Tag: MAMI

Categories
Cinema

MAMI-2 Day 1 & 2

If you’ve seen Haider, and you’re cringing at the title of this post, please relax.

It just means that this is the second MAMI/MFF I am attending 🙂

killa
Day 1: Started with probably the best film I’ve seen this year. Avinash Arun’s Killa is visually stunning, and far more immersive as a story. The scenes are taken to great heights by the performances of the entire cast – especially the kids in the school. A story of adolescence, struggling with moving to a new place, loss, fear of abandonment, not being understood, finding friends, then finding strength, layered with beautiful frames, and music that’s beautiful but never gets in your way. And at many times, I am reminded that segments of this film could very well be a teenage Dil Chahta Hai :). Don’t miss it anywhere you get a chance to see it.

The second movie I walked in to, was Mrityunjay Devvrat’s Children of War. I had seen its trailer a few months back, and was intrigued by the star cast (Farooq Shaikh, Victor Banerjee, Pavan Malhotra, Raima Sen, Tilottama Shome). I walked into the screen around half an hour late (because Killa was rescheduled to an hour after the initial time), but got the gist of the movie in a dialogue Pavan Malhotra (playing a military man from West Pakistan) mouths. I stayed for a half hour after that, but could not sit much longer. Perhaps it was because the contrast in the approaches between Killa and CoW was so stark. That half an hour was full of loud background music, dialogues delivered with strange pauses, extra expositing dialogues, and lots of melodrama. I decided to not let my headache increase and walked out.

Day 2: Güeros apparently is a slur in Mexico. It means a pale man. And many times in the movie, calling someone pale is deemed as a mild insult. Alonso Ruiz Palacios’ Güeros touches upon various conflict of urban Mexican society along with many many other subjects, related to the characters’ lives as well as with art and education in the country. But what’s more delightful than the treatment of these subjects, or the black-and-white and four-by-three frames, or the music that could change Mexican rock that the audience never gets to hear, or the ‘tiger’, or the semi-parasitic relationship our protagonists have with the unsuspecting little girl who’s their neighbour, is the self-effacing approach the film takes – it just dissipates whatever tension is built up because of a character going on a deep self-discovery monologue or a deep political discussion between the characters by taking a totally unexpected and hilarious route. And quite a few times, it appears as if the characters are making a commentary on the film they themselves are acting in, which gave me a feeling of them having crossed the boundary of the silver screen and having walked into the theatre amongst us. It’s in a way a road movie, as well as a coming of age movie, as well as a self-discovery movie. Even though the title refers to a pale man, the most important protagonist is the man who’s referred to as the dark one whenever someone is called pale. Watch it for deep thoughtful conversations, and belly-aching laughs.

In the evening, I walked in to Chandan to catch Atom Egoyan’s The Captive. To be honest, I am a sucker for a good thriller. Most of this film ticks off the boxes for one, but the narrative is mostly loose and flaky. I was trying to write off the discrepancies by positing that the film jumps back and forward in time, not exactly like Memento, but in a loose way. The problem still remained that I could not find any anchors or markers for us to realise ‘which’ time we are in at any point in the film. There even was a time when I wondered if Rosario Dawson is playing twins! The performances are strong, but the motives seem half-baked. The created universe of the pedophile ring seems a bit too goody-goody to be sinister and menacing, and the characters are all in set templates of such a thriller, well, except for Rosario Dawson’s Nicole. I was thankful the movie wasn’t too long, but I wouldn’t watch it again. Well, maybe I would, just to understand (spoiler alert) how Nicole manages to appear in a kidnapper’s van one moment, and then investigating in the next frame, and then back in the van later on.

Categories
Cinema

#MFF

mff
Welcome to the most late-to-the-party post about this year’s Mumbai Film Festival, affectionately called MAMI.

This is the first time I attended the Mumbai Film Festival. Actually it’s my first time at any film festival 🙂 I wasn’t disappointed, overall that is: watching so many movies over one week, discussing them with friends over samosa chaats and sandwiches and cups of tea, all while rushing from one auditorium to the other, is fun. So, here’s the list of movies I saw, in decreasing order of preference.

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (Le Grande Bellezza)
It’s about the life of a writer who’s living the decadent high-life in Rome. It’s visually magnificent, humorous, and thoroughly enjoyable. Maybe the best film I’ve seen in recent times.

Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis
A gloomy film about a young folk singer in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ’60s, who’s struggling to make it big, but can’t catch a break. Well he could be a little less miserable if only he could change the way he was a bit, but he does not.

