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June 18, 2010

Ramayana Reloaded

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Review | Tags: a r rahman, Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Govinda, Mani Ratnam, Priyamani, Raavan, Raavan film review, Raavan movie review, Raavan review, Ramayana in films, Samir Chanda, Santosh Sivan, Sreekar Prasad, V. Manikandan, Vikram |
[56] Comments

Men On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown
(Image courtesy: Raavan Official Site)

Towards the end of Mani Ratnam’s long-awaited Raavan (2010), one of the characters looks at the camera and says “You shouldn’t have turned back”. He might well have been talking to the person behind the camera. Raavan is a visual and narrative mess, with lots going for it and even more going against it. What seems to be a major hammering on a minor flash of brilliance has taken over three years to make. There is nothing much about the plot of Raavan that you already haven’t read in your schoolbooks and seen in your televisions. I suggest you read the Wikipedia entry on Ramayana and plug in the actors’ names beside the characters’ yourself. You wouldn’t be very wrong. There are, however, two major changes to the text that writer-director Mani Ratnam has done. One; the back story of Ram has been removed altogether and a new back story for Raavan has been added which attempts to put things in his perspective and to justify his acts. The second and the more important change is that Raavan has been relegated from a higher caste to a lower one. The second change opens up a number of new possibilities given the setting of the film.

Throughout his career, with a few exceptions, Mani Ratnam has been interested in writing stories in which personal drama plays out along and against national affairs and topical issues. Almost all these ‘issues’ that he deals with could be traced to newspaper articles or cover stories (communal riots in the city of Bombay, cross border terrorism in the far east and north, student protests down south, the LTTE, business scams etc.). It is true that there is seldom any rigor in these analyses, but where Mani really scores is in the other layer of these stories, in which he deals with people who are stuck in (or, less frequently, who help create) these social and political upheavals. He seems to be more interested in the lives of these ‘individuals’, without the trappings of any ideology, and the relationship between them. More often than not, these issues have been a pretext for exploring the fears, apprehensions and hopes of these individuals, who seem to be suddenly thrust into these agitations. As a result, the issues themselves stick out like a sore thumb even when they are handled with solemnity (Compare one of these with a film like Alaipayuthey (2000) where he completely de-politicizes the drama to break down the tale to human levels. The result is a completely bourgeois film, but also arguably the director’s most honest work to date).

Another facet of Mani Ratnam’s writing is his fascination with people working on the wrong side of the law. Right from Velu Nayakar, through Deva, Liaqat, Meghna, Inba/Lallan, Gurukanth Desai and up to Beera, all of Mani Ratnam’s central characters have been exploiting legal loopholes and even defying the legal system. All of them have a moral justification for their deeds and, with the probable exception of Inba (one of the director’s best characters, for he is the product of both an ideology and his free will), all these characters have their own definitions of what is objectively good and what is not. And this moral relativism is what they seem to consider as their redemption and it is what redeems them in the audience’s eyes (What makes the character of Velu Nayakar profound is his inability to morally assess this feature of his). Throughout, Mani’s attempt has always been to, if not construct a holistic and unbiased view of the world, recognize the ‘other’ as human and empathize with their situation. A fan might say that Mani is a silent rebel. But the truth remains that Mani Ratnam has always been an armchair liberal. In nearly every one of the cases above, he leaves the issues unresolved, as if they never existed in his film, and the audience unquestioned. He involves himself deep enough so as to raise questions and make us reflect about the state of the nation temporarily, but keeps himself aloof enough to avoid assuming or giving us responsibility.

But that is not to say that he should be resolving these issues and should propose a direction (which would be too much to ask and which runs the risk of making the films propagandistic – a fatal move for a director who works within the establishment), but the least he could do is test our own moral standings and elicit a complex response from us, as did the last Tarantino movie. Mani is a master of bad endings and even he can’t object to that complaint. Everywhere, he has resorted to either indifference or populist didacticism to restore the film to conventional pop-cinema trajectories. A special note must be made for the ending of Yuva/Aayitha Ezhuthu (2004), despite its crudeness, where, for once, the director throws away the armchair and retains the liberalism. That brings us back to Raavan, which sure does imbibe all these traits above. The villagers in the film are obviously based on the Maoist settlements of central and south-eastern India and their leader Beera is a resistance fighter combating the police and armed forces. The plot points are heavily inspired by Operation Green Hunt, but the region of interest for the director, predictably, remains the triangle of characters at its heart. Oh, but there’s also something going on in the background of these characters. For the second time, after his reworking of the Mahabharata in Thalapathy (1991), Mani Ratnam resorts to an existing mythological text for a template.

[Raavan (2010) Trailer]

Mani Ratnam could have been faithful to the text, playing it out in its entirety and stressing and modulating key sections of it to reveal its inherent sexism and chauvinism and, subsequently, investigate how such a flawed text governs our behaviour. Or he could have stuck, as was his style so far, to the Maoist issue alone and examined the tensions underneath. Instead, Mani relocates the Ramayana into this politically charged narrative, making a few key changes for the sake of authenticity, and compromises both possibilities. Many of the characters in Raavan don’t exist for their own sake, but only to play other characters and to complete an existing narrative framework. Now, this isn’t the film’s biggest problem, but for viewers familiar with the text, it goes on to become monotonous and self-parodying. It is also a bit appalling to see a director like Mani Ratnam going for such banal character mapping. The film’s biggest problem is, however, its viewpoint. Now, the point that the film tries to be making is that there is a Ram and Raavan in every one and that it’s only a matter of context that one becomes the hero and the other the villain. But the whole film shows otherwise. There is not one virtue bestowed upon Dev or one vice assigned to Beera (Being an officer in the police force is the only positive thing about Dev, but Ratnam drains that position of any goodness). It’s all still black and white. The film never moves on to the grey area that it claims it is in. This lack of a moral complexity denies the film any real resonance. It is made clear from the very beginning that Beera is the one the audience needs to root for and Dev is the one to be cursed (The casting only worsens the problem, with Abhishek Bachchan being less easier to hate than the newcomer Vikram). Mani does not balance the sides, as is required, he merely swaps them.

However, the film’s redeeming factor lies in the way it sketches these decidedly good and decidedly bad characters. Dev (Vikram) is the icon of a perfect male god. He is macho, sporting a neatly trimmed moustache, well-built, determined and self-assured. But he also seems to be overconfident of his seemingly infallible masculinity to the point of being sexist. His egocentricity defines the world with respect to himself (the camera gyrates around him quite a few times). He considers his wife and his gun to be fairly interchangeable objects which could be used to demonstrate his power. Mani Ratnam floods the mise en scène with phallic symbols when dealing with Dev. Wielding razors, pistols, sunglasses and cigarettes throughout, Dev is the ultimate patriarch who can control the people around him at will. Or so he thinks. This vanity is his biggest vice. And the disillusionment of that masculine vanity is the cause of his fall. Dev seems to be more interested in killing the man who kidnapped his wife than rescuing her or finishing the mission he is assigned. It is the thought that his wife may have found a better man – that his wife’s fantasies might have outgrown his capacities – that frustrates him more than the fact that she is kidnapped. In that respect, Dev has a lot of counterparts in Hollywood including Dr. Harford of Eyes Wide Shut (1999). What Dev is fighting for is, then, his own potency that has been snatched away by this sociopolitical outcast. He can only do this by killing off any man whom his wife may have considered better. And that is what he sets out to do.

Beera (Abhishek Bachchan), on the other hand, lies exactly at the moral and physical midpoint between Ragini and Dev. He is a man who’s more self-aware and empathetic. He has already realized his own limitations as a ‘man’ the moment his sister was snatched away by the police force some time ago (“It was my fault” he says). Unlike Dev, he is a very progressively thinking person and believes in equality. And unlike that Ram, who can not see anything but lies on Ragini’s face, this Raavan trusts her with his life (and his phallic gun, if you will!). But he is also a man on the verge. He could flip over to the other moral side any time soon. His “jealousy” could turn out to be an obsession. Why, he teeters on the boundary between life and death every day. Each one of his ten imaginary heads might be saying a different thing every time. His temptation of avenging his sister by reciprocally violating Ragini is undone by the fact that both Ragini and his sister are merely variations of each other (This implicit aversion towards “miscegenation” in Raavan is but one of the very many narrative, visual and thematic elements that the film shares with The Searchers (1956), a film that is also set at the native frontier and the film that Raavan wants to emulate). These two people who leapt towards death without fear are the only persons who could stand up to Beera and speak. They are the only ones who prevent him from becoming a Dev. This idea of living on the edge is continually underscored by the film’s visual strategy that employs highly expressionistic landscapes. Beera is usually located on a dark cliff beyond which there are only the white waters of death (and redemption?). He is regularly seen straddling dark geographical structures and the white mist-like atmosphere. Even when he is a mysterious, dark, fearful figure, he is associated with harsh light. Samir Chanda’s production design is noteworthy in this regard. Beera’s idea of redemption is a very subjective one and his vindication seems to be in making Dev realize how morally integral he is, despite his caste, and how unethical Dev is, despite his social and legal standing. Of course, for this he throws his political objective to the wind, as does Mani Ratnam.

Ragini (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) is the symbol of moral strength purity in the film. She’s the only character in the film who could safely be called “objectively good” (for one, Aishwarya Rai is significantly fairer than the other two men in the film. Politically incorrect? May be. Cliché? Definitely). In some ways, she is the mirror image of Dev, and surely the better half, and repudiates all that he stands for. She’s the only person in the film who gets to see the full picture. She acts fairly rationally and, unlike the men, knows no class, creed or ideology (Amusingly, she almost exclusively moves vertically within the frame throughout the film – plummeting and ascending, skidding and rising amidst the rocky mountains – as if transcending the rigid ‘horizontal’ notions of class). She knows no fear in front of Beera, for she has nothing to be afraid of, unlike Dev and his entourage. Beera is just an arbitrary terror for her. And this independence of hers is what brings Beera to earth from his demigod status. These are very interesting characters, no doubt, but our response to them remains highly one-dimensional. As a result, the film turns out to be as one-dimensional and biased as the text it wants to deconstruct. And yes, the film that Raavan wants to be has already been made ten years ago. And how!

Rating:

March 20, 2010

Band Of Insiders

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Review | Tags: Aditya Chopra, Amit Sial, Anshuman Jha, Bollywood, Dibakar Banerjee, Film about films, Love Sex and Dhoka, Love Sex aur Dhoka, Love Sex aur Dhoka film review, Love Sex aur Dhoka movie review, Love Sex aur Dhoka review, Raj Kumar Yadav |
[24] Comments

Through The Rear Window
(Image courtesy: BigOye.com)

Let’s not make wrong assumptions. Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) is not an experimental film, although it is considerably avant-garde in comparison to the existing norms of Bollywood, with its premise, non-professional casting, sound design and somewhat non-conformist grammar. The promos may have given one the idea that it is a film that works in ultra-Brechtian mode. Far from that, the film doesn’t ever breach the fourth wall, thanks to its choice of making the film appear entirely subjective (It actually isn’t as is revealed by certain shots). Another misconception the promotional ads might have given birth to is that Banerjee’s film is highly agenda-driven. This was my biggest fear too, that Banerjee might be presenting an extended, dressed-up message pertaining to mass media and reality TV. Thankfully, not considering its minor flights into Madhur Bhandarkar-ness, the film eschews making any overt statement and lets the implication of its choices speak for itself. Banerjee uses a number of clever and not-so-clever tricks to make the film straddle the zones of populist and experimental cinema, the brilliant and the banal and art and entertainment. But, perhaps, the best part about the whole venture is that it stands witness to the fact that it isn’t just because of the star or studio system that our cinema is in such a poor shape. And that good cinema can well be produced under shoestring budgets.

Love, Sex Aur Dhokha presents three stories, running for about 40 minutes each, each of which is introduced by an apt B-movie title, suggesting the highly fictional and staged nature of the segments to follow. Indeed, each of the three stories amounts to some form of performance or the other. The first segment gives us a student filmmaker, Rahul (Anshuman Jha), who idolizes Aditya Chopra and is trying to complete his diploma film that takes off from his mentor’s much loved Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). The second part tells the story of a retail store manager, ironically named Adarsh (Raj Kumar Yadav), who is terribly pressed for money and plans to break through, not without much hesitation, by rigging up a sex scandal. And the third section gives us a television reporter, Prabhat (Amit Sial), and his aide, whom he saves from suicide, trying to blow the cover of a vulgar pop-star by setting up a sting operation. Banerjee uses the oldest trick of the new millennium to tie the three disparate stories together, using overlapping narratives and intersecting references and conversations, whose artificiality shows up at a few places, but not so much as to make the choice seem completely inorganic. In all three segments, there is at least one diegetic camera recording all the events – of Rahul’s professional camera, the CCTC cameras and Prabhat’s spy-cam – whose footage Banerjee splices and slices to form a seamless narrative.

