SLIFF 2014: Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain

Title: Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain

Country: India

Score: 6

                This is a fictionalized docudrama about the 1984 Bhopal industrial accident, following a range of characters in and around a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the days leading up to a chemical gas leak that kills thousands. The best aspect of the film is its fair-mindedness, asking viewers to consider characters and decisions that would typically be portrayed a lot less sympathetically: the consequences-averse CEO who built the factory up from nothing and really does want the region to prosper, the frighteningly underqualified rickshaw driver turned safety engineer who can’t say no to a job that would put food on his family’s table and provide his daughter’s dowry and an unselfconsciously manipulative – but in a charming way – journalist who has cried wolf too many times to stir up serious concern.

                But while the characters are often interesting individually, they fail to mesh, in part because the casting is so scattershot: Martin Sheen in full-on corporate American mode, teen TV-star Mischa Barton as a fashion reporter who contributes little to the narratives, Kal Penn alternatively glib and serious, Indian comedian Rajpal Yadav in a questionable dramatic role, some evil British dude acting generally callous and colonial, etc. Ultimately the film is competent and admirable, and at its best provokes both sobering thought and strong emotions, but it doesn’t particularly distinguish itself.

Film Atlas (India): Emperor of the Mughals

Country: India

Title: Emperor of the Mughals / Mughal-e-Azam (1960)

The year is 1568, and Emperor Akbar, greatest of the Mughal dynasty that ruled the Indian subcontinent for three centuries, makes a desert pilgrimage hoping for a male heir. His wish is granted in the form of Salim, though unfortunately he’s a born profligate. Akbar, seeing that ease and pleasure are spoiling his child, commands him to lead an army through 14 years of triumphant warfare. He returns a hardened general, with tasteful dabs of blood accenting his face. During the festivities celebrating his homecoming, prince Salim is presented with a breathtaking sculpture that turns out to be Anarkali, a modest court maid gifted in song and dance. Salim and Anarkali fall instantly in love, secretly passing poetry by floating lotuses down the palace pavilion’s fountain-fed private river. The jealous Bahar, an ambitious rival dancer, makes sure the affair is discovered by Akbar. The emperor is outraged by Salim’s intention to marry below his station and makes every attempt to hinder the couple, including chaining Anarkali in the dungeon. Salim respects the sovereignty of his esteemed father over a vast kingdom, but defends the freedom of his heart. Their relationship breaks down, leading to shouting matches, ultimatums and war. Tragedy ensues, but only after Salim and Anarkali are granted a few precious hours of happiness.

Emperor of the Mughals is, if one adjusts for inflation, perhaps the most the successful Indian film ever made and certainly one of its most enduringly popular. It is emblematic of the Bollywood blockbuster model: a timeless obstacle-laden romance writ on a larger-than-life scale, big-name stars, lavish production values, memorable musical numbers and, of course, a three-hour running time. Director K. Asif overcame titanic production setbacks to get it made (shooting first began in 1946, fourteen years and a different cast away from the finished version), but the sheer visual splendor of Mughal-e-Azam shines through.

It’s best enjoyed by sitting back and admiring the opulence: the flamboyant fabrics, faceted mirrors and filigreed jewelry. The soirees in gardens and clashes of armies. The gilt on everything from copulas to crowns. The romance is a flesh-and-blood extension of this theme with Salim and Anarkali part of the visual feast. Dilip Kumar (Salim) and Madhubala (Anarkali) have chemistry, charisma and commitment, even if their tragic love has little resemblance to a real-world relationship, and although scrupulously, even absurdly chaste (in accordance with industry censors), they know how to squeeze every drop of sensuality out of a glance, a gesture or a dance. The rest of the film admittedly doesn’t hold up quite as well, but it entertains. The acting and writing, for instance, are heavy-handed and overwrought, firmly in the tradition of grand historical epics. The emotions are presented only in their most intense varieties, which only makes them all the purer to savor. One can also find, behind all the pomp and bombast, interesting conflicts being grappled with: the barriers of caste and class, the primacy of love versus principles, the responsibility to rule versus the right to privacy, the limits of parental and government authority and every manifestation of loyalty put to test. It’s interesting to note that Akbar, as in history, is truly a great leader while his son mostly just wants schmooze with a hot girl, but one can’t help rooting for love.

