Weekend Film-fest

My weekend usually comprises a healthy dose of doing nothing and watching movies. This weekend was no different. I watched three movies, all three very different and intriguing. I’d like to write about two of them here.

First, is an Iranian movie called “The Mirror”. Ever since I watched Majid Majidi’s “Children of Heaven”, I have sought out every opportunity to watch movies by Iranian filmmakers. I have watched movies by the Makhmalbaf father and daughter duo, Moshen and Samira, by Jafar Panahi and Majid Majidi, whose work really drew me into Iranian new wave cinema, as their work is often called. I am yet to watch many of their best movies. However, the ones that I have watched have been really special in their beauty and cinematic appeal. A movie, irrespective of its genre, has a very special appeal that cannot be compared to any other medium. A movie cannot be compared to a novel or an essay or a song because every medium has its own characteristic and appeal. “The Mirror” turns this cinematic experience on its head and the audience is as much bewildered as entertained.

The story overtly is about a little girl whose mother is late in picking her up one day after school. After waiting long for her mother to arrive, she decides to find her way back home. The first half of the movie is about her experiences about trying to find her way home amidst the hustle and bustle of Teheran, a big city like any other. Like any big city, it is intimidating to a child, especially one like little Mina who doesn’t even know her address and only has a vague about where to go. She gets on a bus and is a silent spectator to the drama of everyday life: a palm-reader who advises a woman how to catch her cheating husband, an old lady who complains about her ungrateful son and daughter-in-law who are too ashamed to introduce her to their neighbors, a couple of young lovers who exchange silent glances from the men’s and ladies sections of the bus. Mina watches them all.

Just when you get all involved in the film and are wondering how is Mina going to find her way back, something extraordinary happens. Mina looks straight into the camera and declares that she doesn’t want to act anymore! The viewer is taken aback to find that people behind the camera, who are now in front of it, are trying hard to get Mina to act and continue filming the movie. One member of the crew, a woman, is sent to find out what’s wrong with the girl and coax her into coming back into the set. Mina refuses. She is very upset and wants to go home. She changes into her own clothes and starts making her way into the Teheran traffic, which is a important protagonist in the movie. Interestingly, she still has the microphone strapped to herself, so the crew decides to follow without her knowledge, or so we think! What follows now is a mirror-image of the first half of the film as Mina once again tries to find her way home. Suddenly there is a film within a film or should I say a documentary within a film, if we are to believe that Mina is no longer acting and this is not the film we were watching. At some point in her convoluted journey (she still doesn’t know her own address and fumbling her way through the big city), Mina meets the old lady who was in the bus. She tells Mina that she was paid some money and asked to come to the set. So Mina asked if she left because she didn’t like the lines they gave her to speak to which the lady replies that she wasn’t given any lines to speak and what she was saying was true. In one stroke, not only is the cinematic medium challenged by blurring the lines between reality and illusion, the film also becomes a sort of commentary on contemporary life in Iran.

Mina does find her way back home eventually but is it really her home? Is she really Mina? Is this also a part of the film or it is as spontaneous as the viewer is made to believe? This is the magic of cinema as in spite of so many unanswered questions, the viewer is captivated by what’s transpiring on the screen. She is challenged to stretch her ideas about art and reality, about feature and documentary. The sense of concern for Mina’s safe return home does not change: the viewer is still worried about a little child getting lost in the mean streets of a big city; however, it no longer remains the film we set out to watch. Several characters walk in and out of the movie but the camera for the most part remains on Mina. A simple journey back home becomes a fascinating process on the nature of film itself.