The first segment, at first glance, seems cut off thematically from the other two. However, gradually, it reveals itself as a gateway to the other two segments, which starkly diverge from the idea the first one presents. Rahul, like the bumbling duo of Ishqiya (2010), does not understand the difference between life and art. He believes that life can proceed the same way as one of his mentor’s movies. He tries to port Bollywood culture on to his life – scribbling his beloved’s name on trees, eloping with friends’ help a la Saathiya (2002) and making late night phone calls to surprise his sweetheart. One even wonders if his real name is Rahul or if it is another one of his lame attempts at merging life with pop art. In other words, he does not realize that his life is the exact negation of the film he is making. A cut from the smiling face of Shruti within the film gives way to the image of her crying in reality. A scene in Rahul’s film is interrupted by a similar incident happening in real life. Shruti’s father turns out to be far from the generous father in his film. Rahul films his life 24×7, in order to send it to his idol some day, with a belief that it is as fairytale-like as the films he likes (there is even a kiss scene in this section that is severed from the frame in a manner characteristic of Bollywood). Rahul, eventually, pays the price for not understanding the vast chasm that exists between reality and its popular representation, an instance of which he is creating as his diploma project (I don’t understand why Banerjee feels the need to exaggerate the film within the film so much to emphasize this dichotomy. Comic relief, maybe).

[LSD Trailer]

Having established the disjunction between truth and its representation, Banerjee’s film attempts to explore the ethics of representation in the second segment of the film. Banerjee bases this part of the film fittingly in a supermarket – the temple of commodification and commerce. Characters, especially the two women in this segment, are almost always filmed standing amidst aisles filled with FMCG products, wearing clothing that is as colourful as the products themselves. One person in the mall tells us how commercially profitable the CCTV is, citing the hefty amount of money that the footage of a shootout brought. Welcome to the world of consumer capitalism, where violence and sex are commodities to be proliferated, packaged, advertised and sold. The moral conflict that Adarsh is presented with, when he has the option of switching off the CCTV system, is the quintessential moral question underlying capitalism – just how far will you go? In fact, the target is capitalism in all three segments of the film. Only that it is indicted through its powerful agents – mass media and Bollywood. Adarsh himself is a more polished and less addicted version of Rahul in the way he is unable to comprehend the difference between reality and its representation (and, hence perhaps, the gravity and possible consequences of his moral choice). In a cheeky homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), Adarsh gloriously “performs”, in true Bollywood fashion, a fake death stunt while he frets when an actual shootout follows. The sex scene itself is filmed head on and plays out between the storeroom shelf and a curtain suggestive of a theatrical performance.

Following this segment on the ethics of representation, Banerjee takes up the tautological (and Godardian) question of representation of ethics. This third section of the film, which deals with a sting operation performed by a private news network, is, on paper, the richest segment of the film for it’s the most morally ambiguous of the three. Morally ambiguous because, unlike the other two segments, we just aren’t able to embrace any particular side or character here. The pop-star’s activities may be highly questionable and even downright immoral, but so are the methods of the news network. Each character in this segment is prostituting himself/herself in one way or the other (Of course, here too, the punching bag is capitalism). Only that the news network, the self-proclaimed keeper of truth and justice, seems licensed to do it. More than acting as a medium of announcement, this news network, as in reality, likes to work as a moral police, telling its people what is ethically right, what is wrong, when to be enraged at someone and when to cheer for some lame event. There is apparently no difference between what the news network editor does and what Adarsh does. However, there is a ray of hope that is presented in this segment in the form of (again, the aptly named) Prabhat, the least unethical person in the film and the alter ego of the director himself perhaps, who refuses to hand over any of the footage that he has shot, sacrificing fame and money for integrity.

Of course, Banerjee’s film isn’t as consistent and ambitious in presenting us with such moral ambiguity. The characters in the first two segments are mostly black and white and we are told beforehand whom to root for and whom to curse. But as such, the film has a set of ethics (evident from its editing pattern), close to that of Prabhat’s, which it staunchly adheres to, even to the point of flaunting it. The possibly sensational sex scene is dimly lit and choreographed at a considerable distance from the camera that it is completely de-eroticized. So is the case with the murder in the first segment. In all three segments, reality is manipulated to a large extent for the sake of representation – Rahul’s film, the MMS clip and the sting operation footage – with a profit motive. Although the titular love, sex and betrayal form the prime motifs in the first, second and third segments respectively, it is clear that all three elements run though all the three sections of the film in a manner that betrays much cynicism about cinema. This cynicism towards such an important medium by a filmmaker is certainly off-putting until Banerjee presents the warm epilogue to the film, where a young girl wields the camera and charmingly interviews the various characters of the film. Yes, Banerjee does seem to recognize the power of cinema in preserving life’s most precious and fleeting moments, to convert them into art and preserve them for eternity.

Rating:

February 2, 2010

Ishqiya: A Revision

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Review | Tags: Arshad Warsi, Babban, Bollywood, Bollywood Western, curry western, feminism in Bollywood, feminism in cinema, Ishqiya, Ishqiya film review, Ishqiya movie review, Ishqiya review, Khalujaan, Krishna, Naseeruddin Shah, Vidya Balan, Vishal Bhardwaj |
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So, for the second time, the Pharisees
summoned the man who had been blind and said:
“Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner.”
“Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,”
The man replied.
“All I know is this:
Once I was blind and now I can see.”

Right after I posted my epic fail review of Ishqiya, bits and pieces of the film started to sink in. Many of the film’s odd choices seemed to gain a significance of their own and, before I knew it, like those clichéd second act endings, they all fell in place, presenting a whole new perspective to the film. Out of the dozen reviews I’ve read of the film, only my friend Satish Naidu’s review seemed to hit the right notes. I strongly recommend reading his review if you’ve seen the film. And yes, spoilers here too (Well, there isn’t really much in the movie that you can’t guess beforehand).

There is a post script, in Ishqiya, to the kidnap set piece where Krishna, amidst a serious argument between Babban and Khalujaan, drives the car away leaving them gaping. She might well be driving away the film there, for Ishqiya, more than anything, is about the resistance to a male view of a world by a female perspective. Ishqiya is a Western alright, with its war-torn landscape leaving no other philosophy to exist other than “might is right”. But that really doesn’t give anyone a license to call it a man’s world. The story unfolds, primarily, in the point of view of the two men, but, rather than being protagonists with clear cut objectives, they are frames of reference – a telescope – using which we view and, unfortunately, try to ‘solve’ Krishna, that obscure object of desire. Yes, they are characters of considerable depth, but they are also, ultimately, peripheral. A quick note, to begin with, about the casting of the film which seems to me like a stroke of brilliance. We have here Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi, men who have rarely been the flawless heroes, who have made a career out of bumbling and imperfect protagonists. They automatically bring into the movie with them flawed male visions that belong to two different generations. Krishna is played by Vidya Balan, who has had a popular image that could well pass off as an icon of the chaste Indian female. This incongruity between what appears and what is, which defines the whole of Ishqiya, is only furthered by this distance between Balan’s image and Krishna.

Babban and Khalujaan are closer to Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) than any other film character I can think of. These men are (con-) artists too, like Doinel, as exemplified in their introduction scene, where Babban tricks Mushtaq with his story and flees with the money. Like Truffaut’s character, who spent a lifetime wondering if women were magic, these men can understand the opposite sex only in terms of art or, in this case, popular cinema (where Krishna is aptly photographed like being frozen in a film frame). It is only through popular film songs that these characters are able to even express their emotions. Khalujaan may make numerous mistakes in his real life, but never does he get the composer of a song wrong. Babban believes dressing up as a movie star will help him woo the girl. As noted earlier, these are men of flesh and blood. They are deeply flawed and they realize their limitations. Babban drags back Khalujaan from his macho, decidedly Western romanticism of taking Mushtaq head-on, as if reminding him that this genre movie is no place for them. In Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West (1968), Frank (Henry Fonda), upon being asked if he is a businessman, says: “Just a man”. Like Frank, these two crooks understand every shade of men and their behavioral patterns, no matter what age group they belong to. However, for these men, like Frank, women just can’t fall in any category other than in the binary setup of the mother and the whore (Khalujaan tells Krishna that he can’t tell whether she is an angel or a courtesan) that popular cinema has given them.

But Chaubey doesn’t give a comic tinge to his characters as much Truffaut does. Yes, they do deliver those funny lines, but they are serious men. They have their own issues. Babban, also true to Bollywood morality, does not want Khalujaan to sully his mother’s name. Khalujaan, on the other hand, takes his past seriously too, through his possibly deceased (possibly non-extant) sweetheart. He really does believe that he can settle down in life. But these are not their mistakes. They are, after all, real men with real emotions and problems. These are not caricatures that we can disregard easily. In any other film, they could have been the backbone of fine drama. Their real mistake, however, is in believing that they are the only ones with problems, that they are the film. The sin of these flawed men is in believing that the woman they fall for would be unflawed. Krishna driving away the car should have given them a clue. But, products of a patriarchal society and cinema that they are, they never realize that. In fact, the whole film is built upon such male perspectives that see nothing more than what they want to see. Krishna’s husband chooses a male-dominated caste war over his wife’s love. Mushtaq prefers to keep his wife as a mere voice heard over a telephone like a horoscope (announced by a Bollywood ring tone, of course). For KK, the fidelity of the male is nothing more than a small joke. Even we, the children fed on the stereotypes of Bollywood, attempt only to classify Krishna into rigid adjectives – femme fatale, all-powerful, resilient, gutsy, seductive – whereas she may be as vulnerable as the men around her.

The key is the scene where Krishna meets her husband once again. She breaks down, for the first time in the movie, revealing her vulnerability. She stands there, with her motives exposed, being emotionally hit. All this while she had been toying along with the two conmen, for she was far assured of her modus operandi. She offers tea for the man who gives her a better kidnap plan, only to deliberately fire the other one up. Krishna, in the scene in which she sleeps with Babban, clearly reveals that she is only exploiting this lucky situation that has come her way for her own good and with the assurance that and that the plan is on track. Not now. The petty goons are all down now. It’s now man on man, so to speak. It’s the only showdown this revisionist Western will have (My genre-addicted mind would have liked a couple more extreme close-ups). Film critic Baradwaj Rangan, perceptive as always, notes that Krishna is essentially an updated version of Jill (Claudia Cardinale) in Once Upon a Time in the West. That, I guess, is the only kind of classification that Krishna can be subjected to. The strongest point of the movie is that it does not try to define her or push her into a single zone of existence in which she may be only be moral, immoral or amoral. She, like many of us, could well be straddling all three. What we may be having here, far from being a character study, is personal cinema in which the writer and director are sharing our own inability to understand Krishna, and by the fact that she is the only woman in the film (not considering the old woman, who might well be an aged Krishna), women in general.

We, the audience, on the other hand, are frustrated like Khalujaan because of this inability to break her down into stereotypes. When she sucks the blood out of Babban’s thumb, one is tempted to jump the gun and label her a vamp. But she might just be using another lucky opportunity there, to strengthen her chances of pulling off the kidnap. Or may be not. Krishna defies identification, which we have all been accustomed to, through standard templates reserved for women in Bollywood which, in turn, are derived from popular mythological figures. She might be sharing herself with many men, taking turns, but she is far from the ultra-faithful Draupadi that her name means. She might appear to be pining for her beloved, a la Meera, as she sings, but that pining is for something else altogether. She is like Savitri too, but she prefers dragging back her husband to death (Death and Krishna being the two people he tricked) rather than the usual way. In the final scene, she merely attempts to restore back a reality that wasn’t. When she faces her husband again, she might well have paraphrased that legendary Bresson line: “I’d rather prefer you leaving me for the love of another woman than for what you call your intellectual life“. And when Babban watches her undress, there is not only the distance of voyeuristic cinema between them, but also this literal wound of Krishna’s past, which only breaks out during the final confrontation, that adds one more layer of enigma for Babban, and consequently us.

It is the opening and closing scenes, or even shots, that really tie the movie together. The film opens with a male perspective, fading out of black, with Krishna on the bed in a reclining, arguably sexist pose. She appears nothing short of a magical being, which is an opinion only the male could have here (Let’s stick to straight orientations for now). And it is a pose that typifies the attractive woman in Bollywood cinema. From this point on, the film’s male perspective, our own “male” perspective and the Bollywood perspective get tied together. And the film closes, literally, with another male point-of-view. Here, Mushtaq watches the three walk away through the lens of his sniper gun. Khalujaan and Babban walk happily, perhaps with the idea that they’ve understood Krishna and one of them will “get the girl”. What they don’t understand is that the real trouble begins after this (This real-drama-begins-after-the-end-credits-roll facet of Ishqiya is one of the reasons why I was reminded of that Almodóvar film whose title I borrowed for the review). Their belief that they will return to a more conventional cinema zone, in which women are easily deconstructed, may well be shattered the next minute by Krishna. As the film presents a POV shot of Mushtaq watching them through the lens, the black circle closes in on the three, thereby ending the film simultaneously through our perspective, Mushtaq’s and in a manner unique to classical feel-good cinema. Chaubey’s film is cynical in a way. It breaks into a new world from within a undoubtedly male world of Bollywood and, at the end, restores that new world back to its obscured state. It unveils the groundbreaking Krishna through a male vision and, then, locks her back using the same, as if suggesting that popular cinema, itself included, will never understand “the woman“. Well, that acknowledgment is a start.

