Film Review: Nandita Das - Firaaq (India, 2008)

Nandita Das - Firaaq (India, 2008)

Indian cinema offers a lot more than Bollywood and while people in America and Europe are currently discovering the pleasures of watching acting scions Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai at work, there are also films that deal with the reality of India.

Nandita Das’ debut and to date only film deals with the 2002 riots in Gujarat when the ever present tensions between Hindus and Muslim reached a boiling point and several thousand Muslims were murdered in communal riots. A blanket of silence is being spread over the actual events, in reality as well as in the film. We see only the peripheral events and the aftermath as we follow the interwoven stories of several protagonists, Hindu and Muslim alike. But contrary to much of real life India, where life as usual continues in the face of tensions, riots and bombings, Firaaq attempts to grapple with the issues and to show that they, indeed, leave a trace.

The film opens with two men who are digging a mass grave, sighing prayers as they work, shoveling earth and shifting bodies. They are Muslims and so are the corpses. A delivery truck comes and the sight is greeted by dismay by the two men. As it unloads its freight we can see why – stacked on top of each other like sacks of rice, more corpses tumble out of it as soon as the back doors are opened. The men continue their work, until the older of them sees something. One of the bodies is the corpse of a Hindu woman. He loses himself in a fit of madness and makes to beat the woman dead again with his shovel and to strangle her with his bare hands. He is barely held back by his partner and breaks down in sobs.

Indian reality is something that is very hard to come to terms with and closing one’s eyes to anything but the issues that immediately concern oneself is a normal reaction to it. I am grateful for this film which tries to deal honestly and openly with topics that are usually swept under the rug quick as they come.

One strand of the story shows a regular middle class Hindu family. The husband is a greedy, nationalistic man who enjoys sitting around with his crony brother-in-law and talking about money while they are being served by his wife, who is also taking care of his invalid father. But she is inexplicably distracted and keeps opening the door when nobody knocks, her thoughts turning her away from the moment. It turns out that she is haunted by the memory of a Muslim woman who appeared, beaten and bloodied, in front of her window and implored her to let her in before they would kill her. She has ignored the woman and the memory comes back, tormenting her over and over again. She sees a chance for redemption when she encounters a small Muslim boy while she goes shopping and so she takes him with her, pretending that he has been sent by a friend to help out and changing his name into a Hindu name so nobody would become suspicious.

Deception is a common thread in all the stories, but usually the deceivers are acting out of impulses of love and protectiveness. The servant of an elderly Muslim singer keeps news of the rioting away from his master, because he does not want to shatter the old man’s world. This is perhaps the most touching of the stories – the singer has an artist’s hope and faith in the world, something that is worth to be preserved. It’s an astonishingly sensitive portrait.

The friend of a young Muslim girl presses a tilak on her forehead to make everyone think that she is a Hindu when they go to apply Henna to the hands of a newlywed Hindu bride and her friends. The girl herself is despondent and seething with anger – the house that she had lived in with her husband and child has been burned down and she distrusts her friend and neighbour, even as she is trying to protect her, because she refuses to tell her who burned the house down.

The Muslim husband of a Hindu wife gives his wife’s last name when given a receipt by two pandits asking for temple donations. The couple is planning to move away from Gujarat and to Delhi, to flee from the oppression and uncertainty that he feels.

A group of young Muslim men, among them the grave digger and the husband of the Henna artist look for a gun that a shopkeeper has hidden. Once they find it, it becomes the supreme symbol and tool of their vengeance – they file down the single bullet that they own so it fits into the gun and make grand plans of revenge. But as they realize the limitations that their new tool of vengeance offers them, they almost immediately begin to quarrel. It’s only one bullet, so who gets to use it?

As bleak and unremitting as the start of the film is, by the end there is a lot or at least a little of hope for many of the characters, as they see the crisis as an opportunity for change and even growth. The film feels raw, at times almost like an attempt to exorcize all the demons it evokes. Some are there to stay, but others can be chased away by remembering humanity and finding courage.

