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April 28, 2024

Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024)

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Whether one admires it or not, it is hard to deny that Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is unlike anything being made in Mumbai right now. The array of trailers that preceded my screening of the film offers a good sample of where Bollywood is otherwise right now: Bhaiyya Ji (a Southern-inspired actioner), Srikanth (an underdog biopic) and The Sabarmati Report (a rabblerousing right-wing political drama), the latter produced by Balaji Motion Pictures, the same company that has issued Banerjee’s film. Like its 2010 predecessor, LSD 2 positions itself consciously at the margin of the industry, drawing its energies from both new media environments and independent filmmaking while at the same time profiting from the mechanisms of professional production and distribution.

The original LSD was a three-part morality play that probed the unsavoury intersection of salacious sex, burgeoning media and cheap digital image-making. The new film retains the structure and the stridency of the original, but goes further by removing the last remaining guardrails that assured us that there may be a way to steer clear of this impending dystopia. Expanding the earlier film’s scope to newer forms of mediation, LSD 2 informs us that we are now fully living in a technocratic nightmare and the only way out is further inside; that delulu is the only solulu.

The opening part of LSD 2 is set entirely inside a Big-Brother-like online reality TV show titled Truth Ya Naach (Truth or Dance), where viewers with smartphones can tune into the camera of any of the participants as well as bet on them in each episode. Participants, in turn, can choose to turn off their cameras at the risk of audience disengagement. At the end of each episode, one participant is eliminated by the panel of judges, played by Anu Malik, Sophie Choudry and Tusshar Kapoor. Banerjee amplifies the self-cannibalizing nature of this ecosystem by mixing show footage with viewer reactions to each episode in the form of vlogs, podcasts and memes.

The nominal protagonist of the section is Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), a transwoman participant whose ratings skyrocket once her estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh) is invited on to the show. However, a change in sponsors of Truth Ya Naach has meant that the show has to pivot to family friendly audiences, forcing the showrunners to evict Noor within the logic of the show. The show’s progressive veneer of inclusion makes way for mother sentiment, both thrown out once they are milked to their limits. Within this totalizing simulacrum, the mother’s sceptical outsider perspective is first presented as a point of identification for us, the viewers of the film who are invited to look at everything on display with contempt, but it is jettisoned when mother herself internalizes the rules of the game.

This kind of narrative rug pulling continues in the second (and possibly the weakest) segment of the film, albeit on a less ironic and more realistic register. Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a transgirl working as a janitor at the metro station, is assaulted in a park. Kullu’s boss Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) helps her file a case, but when compromising details emerge from the police investigation, she finds a PR disaster on her hands. No more a perfect victim, Kullu is a timebomb for the company whether she withdraws the case or pursues it, and Lovina, like the showrunners of Truth Ya Naach, is forced to orchestrate Kullu’s exit by other means. Unfolding through video calls and Zoom conferences, this segment immerses us into the disintegrating mind of Lovina, a single mother whose motives are obscured by her constant frustrations. Things are further complicated with the introduction of other plot elements, such as a housing crisis and an extra-marital affair.

But the film really piles it on in the third segment. An influencer named Game Paapi (Abhinav Singh) is on the verge of internet legend when doctored sex pictures of him are leaked during a live stream by a bad actor. As a reputation management firm tries to put a positive spin on this, Game Paapi himself takes flight in shame and denial, rejecting the iniquities of the real world to establish a cult in the metaverse. Or something. A ChatGPT-level rehash of half-informed boomer techno-prophesies, this section throws in everything you’ve heard about the dangers of artificial intelligence and cyberbullying and then some. Things veer further into incomprehensibility thanks to some aggressive mumbling by the actors, esoteric internet speak and a good dose of enthusiastic censorship.

Each segment of the film is inspired by a specific video medium — live television, video conference and webcasting respectively — and the colours, editing, camera movement, the choice of lenses and the production design are all determined in accordance with these devices. Banerjee’s impressive attention to the specific visual texture and syntax of each medium is superseded only by his incredible ear for language and speech patterns. The third section performs an accelerationist sensory assault, employing a bone-rattling synthesis of webcam footage, recreated memes, AI-generated poop, cable news blight and some queasy-making animation. The film’s sound, on the other hand, is uniformly dull, dousing all the amateur visual spice in a professionally mixed sonic soup.

Throughout, Banerjee takes pains to remind us that everything we are seeing is mediated by a camera with a vested interest. To this end, he even uses points-of-view shots in sequences where a diegetic camera is absent — a blunt tactic normalized half way into the film. LSD 2 foregrounds the inescapability of these media environments, moving from traditional television’s self-rejuvenating search for total reality to Web 3.0’s rejection of reality in favour of an alternate, synthetic universe. This absolute, conspiratorial conception is offset by characteristically dry humour, such as the sight of Game Paapi’s mother bringing lunch to the desk of her YouTuber son, or Noor’s mother on Truth Ya Naach belting out a number titled “Gandi Taal” (Dirty Beat) with the decorum of a ghazal singer.

