A Most Violent Year is an edgy, brooding and compelling character
drama that served as an indictment on the nexus between politics, big business
and organized crime, culminating into fever pitch in the winter of 1981; as
made amply clear by the title, crime in New York City reached its zenith in the
said year. That served as a throbbing backdrop for intensely turbulent few weeks
in the personal, familial and professional life of a rising entrepreneur who,
anachronistically, has decided to make ethics a key driver for his business –
one, ironically, as murky as purchase and distribution of petroleum products.
The film’s superbly structured storyline dealt with Abel Morris (Oscar Isaac),
the brilliant owner of Standard Oil, in simultaneous grasp of a three-pronged
quagmire – chronic hijacking of his oil-filled trucks by a gang of violent
assailants; legal proceedings invoked by ADA (David Oyelowo) against his
company on charges of financial improprieties, but essentially because it was
founded by his wife Anna’s (Jessica Chastain) mobster father; his ambitious
purchase plan, through an all-cash deal, of a waterfront fuel terminal which he
must close within 30 days to prevent forfeiture, even as his banking partner
decides to withdraw financial support. The fact that his icy platinum blonde wife
is at direct contravention with Abel’s unwavering moral standpoint – a Michael
Corleone antithesis, and the ensuing marital complexities, added a charged
undercurrent in this darkly engrossing look at capitalism at its rampaging
worst. Terrific storytelling, rich moodiness and atmospherics evoked through
excellent cinematography, sustained tension courtesy great pacing, and underplayed
performances, made this a gripping and timely tale of an honorable man in the
midst of relentless, all-pervading grunge, grime, corruption and savagery.
Director: J.C. Chandor
Genre: Drama/Crime Drama/Urban Drama/Marriage Drama
Language: English
Country: US
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir’s seminal adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s
acclaimed novel that helped usher in the Australian New Wave, was a lush,
haunting, dream-like, quietly disquieting and exquisitely atmospheric work
replete with socio-cultural observations on colonialism, rigid class divide, sexual
awakening, repression and gender dogmas. Making deft and subtle use of
surrealism, perspectives and mise-en-scène, Weir chronicled a possibly fictitious
story in the form of a fact about the unexplained disappearance of three young
girls and its aftermath, and in the process provided a fine illustration of the
interpretative nature of truth akin to proponents of New Journalism. While the
students of a private boarding school at the turn of the 20th
century are on an educative picnic at the eponymous geological formation in
Victoria, three adolescent girls including the ethereal blonde
Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) and the striking brunette Irma (Karen Robson) –
and then their middle-aged mathematics teacher, go missing while exploring the
mountains. The incident doesn’t just create panic, it ends up having devastating
repercussions on a diverse set of individuals – the upright, alcoholic
headmistress (Rachel Roberts), the orphaned Sara (Margaret Nelson) in love with
Miranda, an introverted aristocrat (Dominic Guard) who becomes obsessed with
Miranda, and an alluring, empathetic teacher (Helen Morse), among others; the situation is further exacerbated when
Irma is mysteriously deciphered few days later, “intact” yet shorn of her
corset and visibly older than before. The resplendently shot mood piece, filled
with mesmeric visuals and slo-mos, along with the melancholic organ-based score
and leisurely pacing, created a rich, eerie atmosphere where dreams and reality
mixed into a complex and confounding whole.
Director: Peter Weir
Genre: Drama/Period Drama/Mystery
Language: English
Country: Australia
Dibakar Banerjee’s reimagining and reinterpretation of the
iconic literary character in the cheekily titled Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, is a heady cocktail of the murky,
cerebral world of Saradindu Bandopadhyay and the noirish pulpiness
of hardboiled literature. The director went for ambitious stylistic
deconstruction - the kind that would have the purists squirming - without supplanting the era. Set in 1940s war-torn Calcutta,
with the city’s nationalistic fervour against British occupation seamlessly
complementing its crime-ridden underbelly, and its multi-ethnic diaspora accentuating
its flavour, and loosely adapted from the first Byomkesh novel Satyanweshi (aka “The Truth Seeker”), the
film focused on the first case of the Bengali super sleuth. Byomkesh (Sushant
Singh Rajput), an incredibly sharp and intelligent but asocial and arrogant
university graduate, is approached by his fellow student Ajit (Anand Tiwari),
who would eventually become his chronicler and life-long friend, in order to
find the whereabouts of his missing father. Unaware of the violent world he’s
stepping into, the strapping young man makes the acquaintance of, among others,
Anguri Devi (Swastika Mukherjee), a sultry seductress with dubious motives, Dr.
