Author Archives: Beyond Four Corners

Rhetoric? Maybe.

Senaryo/Yonetmen – Nuri Bilge Ceylan

In a conversation I held with a friend recently, I ventured to mention in jest, that only in Ceylan’s films you begin your exploratory journey towards a complete comprehension of the character only to find that, at the end, they appear more obscure than they did during your initial acquaintance with them. But, in retrospect, what was said in jest seems veritably aphoristic in this swirling vacuum of limitless depths. My experiences are now recollections as I look back a week after clattering endlessly in eight boundless films crafted with the true fabric of cinema.

I began, as many do, with his highly decorated feature, Winter Sleep. A narrative perpetually covered in snow, as its appellation might suggest ; it seems so long ago that my recollections of this particular film look now like vestiges in that very same snow. This was the first step of eight, a significant one in itself, which challenged the idea implanted by arguable utterances delivered by Syd Field, as he so self-assuredly posits – “A character must effectively overcome obstacle after obstacle to attain his dramatic need”.

But what do I say about Winter Sleep, a film seemingly with no obstacles, no hurdles, or even a destination towards which its protagonist, who seems to display no dramatic need, can carry himself? Does this mean that its edifice is implicitly brittle, or it is a weak film for not giving its audience a tangible end? But, I surely must not detract from Syd Field’s words which, though inherently generalizing all films, were specifically intended to provide tyro screenwriters the ability to navigate and create a script that could garner readership which is by no means inferior to this different and sinuous path. One could contest that the plot points of the film have been so well glossed by Ceylan that it can only be known to him – implying that Field’s maxims still hold true. I digress to mention this to maintain that paths in film-making aren’t inherently restricted to one and once a writer familiarizes himself with a few fundamentals he can then restructure his film and stray away from his initial toolkit.

But coming back to the tale concerning the wet snow (a slice of Dostoevskian phraseology), the only way I can recapitulate Winter Sleep is by calling it a seeming progression of character in voluminous conversations shored up by aesthetically charged bursts of protracted silence. It was only when I made the subsequent steps, all being minor and major deviances temporally, that I realized that this description applied above is equally fitting for his other features as well. I’ll address this feature in more detail when I approach the cluster of films that Ceylan made in the 2010’s.

However, before I proceed further, I should establish firmly the path I wish to proceed upon, so that the circuitous tracks of film-making aren’t themselves described by maundering phrases and sentences. I would like to first trace the path that I followed to reach the end of his oeuvre, comprising of the elements that make up his films before wrapping it up.

The film that I followed up the first with was Climates, which to my pleasant surprise was directed and acted by Ceylan and his wife, Ebru. The film opens with the pair rummaging through the ruins of a site, separated by a few paces, with the wife looking at her husband in an estranged manner. She bridges the distance by moving closer to embrace her husband before distancing herself again. Perching down on a mountain-top, she stares at the camera. She begins to weep and snivel looking at the camera, looking at you, without cessation – and you begin to feel uncomfortable at first instance. Ceylan protracts this uneasiness until you begin to realize, without a word being said, the entirety of the emotional gulf that separates her from her partner. It was at this juncture between the title interjection and the subsequent scene did I slowly begin to grapple with the overwhelming depth of visual exposition that permeates every feature of his.

But, from a conversational viewpoint, he doesn’t fail either. There are two striking instances of exchange that to me are the paragon of conjunction between visual and verbal storytelling. The first follows a beach-side dinner the couple share with their friends in Kas. She remains silent as the husband converses with his friend, and shows visible signs of contempt by shrugging and gazing afar. When the hostess departs, he briefly questions her decision to avoid wearing a coat realizing that the air is chilly ; the exchange soon escalates and is followed by pockets of silence and intermittent accusations before receding to that prolonged absence of dialogue that Ceylan uses so astutely to accentuate these sparse exchanges.

The second instance is even more pronounced. It takes place when Ceylan is separated from his wife and seeks out an old friend to resume an affair they might have had. Relenting at first, she opens the door to allow him inside. They both sit down for a smoke and as the quick lighting of a cigarette is followed by the charring sound of burning tobacco – it seems oddly parallel to the tension between them that awaits a nudge from her to convey assent.

From Climates, I moved on to Three Monkeys. This visually urban narrative follows the lives of three individuals – a mother, father and son. The father is called to act as a substitute for his boss’s crime, while the mother and son await the payment that was promised for accepting incarceration, with the mother having an affair with her husband’s boss. You might think that in any formulaic feature, this premise looks ripe to exploit. Any director could easily sensationalize by hammering away at this potency for drama. Ceylan, unsurprisingly to his acclimatized viewer, does exactly the opposite by internalizing all the conflict and inflates it to attach a sense of profoundness, over and beyond what would be found in a pedestrian affair drama.  

I’m not a big fiend or advocate of awards, but I can at times understand their merits. Ceylan did bag the best director category at Cannes for this feature and I could understand why the conductor won and the work didn’t. Three Monkeys works as a film precisely for the reasons I stated above ; it doesn’t adhere to tried and tested storytelling for a storyline that is otherwise commonplace. The merits of writing don’t shine through at times but, where it does shine through is the last leg of the film, when the narrative comes full circle as the father clears his head by visiting the mosque before approaching a migrant with no relations to take his son’s place for a crime. His deep rumination of this act is also enhanced by the fact that Ceylan tracks him from behind, obscuring his face, as he does in other films as well.

My mild disappointment with Three Monkeys was soon reconciled by Distant. The reconciliation was almost immediate – when the quintessential long shot using a stationery camera trained on a man trundling through the snow to reach the road to hitchhike to Istanbul. Distant as a title is in every way a perfect encapsulation of the relationship between every character the film houses – an estranged relationship between the two central characters and their own relationships with society. Yusuf comes from his industrial town searching for a job at a port and lodges with Mehmet, a freelance photographer who had drifted towards Istanbul many years earlier in search of a job.

I think the first thought I had when the end credits rolled in were – “ I have had films make me feel ecstatic, plaintive and angered. Distant has made me feel frightfully alone”. On script, the film couldn’t be more than 50 pages, and yet it runs over 90 minutes. It just involves Mehmet and Yusuf straggling through malls, airports, parks and beach-side curbs. But I had to ask myself – aren’t many relationships resemblant of the one these two men share ? Fractured ones papered over to work for practical purposes without its participants realizing how vital this string-held counterpart is to their otherwise hollow lives.

There is this one particular scene, where Ceylan sets the camera down for an entire sequence. Mehmet, earlier during the day was held to his word by a friend, who points out that his ambitions to be like Tarkovsky have slackened and he has resigned to subsisting off these commercial shoots. He decides to sit down and watch on DVD a version of Stalker to reminisce with Yusuf beside him. Once Yusuf excuses himself, the former switches to a soft porn video and makes himself comfortable. He scrambles to change the video as Yusuf shuffles back into the room, hoping he would go away. He doesn’t and stands breathing down his back for a painfully long duration. I smiled and asked myself – would that illusion of discomfort be possible had there been a single cut in the entire sequence?

Before I began the film, I learned that Mehmet Emin Toprak, the wonderful actor who played Yusuf, passed away after returning from an ecstatic screening in Ankara owing to a road accident, driving the new car his efforts had rewarded him with, towards Yacine, his hometown. I should note that at this juncture I hadn’t fully grasped the autobiographical undertones that pervaded the director’s early works. Mehmet was Ceylan’s cousin, and was, until a few years ago, relatively obscure. It wasn’t until I ventured onto Kasaba and Mayis Sikintisi, his first two directorial ventures, did I realize how deep an influence his life in the Turkish countryside wielded over his career.

Both Kasaba and Mayis Sikinitisi are so closely intertwined that I cannot separate them – one film is about the making of the other. And the cast is replete with Ceylan’s family and neighbors as he tracks their life in the country and their residence in Yacine. Kasaba, the film which was Ceylan’s directorial debut follows the lives of two children and their family – a scholarly father, an outcast nephew and a wistful set of grandparents. For large parts, the early stretches of the film gave me strong flashes of Pather Panchali with a Turkish backdrop before it veered off into a conversational direction anent the struggles of country life and faithfulness to one’s roots. When I immediately followed it up with Mayis Sikintisi, it shed light on the genesis of the film and Ceylan’s choice to cast his parents as actors in both films, and even a brief appearance in the earlier mentioned Climates.

With this early jaunt complete, I believe it equipped me well to understand how much Ceylan had grown as a filmmaker to achieve those three magnificent films that carved him a name in world cinema – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep and The Wild Pear Tree – each one so brilliant, that it becomes unutterably difficult to verbalize your emotions when you finish them.

Let me start with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, whose title alone could pique one’s interests. Like Distant, this film too opens after a brief overture of three men with a stationary camera set to cover end-to-end the Anatolian mountain range. Three police vehicles rumble along from the far end of the frame only to stop at the middle ; a suspect is dragged out and is questioned before being crammed into the vehicle again as they exit through the other end of the frame. A deliberate synchronization of the temporal and spatial use of the re-iterated beginning-middle-end maxim used to start and finish a scene and the orange hue of a setting sun underscores the near-perfect cinematography that is consistent throughout the film.

But, technical credit aside, it was with this film that I believe Ceylan and his wife truly matured as screenwriters. A search party organized to find a man’s body across a trying terrain find themselves on the fringes of their mental and emotional states. A prosecutor and doctor – much like the memorable banker and doctor of Dickens’s A Tale – converse about the strange death of a woman, who is possibly the prosecutor’s wife, whose identity isn’t revealed as he continues to allude to her death in the third person, much like Mr.Lorry does about the doctor’s illness in the Dickensian tale with much delicacy and precision.