One of the most striking things about LSD 2 is how unprovocative it is despite handling sensational material and hot-button issues. (As an aside, this film is a good example of how to cinematically engage with bigotry and discrimination without recreating it in the name of realism.) Banerjee is not a provocateur, but a moralist at heart, and for all its bleak cynicism and psychological murkiness, the film is remarkably single-minded in its critique. LSD 2 puts its finger on a historical moment when public-facing corporate capitalism, social movements around marginalized sexual identities and a rapidly changing media landscape run up against two-faced middle-class values. Each of these forces is now an ally, now an enemy to the other, each one interacting with the other with a view to self-perpetuate. It is pertinent that the film ends with an interview between a traditional television anchor and a multiverse personality, both connected to pliant viewers on one end and corporate sponsors on the other. In LSD 2, you can check out of late capitalism any time you like, but you can never leave.

 

January 23, 2024

Lyana (1955)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USSR, Review | Tags: , , , , , |
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[The following text was written for the Boris Barnet dossier in the inaugural issue of the amazing Outskirts Film Magazine, an annual print publication on classic and contemporary cinema currently preparing its third edition. You can buy the first two issues here and also at various outlets across Europe.]

Between Masters of Ukrainian Art in Concert (1952), Boris Barnet’s preceding film, and Lyana (1955), the ground had practically shifted in the Soviet Union: Stalin passed away (as did Pudovkin and Vertov), Khrushchev won the political power struggle, prisoners were released from the gulags, the Korean War formally ended and the Warsaw Pact was signed. These events need mention not because Barnet’s work reflects the tumult of the times, but because it clinically keeps it out. At this point, Barnet was himself something of an object of history, obliged to wander across the eastern republics, floating through aborted projects and studio assignments.

Shot in the vineyards of Moldavia, Lyana is a kolkhoz musical, that is to say, a film about collectives, like much else in Barnet’s oeuvre. A group of amateur musicians from the “New Life” kolkhoz travel to the capital to perform at the national theatre. Among them are Lyana (Kyunna Ignatova), her beau Andrei (Aleksandr Shvorin) and their friends. They are a success, but the director of the kolkhoz (Eugeniu Ureche) withholds the diplomas of Andrei and his two pals for ignoring farm duties. This means that the boys risk missing the Moscow tour of the troupe, which puts a strain on Andrei and Lyana’s relationship.

Unlike the Stakhanovite frenzy of Bountiful Summer (1950), Barnet’s previous musical made in Ukraine, work takes a back seat in Lyana, whose characters spend more time rehearsing numbers than crunching them. The mood is uniformly light. There are no villains, no conflicts and whatever little trouble befalls the protagonists stems from the benevolent pedagogical intentions of their social betters. All dramatic progression is promptly thwarted: withheld diplomas are given away at a throwaway moment and the much-anticipated Moscow concert is simply elided. The focus is instead on the symmetry of the lovers’ absurd rituals, frivolous fights and who-blinks-first standoff, a fiction that the participants themselves barely believe in.

In its sense of openness, its postcard-like approach to landscape and its mix of warm and cool tones, Lyana resembles Bountiful Summer, and there is little promise here of the painterly use of colour found in Barnet’s next two features. Scenes are composed with a chain of short camera movements that either move close from a wider view or pull back to reveal one. At periodic intervals, actors hurtle across the frame, jump over fences, fall on their faces or backs. Barnet’s stylistic tendencies make token appearances: the work on gesture (Lyana restraining herself from an impulsive slap or tying her pigtails into a confused knot), the blending of opposed emotions (Andrei charging at his friends for matchmaking behind his back, then turning around to thank them), the use of ellipses (Andrei becomes part of the troupe over a single cut) and the persistent refusal to let scenes play out.

Lyana may be regarded as the first part of a loose trilogy completed by Barnet’s next two films. Coursing through these works is an unresolved ambiguity about the responsibility of artists in a revolutionary society. Party line or personal conviction, a staple of Barnet’s cinema is the belief that an artist must be useful to the community, whether he is going on a suicidal mission into enemy territory (A Good Lad) or only repairing a sewing machine (Whistle Stop). Skipping rehearsals to bone up on agricultural techniques may not sound exciting, but as the kolkhoz director would have the young men learn, praxis is part of one’s education as a Soviet artist. The renegade musicians are eager to prove their usefulness as well, and their earnestness will be rewarded by a readmission into the collective.

Yet this faith in the system is qualified, its limits determined by the price of transgression. In the trilogy that Lyana inaugurates, artists are kicked about by higher powers, compelled by contract and forced to produce to the point of depletion. Startling shots of an outlawed Menshevik poet retreating from a celebratory crowd (Poet) or a defeated wrestling champion walking off the stage (The Wrestler and the Clown) relativize the protagonist’s life by hinting at other forms of being an artist, at other revolutions to be served.

In that sense, the anchor figure in Lyana is not the flautist Andrei, but the older fiddler Georgiy (Konstantin Konstantinov), a merry tippler who encourages the young men to be independent and enterprising. Never recognized by the establishment, he once made his living by going from wedding to wedding, but now down on his luck and out of work, he has become a violinist without a violin. If not a nakedly autobiographical character, Georgiy is at least reflective of Barnet’s situation during Lyana — Otar Iosseliani speaks of the filmmaker being “dead-drunk” and “surrounded by gypsies singing and dancing through the shoot.”[1]

It is hard to imagine that Barnet, who was married five times and who found himself time and again on the wrong side of studio bosses, really believed in the benign authority and starry-eyed romance of Lyana. However marginal, Georgiy’s outsider view tempers the film’s optimism, furnishing a weary framing perspective that allows one to observe the exuberance without participating in it. “Barnet’s outlook on the world, on the Soviet universe,” wrote Jacques Rivette, “is one of innocence, but not of an innocent.”[2] Barnet may not have perhaps believed, but he chose to believe. Innocence may have died much before Stalin, but Barnet drifted from one arcadia to another, trying to see, as Rivette wrote elsewhere, “if there isn’t a small door at the back that will allow us to return to the original paradise.”[3]

 

Footnotes:

[1] Iosseliani quoted in Bernard Eisenschitz, “A Fickle man, or Portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet director,” Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1995.

