Luchino Visconti’s seminal debut feature Ossessione wasn’t the first adaptation
of James M. Cain’s brilliant hardboiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice – that would be the 1939 French film
Le Dernier Tournant; the most popular
– the 1946 John Garfield noir; the sleaziest – the 1981 Jack Nicholson starrer;
or the latest – the 2008 German film Jerichow;
but it was the best of the lot. Credited by film historians as one of the
earliest illustrations of neo-realist cinema, it provided a remarkable
amalgamation of noir sensibilities, viz. bleak pessimism, fatalism, wrong
choices and bad luck, with the grime, poverty, hopelessness and desperation prevalent
in war-time Italy. The classic storyline was about a penniless drifter (Massimo
Girotti) getting into a torrid affair with the sultry but frustrated wife (Clara
Calamai) of the older and gregarious owner (Juan de Landa) of a thriving café.
Sensing the chance to get rid of her husband without losing the riches in the
process, she seduces the stupid young man into committing murdering him.
However, as is generally the wont, their crime catches up with them – first the
form of guilt and suspicion, and then, when they finally manage to reconcile, their
comeuppance in the most wryly ironic manner possible. Calamai was excellent as
the sexually unsatisfied wife who wants to start afresh but not from scratch, the
setting and cinematography provided for a harsh and dreary here-and-now feel, and the
homoerotic elements, not there in the book, was noteworthy as well. The film angered
both the then fascist government and the church, but fortunately it managed to survive
their valiant attempts to suppress and even destroy it.
Director: Luchino Visconti
Genre: Drama/Crime Drama
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
The memories and scars of Partition and the
ensuing exodus, recurred in Ritwik Ghatak’s works. Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, his penultimate film, was therefore,
possibly, a homecoming of sorts for him. Qualified by many as an early instance
of hyperlink cinema, predating Altman’s Nashville– the latter was, of course, a far purer kind – this adaptation of an
autobiographical Bengali novel provided an epic lamentation on the ebb, flow and
irreversible passage of time. The story focused on successive generations of
poor fishermen folks, families and communities, with their simple joys and
debilitating tragedies, living on the banks of the eponymous river in Bangladesh.
The once majestic river, on which the lives and livelihoods of so many people
depend, changes course and slowly starts dying, and that metaphorically provided
for the story’s thematic essence. It begins with a naïve young girl (Kabari
Choudhury) getting married to a fisherman (Probir Mitra); when she’s kidnapped,
he goes mad in shock; she’s rescued and many years later, with a young son in
tow, arrives at the same village where he resides; there, amidst hostility,
finds a friend in the form of a lady (Rosy Samad) who lost her husband to the
river; when she finally unites with her oblivious husband, it ends in tragedy
for both; her friend takes care of her orphaned son, but familial opposition
forces them to part; when the lewd advances of a Romeo from a neighboring
village are spurned by her, it ends in disaster for her and her family. Violence,
hypocrisy, unspoken love, financial difficulties, change and demise of customs and
ways of life, across generations, were lyrically captured in this poignant and
beautifully shot human drama. The emotional excesses and self-indulgence could, however, have been reined in.
Director: Ritwik Ghatak
Genre: Drama/Rural Drama/Ensemble Film
Language: Bengali
Country: India
Juraj Herz resided at the edge of the Czech New
Wave, and if The Cremator, the
tonally and thematically darkest film belonging to that movement I’ve watched
so far, is anything to go by, it is easy to guess why. This was a lacerating
black comedy and a horrifying political allegory – all using the morbid motif
of a crematorium, with a narrative that was highly surreal, and an
expressionistic cinematographic style that was intensely disorienting both
visually and psychologically, which all further amplified its grotesqueness. Karl
(Rudolf Hrusinsky), the chubby-faced and deceptively amiable protagonist, works
at a state-owned crematorium and is a happy family man. However, as Herz
started scratching deeper into his life, discomfiting imbalances and ominous
patterns started emerging – he is an orderliness freak, he has a right-wing
orientation making him easily gullible to Nazi indoctrination, he has strong
opinions on propriety and morality, albeit glibly oblivious to his own
hypocrisy in the form of taking surreptitious trips to a brothel and then
getting himself regularly examined by a doctor on false pretexts, he is overly
religious, he lays huge importance on the importance of masculinity, so on and
so forth. In short, he’s sociopathic and dangerous, with a darn creepy smile as
added bonus. His increasing madness, thus, engulfs his mind and life, and
proves devastating for everyone around him. Hrusinsky provided a powerful peek
into, to borrow the title of Conrad’s novella, the heart of darkness, and the
impact was accentuated by the use of extreme close-ups, and the way, during the
space of a shot, seamless transformations of scenes took place which provided
for subtle but fascinating juxtaposition of parallel perspectives and
scenarios.