The next movie I watched is a Japanese blood-fest called “Audition”. The write-up on the DVD jacket warned me of a psychological thriller. As the movie progressed and nothing extraordinary happened, I relaxed a bit. I guess this was exactly what the makers wanted. The story is about a widower in his 40s who is urged by his teenage son to find a girlfriend decides to hold a fake audition with the help of a friend in the movie business. He and the friend interview many women all day but this particular girl, Asami, grabs his attention with her demure manners and shy smile. He decides to ask her out and tell him that there’s no movie but that he’s interested in her. His friend senses something is amiss with this girl and urges his friend not to meet her. But of course, the guy succumbs. The first scene where I really got scared is when Asami is shown sitting on the ground in this loft sort of a place with her head down and her hair covering her face. On the far ground is an old-fashioned phone and beside it a sack, tied up at the end. The phone rings and rings and finally Asami lifts her face and smiles a sinister smile and at that exact moment the sack moves! I jumped from my seat and can feel the sensation as I write this down.

The rest of the movie unravels the mystery of Asami who we find not to be a shy, demure girl at all but this crazed woman with a disturbing past. Several characters are introduced and the jigsaw puzzle that is Asami is revealed, one gory piece by piece, literally. The climax of the movie is a 15-minute scene of torture, blood and pain that Asami inflicts on our hapless non-hero. It is blood-curdling at times but I had expected it. To call this a scary movie is an understatement. But it is not in the genre of the mindless slasher-horror movies that Hollywood has given us.

It’s said that Quentin Tarantino was inspired by Japanese movies to make his very popular “Kill Bill” series and “Pulp Fiction”. Japanese movies have a rich tradition of stylized violence. They have given the world the manga and the anime and I’m pretty sure Tarantino watched the “Audition” when he was doing research for his movies.

Voicemail Dilemma

I have realized that I hate talking to machines. Well, it is not a particular hobby of mine, talking to machines. I mean telephone and cellphone answering machines, my own and also of those who are too busy to pick up or are just plain lazy to talk and let the machine answer the phone instead. Every time I have left a message, I have stammered, stuttered, forgotten what I had to say or just made a total mess of what I was going to say. It always seems that I am talking against a clock ticking and I have to say all that I had intended in my phone conversation within 30 seconds or less. Of course, the clock is in my head as I don’t remember reading any voicemail answering guide that mentioned that the message has to be delivered in 30 seconds or less. I have never tried leaving any long messages. Who knows, after a few minutes, the machine might say something rude and cut me off mid-sentence. Imagine the ignominy of being rebuffed by the voicemail box!

I also hate configuring my mailbox to ask people to leave a message when I’m too busy or too lazy to answer my phone. I come across as either too earnest or too impolite in these messages. I was even told once that my voicemail message is so rude that the person concerned was hesitant to leave a message. Well, it was nothing more than a statement containing my name, the fact that I was not able to take the call and a request to call me back later or leave a message. How rude can this 30 second sound byte be? Anyways, just sometime back, I was setting up my room’s phone system and after many recordings and re-recordings, I am still not satisfied with the mailbox message. I can’t even guarantee that it sounds like me.

I’m not sure what is it about machines that makes me tongue-tied and hesitant. Though, I must admit, at times I have made some calls and prayed that I got the machine, as I was reluctant to talk to the person and would rather leave a message to prove that I had called!

WALL-E

What do you call an animated movie which is part science-fiction, part musical, part comedy, and part drama? You call it WALL-E! I have always been a fan of animated features but WALL-E is the best I have seen since Finding Nemo and it is little surprise that the two movies have the same parents. The Pixar team have taken the common Hollywood theme of the end of the earth and turned it into a visual symphony of such humor and depth of emotions that one cannot help but be enchanted by it.

WALL-E is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter- Earth Class. Long after earth has become uninhabitable due to the large amount of waste created by a particular corporation BnL or Buy and Large, WALL-E has been assigned the job of cleaning up the mess. He does it with due diligence, locating and compacting the waste but in the process he also collects remnants of the bygone era. And his shed is a collection of assorted treasures like Zippo lighters, teddy bears, a Rubik’s cube and WALL-E’s most prized possession, a VHS tape of an old Hollywood musical, to which he tries to dance every night, after a long day’s work. This act is quite difficult for him as he himself is nothing more than a metallic box with nuts and bolts with legs like an army tank’s wheels! This all too human machine longs for companionship and his binocular-like eyes get all dopey whenever the romantic number in the musical plays and the man and the woman on the screen hold hands. WALL-E’s expression as he watches this is priceless and heart-warming.

