Devdas is Bollywood’s most decorated lover. The reason for him being an inspiration for most of the directors is I guess not his loss, but his tendency for self-destruction. A story that exceeds the height of tragedy is likely to become stuff of legend. Bhansali’s larger-than-life portrayal of Devdas was aesthetic excellence, but Anurag Kashyap imagines that had Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay written Devdas in today’s time, the reason for Dev’s demise would have been libidinal drives and arrogance, and not social differences. Above all, Kashyap succeeds in capturing the isolation of Devdas.

Apart from being a bleaker version among all the previous attempts to capture Devdas on celluloid, Dev D is a wonderful movie-going experience; more so because being Indian we don’t much get to see thought provoking cinema …ok, let me leave intellectual hunger of certain cinemagoers aside… we don’t even get a new experience (and we get either feminist or cliché-ridden patriotic films in the name of serious cinema). Film-making in Bollywood is just packaging. They make products these days, and not movies. Because one love-story is just a reinvented cliché from another mind-numbing film, there are many surprises in Dev D for an Indian viewer. The relationships between the characters filled with anger, egoism, sexual drives gives a very different facet of lovers, far from the image of lovers Bollywood has created (not that all relationships are meant to be fractured, but this was believable) something which reminded me of Faith Akin’s Head-on. Screen characters in Hindi films are becoming one-dimensional, shallow, and artificial – more desperate to flaunt their well-toned bodies in designer outfits than showing genuine humanness; and when they fall in love and sing those high-budget songs, they look like they are still advertising (maybe because of corporate funding). So Dev D comes as a breath of fresh air just like Dil Chahta Hai came few years ago. We like such films for their honesty. By honest, I don’t mean that a film should portray love in all its tragic incarnations, but the situations should at least submit to the character’s becoming. For instance, there came a film called Laaga Chunari Mein Daag in which Rani Mukerji enters deeper into the gritty world of prostitution, and in the end to give a stereotypical happy ending a prince charming enters her life and tells her that he cannot live without her. It must have disappointed a real prostitute sitting in the cinema-hall watching the film because she knows to her guts that prince charming exists only in fairy tales.

Anyways, the structure of Dev D explains the transformation of the three leads in episodes. Among many funny sequences of the film, the trumpet band that received Dev on his return to India and followed him behind his car akin to Emir Kusturica’s Once Upon A Time There Was A Country was amusing to watch. Dev’s crude relationship with his father showed in initial scenes opened a window to his psyche for the viewer to later understand his fall. Going by previous films of Kashyap who is known for dark films devoid of any melodrama, I don’t think he wants the viewer to sympathize for Devdas like Bhansali did. I think he is just observing Dev’s demise and expects the viewer to do the same. After being in the world of drug-induced hallucination, when Dev experiences a near-death experience: that is the first time we see him awake – an epiphany, maybe! It is through Chanda that the torn-apart Dev learns to come to terms with reality; not because she is an angel, but because he starts showing readiness (off course, she is always there whenever Dev needs her despite having her own demons to mend). In fact, Dev D is the most positive version of Devdas ever filmed as it allows Dev to resurrect. And finally, the best moment in the film was “Emotional Atyachar”! The song is performed in such an unrehearsed, matter-of-fact manner that it made everyone laugh out loud in the cinema hall, and it was meant to show the departure of Dev from his known reality.

Though a little uneven at some places, Dev D is finely made, and it is his first script since Satya and Kaun? that I liked. I didn’t like No smoking. It was a nice try to capture the disorientation of the protagonist through surrealism, something which very few have done before in Hindi films. Some scenes were really inventive and amusing, but it still had something missing. I don’t know what because I am not a film student. I guess you have to be David Lynch at the height of your powers to capture the essence of Kafka. I am not comparing them; I am just suggesting that it was Kashyap’s first attempt at something which Lynch has mastered so well in decades of surrealist filmmaking (best example being Mulholland Dr.).

