March 14, 2023

India @ IFFR 2023

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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Indian cinema was in spotlight at the recently concluded International Film Festival Rotterdam, with over thirty titles presented at the two-week event. The majority of these were part of a special non-competitive section titled “The Shape of Things to Come?”, curated by Stefan Borsos, that sought to explore the following question: “Is the institutional success of right-wing Hindu-nationalist groups and the persecution of dissenting voices a sign for the shape of things to come – and not only in India?”

The formally eclectic program showcased a mix of acclaimed fiction features, documentaries, experimental YouTube videos and Bollywood productions, alongside a lecture and a panel discussion. The political ascent of Hindutva was the dominant theme of the curation, with a number of films delving into the ideological and operational aspects of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Many of the works  dealt with particular events—demolition of the Babri Masjid, Godhra riots, anti-CAA protests, COVID-19 lockdown—while some others evoked the atmosphere of fear, intolerance and disillusionment prevalent at different times and places in the country in the last thirty years. A notable subset of films trained their lens on the phenomenon of radicalization and the role that digital media has played in exacerbating it.

Harshad Nalawade’s smart, sympathetic drama Follower confronts the issue of radicalization head on, but remaps it along linguistic lines, bypassing the conservative-liberal dichotomy typical of culture wars. The film takes place in the border town of Belgaum, which, an infographic at the beginning apprises us, has long been a bone of contention between Kannada and Marathi chauvinists. Raghu is an activist at an online media outlet affiliated with a Marathi political party. When his inflammatory posts result in tragedy, we are taken in back in time to understand how a decent, kind young man came to be an internet thug.

The younger Raghu is close friends with Sachin, a successful Kannadiga YouTuber from a perceivably more affluent family, and with Parveen, a single mother whom he has feelings for. Seemingly immune to language wars, the three friends converse in a mixture of tongues and are at ease with their differences. Yet, at various moments, Raghu is shown his place by those that around him, made to feel like an outsider in his own home. These everyday frustrations and untimely mishaps snowball into a psychic assault on Raghu, persuading him to see himself as a victim. Follower touchingly illustrates the corrosive power of political narratives, capable of corrupting the deepest of bonds.

Anurag Kashyap’s short film, Four Slippers (“Chaar Chappalein”) affirms Follower’s diagnosis, but its subject is the personal cost of radicalization. Written by Varun Grover, the film is divided into four chapters wittily modelled on the four ashramas of Hindu life. In the first episode, set in Varanasi in the 1970s, a boy named Rajat is caught fantasizing in class and humiliated by a sadistic schoolmaster. This brutal repression marks the young man for good, catapulting him into a life of progressive social and emotional isolation that comes to an ironic end some twenty years from now.

Despite its coolly analytical approach that obliges the viewer to observe Rajat rather than identify with him, Four Slippers manages to convey the tragedy of a sensitive individual lost to hatred and communal polarization. Rajat’s trajectory, from a young lad who stutteringly sings Kishore Kumar’s “O Saathi Re” to a crush to a lonely man who spends his days online abusing people disagreeing with him, tells the story of an increasing alienation from the world. It is a sad portrait of a gradual inner exile that puts a finger on a very contemporary malaise.

Both Follower and Four Slippers view social media as an indispensable way station on the journey to political extremism. How has the telecom revolution of the past decade changed the shape of Indian democracy? Avijit Mukul Kishore’s short documentary An Election Diary considers this question against the backdrop of the 2019 general elections. Confining itself to the suburban constituency of Phulpur in Allahabad, the film examines the efforts of the BJP in both reaching out to voters through targeted campaigns and bringing them to the booth on election day.

Made as part of a research project for the University of Göttingen, An Election Diary furnishes no voiceover commentary, nor does it place its material within a national context. What we get instead is a highly local mixture of street interviews, kitschy YouTube clips and revealing IT-cell meetings. The cadres, organized into niche social-media units responsible for particular tasks, discuss the strategy of using smartphones to rally voters. Their campaign consistently foregrounds the personality of Narendra Modi, whose shining image is used to gloss over infrastructural issues affecting the constituency. In this scheme of things, digital media becomes a veritable simulacrum replacing reality.

Smartphones and social media, on the other hand, enjoy only a marginal presence in Varun Chopra’s Holy Cowboys. Set in the environs of Vapi in Gujarat, Chopra’s loosely fictionalized documentary keeps its ears to the ground in its attempt to trace a classic pathway to radicalization. Gopal, a teenager who works at a packaging plant, comes across a calf feeding on the kind of plastic bags he produces at work. In genuine concern, he brings the stray animal to a cow shelter run by a Hindu volunteer organization. He becomes a regular visitor to this place and is soon caught up in the outfit’s vigilante operations.

Narrated like a coming-of-age tale with moody music, Holy Cowboys devotes significant time to Gopal’s interactions with his teenage peers. We don’t get to know what the boy thinks of the organization’s activities, but it is apparent that his attraction to it originates from the camaraderie and the sense of community it offers—an empowerment sorely missing in his daily life. In shining a light on the weaponization of compassion, Chopra’s film agrees with Follower and Four Slippers that forces of radicalization feed on deep-seated human issues, offering hatred as a coping mechanism. Illness masquerading as cure.