Bollywood is second only to Hollywood in terms of cinematic influence, and surpasses it in terms of film production and viewership. That said, I approach popular cinema (be it from the U.S., India, Nigeria or elsewhere) with a great deal of skepticism and, like many Western cinephiles, I find Bollywood films to be frequently hampered by their long runtimes, ubiquitous songs, limited themes and reliance on formulas, not to mention notoriously sloppy DVD releases (poor transfers, unsubtitled musical numbers, distracting watermarks) further aggravated by endemic piracy. But India is more than just the hindi-based Bollywood; there is also a ‘parallel’ cinema grounded in socially-conscious realism and artistic aspirations, fostered by internationally-regarded auteurs like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Bimal Roy, Shyam Benegal and Mani Kaul. I chose to write about a film firmly in the Bollywood tradition, but if musical spectacles aren’t your cup of tea try The Home and the World, Salaam Bombay, Subarnarekha, Mr. Shome, Our Daily Bread or Pather Panchali.

My Favorites:
The Home and the World
Sholay
The Lonely Wife
Scorching Winds
Court (2015)
Ankur
The Golden Thread / Subarnarekha
Salaam Bombay!
Guide
The Big City
Emperor of the Mughals
Mother India
Mr. Shome
Hero / Nayakan
In Two Minds / Duvidha
I'll Die for Mama / Deewaar
A Day's Bread / Uski Roti
Throw of the Dice
The Pathetic Fallacy

Major Directors:

Shyam Benegal, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mani Kaul, Mehboob Khan, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, Ghatak Ritwik, Bimal Roy, Mrinal Sen

SLIFF 2008 Coverage Part 3

Title: Slumdog Millionaire
Director: Danny Boyle
Country: UK/India
Score: 8.0
Review:
Boyle continues his successful string of high-energy entertainment with this slick Indian production based around “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Ironically, contestant Jamal Malik, a poor orphan raised on the tough streets of Mumbai, is more interested in reuniting with his lost love from childhood than winning the money, but he just might get both wishes. The inspired structure has Malik narrating his life story to the police, as a way of explaining how a “slumdog” with no formal education could know each answer without cheating.

As with all of Boyle’s films (“Shallow Grave,” “28 Day Later,” “Sunshine”) the style is unabashedly populist, characterized by rapid cutting, throbbing music and aesthetic hedonism. While it isn’t surprising that this formula worked well for his films about gangsters, zombies and astronauts, I was surprised how easily it integrated with the more serious setting of India’s megaslums. It helps that the writer took care to channel the excitement, humor and optimism of youth even as he bares the pain and viciousness of poverty and crime. Even the visuals manage to strike a unique beauty, finding splashes of joy in human faces and dyed cloth against backdrops that include sprawling dumps and open sewers.

The final third of the movie becomes more subdued and saccharine, turning into a more conventional love story complete with overtures about destiny, smirking villains and tragic sacrifice. It’s likely to rub the wrong way with many who enjoyed the freshness of the rest of the film, but I suspect that it’s an intentional nod by Boyle towards the traditions of Indian cinematic romances. The ending credits are done as a Bollywood music video, making a more explicit reference to Indian pop culture.

With his kinetic storytelling, emotional range and engaging story, Boyle’s likely to have another hit on his hands. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he walked away with the SLIFF audience award. At the same time, I suspect the critical elite will turn their noses up at the flashy style, cheesy ending and occasionally hokey acting and they’d probably have a good point… but I have to say it was one of the most entertaining releases I’ve seen this year.


Title: Alone
Director: Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom
Country: Thailand
Score: 7.0
Review:
The Pisanthanakun/Wongpoom team (“Shutter”) continues to make a name for themselves in the international horror scene with this creepy tale about cojoined twins and the strange separation anxiety and survivor guilt that results when only one survives into adulthood. Pim seems to be doing well with her loving husband Wee, but when her mother becomes critically ill and they return from South Korea to Thailand, painful memories of her twin sister Ploy begin to drive her towards insanity.

Though “Alone” is unmistakably genre-bound, it is far less interested in the grotesque body-horror possibilities of its premise than the intensified intimacy of its relationships (twin sisters, husband/wife) and their psychological ramifications. This is more “A Tale of Two Sisters” or “Sisters” (1973) than “Basket Case” or “Dead Ringers” (1988) (interesting to note that this split seems to run down gender lines). The directors are quite skilled, if not particularly original, at developing atmosphere, tension and curiosity around their setup.

Horror fans will be particularly pleased by the sheer quantity of scares, which are thankfully not all hoarded for the finale. These are almost all of the loud-noise/sudden-image variety that I’m not usually impressed by, but I give “Alone” credit for actually scaring me time and again. I wish the directors would have tried to sustain the terror, however, since most of the fear-climaxes lasted only a single shot (sometimes with a reaction shot) and I was too often able to assure myself that “it will be over in just a second.” Though the film tarries a little long in the one-scene, one-scare purgatory of horror set pieces, the directors get the plot out of a rut and managed to admirably surprise me (and everyone with me) with a solid final act.

