Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, who made a
terrific debut with Ratcatcher and
immediately followed it up with Morvern Callar, hasn’t been very prolific thereafter – We Need to Talk about Kevin followed 9 years later, and then, after
another 6 years, she made You Were Never
Really Here. A moody, atmospheric and visceral crime drama – and adaptation
of Jonathan Ames’ neo-noir novel – laced with simmering anger and violence, it
was an engaging genre exercise, albeit pumped with psychological elements and preference
for tonal buildup that differentiated it from more mainstream takes on similar
storylines. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a troubled war veteran, haunted by his
past – memories of his abusive father and the violence during his stint with
the military, and plagued by suicidal tendencies. He is also a hired gun for
rescuing kidnapped girls, and is known for his penchant for brutality; yet, in
an interesting reversal of the laconic loner prototype, he resides with his
elderly mother (Judith Roberts). And, in what was reminiscent of the
unforgettable corridor fight sequence in Oldboy,
his weapon of choice is hammer. His life, however, collapses when he accepts a
high-profile job to rescue a Senator’s abducted daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov).
He, in rescuing the deeply scarred girl, faces the wrath of an organized trafficking
racket of underage girls involving a pedophile Governor with state machinery at
his disposal. Though the film’s length was perhaps too brief to do full justice
to Joe’s damaged soul and the ambience of this mood-piece, by having to
restrict just to glimpses and allusions, it still made for compelling viewing –
especially thanks to Phoenix’s enthralling and immersive turn, ably
complemented by the assured Samsonov.
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Crime Thriller
Language: English
Country: UK
Made by Agnès Varda, the Grande Dame of the
Nouvelle Vague, at the ripe age of 71, The
Gleaners and I, with its disarmingly self-reflexive digressions, playful
ruminations, self-deprecatory humour, left-wing irreverence and deceptively steadfast
defiance against incessant consumerism, served as a fascinating crystallization
of all her distinctive hallmarks as a filmmaker. It began with the conventional
explanation of “gleaming” using Millet’s famous oil-on-canvas painting as a
motif, viz. the practice of picking up agricultural harvest predominantly by
women (now defunct in France, but, ironically, still very much in vogue in a
country like, say, India); however, as one might expect, she used that as a springboard
and a point of departure as she expanded her canvas to explore and browse
through multifarious interpretations and implications of gleaming. Despite its crisp
length, therefore, it managed to cover an incredibly wide spectrum as Varda
crisscrossed France with a hand-held camera capturing engrossing vignettes – the
impoverished and socially marginalized in urban and rural settings rummaging
through discarded potatoes and various other food wastes (both agricultural and
from supermarkets); wealthy farm owners who allow gleaning and those who don’t;
folks who go about scavenging for abandoned household objects; artists and
amateurs for whom random scraps and junks comprise their art; a man who lives
on trashed food not because he can’t afford but because he considers such systematic
wastage unethical; a highly educated urban gleaner who spends nights teaching
immigrants; a gourmet chef who personally gleans the ingredients for his
restaurant. Filled with quirky wit, whimsical charm, and alternately affecting and
lacerating observations, this boldly political video essay also ultimately demonstrated
Varda too as a life-long gleaner – of images, stories and memories.
Director: Agnes Varda
Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Road Movie
Language: French
Country: France
It’s such a brutal irony that, while Article 15 – one of the Fundamental
Rights accorded by India’s Constitution – bars discriminations on the basis of
religion, race, caste, gender, etc., discriminations on those very grounds
remain as deep-set and all-pervading as ever. The nauseating stench of Brahminical
and patriarchal hegemony, and violence against the so-called lower castes –
which is especially pronounced in the towns and rural hinterlands in India’s “Cow
Belt” – formed the key tenet in this taut and discomfiting crime thriller. And,
despite being tad didactic and unsubtle at times, it packed some punch. Ayan
(Ayushmann Khurana), a young IPS Officer posted in the UP badlands, gets introduced
to the caste-ridden environment that he was thus far oblivious of, as he witnesses
the poisonous extent to which the upper-caste can go to put Dalits – who,
unfortunately, perform the society’s most ignominious tasks – in their place,
when two young girls are viciously butchered for daring to demand a marginal
increase in their wage; the widescreen shot, against a barren landscape, of the
two girls hanging from a tree, was haunting. As the cop goes about apprehending
the culprits of this heinous crime, he encounters corrupt cops (led by the
excellent Manoj Pahwa), power-hungry politicians, cynical bureaucrats, callous media,
casual indifferences and societal normalizations. He also meets a charismatic
Dalit rebel leader (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub) – it might’ve been darn compelling to
watch the story unfold from his eyes – and his feisty girlfriend (Sayani
Gupta). Despite a hopeful finale which seemed removed from ground realities,
the stark, visceral and solidly-made film raised inconvenient questions and
touched raw nerves, as evidenced by the hostility it has faced from certain
sections of the society.