Maybe in time we will see Kashyap giving us a breath-taking kafkaesque mindbender...

Everything is illuminated in the light of the past...

An anti-Semitic grandfather and his fervent grandson Alex are told to escort a young American Jew, named Jonathan Safran Foer, through the Ukrainian countryside to find Trachimbrod: a place no longer existing on the map and where most of the villagers were liquidated by the Nazis. Jonathan (played by Elijah Wood) intends to learn about a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The car used for the trip has “Heritage tour” written on the top of it. Alex’s grandpa drives the car, and Alex occasionally translates grandpa’s effusions to Jonathan who sits at the back with Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. (a dog…bitch to be precise). So begins Everything is illuminated: a journey that follows through the Ukrainian landscape towards a bitter past.

The story is narrated by Alex, in his broken English and gestures assumed from American pop culture. Played by Eugene Hutz, Alex is really amusing. The character of his grandpa is also interesting and watchable throughout. The humor during the first half of the film arises due to the idiosyncrasies of the characters. Jonathan has a curious habit of collection things, “family things” as he says. He keeps small plastic bags with him all the time, and whenever he finds something curious or striking, he puts it in one of his bags. He calls himself a collector. He collects because he is afraid that he will forget. There is a conversation between Alex and Jonathan, which I don’t clearly remember, but it goes something like this…

Alex: Father informs me that you are a writer.
Jonathan: Not really… I am more of a collector
Alex: What do you collect?
Jonathan: things… family things.
Alex: It is a good profession, yes?
Jonathan: No, it is not a profession. It is something I do.
Alex: why?
Jonathan: I don’t know. It’s just something I do… I mean, why does anyone do anything?
Alex (looking confused for a while suddenly says with a smile): I understand!

Their interactions are amusing and add to the flow of the film. The humor starts diluting as the journey progresses. They go through curious situations, which I better leave untold. After tiresome search they reach a field of sunflowers and at the heart of the field is a small house. Something occurs to Alex’s grandpa and he tells “check here”. It is a stunning view, like Alex’s grandfather even the viewer will feel that something must be there; that maybe this is the place where the journey is supposed to end.

Alex finds an old woman sitting outside the house, and he asks her the whereabouts of Trachimbrod. She replies “I am it”.

They have reached Trachimbrod. Though the place was destroyed by Nazis, the old woman has preserved Trachimbrod in her house, which is full to the brim with things belonging to the people who were killed. Like Alex, she is also a collector. Having known about holocaust only through films and literature, I wonder how painful it must have been for those who share a similar history. While watching the film’s last sequence where the characters go to the place where once Trachimbrod used to be, I was reminded of Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist. It was about a Jew’s struggle to escape Nazi Germany (though he escapes in the end, it is not dealt with triumph but with loss). Polanski too had lost his parents in holocaust, and The Pianist was constantly reminding me that if someone has survived, it is because of nothing else but chance. Everything is Illuminated looks like an extension of The Pianist, where the third generation of the one who survived returns to the place where it happened unearthing series of poignant revelations. Each revelation brings an illumination....

The film ends with a tragedy and Alex's conclusion “Everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out”.

Curious Case of the Human Chameleon

Imagine a man who can transform himself into anyone who is around him. For instance, if he is near a Chinese, he will start developing oriental features – he will walk, talk, behave, and even look like a Chinese. If he is in the company of intellectuals, he will talk like an intellectual on any damn subject; even referring to specialized papers on the subject, may or may not be written by him. Not only that. He can also transform himself physically; say, if he is around obese people, he will start growing fatter just like that. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine such a creature.