January 30, 2010

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Review | Tags: Arshad Warsi, Babban, Bollywood, Bollywood Western, curry western, feminism in Bollywood, Ishqiya, Ishqiya film review, Ishqiya movie review, Ishqiya review, Khalujaan, Krishna, Naseeruddin Shah, Vidya Balan, Vishal Bhardwaj |
[25] Comments

Once Upon A Time In The North
(Image courtesy: NDTV)

Thanks to debutant filmmaker Abhishek Chaubey (who shares the writing credits of Kaminey (2009)), I’ve been able to watch a film that is absolutely unprovocative, after a long time. As the end credits rolled, I walked out of the cinema hall trying to recollect what felt like a distant memory, like the story of a film that a friend had recited when you were half asleep. Chaubey’s Ishqiya (2010) is a film that exists in some kind of a cinematic void, with only barebones of a relationship with its predecessors. Chances are that you’ll be pleasantly surprised if you thought the film would stink and disappointed if you expected too much from it. I fear that even if I toss a coin to find my stance regarding the film, it would land on its edge. What can you really say about a film that’s got a set of aesthetics tangible enough to arouse interest and uneven enough to restore your smugness, characters quirky enough to hold your attention and set pieces inefficient enough to allow you to not give a damn about them and a knowledge of cinema that’s impressive enough to tease us with the film’s choices and unambitious enough to not go all the way? Ishqiya is a film that seems to have landed, with considerable luck, smack dab in the eye of a cyclone whereby the film neither attracts nor repels, but just sits, like Bill Murray, in a vacuum. OK, this is getting too abstract.

Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and his nephew, Babban (Arshad Warsi), are two small time crooks who hit the road after getting their hands on a hefty sum of money. With nowhere to run for cover, they, somehow, land up in a village near the city of Gorakhpur where they find refuge at the residence of an old acquaintance, hoping to cross the national border into Nepal. After putting up with some dodging by their hostess, Krishna (Vidya Balan), they come to know that the man they have come here seeking has been long dead. By a tragic turn of events and the inevitable need to proceed to the second act, the money they’ve been carrying around gets pinched just as the duo get tracked down by the true owner of the money. With one last chance given, the pair, working on a plan charted out by Krishna, decide to kidnap a big shot in the city and make enough money to pay back the stolen sum and to settle down for life. But then, both of them eat the forbidden fruit as they fall for Eve – Krishna – who, in turn, does not give a clear indication to either one of them. To get a clearer sense of the film’s script, take Mani Ratnam’s Thiruda Thiruda (1993, co-written by Ram Gopal Varma, whose film Rann, incidentally, opens this week and ) and strip down all its grand set pieces, action genre elements and ensemble cast. Bland? Yes.

The central conceit of Ishqiya seems to be that of a Western. The literally explosive opening sets the tone for the tale that’s going to unfold in this outwardly serene yet war-torn land. Speaking of war-torn lands, there are far too few shots of the landscape of the village which is really sad, for what’s a Western without the Wild West?! Apart from this basic glitch, you have broad syntax of the Western more or less intact. There are the typical outsiders – two of them, in this case – who enter a completely alien townscape and find themselves trapped in the local gang wars. These are perfect “road people” that we are talking about. Then there’s Vishal Bhardwaj’s Ennio Morricone-esque score that does a whole lot of good to the film. There’s even an ending where the triumphant “lone rangers” ride off into the sunset. But the fatal blow to this attempt at a wonderful transposition of a foreign genre into an indigenous landscape is dealt by the largely inept development of the protagonists. Let’s make no mistake about this. The Western genre has always been, primarily, about morality, about the need to hold a moral ground in an amoral and hostile environment and about the validity of one’s own moral standing (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) – it’s all taken apart, right in the title!), thanks to which they retain a timeless, philosophical quality. Ishqiya, unfortunately, turns a blind eye to this requirement.

The lead characters here, on the other hand, are presented with no formidable moral choices at all. If I remember correct, there are exactly two points in the film where Khalujaan has to make a moral decision (the same goes for Babban, who isn’t much different, although we are led to believe otherwise, early in the film). The first is when he is asked to take part in a kidnapping and the second, when he is asked by Babban to kill Krishna. In both cases, Chaubey cuts away too quickly, sacrificing quality drama to carry forward the plot. This moral imbalance is only furthered by the presence of the most important and well rounded character in the film, Krishna, who, thank heavens, for once, does not advertise her moral universe using monologues or outbursts. She constructs her own moral fabric wherein she does not make a fuss about kidnapping a man to get what she wants. Here’s a married woman who does not mind seducing two men simultaneously as long as it helps her purpose (It’s not for nothing that her name is Krishna). She doesn’t flinch one bit to knock off her beloved husband just because he had ditched her earlier. So we have the all-powerful Krishna, who can go any length to get what she wants, on one side of the see-saw and the pair of charlatans, who are ready to even lick boots for survival, on the other. Right there, the moral tension is lost and film turns away from being character-driven, which is how it starts out as, to, sadly, being plot-driven.

[Ishqiya Trailer]

There’s really no problem with that except when you don’t provide any emotional anchor to root for a character (I’m going old school just because the mode of discourse Ishqiya adopts is generic). What happens here, as a result, is that we are only indifferent to the very many actions and gestures unfolding on screen. Consider the sequence where Krishna holds the duo hostages for one last time. This moment is followed by the duo tricking Krishna and getting the pistol back from her. Genre grammar tells us that dramatic tension should be cranked up when at least one of the parties is in power. No. We just don’t give a damn and wait for the next plot point. We don’t feel anything when Babban slaps Krishnaa following this. Why? May be because we never really sided with any of these characters. Only Naseeruddin Shah, with his characteristic quirks and improvisation, adds some flavor to Khalujaan. But even his character is presented with no real challenge in the script and, instead, is made to move along with the plot. Neither are our sentiments with the pivotal Krishna, who is but another instance of the militant brand of feminists “New Bollywood” cinema has been endorsing for some time now. In an attempt to break away from the stereotype of the divine, chaste female who sacrifices herself for her man, these films have resorted to the opposite end of the spectrum where the woman is the ultimate destroyer, which, I think, is equally questionable.

There is something very strange and intriguing, not necessarily bad, about all these characters in Ishqiya. Take the two crooks, Khalujaan and Babban, who, although played by stars, aren’t really heroes or even brave men. All they desire is to survive and, if possible, get the girl (Heck, they start their journey from the grave they have dug for themselves!). They do not wish to outwit the owner of the money they’ve stolen from. They don’t attempt to exploit the gang war for their benefit or for anyone’s (These are not Yojimbos!). They don’t carry out the kidnapping successfully. Why, they even require the help of a bumbling police force and an old woman to pull off the final stunt. These are truly flawed characters. All this takes these characters away from genre cinema, which Ishqiya seems to gleefully build upon, towards realism. In fact, call it the irony of Bollywood cinema, these characters seem so multi-dimensional when they are supposed to play cardboards. Even Krishna’s husband, who is allotted not more than ten screen minutes, feels true to life (and is, sadly, played ‘realistically’!). It is as if these real-life characters have been nudged into a genre movie after being given a brief and asked to improvise their way out of it (opposite of what Tarantino generally does). This does sound really interesting, but it never really amounts to anything. The actual triumph, in fact, comes in the form of a minor character – the owner of the stolen money – who is, probably, the only character who knows where he is and, thankfully, gets to close the film.

The first half hour is perhaps when the film is at its finest, with the relationship between characters being established using well choreographed compositions, and where the feminist stance of the film is at its most commendable. Early on, when both the audience and the two men are struggling to understand what kind of a person Krishna is, she is, fittingly, photographed almost exclusively behind bars, through doorways and within closed structures, as if she’s dodging analysis. We are even led to believe that she is like Meera, but it turns out that she’s far from a woman who pines for her man who’s gone away (This Meera doesn’t mind two more men meanwhile!). And at the end of the film, she’s seen out in the vast open walking peacefully with these two men, with nothing to hide. However, this attention to composition isn’t always consistent and the film, for most of its runtime, loses track of its own aesthetics. This kind of tapering off of intensity is visible within separate set pieces of the film too. What start out as a gritty genre pieces end up nowhere. The kidnap set piece, to cite one example, begins with standard thriller procedures but, eventually, moves towards deadpan comedy wherein it’s the common public that carries out the kidnap. This kind of attempt to work from within and, then, out of genre templates may have been intentional on part of Chaubey, but it doesn’t exactly give a whack. It doesn’t really hurt the film either. The film, somehow, seems to neutralize itself. Go stare at it if you want.

Rating: Whatever

December 19, 2009

Pandora Mon Amour

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Hollywood, Review | Tags: Avatar, Avatar and the Vietnam War, Avatar film review, Avatar movie review, Avatar review, Colonel Quaritch, Giovanni Ribisi, Grace Augustine, Jake Sully, James Cameron, James Horner, Na'vi, Pandora, Parker Selfridge, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Starship Troopers, Stephen Lang |
[36] Comments

And Herzog Laughed... (Image Courtesy: Impawards)

James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is a masterpiece. It’s a movie that is epic in its scope and groundbreaking in its techniques. James Cameron is one of the most imaginative minds in Hollywood today and, in Avatar, he presents us a whole new universe so rich in detail and so endlessly inventive that one can’t help but surrender to the magic of the film. But more than being just an exciting movie experience, it provides us with so many profound subtexts that will have you ruminating long after you leave the cinema hall. Avatar is not just the special summer blockbuster, it is a scathing satire about man’s plundering of his environment, a parable about the conflict between nature and machines and the inevitable victory of the former, an appeal for conservation of diversity and a trenchant exploration of human greed and its consequences.

Ya, right. Now, the review:

James Cameron’s Avatar is a summation of all that’s wrong about Hollywood cinema. The only difference between James Cameron and the teenage fanboy who never misses out on any summer action movie is that Cameron has got the money. Endlessly exploitative, determinedly commercial, cinematically incompetent and morally dishonest, Avatar makes the films of Michael Bay seem like Martin Scorsese’s. At least in Michael Bay’s movies, like any other low-budget B-movie, one gesture of honesty shines through – that the people behind the camera are merely trying to make a living, by whatever means possible. With these movies, you at least know that everything is manipulated and put together with little creativity to sell and earn something. Unlike self-proclaimed artists like Spielberg and Cameron, these directors know their scope and are satisfied with sticking to what they do best (Can you imagine Bay making a Holocaust movie? Neither can he). Cameron returns to the screen after 12 long years, following Titanic (1997), to make this tepid genre movie and one only wonders if he was too immersed in his “research” to keep up with the pace of Hollywood in these dozen years.

The plot? Not a new one at all. The year is 2154 and it is a fact that humans have set foot on an exotic planet called Pandora inhabited by a race called Na’vi. They are here to mine some very valuable minerals and take them back home. But alas, the Na’vi are not willing to relocate and make way for the American mining company SecFor, headed by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), that has set up a base in Pandora. The company has two schools of action. One, led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), believes in learning the Na’vi culture, becoming friends with them and proceeding with peaceful negotiations for the relocation. The other, headed by Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), believes in brute force and has already mustered up enough arms to blow up the planet. Now, a disabled marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is transferred to the station and he has to act as the bodyguard (using a different body, of course) to the peaceful group as they move about in Pandora, condescending on Na’vi kids and hugging trees. But then, he discovers that he is the brave soul that the Na’vi are looking for. And all of a sudden, he becomes everyone’s hero. Knocking about in Grace’s camp, reporting to Lang and bonding with the Na’vi, Sully’s life is only all too good for him until the day, well, it isn’t.

Avatar is a conformist film. It acknowledges, reinforces and perpetuates every myth that the popular media has created and disseminated throughout the world. Mixing all possible ethnic and gender stereotypes, Cameron creates an alien race that seems just like the human race, living in perennial Halloween (Yes, there are the token Japanese, Indian and black American characters too). The Na’vi are modeled on oriental and African types of Hollywood – tall, lanky and with large nostrils and broad nasal bones. All their women have hourglass structures and the men, six packs. Their English accent and exotic religious practices are clearly those of the African clans or Asian settlements that Hollywood gives us. Not only does Cameron anthropomorphize aliens (which is only expected from popular cinema), but gives them the stock status of the noble tribe who live by strict Victorian morals and exist in harmony with nature with their simple desires and dreams. Furthermore, their emotional pattern is same as ours (surprise, surprise) with all the popular notions of love, sacrifice and fraternity intact. James Horner’s score suffuses the soundtrack with quintessential African chorus and ethnic vocals, the likes of which one can find in those movies about Tibet or Uganda. What next – a MacDonald’s outlet in Pandora? James Cameron’s film may have attempted to make some larger than life statements about imperialism, but, in the end, it is Cameron who turns out as the cultural imperialist.