This emotional space afforded for each character allows them, through their performances, to distend the presence and impact they can have, even if they seem relatively obscure in the progression of events. This pattern repeats itself in Winter Sleep as well, with peripheral characters able to impart within the short spaces they get a profound impact.

Winter Sleep, being the first film in this Turkish incursion of mine, was indelible because it was quite frankly the best place to start. It follows Aydin, a retired theatre artist, in search of everything and nothing, always sure and unsure, ideological and practical – at constant loggerheads with his wife and sister, both incidences underscored by such brilliant exchanges of dialogue that really makes the viewer covet for more. He condemns the lack of principles in the local imam, yet shrivels away like a poltroon from the boorish brother of his when he chooses to confront him. This boorish brother, Ismael, sears himself so brilliantly with the least screen-time by displaying a fierce pride in privation when he is confronted with an abhorring attempt at philanthropy by Aydin’s wife.

But, this director whom I have grown fond of reserved the best of his powers for The Wild Pear Tree. As I was watching the film, I was enraged. I had a bone to pick with this man who I had no connection with for he had plagiarized my life without even knowing it. It follows Sinan Karasu, an aspiring writer, a recent graduate who struts around with a contemptuous air, sneering with haughtiness at all those uncouth souls who pass through life with no notion of the wonders the literary world possesses ; as I write this, I realize I have given a very accurate description of my own self-assured behavior at times. But watching the film itself provided a larger check on my demeanor than the frequent ones I seemingly process.

The relationship with his father, his relationship with his mother, his sister and even his social circle were in many ways vastly different, yet remarkably semblant. Even the relatively small characters, like the conversation between him and a schoolmate for whom he had a inchoate passion are cut up in such fine fashion. She is to be married to a jeweller, twice her age, and she rues this decision of hers by giving Sinan a decisively aggressive bite on the underlip – but it isn’t overt, and much less contrived. Ceylan toys with the surroundings of rustling leaves and the wind stealing over them before focusing on their intimate exchange through the canopy.

I have come to a consensus within myself that when it comes to writing modern, inflated, and shockingly realistic conversations – Ceylan’s writing trio or duo are the paragon to be looked up to. I haven’t seen better dialogue in the swathes of contemporary films I pass through or have passed through. There is this scene, that is ineffably good that I can’t wrap my head around how a director holds the visual illusion taut while pouring an ocean of dialogue that at times is a rapid patter, a slow re-iteration and a languid dismissal. It follows two imams and Sinan, as they stagger downhill having a theosophical conversation, a philosophical tete-a-tete and a smattering of small talk all rolled into one, concluded by one imam saying – “We are all water sloshing in a glass”.

But, let me make an important digression here. I have noticed in Ceylan’s films the free rein that he gets to direct these films. In a conventional Hollywood studio, his scripts would be in the bin before the reader finished the opening conversations. When I stumbled across a comment by a perspicacious redditor during some internet lurking session of mine, I realized that leeway is directly proportionate to the budget of the film.

Have your pick between Roma and Y Tu Mama Tambien – both being Cuaron’s features made in Spanish and shot in Mexico on very meagre resources. And both of them, in my opinion, are his best features. The leeway granted to him would be significantly lesser than what would be afforded to him in say Prisoner of Azkaban or other mainstream ventures he directed. When the budget is big, the production company cracks down on directorial decisions. When the opposite is true, the director’s call on what is apposite and isn’t is almost always final.

I’ve seen this across film industries interspersed throughout the globe. Wong Kar-Wai has more leeway to shoot Chungking Express or Fallen Angels compared to The Grandmaster, financed by a major mainland production company. One could argue that once a director establishes a reputation, his decisions are not so likely to pop up on the executive’s radar. But again, that is decided by the cost attached to a decision and I believe Wong harbored a passion for a big-scale project and made the sacrifices willingly.

However, in Ceylan’s case, he is strictly a no-compromise director and I love him all the more for it. He gets a larger purse to operate with as his rising reputation wells up beyond Turkish borders and he still sticks to his decisions and is even more audacious with each film – a striking feature in an auteur that sets him as a class apart to the rest. Even his later films aren’t exactly big budget – they are relatively inexpensive.

Well, I guess I draw the line for today’s post here. I have been in equal degrees wastefully descriptive and unusually enthusiastic but I ask someone who has watched Ceylan’s films – will it ever be possible to verbalize those gyrating emotions installed in you by the mere act of watching them? I have tried my hand at it and I will knead the keyboard keys once more when I can get my mind rattling again with thoughts I purchase with time from some other auteur in this never ending list spanning directors from Norway to Thailand whose names increase by droves in my watch-list.

The Sweet Child of Technicolor – El Loco Pedro Almodóvar

When we loaf about in societal gatherings, that is ones in more traditionally collective societies, more often found in the countryside than in urban spaces, we tend to see a certain child constantly beside his mother who would be gesticulating and conversing boisterously within a circle of women.This child does not partake of the conversation and listlessly gazes at the interlocutors. A silent observer of this diminutive version of the feminine universe. This boy is Pedro Almodovar.

Born in La Mancha, his upbringing at home was limited. He was soon dispatched to a religious boarding school with his parents hoping that their bookish son would soon develop pious feelings in his bosom and devote his life to the teachings of Christ. I can only laugh. If anybody is vehemently detached from the Church, and harbors a spiteful vista of that religious world, it has to be Pedro. His impish duo of Zahara and Paca in La Mala Educacion steal the ecclesiastical ornaments to get themselves more money to fritter on drugs. But surely his characters aren’t representative of his heretic nature?

In Dolor Y Gloria, his latest work, and evidently autobiographical to a large extent, Pedro fondly jokes, through Antonio Banderas, that he is an atheist when the pain he suffers is bearable and prays feverishly when it is intolerable. After all, across liminal periods in history, whenever the materialists make strides by publishing more and more to substantiate their point, avid philosophical consumers imbibe it and calm themselves down, but in moments of immense pain and suffering, the phrase “Dear God” is no longer a contemptuous utterance, but a febrile plea to the very being they actively reject.

But his religious inclinations aside, this post is solely to address, rave and rejoice in the redoubtable career of this marvellous auteur and his choice to revolve in this feminine universe and his love for lurid colours that shimmer and dazzle to no end in his illustrious career that spans over four decades. It is solely due to this that I chose to make my first post in five months as expansive as possible, to address as many dimensions of this particular artist as possible.

A good place to start with is why I chose to entitle him, albeit fondly, as El Loco? Starting from his early days with Carmen Maura up until the latest installment in his oeuvre Dolor Y Gloria , the most commonly used phrase has to be El Loco. His central characters are always zany to the extant that they would be called out as eccentric by their milieu, which by itself is more often than not an idiosyncratic coalesce of people. This zaniness is most prominent in the film that exalted his name as a true auteur in the international arena, which was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Pedro is excessively fond of these delusional outcasts, who love more than what is acceptable, cry more than what is acceptable, vacillate more than what is acceptable. They try to kidnap the women they love, as in Atame!, when a recently released inmate from a sanatorium kidnaps an actress in her own house to convince her of his love for her, or they try to slake their impossible obsession with gladiatorial death by treating their sexual partners as the bulls they would otherwise face within an arena, as happens in Matador, or they murder to obtain like the covetous Antonio in Law of Desire, or equate and place their own tribulations above that of a war-torn nation, much like the ever oscillating Leocadia in The Flower of My Secret.

Throughout his early years as a budding filmmaker, Pedro tried to conflate dramatic elements with comedic elements. By forcing the benign social deviance to such extremes, he achieves a sense of hilarity in his films. In Nervous Breakdown, when Pepa hosts the two policemen who have come to enquire about a phone call from her telephone, she tells Carlos to serve everyone a spiked gazpacho, including the cops themselves. Going from the decision to spike herself to the decision to spike everyone lends her the quality of thriving on extremes.

When a delusional man does something far more appalling than is expected of him, it can either provoke laughter or a terrible shock, with both reactions being contingent on the circumstances. When Robert kidnaps the alleged rapist of his daughter to avenge her recent death in The Skin I Live In, it seems to be acceptable for such an individual. But when he performs a vaginoplasty on the rapist to slowly morph him into his late wife, his actions can astonish those who thought he couldn’t go further.

But I’m merely teetering on the edges of Almodovar’s universe, I’m limning the far flung orbits of the throbbing heart of his universe. I am yet to move closer to it. As we course through the veins of his artistic body, another prominent theme that features in all of his films but isn’t overtly striking is his unduly focus on sexual vengeance ; And what better film to start with than Carne Tremula.

Carne Tremula is the quintessential lust trumps all modern fable. In Pedro’s films, the demarcation that indicates that a director has switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality doesn’t exist. His films anchor purely on the sensual relationship between two characters. When two individuals express sexual desire, its merely sexual desire. He doesn’t force the marginalized narrative and coerce you into seeing them any differently. And that’s a refreshing breath of air from the cramped, contrived narratives that throng the theaters to lionize what it means to be a marginal group. By not pushing any designs to change your way of thinking, he has already avoided seeing them as the other. It may not seem much today, but it meant a lot not to differentiate in the 80’s, with Pedro himself being homosexual.

I chose to make this sinuous detour at this juncture before I went on to speak about eroticism in his films and I felt this understanding of Pedro’s narrative needs to be made clear. As I was saying, Carne Tremula is a fairly straightforward tale of sexual revenge, and probably the most overt in all his films. A wrongly indicted man has pent-up emotions of rage towards the couple who were the sole reason for him being sentenced. He vows to ravage the woman when he steps out as she questioned his virility before he was wrongfully jailed. However, he gets involved with another woman and soon forgets his schemes to sexually avenge his lost years. When he confesses this desire to the woman he held guilty, she resolves to go away after allowing him to satisfy his desire – and that particular point in the film is a perfect catharsis of built-up sexual tension which culminates in unarguably the most erotic scene I have had the chance to witness in a film. What unfurls is a shivering passion to satiate a long held desire of vengeance, with a sweat filled aura pervading the scene to give it a sensation that is insomuch not vulgar but the cinematic definition of pure erotica.

