Bhuter Bhabishyat,
for all its flaws, managed to become a pop-cultural moment for contemporary Bengali
cinema. Consequently, one might get a sense of verisimilitude if one isn’t
aware of this Aparna Sen film’s nitty-gritties, because, the ghost aspect and
the elements of social satire and political commentary apart, they are
essentially different films. Adapted from Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s novel, the
story, which begins with India’s partition and culminates with Bangladesh Liberation
War, is that of an aristocratic family with dwindling feudal fortunes and its
attempts to get back on its feet. Rashmoni (Mousumi Chatterjee), who had become
a widow at an early age, is the tale’s driving force, even if she isn’t alive
for most parts of it. Her obsession with her gold ornaments, which, ironically,
she has always been forbidden from publicly wearing, incidentally ends up in
assisting not just the financial rehabilitation of the family’s youngest son
(Saswata Chatterjee) and his wife (Konkona Sen Sharma), but also, eventually,
their daughter (Srabanti Chatterjee) and her friends who become involved in the
liberation struggle. The director tried incorporating a plethora of themes into the tale – critique of primitive social customs, a satirical look at
feudal mindsets, chronicling of a family’s coping with changing times, etc.
However, the film’s best aspect was, undoubtedly, the hilarious foul-mouthed
ghost memorably played by Mousumi Chatterjee. The satirical aspects were amusing
too, but the political angle ought to have been downplayed, and the subplot on
the extra-marital romance stood out as a sore thumb. The narrative, which dragged
at times and lacked enough coherence, could have easily been compressed into a
more compact script.
Director: Aparna Sen
Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Romance/Family Drama/Political Drama
Language: Bengali
Country: India
Five years in the making and a pet project of Wong
Kar-Wai for long, the much anticipated The
Grandmaster is one gorgeously mounted martial arts film. Though it wouldn’t
rank among his best works, it does contain all the hallmarks of the Hong Kong
auteur – themes of unrequited love and loneliness, melancholic tone, elliptical
narrative and visually ravishing cinematography. It deals with the life of Ip
Man (Tony Leung), the legendary Kung-Fu grandmaster and teacher, with his most
famous student being Bruce Lee (that, though, isn’t the focus of the story). The
film chronicles his staid marriage to his doting wife, his being chosen as a
successor by a retiring grandmaster after a duel of wits, his platonic romance
with the former grandmaster’s daughter Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) who is a martial
arts exponent herself, and his eventually settling-down as a teacher, with the turbulent
socio-political events in China from 1930s to 1950s, particularly the
Japanese-occupation of the country, at its backdrop. That said, this is anything
but a conventional biopic; this deeply introspective and existential work was far
more interested in the philosophy of martial arts, meditations on love, loss
and coming to terms with one’s life, and underlying socio-political contemplations,
than the minute historical details. Wong-regular Leung was brilliant as always,
and Ziyi, too, was nearly as good. the lush
production designs, the superbly choreographed combats, and in particular, the
dazzlingly shot opening sequence following Ip’s quiet ruminations
on what kung-fu means to him, were memorably done. The self-indulgent aesthetics and the muted
melancholia, however, might make this a tad uneven viewing experience.
Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Existential Drama/Action/Martial Arts Film/Biopic
Language: Cantonese/Mandarin/Japanese
Country: China (Hong Kong)
Charlie Kaufman has written some of the most
original and mind-bending scripts – think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
Consequently, when he decided to direct as well, it was a given that the film
would be wacky, intelligent, audacious, and, with no one to hold him back,
self-indulgent, overly ambitious, and not flawless. Synecdoche, New York was all of these, and a bit more. Cadence Cotard
(Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a talented but eccentric theatre director, sees his
marriage and family falling apart when his painter wife (Catherine Keener) leaves
with their daughter for a trip to Berlin only never to return. He also sees his
life falling apart when he starts getting afflicted with a number of ailments, realizes
too late that he is in love a box office girl (Samantha Morton), and his second
marriage with an actress (Michelle Williams) too ends in shambles. With such
personal complexities at stake, he undertakes an insanely ambitious project,
his magnum opus, when he unexpectedly wins a Fellowship – recreation of his
life and those of the people around him through a mimetic, endless play, by
constructing a miniature city and casting actors to play him and others. Brilliantly
enacted by the ensemble cast, which also included Tom Noonan, Emily Watson,
Jennifer Jason Leigh, among others, led by a startling and nuanced turn by
Hoffman, the movie, with its meta-narrative and deliberately alienating style,
covered a huge array of themes – deep existential crisis, unrequited love,
loss, pain, creative urge, celebration of the mundane, and of course, the
concept of art imitating life and vice versa.