This attempt by the script to overreach and make broad political statements is what really kills Avatar. Remove the 380 million dollar cover of the film and you will find a B War movie chuckling beneath. Avatar regularly tries to call our attention to the parallel it strikes with the WW2 and the Vietnam War (One character calls the Na’vi “blue monkeys” in the bushes and another wants to blow up a crater on the Pandora surface that generations will remember. Oh, how subtle). The sheath it uses to cover its shallow liberal messages is as deep as thin ice. And the movie harnesses every possible chance to demonize these characters who want to plunder the resources of Pandora at any cost. Is this a gesture of introspection or self-criticism? No, it’s fake repentance. Avatar still remains a film that upholds the political ethics of America and continues the streak of white man’s victory in an alien land. Look how Cameron has the handful of guys in the film, who apparently want to negotiate peacefully with the Na’vi, side with the natives and take up arms all of a sudden (as if they didn’t see this coming) and, in effect, segregates the “good” Americans from the “evil” ones. By alienating one set of Americans by intense caricaturing and observing the other with considerable empathy, Cameron successfully preserves the popular morality of the American armed forces, wherein the just alone shall be rewarded. It still takes the leadership of a white man and the martyrdom of a few others to defeat evil forces. Now, why in Pandora couldn’t the Na’vi kick all the imperialist butts by themselves in the first place?

In Starship Troopers (1997), a film that I don’t really care much for, Verhoeven avoids most of these pitfalls as he stretches the film’s campy nature all the way to leverage the resultant the absurdity to make his statement. But no. Cameron wants us to engage emotionally with the characters – with these shallow characters. Complete with the corniest of lines, which are at least three decades old for Hollywood, each character in the film is a cliché. The American dude, the geeky systems engineer, the savage colonel, the resolute female scientist, the brave and virtuous native girl and her tough suitor are all familiar to us now and not one of them has any depth (No, not because I saw the film in 2D). Only rarely are the characters aware of the same (Weaver seems to be consciously reprising her character from the Alien quadrilogy), but Cameron kills of any such cinematic joy immediately. Not just the characters, each body gesture, each conflict, each set piece and each emotional conversation falls on predictable lines, as in ordinary animation films. One can actually spot the precise points where the first and second acts end. Unlike Peter Jackson’s Rings trilogy or even the Warcraft series of games, Avatar just doesn’t have meaty literature or memorable characters to build upon and nudge us into a complete new world. And did someone say that Cameron was a visual storyteller? For most part, instead of simple on-screen text, Avatar’s story is told to us through unbelievable conversations between characters where they sum up situations and emotions (Parker has to remind grace about their mission even after years of working in Pandora). Avatar could have well served as a commentary about internet culture, where one can assume a whole new personality and lead a whole new life, where one can try to undo all the wrong moves he/she might have done in real life and which, like cinema, is a zone of wish-fulfillment. But the film sets its gaze elsewhere.

Suspending all my complaints about the shallow and pretentious script and considering Avatar as an uncomplicated genre movie does not help either. One strong point for the movie seems to be the exhilarating experience and the visual inventiveness the film supposedly offers. But there, too, Cameron’s movie seems utterly deficient (I have only seen the film in 2D, but I do believe that 3D, unless used for Brechtian causes, is purely a gimmick). Cameron sticks to tried and tested genre grammar and compositions which are far from the breakthrough that the film is being hailed as. The diagonally descending camera as the characters commute, the arcing shots when a CG delicacy unfolds, the handheld through the woods or even the sudden exposure of vast, open spaces are all tools exploited and killed many times over right from the Indiana Jones (Spielberg, now there is a visually inventive director) to the Transformers series. A lot of times, I felt, Cameron sacrifices composition for cheap 3D jolts (the arrow has to hit you some time in the movie, that’s the basic), which one can identify easily in the two dimensional version too. His cuts serve the purpose of hiding CG defects than to provide a new way of depicting action. Then, there is Cameron’s excessive use of close ups of the Na’vi that seem like moves to show off character design (the science behind which is indeed praiseworthy). These are shots that cry out for technical attention and which will be, without doubt, played endlessly in technical conferences and in the DVD extras where the makers would explain how they used “emotion capture” to create the Na’vi out of the actors and how they had to design separate jaw and dental systems for the creatures (Yes, I’m taking about you, Mr. Button). Mr. Cameron, we are the audience, not the auditors. You need not justify your budget within your film.

Let the fanboy bashing begin!

Verdict:

December 6, 2009

Stranger Than Paradise

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Review | Tags: Art in film, Arthur Rimbaud, Bill Murray, Christopher Doyle, Eugenio Cabarello, film and other arts, Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbas, Independent cinema, Isaach De Bankolé, Jean-François Stévenin, Jim Jarmusch, John Hurt, Last Year at Marienbad, Le Mepris, Lone Man, Molecules, Paz de la Huerta, The Lady From Shanghai, The Limits of Control, The Limits of Control film review, The Limits of Control movie review, The Limits of Control review, Tilda Swinton, Yukih Kudoh |
[12] Comments

Last Year in Jarmuschabad
(Image Courtesy: Impawards)

If I had to resort to one of those crude movie equations to describe Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009), it would have to be “Quentin Tarantino minus the hyperkinetics”. Studded with a plethora of movie references, Jarmusch’s movie is a film buff’s dream, literally. In some ways, Jarmusch is like Pedro Almodóvar, who has been consistently accused of being apolitical in his movies (Is it a mere coincidence that The Limits of Control is based and shot in Spain?). But a little investigation shows that the very nature of Almodóvar’s films – with their explicitness of ideas and visuals – reinforces the difference between contemporary Spain and Francoist Spain and, in the process, draws a portrait of a country that has come a long way since those oppressive years. Jarmusch’s cinema, too, does not exist in vacuum. With their plotless scripts and unhurried pacing, his movies are the perfect antidote to the summer blockbuster of Hollywood. These films have been relentlessly repudiating Hollywood’s ideas of filmmaking and its mantras for success through the years. However, with this movie, Jarmusch establishes himself as the absolute antithesis of the industry-driven cinema of America. It is almost as if Jarmusch believes that he exists only because an entity called Hollywood exists – a kinship like the one between The Joker and Batman. Hollywood and Jarmusch, it seems, complete each other. In that sense, not only is The Limits of Control Jarmusch’s most political movie, it is also his most personal and most complete film.

The Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) dresses in snazzy formal clothing and meets up with two men at an airport, one of whom speaks Spanish and the other translates. The conversation is completely tangential to the mission briefing, which seems like some illegal job, possibly an assassination. He listens to them keenly, gets up and leaves. Cut to Madrid. In the city, he visits art galleries daily before retiring for the day at the local restaurant, where he orders two espressos in separate cups. He is, of course, waiting for Violin (Luis Tosar), who, like all the other agents in the film, exchanges matchboxes with him. The Lone Man draws out a piece of paper from his matchbox, which has some kind of codes written on it. He memorizes them and eats the paper. A day or few later, he has a rendezvous with a blonde woman (Tilda Swinton). The matchbox routine is followed. This time the matchbox contains a bunch of diamonds, which the Lone Man hands over to the woman (Paz De La Huerta) who has been staying with him in his hotel room. He leaves Madrid and on the next train meets up with an oriental woman, Molecules (Youki Kudoh), who has her own scientific, religious and philosophical theories to tell him. After the matchbox ritual, he checks into the hotel at Seville. There, he attends a dance rehearsal and meets Guitar (John Hurt) who tries to derive the etymology of the word “Bohemian” and hands him over a priceless guitar. Lone Man leaves the town. On the way to his next destination, where he would meet a Mexican (Gael García Bernal), he snips off one of the guitar strings that he will soon use to assassinate an important man. Make what you will of this weird plot, but you can’t blame the film for what it does not have. Jarmusch has written and directed the movie exactly the way he wants it to be.

The Limits of Control continues to explore one of the director’s favorite questions – How aloof can a man be from his surroundings? Till this film, this idea was most manifest in Ghost Dog (1999) (which clearly takes off from Jean-Pierre Melville’ austere Le Samourai (1967)), wherein a Black American lone ranger living in Jersey City follows the code of the Samurai and, in effect, constructs his own moral and psychological world. In The Limits of Control, the Lone Man – an American who performs Tai Chi in dressing rooms, hotels and train compartments in Spain – is a blue whale in a baby carriage. The film opens with a quote by Arthur Rimbaud: “As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen”, recalling the final scene of Dead Man (1995). This “impassable river” soon goes on to take multiple meanings in the film as Lone Man commutes from the labyrinthine western structures of Madrid to sparse and open locales of the Spanish countryside. This fitting quote is followed by the bizarre opening shot whose camera angle presents us the Lone Man in a seemingly reclining position, like that of William Blake (Johnny Depp) in Dead Man. The Lone Man has already entered the mystic river. Production Designer Eugenio Cabarello’s fabulous work gives us ominous vertical, horizontal, diagonal and spiral structures that attempt to devour the Lone Man. Christopher Doyle’s camera arcs and glides to trap the Lone Man within the convoluted architectures of the film, in vain. Evidently, the Lone Man is Jim Jarmusch himself, like a monk, relentlessly wading through from the corrupt, impassable and savage rapids of Hollywood.

The Limits of Control is an unabashed celebration of art, of its eccentricities and of losing oneself in it. The film is loaded with conversations about paintings, music, dance, films and books. In fact, Jarmusch’s film is closer to Last Year at Marienbad (1961) than any other. “It’s just a matter of perception”, says one of the characters in this movie. The world in The Limits of Control is one that exists solely in the mind of its protagonist. Like in Marienbad, Jarmusch uses parallel structures – hedgerows, pillars and hallways – to underscore the idea that what we see is not a physical world built out of concrete and cement but the labyrinths of the mind – memories and experiences, particularly, of art. If the surroundings, at times, seem highly artificial, it’s because that is how the Lone Man perceives it to be. It’s a world that is completely parallel to the real one, like Jarmusch’s cinema. It’s a world which is far more valid, uncorrupt, honest and truer than the real world for the Lone Man, very much like Jarmusch himself. One character quotes that “For me, sometimes the reflection is far more present than the thing being reflected” and that “La Vida No Vale Nada” (Life is worthless), as if believing that if at all there is some meaning to be found anywhere, it is in this world of art – the one which they live in. It is this alternate world that interests Jarmusch more than the real one. The film is parenthesized between shots of the Lone Man entering and leaving his dressing room –the portal to the film’s world. The first cut in to the movie signals, through the skewed camera angle, the other worldliness to come and the final cut out of the film, an unmistakable Jarmusch signature, segregates the film from squalor of the real world (This cut recalls the final one in Broken Flowers (2005), where the director nudges the hitherto Jarmuschian protagonist into the melodramatic clockwork of the pop cinema and cuts away to indicate the end point of his world).

Throughout The Limits of Control, there is the notion of interchangeability of art and life – of reality and memory. Representation becomes perception and vice versa. One character even believes that violins have a memory and can remember every note that is ever played on them. The Lone Man watches the paining of a nude woman, only to find a nude woman lying on his bed, in a similar position, a few minutes later. His point-of-view shot of the vast expanses of the city of Madrid is intercut with a similar paining of the city. Life becomes images and images come to life. The Limits of Control reinforces George Steiner’s theory that “it’s not the literal past that rules us, but the images of the past”, through works of art and through one’s own memory – the two carriers of history – that have preserved them from being destroyed completely. Jarmusch’s movie reflects on how these images of the past – our masters – are being rapidly corrupted and replaced by the ones from popular media in an attempt to forge false histories, destroy critical mythologies and homogenize world culture by influencing their past (art) and present (life), through endless stereotyping and manipulation of truth, to reflect kindred iconographies and system of beliefs (One can sense seething anger beneath the cool exterior of the film). The climax of the movie (that I, first, felt was crude and which, now, I feel is deliciously Lynchian) depicts the Lone Man in a remote region in Spain getting ready for a face off with his adversary, a typical Conservative, American executive (Bill Murray, top class), who does not understand or give a damn about these “bohemian” ideas of art and who has infiltrated the deepest of foreign regions on a mission, perhaps, to establish the biggest studios, worldwide.

[The Limits of Control Trailer]

The Limits of Control seals Jarmusch’s position as a reactive filmmaker. Each facet of the film seems like a move against the “industry norm”. The cast consists almost entirely of non-Hollywood actors. The film is shot on location in Spain, a world away from the cluttered studios of Fox or Universal. The average shot length is way too high compared to that of the blockbusters. The colour palette isn’t at all like anything we see on TV every day. On the surface, Jarmusch’s is the typical man-on-a-mission movie. His script, however, is made up entirely of in-between events that are taken for granted in such movies. There is a Bourne movie, a Bond movie and a McClane movie unfolding somewhere in the background. But that is not Jarmusch’s world. What Jarmusch did with cinematic time in his movies, so far, is applied to cinematic space in The Limits of Control. Jarmusch’s “dead time” has always complemented Hollywood’s “show time”. In The Limits of Control, he goes to the extent of dividing his protagonist’s world into Hollywood zones and non-Hollywood zones. The moment our man enters a “Hollywood infested zone”, the camera goes crazy, the editing becomes rapid and the soundtrack starts blaring, while at other times they remains sober. None of the “actions” of the mission are shown on screen. Like Le Samourai, which opens with an photograph-like shot of the protagonist, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), on his bed and goes on to show us a zombie-like detached figure walking through familiar checkpoints in a genre movie as if performing a ritual, Jarmusch’s Lone Man is seen, for most part, lying down on bed and walking towards his next strategic position. We come to know neither of the meaning of the codes that he gathers, not of his business with diamonds and matchboxes. Heck, we don’t even get to know his name.