This theme of sexual vengeance has been ever present in all the phases of his film-making career and has manifested in various degrees. It is again noticeably present in The Skin I Live In, which focuses on a man exacting vengeance by metamorphosing his daughter’s rapist and keeping her captive only to copulate with her later. In Broken Embraces, a rich despot hatches a plan to avenge his wounded pride by murdering his mistress and her new lover with whom she has run away. In La Mala Educacion, vengeance spurs vengeance as a priest tries to thwart the vengeful child he once molested and who is now out to expose him. It has even existed in a minor degree in his later films like Julieta, where a mother who has indirectly caused the death of her husband by arguing upon his affair finds herself subjected to the vestige of the wrath that spurred her in the first place, holding her accountable in the form of her daughter. This undercurrent is not absent from his earlier films either, with Antonio setting out to find the former lover of his current one in Law of Desire, after it has come to his notice that they still hold a passionate correspondence, with the sole intention of murdering him.

As I have amply listed the instances of sexual vengeance, I now progress towards the innermost fold of his throbbing heart, arriving and piercing its center. The central motif of his most dazzling films – motherhood and loneliness. The period between 1999 – 2006 is his most illustrious period, with each film as ambitious as its predecessor. The crown jewels that he produced during the height of his vividly colourful powers – All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Volver.

I find it amusing that my very first foray into this world was with Almodovar’s All About My Mother ; I had given his films 12 chances to topple the first experience I had with him, and although they had all come incredibly close, they couldn’t dethrone my first tryst with him. It was poignant that his beloved mother passed away during the year All About My Mother had released. Pedro adored her and owes much to her for bringing him up in adversity and in ways it is through this film he pays homage to his mother and all the women she introduced him to in her feminine universe.

The film is centered on the relationship between a dreamy son and his single mother, living in Madrid and working as a nurse, as he harbors dreams of becoming a writer. As she fixes dinner for them both and settles down to watch Bette Davis’s All About Eve (even here we find echoes of Pedro’s inspiration), and the boy poses an unseemly, albeit intimate question to his mother – “Would you prostitute yourself for me?” for which she replies “I’ve already done just about everything for you”.

In many ways, this utterance strikes one as a bit odd, as it calls upon what is it that she has done for her son. Soon, her son is crushed along the rain drenched gravel by a speeding car and she is left screaming, hopeless and alone. From here on, the movie completely revolves in la universo feminino – men who have become women, men who wish to become women, jaded women, jilted women, mothers, sisters, daughters. We soon learn that Manuela, the central character, once worked the street in Barcelona before hastily leaving her husband to flee to Madrid while concealing her pregnancy. She rekindles an old friendship while in search of her husband and finds solace by stalking the theatre cast of The Streetcar Named Desire, chasing whom her son was sent to his untimely death.

But more than plot or progression, what really stood out and made its indelible mark on me is the true candidness of conversation. A male director cannot write such sequences between women unless he well and truly is a part of that universe. Men have, since time immemorial, stood from afar while depicting women, and with the exception of few, have always given them unfair portrayals. Women have had the ability to adroitly present a man given that history is littered with stories about men to no end. This space of femininity has always been enclosed and has seldom been accessed by men. Pedro’s close upbringing with women in all possible gatherings and in day-to-day life has enmeshed his presence as a stalwart observer. The film ends with a befitting tribute to every woman who has and is still inspiring his work, and it reads as follows –

“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.”

Having addressed one masterpiece I move on to another in Talk to Her. The film opens with two men gazing intently on a silent theatrical performance, with one man shedding tears and the other observing him with a fleeting glance. We are shown that the fleeting observer works as a nurse in a medical institution for people in a coma and the other a journalist. Both men seem to have an ocean of loneliness welling within them, and this is most striking in Benigno, the nurse at the hospital, who works day and night to look after a girl who before her untimely accident had been the sole happiness in his life, completely unaware of his love for her. For the entirety of his adult life, Benigno has been a caretaker and has not had much contact with society and observably with women of his own age. Without divulging too much, I watched an incredibly maudlin affair, not affected in the least, unfurling as it absorbed and toyed with ideas such as loneliness, volition, and brotherly love between its two central characters who find themselves at the end of the film to be closer than they could have imagined at its start, with a perfect interjection of a short silent film, which I was lead to believe actually existed until I had looked it up.

The third piece in this marvellous period of film production – Volver has to be, at the same time, conventional and personal as it strikes upon all the chords he keeps closest to his heart and holds taut. The film is about a mother, her daughters, and her grand-daughter who hail from La Mancha in Spain. Carmen Maura features in this film after almost a two decade hiatus of collaboration with Almodovar as the zany grandmother. A father tries to rape his stepdaughter which ends up in his murder. The mother is left to deal with it and tries to do so without the aid of her sister, who has to face a bizarre occurrence of her own, with their dead mother returning to life. Their neighbour in the village has lived alone and seeks an answer regarding the disappearance of her mother which she believes is known only to her neighbour’s dead mother. In this splendidly taut narrative, Almodovar highlights the fraternal relationship that exists door-to-door in Spain’s villages, the mythical beliefs of this society (an allusion to the underlying vein of magical realism present across the Spanish world) and the generational recurrence of strained relationships between mother and daughter and the absence and neglect of frivolous fathers, while not failing to take a jibe at Spain’s ever present trash television which consistently vulgarizes by its mere actions the personal space of individuals.

Having finished this Spanish sojourn of mine, I found myself before the ripe fruit of Almodovar’s own life – Dolor Y Gloria. A life that has been for two scores largely personal, would finally be shown on screen, although corrupted fondly by fictional details. Starring his two favorites – Antonio and Penelope – the film follows his own life and relationship with his mother and his upbringing as he grapples with the current revelations in his life, his love for Chavela Vargas and his flame from the past during the raucous days spent in Mexico City. In this intimate address to his fervent patrons, he divulges his tribulations and struggles with body and mind and a passionate play that speaks of his young love and struggles with drugs as he looks back upon an illustrious career spanning forty long years. I rejoiced everytime I could glimpse at the ever-bookish young Salvador, devouring his books in the cave he calls his home, quarreling with his mother and making peace with her and acknowledging her claim that he has failed her as a son.

But foolish as I am in my half cursory and half impassioned recollection, I have failed to address the aesthetical aspect of this child of Technicolor. In Cannes, Pedro mentioned he grew up during the age of Technicolor – the superimposed reels of colour conflated to give a final, dazzling, contrasting product. Most of his films have a wide and wild use of colours to convey the mood and sometimes even a tonal shift as they transition from a lighter shade gradating into a darker one. The colour manifests in sartorial decisions, decisions regarding production design and even hues added in the editing room. However, his fanatical use of contrasting colours doesn’t convey a larger purpose or set a general tone for the film, as it does in a Wong Kar-Wai film, and only serves to be representative of the auteur’s upbringing and fondness for visual gradations.

Pedro stresses on his need for Madrid through Salvador in Dolor Y Gloria. Why is that so? Pedro is the child of La Movida Madrilena, the counterculture revolution in the arts that took place in the late 70’s following the end of Francoist Spain, which ushered in a new era for Spain and was marked by economic growth. He made his first features during these years and owes everything to the theatres and streets of Madrid for serving as the origin of his inspirations and as the receivers of his own work. It gave him his first financial break as a director after his long stint as an administrative assistant and propelled him to fame. In many ways, Madrid manifests itself through Pedro. Spain manifests itself through Pedro. And with that I draw to an end my long journey in España

As I conclude this post, I’d also like to add that I will not post with the same fervor as before, but limit myself to posts where I actually have the ability to expand on a motif or theme as I progress from director to director as I am doing so now. You can watch out for my next post on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish auteur.

Psycho – A parts-greater-than-whole spiritual slasher thriller.

“We take films for today’s audiences. But what stories are left to tell? There are only 36 plots to tell says Polti” – Mysskin

Before I get to explain the title, I must talk a little about my own experience watching this movie. I purposefully chose to watch a late night screening for what I knew was a slasher thriller. If you had asked me to go watch this movie, with a band of people, 6 years or 5 years ago, I would have said no. A year or two later, I would have agreed to go but largely turned away from the screens or blocked my ears to drown out the cackling voices and screaming. But today, I chose to go alone, sat there throughout the movie, blunter than ever. I did get jolted once or twice, but that was about it. It didn’t unnerve me. Contrarily, I felt glued to the screen more than ever.

My experience with Mysskin stretches far back to Yudham Sei, the plot of which I don’t remember even remotely, yet I distinctly remember that it was a blood-fest. Psycho was no different. But between these 6 or 7 odd years, I’ve realized that his films are often discarded at the surface level for being grotesque and gory. Mysskin himself says that he respects the individual right to an opinion in a democratic nation, but what kind of a criticism is – “The movie was good”; “The movie was boring”; “The movie had lots of blood and was engaging”. So, as to not disappoint him, I’ll endeavour to record my impressions with the minimal dexterity I possess.

Coming back to the title of my post, how can a slasher thriller be spiritual? The answer oddly lies in Mysskin’s own words. Psycho is the modern day rendition of the tale of Angulimala, the brigand who descended with his blood curling cry to sever the 1000th finger in pursuit of a teacher’s task. But, as he descends from the hills to sever the 1000th finger, he realizes he faces Buddha himself. Upon realizing that who stands before him is an incarnation of pure austerity, he drops to the ground and becomes a disciple of Buddha, and soon turns into a monk. Without a difference, Psycho’s protagonist is Gauthaman and the serial killer here is Anguli.

