Movie

Sylvain Chomet: Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003)

Mar 13

I come back to Sylvain Chomet and Evgeni Tomov‘s ‘Les Triplettes de Belleville‘ every once a while to participate in and relive a cinematic experience that is quite unlike any other. Dark, idiosyncratic, powered by memorable flights of imagination, while reveling in it’s oddly humourous, grotesque and irreverent universe. It is also a lesson in the possibilities of the animation film, that, when technical brilliance weds inventive storytelling, you leave behind a cultural artifact that attains significance on it’s own strengths. A visual style of part graphic novella meets comic strip, and part European caricature brilliance, the cinematic space becomes uniquely ‘mythicaly’ evocative, and the remarkable characters of Madame Souza, Champion, Bruno and the Triplets themselves, linger in memory long past the final credit roll. Read More…

Oliver Hirschbiegel: Das Experiment (2001)

May 28

German director Hirschbiegel‘s debut feature ‘Das Experiment‘ does not quite shine as an accomplished cinematic piece (it is plenty rough around the edges,) but what it does is that it brings ample material to the table for engaging in debates surrounding the psychological ramifications of incarceration, confinement and captivity. The distribution and struggle for power is thematically anything but novel, but in choosing to adapt Mario Giordano’s novel titled ‘Black Box‘, Hirschbiegel does manage to orchestrate (however imperfectly) a taut and bleak look at the ‘discipliners’ and the punished, housed in modern prison systems. Read More…

Damon Gameau: That Sugar Film (2014)

Apr 01

What you eat and drink is what you are, and what you become. In the broader tradition of diet/food/health awareness documentaries like Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Super Size Me‘ (2004,) Australian actor-director Damon Gameau, in ‘That Sugar Film‘ (2014,) inflicts a food and drink experiment on himself – of consuming the Australian ‘average’ of about 40 teaspoons of sugar a day for two months. What unfolds is a quirky, and at times, humourous look at the far reaching damage caused by the hidden sugars in our everyday, supposedly ‘healthy’ store brought food and drink. Read More…

Majid Majidi: آواز گنجشک‌ها (The Song of Sparrows) | 2008

Dec 23

In a ‘cinemascape’ of lyricism and allegory, Majid Majidi inhabits a space that is uniquely his own, where, with a flourish of quiet sentimentality and poetic poise, he unfurls for us a spiritual fable of a righteous man placed in the pastoral rural and the materialistic urban. Majidi is a relatively later figure in Iranian cinema, but to my mind, certainly not a lesser figure. In a telling moment in آواز گنجشک‌ها (The Song of Sparrows,) the protagonist Karim (played convincingly by the inimitable Reza Naji) breaks into a nostalgia soaked song that brings smiles to the saddened young boys surrounding him – “Our flowers have withered, our eyes are crying, I remember the good old days….The world is a lie, the world is a dream ….I’ve passed my youth in pain in this world.” The pastoral rural marked by close family ties, community living, and proximity to the ‘living world’ lies in stark contrast to the transactional, corrupting and materialistic core of the urban, and in straddling these seemingly incompatible universes, Karim has to be committed to his essential righteousness, to his faith. Read More…

Jeff Nichols: Take Shelter. 2011

Sep 10

“There is a storm coming…like nothing you have ever seen, and not one of you is prepared for it” screams Curtis (played by the very talented Michael Shannon) in American director Jeff Nichols‘ film ‘Take Shelter‘ (2011). I would say nothing quite prepares one for a film like ‘Take Shelter’ as strands of the real and the non-real interweave to create this tapestry of a brooding, melancholic and menacing exploration of notions of anxiety, marriage and commitment, and communication in interpersonal relationships. This is probably one of the few films from that year that made me sit up and take notice of the classic independent cinema. A theme of a married couple with a young child going through difficult and intense times is a theme that has played on screens in darkened halls over decades now, and therein lies Nichols’ genius, for he takes this familiar as a doorbell universal theme, and retells it with a mastery and a quiet restraint far beyond his years. Read More…

Jafar Panahi: Badkonake Sefid (The White Balloon). 1995

Jun 27

Emerging out of the shadows of the much venerated Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s emphatic debut feature won him many accolades over the years, and deservedly so. A collaboration of scriptwriter Kiarostami and writer-director Panahi, ‘Badkonake Sefid‘ (The White Balloon, 1995) holds on dearly to the cinematic realism of Panahi’s larger oeuvre, along with the mise-en-scene sensibilities central to a certain tendency in the Iranian ‘new wave’ cinema. In telling the story of a 7 year old girl’s (Razieh) longing for ownership of a chubby gold fish around the Iranian New Year, Panahi masterfully controls his material, absorbing the audience entirely into his heroine’s delicate, innocent, enquiring world, playing it out on the often unkind streets of Tehran. With the narrative hinged around the loss (and subsequent regaining) of the means of purchase of an object of desire, Panahi chooses to bring a cinematic style of subtlety and remarkable human detail. Watch. Read More…