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Film Review: Joel & Ethan Coen - True Grit (America, 2010)

Joel and Ethan Coen – True Grit (2010)

The second foray into the Western genre for the Coen Brothers proves to be much more lighthearted and old-fashioned than their first, but also packs significantly less punch. While No Country for Old Men can be seen as a bleak meditation and a modern Western, True Grit is a very straightforward film, a classical throwback Western. It’s much better than the horribly cynical A Simple Man, their last outing (although the sublimely creepy dibbuk introduction sequence of that film might be one of the best things the brothers ever filmed and makes me wonder what they would do with something like The Golem by Gustav Meyrinck), or the empty and revoltingly stupid Burn After Reading.

By the end of the film I was surprised that it had taken a sudden and rather unexpected turn into classical Hollywood cliché when it tried to up the ante needlessly during what was already a tense resolution sequence. For a moment all the smart and skilled characterization was thrown out of the window to make the protagonists appear more heroic than was needed or simply to get them from one place to the other – it jarred with the rest of the movie, which was kept realistic and interesting by the three excellent leads.

I don’t know the John Wayne original, so I cannot comment on any departures in plot or character. Hailee Steinfeld is excellent as the street-smart fourteen year old Maddie Ross who sets out to find the murderer of her father by all means available, balancing effortlessly between preternatural wisdom and daring and childlike touches. A couple of scenes even seem to play subtly with her maturity and ripening sexuality, which considering that it is an American mainstream feature might not be entirely intended but is still engaging.

Jeff Bridges has a lot of fun with the role of grouchy Marshall Rooster Cogburn, who is kept well this side of realism and is more of an archetype than a true character. Still, few American actors can do this as well as him and he doesn’t slide into the Dude in a Western territory and chooses not to emulate the role that fused him and the Coen brothers together except in little details. Perhaps this is unavoidable, but it doesn’t distract.

Matt Damon plays it relatively safe, but competently so. The banter, with him usually ending up as the butt of the jokes, is often hilarious. He plays the thankless role of straight man with aplomb.

The most effective sequences are the surreal and often exceedingly funny parts for which the Coen brothers are rightly known. The hanged man and briefly afterwards the dentist in the crazed shamanic bear costume must rank as absolute highlights. The darkness is kept to a bearable minimum, mainly because of the absence of cynicism. I found A Simple Man which has zero violence to be so much harder to watch because of the total absence of anything resembling humanity. The actors of True Grit infuse the film with humanity and warmth and turn it into an exciting, if occasionally quirky, mainstream action Western which can almost be considered a family film. Nothing too exciting or daring, True Grit remains a serviceable fare.

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Film Review: Anton Corbijn - The American (America, 2010)

Anton Corbijn – The American (2010)

Having spent a week of the past autumn in Florence and Siena, seeing Tuscany with all its heavy clouds that seem like vast shrouds stretched all the way from the ground to cover the gods high above, is an immediate relief and a joy for me. Much more so since Corbijn, as a photographer, has a keen visual sense and while his Italy is kept significantly cooler than it would be through my own modest lens, it is simply a joy to watch. Good visuals make one relaxed, enable one to take whatever unfolds in reflectively, without the hectic emotional investment that most modern films demand. In that The American reminded me a little of Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful and utterly cool and unflappable The Limits of Control.

The story follows Jack or Eduardo or Signor Farfalle, as he is called in turn by both a prostitute and a female assassin. Jack is an assassin and weapon’s expert. The opening shows him enjoying a beautiful day in a hut in the Northern European woods together with a beautiful woman, who reclines on his shoulder, naked. They get dressed and cross the frozen lake to go into a nearby village when they are attacked by a gunman. He is obviously out for Jack. Jack shoots him, skillfully, and then – after a moment's thought and to the viewer's shock – he shoots the woman in the back of her head.

The film has no obvious explanations, but watching and listening to what is going on, it is not hard to fashion the story. Details are unnecessary and background details are limited and sparse in what turns out to be a highly stylized version of European spy thrillers from the 1970s. The setting is, as already mentioned, Tuscany, where the assassin is sent by his boss to hide out and complete a final mission. Ronin, by John Frankenheimer, is an obvious parallel, but Ronin is fleshy and demonstrative, while The American remains aloof and bordering on a parable.
The nature of his profession makes Jack a loner and supremely paranoid, something which is marvelously played with in a tense picnic scene between Jack and Clara, a prostitute who falls for him. The characters are sketches, but skillful sketches, and it is not hard to project oneself into any of them. Besides Jack and Clara there are a not entirely pure priest who attempts to befriend Jack and a read-headed, steel-eyed female assassin who orders a custom-made gun from Jack. The most effective scenes are scenes that bring the underlying tension close to the surface, although it never breaks it entirely, not even during the few faster moments. The film is slowly paced, rarely demonstrative and never abandons its cool and atmosphere. Everything is hinted at in masterful images, whether it is Jack haunted by the murder of the woman or the laconic and moving climax.