Zelig is Woody Allen’s vision of one such man, set in 20s and 30s. The film presents us the fictional story of Leonard Zelig in an unusual mockumentary-like structure with interviews and footages. Through interviews, prominent literary figures like Susan Sontag, Irvin Howe and Saul Bellow give their opinions on the life and times of Zelig. Side by side, we see black-and-white worn-out footages of Zelig’s metamorphosis, a notice of his ability by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an attempt to study and cure him by a certain Dr. Eudora Fletcher (played by Mia Farrow). As the film proceeds, America gets fond of Zelig and makes him a public icon. Dr. Fletcher discovers that Zelig’s rare feat is a result of isolation and unhappy childhood. An urge to be accepted by the people around him is so acute that he transforms himself into anyone who is around him so that he can be liked. The psychological sessions turn slowly into romance and till the story reaches its conclusion, we see Zelig standing near Pope Pius XI in the Vatican, escaping the Nazis by flying a plane upside down across the Atlantic (setting a record, indeed!) , and being destroyed by the same media that made him a hero. Zelig is at once a comedy, a love story, and a commentary on American popular culture. Technically the film is remarkable, mainly for the blending of actors into the newsreel footages. Shots are taken through antique lenses to give a vintage feel.

Woody Allen is a delighting story-teller: he can make you laugh, and at the same time can emotionally move you. The metamorphosis of Zelig also indicates the lack of personality. He has no “self". The film is not a total fantasy; it can also make one think: aren’t we all like Zelig? Trying in our own funny ways to be accepted by the society, trying not to divulge from the social norms, assuming gestures and accents that are not our own, keeping abreast with corporate goals, and after a fast-paced life when we retreat to a slow place and are left with all the time in the world to think, we realize that we have never known a person who recides deep inside: the “real me”!

A face, a gesture, a moment, a desire - Frozen in Time

Memory is often of deep interest to artists and philosophers. It is nevertheless difficult to portray in works of art. The fact that a film exists that meditates on the nature of memory, disguised as science fiction, is enough to increase curiosity. La Jetee, a short film made in 1962, is remarkable for being made completely out of still images. In the words of filmmaker Chris Marker it is a photo-roman (a photographic novel). It tells the story of a man “haunted by an image of his childhood”. As a kid, the protagonist had seen a woman on the pier of Orly airport just before she witnessed a murder. Years later, after surviving nuclear war (which is mentioned by the narrator as World War III) he is held captive underground with others like him; they are used as guinea pigs in the time-travel experiments their captors conduct. With the help of these experiments the captors search for food, medicine, and energy sources in different time zones, “using past and future to aid the present”. Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys is inspired by this film, and it is a good film in its own terms, but personally I found La Jette to be more absorbing and less confusing. Both films have lots of differences in terms of plot and narratives, but thematically they coincide. It is not important whether time travel is possible or not. There are plenty of Hollywood films dealing with this subject, most of them unconvincing. La Jetee and Twelve Monkeys use the time travel notion to probe the mysteries of time, and not to create swashbuckling adventure.

The protagonist is selected for the experiment just because he is glued to an image of his past – the face of a woman that has haunted him for years. The story is of faces too as they are persistent in the memory; we remember the past and we remember faces. Human face is a subject for all great directors – be it Bergman or Tarkovsky. In the words of Woody Allen: they just put the camera on a face and keep it there and keep it there...

After days of experimenting, our protagonist starts gathering his past. He sees the fields, horses, children and places yet not ruined by the war. And he meets the woman. During the first few experiments he tries to familiarize with her. As he is sent to the past for limited time, he is not sure how much time he can spend with her, nor does he know whether his captors will send him back again after the experiment is over. With this uncertainty in his breast, and recurring time travels he forms an unconditional relationship with her. The woman on the other hand starts accepting his appearing and disappearing as a natural phenomenon. She calls him her ghost. They spend joyous moments together. “They have no memories, no plans. Time builds painlessly around them” says the narrator. There is a moment in the film when the woman is sleeping, and after some ten to eleven frames opens her eyes. Though a very ordinary looking scene, after watching still images for so long this faint motion has a power to move the viewer. Chris Marker is a master who can make an obvious motion look magical. Maybe she is looking at the protagonist, and in her eyes one can mark sheer love. The desire to be complete with “the other” dwells in every heart, and here is the woman he longs for, lovingly starring at him. But the viewer is also aware of an inevitable fact that this is just a moment and the protagonist has to leave it to go back to the miserable present he comes from. This knowledge makes a very beautiful scene look heartrending.

