Sam Mendes’
flamboyantly mounted WW1 epic 1917 is
packed with cinematic extravaganza, in its penchant for dramatic storytelling,
operatic picturization of war and also befuddling viewers with technical
wizardry. Consequently, the intent for immersive viewing experience got muddled
with predictability and gimmickry. The narrative kicks off when Lance Corporals
Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) are entrusted with
delivering a message to another battalion to halt their planned attack against
the Germans who’re mistakenly assumed to be on retreat, but essentially waiting
to wreak massacre; the fact that Blake’s elder brother is in that battalion made
this as much a personal mission for him as a patriotic duty (the premise was similar
to Saving Private Ryan). This inanely
absurd task, albeit one bound to end largely in success despite the outlandish
challenges, was taken into the realms of a video game through deliberately
placed hurdles, including a German bunker sitting on a ticking bomb, a dogfight
ending at their footsteps, foot chase through a town straight out of Dante’s Inferno,
and surviving a raging waterfall. And then there’re oodles of cloying sentimentality
thrown in too, thus conveniently amplifying Blake’s humanist idealism and
mellowing Schofield’s cynicism. Making use of stunning SFX wherein multiple
shots weare artificially stitched into a seemingly unbroken single-take lasting
the film’s 2-hour duration, it therefore turned out as a spectacularly shot war
movie providing a typical rehash of “heroism” and “duty before self”, instead
of one that delves into the madness, senselessness, moral ambiguities, ironies,
banalities, and other gray complexities therein. That said, the initial part of
their odyssey painted a visceral and disorienting vision of purgatory, which strikingly
captured the urgliness and brutality of war.
Director: Sam Mendes
Genre: War/Epic
Language: English
Country: UK
Agnès Varda had
resided for many years in Rue Daguerre, a lively market street in Paris’ 14th
Arrondisement and Montparnasse district named after the pioneering inventor of photographic
process Louis Daguerre, since moving in here as a young photographer herself. Awash in
nostalgia and amusing reflections, Daguerréotypes was her loving homage to this fascinating, chaotic,
demographically diverse, working class neighbourhood, filled with gentle
observations on the simple-natured, hard-working, blue-collared folks – middle-aged
and ageing couples and immigrants from various parts of France and beyond – who own and run the small shops, stores and
establishments situated along its pavements. Selling everything from perfumes
and haberdashery to bakery items and meat products, running salons for men and
women, tailoring dresses, repairing old clocks, and providing music and driving
lessons to the young and the old, this was the kind of closely-knit community
where everyone knew everybody’s histories, the local sounds and smells were
integral parts of their existences, and time flew at its own sweet speed – the
kind of irresistible, albeit largely vanished, time capsule that Tati had immortalized
in Mon Oncle. The documentary
comprises of a collage of candid scenes of daily life – each day being almost
like any other random day – with people buying home-made perfumes, baguettes,
sirloin steaks and whatnot, partaking lessons in musical instruments and
traffic rules, chatting with each other on the streets and within the shops,
and going about in their quotidian tasks; it also has heartwarming interactions
with these people and descriptions of them through voiceover by Varda herself,
and a rather funny magic show too. Accompanied by the lilting tunes of
accordion, this sepia-toned, warm-hearted mosaic portrayed the poetry and
beauty within the banal.
Director: Agnes Varda
Genre: Documentary
Language: French
Country: France
Dharavi, the densely populated settlement in Bombay (Mumbai)
– patronizingly touted as one of the largest slums in the world – has always formed
a dramatic counterpoint and dark underbelly, in Hindi cinema, to the pompous epithet
of ‘city of dreams’. In the eponymously titled movie directed by Sudhir Mishra,
the grim and gritty tale of one man – his fierce ambition, desire to rapidly
climb the socioeconomic ladder, dogged refusal to strike compromises with his
harsh realities – provided an indictment to the city’s romanticized image that
through sheer hard work, burning ambitions and a bit of luck, a pauper can
jolly well become a wealthy prince. An embittered taxi driver (Om Puri), living
in a cramped shack with his wife (Shabana Azmi), plans to buy a business for
dying clothes along with his drinking pals. However, when contributions fall
short, he makes the fatal choice of taking help from a local gangster which leads
to disastrous downward spirals for all. The film ended on a feeble note of hope
that added an interesting ambiguity to the vicious cycle. His obsession with
getting off the rut, punching way above his weight and becoming the owner of
his own fate, was manifested in his parallel fantasy world by his romancing with
a screen goddess (Madhuri Dixit playing herself) who represents the highest
echelon of beauty, dream and desire for him – a holy grail that he can never
attain in the sordid grime that he exists. Over-usage of slow-mo, sound
amplifications and echoes, to create visceral effects, dampened the viewing
experience, though commendable turns by Puri and Azmi in capturing their
disillusionment and lost dreams, and representation of the mileau,
compensated for these lapses.