The rest of the movie is about his finding a companion, in the form of a highly sophisticated, extra-terrestrial robot, EVE (another acronym) and the ensuing adventure. The first thirty minutes of the movie is devoid any dialogs. It is a collection of visuals and sounds that convey the emptiness of earth and WALL-E’s loneliness with perfection. The magic of animation meets basic human emotions to create a movie of such honesty and warmth that is sure to touch even the most cynical of moviegoer.

For an animation movie, WALL-E deals with several adult themes like consumerism and environmental catastrophe. The movie is a gentle, prophetic reminder that the present human society based on consumer capitalism is unsustainable in the long run.

Watch it!

Calcutta Farewell

It’s funny how in talk one thing leads to another and before you know it, you’re hit by a heavy dose of nostalgia and you can’t stop recounting some significant piece of your past. Let me explain. The other day R and I were planning this fanciful vacation to Jamaica. We do this often: plan getaways to exciting, exotic locations, the best deals, the cheap hideouts, only to realize pretty quickly that we neither have the time, or more importantly, the money to make such a journey and we relegate the plan to the future, make mental notes, indulge in some hope that someday we will make it there. Such a place happened to be Jamaica a few days back, and talking about Jamaica, I was reminded of Harry Belafonte’s Jamaica Farewell and it turned out that that song was a favorite number from both our childhoods. For me, my father used to sing that song often when he was in one of his moods when Pat Boone, Jim Reeves, Nat King Cole, Belafonte songs, among many others would be sung one after another on a load-shedding induced dark, quiet evening. For R, that song was a constant feature in his school’s music class and hence has fond memories for him. This got me all excited and I quickly googled the song and I found an old black and white video of it on YouTube. It gave me immense joy to listen to it. And as one is prone to do on YouTube, browsing the related videos, I ended up listening to several versions of the Jamaica Farewell and the Banana Boat song and relived a little piece of my childhood.

It happens to me a lot these days. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of my advancing years or the fact that I have too much time on my hands right now, I seem to be getting more and more nostalgic as years go by. Nostalgic about my childhood, my years in college, the years after that. The smells, the sounds of Calcutta, the city of growing up often feature on these nostalgia jaunts. Like the other day I was reading this article in the Telegraph about some overflowing garbage vat on S.N. Banerjee Road and there was a line mentioning that this vat is near Hind cinema, which is now closed. My first reaction on reading that was how come no one told me about this. What next, they close down Lighthouse cinema too? Oh wait, they already did that! There’s a stupid shopping complex it its place now. It’s not like I watched every movie that played at Hind when I was in Calcutta. To the contrary, it was quite a rundown place as I remembered it that often showed dirty morning show movies. But it was close to my school, a landmark in the place I went to nearly 10 years of my life. It’s this piece of my childhood that I have some claim over, so what if the only film I can recall watching there is Darr in the early 90s, when I was a closet Shah Rukh admirer!

And not just Hind cinema. The places I frequented growing up in Calcutta have changed. Some have been renovated till they’re unrecognizable (like Flurry’s) or they have just been taken over by a chain restaurant or a bigger name brand or have simply shut down. It’s not that I dislike the shopping malls. I love City Center and the cheaper Big Bazaar near home but why do they have to come up in place of my Hinds and Lighthouses? Why does Ganguram on Chowringhee have to shut down and BCL move to another location? Why does the Calcutta I know have to disappear completely and become this whole other city I can’t recognize?

Or is it just that I have been away too long?