SLIFF 2008 Coverage Part 1

Well, it's high time the SLIFF reviews started trickling out. Here's the first batch, and from here on out I'll try to keep them coming at a reasonably steady pace. But don't wait for me to filter through the roster: the festival continues and St. Louisians should take advantage! If you want to see where I'll be for the remainder of the festival, you can check out my calendar over at Highway 61, where I'll be cross-posting.

I'm already sensing that the festival has taken a lot of my advise from last, though probably not from me. There's a lot more late-night genre options and shorter intro commercials for one thing. More on that after the festival.

Title: Vanaja
Director: Rajnesh Domalpalli
Country: India
Score: 7.0
Review:
After already playing in almost every other festival in the world (it seems) and getting a DVD release, “Vanaja” finally made its way to St. Louis. It tells a the coming of age story of Vanaja in a rural Indian village, who hopes to overcome her poverty, low-caste status and poor prospects by learning traditional dance in the home of her rich landlady. While working as a servant girl, she wins the approval of the landlady and sets about becoming an accomplished dancer.

This familiar arc is soon disrupted both by her father’s increasingly lethal drunkenness and the arrival of the landlady’s attractive, politically ambitious son. Despite early flirtations, any chance of a storybook romance is foiled by age and class, resulting in a painful relationship that includes rape, a contentious pregnancy, blackmail and difficult choices about motherhood.

For some reason I felt hard to please while watching “Vanaja,” both during it predictable plucky-hero dances towards her dreams first half and it’s more complicated young-mother making tough decisions second half. Perhaps it’s because both plotlines are such perennial festival scenarios. Yet what they lack in originality they make up for in delivery. There’s a great deal of well-earned emotional moments and enough time and nuance to gather honest sympathy for Vanaja and her situation.

The acting, particularly the 15-year-old lead Mamatha Bhukya and Urmila Dammannagari’s curmudgeonly landlady, is where the film really shines. Director Domalpalli deserves credit for his unassuming sunlit photography, which captures the rustic dustiness and colorful highlights of rural India. Working on a small budget, the film nevertheless has just the right atmosphere to intensify the drama without overwhelming it.


Title: Interkosmos
Director: Jim Finn
Country: USA
Score: 4.0
Review:
Part of a double-feature by experimental director Jim Finn, “Interkosmos” is a mishmash of appropriated documentary footage transformed into a fictional history of a lost East German space program. A mixed crew from assorted communist nations attempts to establish mining and refueling stations on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but spends most of their time chatting aimless by radio. Their greatest success is in positioning orbiting libraries of communist material, which later conspiracy theories suggest was the real mission goal all along. When the budget disappears, the manned ships go silent and the government covers up the program.

Finn’s premise and his unusual style of integrating archival footage with artificially-aged fiction are certainly interesting, but this first feature by the director suffers from a fatal lack of focus. Monologues about dolphins, minimalist space exercise routines, an all-girls Marxist hockey match, a hamster in a space suit, NASA videos of Earth and a lot more are loosely fitted into place, but they amount to a fairly arbitrary collection of things that Finn found amusing more than a story or even a compelling overview of a story (which is probably closer to his intention).

Even with the short ~70 minute run-time, the film feels far too long and drawn out. It’s hurt by a lack of editing discretion and abundant repetition, revisiting low-interest imagery with minor variations of what we’ve already seen and digested. The overextended intro and end credits are perhaps the clearest examples of indulging at the audience’s expense. Even the best set designs, like a spaceship cockpit and two moving models of the moon stations, are given too much time to sink in while we listen to mildly informative monotone voice-overs. The film is at its best when it plays the narration for bone-dry humor, as in the radio transmission conversations with their blend of bored small talk and Marxist rhetoric.


Title: The Juche Idea
Director: Jim Finn
Country: USA
Score: 6.0
Review:
Much more successful than his previous film is Finn’s “The Juche Idea,” a rough retrospective of fictional propaganda films created by an enthusiastic North Korean director. The director once again appropriates a disparate assemblage of archival footage including media coverage of national celebrations, internal theatrical releases and corporate training videos.

Not only is it clear that Finn has matured as a director and polished his style since the former film, he also seems to have homed in on his strong suit: humor. Laughs are stitched from all sorts of unexpected resources, rather from juxtaposing Kim Jong-il's ideological tenets with laughably lame film clips, mocking language-training videos with badly green-screened backgrounds and heavily-accented ludicrous conversations or just from spouting inappropriately convoluted metaphors.