Psycho opens with a tribute to Hitchcock, both literally and visually. The very first scene of the movie, with rapid cuts, is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Psycho and the famous shower scene. Mysskin wastes no time in setting up the movie, and the characters. We see that Gauthaman is blind, he pursues Dahini, a radio jockey for whom he harbours feelings. And after the amazing Unna Nenachu composed by Raja, things take a turn for the worse.

Throughout the film, the only thing I kept ruminating about at the back of my head was how well Mysskin crafts his images. He uses the long shots to perfection, and tracks with perfection, and edits his shots in such a water-tight way. There is an amazing scene with Ram, who now reposes at death’s table having accepted his fate. The scene opens with a wide shot, and we see both Dahini and Ram. As Dahini tries to reach out to Ram in vain, she realizes that she has been tethered to a very short leash, and splashes the little water she has on his face. This little interchange between two doomed characters is cut abrupt as the killer enters in his mechanical fashion and Dahini rescinds in fright back to her corner. Once the killer goes through his routine and raises his knife, Ram gently places a death request – Kadaisiya orey oru dadhava A.M Raja paatu onnu padikatuma? As Ram hums to an impending death, the camera slowly pans out to engulf the wimpering Dahini and as the knife falls, the cut to Dahini does to. It’s this melancholic poetry that defines Mysskin.

There are many such instances of this masterful craft in the film. The scene where Kamala and Gauthaman drive to rescue Dahini as the film reaches its soaring peroration reminds me of the shots of Lynch’s Lost Highway, and as the haunting Neenga Mudiyuma gives you the chills, Mysskin goes to a god’s eye shot that tracks the car as it moves across the winding road, in perfect darkness, with its headlights. Oddly, the way in which the characters were staring at the camera even reminded me a little of Clockwork Orange.

But where I really felt another tingling chord within was the crime scene of the first murder. As the police arrive in broad daylight to identify the decapitated corpse, the surroundings felt a tad similar to that of the opening sequence of Memories of Murder. I then realized that both films were centred on compulsive killers. But what, apart from the plot, makes the latter a more coherent whole than the Mysskin’s Psycho?

Memories of Murder, directed by Bong Joon Ho, focuses on a compulsive killer who nabs women to satiate a sexual drive, whereas Psycho focuses on a killer who kills to feed off the fear, and as he heaves the knife downwards, he siphons the fear he desires, through the eyes of his female victims. Both killers have a similar pattern but a different M.O. Although Bong went easy on the degree of grotesqueness, Mysskin is unabashed in his story. However, that still brings me back to my lingering question of what made the Korean film a more coherent whole?

Bong Joon Ho had progressed in a way that gave no room for frittering, visually or orally. His scenes have a definitive beginning, middle and end. Of course, no two filmmakers are to follow any manual to make a film. However, Mysskin in Psycho was more random. Sometimes you see, Ram humming and then you wonder why it was shown, or when certain conversations take place that seemingly lead forward, but exposes more details that don’t add to the plot, like a severed finger (although alluding to its mythological source), or even an unnecessarily long scene with an internet hacker, you wonder what these little details add to in the end. But that doesn’t take away any credit from Mysskin’s craft. There are instances when I felt an elevated sense of awareness and fright, almost as if his scenes were snippets of a Beethoven Symphony, moving quickly and elegantly, forming the most delightful parts of a lyrical cadence.

However, that lyrical cadence is a mixture of highs and lows. It’s almost like a bag of diamonds strewn across the floor that glisten under night lights when viewed individually, but don’t form any succinct pattern that plays out like a perfect orchestra from start to finish. Albeit, Mysskin hasn’t relinquished his ability to make you feel uneasy. As a personal anecdote, I’d cull out the staged scene with candles that didn’t try to appeal to the audience to empathize with the killer, but provided a glimpse into his tormented, pious childhood that was filled with torture and injunctions under the name of religion. The way the scene was staged was far more intimidating than any cut and slash scenes that could be inserted in a normal slasher thriller. That’s why I felt that even though the film had focused on the bloodshed, it still had a spiritual undercurrent to it through its mythological implication.

Psycho isn’t the finest addition to the grim, yet lyrical poet’s oeuvre but it certainly isn’t a weak one. I do feel that Mysskin is at his glimmering best when he treads the mystery-thriller genre but for a slasher-thriller that marks six glorious decades of a revelation in storytelling and editing, this eponymous film is profoundly mystical in its own cadence of highs and lows. It registers as a solid addition to an exciting year ahead for both international and domestic films.

Cinema is dying – But the Visual Medium will survive

It must have been a week ago, or two. I don’t remember. I was woken from my pseudo-slumber state by the climatic sequence of Darbar which surprisingly ended before someone could clasp their hands together in dread. Good toppled evil once again and for the sake of fan service, all logic has been defied. However, all that hero worship aside, as I trickled out of the screen with a friend of mine, I happened to notice how eerily empty the theatre was. Not because audiences where engaged in other shows. I could see them moving about in pairs or individually. The charm that permeates any theatre seemed to be almost non-existent. That’s when I willingly, or unwillingly, slipped into wistful longing of the days that I spent going to the screens when I was naive and young.

Rappelling back to early 2010’s and the years that preceded it, therein lies those festive trips to the theatre, which were treated as family outings once a week or twice a week depending on what was showing. There were movies that fascinated me, and movies that lulled me to sleep. But in spite of the state of affairs within the theatre, the allure of the structure that is perched so invitingly is what kept me craving to go back for more. The prolonged fade of the lights until only the screen is visible. When the visages next to you become the resting place of restless eyes that scan the dimensions of the screen. When the friends and family next to you become remote, while newer friends spring forth from the screen in front of you. And when all was done, the jostling and constant chatter that takes place as you walk out made it an event in-itself. And the best part? You didn’t have your own rectangular screen to distract you.

Not until a few years ago did I frequent the habit of going to theatres alone. Albeit being a personal preference, I noticed that the crowd that swarms a theatre soon started to diminish in strength. To highlight this, I’d have to borrow an anecdote. It must have been a Hollywood release in fall, if my memory serves me well. Just days after its release, in a multiplex, the theatre didn’t even reach a 30 percent occupancy. I divine that it should Bohemian Rhapsody if the same memory can be relied upon. I wasn’t appalled but I realized that it could be due to the lack of a widespread audience who relish Queen’s releases.

But then again you may think that I profess from limited exposure. There could be screens that run with a full audience, there could be differences in vicinities, each Cinema having its own patrons and a host of other factors. But that isn’t where the change manifests. It’s expressed when we communicate. I’ve held conversations where I’ve broached the idea of visiting the theatre to view a movie and have had the same turned down due to my acquaintances being indisposed to traverse the distance. People are beginning to be increasingly averse to go through the theatre rituals as they perceive it and prefer to stick to their personal devices.

But does this mean that theatres are obsolete? Absolutely not. They have been turned into a sort of Mecca for the energized patrons of franchise films. Once again, if my opining seems to lack weight, I have the likes of Martin Scorsese and Vetri Maaran down south in India to pitch in. You see, when the demand shifts from major screens, which alley do creators have to walk into? They are left facing the doors of streaming platforms with the likes of Netflix and Amazon keeping open doors. All this takes place, while franchise films continue to flood the theatres and rake in dollars as they have been crafted to do. Contemporary filmmaking that deals with the different subsets of drama is slowly migrating from bigger rectangles to smaller rectangles, or in other words, our personal laptops and mobile phones. Martin says that it is a perilous time in film-showing as independent filmmakers no longer have the luxury of big screens. Vetri says that the mass hero films down in South India are from the same stable, embodying the same energized fan-base that storm the theatres to worship their heroes. Epigrams separated by cultural fences, but both stand to deliver a universal truth.

Now that we have creators seeping into the domain of streaming services, where does this lead us then? Once people have done away with the need to festoon themselves and canter to the theatre, they are left with a lot more time on their hands than they expected. They enjoy prolonged content as opposed to a traditional 120 minutes or 180 minutes of storytelling. So, the structure of a film in the streaming space is no longer the three-act structure or any other structure used to narrate a film. Long form TV is seen as a festering phenomenon in today’s context. This is attested by Gautam Vasudev Menon and Vetri Maaran who both corroborated each other in claiming that this is indeed, a golden age for screenwriting.

It does make me wonder what audiences would lose out if this impending decline accelerated to reach its end. For this I have to borrow from the reserves of a far greater man than I, who has been a dark horse of sorts in the Tamil film industry. Director Mysskin in his extremely enlightening interview with Film Companion  gives a profound example from his experiences. He and his friend, after the end of a moving film, decide to walk on opposite pathways, until they reach Teynampet. He reminisces that they both agreed that kindling any conversation would roil the effect that the film produced in them. He says that the theatre and the medium, acting in conjunction, have permeated our lives in every possible aspect, and goes onto to joke that even after falling hopelessly in love, an act which was undoubtedly spurred on by the movies he watches, a young man feels irresistibly obliged to entreat the girl to go to the theatres with him.

But the decline of traditional film-showing is not something that is to be appalled by or mourned at. Throughout history, our art forms have eclipsed their predecessors. The same way in which cinema eclipsed theatre and theatre eclipsed long forms of literature. Our art-forms evolve with us, and change as we change. The term cinema could no longer be associated with theaters in the future, but as far as our sights can stretch, the length of a film can be truncated, elongated or reposed at the same duration. If anything, screenwriters and content creators should rejoice as they can exploit, or even abuse their creative faculties to storm up brilliant stories to harness the technical gifts that advancement has bestowed upon us, knowing that content based platforms will provide the financial go-ahead if they find themselves satisfied.