Think about this: you are dead and stuck in a place between heaven and earth. For you to be able to reach heaven, you need to choose one significant memory from your life on earth. Just one. This memory is your heaven and you will be stuck with this memory for all eternity. This is the theme of the Japanese movie “After Life” I watched yesterday. Dead souls are brought to this facility which looks very much like an old government building or an old university and they have three days to tell the staff at this facility what this single special memory is. The staff then recreate this memory on film (!) and when the dead watch this film they can move to heaven or someplace out of the limbo, at least. There are all kinds of memories ranging from the feeling of being in a mother’s lap to flying a Cessna over fluffy, white clouds. There are some who find it very hard to pinpoint any one memory. They’ve either had a very ordinary, mundane life or one so fulfilling that they cannot do justice to it by choosing any single memory. And there’s one character, a young boy of 21, who refuses to choose, saying he takes responsibility of his whole life and cannot choose one special memory to keep with him. Interestingly, those who fail to choose, end up working in the facility as they cannot move to heaven.

Though my synopsis sounds heavy, the movie is quite a light-hearted treatment of the subject. It’s about life and its little joys and moments of happiness and sadness. It’s funny in parts like when this middle-aged Japanese man reminisces about his triumphs with women, mostly prostitutes, and discusses at length how lovely and fulfilling his sexual experiences have been but when it comes the time to choose, he chooses the memory of his daughter’s wedding! Or an old, senile spinster with a mind of a nine-year old who only collects different leaves and flowers from the compound of the facility and brings them to the staff and cannot, for the life of her, recollect anything memorable, anything significant. The staff member finally zeroes in on her fascination for cherry blossoms and that’s the memory she leaves with.

Do watch the movie when you get a chance and think about what single memory of your entire life would you choose, if you had to!

Yet another sunset picture

Here's another sunset photograph. Since I can never get up in time for capturing a sunrise, a sunset is a healthy, equally beautiful alternative. This one's taken on a road trip between Baltimore and Amherst. I'm sorry but I forgot the name of this bridge. I took this photograph from inside a moving vehicle at 60 miles per hour!

July 2, 2008 11.06 p.m., Baltimore

What if life was a fairy tale? With magic books and human changing into birds. With beautiful princesses and kings and magic ointments that cure every wound. Where things are in black and white and good and evil are clearly demarcated. Where you always know what is the right thing to do and there are not many moments of doubt. But life has to be this collection of moments when most things are not clear, there’s no right and wrong and it’s just choices, some good ones which you can stand by and some that you kick your feet later for having made.

It’s also this endless cycle, a routine of activities to earn a living: though when I see the people around me I can’t call what they do as living. They do things to pass the time and are quite delusional to think what they do is of any significance to anyone, including themselves. They have careers, families, hobbies, aspirations, the works or they think they do. It’s perhaps more important to think certain things exist when they really do not. In other words, delusion is real. It’s like the monsters in the shadows: if you think they exist (which I did), they sure do.

I’m reading a book of Italian Folktales, select and retold by Italo Calvino. I love reading Calvino’s work for the sheer beauty of his language, even though I’ve only read them as translations, so I wonder how moving the original Italian may be. So when I was in Amherst’s Jones library and I saw this book on the catalog, I promptly checked it out. The book contains an introduction by the author describing why he chose to do the book and in it he goes on to declare that folktales are real. In his opinion they offer a general explanation of life “preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciousness”; folktales are catalogs of the potential destinies of men and women. It’s true that folktales are more often than not just allegories for real life and life’s challenges and triumphs but the simplicity of the tale is so far removed from real life that it is hard to apply the folktale formula to it, at times. Or maybe life really is actually simple and we just complicate it needlessly, to make it worthwhile maybe. There are way to many “maybe”s in the previous sentence.

Whether or not folktales are about life and human vicissitudes, I immensely enjoy escaping into a world of fantasy and magic where things are shinier, brighter, and as Calvino says “where paths bristling with obstacles lead to a happiness held captive by dragons.”