Quentin Tarantino said about The Bride in Kill Bill (2003-04) that she was, in fact, fighting through all the exploitative cinemas from around the world. Tarantino’s movie both paid homage to and incriminated all the exploitative movies that the director had grown up on. Likewise, within his world of art, Jarmusch integrates cinemas from around the world in an attempt to illustrate that all art is one (Molecules tells us that Hindus believe the whole world to be one and that she thinks people are nothing but molecules rearranging themselves regularly). There are actors from almost every continent in the film. Like The Bride, the Lone Man wanders these empty corridors on a mission to keep art untainted. His arch nemesis seems to be the “art industry” that tries to infiltrate his perception (of the world, of art and of this art-world) and impose its own dynamics in it. The Limits of Control is a clash of these two perceptions where the title of the film refers to the ability of one to “think the right thing”, free from TV-driven emotional response systems. During the final scene, upon being inquired, not so politely, how he got into the heavily guarded building, the Lone Man says “I used my imagination” as if pointing out that one’s acceptance of rejection of popular beliefs is purely a question of the psychology. So the film also unfolds as one man’s journey into his own subconscious, to free himself from the chains that bind him to predictable ways of acting and thinking. It’s an odyssey to rid art of capitalistic models based on consumerism and marketability (The post credits sequence flashes a huge marquee that reads: “No Limits No Control”). The film is counteractive to every “formula” that pop cinema sticks to for keeping its “products” of art saleable (“No guns, no cell phone, no sex” quips someone in the film). Again, Resnais’ and Marker’s Statues Also Die (1953), an overt, one-sided but well-crafted bashing of the western world’s fetish for exotic art and its detrimental effects on lifestyles and cultures, comes to mind.

But, by no means is Jarmusch’s film a propagandist assault on this conveyor-belt mindset of ours. It is far too assured and composed for that kind of conversation. “I’m among no one”, claims the Lone Man. Jarmusch makes it clear that he does not have an agenda here. He just wants no other agenda to be made with respect to art. He is not against any particular system or a film industry, he is against the very notion of industries that try to regulate and quantize the quality of art. And justifiably, his movie is a celebration of all such films that have survived the concentration camps of major studios. Jarmusch adorns the movie with references to iconoclastic movies that have raised their voice against the oppressive, money-driven tendency of the studio systems. Early in the film, the Lone Man returns to his hotel room in Madrid to find a nude woman named, well, Nude on his bed. She asks him if he likes her posterior. This, of course, is the hyperlink to Godard’s polemical Contempt (1963), where the director bit not only the hand that fed him, but all such hands which feed only conditionally (Jarmusch even recreates the shots of Brigitte Bardot swimming). Later, Blonde, a film buff, talks about The Lady from Shanghai (1947), where Welles had to put up with a lot of meddling by the execs at Columbia Pictures. Jarmusch even sneaks in pointers to his own movies, effectively categorizing his movies under this kind of cinema of resistance, although he never takes sides. There are broken flowers, there are coffees and cigarettes everywhere in the film and the Lone Man, whose cousin lived by the Samurai code, travels in a mysterious train with that Japanese girl who we saw in Memphis a few years ago. There are also movies that Jarmusch loves and pays tribute to. There is Jean-Pierre Melville, there is Aki Kaurismaki and there is Andrei Tarkovsky, packed somewhere into this seemingly sparse and empty film.

Because of all this and more, watching The Limits of Control is like having a déjà vu marathon. Notwithstanding the fact that many lines in the movie, as is the case in other Jarmusch films, are recited over and over throughout, one gets the feeling of having seen these people, these objects and these setups somewhere, sometime ago – another Resnaisian trait of the film (specifically redolent of one of Marienbad’s powerful, enigmatic quotes “Conversation flowed in a void, apparently meaningless or, at any rate, not meant to mean anything. A phrase hung in midair, as though frozen, though doubtless taken up again later. No matter. The same conversations were always repeated, by the same colorless voices.”). It is the kind of experience some people have watching Vertigo (1958). “The best films are like dreams, you’re never sure you really had.” tells Blonde. Indeed. Like Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1992), The Limits of Control blossoms out as a dream in which you meet the most unexpected of movie stars in the most trivial of roles. Jarmusch’s self-referential tricks only add to this strange familiarity that we feel with the movie. Blonde likes movies where people just sit there, doing nothing. Ring a bell? She tells the Lone Man that Suspicion (1941) was the only film in which Rita Hayworth played a blonde. The Limits of Control must be the only film in which Swinton plays a blonde. Seemingly pointless lines such as “You don’t speak Spanish, right?”, “Life is a handful of dirt” and “The universe has no center and no edges” go on to become central to the ideas of the film (there is a strange little prank involving subtitles in the all important opening conversation of the film). The major attack against The Limits of Control, I imagine, would be regarding the self-indulgent nature of the film. Sure the film is self-indulgent, but it is also more than that. It is a self-indulgent movie that promotes self-indulgence. It is a movie that dares to almost profess that art can exist for only its own sake (what else can it exist for? World peace?). That there is nothing called “progress” or “superiority” in art. That all art is one and, to kill the most frequently uttered maxim in this movie and elsewhere, everything is subjective.

Verdict (Oh, The Irony!):

November 29, 2009

Children Of Men

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Austria, Cinema of Germany, Review | Tags: Burghart Klaußner, children in film, Christian Friedel, Das weisse Band, Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, Das weisse Band film review, Das weisse Band movie review, Das weisse Band review, fascism and film, Le Corbeau, Leonie Benesch, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Michael Haneke, Palm D’Or 2009, Palm D’Or winners, Rainer Bock, The Conformist, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon, The White Ribbon film review, The White Ribbon movie review, The White Ribbon review, Ulrich Tukur, Un Prophete, Ursina Lardi |
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At Loose Ends
(Image courtesy: Empire Online)

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon had to fight it out with quite a few heavyweights this year at Cannes for the Golden Palm including Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Jim Jarmusch, Jane Campion, Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino. It has also been selected, but not without some controversy, as Germany’s official entry for the Oscars. All I can say is that Austria must be happy. Since the end of the Second World War, fascism has been studied and dissected on film many times over with varying degrees of success. With a veteran such as Haneke at the helm, writing an original script for the movie, I did expect more than what The White Ribbon presents here. Some reviewers have pointed out that being familiar to Haneke’s body of work will help one appreciate this film more. I had only seen his The Piano Teacher (2001) before this one and felt that The White Ribbon does not really succeed because Haneke undoes everything that he did right in the former film. Even his subtle, cerebral and gently commenting mise en scène is not able to heal the film from the blows dealt to it by its script. Sure, it is an ambitious film that many directors would not have been able to pull off, but it falls way too short of standard for a director who has established himself as one of the most important directors working.

The White Ribbon brings to us a chain of mysterious and violent events that occur in a village in Germany prior to the First World War as narrated by a teacher (Christian Friedel) who worked in that village during that period. We are presented with a host of characters from various walks of life – the Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and his wife (Ursina Lardi) who provide employment to majority of the village, the Fender family of peasants who have just lost the lady of the house in an accident at the Baron’s workplace, the village doctor (Rainer Bock), who has recently had an accident riding a horse, and his mistress and the midwife of the village (Maria-Victoria Dragus), the village priest (Burghart Klaußner) and his family and the narrators own love interest – the new nanny at the Baron’s – the seventeen year old Eva (Leonie Benesch). We are made privy to the happenings of each household and the dirty underbelly hiding behind the flawless exterior of the quiet and secluded village. Mishaps pile up one after the other, progressively violent, and suspicion soars in the village as the culprit is nowhere to be found. All these characters and events are held together on a single clothesline that consists of the children of the village. They are the witnesses and victims of the events that unfold. They are also the documents that would define the course of history – of the village, of the country and of the world – that is to come.

Primarily, Haneke’s film proposes political, social, religious and sexual repressions exhibited on a young generation by its predecessors as the roots of fascism and places this argument in the context of pre-war Germany. Although these forms of repressions have been studied individually and in considerable detail in many other films of the past, The White Ribbon attempts to integrate all these influences into a monolithic attitude that defines the course of a society. As observed by many reviewers, The White Ribbon bears remarkable resemblance to Clouzot’s wartime classic The Raven (1943), which scathingly exposes the changes in mentality of a collective during uncertain times and the hypocrisy and hate that such a political climate brings to surface, in its study of a group as a whole wherein disparaging threads eventually converge to draw out a single, coherent portrait of the group at a particular time. The class system is tangible, with the aristocracy, intelligentsia, the middle class and the peasantry being represented with clear demarcation. The Baron and his wife – the upper class – have only their personal relationship and their property to worry about. The bourgeoisie is content in sticking to a set of middle-brow principles (there is way too much formality going on in the film) and maintaining status quo. The peasants can only worry about everyday survival. The apolitical intelligentsia – typified by the doctor and the teacher – is busy with its own romantic encounters and perversions. Cinematographed by Christian Berger, this isolation of the clerisy is summed up in two stunning shots in the film – one during the dance at the village fest (reminiscent of Ophüls’ magical Madame De… (1953)) and one on a horse carriage (reminiscent of Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), one of the best explorations of fascism on film) – in which the teacher and his love interest Eva are alienated from the village events. And whenever a member of any class tries to digress from these functions, they are berated and made to return to their position by either the class divide or the generation divide.

The White Ribbon presents us a seemingly pacific society which thrives on domestic bureaucracy for survival and maintains hierarchies to perpetuate that status. Haneke presents these power games not as a ping-pong rally, as we have seen in so many films, but as a chain of dominoes. In his world, there is no such thing as retaliation. Everybody has to conform to and perform specific roles in society – willingly or otherwise. The elder Fender has to play the role of a helpless farmer whereas his son, the radial, has to play the part of an obedient child irrespective of him being an adult. There is an obligation placed on everyone in the hierarchy by ones above them to conform to certain rules and to get punished upon transgressing those boundaries. The priest ties a white ribbon – another stereotype which symbolizes innocence (as defined by Protestant morals) – on his adolescent son’s arm to remind him of his duty to ward off worldly temptations and lays down an unwarranted responsibility upon him to play the role of a moral Christian. This seems to be the plight of every child and young adult in the village who can’t seem to counter their “masters” and are forced to channelize their reactionary violence through other means. Like Estike (Erica Bók) in Satan’s Tango (1994) and Isabel (Isabel Telleria) in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), both of whose forced passivity and oppression translates into graphic violence on powerless creatures (I can imagine a restless Chris Marker tossing around in his seat), these children, too, exercise their power on those lower down the hierarchy (The White Ribbon could also be titled “The slap fest” for domestic violence in the film is commonplace).

[The White Ribbon trailer]

Moreover, this kind of contrived passivity that we observe within the village is reflected in the larger picture of Germany. The White Ribbon is set in a time just before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that triggered the Great War. History stands witness to the fact that Germany also went through such cycles of passivity followed by misguided violence like the children in the movie (the film is subtitled “A German Children’s Story”). If Germany’s army was curtailed after the first war and Alsace and Lorraine confiscated, it would give birth to a patriotic movement that would go on to mutate into a fascist force. If the second war resulted in a greater chastisement and imposition of eternal guilt on its citizens by the western world, it would explode into a misdirected “terrorist” movement – the RAF (“…punishing the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generations” reads a note dropped at the scene of one of the crimes). Although Haneke shoots in black and white and has the narrator recite the story in the past tense, his film resonates in the contemporary world too. At one point in the film, the priest tells the doctor’s son, who asks his permission to shelter an injured bird, that the bird in his room is used to captivity while the one in the kid’s hand is used to freedom. The upper class in The White Ribbon flourishes by keeping the rest of the village engaged in the economic clockwork that it has setup and by ensuring that any subversion will only result in despair and struggle for livelihood for the insurgents. The elder Fender, although aware that the Baron is responsible for his wife’s death, cannot do anything about it for any action on his part will put the future of his kids in question. This situation isn’t much unlike those in today’s capitalistic societies which have a strong religious backbone.

Evidently, the film’s scope is large. Haneke attempts to study and integrate the very many factors responsible for the rise of fascist movements by actually having many threads in the narrative to illustrate each of these factors. And this seems to be one of the biggest drawbacks of the film. Haneke has way too many characters to have depth in each of them. What begins as an incisive study of a few characters goes on to become a document of the society at large, in which individual characters are sacrificed to drive forth Haneke’s idea. His work here turns out to be a film that is built on a set of judgments made by the writer-director rather than a keen exploration of issues. Compare it to the film that it pipped at Cannes this year for the Golden Palm – Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (2009). Audiard’s film, which I think is one of the few brilliant films of the year, is sufficiently ambiguous and presents us with sketches from the protagonist’s life. Audiard does not give us an “idea” or a “message”. He lets us form any possible meaning out of the film’s observations. Haneke, on the other hand, sacrifices truth for meaning. He cuts from one vignette to another in a deterministic fashion to serve a set of preconceived ideas. His hop-step-and-jump approach works wonders in the initial part of the movie, when we find ourselves struggling to sort out an overarching theme, but it goes on to over-determine the central idea of the film, just falling short of being didactic. Eric Hynes’ review sums up with ease my complaints about the movie. It is true that the film, to a good extent, explores fascism as a phenomenon of the masses rather than that of a single evil soul, but Haneke dwells a bit too much on kindred events to remove any scope for thematic enrichment.