[2] Jacques Rivette, “Un nouveau visage de la pudeur,” Cahiers du cinéma, February 1953.

[3] Jacques Rivette, “Le secret et la loi,” La Lettre du cinema, autumn 1999.

 

December 29, 2023

Animal (2023)

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At the heart of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s new film Animal is unrequited love: that between an uncaring construction magnate Balbir (Anil Kapoor) and his hopelessly obsessed, perennially teenage son Ranvijay (Ranbir Kapoor, who seems drawn to the subject of one-sided romance). Ranvijay’s obsession with his father metastasizes into world-burning psychosis when there’s an attempt on Balbir’s life. Animal is a sprawling rampage by an inconsolable character at war with the world and himself, filled with ultraviolent set pieces, but one that pushes past the formulas of contemporary pan-Indian actioners to get into sticky territories of its own making. Since I watched the film after it had made so much noise, I wasn’t shocked or unsettled by any of its provocations or excesses. I rather admired its passionate bravado, its stunningly abrupt detours, its taste for self-sabotage. I’ve seen nothing quite like it in Indian cinema.

Vanga seems to have responded to the criticisms levelled against his first film, Arjun Reddy (2017), not by digging in his heels, as several commentators have suggested, but by taking a step back. Where Arjun Reddy positioned its lead character as a textbook stud whose appeal is evident if qualified, Animal takes pains to mark out Ranvijay as an exception, a pathological example to be gawked at like a train wreck. Rarely has a Hindi film been so nakedly, laughably Freudian, with every action of Ranvijay’s — his murderous outbursts to his solicitousness towards his sisters to even his marital infidelity — explained away as symptoms of his unresolved daddy fixation. Not even the most ardent admirer of Arjun Reddy will come out of Animal wanting to emulate Ranvijay.

Like Arjun, Ranvijay is a Capital-R Romantic, a guy who knows his girl will break off her engagement to another man and return to him running, one who will make love to her on a private plane and marry her the following day on a hill temple. I choked on my saliva when a teenage Ranvijay brings in a machine gun to a classroom to threaten his sister’s bullies. But after Animal reaches a paroxysm of alpha-male fantasy in a gala mid-movie shootout, it turns itself inside out. Vanga’s film heads off in a new direction no less than three times after its interval. In the first of these restarts, it catapults us from the adrenaline rush of all the bloody mayhem into the sedate sordidness of Ranvijay’s domestic life. Sporting a paunch, Ranvijay is now the source as well as the butt of awkward jokes about his semi-vegetative state.

It is in this section that the film anthologizes most of the outrageous behaviour that has been taken apart by critics: Ranvijay snapping his wife’s bra strap as a twisted come-on (but the film hardly shows the gesture itself), having her remove her clothes in the living room (but the camera shifts focus to the maid in the background, complicating our response), giving her solemn lectures about his incontinence (but filmed from above the staircase under the gaze of his men, Ranvijay cuts but a sorry figure) and so on. Commentators have repeatedly enumerated these actions, presenting them as self-evident proofs of the film’s depravation, short-circuiting the necessary hierarchy between content, intent and effect.

But the film presents these seedy episodes as the exact obverse of Ranvijay’s brash individualism, his capital-R Romanticism. In Animal, the impulsiveness that makes a man love a woman among the clouds or on an airstrip is the same one that prompts him to make weird underwear jokes or commission a Rolls Royce the colour of his lover’s hickeys or strangle an enemy with his bare hands. As much as Bollywood likes to present a sanitized myth of the soft romantic hero, all this behaviour, Vanga’s film advances, is of a piece. In doing so, Animal clears any remaining ambiguity around Arjun Reddy, deconstructing alpha-male existence as being motored by beta-male insecurities. This is a film that introduces his hero, like Arjun Reddy, through wisps of glamorous smoke, but leaves him a crying mess.

Not that there is a shortage of calculated provocations or queasy writing choices. The prelude is a gratuitous come-get-me, and the film doesn’t seem to be sure where to end exactly, chaining together half-a-dozen scenes, serious and funny, corny and thrilling, before the lights come up. Geetanjali, the character played by Rashmika Mandanna, gets one of the meatiest scenes in the film, but in all others, she is a two-bit character switching moods at the drop of a hat, or a top. Tripti Dimri is the star of the film’s most tedious detour, from which it takes a while to recover. But for the most part, the film remains true to the character of Ranvijay, played with a ferocious intensity by Ranbir Kapoor, who keeps the film together even with a host of tentative secondary performances.