 

[First published in Mint Lounge]

 

February 18, 2021

The Year Before The War (2021)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Latvia, Review | Tags: , , , , |
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Dāvis Sīmanis’ The Year Before the War, which premiered in the Big Screen Competition section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in February, has all the potential to be one of the great festival hits of the year. It’s certainly among the most polished, good-looking films at the IFFR. Presented in a striking monochrome palette, it’s a period picture unfolding over several European locations and in multiple languages. As such, it has the finish of a high-end arthouse production that is bound to appeal to a larger audience. Most importantly, it has got, yes, a vision.

Set in 1913, Sīmanis’ film centres on Hans (Petr Buchta), a doorman at a hotel for international visitors in Riga, Latvia. When we first see him, he obsequiously bows to a German tourist who injures and racially abuses a black porter trying to pick up his luggage. He is told off by a colleague for this abhorrent behaviour – a minor reprimand that triggers a major change of attitude in Hans, who starts by tossing a coin from his ill-begotten Trinkgeld to the porter on the ground.

In the following weeks, Hans begins to stand up against quotidian acts of injustice, without actually adhering to a cause like his colleague had advised. When he is falsely implicated in a bombing carried out by anarchists at his hotel, he flees Riga to shuttle from one European capital to another for the rest of this momentous year.

The Europe that Hans traverses is less a real geography than an abstract zone of competing political currents. War is around the corner, and there are several groups trying to influence the course of history. Over the course of his cross-continental flight, Hans encounters figures like Lenin, Freud, Mata Hari, Hitler and Stalin. Everyone recognizes him instantly, identifying him as a certain Peter (in reference to the mysterious Latvian-born London anarchist Peter the Painter).

Like in a wrong man thriller by Hitchcock, Hans disowns the name at first, but eventually slips into the role, getting admitted to a mental asylum, serving as a shill at Lenin’s demonstration, and even carrying out acts of violence in Peter’s stead. Over the course of these events, zealous ideologues seek to entice and co-opt him, subjecting him to what Louis Althusser called “interpellation”: the recruitment of the individual as a subject of a Grand Narrative.

All through, Peter fights hard to follow his own moral compass, to flee subjecthood, and to retain his individuality. As the Great War ends, however, he finds himself a hero and in the upper echelons of the Soviet state, dispatching dissidents to gulags with a wave of the hand. So, in line with his friend’s counsel, Hans does indeed become the flag-bearer for a cause, ‘turning into’ Peter wholeheartedly, but he is not necessarily any better than the man who bowed down to a bigot at the entrance of a hotel. In the scheme of The Year Before the War, it’s those who believe in an ideal that are capable of much greater violence than apolitical opportunists.

Sīmanis’ film is essentially a historical picaresque. But where the protagonist of a picaresque is a fully-formed subject, Hans is a cipher in the process of becoming one, rendering The Year Before the War something of a commentary on the genre. Simaris is interested in the singularity of this particular juncture in Western history – a point at which fin de siècle optimism about technology and human rationality came crashing against the reality of trench warfare, all the paths of glory leading to the grave – where countless isms sought to impose their own vision on the world.

The Year Before the War translates the torrid atmosphere of this period into a frenzied mise en scène that is as effective as it is film-aware, Simaris’s style here echoing the ironic textures of Lindsay Anderson and Guy Maddin. Hans’ increasing confusion and loss of a sense of self is conveyed through expressionistic devices that also pay homage to post-war silent cinema. The performances of the actors are similarly stylized, poised above naturalism and steadily developing towards a fever pitch; the political personalities, especially Lauris Dzelzitis’s glass-eyed Lenin, are virtually high-strung puppets.

In Escaping Riga (2014), Sīmanis zeroed in on two 20th-century figures born in the Latvian capital – the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin – who were swept along by intellectual waves of the time and ended up on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. There’s something of them in Hans, a small man caught up in big events, who might have been a doorman all his life in any other era. It would seem that Sīmanis views Latvia of the early 20th century as something of an ideological waystation, an unstable intellectual field where free radicals like Hans can’t help but be neutralized. And that vision isn’t without contemporary resonance.

 

(First published at Ultra Dogme)

 

February 18, 2021

Aristocrats (2021) + Witches of the Orient (2021)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Japan, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
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Like several events over the past year, the 50th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) was reconceived in light of pandemic-imposed restrictions. In addition to a significant part of the proceedings taking place online, the festival is also split across February and June, with a host of repository screenings (online and off) and a special exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam offered for audiences in the interceding time.

It was also the year that the festival found a new director in Vanja Kaludjercic, who, in an interview with Screendaily, evoked her work as a programmer with festivals specializing in a diverse range of cinemas. The programming at IFFR this year, too, was nothing if not eclectic. The films on showcase spanned a range of styles, genres, budgets and themes, suggesting a festival beginning to open up to newer horizons while remaining focused on its mission of promoting up-and-coming talent around the world. The June leg of the IFFR promises to throw more light on the overall character and orientation of the festival under the new direction.