I do not intend to say that Haneke bites off much more than he can chew, but just that the way he goes about chewing seems inefficient. It seems to me that the film would have been better off had Haneke pruned down many of its narrative elements in order to provide depth instead of attempting to crystallize a meaning. By pruning down, I do not mean simplification of its themes or trivializing of the issues at hand, but that the number of characters could have been held at a bare minimum. One fatal blow for The White Ribbon is that, although there is a narrator who provides the basic “facts” about the film before Haneke illustrates the in-between events visually, the film lacks a constant perspective using which all the disparaging ideas could be integrated. It is true that Haneke denies emotional identification in the movie, but the problem is that he does not even provide a reference against which the audience can interpret the events. Haneke’s script, in essence, is a consolidation of the themes Bertolucci explored in detail in individual films. The White Ribbon shares with The Conformist (1970) the idea that sexual repression and social conformism may be the prime instigators of fascist drive. More importantly, the depiction of fascism as being perpetuated by religion and its minion unit – the family – is also that of the masterful The Last Tango in Paris (1972). And the master-slave relationship between the Baron and the Fenders is but a miniature version of 1900 (1976) – an ambitious film that strays off and moves into self-parody. In all the above cases, Bertolucci provides us with a constant perspective, even if he has multiple protagonists, so that we are able to clearly assimilate and make judgment. On the other hand, The White Ribbon lacks a single coherent perspective (or has only one perspective – Haneke’s) and individual scenes, although possessing enough ambiguity of their own to be called virtuoso, exist only to conform to Haneke’s meaning and judgment.

Because of this over-emphasis on the central theme, The White Ribbon eats up many of the other possibilities which the first half of the film puts forth. Even at the end of the film, we do not know who commits these atrocities. It could well be some of the repressed members of one of the social classes and there are enough evidences to actually find a one-to-one matching. Haneke does not implicate them and finishes the movie with an open ending (“open” as far as the genre is concerned). Sure, it makes it clear that it is the whole society that is to blame. But Haneke’s writing prefers to lean towards and to underscore endlessly the idea of a repressed childhood and forced conformism to such an extent that it almost obscures the other dimensions of the movie. The film begins with the narrator confessing that many of the elements in the story he is gong to narrate are hearsay, preparing us for the narrative ambiguity in the film, but the film promptly repudiates that statement and removes any thematic ambiguity the first half may have offered. Scenes like the violent outbreak of one of the village boys on the Baron’s son and the priest’s daughter ripping apart her father’s pet bird are inserted into the narrative in a contrived and unsubtle fashion to be regarded as worthy. So are the scenes of the parents’ behaviour towards their children that end up seeming only like filler materials which aid to fatten a shallow analysis based on a single new idea. But even with a wafer-thin idea on text, the director has enough freedom to explore it cinematically. Bertolucci did it in The Conformist with its dynamic mise en scène, which took over the job of providing meaning and emphasizing the central idea, however simplistic it was on paper, unlike Haneke who relies here on his script to do that. That does not mean that Haneke’s film is technically unsound. Right from the first shot, where a peaceful horse ride in a serene countryside is suddenly interrupted by a jolting moment, Haneke announces the soberness of his gaze. He keeps alienating us from the movie with his choice of B&W, the detached distance of the largely stationery camera, the painting-like stasis of the images and his restrictive framing (his indebtedness to Bertolt Brecht is discussed in detail here). Sure, he does very effectively disengage us from the narrative to make us reflect on the events rather than identify emotionally, but he also goes to the extent of denying omnipresence to the narrator for this purpose. And that hurts the film.

Verdict:

November 15, 2009

Book Nook: What Is Cinema? Vol. II

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Review | Tags: André Bazin, Cinema Nuovo, Guido Aristarco, Hugh Gray, Monsieur Verdoux, Neorealism, Que-est-se que le Cinéma, Realism in CInema, Rossellini, The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux, The Outlaw, What is Cinema, What is Cinema book review, What is Cinema review, What is Cinema Vol. 2, Will Hays, Zavattini |
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What Is Cinema? Volume II
André Bazin (Translated by Hugh Gray)
University of California Press, 1971

The second part of Hugh Gray’s translation of Andre Bazin’s essays is, evidently, more coherent and wholesome and better compiled than its predecessor. It may be either because Bazin has sorted out the ambiguity discernible earlier in his theory, which he presented in the previous book, or because one gets accustomed to Bazin’s style of writing and his huge canvas of references that range from philosophy to science. Whatever the case, those who have persevered to read the second volume will only have a richly rewarding experience and get to know why Bazin was so enthusiastically supporting realism in cinema. The anthology begins, fittingly, with a foreword by Truffaut where he recollects, through many interesting anecdotes about Bazin, how his life was enriched by his godfather and “the most unforgettable character” he has met. He closes the essay with a paragraph from Bazin’s letter that sums up his unassuming and open-minded attitude towards the whole of cinema:

“I’m sorry I couldn’t see Mizoguchi’s films again with you at the Cinémathéque. I rate him as highly as you people do and I claim to love him the more because I love Kurosawa too, who is the other side of the coin: would we know the day any better if there was no night? To dislike Kurosawa because one likes Mizoguchi is only the first step towards understanding. Unquestionably anyone who prefers Kurosawa must be incurably blind but anyone who loves only Mizoguchi is one-eyed. Throughout the arts there runs a vein of the contemplative and the mystical as well as an expressionist vein”

The first essay of the book is the legendary “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism” in which Bazin traces out the characteristics of this New Italian School in contrast to the existing forms of cinema in Italy and elsewhere (including his views on the use of non-professionals, its advantages and shortcomings). He illustrates why he thinks that realism in cinema more an aesthetic choice than an ontological byproduct and how this “realism” can be controlled to present a world view of the director without being instructive (“But realism in art can only be achieved in one way – through artifice.”). He then proceeds, taking Citizen Kane (1941) and Farrebique (1946) as examples, to elucidate the conflict between using deep focus (which could then be achieved perfectly only in a studio setting) and using real locations (which are cumbersome from the point of view of cinematography) and, hence, proves why every technological advancement that helps bringing cinema closer to reality must be embraced. This is followed by an analysis of Rossellini’s Paisa (1946), arguably the greatest neo-realist film, which studies the episodic narrative of the film, the elliptical nature of its editing and the ambiguity of reality that it offers.

This grand opening is followed by extremely insightful, individual essays on key neorealist films such as Visconti’s The Earth Trembles (1948, “La Terra Trema lacks inner fire… no moving eloquence to bolster its documentary vigor”), Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957, “I even tend to view Fellini as the director who goes the farthest of any to date in this neorealist aesthetic”) and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1947, “Ladri di Bicyclette is one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”) and Umberto D. (1952 “De Sica and Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality”), wherein Bazin, step by step, clarifies his championing of realism in cinema and his stance that realism in cinema must be concerned only with appearance and not meaning (“Realism is to be defined not in terms of ends but of means, and neorealism by a specific relation of the means to the ends”). Together, these sets of essays make so much meaning, even today, that one is able to see why the photographic property of cinema (and hence its ability to resort to absolute realism) makes it all the more powerful by providing it with the power to reveal the most abstract of philosophical ideas using the most commonplace of images.

Interspersed between these critiques of neorealist films are two essays that deal with the entire filmographies of two neorealist directors – De Sica and Rossellini. In the first of these, Bazin examines the attitude of De Sica towards the reality of the world in his films (“…in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely…in loving them in their singular individuality.”). He notes that although De Sica’s cinema is primarily based on love and compassion, his construction of the film’s universe is nevertheless rigorous and meticulous. The second essay is actually a letter that Bazin wrote to Guido Aristarco, the Editor-in-Chief of the Italian film journal Cinema Nuovo, in defense of Rossellini against the claims of Italian critics who slammed the director for betraying his neo-realist roots. This essay is perhaps the central piece of his set of essays on neorealism and illustrates what kind of realism Bazin was looking for and what value it adds to cinema as a medium (“The traditional realist artist – Zola, for example analyzes reality into parts which he then reassembles in a synthesis the final determinant of which is his moral conception of the world, whereas the conciousness of the neorealist director filters the reality.”)

But what’s really the killer piece of the book is the essay called “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux”. In this section that runs over 20 pages, Bazin explains why he thinks Monsieur Verdoux (1947) is Chaplin’s greatest work by deconstructing the film part by part and taking it into various levels of discussion. He argues that, in Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin absorbs from the myth of the tramp, which was developed by him and lapped up instantly by the world, in order to contrast the mute being with Verdoux. He examines how society has, in fact, killed Charlie and how Verdoux is a revenge of sorts for Chaplin. Bazin takes into consideration the whole of Chaplin’s filmography to explore the significance of Monsieur Verdoux, both to Chaplin and to Hollywood. He makes note of the Chaplin’s casting, which seeks out faces that can not only represent and portray the character in this movie but those which carry with themselves their own cinematic histories and mythologies. In the subsequent two essays on Limelight (1952), in one of which he speaks about the emotional impact that Chaplin’s presence in Paris had on critics during the film’s premiere, he examines how Limelight, in fact, takes the myth of Charlie into the realm of Chaplin, by integrating into itself facets from both Charlie’s persona and Chaplin’s life, and pushes the boundaries of authorship to a point beyond with it is impossible to separate the artist from the person.

Then there are also some pleasant surprises in the form of shorter essays, two of which deal with the Western genre, its evolution, its cinematic and historical exploration, its transformation following World War 2 and authorship of a director within norms of this genre. There is also one about the birth of the “Pin-up girl” wherein Bazin discusses the philosophy between the ways these posters are designed and later reflects on its relation to cinema. This is followed by two articles on eroticism in cinema and censorship, in one of which Bazin, taking up Howard Hughes’ notorious The Outlaw (1943) as the centerpiece, elaborates on the type of censorship that contained within the cinematic image and argues that it is because of Hays that Hughes was able to take cinematic eroticism to the next level by kindling the audience’s imagination using mere hints, unlike his European counterparts. There’s a lot of humour to be found in these essays (and the earlier ones too) that just adds to the effortlessness and confidence that is palpable in Bazin’s arguments. But, in the final analysis, it is Bazin’s inclination to realism in cinema that is the USP of the book and serves to explain why cinema can transcend other arts in some ways. Although this support of Bazin for realism seems to need a revision with the advent of modernist, postmodernist and animation filmmaking, his theories still seem very pertinent and precise as far as conventional narrative cinema is concerned, especially considering the tendency of today’s mainstream filmmakers to move away from realism by imposing a single meaning on the realities of their worlds.

Verdict:

P.S: You can read some part of the book here

October 3, 2009

The Grand Illousion

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Hollywood, Review | Tags: A Clockwork Orange, Aldo “The Apache” Raine, ANything Else, Bomb theory, Brad Pitt, Bridget von Hammersmark, Christopher Waltz, Daniel Brühl, Denis Menochet, Diane Kruger, Hans Landa, history of cinema, Inglourious Basterds, Inglourious Basterds film review, Inglourious Basterds movie review, Inglourious Basterds review, Kaminey, Mélanie Laurent, Nation’s Pride, Omar Doom, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Richardson, Shoshanna, Sylvester Groth, The Cameraman's Revenge, The Conformist, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Vivre Sa Vie |
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Never mind the Schindlers, here come the Inglourious Basterds
(Image Courtesy: Scanners)

If there is any filmmaker whose single film could evoke comparisons ranging from Happy Gilmore (1996) to La Dolce Vita (1960), it would have to be Quentin Tarantino. But why not? Here is a director who has made a name with his unique style that more or less marries the crassest and the classiest of film elements. It almost seems like no matter what film you name, you can always find a connection to Tarantino’s. Here he is, with his ultra-violent WW2 epic Inglourious Basterds, releasing in India on the birthday of a person who has become an icon of non-violence. An unimaginably large number of essays, analyses, critiques, blog posts and reviews have cropped up within weeks of its release, with opinions running the gamut, and that just goes to show how provocative this one is. It has even raised questions about creative licenses and the unlimited freedom it has given artists through the years. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino strays out of what many people would have till now called his comfort zone and has proven once and for all his status as an pop auteur. Inglourious Basterds may not be the film of the year, it may not even be the director’s best film, but it sure is the most important film of the decade.