There is not much to say about the film, but it is one of those beautiful things that can be enjoyed in complete silence. I am sure that many people will consider the ending predictable, but that is beside the point. There is enough room for the viewer to arrange all the feelings and all the consequences so that they have the full impact and that alone is a rarity in modern American cinema. Of course this is not an American production - race and cultural context don't play a big role. The American could well be the Outsider and as such he might be a self-portrait of director Corbijn (he pretends to be a photographer), who has spoken about the loneliness of his job and of many travels in interviews.

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Film Review: Andrzej Munk - Bad Luck (Poland, 1960)

Andrzej Munk – Bad Luck (Zezowate szczescie, 1960)



At the beginning of the film an old man begs an official not to throw him out. He doesn’t want to start again and this place where he is now is the only place where his bad luck has not followed him. He begins to tell his life story, to illustrate just what fate has had in store for him.

So begins the story of Jan Piszczyk, the son of a tailor in Warszaw. We follow his childhood years, his luckless university days and how he meets his first love when he is hired to give her private tuition. We see him as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a lawyer in post-war Krakow and a party official. He streaks through life like a shooting star of misfortune. Whenever something good appears in Piszczyk’s life it is simply the gloss and veneer of some underlying and inevitable bad luck.

Walking through a field towards the military post that has just recruited him, Piszczyk is bombed by German planes, running in slapstick fashion between heads of coleslaw while the bombs explode around him. Heavily delayed he finally arrives in Zegrze, the military school – but it is deserted, raided and empty. He clambers through the rooms, finally finding what he was looking for: a gleaming gala uniform. After he had seen the laughingstock of his school escorting two ladies to a ball, he knew that to count for something he would have to find a uniform (either a priest’s or an officer’s). He is so enchanted by the image of himself in a uniform that he remains completely oblivious to a jeep of German soldiers who enter Zegrze, looking for Polish officers. When they enter the room behind him, he is still lost in a Narcissus gaze at his own image and is promptly captured. What can he tell them? That he just put the uniform on? What, furthermore, can he tell his fellow POWs? He makes up stories that make him out to be a war hero, almost implicating himself in a truly dangerous escape attempt, from which he is only “saved” when another graduate from Zegrze arrives in the prison camp and unmasks him…

Between a rock and a hard place would be a deeply comfortable position for Jan Piszczyk, as he continues tumbling and scratching out a place for himself, always waiting for the inevitable stroke of bad luck. The only time when nothing happens is when he is helping out at his father’s farm since, in his own words, fate probably considered cutting my ears off with a scythe a cheap trick.

A deep sadness is at the core of the upside down world that is presented in Bad Luck – in fact, things are so sad that all you can do is laugh. Cowardice leads to being hailed as a hero while no good deed, as the proverb says, goes unpunished. Piszczyk is cresting the waves of turbulence and as one upset leads him to another, we can get a glimpse at the upturned world of post-war Poland where opportunity goes hand in hand with paranoia and only robust fatalistic humour can get you through. It comes as a small but still very poignant surprise when we learn at the end of the film that the place Piszczyk is so loathe to leave is the state prison.

Andrzej Munk is not a very resonant name today - in 1961 the director from Krakow died aged thirty-nine in a car accident, leaving behind a small but impressive resumé. However, some of Munk's themes, like the cruel jokes that fate plays, turn up mixed into the more metaphysical and gothic films of one of Poland's most famous filmmakers, Roman Polanski, who was an assistant director on Bad Luck.

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A Crucifixion in their Headlights

A review of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost...