It is a dense film but from what I have understood, the protagonist had just seen the woman once in his life, as a kid, when she was witnessing a death. When he enters the past (which I take as entering one’s own memories), the time he spends with her may very well be the vacuum of his desires, and not the memory of something that actually happened. Desires always come into play. The ideal woman he longed for had the attributes designed by him but they lacked a form; the image of that woman provided one. In the end, at the Orly airport, when he runs towards her because nothing in the world is more precious than her, he also sees the kid that he used to be. It is a remarkable scene – something that was, something that is, and something that should be, all in the same time zone. Then the terrible, maybe unavoidable, happens. What is more important: the actualization of all the desires or having triumphantly lived just one in the mind?

The film left me with a feeling; somehting which I cannot really put in words. To put it in the words of Chilean Poet Pablo Naruda:

How much does a man live, after all?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say “forever”?

The Fall...

There is a train on the bridge. Few men are shouting and running, few are gazing down. They use a rope to drag something out of water under the bridge. Something must have fallen when the train was in motion. After a moment, we come to know that it was a horse. With a visual quality like that of prolonged dream dreamt by Dali and Jung, The Fall drags the viewer into a world where reality and imagination merge so that the film’s characters can take refuge into the world of the mind to escape the gravity of existence. It is a unique film, unique in the real sense of the word, and relies heavily on images than on a fixed plot.

The story takes place at Los Angles, 1915, in a hospital where half of the beds are neatly made but empty. On one of the beds, we see Roy (Lee Pace), a silent movie stuntman, who has injured himself badly and cannot walk. There is a small girl called Alexandria who roams around the hospital the way friendless kids do to pass time. She peaks into the nurse’s room now and then who is apparently the only person she is most comfortable with, she regularly meets an old patient who removes his teethes to amuse her, but she is loitering alone most of the time. She drops around Roy’s bed by chance and they form an odd company. Roy tells her an adventurous story that involves a black bandit (whose is Roy himself), an Italian anarchist, an escaped African slave, an Indian, Charles Darwin and his pet monkey; they are deserted on an island, they have their own reasons to kill Governor Odious, and they escape from the island riding swimming elephants. Though Roy tells the story, the visuals that we encounter are the output of Alexandria’s imagination – of what Alexandria makes of Roy’s story. There are words she does not understand, and she imagines something different from what Roy intends. The Fall gains its momentum slowly and steadily – it shifts from the story Roy is telling to the reality of Roy in the most unusual narrative structure I have encountered.

Roy is paralyzed and is dumped by the woman he loves. He wants to kill himself but since he cannot walk, he wants someone to bring morphine pills from the medicine room. The story he tells to Alexandria is just a bait to make her bring the pills. Alexandria on the other hand has found a good company in Roy, a good friend who tells her stories. Both of them have little to live for in the real world. Alexandria tells in passing that bad people burned her house; Roy asks her “who?”; “bad people” she replies in her innocent diction. Her father is dead and she does not want to leave the hospital to go back to her mother. Roy’s story makes her feel excited, and it helps in forming an odd bond between the two. “We are an odd pair”, Roy tells her once. The film is not without poignant moments. There is life affirmation near the end of the film as well. Bleakness is a phase that has to pass, and if one has company during such period, that to of someone like Alexandria’s, the train leaves the tunnel a little faster.

But what is fantastic about this film is that the story within the story moves, shape-shifts, and changes based on the mood of Roy and Alexandria. The Labyrinth of despair from which the only escape is death, the blue city, Darwin’s monkey chasing the butterfly, the zigzag staircase, man appearing from a burning tree – these are few of the visuals worth mentioning. They are worth watching for the only reason that there is not a single trace of computer-generated animation seen in the film. It took Tarsem Singh (a lesser-known Indian director whose first film was The Cell, and who has directed music videos for Deep Forest) four years to complete this film, and he traveled across twenty-eight countries to shoot it. The result is awe-inspiring, a visual treat of the highest order. It is undoubtedly a movie made with utmost passion for images. I hardly know about any other film that is even close to this one.