For the uninitiated, here is the central premise of the film. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) has just produced a film titled Nation’s Pride involving the real-life exploits of a Nazi Private Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who plays himself in the movie and which is going to be screened a cozy little theatre in Paris owned by a Jewish woman Emmanuelle aka Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent). A group of American Jewish soldiers now called The Basterds, led by Lieutenant Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt), along with inputs from the allied forces plans to blow up the theatre in order to get the leading Nazi men including Hitler (Martin Wuttke). However, to complete their mission they have to get through the cunning and powerful Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) who is in charge of the security at the grand event and who never leaves any stones unturned to trace out the Jews that the Nazis are in search of. Meanwhile, Shoshanna, whose family was murdered four years ago by Landa plans for her own revenge by blowing up the cinema hall using inflammable nitrate films that she has stocked through the years. Of course, as always with Tarantino, this summary is completely unimportant in comparison to what he achieves in the film.

With Inglourious Basterds, gone are the romantic days of Renoir when a couple of gentlemanly officers could end the war over a cup of tea. Now, deals are meant to be broken, enemies are meant to be stabbed from behind their backs and friends are supposed to be ratted on. Enemy corpses aren’t supposed to be given a proper burial, but should have their scalps removed. Instead of receiving a gentle kiss on their hands, ladies have their necks wrung. “I respectfully disagree” makes way for a “*bleep* you”. “Nat-zi ain’t got no humanity” replaces universal brotherhood. And scheduled duels are substituted by under-the-table gunfights. Everything in Inglourious Basterds is guerilla-esque, everyone in the film remains true to the title of the movie. Nothing is sacrosanct, everything is to be questioned. Tarantino’s army is one that lives and moves in the shadows. What you see most definitely isn’t what it is. Like the film hints in the card game that the officers play in the tavern in the fourth chapter, the inhabitants of Tarantino’s new universe wear so many masks one over the other that it almost reduces to a Scooby Doo adventure. One isn’t supposed to believe what one sees, even if it’s all written out there.

The idea is simple. Inglourious Basterds is a 5-set tennis match. The Jews win it 3-2. For every Nazi set, there is a Jew set that follows. Throughout the film we see characters trying to get the upper hand and stay on top in whatever way possible. Even within individual chapters small scale power games are at work and one isn’t always sure how it is all going to turn out. The final images of these chapters alternate between images of the Nazis and those of the Jewish characters – Landa kissing Shoshanna goodbye, Raine carving out a swastika on a Nazi soldier, Shoshanna planning the film, Landa digging out Hammersmark’s shoe and Raine, again, with his masterpiece – much like a close tennis match. Each sequence, each shot and each dialog seems and feels like a tennis rally. The director regularly places his actors on either side of the widescreen and the audience’s eyeballs are made to go left and right throughout each conversation. Tarantino’s editing pattern could well apply to a Wimbledon telecast, for it mixes over-the-shoulder shots and two shots effectively as if providing both the audience’s and the camera’s viewpoints of the “match”. And of course, Tarantino’s writing ensures that we get the reward for the tense stretch of time he puts us through during each conversation.

The mere skeleton of the plot would reveal that Tarantino is reversing conventions here. For once, he is allowing the Jews to kill Hitler. But Tarantino keeps underlining, hinting, presaging and highlighting this reversal of roles between the Jews and the Nazis throughout the film. There is some sort of reversal going on within each structure and substructure of the film. Take the magnificent first chapter of the film wherein Tarantino throws at us everything that the film will offer us in the rest of the chapters. As Landa sits at the table, surrounded by the farmer’s family, it looks as if it is Landa who is being questioned. We are soon proven wrong and Tarantino’s majestic train of role-reversals kicks off once Landa starts digging. In a Bertoluccian touch, Tarantino keeps breaking the 180 rule without any hesitation, allowing his camera (helmed by ace cinematographer Robert Richardson) to wander into both sides of the two-shot setup to suggest the inversion of the hunter-prey relationship that adorns the whole conversation. Even his dialogues are decorated with such rhetorical clauses like “If I were in your position…” and “If you were in my shoes…”. Or consider the way he writes the first and final chapters such that they mirror each other entirely. If the Nazis kill a few Jews hiding below them during the first chapter, the Basterds will similarly gun down hundred times that number of Nazis in the last one. If Landa lights up his pipe to create a small smoke cloud in the farm house, a whole cinema hall will be burnt by the Jews. If LaPadite (Denis Menochet) is the betrayer of Jews in the opening chapter, Landa will become the traitor among the Nazis in the final chapter. Both Tarantino’s camera angles and his actor placements locate and relocate the relative positions of the Jews and Nazis throughout the film in a manner that recalls the way young Bertolucci handled his mise en scène in The Conformist (1970), which too revolved around faked identities and interchangeable personas and which Tarantino seems to be alluding to in the final few minutes of the movie.

Tarantino really puts his audience in a dicey situation here. Inglourious Basterds has been called a revenge fantasy. But never does a character in the film mention that it is a mission of revenge. The Holocaust hasn’t yet happened in the movie time and there are only hints of the Nazi’s plans for the Jews. It is only in hindsight, with the knowledge of what happened in reality, that we are able to call the film a revenge saga. If there is someone in the audience who is oblivious to Holocaust, the film might just appear otherwise. Tarantino teases us with the notion that revenge is the same kind of crime as the one that instigates it, but aided and justified by the passage of time – an idea that was ineffectively explored in Gaspar Noé’s positively disturbing Irreversible (2002). Tarantino lets the two worlds – the “real” reality and the film’s reality – collide and one’s response just depends on how much of a balance one wants to maintain between “what happened” and “what happens”. We can choose to either draw the line between “what-might-have-happened” fiction and “what-couldn’t-have-happened” fiction early on in the film or wait till Tarantino draws it for us in the last chapter.

Some commentators have suggested that Inglourious Basterds tries to humanize the Nazis and gain sympathy for them. But, surely, it isn’t the fault of the movie that we pity the SS officer when the Bear Jew prepares for the homerun or when the Nazis turn to ashes in the theatre. It is simply the ways movies work. Given a pattern of narrative, we seem to generally tend to support the weak, the suffering and the oppressed, thanks to our morality. Be it aliens of sci-fi flicks, tribes of exotic countries or mute animals of the jungles, we tend to patronize them, putting them on our moral scales. When, in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Alex de Large (Malcom McDowell) is trained to respond in a predictable fashion to certain impulses at the reformatory, Kubrick, in some ways, is speaking in a self-reflexive fashion. Alex is pure evil and there can be no other justification for his acts other than the fact that he is an evil-doer. Even so, Kubrick makes us accomplices to his acts and eventually makes us root for him. It is Kubrick who is manipulating his audience as a cosmic joke. And it has taken around four decades for some filmmaker to stimulate us in such equally provocative fashion and, in the process, make us evaluate our own moral standing and the way we tend to judge characters – on and off-screen. Speaking of A Clockwork Orange, Hans Landa drinking his glass of milk is reminiscent of and as chilling as Alex holding it in Korova Milkbar

Tarantino adorns the movie with a slew of sight gags, much like the ones we see in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, almost none of which actually fails. During Landa’s interrogation of LaPadite, at one point, he unveils his gigantic, almost unreal, smoking pipe dwarfing that of LaPadite. In the fourth chapter, when the Gestapo officer comes from within the tavern to question the officers about their accent, we see a huge whisky glass in front of him that’s unlike anything we’ve seen in the scene. Even in the last scene, when Landa hands over his knife to Raine, we are shown that Raine’s knife is the bigger one! Furthermore, during the second chapter, as we are introduced to Hitler, he is posing for a gigantic portrait, indicating that his image is much more formidable than the man himself, whom Tarantino is happy to caricature. In fact, all these in-jokes would have fell flat if Inglourious Basterds had indeed played out as a straightforward drama. Thankfully, Tarantino’s characters are themselves cartoon-ish in nature, hence justifying whatever deformation Tarantino does to them and his attempts to reduce intense and delicate power games to petty mine-is-bigger arguments.

Tarantino doesn’t just bend and blend genres here, he takes them along the movie. His characters don’t simply absorb from genres, they are the genres. Inglourious Basterds is the kind of movie that will happen if a filmmaker casts non-actor cinephiles to act in a WW2 movie. Tarantino’s history is not a history given to him by text books (which by itself is a corrupt version), but one given to him by cinema. His characters aren’t those defined by the WW2 setting of the film, but ones from our age that have strayed into a WW2 movie. These aren’t characters have evolved from the film, but ones that have been pushed into it. What Tarantino does here is that he picks stereotypes from every genre of popular cinema and cooks them up in his WW2 broth. In Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), the titular character tries to chew more than he can bite by jumping from one genre of cinema to another and trying to pirate the film away from the director to places only he wants to be (Early in the film, director Samuel Fuller tells us that movies are all about emotions). Continuing the tradition of Godard’s influence on Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds too absorbs quite a bit from the French, especially Pierrot. In Tarantino’s film, too, each character tries to hijack the movie from the genre it is supposed to be, as if protesting the director’s decision of forcefully situating them out of place.

[Inglourious Basterds Trailer]

Almost every character in the film tries to own a sub-genre. With his ultra neat conversational ethics and table manners, not to mention the tinge of narcissism, Landa is the quintessential smooth-talking secret agent (Landa himself insists that he is a detective later on). Aldo Raine is the leader of the men who are on a mission type, with his I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude. Shoshanna thinks she is the next Beatrix Kiddo, with her all-red femme fatale act. Poor little Zoller tries to be the romantic hero despite his designation in the film. Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), already an actress, wants to be the deadly female spy (someone mentions Mata Hari as she talks during the tavern scene). Lt. Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is altogether from a different country’s cinema, with all his ethnic and lingual idiosyncrasies intact (“Well, if this is it, old boy, I hope you don’t mind I go out speaking the king’s?” ha!). Even Herr Goebbels seems to think that he is in a B-grade sci-fi flick (“I have created a monster” he says). Much has been said about the corny celebratory ritual that Donny Donowicz (Eli Roth) performs at the end of his “innings”, but that only conforms to the genre that he is – the B-Comedy subgenre (Apparently, Adam Sandler was to play this part – who else?). You’ll either love his lines (and his bizarre nasal accent) or hate them, depending on how much you appreciate such type of comedy.

Apart from playing out their genres in the movie, the characters in Inglourious Basterds keep assuming different nationalities and ethnicities. Faking accents, speaking multiple languages, feigning papers and changing appearances seems to be order of the day. Characters are recognized using ethic slurs and covers are blown with the minutest of faux pas (which sort of brings back the scintillating experience of watching last year’s treasure In Bruges, which got everything right when it tried to marry the most serious of genre elements with the most absurd of situations). “I am a slave to appearances” confesses Aldo Raine as he handcuffs Landa in the final scene. Everyone in the film is. The multilingual Landa wants the Italian names to have a ring to them. The “little man” is unhappy about the unfair nickname that the Germans have given him. Hitler is convinced that the Bear Jew is a golem. Shoshanna goes to the extent of performing a full fledged ritual for this purpose. Right from the misspelt title you are told that what it looks or sounds like isn’t what it is. Tarantino pulls our legs as he switches the subtitles on and off throughout the movie, giving us only the most basic of information and leaving the rest to our ‘expertise’.

Tarantino’s complete disregard for the content of his film and his prankster attitude towards it are characteristic of Jean-Luc Godard too. But even with all the influence Tarantino has managed to kill his “father” with a distinct style that borrows from Godard’s yet deviates starkly. The greatest asset that Tarantino seems to possess is the ability to maintain a consistent tone in the movie. Even when he marries genres as wide and fatal as melodrama and thriller, he maintains a certain kind of detachment from it that lends these sequences a tongue-in-cheek flavour which unites them under a single stylistic umbrella despite their vast disparity. One deadly flaw that Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey (2009) had was that, in an attempt to marry genres, he ended up marrying styles too, which made the film be nothing more than a surface imitation. On the other hand, even when he cuts to cheesy in-movie documentaries (narrated by Samuel L. Jackson), again reminding us of Godard’s My Life To Live (1962) where the director seamlessly includes a mini documentary that lists down statistics and factoids about prostitution in Paris, Tarantino maintains a strong grip on the filmmaker’s gaze towards his subject, never allowing us to mistake him for inconsistency of style.

Tarantino’s idea of filmmaking is akin to blowing a balloon. He blows and blows, till the onlookers cringe and then he allows it to pop. The mantra, for him, seems to be not “if it bends its funny, if it breaks it’s not funny”, but “if it bends its funny, if it breaks it’s funnier”. This way, I guess one could call him anti-Hitchcockian. Hitchcock’s sums up his legendary theory of suspense thus:

There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise’, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.

The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb underneath you and it’s about to explode!’