One still finds too much repetition, a lack of visual stimuli and the unsatisfying feeling that no cogent movie really forms from the individual scenes, but the pacing is more stable, the rhythm tighter and the themes better realized. For those who are interested, I’d recommend sampling this film first before giving “Interkosmos” a try.

Review of The Fall (2006)

Like most cinephiles, I fancy that I have a pretty good network for finding out about the best films. We all have our favorite sources, be they friends, reviewers, websites, blogs, books, movie channels, theaters, film festivals or whatever. With newly released films, its often just as important to learn how to avoid bad advice and obnoxious trailers. Yet sometimes our personal systems fail, something which happened to me recently when an internet popup ad was the unlikely informant for guiding me to the best recent film I’ve seen this year.

I say recent, because Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” was actually finished in 2006, though it didn’t see a national theatrical release until 2008. Along with the poor distribution it was given, limping marketing and poor reviews have dogged it. I don’t usually write about films while they are still technically in theaters, but I must rise to the defense of “The Fall.” I feel strongly that it is a masterpiece.

Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) is the curious child of Hispanic orange-pickers in California (circa 1920), who has landed in a hospital after falling from a tree. There she meets Roy Walker (Lee Pace), a Hollywood stuntman who has recently paralyzed his legs in a fall of his own. Alexandria takes to the man after he enchants her with a whimsical epic that consumes her fertile imagination. Yet Walker’s fantastic tale is woven with his own agenda and to get past each cliffhanger Alexandria must help Walker steal enough morphine to seal his suicide.

While the frame story might seem dark and a little disturbing, it’s infused with warmth and wonder by Untaru, who gives a brilliant performance despite being nine years old and not speaking English (she learned as shooting progressed). What give the film its staggering beauty and – less often mentioned – its depth, is Walker’s tale. In it, six disparate adventures (a slave, a sapper, an Indian, a mystic, a masked bandit and Charles Darwin) seek revenge on the nefarious governor Odious. They must undergo a great deal of travel and tragedy before they can face him.

Tarsem Singh was already known as a visual virtuoso for his music video work and his flawed debut “The Cell” (2000), which may arguably deserve its fast fade into obscurity (I’m personally a bit fond of it), but, if nothing else, showed off a great deal of potential. With “The Fall,” Tarsem has made one of the most lush, sumptuous films ever made. It is even more impressive since it is purportedly made without CG, though post-production color work was clearly done. The film has the feel of a Guillermo del Toro fantasy graced with Sergei Parajanov’s talent for appropriating cultural details and Dario Argento panache for enriched colors and aggressive location scouting.

[Images: That’s Charles Darwin in his ridiculous red, white and red fur coat visible in the first three screenshots.]

The film makes no apologies for its ostentatious presentation; an audacious all-out bid for striking beauty that made many critics uncomfortable. It opens with a black-and-white credit sequence of exquisite slow-motion tracking shots whose meaning will not be clear until later in the film. The shots are in an elegant industrial tableau style not quite in keeping with the rest of the film, yet the dreamlike contrast only helps, making the difference between reality and fantasy into a matter of mood.

There’s another standout sequence later in the film in which a troubled dream is submerged in bizarre imagery combining real actors, stage backdrops and stop-motion surgery. Katie noted (and I second) that both the opening credits and dream sequence, if they were presented as standalone shorts, would be amongst her favorites.

Other mesmerizing moments include a sea journey via swimming elephant, a human map performed as a ritual and a chain of death sequences that combine fable, farce and tragedy. These sequences demonstrate a daring creativity and eclecticism that I can’t resists (Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Juenet come to mind), and they work so well for the film that claims of pretentiousness or inconsistency would be petty.

The cumulative impact of the cinematography, camerawork, set dressing, location finding and costume design is so delirious it feels drunk with color and grandeur. Thus it is perhaps not too surprising that one of the main complaints is that story doesn’t live up to the presentation. I disagree, though with imagery this magnificent I’m not sure I’d care if it were true.

Still, I think the accusations that the film is merely shallow excuses for pretty pictures is little more than a snap reaction blinded by the overwhelming visuals. It’s not an uncommon response, motivated by the gut instinct that excellence in one area is necessarily balanced by a lack elsewhere. Does one often, for instance, see a gorgeous blonde and assume they have a PhD?

I happened to really like Tarsem’s storytelling. The nested tale featuring a child’s imagination where reality and fantasy blur and interchange has been done before in “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Princess Bride,” “The Neverending Story,” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” to name just a few. What Tarsem adds to the tradition is a sense that all stories have an agenda, and not necessarily one as noble as a moral. He reveals how they can manipulate and be manipulated to serve the purposes of the teller (how well modern audiences know the double-edged power of the cliffhanger as we sit through commercials!) and even the listener (at one point Alexandria slips into the story to save her beloved hero).

