving homage to this fascinating, chaotic,
demographically diverse, working class neighbourhood, filled with gentle
observations on the simple-natured, hard-working, blue-collared folks – middle-aged
and ageing couples and immigrants from various parts of France and beyond – who own and run the small shops, stores and
establishments situated along its pavements. Selling everything from perfumes
and haberdashery to bakery items and meat products, running salons for men and
women, tailoring dresses, repairing old clocks, and providing music and driving
lessons to the young and the old, this was the kind of closely-knit community
where everyone knew everybody’s histories, the local sounds and smells were
integral parts of their existences, and time flew at its own sweet speed – the
kind of irresistible, albeit largely vanished, time capsule that Tati had immortalized
in Mon Oncle. The documentary
comprises of a collage of candid scenes of daily life – each day being almost
like any other random day – with people buying home-made perfumes, baguettes,
sirloin steaks and whatnot, partaking lessons in musical instruments and
traffic rules, chatting with each other on the streets and within the shops,
and going about in their quotidian tasks; it also has heartwarming interactions
with these people and descriptions of them through voiceover by Varda herself,
and a rather funny magic show too. Accompanied by the lilting tunes of
accordion, this sepia-toned, warm-hearted mosaic portrayed the poetry and
beauty within the banal.
Director: Agnes Varda
Genre: Documentary
Language: French
Country: France