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Genre: Crimer Thriller/Police Procedural
Language: Hindi
Country: India
David Lynch made a groundbreaking debut in the
context of indie and defiantly non-mainstream cinema – and, in turn,
established himself as someone who’s committed to perennially operate outside
conventional yardsticks – with the low-budget, surrealistic and nightmarish Eraserhead. Made over a period of 7
years, and shot in grainy and expressionistic B/W, the discomfiting, strangely
hypnotic, darkly funny and heavily experimental body horror film presented a bleak
and grimy vision of urban industrial grunge and dystopia. Henry Spencer (Jack
Nance), a blank-faced and mild-mannered man with an outrageous hairdo, lives
with his girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) in a cramped, claustrophobic
apartment located in the middle of an industrial wasteland. Upon returning home
one day he’s informed by his sultry next door neighbor (Judith Anna Roberts)
that Mary has gone to her parents’ and he’s invited there for dinner. There, in
what was for me the film’s most deliriously memorable sequence, he meets Mary’s
hilariously oddball parents over a bizarre dinner, and is informed in a rather
awkward fashion that Mary has given birth to their child; as is eventually
revealed, the child is an grotesque looking creature with a reptilian head and bandages
serving as its skin. Despite its “unnatural” appearance – what is “natural” and
conventional in a world obsessed with normalcy and conformism, possibly remains
the film’s most incisive indication – Henry develops a surprising soft corner
for the mutated baby; however, when Mary is driven out, in a moment of crazy
fit, by the baby’s incessant wailing, and a possible tryst with his luscious neighbor
remains unfulfilled, his fragile outer and chaotic inner worlds collapse into a
miry, outlandish cesspool that made the film’s weirdness quotient crash through
the ceiling.
Director: David Lynch
Genre: Body Horror/Surrealist Film/Experimental Film
Language: English
Country: US
A Woman is a Woman,
Godard’s fabulous third feature following his seminal debut film Breathless and the politically ebullient
The Little Soldier, had the Nouvelle
Vague iconoclast at his most irreverent, cheeky, alive and buoyant – achieving,
in the process, a delicate and delectable balance between modernism and
accessibility. The delightful, infectious, experimental and freewheeling
“neo-realist musical” – a deliberately self-contradictory description by the
ever-mischievous provocateur – provided for an ingenuous deconstruction of the
American musical genre; the highly improvisational film, which Godard made over
just 5 weeks, including penning down the dialogues in between shots and filming
in natural sound, therefore forms, for me, an interesting double-bill with Lars
von Trier’s bleak and brilliant revisionist musical Dancer in the Dark. The teasing plot comprised
of a ménage à trois between Angéla (Anna Karina), an exotic dancer in a strip
joint, her live-in partner and lover Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy, bearing an eerie resemblance to Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his best
friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Angéla suddenly realizes that she wants a
baby; but, when Émile continues to be hesitant and non-committal despite her
ardent persistence, she starts providing coy invitations to Alfred who holds a candle for
her. The film’s tonal exuberance and
formal joie de vivre were complemented by its dazzling colour palettes, melodic
choreography, and the series of hilarious gags, puns, wordplays and deadpan
meta-humour that it was filled to brim with. The chemistry between the three leads was
terrific, but the focal point, without doubt, was Karina’s sassy and enchanting turn. It also had brief but delectable appearances by the irresistible Jeanne Moreau
and the affable Marie Dubois, while referencing to Truffaut’s Jules & Jim and Shoot the Piano Player.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Musical
Language: French
Country: France
Maverick filmmaker David Lynch conjured a quintessential
Lynchian universe – a deliriously and hypnotically mind-bending mix of
alternate versions of reality, hellish dreams and repressed desires – with the
masterful Mulholland Drive. Lost Highway presaged that with such an
eerie sense of déjà vu through stylistic and thematic resemblances, even if it
didn’t have the same richness, that the two ought to be clubbed as companion
pieces. And hence, with its wildly unpredictable neo-noir plot which boldly traversed
a surrealistic Möbius strip – accompanied with dramatic shifts in the character
and narrative dynamics – it certainly had Lynch’s signature all over it. The
film sedately started off with a wealthy LA couple – saxophonist Fred Madison
(Bill Pullman) and his coy wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) – in a polite but
tenuous marriage; it’s obvious from the outset that Fred finds himself
inadequate to his buxom wife, and, perhaps for that reason, also suspects her
having extramarital affairs. The situation becomes trickier when it appears
that someone is possibly spying on them, and things soon take a bloody turn
with Renee’s murder and capital punishment for Fred. The narrative, then, took
a startling turn as we see Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a young auto-mechanic
who still lives with his parents, falling crazily head over heels and being drawn
into a torrid affair with a mysterious older lady – an irresistible platinum
blond femme fatale (Arquette), and the mistress of a dangerous gangster (Robert
Loggia) – who’s possibly using her brazen sexual power to make the naïve guy do
her odious bidding. And, when the two divergent strands collide, one realizes
that the latter might just have been a representation of the cuckolded Fred’s
repressed fantasies and desires.
Director: David Lynch
Genre:Neo-Noir/Crime Thriller/Surrealist Thriller
Language: English
Country: US