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: English
Country: US
Steven Spielberg, but for his share of mishits, has
always had an innate ability to concoct truly cinematic experiences.
Consequently some of his best moments have been had, when, instead of trying to
create something “serious”, he rather focused on making full use of the medium’s
audio-visual and technical possibilities. Duel,
a made-for-TV film and his feature length directorial debut, remains a classic
illustration of that. He didn’t attempt to make anything grand or highbrow; instead,
he kept it simple by stripping the premise down to its basics. Consequently
what we had here was, a taut, thrilling, visceral, unsettling, muscular and riveting ride – both literally and figuratively. A mid-level exec (Dennis
Weaver) is on a road trip down a California highway in his Plymouth for
business reasons. However, what should have been a long and uneventful ride,
turns into something utterly bizarre, when a faceless psychotic trucker atop a massive
Peterbilt gas-tanker, seemingly decides to have some fun with him. What begins
as amateurish pranks soon turn incredibly dangerous game of cat and mouse – so much
so that, the smug exec, who prefers driving at a comfortable 60 mph, must now
test the limits of his car and his driving skills by doing upwards of 90.
Nearly bereft of dialogues, except for a few rather inane monologues, this was,
so to speak, the first monster movie by a man who would go on to make a few
more. The brown, rusty, relentless, ferocious and primal beast almost had a character of
its own. On a lesser note, the film also provided a quiet meditation on America’s
vast, endless and eerily lonely highway network.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Genre: Thriller/Road Movie/Chase Movie
Language: English
Country: US
The collaboration between filmmaker Hiroshi
Teshigahara and novelist Kōbō Abe attained its greatest moment under the sun
with Woman in the Dunes. But the dark
and modernist exploration of identity, ethics and existential angst, The Face of Another, was nearly as
compelling a work. Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), a wealthy executive, has had his
face horribly damaged in a chemical accident, thus forcing him to keep it under
wraps at all times. This hasn’t just turned him into a social outsider, he even
finds his wife (Machiko Kyō) avoiding his proximity. The bleak existence of
this increasingly bitter and alienated man, however, gets a new shot of life
when his psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) offers a scientifically breakthrough but
ethically questionable solution – a life-like mask modeled on the face of a stranger.
This opportunity to rejoin the society with a face of no one offers him the
kind of freedom rarely available to anyone, and he decides to use it seduce his
wife. Unfortunately for him, this presents a double-edged sword for him; if he
manages to get his wife to bed, it would expose her willingness to commit
adultery. The film, therefore, raised a number of difficult but philosophical pertinent
questions. And, lest one forgets, it touched on the theme of Frankenstein’s
monster as well. The terrific B/W photography, with its dashes of expressionism
and heavy usage of New Wave techniques (freeze frames, jump cuts, sudden
close-ups and zoom-outs et al), and the jazzy but minimal score, brilliantly accentuated
the brooding mood, and the protagonist’s compulsive yet surrealistic journey
from intense alienation to succumbing to his baser temptations.
Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Existential Drama/Avant-Garde
Language: Japanese
Country: Japan
Watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest display
of audacity, The Master, with its
religious and familial overtones, might provide a sense of déjà vu to those
acquainted with his small but rich body of work. I would club it most closely
with Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, though strong
thematic similarities exist with his other 3 films as well – no wonder, he is
among the foremost auteurs of contemporary world cinema. The story deals with
the complex friendship between two exquisitely portrayed and seemingly
incompatible characters – Freddie Quell (Joaqin Phoenix), an alcoholic,
psychologically disturbed, highly volatile, and sex obsessed war veteran, and
Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a charlatan, a demagogue and the
charismatic leader of a religious cult. The two couldn’t be more different from
one another; yet, over the years, these two polarizing personalities develop a
strangely powerful bond with each other – initially because of an indigenously
made hooch, and gradually due a profound and decidedly homoerotic
master-follower relationship. While Dodd, using his controversial technique of
hypnosis, attempts to cure Quell of his subconscious trauma, the damaged and
unpredictable Quell takes on the role of Dodd’s henchman, beating into silence
anyone who questions the cult’s unscientific practices and mumbo-jumbo
philosophies. The conflict between rationality and blind religious obeisance
was an underlying motif though not the key concern. The two towering central
performances were nicely aided by a competent supporting turn by Amy Adams. The
vibrant photography and the thumping score, too, deserve mention.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Religious Drama
Language: English
Country: US