There’s a certain brazenness today in suggesting that it’s OK for stories to be flexible; that the facts can be changed and previous events edited without invalidating the emotional core and underlying truths. To me, this giddy irreverence for “The Epic” is what deflates any bulges of pretentions. It gives a little room for humor, as when Walker retroactively claims that the masked bandit had his fingers crossed behind his back when he swore a blood oath vendetta over his brother’s corpse.

Tarsem makes it clear that he is not exposing the magnificent heights and exploitative depths of just any brand of storytelling (the novel, for instance), but that he is thinking specifically about cinema. The main character’s former position as a stuntman is, itself, a job that distorts the border between truth and fiction. It addresses the lie we see (that a famous celebrity is performing a death defying feat) and the truth that is hidden (that an underpaid unknown actually executed the act). One can see why Tarsem would choose to minimize the greater lie: that no one did the stunt because computer effects faked it. “The Fall” suggests that the fiction and reality are dependent on each other for their magic.

The film has direct references to film at both the beginning and end, but one of my favorites takes place just as Roy Walker begins to tell his first tale. Alexandria stands against a wall as the morning sunlight enters in through a keyhole, projecting an image of a horse from outside onto the wall. At first, it appears that the shadow is shaping itself to Alexandria’s imagination until the cinema-like mechanisms of the projected light are revealed. Appropriately, Alexanderia inadvertently slips the horse into her visualization of the story, as she will do many times with her whims and misinterpretations. The Indian of the story, for instance, is clearly intended by Walker to be an American Indian (he marries a squaw and lives in a wigwam), but Alexandria always sees him as an East Asian.

Though it isn’t a captivating title for bringing in newcomers, I love the way “The Fall” works on so many levels for both the plot and themes. It is a pair of falls that unite the leads and a third that provides the climax. More interpretive is the idea of the Biblical fall (visually reflected by the idyllic Eden/Apple-esque motif of oranges) and loss of innocence. This is plays out as Alexandria comes to learn of Walker’s real agenda behind telling the story.

This is where I read something into the story which I can relate to deeply: the sudden lurch as one sees the private interests behind the curtain. The turning point of knowing you’ve been manipulated. Wonder and joy, thereafter, can no longer be experienced in their purest form. But “The Fall” offers a solution I truly love. [SPOILERS] In the film’s touching epilogue, Alexandria learns to find a new pleasure in searching out Roy in the cinema: in the falls (yet one final layer of its meaning), fights and climbs of the stunts whose unsung artistry she now understands and treasures. She falls in love with stories again, but this time for the truth of their hidden craft rather than merely the fiction of their outer appearances. [End of SPOILERS]

[Image: This shot is a little hint at an upcoming Film Walrus event.]

So how come critics dismiss this movie so easily? I think a lot of them missed the message I interpreted (hey, I could be reading it wrong), but I don’t think many were bothering to interpret at all. Most saw a film that was big, bold, surreal and shameless and they were unable to reduce it to the pocketbook realism and genre limitations they were used to. Having become so sated on bland mediocrity, this outpouring of flavor and spice turned their stomachs. They came face-to-face with creativity and beauty only to pinch their nose with one hand, turn their thumb down with the other and haughtily declare that they have no use for [sneer] “pretty pictures.”

And so I cast a pox upon them. Not a flesheating disease, but the mindeating one they crave: a plague of visually-stunted overdone mediocrity. I hope these reviewers suffer through endless lugubrious art films by bored auteurs immolating themselves with minimalism. I curse them with cute indie flicks about bridging gender, cultural and generational divides. I call down a hailstorm of clockwork thrillers, raunchy comedies and soulless rom-coms. And I will get my wish, because it is their wish, too; because the Market Forces are listening to the prayers of critics who preach cinematic banality to their flocks.

[Image: Alternatively, I would accept the exile of hateful critics to the labyrinth of despair.]

That said, credit is due to those who have stood against the critical tide. Roger Ebert, one of the few great critics who is powerful enough that he doesn’t feel the need to toe the line, gave the film it’s only major perfect score. Directors Spike Jonze and David Fincher have nobly supported the film. Then, too, audiences who have caught it so far have clearly loved it, if their IMDB support is any indication. Hopefully this niche audience will be justly rewarded, perhaps with no better prize the continued career of Tarsem and other directors who share his audacity and virtuosity.

Walrus Rating: 10.0