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Reflections

There are moralizing books. There are reflective books. There are inquisitive books. And yet, the most fascinating of them all is a poisonous book. Poisonous is too ambiguous a word to use in this context, but it is certainly a suggestive book. When Wilde set out to write Dorian Gray, the Victorian Era was drawing to a close. Curiosity became the primary, and only excuse, for people’s lavish explorations. The sins that were untouched were soon caressed, and to exhaust the soul, one at times exhausted the body. The Picture of Dorian Gray, even in its last hour, isn’t a moral sermon. It is the ultimate result of what follows when one’s subdued conscience reveals itself in a horrifying realization. And that is why, unlike Huysmans’s A’Rebours, Dorian Gray isn’t vivacious in details of corruption, but in details of indulgence, debauchery, and repentance. It isn’t certain while alluding to the gamut of poisons, but it teases them so effortlessly.

I’ve been reading the book for more than a month, even though it is spread across 200 odd pages with an introduction. I’ve come to realize the pages and your pace are never proportional. I’ve spent hours musing on mere lines. I’ve learnt to savour their paradoxical questions. I feel satisfied I took quite some time to finish it, else I would have been very distant from the world Dorian walks through. It has been nothing short of a rich reading experience. And much like its eponymous lead, the immorality in things fascinates me. But can a book ever be a corrupting influence, like Dorian Gray is to countless young men and women who he has blinded with infinite desire for new sensations?  Here is what Wilde had to say when he vehemently defended that, immorality through text is nothing but false propaganda –

“Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them”

The first time I gazed at these sentences, I read them again. I read them over and over, flipping the page back and forth. Was it really true that I only saw sins that I envisioned in Dorian’s actions, or was it laid before me explicitly? I revisited every chapter, but I couldn’t find detailed descriptions of Dorian’s quests for pleasures in the immoral realm, with of course, the exception of an opium indulgence, and his seasonal indulgences in raiment, perfume, music and jewellery. But the latter was never an overt sin, as society would perceive, and would appear more so as aristocratic profligacy. Dorian had merely transcended to a plane of indulgence higher than his compatriots. But his actions of instilling corruption in the brightest of hearts are brought to the fore by Basil Hallward. However, never is it mentioned what pleasures or sins Dorian chose to plant in their minds. Even when he coerces Alan Campbell with a note, we are never shown the contents of that threatening message. We are left to our own imagination as to what those pleasures or sins could be. At times, these lines make me wonder, was Wilde too optimistic in his defiant resistance, or did Dorian Gray be more than just a mirror of one’s own sins?

I did something unusual for the first time, for a book of philosophical fiction. I jotted down everything my mind imagined during key exchanges and ruminations. I felt that I might be overdoing reading for pleasure, likening it to what would be an academic pursuit. The most obvious thing I could note was that everything was a chain of influence. When Henry teased the vanity in Dorian during their stroll in Basil’s garden, it set forth a chain of influence on ideas and thoughts, passing from one character to another. Henry’s epigram was that the soul should be cured by the senses, and to accomplish this, the senses must never be denied the opportunity to experience something new. Dorian builds his life around this, and he finds immeasurable fascination as he watches others seek new sensations, the same way Henry experienced fascination when he set Dorian on the same course.

But what made the novel extremely endearing was its exchanges. I’m not going to define it, because to define is to limit, as Henry exchanges words with his cousin Gladys. The countless comparisons to history itself, and the innumerable questions on existence and the purpose of art all make it seem enticingly paradoxical. Henry’s aphorisms for one, although passed with a tinge of contempt or more at times, ridicule mankind and the history of civilization, which was a cause for concern amongst the novel’s disgruntled readers. I was never concerned with the authenticity of the refuting claims made by the characters, but the brilliant style in which they were written and delivered. I still find it fascinating, because, excitement doesn’t exist in conformity. Even if they may appear condescending, the very fact that they dare to talk against firm beliefs and superstitions, makes them immediately captivating. Wilde’s choice of words in interplays, make the whole scene feel as though two Romans were exchange blows with sharp edged swords.

Going back to my very first statement. I mentioned that The Picture of Dorian Gray is a suggestive book. And it did what it was crafted to do, it did suggest to me, as a reader. I shunned from reading the preface before I began the book. I kept it a point to read it once I completed the very last verse of the novel. I came back to what Wilde had to say in his preface. And as I did, I got the most succinct yet philosophical sentences on art, where Wilde even signs off by saying –

‘All art is quite useless’

Wilde was a romanticist, and he felt that every reader indulges in any work of art by exercising their own free will, and in doing so, engage at their peril. If we find something real, we must not blame the artist. For each artist, morality and immorality are the two colours with which they would paint perfectly on imperfect mediums. Their words may never subsume actions or be representative of them, but they will still try. The author must never side with morality or immorality, as art is merely spectative. If one chooses to go further down, to plunge in search of meaning, he again, does so at his own peril, he states. But what does he imply through the above statement? Is art useless because it is spectative? Or is it because it never chooses sides on the scale of morality and immorality? Then again comes the question, what could art be? Can it be something more than spectative or reflective? For the man himself, style precedes right and wrong in art.

Apart from diverse world views, The Picture of Dorian Gray has shown me the two sides of hedonism, debauchery, and decadence. The fascination of all new sensations on one side, and the tussle with our own conscience for indulging on the other. It has also given me a new perspective on who a critic is. I would like to join the definition of Wilde’s term as a critic, and not what society perceives it to be. And if his definition were to hold, all of us are critics in our everyday lives –

“The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful thing.”

But I’m afraid this breed of critics are fast dying. I enjoy reading impressions that certain others hold while regarding any work of art or the presents bestowed by the world itself. But, those who take to writing, and including myself in that list, inject our own flames into the words we write. Our own anger must be kept at bay when trying to cast our impressions. I doubt that would be possible in our modern day and age, but it will have to be a conscious effort.

I’m not going to slice and dice the novel anymore, and in doing so, take the edge and excitement you would get in reading the novel yourself. I have gained a lot from Wilde’s only novel, and wish to read it again, with the weather of another season, down the road of time. But for now, I have decided to move onto Albert Camus’s L’Étranger or The Stranger. I look forward to the new perspectives it could give me, and the impressions I can impart, after indulging in it myself.

Red Beard – Reflections

Red Beard is not an easy watch. Let me explain. The film, split into two halves, spans a duration of 180 minutes. But the length was never an obstacle. Set during the Shogunate of the 19th century, it takes time for you to settle into a world that is distant in every sense. Watching movies that originate from the west never seem difficult, given that shared ideologies percolate through the borders of each country. But Japan, as small as it may seem, is a world in itself before the intrusion of the west. But I don’t like to value experiences based on pleasantries. As Wilde says at some juncture, the experience takes precedence to the fruit of the experience. I was far from disappointed when Red Beard concluded.

Red Beard follows the life of Noboru Yasumoto, a young doctor, well versed in Dutch medicine, aspiring to be the Shogunate’s personal physician, finding himself pigeon-holed into some rut, as he deems it, in the countryside of Edo, the modern day Tokyo. He is to be the understudy of Kyojo Niide, or otherwise called Red Beard, for the difficulty that may arise in pronunciation of his birth name. The clinic that operates to tend to the poor is under his supervision, and we are shown the downtrodden state of Japan’s poorest.

I’m not going to typify the average viewer’s attention span, as I myself took a while to get accustomed to the descriptive, yet slow paced narration. Kurosawa takes his time to establish Edo. Mind you, Red Beard released in 1965, well ahead of the traditional Japan that we witness in the film. Even the native inhabitants of Japan would have to be bridged to their past. We understand that Yasumoto is enraged that he has been appointed to do menial tasks instead of aiding the Shogunate, and refuses to comply with Niide’s commands. He rebels, in the hope that he will be dismissed from service, but Red Beard does not pay heed to his petulant actions. He still wishes to reform him.

As I kept viewing, I began to realize how distinct and masterful Kurosawa is in envisioning things. The way he communicates a scene through only visuals is what makes him the great filmmaker that he is. For large parts of the film, there are no dialogues. Let me seek an example to shed light on this. Early on in a particular scene, Niide asks Yasumoto to observe the final moments of a dying man, stating that those are the most solemn moments in his long life. Yasumoto, unable to witness it, is relieved when he is called upon to operate on a young girl alongside Niide. Unable to process the grotesqueness of the operation, with the girl convulsing on the table, Yasumoto faints. Throughout both scenes, Kurosawa’s blocking amplifies the way you perceive the events. He manages to keep the girl and Yasumoto within the frame, and places Yasumoto in the centre, with both his aiding doctors on the side, while still having the girl within the frame. It’s masterful staging, merely because the grotesqueness of the scene never slips away. I’m afraid I can’t refrain from borrowing Wilde’s aphorisms, and as he states, the ugliness of things make them frighteningly real.

Something apart from his blocking that fascinated me was how he never smudges the illusion of scenes by cheaply infusing a cut. One of the scenes that had me on the hook was a single, long, uncut take when Yasumoto is confronted by a delirious woman who has been confined in a separate chamber constructed outside the clinic. As she begins to talk about her tormented past, the scene edges closer with each revelation, moving in from an initially wide shot, until we see both their faces. None of it required a cut, but in most modern films, directors and editors abuse cuts to build cheap, ineffective scenes. One may argue that it is insignificant, but, to an audience, it makes a worldly difference, subconsciously.

If I had to draw examples on his visionary style, I’m afraid I’d have to expound on each scene in the movie. But, what made me different to Red Beard was it was storytelling, within storytelling. It had characters talk about their lives, in a way that was narrating it. Sometimes, Kurosawa lets you have the conciseness of an image to aid you. Otherwise, he lets the characters speak or act out the events of the past. The latter is much more preferred when he wants you to see what it does to Yasumoto or Niide, who listen to these poor patients that have arrived at their door.  Filmmaking is all about choices, and choices that don’t involve forethought often turn out to be poor ones.