Anukil Guha (Neeraj Kabi), a brilliant physician who runs a small hostel, Kanai
Dao (Meiyang Chang), a hostel resident with Chinese roots, and Satyawati (Divya
Menon), the niece of a local politician, sister of a nationalist revolutionary
and Byomkesh’s future wife, and is plunged into a world of opium traders,
war-plotting, brazen lust, double crossers and vicious murderers. The dazzling
cinematography made marvelous usage of colors and shadows to highlight the moody
atmosphere and grotesque side of human nature, the startling art direction meticulously
captured the period, and the new-age, esoteric score cemented Banerjee’s
experimental intent.
Director: Dibakar Banerjee
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery/Post-Noir
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Witness, directed by Peter Weir, was an underplayed and
modestly made film that succeeded in being a charged romantic drama, a quiet
look at a child’s innocence, an amusing religious and cultural satire, and a
subdued police thriller. Despite the formulaic and straightforward nature of
the basic plot, its lyrical tone and elegant pacing added a reasonably affecting
flavour to the proceedings. A young Amish boy Samuel (Lukas Haas), while on a
short trip to a big city for the first time in his life, becomes an accidental witness
of the murder of a cop, and Detective John Book (Harrison Ford) takes charge of
solving the crime. Things, however, take a murky turn when it turns out that a
powerful, notorious police officer (Danny Glover) is responsible for the act,
and that corruption runs right to the top. Hence, in order to protect the kid
Book is forced to go on the lam and take shelter at the residence of Samuel and
his demure but ravishingly alluring widowed mother Rachel (Kelly McGills), with
whom he becomes intimate to, much to the disapproval of the conservative Amish
community. The policer and thrill quotient were unremarkable, and predictable
too; but the cheeky peek at the cultural gap between an orthodox, peace-loving
religious group and the condescending, insensitive world around them, along
with the tentative yet scorching romantic angle managed in making this worth a
watch. Ford, fresh from his act in the bravura sci-fi Blade Runner, established his abilities outside one-dimensional
action flicks with this, while McGills was noteworthy as a lonely lady
vacillating between conformance and desire.
Director: Peter Weir
Genre: Thriller/Police Thriller/Romantic Drama
Language: English
Country: US
Maurice
Pialat’s startling directorial debut, Naked
Childhood, provided a clinical and subliminally devastating examination of
the tragic social and psychological detachment of an orphaned kid exacerbated
by an overburdened foster parenting process. As a stark yet affecting portrayal
of troubled childhood and complicated relationship of a young boy with those
around him, it is bound to evoke memories of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and throw an effective light on the filmmaker’s
frugal but mercurial career. The movie begins with François (Michel Tarrazon),
under care of working-class parents (Linda Gutemberg and Raoul Billery),
showing discomfiting glimpses of anti-social behavior like stealing money, taking
peek at his sister suggesting his sexual awakening and killing their pet cat.
These acts, coupled with his foster parents’ financial plight, force a change
in his address. Despite the rather warm treatment he gets from his elderly new caretakers
(Marie-Louisse Thierry and René Thierry), his behavior starts growing even more
erratic, with recurrent flashes of violence, thus displaying his increasing
disconnect and abandonment with accepted social norms, as a combination of his
innate inability to form emotional bonds, deep identity crisis and the nature
of his nurture on account of him being an “other” without a sense of
belongingness. The film’s austere tone, further assisted by the excellent,
unobtrusive photography that gave a “here and now” feel to the proceedings, and
key asides to the central narrative, imbued a strong dose of poetic realism and
a bleak sense of desolation. The mostly non-professional cast, led by the
marvelous Tarrzon, was pitch-perfect in capturing the film’s blue-collar
milieu, socio-political context and thematic essence.
Director: Maurice Pialat
Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Childhood Drama
Language: French
Country: France