Although its analysis may be simplistic, it perhaps needed Animal for Hindi cinema to show up Northern India’s “baap baap hota hai” obsession as the sign of a foundational corruption. There have been dysfunctional dads galore in Bollywood, but I can’t think of many films in which filial veneration is framed as a chronic disease, as something less than an unqualified virtue. Like Arjun Reddy, Ranvijay embodies certain attractive modern ideals, at least to the degree that he can be empathized with: a kind of brute gender equality that belies his primitivism, caste blindness, religious scepticism and a pervasive non-conformism. And like him, the film is volatile and unpredictable, refusing to conform to the norms of mainstream storytelling, or doing so in its own particular way, or failing on its own terms while attempting to do so. Imitation is perhaps the last thing the film can be charged with. I’m reminded of a joke about a minister and a monkey.

 

November 17, 2023

Jigarthanda DoubleX (2023)

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The two defining currents of Tamil cinema of the past decade — the engaged, politically aware films of the Pa. Ranjith school and the playful, movie-aware work of the Naalaya Iyakkunar gang — collide head on in Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda DoubleX (2023), a spiritual sequel to the director’s second feature Jigarthanda (2014). Where the earlier film, arguably its maker’s finest, was a heady celebration of the supremacy of cinematic mythmaking over that of the gun barrel, DoubleX is a much more solemn, spiritually tortured assertion of the importance of cinematic demystification.

As a filmmaker, Karthik Subbaraj calls to mind those expert craftsmen who keep snipping away at a chunk of folded paper without giving us an idea of where they are going with it, only to unfold it at the end and have us marvel the intricacy of the design and the necessity of every redundant seeming gesture. He begins with pet ideas and images — in this case, again, the primacy of the camera over the gun — and then weaves a convoluted plot over them outwards, allowing the audience to arrive at their beating heart in the middle of a film. Showy? Absolutely. And DoubleX doubles down on the showiness. Every shot is an event – sometimes tiringly so, as in the many ritual shootouts organized in a movie theatre — and dramatic logic makes way for a logic of the spectacle.

Coerced by a cop to kill a ruthless, Clint Eastwood-loving henchman named Caesar (Raghava Lawrence, spitting image of a young Rajinikanth), prisoner Raydas (SJ Suryah) masquerades as a filmmaker to woo his vain target into a celluloid dream and slay him. Raydas and Caesar embark on a movie project together, but they soon find their fiction overwhelmed by reality. Faced with the genocide of a mountainous tribe by those in power, both filmmaker and subject must choose to leave fiction for reality. Rather, transform their fiction into reality.

As the synopsis suggests, the film goes all over the place, and then some, and part of the fun and the frustration is in observing Karthik Subbaraj make straight-faced connections between elements that have no right to be together. His previous film Mahaan (2022) — built around the idea of real-life father and son playing a slippery morality game on screen — was in comparison a lean operation, balancing its two central elements with relative ease. DoubleX, in contrast, is unwieldy — weighed down by seriousness where Jigarthanda was shrewdly unserious and light-footed — overstuffed with dramatic developments, all of which, to be sure, is fleshed out with the director’s characteristic taste for symmetries, repetitions and reversals. A wannabe cop, Raydas ends up as a criminal, pretends to be a filmmaker, only to become a real filmmaker exposing the cops; a petty criminal, Caesar aspires to be a movie star, only to turn into a real hero, who becomes a screen legend. And so on.

After Mahaan, Karthik Subbaraj seems to have grown more comfortable propelling his narrative through characters that aren’t conventionally likeable. For a good while, DoubleX is a veritable parade of inglorious bastards, our identification never resting securely with any of them. But despite Karthik Subbaraj’s self-absorbed cinephilia, there’s a naïve idealism at the heart of his films that keeps them from hip cynicism. Part of the idealism comes from the subaltern political assertion, now domesticated thanks to the work of Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj, that DoubleX borrows and gives a unique spin to: cinema cannot defeat oppression, but it can stand witness to it; art cannot fight malevolent power, but it can influence individuals to change the nature of that power.

DoubleX is Karthik Subbaraj’s first film to release in theatres in many years (Mahaan went straight to streaming), so it is perhaps understandable that he turns it into a sentimental ode to the collective movie experience. The notion that a theatre audience can be outraged by images of oppression and moved to action (a lasting legacy of Shankar’s cinema, where cable news and social media become the keepers of public conscience) is so corny and old-fashioned that it is thoroughly impressive in its sincerity. DoubleX presents it almost as a necessary myth for truth to flourish.

It is curious that we get Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and DoubleX within the span of a month. Very different pictures, but both tackle fraught political subjects with an often stifling piety (although Karthik Subbaraj is capable of inserting an absolutely juvenile punchline in a cop’s mouth in the film’s most harrowing scene), expose cinema’s tendency to “print the legend,” yet refuse to stop at this demystification in order to lay the foundations for truth. The worst rogues in DoubleX use cinema as a medium for political propaganda, but it is also put at the service of justice. The camera is neutral, it is those who wield it that make it good or evil. That, perhaps, is the ultimate myth.

 

September 16, 2023

While We Watched (2022)

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Early in While We Watched, Vinay Shukla’s intimate documentary on the life and work of the acclaimed Indian journalist Ravish Kumar, we see the newsman receiving compliments from a fan at a petrol station. As Ravish takes leave of his discontent admirer, a faint smile crosses his face, only to dissolve into his trademark frown when his car leaves the station. The smiles will be fleeting all through Shukla’s film, much like the short-lived victories and brief moments of joy that the journalist experiences at home and his newsroom. For the most part, we witness Ravish drained, slouched in a chair, his hair dishevelled, his face buried in his palms or the crook of his elbow.