But what fascinated me was the cultural set-up of an unscathed, medieval Japan. It is extremely fascinating to know that around the same time, the likes of Huysmans and other novelists were working on expanding the dimensions of artistic thought, while western medicine began to inculcate psychology as a more formal study, whereas Japan still relied on physiologists to tend to both body and mind. Their examinations do not involved structured studies to assess their patients mentally. They view them through the lens of commonplace citizens, and attribute their misfortunes to the plagues of politics and aristocratical profligacy. Japan’s poor were not merely poor, they were trampled on in every sense. They try to undo years of mental torture through ways that are instinctual and not systemic.

For the aspiring doctor in Yasumoto, the film is a passage of enlightenment. He takes the path of abolishing the notion that being a doctor is a comforting task, owing to his perception that his services would be limited to the Shogun. He understands that the stench of the poor has a reason, that their torn dresses are from labour and abuse, their coarse voices from eating nothing but the gruel that they are confined to eat, unlike the sake he can have at will. It is not through hardship does he learn, but through observation, slowly taking in the world he hadn’t known. He is aided by Niide, who teaches him what it means to be a doctor. It is merely beyond the task of tending to examination and administering medicine. It involves forming a tryst with those at your mercy, and to regard them with infinite pity and compassion.

There is an amazing passage right after the film opens for the second half. After rescuing a girl from a brothel, Niide places her in Yasumoto’s care. Kurosawa has spoken highly of classic literature, and holds Dostoyevsky in admiration, and the inclusion of this storyline is inspired from the author’s Humiliated and Insulted. We watch Otoyo, the young girl and Yasumoto form a relationship as, at first, he tends to her to alleviate her mental woes, before falling into illness himself, and in a reversal, Otoyo now tends to Yasumoto. The entire passage involves very minimal dialogue and at some points no dialogue at all. We observe actions, decisions and gazes but never does a tongue move. There is something truly profound in motion, than oration. I was able to indulge more and more in the second half of the film after soaking in this epoch throughout the first half. I was able to appreciate it better and was appeased by its storylines.

Is Red Beard philosophical? Kurosawa’s affinity is without doubt to Humanism and Existentialism. Without moving into conceptual definitions or saving it for another post, it was clear that the film is a commentary focused on vehemently admonishing spoilt riches and starved peasants. It tries to tell through its characters that, their actions in their lives give it meaning, more than their social standing. The decisions of a caretaker or the defiance of an emancipated daughter from her abusive mother, all involve characters trying to establish meaning to their own lives beyond their typified roles in society.

I had a sudden thought as to how my earlier viewings of Japan before its modern makeover compared to Red Beard. I had watched Silence, but that was through the eyes of the west. It had showed Japan in a mystical sort of way. But, such was the theme of that film. I had seen films on a transitioning Japan, as an imposing, dictatorial nation state. But, the humanist aspect of Japanese people themselves had revealed itself to me through this film. I do have memories of watching Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, but that seems distant, and I would most certainly love to watch it soon in this Director Focus series of the Japanese Master. Red Beard, apart from giving me a completely different cultural immersion, has helped me understand visual choices in a scene. It fascinated me and gave me thought than trying to appease me emotionally. I guess that would be due to my distance from this world, a world which I’m looking forward to explore.

Marriage Story – Reflections

The first thought that I had when I finished watching Marriage Story was how well it did not do what it could have done. It could have milked every drop of tear out of it and made the scenes melodramatic to a stifling extent, but it didn’t. Before the reality in it seems to seep away, it manages to close the tap. It’s appeal to divorces and more so, separations around the world and our anxiety at uncertainty make it a brilliant discussion sewn from the finest fabric of contemporary cinema.

When you grew up, do you remember your parents carefully secluding you from a conversation that they deemed was grown-up stuff? The very throbbing heart of Marriage Story is to rebuke that conception. Any adult in a situation that is intimidating, becomes as naïve and unexposed as a child in unchartered waters. A divorce is a realm that pervades our society, yet we are so remote from its repercussions. Only when it takes place to us, in its fascinatingly personal way, do we truly face the tremors. No one is experienced, and our petulant ways resurface as anxiety proliferates.

The movie opens with voice-overs on what appears to be each character picking and placing the best of what they see in their counterparts, and with a single cut, we are suddenly now in the counsellor’s room, looming on the brink of an imminent divorce. It’s the contrast that really draws your attention to what could have been the problem for such seemingly affectionate remarks to turn sour. As Nicole, played by Johansson walks out, we then witness their marriage on a much larger scale.

Early on, I began to realize that Noah Baumbach is a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson, and through their companionship, Noah has been able to evolve a distinct visual style that is his own from someone who is known for his prominent visual style. The camera moves along with the characters, and matches the tempo of the scene. There is this brilliant scene in a divorce lawyer’s office where it shone out. Most shots in the scene were single, uncut and long, focusing on Nicole as she relives the experience of meeting her now distant husband. When she narrows down to the crux of what was wrong with their marriage, the camera slowly moves in, towards her, until we only see her face. It’s a great way to focus our attention on her words, while not roiling the illusion of the single, uncut take. We finally get to learn that she felt eclipsed in a marriage, where her opinions no longer mattered.

From birth, we are taught that marriages are binding. But how binding? We tend to see our parents behave in cohesion, and talk to back each other up. Behind closed doors, it’s different. But, we are accustomed to seeing them as one. The concept of marriage making two organisms one, to an extent where both get diluted and lose their own individuality is still believed in many invisible circles. But we can still distinguish which person pitches in more. However, we are lost somewhere on the borderline of whether the decision is made by us, as an individual, or us, as a conscious part of this formed organism? Are we really two, or are we really one? Are we making these decisions for our welfare or for this combined, yet singular organism’s welfare? Marriage is more than just a yes or no on the day of roses and white dresses. It’s a myriad of things that gives birth to choices, some we make willingly for our own selves, and some for the joint welfare of the two constituting one. Harmony resides in the precarious balance of these choices, and in Nicole’s case, the balance was lopsided, weighing more heavily on her shoulders, as she perceives it.

Marriage Story tackles this concept to establish the individual side of each divorce. Behind the gory legal spats, each divorce has a human side. Apart from jaw-dropping bills from your legal representative and brawls for custody of a child, it invites you closer to a discussion on the more human side of it. How each person in it surmounts or succumbs to the stress that piles on their desks incessantly, changing their love to toxic outbursts that are neurotic and not intentional. There is a particular scene that shoulders the entire film, between Charlie and Nicole, the two involved in the ongoing proceedings, in Charlie’s apartment. What turns out to be a calm conversation to settle their differences turns into vile exchanges heaved at each other until saturation. It’s so strikingly metaphorical. It resembles the process of each cell undergoing this strenuous fission from the larger cell of marriage, to vehemently defend themselves, finally realizing they are now separate. And the editing, coupled with the camera work, make it a standout. As the heat in the conversation boils, so does the editing. It becomes more fast-paced and when it’s done we focus on these two characters separately.

The question for me wasn’t whether Marriage Story fascinated me. It was whether it enlightened me. It gave me a much cleaner lens to see the nuances of separations, and to understand that feelings felt by us and by those surrounding us, are not unprecedented. It happens across societies that are culturally different than ours, experienced in degrees that have not engulfed us. It’s like that saying somewhere that a heartbreak means the world to you, while it seems insignificant to the world. It takes you as close as any experience in film could, to the changed dynamics of modern marriages, to spectate on heartbreaks meaning the world to someone going through them.

But the task I just mentioned is as easily said than done when framing a story. The way the screenplay was structured reminded me of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Nicole and Charlie move through a very small world. Nicole’s house in LA, Charlie’s house in LA, their own house in New York, and all other places that constantly resurface throughout the movie. By making their world much smaller, Noah is able to draw you into seeing them change as this process of separation takes place. And they work as episodes throughout the divorce, each denoted by a fade to black. We see them with their son Henry, and how this divorce affects that relationship. It makes it all the more better that the structure was linear, with characters only referring to the past, not living it, except for the opening discourse. It gave me the ability to see their relationship after, and not before. That’s why I expounded in the beginning on what the Marriage Story could have done, but chose not. If Noah had opted to go back to any particular event, we as viewers may have chosen sides, then that would have not been the point that was being driven.

The film closes with the world surrounding Nicole sneering with the scent of triumph. But that was not what she wanted. She wanted her relationship with Charlie to be amicable, while not being romantic. But then again that comes to the question of whether that is truly possible for someone you have already harboured feelings for. Charlie reads out the letter that Nicole wrote about him during the opening sequence of the film, and they both realize that they have grown apart, but will carry a part of each other with themselves as long as they live.

The weight of the performances by the lead actors dawned on me as the credits rolled. I have actually held Johansson in high regard for her performance in earlier films, and I do wish she does more films like these, instead of confining herself to a character that is greater than herself in the MCU. As for Adam Driver, I have held him in high regard since his work in Silence and needless to say, this was wonderful as well. I later came to know that both actors have been through divorces, with Driver still sharing custody of his son, making them actually bring more to these roles.

But above all, Marriage Story did give me something to reflect. The ever-present question of how we survive in relationships once their dynamics change. With people we have known for so long, we shake with trepidation to keep a foot forward, fearing that we might overstep a line that has newly appeared. Its new boundaries intimidate us, and we feel helpless as nostalgia floods our minds. But like everything else in our thoughts, it becomes hazy after some juncture unbeknownst, as time awaits, staring at us from the interminable outset, to knead on our memories.