Director: Sudhir Mishra
Genre: Drama/Urban Drama
Language: Hindi
Country: India
In 1971, 343 feerless
French women disclosed in the “Manifesto of the 343”, ignoring the possibility
of criminal persecution and conservative backlash, that they’d had abortion; its
signatories included, among others, Agnès Varda. The stirring statement that
“the personal is political” is therefore emphatically applicable in her poignant
and powerful film One Sings, the Other
Doesn’t. An infectious tale of enduring friendship between two women whose
lives parallel the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s France, imbued it with
attributes that went beyond cinema; that it was also a beautifully rendered
movie, at once playful and melancholic, irreverent and serious, polemical and poetic,
and comprising of diverse formal choices like voiceovers (by Varda herself),
epistolary narration (through heartwarming use of postcards), blending of “live”
music and non-fiction agitprop elements into the within the narrative
time-space, etc, made this all the more memorable. The kinship of the two marvelously
enacted women begins when 17-year old high-school student Pauline (Valérie
Mairesse) helps fund the abortion for 22-year old Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard),
who’s struggling to make ends meet with the two kids she already has with a married
photographer. And their bond gets sealed for life upon getting reconnected a
few years later at the historical Bobigny trial. Their nature and life arcs
couldn’t be more disparate – Pauline, the more impulsive and outspoken of the
two, becomes part of a travelling feminist folk group singing quirky political
songs and gets briefly married to an Iranian man, while single mom Susanne, who
gradually embraces her radical spirit, eventually starts a family planning
clinic. The final sequence, shot using a gently panning single take, ended this
defiant yet intimate film on a beautifully elegiac note.
Director: Agnes Varda
Genre: Drama/Buddy Film/Feminist Drama
Language: French
Country: France
Jia Zhangke’s
extraordinary masterpiece 24 City is
a work of tour de force filmmaking –
even if, ironically, that might appear counterintuitive due to its profoundly poignant,
meditative, rigorous and austere nature. He’d crafted a magnificent exploration
of China’s sociocultural flux and ensuing human displacements in Still Life, and the same thematic thread
was continued through the premise here, viz. demolition of a state-owned
military-industrial complex which, at its peak of productivity during the
Korean and Vietnam Wars had employed 30,000 workers and formed a township in
itself, and building in its place a sprawling apartment complex. The film,
therefore, covered two connected displacements – getting in place its massive workforce
from all across when the factory was setup in 1958, and thereafter, the
downsizing once the war efforts petered down and eventual shutdown. Jia made
this in the form of intimate oral histories akin to Svetlana Alexievich’s
literary approach in order to capture the deeply personal stories and anecdotes
that powerfully humanized the cost of “progress”, and, in the process, painting
a heart-wrenching picture of loss, loneliness and desolation. Yet, in an act of
outrageous genre-bending audacity, he mixed non-professionals with established
actors for the interviews, thus blending documentary facts with fictionalized
facts, and therefore underpinning an incisive commentary on the futility of
absolute authenticity when it comes to memories and the idea that there’s no
such thing as 100% objective truth. While all the monologues – penned by the
poet Zhai Yongming – were piercing and poignant, the most breathtaking one involved
the stunning Joan Chen featuring as a lovelorn lady who’s been given a moniker by
her co-workers after a film (Little
Flower) which, ironically, she herself had starred in.
Director: Jia Zhangke
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Documentary
Language: Mandarin
Country: China
