Danish filmmaker
Nicholas Winding Refn’s pulpy, nihilistic and mock-serious Drive – dripping with urban cool, self-conscious style, tone and
moody atmosphere – both embraced and eschewed tropes and formulae of 70s
exential thrillers. The way it harked back to that iconoclastic period,
especially with its protagonist – a brooding, opaque, self-destructive,
taciturn loner with a half-chance for redemption and an inherent penchant for
violence – some have enthusiastically compared it to The Taxi Driver, though it’s perhaps closer to the likes of Point Blank, Bullitt, Get Carter, Sorcerer, etc.; however, instead of the grit,
grime and edginess that the 70s popularized, this was smoother, polished and
more in sync with the synth generation of 80s pop. The film’s laconic unnamed
LA-based Driver (Ryan Gosling in a terrific turn that seemed like a throwback
to Alain Delon), works as a stunt double and auto-mechanic by the day, while at
night – and here the character, especially in his ability to skirt police
chases through spectacular driving, was heavily inspired by the eponymous
protagonist in Walter Hill’s The Driver
– he takes jobs from the mob as their gateaway driver. His only friend and
accomplice is a crippled auto shop owner (Bryan Cranston) dreaming big. His
isolated existence, however, changes when he gets close to a vulnerable single
mother (Carey Mulligan) and her young son; and when, to save a desperate
scenario for them, he takes a rotten job which ends in disaster, his deadly doppelgänger,
masked under his placid veneer, bursts forth to exact bloody payback. The scintillating
chase sequence that the film begins with, the bursts of hyper-violence, the
spare narrative and the moody electronic score, elevated this beyond just
another B-movie or a pastiche.
Director: Nicholas Winding Refn
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller
Language: English
Country: US
The Babri Masjid
demotion, carried out in broad daylight by a throng of fanatics and lumpens
with tacit approval of the establishment, unfolded a dark chapter in India’s
contemporary political history in the way muscular majoritarian forces brazenly
trampled upon the country’s secular fabric. Saeed Akhtar Mirza, the gentle
giant of parallel Indian cinema, deftly portrayed the simmering political
tension leading up to this disgraceful event and the ensuing disillusionment at
this brazen betrayal of trust, and in turn interpretated what this entails
collectively and personally, in his beautifully poetic, meditative and poignant
film Naseem. At its most elemental,
it’s the tale of a delicate, tender and heart-rending friendship between Naseem
(Mayuri Kango), an innocent and wide-eyed schoolgirl belonging to a
middle-class Muslim family in Bombay (Mumbai), and her ailing, gentle-natured
and cultured grandfather (played by the legendary Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi). She
loves literature, hanging out with her friends, spreading empathy and kindness,
and listening to the humorous anecdotes that he loves recounting from his days
as a young man living in Agra – surrounded by his loving wife and mischevious
friends – in pre-Independent India. Naseem’s naïvete and cocooned world, and
her grandfather’s old-world idealism and charming mamories, formed a striking
contrast to the crumbling world around them. The parallel narrative formed a
delightful dichotomy of what was dreamed and how it turned out – as made
bleakly evident by the disconcerting present. The stellar ensemble cast
comprised of Kulbhushan Kharbanda as Naseem’s perplexed father, Salim Shah as
her elder brother finding it tough to absorb the murky developments, Surekha
Sikri as her deadpan mother, and Kay Kay Menon as a deeply radicalized guy, among a host of others.
Director: Saeed Akhtar Mirza
Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Political Drama
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Goutam Ghose’s Paar, adapted from Samaresh Basu’s Paari (Journey), is an intense, harsh, bellicose, confrontrational and bleak
movie simmering with political angst. The narrative, which is split into two interrelated
halves, is centered around an impoverished Dalit couple brought to life by extraordinary
physical and emotional turns by Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi. When, with a
socialist schoolteacher’s (Anil Chatterjee) guidance, the historically exploited
Dalit community in a village start battling for their rights and even has a
person from among them (Om Puri) winning the Panchayat election, they face
retaliation, violent payback and ultimately bloody carnage at hands of the slimy
landlord (Utpal Dutt) and his brash brother (Mohan Agashe). This forces the
couple to flee to Calcutta; however, when their hopes for a job at a struggling
jute plant doesn’t materialize, bereft of the last cent and forced to the absolute
end of the line, the desperate man and his helpless pregnant wife take the horrendous
job, that too for a pittance, of swimming a drove of pigs across the mighty
Hooghly river. The extended sequence that followed was harrowing and
gut-wrenching. The horrors of caste-based discrimination, oppression and
violence formed the film’s central tenet – be it in the upper caste zamindar’s
systemic abuse of power, the violence that they unleash when the power balance
seems to tilt, or in the nightmarish job that they’re callously compelled to
undertake not just because they need that money, but also because no one else
simply will. There was also a stirring flavour of agitprop and guerila
filmmaking – perhaps inspired by Mrinal Sen – especially in the sequence where
a faceless reporter is trying to deconstruct what happened in the village.