Shoot First. Sightsee Later.

In Bruges is not a thriller, is not existential philosophy, is not a travelogue, is not a dark comedy, yet it is a little bit of them all. Two Irish conman are sent to Bruges after a hit goes horribly wrong. A hotel room is booked for them for two weeks; they are waiting for a call from their boss, and till then all they can do is sightseeing. Ray (Colin Ferrell) is young and is probably new to this job; he is impatient since he has come to Bruges and unlike his older and sympathetic partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson) has no interest in the medieval history of the land. Ken and Ray loiter around Bruges like tourists, and those initial scenes are eccentrically funny. Bruges is shot beautifully like a video catalogue of some travel agent, but it remains as a backdrop, and by being so opens a window to the psyche of the characters.

They have their suspicion – their boss cannot send them to Bruges just for hiding! Maybe, they will be given some assignment that is to be carried out in Bruges. Who knows? Meanwhile, they come across interesting characters: a dwarf actor shooting for a film that is very much like Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a blond girl with whom Ray oddly bonds, a pregnant hotel-owner, and a guy named Yuri who does yoga and arranges guns for his clients. One of the conman has hidden sorrows. Maybe, he is trying to cop-up with what has gone wrong; but his eccentricities and absurd behaviors create curiosity in the viewer. You don’t know whether to be happy or sad for him.

Telling more about the film is like telling nothing. It is very much like Glengarry Glen Ross; as in, the story of the film, if told, is so simple that it will not interest anyone to even take a look. Its power lies in the way the characters interact. It entirely depends on how it is written; dialogues here just don’t drag the plot, but triumphantly denies the notion that a film can need a plot. It is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, an established Irish play-writer who like David Mamet (writer of Glengarry Glen Ross) shows uncanny playfulness with words and situations.

The call from Harry (Ralph Fiennes) finally comes one night, and the conversation he has with Ken is really amusing. The task he assigns is difficult to carry. There are ethical choices involved. And after that scene when the call finally ends, you will see how brilliantly the film grabs you till it reaches its unusual and inevitable close. By the time the film ends you might have guessed what is going to happen, but you will not be able to move your eyes away from the screen. Such is the power of its execution. Brendan Gleeson is very convincing as a gentle conman who has seen it all. Also worth mentioning is how Ralph Fiennes makes his character a treat to watch, the conversation he has with Ray near the end of the film with the pregnant lady standing between them is so absorbing. Murders that take place are darkly funny and bear the eccentric logic of the film’s characters. There are twists in the tale like any other thriller; the dialogues flow like they have been written by someone close to the theater of the absurd; but In Bruges is above all an allegory: a beautiful city like Bruges acts as a symbol of ‘waiting’. Maybe hell is on earth and after you have committed a brutal crime, wherever you go, you cannot find solace. You are trapped in the earthy hell, in Bruges.

The Horror... The Horror...

There is a scene in Apocalypse Now where two boats confront each other in a Vietnamese river. One is filled with local civilians and other has soldiers of American military. Despite the protagonist Captain Willard’s advice the soldiers search the civilian boat. The camera moves from the soldiers to the civilians meticulously showing how tense both the parties are. A soldier reaches for a box to inspect it, suddenly a civilian woman in the boat runs towards the box propelling the soldiers to shoot the civilians. Later it is found that there was a small puppy in the box, and the shooting was absurd. The woman is still alive, she moves a little. The boat pilot orders the soldiers to take the woman in the boat as they can save her – maybe there is regret in his heart and he wants to compensate by saving her. Captain Willard shoots the woman, with total lack of emotions, and coldly tells to the boat pilot “I told you not to stop the boat”. The film proceeds with no further explanation. And there cannot be an explanation. This was one of the most powerful scenes in the film. What image are we to gather of Captain Willard? (a disoriented military veteran who after spending three years in Vietnam has lacked all faith in human life, and is not able to connect with the society again). He knows to his guts that what all is going on is absurd, and checking a boat full of civilians in the midst of war will result only in chaos. The civilians were innocent, the soldiers were not cruel enough to kill them, but it happened. Maybe Willard shot the woman to spare her the horror of being the only person alive when all her companions were dead. I could never tell. Apocalypse Now is filled with such remarkable moments.