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Take the case of Tarantino. The audience always knows the outcome of his set pieces – that the balloon is going to pop one way or the other. Additionally, he doesn’t inform his audience of the popping time. Instead of making us ask questions like what will happen, he makes us ask when will it happen (and here, Tarantino likes to stretch the audience’s patience). Furthermore, Hitchcock preferred not to make that bomb of suspense explode, for he believed that it will make the audience uncomfortable, whereas one can bet that Tarantino will relish in showing what you expect (Not only will the Hitchcockian bomb explode, but limbs will fly, heads will roll and blood will flow). In fact, in Inglourious Basterds, not only do the Basterds’ bombs explode, but the theatre burns as per Shoshanna’s plans, Landa’s “private” bomb goes off and Donowitz and Ulmer (Omar Doom) manage to machine gun down the Nazis. Talk about beating a dead horse. But, on the other hand, Tarantino also uses a lot of the master’s techniques in Inglourious Basterds as he builds the film with the aid of a series of Red Herrings and Macguffins (One could have sworn that Landa had Shoshanna when he orders the milk). I am, however, undecided about the violence that the director depicts since it doesn’t work just on a purely cartoon level as in the Kill Bill movies. Here, the violence is closer to reality and one only wonders if Tarantino would have lost anything at all if he had cut away before the moment of gore.

But Tarantino’s film, like all his other works, is at heart about cinema. His streak of film references and tributes continue as he recalls a number of films from the past that he has grown up with. He pays homage to German cinema throughout Inglourious Basterds with a large number of Dutch angles that never once feel forced or out of context. In the final chapter, which begins with images recalling Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979, complete with the 360 degree Ballhaus shot), Tarantino takes this fetish to a whole new level. The film within the film, Nation’s Pride (actually directed by the Bear Jew), presents to us a German propaganda movie made in the style of a Soviet propaganda movie, Battleship Potemkin (1925) in particular, forming an unusual alliance between two countries that could have only been possible in cinema. This whole set-piece works on multiple levels of realities. If Goebbels is making a fiction within the fiction based on a distorted form of reality within the fiction, Tarantino too is making a fantastical fiction that relies on betraying reality. Only that Tarantino’s ethics are far from Goebbels’ (which is actually the way Hollywood tells it). It’s certainly less exploitative to heavily exaggerate a reality that never was than to mildly dress up a reality that was.

Early this year, Tarantino called Woody Allen’s widely and undeservedly trashed Anything Else (2003) one of the 20 best films made after he entered the industry. And not surprisingly, much is common between these two films despite their stylistic differences. In Anything Else, David Dobel (Woody Allen) tries to break out of the schlemiel image that the director had created for himself through the 70s and the 80s. “The issue is always fascism” he says in the film and he smashes the car windows of two thugs who bully him out of a parking space. What Woody was trying here is to undo history – both personal and collective – as he guides his younger self, Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs), who prefers “writing a biting satire in the quiet and safety of some delicatessen”, away from what he has become. Tarantino realizes that the only way to undo history, if not in reality, is through art and that art, in many ways, does not owe anything to political and historical “reality”. When Shoshanna switches from one projector to another during the screening, she is actually shifting the movie from one reality onto another – from a history we all know to a history that could have been.

[Tarantino interview]

Tarantino’s mission of trying to carve out a fantastical alternate reality isn’t really a unique one. In Godard’s magnum opus History of Cinema (1988-98), he keeps talking about two kinds of histories – the history that was and history that could have been – of cinema and that of the world. He argues that cinema could have indeed prevented large scale mishaps and put an end to Nazism once and for all. Tarantino realizes that this is nothing more than an elegiac fantasy and makes a joke out of it all telling us that the only way cinema could have brought about a political change was physically – by blowing itself up. And that the only way it could have ended Nazism was by putting them all into a large room and burning it down. In a scene that echoes the final few minutes of The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), which was a film that reflected our tendency to believe that if it is cinema it must be true, Marcel (Jacky Ido) burns the pile of nitrate films to blow up the theatre as a huge heap of bullets piles up on the screen resembling it. With that, Tarantino is happy to plainly flesh out his idea of history that could (should) have been.

His attempt, like Allen’s in Anything Else, is to shatter the image that, especially popular cinema, has bestowed upon minorities of America through its incessant ethnic stereotyping – the suffering Jew, the benign black and the noble Native American. Let’s face it; it would only be a miracle if we ever see a black/Native villain in a summer blockbuster. So in a way, the revenge, led by Aldo-Shoshanna-Marcel, isn’t merely a fantastical Jewish revenge for the Holocaust, but a revenge for all the minorities and nonconformists of a cinema (industry) whose fascist producers insist upon maintaining status quo and sticking to a “final solution” (No wonder Marcel burns the movie reels). For Tarantino, who has been a popular nonconformist throughout his career in Hollywood, this is surely the sweetest revenge fantasy possible. It is his fairy tale and he is telling it the way he wants it to be. When Landa finds a single shoe in the tavern following the shoot out he must have realized he is in someone’s Cinderella story. The truth is that it’s Tarantino’s.

Verdict:

P.S: Christopher Landa delivers the performance of the year. His scene with Hammersmark is one to worship.

Essential Reading:

Jim Emerson’s series of articles on the movie at Scanners

David Bordwell’s take on the film at Observations on film art and Film Art

The Auteur’s Round-up of articles in their Notebook

Mark Baker, Adrian Martin, Jan Epstein and Nathan Wolski discuss the film’s wider aspects at The Monthly

Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy in conversation at The House Next Door

August 29, 2009

Book Nook: Scorsese On Scorsese

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Hollywood, Review | Tags: After Hours, Bad, Books on cinema, books on Scorsese, Cape Fear, David Thompson, director on director, Faber and Faber, Ian Christie, Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese books, Mean Streets, New York Stories, Raging bull, Scorsese On Scorsese, Taxi Driver, The Color of Money, The King of Comedy, The Last Temptation of the Christ, The Magic Mountain, Transes, World Cinema Foundation |
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Scorsese On Scorsese
Martin Scorsese (Edited by: David Thompson and Ian Christie)
Faber and Faber, 1979

“But prayer is really dealing with what you have in the home, dealing with the family, how you raise your children, how you relate to your wife. May be that’s what prayer really is in the modern world”

– Martin Scorsese (Scorsese on Scorsese, 1979)

Amazingly, last night I had the most memorable dream of my life and the best part is that I remember all of it in detail. I was at Scorsese’s house and talking to the man himself about the cinema in India and the deteriorating state of old regional films. How about that?! Dr. Freud would immediately remind me that I had finished reading Scorsese on Scorsese just the day before. Whatever the case is, reading Scorsese on Scorsese is best approximated as an extended conversation with the director. In fact, editors David Thompson and Ian Christie have done a splendid job by keeping factual autobiographical details to the minimum, presenting them as small italicized snippets between Scorsese’s talks, hence removing any hindrance for us to speak with Scorsese the man and Scorsese the director. Though compiled from a set of lectures and interviews the director had given around the world, Scorsese on Scorsese never gives you the feel of an authoritative person directing you towards what you have to know. Instead, Scorsese recollects events, almost from the top of his mind, lets us interpret and thus get to know the man and his films more.

Divided into six chapters, the first of which details his childhood and teenage memories and the rest taking us virtually through the making of each one of his movies, Scorsese on Scorsese is a joy ride for any film buff. There is much humour throughout the book and at times you almost hear Scorsese break out with his characteristic and infectious laughter. Many would agree if I say that Scorsese is one of the biggest film buffs of the world and this opinion is established as a fact in these texts. There is almost no line in the book where you don’t hear the man come up with a movie comparison or a simile that is related to the movies. Even in the most commonplace of statements, like feeling sick on the sets (“…I was coughing on the floor and sounding like a character from The Magic Mountain”), recalling parking problems (“…but destroying things as in a Godzilla movie”) or describing the streets of New York during summer nights (…reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments, portraying the killing of the first born, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor…), Scorsese’s never flagging enthusiasm for the cinema surfaces.

Scorsese on Scorsese is a must-read for anyone who doubts Scorsese’s status as a genuine auteur. As one moves along in the book, one sees that all of Scorsese’s characters have a bit of Scorsese in them and could be seen as extensions of his personality in a fictional world (Be the screenplay officially by Schrader, Price or Minion, Scorsese invariably seems to have had a hand in their final versions). Although the book covers the directors career only till New York Stories (1989), one can see the same phenomenon carry on in his later films too. As Scorsese goes on explaining how each movie, each scene and each set piece came about one can actually see the deep influence that his childhood and teenage has had on his thought process and his vision of the world. He elaborates on what made him take to priesthood and then the transition to cinema (He says: “In my neighbourhood, the people in power were the tough guys on the street, and the Church. The organized crime figures would tip their hats to a priest and watch their language, an they would have their cars and pets blessed”).

This book was compiled just after The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) hit the screens and it is evident that the whole book centers itself on this event. Right from the unusual introduction chapter, which recounts the events that preceded the release of the controversial movie, one can see that the authors intend to take a look back at the director’s career standing at this historical point. The concept of religion is also manifest in Scorsese’s talks throughout the book as he subtly reveals how his experience during the days as a young priest, away from the meanness of the streets, shows itself in almost all his early films. Be it overt as in Mean Streets (1973) or underneath as in Taxi Driver (1976), the idea of God and religion, Catholicism in specific, seems to be always present, mostly in the form of a hope for redemption, in his movies. In hindsight, The Last Temptation of Christ almost looks like a confrontation of sorts with his own inability to reconcile between what he learnt in the Church and what he saw in the streets.

Another interesting thing is that even though he has had to put up with a lot, Scorsese never dwells on the difficulties much. Yes, he does talk about them in detail, but he makes all his travails sound like simple trivia and things of distant past. It is remarkable how he has earned the title of a major Hollywood director (in spite of his legendary association with New York), especially after his near ostracism by the studios after The King of Comedy (1982). He makes the trouble he had shooting After Hours (1985) and The Color of Money (1983) sound so amusing that one tends to overlook how appallingly tough it must have all been. The book complements these accounts with loads of rare, behind-the-scenes photographs from his movies, the complete story board of the final scene in Taxi Driver drawn by the director himself and other stills from famous movies, including the ones he cites as inspirations, placed side by side as if the director himself is showing us what went through his mind when he made those compositions. There is even a still of Michael Jackson and Martin Scorsese in discussion during the shoot of Bad (1986)!

During the course of all this recollection, Scorsese talks about some abandoned scripts and some ideas for future that now seem so fascinating. He talks about a script called “Gangs of New York” that couldn’t be realized (and which eventually got made in 2002 perhaps with much change), he mentions that he doesn’t really want to do remakes (he made Cape Fear (1991) almost immediately!) and that he was immensely influenced by the music in the Moroccan film Transes (1981) (which has now got restored by the World Cinema Foundation headed by him and shown online for free!). Those who still think that Scorsese has sold his soul to Hollywood of late, I think, would see that The Aviator (2004) is as personal a movie as Taxi Driver or Raging Bull (1980) once they read this book, or rather this memorable evening of reminiscing with Scorsese. At the end of it all, it feels like if Scorsese had indeed taken up priesthood as a profession, which seems to have seemed very likely, the world would have got one good priest more but one great director less. Now, what kind of an unfair exchange is that!

Verdict:

P.S: Scorsese on Scorsese contains one of the greatest forewords that I have read. I type it down for you here:

What’s Hecuba to Him?

The first Martin Scorsese film that I saw – or that saw me – was Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The actors were directed with assurance. There was not a frame wasted. I said to myself: Michael Powell, you’re going to have a good time – this man knows where he’s going and you’re going with him. On the screen we were entering a fast food emporium, with two splendid actresses volleying words and phrases at one another. It was like watching a singles match on centre court at Wimbledon, between two champions. I hadn’t seen match play like this since I saw Pat and Mike.

We screened Taxi Driver. ‘Stop! Stop!’ I said. ‘Who’s that devilish actor who plays the Devil in the scene with Robert De Niro?’
‘That’s Scorsese.’ Said my friend, who had arranged the screening.
‘What! Can he act too?!’
He smiled, ‘want more?’
‘Is there more?’
He nodded vigorously. ‘Much, much more.’

He arranged a screening of Mean Streets. It was in a little projection theatre off Wardour Street, London WI. There were four of us and the projectionist. When the screening ended, we looked at each other, stunned. The five of us crossed a narrow street and went into a pub that was just on the verge of closing. Nobody else was there. Still we said nothing. There was nothing to say.

All art is one, and every artist owes a duty to his art. We can’t all be masters, but we can know a master when we see him, because he has something to say to us, and sooner or later imparts it. The difference between these films of Martin Scorsese’s is that with Alice and Taxi Driver he handles the materials like a master; with Mean Streets he is in direct contact with the audience, from the beginning to the end. This is the rarest gift given to a movie director. Most directors, however wise, however experienced, however resourceful, however bold, don’t have it and never will have it. Marty always had it.

He has this great, generous gift of creating a situation for an audience, and sharing it with them. He is the ventriloquist and his doll, the singer and the song. In his latest film, Life Lessons, Marty performs the same miracle, he is the painter and his palette, he is the pupil and the master, he is the cunning of the fox and the innocence of the child, he is the voice of the tape deck screaming ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.

When Hamlet sees the tears in the Player’s eyes, and asks Horatio:

What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her?

he is asking the same question that we ask of ourselves when Scorsese, in The Last Temptation of Christ, gives us our first glimpse of that hill called Golgotha. For, as the tears spring to our eyes, we know that we shall see that hill again, and then it will be our last sight on earth – and his.

Michael Powell
March 1989

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