Long affiliated with the New Delhi Television (NDTV) before its hostile takeover by billionaire Gautam Adani in December 2022, Ravish Kumar came to be perceived as one of the last bastions of independent journalism in a media climate increasingly in thrall to the Narendra Modi-led Indian government. Structured around half-a-dozen key events from 2018-19 — including the attempted murder of student activist Umar Khalid, the attack on security personnel in Pulwama, Kashmir, and the General Election 2019 — While We Watched weaves a robust cause-and-effect narrative that offers a study in contrasts: we witness how Ravish’s sardonic, reasoned language in discussing these hot-button issues stands out against the strident demagoguery of his counterparts on other TV channels.

It isn’t a battle of equals by any means. Stacked against Ravish are not just vicious troll armies and powerful media houses attacking him covertly or otherwise, but also a malevolent state that grinds down dissident organizations by means of defamation lawsuits and income-tax raids. At one point in the film, a major scoop about an instance of cow vigilantism is thwarted by selective disruptions of the broadcast. Ravish’s phone buzzes with calls from bullies with the choicest invective and his physical safety is threatened, resulting in a police officer being assigned to escort him.

Ravish responds to such orchestrated harassment with a resigned smile, and notwithstanding his ordeal, he remains very much accessible to those reaching out to him. While We Watched is certainly a tribute to the journalist’s conviction and persistence, but Shukla isn’t interested in telling a triumphalist tale. The film is shot through with a melancholy reflective of Ravish himself, who registers less as an unflappable crusader demolishing ill-informed opponents (though he does get a moment or two of that) than a solitary romantic whose heart beats for a lost cause.

While We Watched places significant emphasis on Ravish’s perennial loneliness. The hawk-nosed journalist is largely seen in profile in tight closeups, severed, as it were, from the world around him. He is withdrawn into himself, even when he is at gatherings and parties, his face and body never ceasing to relay his disappointment and world-weariness. As other television channels grow in popularity and revenue, resignations and farewell parties multiply at Ravish’s office, his trusted colleagues moving on to greener pastures.

This solitude is redoubled by the format of Ravish’s prime-time show on NDTV which, as the fan at the petrol station points out, relies on the star-anchor’s persuasive monologues rather than the sensational panel discussions seen on other news channels. Is Ravish simply jaded and too much in love with his own voice to have invitees on his show? Or is it that he resists the faux-neutrality of such pseudo-debates that turn every story into an occasion for communal polarization? The film doesn’t tell us. But what is sure is that Ravish finds himself increasingly isolated from his peer group, with sporadic gestures of solidarity coming from fledgling journalists and college students. At regular intervals, we see him read his own words off a teleprompter, as though he is walled in by them, with no other voice coming in support.

In its unwavering focus on Ravish to the exclusion of other anchors working alongside him, While We Watched risks overstating his predicament and minimizing the role of NDTV as an institution with its own policies and imperatives. Even so, the film succeeds in giving a sense of what it takes to be a national journalist in India today, of the price to be paid in remaining upright in a world all too willing to bend down. Watching Ravish soldier on despite workplace attrition and dwindling spectatorship, continuing to gather information from conscientious reporters and disgruntled youth, we come to recognize the value of speaking truth as a worthy goal in itself, beyond its mediatic reach and capacity for influence. As Ravish put it in his now-famous speech at the Magsaysay award ceremony that bookends the film: “Not all battles are fought for victory. Some are fought simply to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield.”

 

[First published in Sight and Sound]

 

April 6, 2023

When the Waves Are Gone (2022)

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Filipino auteur Lav Diaz’s reputation as the maker of extremely long, austere films in black-and-white may have unfortunately clouded the degree to which his work remains intellectually and emotionally accessible. While it is true that Diaz privileges a detached, master-shot aesthetic, with little camera movement and musical score, he remains a filmmaker firmly committed to clear narrative lines and character motivations. Despite his unmistakable personal style, his films consistently grapple with established film genres, freely adapting conventions from crime movies, melodramas, sci-fi, political thrillers and even musicals.

Diaz’s latest opus When the Waves Are Gone (Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, borrows equally from film noir and the Western, recounting the fated encounter of two violent men with a score to settle. Wracked with guilt over his involvement in the government’s murderous anti-drug campaign, top cop Hermes Papauran (John Lloyd Cruz, in his fifth feature with Diaz), begins to lose grip on his well-being and family life. His body develops severe psoriasis, prompting him to head for the salubrious coastal clime of his native village. In Hermes’ autoimmune disorder, Diaz finds an apt metaphor for a system determined to attack the very thing it is supposed to protect. Yet it is an unnerving, puritanical association that views physical illness as the offshoot of moral rot.

Released from prison, meanwhile, ex-sergeant Supremo Macabantay (Diaz’s regular collaborator Ronnie Lazaro) sets out to hunt down Hermes, who was once his protégé at the police academy and who had him arrested for corruption. As is often the case in Diaz’s films, this antagonist proves the more interesting character. A political assassin who is also an evangelist, Supremo commands the best passages of the film, such as the darkly humorous episodes where he coerces a boatman to jump overboard for baptism or when he brings a young sex worker to his hotel room, only to have her kneel and pray.