Two films set in Japan, featured in the Big Screen Competition section of the festival, provide complementary perspectives into the intersection of class and gender in Japanese society. At first glance, the films couldn’t be any more different: one is a classically-styled fiction, while the other is a sport documentary. Yet, the two films succeed, in their own ways, in drawing out what they see as certain fundamental features of the national temperament.

Adapted from Mariko Yamauchi’s serialized novel Ano Ko wa Kizoku (2015-16), Aristocrats presents two narrative arcs each centred on one young woman. Hanako (played by Mugi Kadowaki) is the last child of an upper-class household in a posh ghetto of Tokyo. The opening scene, a New Year dinner in an upscale restaurant, establishes the family dynamic: just jilted by her fiancé, Hanako sits humiliated in silence as everyone from grandma to her sisters offers tone-deaf advice on how she should find a new partner soon.

And so, Hanako is sucked into the rigmarole of arranged marriage, meeting one unsuitable boy after another in locations across Tokyo. Where another film might have dispatched these unfortunate encounters in a quick, comic montage, director Yukiko Sode chooses to flesh out each meeting, dwelling on Hanako’s discomfort in not just interacting with these basket cases, but in negotiating these alien spaces of the city.

The problem with Hanako, however, is less romantic than existential. She is a cipher with no identity of her own. Brought up in the cocoon of ultra-privilege, she never comes into her own, moving straight from the role of a father’s daughter to that of an aristocrat’s trophy wife to that of a mother to a political heir. In the duty-bound upper echelons of Japanese society, Hanako must fulfil the social function ordained for her, whether she wills it or not.

Miki (Kiko Mizuhara), on the other hand, has always had to fend for herself. Born in a modest household in the provinces, Miki is nearly forced to drop out of her college by her ne’er-do-well father and takes up a job as a hostess to be able to continue her studies. Not all spaces of Tokyo are open to her, but as a working-class girl, she enjoys freedoms that Hanako in her regimented social station cannot. She lives alone in a studio in the city, drives around on a bicycle and forges friendships in a way her social better can’t imagine. Even formally, her story moves freely between the past and the present, in contrast to the strict linearity of Hanako’s narrative.

The first time the two women meet, it’s in order for Hanako to confront Miki about her relationship with her aristocrat husband, whom the latter had met in college and had an affair with ever since. What one expects from the scene is an expression of jealousy and anger from the women; what we get, instead, is mutual curiosity and respect. The affair itself comes to an end in a dignified, bittersweet fashion.

The two meet one more time in the film. Hanako, resigned to her gilded cage, spots Miki on the road. Miki takes her to her tiny studio, which Hanako peruses with a fascination recalling Greta Garbo’s ‘memorization’ of the bedroom in Queen Christina (1933). It’s a busy loft, filled with souvenirs and photographs, attesting to a life of individual enterprise and genuine camaraderie – concrete signs of a personality that prompts Hanako to take control of her own life.

Issues of class and gender identity are present in a more subdued manner in Witches of the Orient, French filmmaker Julien Faraut’s documentary about Japan’s legendary national women’s volleyball team that won the gold medal at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Given the epithet of the film’s title by the Soviet press for their athletic wizardry, the team went undefeated for 258 games in the early sixties – a still unbroken record – and were eventually assimilated into Japan’s broader pop culture.

The film opens with a lunch meeting between some of the players as they are today. Faraut takes us through their daily sport routine, while their voices on the soundtrack furnish recollections of their glory days. Some of the teammates are no more, some infirm, but most still very fit, and at least one still coaching younger volleyball teams. The film doesn’t get too much into the details of their private lives, allowing their public role to take centre stage.

The team originally belonged to a textile factory in the Osaka prefecture, where the women worked at daytime. After their shift, they would train for the rest of the day, sometimes until dawn. Faraut, who is in charge of the audiovisual repository at the French national sports institute, INSEP, unearths archival clips that show the rigours of the women’s training: a barrage of balls directed at individual players, who keep throwing themselves at the ground with the last ounce of energy in order to gain the points that will allow them to wrap up the session.

Faraut charts the team’s dream run by intercutting footage from the games with clips from an animated television series that was later made based on the team’s sporting exploits. Set to pulsating electronic music, these dynamic sequences neatly illustrate the way the rugged working-class bodies of the players were idealized and exaggerated into elegant, expressive anime forms that became part of Japan’s popular lore.

Towards the end of the film is a sequence presenting Japan’s astounding rise from a country left in ruins by the war to being a global industrial giant in less than two decades. In a bit of cultural essentialism, Faraut equates this economic miracle with the volleyball team’s ascent to world domination, the common thread being the indomitable determination of the Japanese in beating almost impossible odds. It is pertinent that the team’s brutally exigent coach, Hirobumi Daimatsu, was a commander in the Imperial Army who survived starvation with his platoon in the Burmese jungle.

Despite the heterogeneity of their source material, both Aristocrats and Witches of the Orient adopt a relatively simple style that can at times even feel rather flat and disinterested. But through accumulation of detail upon detail, both films manage to achieve a certain critical weight and emotional resonance. They are likely to travel far.

 

(Originally written for Firstpost)