Xiaogang Feng: Ji jie hao. 2007 (China)

Oct 21

Feng Xiaogang‘s ‘Ji jie hao‘ is set around the mid 20th century, during the dying years of the long drawn civil war in China fought between the forces loyal to the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang. To Feng’s credit the film does not follow a straightforward triumphalist narrative about Communist war heroes, but instead builds a complex tale of an individual (Captain Guzidi, played remarkably by Zhang Hanyu) who struggles for the posthumous recognition of the men in his company who laid down their lives on the battlefront. These were soldiers who were terrified and sometimes balked at the clear and present dangers before them – as would anyone – but they made the ultimate sacrifice and, as the only survivor from his company, Captain Guzidi strives long and hard to have their efforts recognized as a unique contribution to the war effort. Like great combat films, ‘Ji jie hao’ ceases to be war porn, and rises above to make a stellar comment on the inhumanity of all wars, and the immorality of taking away lives, in the guise of war. It is also a severe indictment of post-war society and government in China. Watch.

Werner Herzog: Stroszek. 1977. (Germany)

Jul 10

The inimitable Werner Herzog is generally known to take on film projects that are more than challenging, both in terms of production and realization, and that also involves working with actors who are ‘difficult’ to say the least. Herzog’s ‘Stroszek‘ from 1977 is a meditative cinematic triumph and remains a prominent film moment from the last century. Putting together an accomplished actor (Eva Mattes) with a non actor (the unforgettable Bruno S.), Herzog weaves a tale in the mode of a grand existential tragedy, pitching in moments of raw pathos along with reflective soul searching for the truth. In telling the story of characters in the fringes of human society – an alcoholic, a prostitute, an elderly eccentric, and their earnest quest for a more respectable, happy life via the american dream, Herzog paints a USA, and a human condition we would rather not acknowledge. Therein lies his directorial brilliance. Watch.

Jan Švankmajer: Lekce Faust. 1994

May 11

Czech animator Jan Švankmajer remains a rare and remarkable creative force in the motion pictures. For Lekce Faust (‘Faust’) his second feature length film, Švankmajer drew on his personal experience and familiarity with the Faust legend through his work on Czech director Emil Radok’s film ‘Doktor Faust’ in 1958. But, over and above that formative influence, his academic training in puppetry in the Academy of Performing Arts (Prague), coupled with his commitment to surrealist performing art via the Czech Surrealist Group, led him to craft one of the most intriguing films of the 20th century. Marrying his mastery of stop-motion cinematography to a volatile mix of puppetry, human theatre, German opera, Czech folk performance, and dark irreverence Švankmajer’s ‘Lekce Faust’ is an absolute original. Of particular interest is the fact that he manages to loosely weave into the narrative two rather well known tragic plays – Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus‘ (1604) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ‘Faust‘ (1806), in a spirit of imagination and creative interpretation. In the end, one is left with the feeling, that in all of this, Švankmajer remains the original conjurer, the ‘black magician’. Watch.

Hiroshi Teshigahara: Suna no onna. Japan. 1964

Apr 16

Adapted from Kōbō Abe’s 1962 novel of the same name, ‘Suna no onna’ (translated as ‘The Woman in the Dunes’) is the piercing vision of a remarkable film artist, Hiroshi Teshigahara. Trained in the Japanese traditions of ‘Ikebana’ and classical painting, his turn to cinema was distinctly an aesthetic choice. In ‘Suna no onna’, he translates cinematic frames into canvases for his expression, while telling a story resonating with the myth of Sisyphus, within the existential paradigm set up by authors like Albert Camus, whose work Teshigahara was familiar with. ‘Suna no onna’ is both a brooding and scathing critique of human reasoned argumentation (the man-of-science, the urban man, the man governed by explanations for everything), and an emphatic tribute to the intuitive knowledge of nature, that which is instinctive and intrinsic, that which has not undergone the distortions imposed by human reason. Ultimately, ‘Suna no onna’ transcends itself as a cultural product of early 1960s Japan, to make a universal and specific statement about the human condition. Watch.