RW Fassbinder left behind a staggeringly
prolific body of work, despite having died at the young age of 37. The fact that
he took just 2 weeks to make this film perhaps explains his speed. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, one of RWF’s
most renowned works, was a classic example of a social message film with a
tightly bound core focus and the point of view stressed upon through the use of
a distinctly melodramatic style. The film’s two protagonists are, Emmi
(Brigitte Mira), an ageing, widowed and lonely German lady, and Ali (El Hedi
Ben Salem), a young Moroccan immigrant. The first scene itself introduced the
two characters to us and to each other, when, in order to escape from the rain,
Emmi enters a bar and ends up being accompanied by the terse but courteous Ali
to her home. Before long the two decide to get married, and therein starts
their battle with the intensely prejudiced society in which they reside and in
turn with each other too – the former because he isn’t one of them, and the
latter because of their age and social difference. Brevity and succinctness
were among the key traits of this film as RWF didn’t waste time in covering details
of their love story. However, that was also one of the alienating factors as,
despite being essentially likeable characters and their craving for
companionship, one is still left clueless as to what triggered this
cross-ethnic May-December romance. In the end, his motive was clear – portrayal
of the innate racism, xenophobia, social conservatism, hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness
prevalent in his country, and in all honesty, nearly everywhere, and it managed
to be touching and thought-provoking, if tad loud at times.
Director: Rainer-Werner Fassbinder
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Romantic Drama
Language: German/Arabic
Country: Germany (erstwhile West Germany)
The early Szabo Lovefilm, made four years after his masterful Father, was a film delicately filled with youthful love and
exuberance on one side, and melancholia and nostalgia on the other. It was a story
about separation from one’s homeland and close-ones due to political
upheavals and tumult – in this case the iron-fisted Soviet invasion to crush
the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. But more than anything, this was a poignant and
freewheeling portrayal of memory and its juxtaposition with reality – two things
that can hardly ever be reconciled. Jansci (Andras Balint) is a young man
seemingly in a happy relationship, but his mind keeps jumping back to his days
as a boy and his friendship with a neighborhood girl which, unbeknownst to
both, slowly blossomed into love. The events of 1956, however, compelled her to
leave the country, and so now, 10 years later, he boards a train for Paris in
order to meet his childhood sweetheart Kata (Judit Halasz). Though they have a
blissful few days together, they eventually realize that they aren’t the
carefree kids anymore, and that both have changed in more ways than once over
the years. Szabo used a breezily kaleidoscopic structure, particularly during
Jansci’s train journey where brilliantly designed montages were used to weave
together his memories, including some that aren’t wholly reliable, of his days
as a kid in Budapest. Though, in essence, a deftly construed love story, the
film had its fair share of socio-political observations, which added layers to
it. Accordingly to Szabo himself, he was heavily influenced by Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and Je T’Aime Je T’Aime, and the effects
were discernible.
Director: Istvan Szabo
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama
Language: Hungarian
Country: Hungary
Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the Canadian filmmaker
who earned a fair amount of attention with his previous feature Incendies, Prisoners was an intense, moody and slow-burning psychological
crime thriller where the ethics of taking the law into one’s hands was weighed
against a crime as decidedly serious as the abduction of a child. The film was,
therefore, from a stylistic standpoint, in the mould of the likes of Mystic River and Zodiac even if not at par with them. The film kick-starts into
action when the kid daughter of Keller (Hugh Jackman), a religious and
temperamental man operating a carpentry store in a small town, and her friend
get mysteriously abducted. Things get complicated when Alex (Paul Dano), a young
man with the IQ of a 10 year old, becomes the prime suspect even though no
tangible evidence is found against him. Keller, however, becomes convinced of
his guilt and decides to take him into his custody and torture him into
revealing the location of his daughter. Meanwhile Detective Loki (Jake
Gyllenhaal), who has a perfect track record, needs to bank on all his
experience and resources in order to crack this particularly taxing case. Villeneuve
used the tale to construct a morality play on the clouded definitions of right
and wrong vis-à-vis the law and legal ambit, and was reasonably successful until he let the
plot get the better of him in his attempt at concocting the impossible twist.
Jackman gave a career-defining turn as the tortured father, while Gyllenhaal was
decent. The bleak, atmospheric photography was its most impressive feature.
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller
Language: English
Country: US
Memories of Under development, Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s art-house
classic, was a fascinating amalgamation of the political and the personal. The most acclaimed Cuban film, along with Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, after
Fidel Castro's popular revolution had swept aside the Batista regime, it provided a
formally, aesthetically and psychologically arresting peek into a left-minded
bourgeois writer’s ennui, anger and existential crisis at the backdrop of the
flux between the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in
1962. Sergio (Sergio Correri) is a wealthy intellectual who has decided to stay
back in Havana while his wife, friend and family, along with hordes of others,
flee to the US. He despises imperialism and the bourgeois-class, even though
his lifestyle is anything but that of the proletariat – and this ironic
dichotomy was used as the springboard for the portrayal of his aimless
existence as an outsider, his severe alienation, his casual flings devoid of emotional
attachments, and his caustic sociopolitical ramblings. He faces a moment of crisis
when a young and attractive but unpredictable girl (Daisy Granados) he gets
involved with accuses him of rape, but even there he is hardly ruffled. The stylized
and moody B/W photography was interspersed with cinéma vérité style documentary footages, which provided a
startlingly here-and-now feel that marvelously juxtaposed the protagonist’s internal
chaos and vacuum with the external uncertainty and developments around him.
Correri, who seemed to be sleep-walking through his role, effectively captured
the multi-layered Sergio.
Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama/Existential Drama
Language: Spanish
Country: Cuba
Substance abuse, in its various
tragic forms, have been covered over the years in movies, but rarely did
alcoholism receive the kind of attention as it did in Wilder’s harrowing and
unflinching drama The Lost Weekend. Based
on a novel that he chanced upon during a train journey, it focused on one
rather dark and depressing weekend in the life of an alcoholic writer. A terrific
medium-take takes us right into the story as the camera slowly panned from the Manhattan
skyline to a non-descript building with a bottle hanging outside the window.
The story’s self-destructive protagonist is Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a failed
New York writer, whose insatiable craving for liquor has cost him his penchant
for writing, money, and self-respect. His brother Wick (Phillip Terry), after
somehow having put his urges under control through strict surveillance, is
planning to take him on a vacation. But when Don somehow manages to get Wick
and his doting girlfriend (Jane Wyman) leave him alone, and fortuitously
stumbles upon some cash, he hops to the nearest bar and starts drinking, and
thus begins a grim and distressing look into the life and mind of a man taking
the short-cut to hell. The film comprised of a host of deftly executed sequences –
the scene where he keeps having one drink after another while revealing his
literary bent to the uninterested bartender was deeply poignant, while the
later scenes where he gets forcefully admitted in a sanitarium and escapes to
his home only to have bizarre alcohol-induced hallucinations, were intensely
disconcerting. Milland gave the performance of his lifetime as the doomed hero and the expressionistic
visuals brilliantly accentuated the tale’s bleak social message.
Director: Billy Wilder
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Social Drama
Language: English
Country: US