Super Deluxe – Disrupting Mainstream Tamil Cinema

I’m quite baffled myself. I’m still wondering as to why I decided to write about this particular movie almost 8 months after watching it. The most suitable explanation I believe would be that I’d have liked to watch the remainder of the year to come to a conclusion. Super Deluxe, written by Thiagarajan Kumararaja, was the arguably the most daring attempt of 2019. Not because it had a stigmatized transwoman as a central character in a traditional society, but for a view that encompassed a multitude of issues, with a unique flavour to each character, all of whom helped to create a shared universe for the director with his previous venture: Aaranya Kaandam.

The question that nags me the most is the one that carves out a good portion of my thoughts: What defines a good film? If this was asked to me when I was a much younger version of myself, the response would have been superficial. I would have tossed phrases such as good acting, good writing without knowing what I meant. And that wasn’t wrong, because I was learning to give these words meaning. But now that it’s nearly been a decade since my first proper foray into film, I decided to a give this question the good once-over. The result? There are no good experiences, there are only new ones. However that doesn’t mean an experience could be new by means of absurdity. The framework holds. It is only the way the tools within it are used which changes, along with the content base of a film. Any film that unsettles me, excites me, surprises me, makes me feel a different way, regardless of the degree of change within, is a good film. If it can be captured through sparsity in words, then its effect was timid and tame. There should exist an inexorable impulse felt by thought and expression in unison. That’s when a film, or any work of art, for that case, has altered you.

Kumararaja’s universe is a simple one with the central theme of coincidence and chance holding its quirky yet nefarious framework together. The presence of the invisible chain that acts beyond us, connecting each act together. In his first venture, the father-son duo played by Guru Somasundaram and Vasanth were connected with the tussle between Singaperumal and Pasupathy, where Singaperumal had held captive a young woman to be his mistress, who has an intimate relationship with Ravi Krishna’s character. When one event sets off, the entire layout falls in a domino effect. The same happens to be the case with Kumararaja’s second and much later venture: Super Deluxe.

I find it amusing that I remember so much of the film months after watching it. There was a distinctness to its dialogues and actions. Super Deluxe, began filming in 2016. It was a start-stop filming period. Vijay Sethupathi, who plays the charming Shilpa, felt utterly out of place when he first stepped into a woman’s shoes. The costume fit, the make-up was perfect, but that feminine sensation hadn’t seated itself within him. The film had to stop due to budgetary constraints and it didn’t begin until much later. Kumararaja joked that he forgot how to direct after this prolonged gap between his second and first venture. I guess this feeling of filming over a long period and much room for thought gave way for the director to apply this distinctness to each character on set.

The shooting began again, and this time, Vijay Sethupathi mentioned that when he donned the clothes of a woman, whatever he did, suddenly had a much more imbued, feminine vibe to it. Retrospecting now, the grace to his character was what gave his story in the anthology its heart. People often undermine how daunting a task it is to experiment. In an extremely conventional environment, for an actor to try is one thing. But to leap genders is frowned upon. And for such an established actor, who has captured this traditional society and captivated them, he was putting everything on the line by doing so.

But, what made Super Deluxe as a film so endearing to its viewers, or more so, myself? Its sheer audacity to tackle not just one, but multiple taboos is certainly a ringing answer. Not only did the film showcase third-gender discriminations but also the case of infidelity, teenage lust and also had a controversial take on religion. Kumararaja shoved all these controversial issues that plague society into one bag, like a feverish shopper on a spree, before setting out to dismantle them and use them to craft a story on what they actually are in a sort of brazen, unnerving fashion.

Technically the film is a marvel, and Kumararaja’s blocking is a homage to the filmmakers that taught him how to do so. An evergreen fanboy, he made sure that, in a scene where a group of leering teenagers fumble to buy a few age inappropriate movies as they call them, he slipped in a few posters of Kill Bill and The Vengeance Trilogy directed by Quentin Tarantino and Park Chan-Wook. Having the likes of Nirav Shah and P.S Vinod give the film its shady setting, he made his universe more refined, and crystalline, as compared to the grainy film work done on Aaranya Kaandam.

But Super Deluxe didn’t disrupt just because one major star decided to walk into the project. The likes of Samantha Akkineni and Fahaad Faasil, two leading actors in the South Indian film industry also decided to sign up for the project. The size of the project eventually became big enough to be called mainstream. But it was different. It had all the lead actors that would star in huge films, but the story didn’t compromise itself for them. It had that clearly embellished feeling, the mark of an auteur, who in this case was Kumararaja. The actors were tools that helped him place his vision better, to gently transport the ideal that thrived in his mind into an art-form.

From start to finish, it’s the way Kumararaja plays with you that defines your experience. His ability to build tension in a tenacious way, so much so that you feel as vulnerable as his character. In a scene towards the end of the film, a corrupt police officer doesn’t appear domineering as he tries to elicit a sexual favour. He seems as sly and cunning as a fox would be, lowering his voice when he tries to remind the couple of their unspeakable situation. By giving his character something that is so unique, be it their voice or bodily expression, the director extracts the most out of them. It’s the kind of astute usage, wherein it isn’t overused to become trite or underused to become negligible. It’s like how Vijay Sethupathi says so in the trailer – like a snake slowly coiling itself around your neck.

There were other instances of brilliance too. The tracking shot that moved a complete 360 to cover the scene before narrowing in on what has happened. In that scene, dialogue was merely peripheral. Kumararaja used that valuable screen time to establish the character and her surroundings. When the dialogue was important, the opening credits rolled in, so the only thing you would focus on would undoubtedly be the dialogue. It’s the knack of shrewd filmmakers, like Mackendrick says – “What a director really directs, is the audience’s attention”.

But the most controversial and baffling thing in the whole film was the inclusion of an alien. At first glance, one may think that was such a tawdry thing to throw in for a few gimmicks. Till date, even I have certain suspicions as to why the decision was so. Of course, the film was philosophical. Just the same way his earlier film concluded. It had a different adage now. The sheer simplicity of things, and the relentless quest for meaning, the trifleness of it all, ultimately boiling doing to simple genetic reproduction. But the ambiguity towards the end in what was that Kumararaja was actually alluding to became jarring after initial viewing. People realized the presence of Schrodinger’s cat and all the other theories of the world riddled across his film, but, I settled down to realize that it was his way of saying that in our quest for meaning we tend to overthink everything, and that’s why I guess he re-enforced the simplicity of reproduction in the end. And that was merely the conclusion of one story.

There are several roadblocks that directors face when directing non-linear narratives or when they even sit down to write. How are they going to devote time to each one of these stories, or weave them together so that all of them maintain their individuality while allowing each other to co-exist? They would have to give no room for their characters to be cannibalistic for screen time or take sides due to whimsical fancies. Each story in Kumararaja’s tale has its own philosophical stance. He needs to make sure they enter and exit in such a fashion that while the audience absorbs what is going on in front of them, the previous story is wallowing in the recesses of their mind, before it pops back up again.

But stepping back to look at the impact of the film as such, it has created a buzz of attention on film-making in Tamil Cinema. Until the start of this decade, films that came out in Tamil, largely, had a sense of crudeness, or in some cases, a traditional pulse to them that was tacit. Something that only its own populace could resonate to. Of course there were exceptions, but there was nothing like a paradigm shift of sorts that spurred the way for a film-making revolution that was witnessed decades ago in other film industries or even the replacement of character films with commercial films in Tamil Cinema during the 70’s. Films sent to festivals were still somewhat restricted in effect that the viewers there found it difficult to immerse themselves at times. Even Vetri Maaran mentioned that people at Cannes were appalled with Visaaranai’s brazen delivery, although that was one of the more refined films for local audiences here. Filmmakers here are constantly trying to achieve that universal feeling that is imbued with films from other nations. Super Deluxe, by shouldering all the controversial issues, delivers a film that is driven in that direction which is hoped for, and marks a solid step in trying to redefine what mainstream Tamil Cinema is.

Cinema Paradiso – Reflections

Whenever we seat ourselves down in any of the multiplexes we stroll into these days to watch a movie, we fidget our phones, give room for some chit-chat, gobble some popcorn before the lights go off and the movie begins to unfold. We pass a few comments here and there, loiter out to the washroom if nature calls before walking out of the theatre for good. The projection room above our heads never piques our interest. After all, it’s merely a machine, which, with the flick of switch, can play the series of images intended for you. It is through that lifeless machine that life itself manifests. But the past has always had a pair of eyes behind the opal light.

Cinema Paradiso is a film that has been rankling my dormant watch-list for quite some time. I finally found a decent two hours today and hence I settled on watching the film. Tornatore wastes no time and sets-up the plot as quickly as possible before dispatching the train back in time. We find ourselves in this dainty town of Giancaldo. Propped alongside the sea, its limited populace is an unaffected one, and their life revolves around the Cinema Paradiso and the church.

One may consider the movie to be a house for many themes. But what forms its crux should by no means invoke doubts. At its heart, Cinema Paradiso is a nostalgic trip undertaken by Salvatore Da Vita, who reminisces about his friend and mentor, Alfredo, the local projectionist who rummages in the attic of the Cinema Paradiso. Some dusty memory in my mind started twitching, and I realized that Tamil Cinema had its own inspired version in the form of Veyil which was something I remember watching years before.

But Cinema Paradiso is an extremely heart-warming bond between its two pivotal characters, whereas the latter explores other themes. Salvatore, or otherwise known as Toto, is the altar boy and is by no means a happy one. He slips away whenever possible to Alfredo’s den and sets himself down beside the severed negatives. Being a parochial community, every film has to pass the all-seeing eye of religion before gracing the eyes of the commoner. As the Father signals to Alfredo with fury at the very sight of on-screen vulgarity, Toto watches on from behind the screens with an ecstatic glee.

It didn’t strike me at once, but it did, eventually. I happened to realize that Toto wasn’t a nickname that was restricted to Salvatore but also Tornatore, who in this case happens to be the director of this film. It was only after the film that I had read that this movie was by all means an autobiographical account for Tornatore, who always looked forward to craft this ode to the cinema that liberated him as a child.