Ondaatje is a frightfully good stylist for the book removes us to a strange and heightened kind of poetic reality – but what he chooses to fill this reality with is (with a number of extraordinary exceptions) anything but poetic. He writes about Sri Lanka, his own native country, during the last years of its unspeakably brutal civil war. Acts of brutality are random, inevitable and filled with the inhuman creativity of torture – all painted against a tropical darkness, all of them (except for the last one) committed by nameless and faceless shadows. And so the books main concern is with identity. To find out the identity of a murder victim of whom nothing but an exhumed skeleton named Sailor remains is the main point that drives the plot. The heroine, Anil, almost expatriate Sri Lankan and forensic anthropologist, is a rootless creature whose very life is filled with so many questions about identity that she seems almost protean; even her name was, rather memorably, acquired in a deal with Anil’s own brother. Through Anil’s eyes we are introduced to more questions about identities. Who are Sarath, her colleague, Gamini, Sarath’s brother, and Ananda, the artist who “rebuilds” Sailor for them? From Anil’s conversations, her thoughts and actions we can glean many intimate and immediate details about those men’s pasts and inner worlds, but nonetheless we will close the book with not a single question answered about who they are. This is not meant to condemn the author – quite the contrary. It evokes many things: the self destruction of a country , of a national entity, embroiled in civil war; the very essence of violence, which renders all questions of identity futile, except maybe for the one essential to any conflict – who is the victim?; another essential matter – one of identity itself…we aren’t offered any authorial or definite voice, not even the conceit of a knowledgeable teller. Ondaatje achieves such realistic and convincing people that it is always them speaking to us and so we are faced with the same questions we would be faced with when looking upon people that we have known for a long time, people we have shared intimacies with…we know them from such close quarters that we cannot look at them from any other perspective and their minutiae become absolute to us. We look on helplessly as they move through the chaos, knowing that they will not offer a heroic solution.
The book moves along at a feverish pace, broken only by a few moments of contemplation. The protagonists are spurned by their own merciless ghosts, never meant to escape. Solace is a moment, reading a cheap book in a bloodstained coat, or engulfed in work with one’s earphones on. They move from one state to the next, unable to reflect, their senses heightened, always aware and yet trying their best not to be aware of the importance and necessity of their actions. But one is never allowed to forget what drives them – fierce ghosts of sadness, guilt, pain, loss, confusion. Gamini is a doctor who has lost himself in his work and to an addiction to stimulants after his wife left him. Sarath’s wife is dead and he has closed himself from apparently everything. Anada’s wife has vanished and he drinks heavily. Anil has left everything behind, for no reason at all, haunted by memories of her married ex-lover.
It is strange, for the tale seems desperate and depressing only in hindsight and reflection. The language moves and carries us like angelic dirges through the mud and mire of this particular hell, plunging us deep into the fever and frenzy, so inescapable it almost seems placid at times even when describing atrocities. It’s rare to feel the effects of a collapsing world so immediately through a book and through language, but this is where Ondaatje has succeeded utterly. There is no time to think and whatever beauty or comfort there is along the rushing path, it has to be absorbed immediately. We are left to wonder about how much of our identity or the perceived lack of identity comes from our surroundings and the stability, perceived or actual, of our world. Memories of the time before the war have almost been obliterated from everyone’s minds and the few moments when Sri Lanka’s rich history becomes palpable and enters the text, it offers an immense solace. A certainty that whatever happens, however cruel and hellish it is, it is only a chapter and a brief one at that.