Captain Willard is played by Martin Sheen who genuinely looks detached throughout the film. The premise of the film is based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which was partly based on Conrad’s experience as steam paddleboat captain in Africa. Though there have been a number of plot modifications, the movie is faithful to the novel as it goes far beyond the war and reaches into the darkness of the human heart, a darkness lurking in even the most civilized of men.

Going through this film is indeed a visual experience matched by very few films made on war. I was amazed by the way sound of approaching helicopters was used. It was so much in synch with the images that it could have worked as a background score. As far as the cinematography is concerned, it is well-known that Coppola was inspired by Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) . Like Herzog, Coppola also intended to give an authentic experience to the viewer; as if, not only the unaware soldiers but the viewer too is aboard the boat bound for the deadliest place on earth.

A renegade Captain Kurtz, one of Army’s most decorated soldiers, has set up a secret abode and has established a Warlord like image among tribesmen. His whereabouts are unknown. Captain Willard’s mission is to find and terminate him. What follows is a journey to find Kurtz. Along the way Captain Willard and his crew encounter number of interesting characters and situations with American intervention in Vietnam as a backdrop. As the journey deepens, Willard grows obsessive towards Kurtz. He has been told that Kurtz has gone insane, operates with unsound methods, and is feared by both Vietnamese and Americans. Willard knows that he has to find him, but he is unaware of what he will do once he reaches there. Nevertheless, he continues upstream with only one desire: “to confront him”. The film remarkably creates the same feeling of anticipation in the viewer as well.

After voyaging through various military outposts, Willard and his crew reach a bridge which is the last American outpost in Vietnam. The bridge also marks the last traces of a world known to Willard, the last traces of an assumed sane civilization, beyond which lays chaos and darkness – beyond which “there is only Kurtz”. The journey towards Kurtz is so breathtakingly depicted, including the scene in which the boat passes through the natives and enters Kurtz’s world, I was weak-kneed with admiration. More than terminating Kurtz, the film concentrates on Kurtz’s discovery and his resulting madness. Marlon Brando as Kurtz is presented only in half-lit shots, with his voice doing the trick. Called a warrior-poet, he speaks to Willard about the discoveries he has made and that no one, not even his son can understand him. “I have not seen a man so ripped apart than Kurtz” tells Willard in voiceover. To make conclusions from Kurtz’s speech is difficult. Of what I have understood from it: there is a fine line between sanity and insanity, order and chaos, light and darkness, and the horror is that this line can get erased, more so at the time of war.

Kurtz is also seen reading T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow man”, a copy of The Golden Bough is also shown in one scene; he also chops off the head of one soldier and puts in Willard’s lap, a photojournalist (played by Dennis Hopper) worships him to the point of mania. All the scenes featuring Kurtz can have debatable interpretations. What a viewer can be sure about is that Kurtz is clearly insane, and Willard kills him. But what remains in end is something that cannot be killed by anyone – the discovery of a reality we are not happy to discover, but after going through war is inevitable to deny. The closure of Apocalypse Now is one of the most haunting climaxes I have ever seen. I first watched this film when I was in college. I certainly did not understand it then. But yesterday night after watching the film when I lay down in my bed, I was not sure whether I have finally understood it, but Kurtz’s last words were still echoing in my head: “The horror…the horror…”