For the most part, Waves interweaves their stories, with Hermes and Supremo biding their time at their respective hideouts before their eventual high noon, which arrives in the shape of a ritual showdown by the sea. Alternating between towns and villages, indoors and outdoors, the film combines significant narrative ellipses with expansive slabs of real-time action, all helping impart a dynamic rhythm to the proceedings.

Waves is of a piece with Diaz’s permanent examination of his country’s embattled moral conscience, but the address is more direct than ever, the tone more despondent. The result is a passionate (if somewhat melodramatic) philippic against a nation that seems doomed to cycles of enslavement and oppression.

 

[First published in Sight&Sound]

 

April 1, 2023

The Film You Are About to See (2023)

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Premiering at the 45th Cinéma du Réel in Paris, Maxime Martinot’s short essay The Film You Are About to See (Le Film Que Vous Allez Voir) offers a brilliant investigation into the ways in which cinema exhibition and spectatorship are mediated by paratexts within and outside the films. Repurposing a range of verbal material intended to set context for viewing — disclaimers, introductory warnings, fourth-wall breaking intertitles, notices from theatre management — the film examines the fraught, slippery nature of the relationship between text and image in cinema. In doing so, it also throws light on contemporary institutional outlook towards problematic works from film history.

The texts that Martinot gathers greatly vary in their tone, style and function. A number of them are pre-emptive disclaimers about the films not being representative of the real world (“merely an ancient fable”), forestalling perceived slight to such institutions as the police, the Red Cross and the Catholic church. A few extend the language of publicity, hard-selling the provocations of the film or preparing the audience for the experience to follow (“not a detective genre movie”). Yet others instruct the projectionist to keep an eye out for spectators pirating the film, while one intertitle registers a feeble protest against the censors: “In its original version, the film ended here, but the censorship demanded an optimistic ending as you are about to see.”

Systematically interspersed with these title cards are thirty-two excerpts from across the history of moving images, from Jules Janssen’s Passage de Vénus (1874) to Angus MacLane’s Lightyear (2022). Arranged more or less in chronology, these images often have a dialectical relationship to the intertitles, which, for their part, are presented in a reverse-chronological order, culminating in slides preceding magic lantern shows in the seventeenth century. This historical regression of the title cards goes not only against their anticipatory function and forward thrust within their respective films, but also against the increasingly slick, sophisticated images on display.

The Film You Are About to See cogently demonstrates the extent to which such title cards serve to fix the meaning and affect of the images, and to counter, as Roland Barthes put it, “the terror of uncertain signs.” Taken together, these paratexts attempt to tame the image and protect the audience, cautioning them about the kinds of violence that the images could subject them to: nausea, dizziness, motion sickness, temptation to vice, even moral outrage. One intertitle reproduces a notice that a theatre in Oklahoma had put up to alert the viewers of Lightyear about “scenes of gender ideology,” assuring them that a same-sex kiss will be fast-forwarded as soon as it appears on screen.

In this regard, the counter-chronological arrangement of intertitles and filmic excerpts also evokes regressing cultural attitudes to potentially disturbing films, the atavistic fear of the power of images. The disclaimers we see in the film have a striking resemblance to modern-day trigger warnings that seek to shield viewers from presumed psychic assaults. However, in its savvy assembly of ambiguous movie clips, Martinot’s film suggests that this is an ultimately futile enterprise, for images will always find a way to escape domestication and remain polysemous in the face of texts that seek to pin them down. In this and its fixation on the perverse detail, The Film You Are About to See comes across as a quintessential work about cinephilia, that illicit passion for smuggling personal significance into curated, tamed images.

 

March 31, 2023

Viduthalai (2023)

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“Don’t use your powers to feed your perversions,” police officer Suresh Menon (Gautam V. Menon) tells off his subordinate Raghavendar (Chetan), who has stripped his detainees in an effort to extract vital information. It’s probably too telling a comment, for Viduthalai Part 1 (“Freedom”) offers director Vetrimaaran one more occasion to anthologize his fantasies of sadistic, retributive and occasionally poetic violence. Set in the 1980s, the film follows the efforts of the police in eradicating armed rebellion in a mineral-rich corner of rural Tamil Nadu in order to make way for mining corporations to set up shop. Newly appointed as a driver to a unit working deep in the forest, constable Kumaresan (Soori) runs up against his superior Raghavendar after he develops affection for the local population, who support the rebellion and distrust the law enforcers.

Manifesting variously in allegorical (2011’s Aadukalam), legal (2016’s Visaranai) and historical (2018’s Vada Chennai and 2019’s Asuran) forms, violence has been the idee fixe, the central subject of Vetrimaaran’s body of work. Yet, barring perhaps Visaranai, his films have proven themselves increasingly unwilling to transform it artistically, to relate the viewer to on-screen violence in any other terms than voyeuristic.

The problem is that Vetrimaaran is so committed to a form of seamy, immersive realism that the only way he can depict violence is in terms of its real-world plausibility; the primary effect he aims at is moral outrage. The problem is also that Vetrimaaran has now been overtaken by hacks who have perfected his original method and rendered it highly conventional. You can’t help but laugh or wince when the police in Viduthalai wrest away adults from a hut to leave behind a crying infant. Or when Raghavendar, having stripped a group of women, asks his deputy for chilli powder, kindling the sordid parts of our imagination. With Viduthalai, Vetrimaaran may have voluntarily turned himself into a meme.

