Time [2020]

 When it comes to depicting the prison-industrial complex, the premise is usually always built around person(s) incarcerated under false pretexts. However, the portrayal becomes incredibly more complex when the carceral system is critiqued without associating victimhood with innocence – along the lines of Capote’s denunciation of the grotesquerie of capital punishment in his unforgettable masterpiece In Cold Blood and by Herzog in Into the Abyss – and that’s essentially what Garrett Bradley accomplished in her achingly beautiful, deeply poignant, politically vocal and passionately dissident essay film Time. It confronted this topic from the outside – through people affected by disproportionate, racially loaded punishments – despite situating the locus squarely within the Louisiana penitentiary (which appeared like a military base from its aerial shots). In 1997, Sibil and Robert Richardson – a young African-American couple – recklessly decided to rob a bank out of financial desperation. They were of course caught and found guilty; she got 12 but got paroled in 3 ½ years; he, unfortunately, was served with a horrendous sentence of 6 decades without parole. Over the next 2 decades Sibil – a single mother of 6 exceptionally groomed boys – became a successful entrepreneur, a defiant activist against the harshly punitive and brazenly prejudiced nature of the criminal justice system – reminiscent of Joan Baez’s powerful protest song Prison Trilogy – and a tireless advocate to get her husband’s mammoth sentence reduced. The heartwarming mosaic of grainy, B/W home video sequences that it’s interspersed with, accompanied by gorgeously bluesy score, marvelously established the melancholic passage of time and the tale’s heartwarming intimacy. As an interesting aside, there’re even a few playful self-referential elements and performative moments that made this so much more than just a human story.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Garrett Bradley

Genre: Documentary/Biopic

Language: English

Country: US

Nasir [2020]

 Tamil filmmaker Arun Karthick’s Nasir – incidentally the 2^nd sophomore feature by a young Indian filmmaker that I’ve now watched in succession, after Chaitanya Tamhane’s immersive The Disciple – was laced with such deftly muted fatalist undercurrents and simmering inevitability that one might as well rename the film ‘Death of a Salesman (whose fate is sealed)’ (to borrow the title of Arthur Miller’s famous play). Through portrayal of a seemingly random day in the life of its eponymous protagonist Nasir (Koumarane Valavane) – one that’s filled with mundane activities, chores at the clothing shop he works at, a few “personal” moments amidst the routine of his lower-middle class existence in the city of Coimbatore, be it with his wife who’s leaving for few days, or his mentally challenged son, or discussing job opportunities at Dubai with an old acquaintance, or reciting poetry that he’s himself composed – that begins innocuously but ends on the most horrible note imaginable. Yet, as the background noise, stray conversations, political slogans and news announcements reveal, he’s been living within a combustible keg all along – viz. the poisonous but tragically normalized climate of unabashed (and entrenched) hatred, bigotry, socio-religious prejudice, Islamophobia and "otherization" perpetuated by aggressive populist majoritarian nationalism – which was always boiling up to this… just that Nasir, not because of any specific actions directly attributable to him, but by simply being a member of the “other”, gets shockingly subsumed and massacred by it. Thus, through this minimalist slice-of-life – adapted from Dilip Kumar’s short story A Clerk’s Story – Karthick took the vital stance of positioning Nasir’s victimization as an interconnected dot within a larger narrative which, despite its devastating culmination, was sadly neither isolated nor utterly unanticipated.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Arun Karthick

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Slice-of-Life

Language: Tamil

Country: India

The Disciple [2020]

 Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple – the first Indian film since Mira Nair’s brilliant Monsoon Wedding to feature in the main competition at Venice – was an immersive delve into the austere, rigorous and cloistered world of Hindustani classical music… the years of training, discipline and self-sacrifice that it necessitates aside, a world defined by the tradition of passing down of skills from guru to protégé, and avowed reverence in return. The film’s titular disciple is Sharad (Aditya Modak), who’s thoroughly committed to attaining mastery in this field, even if that means life-long self-denial. Unfortunately, despite his monomaniac pursuit and extreme desire to achieve transcendental abilities, he may never be able to make the leap to greatness; and hence, his growing internal conflicts with seeping disillusionment, existential despair and puritanism become as onerous as the pursuit itself. In this journey over a number of years, from youth to approaching middle-age, three people represent his moral compass – Guruji (Arun Dravid), a barely recognized stalwart and his equanimous teacher, who represents the benchmark that he strives for; his father who too lacked the gift despite his enormous passion in this field; and Maai, an esoteric, forgotten maestro whose views about denouncing recognition and embracing extreme self-flagellation – captured through eerily captivating voice-overs – accompany terrific slo-mo long-take shots of Sharad riding on his bike through the Bombay streets. Modak and Dravid, interestingly, are both classically trained vocalists, and both brought startling authenticity to their roles; Modak was especially brilliant in capturing the seemingly unflappable protagonist’s obsessive quest that completely consumes his identity and being along the way. The film’s brooding tranquility and layered use of music – a prerequisite given the subject matter – were absorbing too.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chaitanya Tamhane

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Marathi

Country: India

Beginning [2020]

 Déa Kulumbegashvili’s marvelous debut feature Beginning – with its rigorous minimalism, austere aesthetics, languorous pacing, brooding undercurrents, visceral unease, moral quandary, narrative ambiguities, and bleak, troubling exploration of faltering faith – had shades of masters ranging from Bergman and Tarkovsky to Tarr and Haneke; yet, for all its influences, the striking Georgian filmmaker stamped her voice by suffusing the proceedings with ferocious feminist underpinnings. The movie began on electrifying note as a Jehovah’s Witness congregation, at a picturesque pasture outside Tbilisi, faces petrol bomb attacks by religious extremists, while they’re in the middle of a didactic sermon on the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac by its stern leader (Rati Oneli, who also co-wrote the script along with Déa). The protracted burning sequence set the tone, mood and context brilliantly, including the clear subtext that this tightly-knit minority community faces regular persecutions by the Orthodox Christian majority and prejudiced officials. The POV thereafter resolutely shifted to the pastor’s wife Jana (Ia Sukhitashvili), and we see her tremendous emotional, psychological and spiritual struggles, considering her daily battles between religious obedience and increasing disillusionment; and this was juxtaposed not just with the societal bigotry and pedantry surrounding her, but also – perhaps most importantly – the patriarchy and misogyny that she experiences as a woman, wife, mother and daughter. Specific to the latter, her life is bound to her boorish husband, her young son preparing for baptism, a man who starts sexually assaulting her, and her dead father whose uncouth behavior continues to plague both her and her aged mother. The film’s disconcerting themes were complemented by stark visuals and long takes, punctuated by nerve-racking violence, and held together by Sukhitashvili’s terrific central turn.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Religious Drama

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia

Education (Small Axe #5) [2020]

 McQueen brought his ambitious, exhilarating, topical and undeniably personal ‘Small Axe’ anthology series to an unassuming and gently evocative finale – on a subject as important and troubling as any – with Education. Compact in length like the previous three entries (only Mangrove, the fiery first episode, had a more conventional feature-length runtime), this was in a way similar to Lovers Rock. They were the only two films in the series where the premises were based on actual incidents but the stories were otherwise fictionalized, focusing – like the anthology itself – on different manifestations of systemic racial prejudice, bigotry and xenophobia faced by West Indian immigrants in 70s and 80s London; that apart, though, they couldn’t be further apart given the latter’s gloriously free-form style. 12-year old Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy) faces regular admonishments at school for being slow in his reading and for his love for fun. However, when his principal informs his mother Agnes (Sharlene Whyte) that he’ll be transferred to a different school which’ll cater to his “special needs” and she begrudgingly agrees, he’s unhappy on being separated from his friends. This relocation, though, was as part of an unofficial policy of segregation of black children, by some London councils, by classifying them as “educationally subnormal”, which is eventually revealed thanks to two passionate black sociopolitical activists (Naomi Ackie and Josette Simon). The title, therefore, referred to “education” on two fronts – that of the kid (ironically speaking), and, in a way, of the distraught mother too. Though a largely straight-forward work, it nevertheless had one moment of wry, deadpan improvisation, viz. an extended rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” by a haggard teacher that was alternately hilarious and annoying.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Steve McQueen

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/Social Drama

Language: English

Country: UK