Director: Gautam Ghose
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Political Drama
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Japanese auteur Hirokazu
Kore-eda’s Still Walking is a nuanced,
Ozu-esque family drama with a delicate balancing and interplay between
tranquility and simmering underlying tensions, warmth of a reunion and
suppressed memories, renewing of bonds and inadvertently touching on raw
nerves, ever yawning generational gaps, and between life and death. Regrets,
unresolved elements from the past, and mortality, therefore, formed key themes of
what was a personal work for the director (he’d made this just a year after his
mother’s demise). The death anniversary of their eldest son Junpei, who’d
accidentally drowned many years back while rescuing another kid, forms the
occasion for congregation of the Yokohama family and the setting of an
interweaving study – Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), a retired doctor and gruff family
patriarch; Toshiko (Kirin Kiki), the fussy and frank-speaking mother; their
second son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a floundering art restorer with a complex
relationship with his father; the beautiful widowed single mother Yukari (Yui
Natsukawa) who Ryota has married, to his conservative parents’ dismay, and her
young son; the Yokohamas’ lively daughter (You), who’s come with her easy going
husband and their precocious kids; and, most disconcertingly, also the kid who
Junpei had saved and who’s now grown into a struggling man. Set over the course
of 24 hours, the gently roving camera affectingly portrayed the various characters,
through rambling discussions, pointed conversations, awkward silences, subtle
attempts at reconciliation and quiet reflections, as the brilliantly chaotic
first half made way for a more meditative 2nd half. Interestingly,
this was made in the same year as two other exquisite films on familial
dysfunctions, bonds and complexities – Olivier Assayas’ ravishing Summer Hours and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s low-key Tokyo Sonata.
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Genre: Drama/Family Drama
Language: Japanese
Country: Japan
Martin Scorsese has
made a triumphant return to his glory old days with his magnificent masterpiece
The Irishman. Sprawling, ambitious, multi-layered,
elegiac, alternately epic and intimate, and audaciously framed, fellow
septaguanarians Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino spectacularly
rolled back their years with bravura filmmaking and acting masterclass. While Mean Streets remains the most emblematic
Marty gangster film for me, this is stylistically closer to Goodfellas and Casino – forming a trilogy of sorts – in that they’re based on real-life
accounts, are narratively similar (mobsters looking back at their rise and fall)
and set against expansive historical-temporal canvases. Adapted from Charles
Brandt’s euphemistically-titled narrative nonfiction I Heard You Paint Houses, the movie – riveting every minute of its
3 ½ hour length – chrocicles the life of narrator and central protagonist Frank
Sheeran (a tour de force De Niro), a
WWII veteran who becomes a Mafia enforcer and labour leader, along with an
engrossing parallel account of the world of organized crime in general as well
as watershed political events through the 60s and 70s – the Bay of Pigs debacle,
the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s presidency and assassination, the Watergate
Scandal, etc. Sheeran’s eventful life, moral ambiguity and the burden of crimes
and violence that he carries to his graves, and the timeless clannish themes of
loyalty, brotherhood, honour, guilt, betrayal and omerta, played out through
his evolving relationships with Mafiosi boss Russell Bufalino (a remarkably
restrained Pesci) and the infamous labour union legend Jimmy Hoffa (a
boisterous Pacino). The fabulous ensemble cast includes a terrific Stephen
Graham and Hervey Keitel in a cameo, while the tonal shift from vigorous to
mournful was aided by the terrific soundtrack.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster Film/Biopic
Language: English
Country: US