Like Asuran, Viduthalai applies a jittery editing to the most basic of conversation scenes, never lingering on the actors for more than a couple of seconds. When, for instance, protagonist Kumaresan and his sweetheart Tamizharasi (Bhavani Sre) are talking at a shrine in the woods, the camera keeps switching perspectives, suggesting inexistent threats. This CCTV-adjacent aesthetic is generalized in Viduthalai, which, while nominally told in Kumaresan’s epistolary voiceover, keeps shifting perspectives for the sake of furnishing additional narrative information. The film treats its actors like non-professionals, rarely providing them close-ups or extended shots outside of kitschy montage songs, because Vetrimaaran seeks to neutralize their performance with heavy dubbing — the same kind of asynchronous mush that made Asuran so jarring — which undermines his otherwise realist approach.

The longer shots in the film, on the other hand, are devoted to passages of extreme physicality. We see Soori running in from deep inside the frame, out of breath, or doing squat walks as part of punishment in unbroken shots. It is plain by now that Vetrimaaran is excited at the prospect of choreographing such convincing scenes of exertion and torture, compared to the simple, mundane presence of bodies talking to one another. It’s as though Vetrimaaran the filmmaker is bored to death by Vetrimaaran the screenwriter, who can’t help but insert political lectures into the mouths of characters or flatter us with snappy, jargon-laden insider talk among top-level police officers.

A number of things nonetheless ensure Viduthalai is never less than absorbing. The inspired casting, for one; to see a tragic hero in the perennial comic Soori not only imparts a dialectical streak to the protagonist, it also affords Vetrimaaran to work out a nurturing, vastly different kind of masculinity than the avenging, star-driven model of Asuran. Flabbier than usual, the middle-aged Soori can hardly pass for a rookie cop, but his naivete and professional disenchantment are never in question. It’s touching to see his unprepared body slip on rocks, jump across rooftops or trudge through a difficult, rocky terrain — a terrain that is transformed into a garden through the power of his love. Despite his omnipresence in Tamil cinema these days, Gautam Menon is excellent as a ruthless officer who is persuaded that winning hearts and minds is the first step to defeating terror (although his character undergoes an inexplicable corruption that gives mixed signals which are never resolved).

Among the most articulate, committed filmmakers of his generation, Vetrimaaran takes obvious pleasure in elucidating ideological processes shaping his narrative. To this end, we have the superintendent of police, played by cinematographer Rajeev Menon (the third director in the cast after Gautam Menon and Tamizh, who plays another policeman), expounding on political strategies such as party-led protests that act as democratic safety valves against armed insurgency, poster campaigns to instil hope in doubtful investors or having decoy militants surrender in a ploy for the police to take moral high ground. If these details don’t make you laugh, they are bound to leave you impressed — just like the flashy, one-shot train wreck that opens the film.

The most compelling aspect of Viduthalai is, however, its final (and only) set-piece which intercuts between the aforesaid scene of Raghavendar humiliating the women and an ununiformed, unarmed Kumaresan running through a maze-like town chasing the rebel leader Perumal (Vijay Sethupathi, who appears after an hour into the film). The sequence intriguingly casts Kumaresan’s courage as a product of desperation, an act of “fleeing forward.” The scene is also rather surprising in the manner in which it pits Kumaresan’s romance not against his allegiance to the police force, as we are led to expect, but against his newfound sympathy for Perumal. In doing so, it approximates the paradox of identification that Visaranai posed insofar as we are caught between a desire to see the cops succeed in capturing Perumal and a profound hatred for them for what they are doing to the captive women.

Viduthalai is, to be sure, an improvement over the slapdash production that was Asuran. It certainly isn’t made with an eye on the box-office, and if it does bomb, which is a likely development, Vetrimaaran would still go to bed a happy man. But the film doesn’t seem to me like an inflection point in his career, for it doesn’t evolve Vetrimaaran’s style as much as harden it, set it in stone. And that’s too unfortunate for a filmmaker who has just begun.

 

March 9, 2023

Thuramukham (2023)

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What struck me first watching Thuramukham, a large-scale period picture about docker struggle in coastal Kerala, is how abstract and timeless it feels. Rajeev Ravi’s fourth feature is certainly set in a specific location and era—the area of Mattanchery in Cochin during the forties and the fifties—but it isn’t until a good while that these particulars come to the fore. Where Rajeev’s previous films establish time and place in their opening minutes, Thuramukham immerses us into a fable-like world that feels untouched by history. When the camera descends into an anonymous settlement of huts in the first shot — one of the film’s many convergences with Bala’s Paradesi (2013) — it’s not even clear if it’s a real space.

Living in this netherworld—a cinematographer’s paradise, with its candlelit rooms and nocturnal action—are dockhands who fight every day for chapas, work permits tossed at them by exploiting contractors, and spend what remains of their wages on alcohol and gambling. Part of Thuramukham traces the evolution of this lumpen mass into a proletariat fighting for its rights, developed through the characters of brothers Moidu (Nivin Pauly) and Hamza (Arjun Ashokan). This vast, generation-spanning narrative arc gives the film an epic sweep comparable to that of Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), on which Rajeev was cinematographer.