Fahad Mustafa & Deepti Kakkar’s Powerless / Katiyabaaz
A documentary about the state of power distribution in Kanpur, and the alternate industry called Katiyabaaz this has spawned, it’s a documentary which feels like a drama-comedy-thriller crossover. The characters, played by the real people themselves, talk without help of dialogues, but they might as well have been written & bound in a script, for they evoke all the responses you’d expect from a scripted drama.

Yong-gyun Kim’s Killer Toon / Deo Web-toon: Ye- go Sal-in
Gripping, horrifying, with lots of emotional hooks to keep you glued. The latter half loses the suspense element to give way to lots of exposition, to keep up with the somewhat complicated plot. But a unique concept, and competent direction make it a favourite.

Steven Knight’s Locke
How long can one scene be? How gripping can a very long scene be? Steven Knight shows us that the rules of filmmaking can be ignored/bypassed/broken, and still a fantastic piece of cinema can be made. Locke is a construction professional, who is on his way to London to take care of a one-time mistake he made around a year ago, partly because it’s who he is, and partly because of how his father had behaved in a similar situation years ago. It raises a lot of questions, uncomfortable ones, and doesn’t answer any of them. Just like life.

Amit Masurkar’s Sulemani Keeda
Jane Bhi Do Yaaro hangover? Maybe. Except that this movie does not have any commentary on politics or the state of our country. It’s a light-hearted story of two struggling screenwriters who live in where-else-but-Versova, and their journey – to find work and meaning. Cameos by Mahesh Bhatt, Anil Sharma, and Razzaq Khan, who plays a producer father of a wannabe director son, whose cat is called, what-else-but-Fellini. Also, Aditi Vasudev looks her most stunning here.

Guillaume Brac’s Tonnerre
The only love story that I saw here, albeit an unusual one. A 30-something musician comes visit his father in the small town of Tonnerre, and starts dating a much younger reporter with a local magazine. The girl’s ex-boyfriend is a local sportsman closer to her age. The usual complications in such a situation arise, and juxtaposed with our guy’s relationship & past with his father, it makes for an interesting & gripping story.

Boris Khlebnikov’s A Long and Happy Life / Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn
A leisurely paced story of a farmer, who’s stuck between the easy way out of giving up his farm for a huge sum of money, or standing up for workers on his farm, who eventually desert him. It’s interesting to observe his psychological condition, from uncertainty, to a sense of purpose, to betrayal and then obstinacy. The performances are good, the story touching, and the Russian countryside looks beautiful throughout the film.

Anup Singh’s Qissa
A film that uses an unbelievable premise and a supernatural twist to tell us a tale which is about a very real problem – of the state of girl children in India. Stellar performances, almost mythical storytelling, and a largely tight screenplay make it a must watch.

Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin / Tian Zhu ding
Four real stories of four different people who didn’t have much to begin with, their struggle to make a living despite that, and how sin enters their lives. It’s so good that the only time I noticed how long it was was at the end of the third story. I had expected it to be the last one.

Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry
Wow for the storytelling. It’s the story of a boy who belongs to the class of untouchables, his one-sided love for a girl way out of his reach, and his struggle to get her amidst all the hardships he faces because of his ‘identity’.

Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo
It’s Gondry. So it’s absurdism at its best. The story is a pretty simple tragedy – of a man who has everything, finds love, and then loses everything in the process of trying to save her. But it’s visually entertaining with the legs that stretch in curves while dancing, doorbells who run like arachnids when they go off, the mouse who strangely looks like a tiny man in a mouse suit, the flower that grows inside lungs, and many others, which make an otherwise simple story interesting enough to watch.

Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s The Japanese Dog / Cainele Japonez
A sweet idyllic movie about the conflict between a father who, against everyone’s advice in his village, is holding on to his land and life in the village hoping for his son’s eventual return, and the son, who’s made a life for himself in faraway Japan with his Japanese wife & son, and how these two worlds reconcile.

J. C. Chandor’s All is Lost
Life of Pi meets Gravity meets Tree of Life? One character who is out sailing in his yacht, and faces the perils of sea. Words are spoken only twice – when the nameless character does a sort of an intro of his voyage, and later when he tries speaking to someone on the radio asking for help. Beautiful camera work. And the character’s arc is in place. But it’s tedious, very tedious. I haven’t looked at my watch so many times in any other movie.

James Gray’s The Immigrant
A thoroughly boring movie, if ever there was one. The only thing bearable was Marion Cotillard’s face, but throughout the movie even she bore the same stiff pained expression of eternal suffering. Throughout the movie I was reminded of Nolan’s The Prestige, because of the period and the palette, but sadly this movie lacks all the humour and charm of The Prestige.