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Speaking in Severed Tongues

Ma Jian’s collection of stories “Stick Out Your Tongue”. The title itself is a little provocative and maybe off-putting. One wonders what it refers to. A suggestion to offer childlike resistance? A doctor’s request?
It is a collection of stories set in Tibet. Ma Jian is Chinese (currently living in exile in Europe) and he travelled in Tibet for several months where, as he writes in a very disillusioned but still inspired preface, he wanted to see the “true Tibet”. He quickly and rather mercilessly deals with all the preconceptions that people in the West have of Tibet, offering that there is very little romanticism to a poor and downtrodden country, one that is as filled with cruelty and corruption as any other country. Curiously enough his stories belie his sober preface, for they are filled with mysteries and with a sense of divinity. The divine, in Ma Jian’s stories, mostly takes on threatening and terrible forms. His protagonists are haunted by specters of loneliness or guilt or ill-handled sexual desires. Tibet creeps into his stories as something spiritually overpowering and frightful. One gets a clear sense of someone who has wandered into a country of unfriendly ghosts. A country that wants to see him gone. And so the preface and the disillusionment take on the form of personal disappointment – albeit the disappointment of an intelligent man – the grumblings of someone who finds only closed doors. It is not hard to imagine that the Tibetans would treat a Chinese traveler with less than kindness.
The stories are very dark. They are filled with death. A minute description of the dismemberment of a woman before a sky burial that is almost as cleansing as it is cruel. A man searching for his family, which might be long dead, and crossing into the realm of spirits through his exhaustion. A woman monk who dies after ritual rape. They are a fascinating look at rituals and superstitions from a completely unromantic set of eyes. But the rationality that we Westerners usually pair with lack of romanticism is absolutely lacking, so there is no attempt to defuse the mystic and divine aspect of Tibet which explodes into the text from time to time. Ma Jian’s dreamlike language does not question, it describes and meanders from one reality into the next, leaving the reader as baffled and willing a follower to the strange powers evoked as the protagonists.
Some of the stories almost read like supernatural horror. The story about the man who dissolves during the search for his family shows man at the supreme mercy of a cruel nature and the people often seem like the landscape. Barren, with hidden and treacherous depths. Most impressive, though, is the tale of the female monk. It is a mixture of wild superstition and spiritual reality – a woman, after long study to take up a high rank in the monastic hierarchy has to undergo a ritual sexual union with a senior monk. After the ritual she is required to sit in freezing water for a period of several days, to confirm that her nature has gone past the human. Her yogic powers, though, desert her and she freezes to death. It is too easy and convenient to see it as a condemnation of spiritual practices, I think. The author has no interest in condemnation. There is the beautiful inevitability of myth in this story, alongside an all too real cruelty and inhumanity. Both exist side by side, without denying each other or intervening with each others powerful effect. The idea to go past the human into the reality of angels is as real in Tibetan spirituality as the idea to go past the human into the reality of dogs.

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The Light Heart of Darkness

After finally watching the magnificent Apocalypse Now I found myself correcting one of the many holes in my literary knowledge and picked up J. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (my school curriculum of books was limited to Goethe, Gerhard Hauptmann and Bert Brecht). One of the characters that struck me most - in both film and book - was the Harlequin...

Maybe even more than the meeting with Kurtz, Marlowe’s meeting with the young Russian that he calls the Harlequin is the part of Heart of Darkness that holds the most fascination for me. He seems a strange and oblique mirror image of the narrator. Marlowe is driven by an unalterable and undeniable internal world – he, too, is a kind of fanatic and more than anyone else’s heart his own is filled by the eponymous darkness. He is introduced to the reader as an almost Buddha-like figure and as such he exemplifies a man who makes sense out of the world through his suffering. The fever of his trip to the heart of the jungle almost always borders on the edge of what can be borne, yet he remains, even through his anger, impassive, unattached to everything but his aim. The world is a horror only to be met by resistance and contempt and supreme thought.

Now enters the Harlequin. The holes in his clothes patched up by mismatched coloured rags, exalted and – to Marlowe – almost admirable, insane and dangerous, he seems like a clown saint, someone who has come to terms with his own fundamental ridiculousness and fickleness. Marlowe sees his devotion to and exaltation of Kurtz as the most dangerous part of him – yet it is what makes him seem invincible to the primal world around him, just as Marlowe’s own dark exultation drives him all the way to Kurtz’s camp. Marlowe seeks invincibility in his fear and the heightened sense it brings to him, and so someone who ignores fear almost entirely or uses it merely to fuel his sense of devotion, can only arouse suspicion in him.

But, in fact, those two have come here in the same manner and for the same reason. One could even say that Marlowe is the more devoted of the two, since his entire voyage is steered by thoughts of Kurtz, while the Harlequin was brought here completely by chance and simply took up the devotion where he found it.

To me the Harlequin is Marlowe turned inside out. Marlowe fearfully guards his human core against the primal assault of the river and the jungle and the Harlequin nervously, thoughtlessly spills this core in order to be able to go on. He is Marlowe without a fear of death. A mad mystic, half swallowed by wilderness, in stark contrast to the sad thinker who strongly clings to his sense of civilization and contempt.

The Harlequin does not have Marlowe’s staunch and almost fanatic moral convictions. He leaves with a few cartridges and his book on sailing in his mismatched pockets – a wandering fool, a strange breath of thoughtlessness and optimism in the dark tale.

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