The sprawl of the film has another possible source. Rajeev Ravi is a filmmaker with a weakness for classic literature. He gravitates towards stories of individuals swept along by the forces of time. His characters are often passive witnesses of history who, by choice or circumstance, become its protagonists. Thuramukham, written by Gopan Chithambaran and dipping in and out of Russian literature, fissures the leading character of Kammattipaadam (2016) into the figures of Moidu and Hamza, men whose nihilism or passivity renders them victims of history, only to fuse them again in their choice to act.

The monumentality of Thuramukham is only part of the story. What really nuances this testosterone-driven saga, and why I find the film to be a significant departure from Rajeev’s earlier work, is the way it relentlessly balances the epic with the intimate. The world of Thuramukham is very distinctly divided into domestic and public spheres, which respectively translate to feminine and masculine domains of action. Politics is the means by which men look out for one another, while women find solace in each other through shared suffering and mutual care.

The lack of feminine agency in Rajeev’s films has been noted, and I can’t help but feel that Thuramukham is working out an answer to that reproach. At first glance, the film only adds fuel to the fire. Confined to their homes, the women nurture, love and suffer in silence as men get out there to take control of their fates. But, for once, we also see the havoc the men wreak by their actions or inaction. The film reserves its most evocative closeups for its leading women, the terrific Poornima Indrajith and Nimisha Sajayan, whose faces bear the brunt of men’s follies.

So the film responds to the exclusion of women from public sphere by revalorizing the domestic sphere. For one, its political story is couched within an intricate filial narrative in which the class consciousness of the prodigal son coincides with his coming home while that of his brother coincides with his leaving home for the streets. It is also substantial that, unlike its predecessors, Thuramukham ends on the closeup of a woman, one who has been forced to leave her household and mourn in public.

[Originally written for IFFR 2021]

 

February 24, 2023

Karparaa (2023)

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The story of grown-up children feeling burdened by aging parents has been told innumerable times since Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and its more influential Japanese remake in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). Dozens of Indian films, most famously Baghban (2003), have milked the theme of elder abuse for maximum melodramatic effect. Premiering at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Vignesh Kumulai’s Karparaa presents an extreme rarefaction of the premise that swaps moralism for stoic reflection.

At the centre of the film is an elderly couple in rural Tamil Nadu. Both husband (Arumugam) and wife (Sundharathamal) are bedridden and live separately under the care of different children and relatives. Karparaa doesn’t elucidate their relations; instead, it presents vignettes from their everyday life seemingly gathered over a year. We see their guardians attend to them reluctantly: grandsons who wash them like cattle, daughters-in-law who are weary of cooking for them, young ones who would rather be busy with their smartphones on lazy afternoons than take them to the toilet.

We notice the casual cruelty of children aggrieved by unwanted caregiving responsibility. But director Vignesh relegates most of this harshness to the film’s margins to focus on the world around the couple. Vast stretches of Karparaa are devoted to recording the daily activities of the village: men and women tending to cows, feeding chicken, winnowing rice, building canals, harvesting groundnuts, spraying pesticides or taking afternoon naps. These documentary sequences serve to both illustrate the situation of the couple, locked out of any productive labour and therefore becoming a ‘liability,’ and to evoke a sense of life moving on, indifferent to their plight.

The filmmaker reinforces this cosmic perspective through close attention to cycles of nature. Leisurely paced, Karparaa is structured as much by alternating day-and-night sequences as by the changing seasons. Images of animals nurturing their young ones abound—a touch of sentimentalism in an otherwise austere work—most notably a calf butting its head against its mother’s udder. The camera lingers on old, gnarled trees, on the brink of being uprooted, that come to resemble and represent the couple. Repeated appearance of these elements of nature suggests generational cycles, a sign that the next generation will endure the same fate, as will the one after that.

Vignesh was the cinematographer on P.S. Vinothraj’s breakout feature Pebbles (2021), winner of the top prize at IFFR 2021. The muscular, sunburnt cinematography of that work makes way for a subtler approach to colour and movement in Karparaa. Perhaps the most startling aspect of Vignesh’s film is its unflinching examination of frail, aged human bodies in extreme close-ups—a taboo in cinema where such images are associated with abjection and disgust. The manner in which the camera pores over wrinkled skin, silver hair, ocular secretions, toothless jaws chewing betel leaves, unwashed mouths—recalling the street portraiture of Khalik Allah—transforms these faces into landscapes in their own right, fusing human bodies with nature at large.

It is equally noteworthy that, unlike the recalcitrant parents of Make Way for Tomorrow and its successors, the couple in Karparaa lack the physical agency to respond to their predicament. Having withdrawn into themselves due to old age, they hardly talk, react or resist. They become purely external beings, biding their time, waiting for the inevitable. We are made witness to their fading consciousness, to the sordid spectacle of dignity dying a quiet death. Midway, the film breaks this inexorability with a voice-over by the man reminiscing about the past and expressing disappointment at the iniquities of his sons. The couple neither meets, nor expresses a desire to. And yet, as the film arrives at its shattering final minutes, we wonder what they are feeling or thinking even when we know we’ll never know.

 

(First published on Film Companion)

 

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