Director: Juraj Herz
Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Psychological Horror/Avant-Garde
Language: Czech
Country: Czech Republic (erstwhile Czechoslovakia)
Heist films, or even their armored car subsets, have
been dime a dozen right from the days of film noirs; the template of a gang of
criminals, planning a spectacular robbery as a means of escaping from their
grimy existences, with predictably tragic consequences, is, therefore, anything
but original. Yet, the associated existentialism, fatalism, inevitable double
crosses, sheer bad luck, and loner tough guys fatally hoping for a final big
hit, if done well, never fails to engage, and this taut, pessimistic and
hard-boiled Nikkatsu Noir was clearly one. Directed by Takumi Furukawa, the
films begins on a matter-of-fact note with chipmunk-faced Togawa (Jô Shishido), fresh out of prison, being asked to head the planned
robbery of an armored car that is scheduled to carry 120 million yen from the
race tracks. Though aware of the tremendous risks and pitfalls associated with
such a venture, he takes up the job in order to get money for his sister’s
surgery (played by Chieko Matsubara who, interestingly, was cast
opposite Shishido in the excellent Nikkatsu Noir, A Colt is My Passport). His rickety team comprises of an old friend
(Yuji Odaka) – the only person he trusts, a former boxer, and a dough-crazy
drug addict with an over-inquisitive girlfriend; add to that a powerful yakuza boss planning to double-cross the
team as soon as the deed is done, and his right-hand man who has plans of his
own, and what you have is a ready-made plan for disaster for all involved.
Filled with twists galore and dialogues drenched in sarcasm, and comprising of sparkling B/W photography, a wonderfully tense score and a bleakly ironic finale
featuring another former compatriot who has turned straight (Tamio Kawaji),
this is one bumpy but fun-filled ride.
Director: Takumi Furukawa
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Post-Noir/Heist Film
Language: Japanese
Country: Japan
In Apa,
only his second feature, Szabo painted a haunting, heartbreaking and deeply personal
portrayal of loss and coming-of-age, and an ingeniously mounted depiction of
father-son relationship, against the turbulent backdrop of post-WWII Hungary. The
breezy and freewheeling narrative, along with the delectable sense of humour,
made this a powerful work. Tako (Dani Erdelyi) is a young kid whose father died
during the war, and lives with his mother in a cramped apartment. He doesn’t
have many memories of his dad, but his fecund imagination creates a heroic
image of him as a brave partisan fighter against the Nazis and a savior of the
poor and sick. Thus, while he concocts and chronicles this fantasy life of his
father’s valour, dare-devilry and humanitarian spirit to his friends and
teachers, it is also visually created, as if in Tako’s mind, for the viewers.
Eventually the kid grows up into a young man (Andras Balint), and his relationship
with a fragile Jewish refugee girl (Kati Solyom), who suffered devastation
during the Holocaust, makes him place his own loss in perspective. And with
that newfound awareness he goes about, for the first time in his life, trying
to find out who his father really was, and what he realizes is incredibly
profound in its simplicity and banality – that his dad was neither a hero nor a
villain, just a regular guy. The juxtaposition of the larger-than-life
fantasies with the humbling personal reconciliation, and the ensuing maturity as
a result, along with alternate imbuing of humour and pathos, and not to forget,
some sharp political observations, made this a remarkable and eloquent film.
The energetic camera-work and the authentic performances, too, deserve
appreciation.
Director: Istvan Szabo
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama
Language: Hungarian
Country: Hungary