The best and most sumptuous part of the film for me was to watch the relationship between Toto and Alfredo bloom. And when I say bloom, it actually did, in a perfectly paced and sinfully innocuous manner. Alfredo reminds the young boy with the repetitiveness of a parrot, borrowing all the lines that he heard from actors he gave life to, that however alluring this attic may seem, it has a crippling monotony to it, admonishing that Toto must never pledge his arms to it. But he isn’t entirely critical about his life. He confesses that he finds solace in every laugh and every tear that the audience imparts, feeling almost as if it were him that gives them that wonderful ability to feel and empathize. Before we know it, tragedy befalls and Alfredo is deprived of the visual sense he cherished the most, and Toto grows to become a teenager.

For someone who has grown up watching films, breathing them and living them, this portion of the film really resonated with me. Albeit growing up in an age of hard drives and digital reproductions, I found comfort in Toto’s negatives. I often look around these days to find that as much as films are being enjoyed, they are also being dissected. The time and age when the allure of cinema alone, coupled with its ability to transcend time and space in itself was considered a gift from the heavens. As the lights go off and voices become mellow, the screen takes precedence. The great joys and greater sorrows of the characters become yours. You find yourself leaning forward, like one of the patrons of the Paradiso, reciting each line by rote, to yourself, as your jerk a tear.

As Toto now wanders out with a camera in his hand, with due course, he falls in love and his negative reels are filled with the girl who fills his thoughts. Much has changed in the landscape of the little town of Giancaldo. The burnt down Cinema Paradiso is now a renovated marvel, with Toto being the projectionist and Alfredo his aide. He soon assents to Alfredo’s suspicion and pours his heart out, withering each time he mentions that he fails to garner the girl’s attention. He fumbles when he trots up to talk to her. He finally devises a scheme to get into the confessional, and with a mustered up courage confesses his love for her. He decides to play out a tale that Alfredo recited to him, and stands beneath the windows of her house, steeped in tranquillity and refraining from a peppy serenade. Just as hope seeps out, all things fall in place, and they end up together on a rainy night inside the projection room.

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve begin to realize how different filmmakers across the globe have used certain tropes or techniques to flow through time seamlessly. With Satoshi Kon, it’s his impeccable editing style that bridges reality and fantasy. With Wong Kar-Wai, it is moving his characters through fixed landscapes and environments to flesh out the internal change against the change in the externals. Kurosawa cuts on movement to keep the pristineness of time intact. The reason why Cinema Paradiso moves as well as it does is because it does what is necessary for the film. By focusing on a changing external, it tries to bring a contrast in what the characters feel within. As time fondles with their surroundings, it explores how the characters react to it as well.

Time propels further, and Toto is soon separated from his love, does his share in the military, and returns back home to the town square of Giancaldo. He gazes at the surroundings, seeing it change furthermore, and even discovers the presence of a new projectionist for the theatre. He takes a stroll onto the beach with Alfredo, who insists he leaves this cursed land, and sets out for good and never turns to look back. He believes that nostalgia would never let progress see the light of the day. As long as Toto reminisces, he would always yearn for a past he can never hold. Toto pays heed to his words and decides on leaving. As he leaves, Alfredo holds him by his cheeks and reiterates his words, asking him to not come back at any cost, and Toto boards the train looking back, much like Moraldo from Il Vitelloni.

Cinema Paradiso pays homage to all the directors and actors that proved to be formative to its director when he was growing up as a young boy in the towns of Sicily. The likes of Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and John Ford find their space in this modest theatre. It shows the subtle yet profound influence on a young, impressionable boy who hails from the most humble background, whose only true comfort is behind the projector watching all their works come to life, and in the process, becoming a part of their worlds.

As the film finds itself in its final act, we can now see that the cocooned existence that was shared by Giancaldo’s inhabitants has ceased to exist. Its world has now been penetrated by the digital and industrial growth outside of it, robbing the small town of its much cherished innocence. As Toto returns for Alfredo’s funeral, he sees the presence of all the faces that were associated with the town square and the Cinema Paradiso as he grew up. He learns that the theatre is scheduled to be demolished, and walks in for one last time. Alfredo’s wife makes him aware of the fact that her husband left something for Toto in a projection reel. In the final scene of the film, he plays the reel in an empty screening hall, and a surprise montage of all the severed kissing scenes enamours him, as he rides on a wave of nostalgia before it all draws to a close.

Much of the film’s premise isn’t completely novel. Of course, there are always films on nostalgia. What distinguishes any of them is their treatment, which in any case is universal. Tornatore’s vision in stitching a string of experiences is what makes this film such a memorable watch. His ability to bring back the changing landscape of Sicily onto the screen is certainly one, but the wonderful interplay between projectionist and patron makes the film stand apart for me. It is a journey into our relationship with cinema and is presented with a lavish serve of sugar, which in this case, was completely acceptable. It did come to my notice that there existed three different versions of the film, with the late directors cut running up-to a length of nearly 3 hours. With a feverish curiosity, I watched it by phasing through the added clippings. All I can remark without divulging further is, stick to the 1989 version and don’t peek into the later version or the original Italian cut at any rate. Sometimes added scenes can make a film better, as in the case of Batman v Superman’s Ultimate Edition. In the case of Cinema Paradiso, it most certainly doesn’t. Its effect can only be described as tainting.

The Irishman – Reflections

When November kicked off, I knew The Irishman was on the cards. I soon was made aware of the fact that the film was scheduled to make its Netflix release yesterday, so I halted all errands and tasks, and made my way home to watch the film uninterrupted. I tossed everything aside, made sure that the seating I placed together was ergonomic, and crossed fingers hoping that I wouldn’t stir. After all, a film with a runtime of three hours and a half isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

Funnily enough, I remember reading one of Syd Field’s many books on screenwriting earlier in the year. He ventures to mention that film houses would not read a script more than a 128 pages. If you aren’t familiar, each page is an equivalent of one minute on the screen. That is subjected to change on set, but the underlying principle being, today’s audiences don’t have time for overlong films unless they come from accredited names. Even then, a solid half hour more than the 3 hour mark is sure to be a taxing affair.

Being a huge patron of Martin, I loved his earlier venture, Silence. It never garnered widespread acclaim with many finding the runtime to be bloated. When I finished watching The Irishman, I felt a tinge of reminiscence. It was surely this brilliantly crafted piece of work, and upon viewing, one would assent that it belongs to Martin’s stable. But before I get into the nuances and affinities, I would like to touch upon this controversial element of time, and how, on a personal level, the same is most rewarding rather than taxing in Scorsese’s films.

The Irishman, unlike films such as Raging Bull or Taxi Driver, needs context. The film is hinged on the premise of I Heard You Paint Houses, an elaborative account of the life of mafia hitman Frank Sheeran, collected by Charles Brandt. The central crux of the narrative in the book surrounds the time when Sheeran meets Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of America’s largest union. Shadowing their relationship, it boils down to discern that Sheeran killed Hoffa on the orders of the mob, with Brandt claiming in his book that the former confessed to him during an interview. The film itself languished in development hell for nearly 12 years, before being finally made, with the help of de-ageing technology to help its cast relive their younger selves.

Scorsese opens the film with Frank recollecting his life. The landscape changes, the political scenario changes, the cultural inhibitions change, and you find yourself on the highway alongside a younger Frank Sheeran during the 50’s, who chances to meet an inquisitive gentleman by the name Russell Buffalino in a drive through pump. We get to learn who Frank is, what he does for a living, and what he does behind the scenes to grab some dough. Russell takes a shine to him and we see them both grow and age together. Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t even make his appearance until an hour passes. This is an extremely long set-up, but it’s substantiated. Let alone worldwide audiences, even much of the American public today don’t have a vague notion of who Jimmy Hoffa was. So much so that even Frank alludes to the same fact as he reminisces in the film.

Whenever an audience gathers to watch a film from a different time period, before they get to know the characters, they should first, knead through time and circumstances to understand what the character goes through. In Martin’s previous venture, Silence, the film opens with a sequence that follows Liam Neeson’s character as he is tortured without reprieve in a medieval Japan where preaching Christianity is a sin. If films tend to take a cursory approach here, then the audience will most certainly feel left out. Reverting back to The Irishman, it takes its own time to establish the context. The little corner shops, Italian neighborhoods, compatriots of war, mob bosses, the labor union. To an audience that is largely constituting the 21st century who are so remote from this world, Scorsese takes his time to walk them through something he experienced when he grew up. The time needs to weigh on you, it needs to smite your senses, so that you detach from your reality to enter his. And I don’t say this to add to my rhetoric. When the film concluded, I could actually feel that I was exiting from a time period after being immersed for so long. I felt the same thing when I finished watching the likes of Silence and Vada Chennai. The feeling of being drenched in time, the feeling of knowing the characters as if they were neighbors and familiarizing myself with their names.

As I mentioned earlier, the film follows Frank as he weaves together his life facing the camera. Irish by birth, American by war and Italian by brotherhood, Frank’s life is by no means vapid. He joins the cohorts of the Downtown mob bosses, and runs errands for them, burning cars and painting houses. The film is actually riddled with euphemisms and it does so well to highlight the flow of tension between characters. Here’s something to add to your gamut of known phrases: Painting houses is the mob euphemism for popping some with a revolver, and hence, painting the walls with their blood.

It is only after this elaborate set-up that Jimmy Hoffa can waltz into the scene. The leader of the Teamster Union, heading over a million people in what is America’s largest union of blue collar and professional workers. He gets introduced to Frank through Russell, and Frank soon starts to iron things out in Hoffa’s life. They both get pally and we see their relationship grow. They start to dine with their families, and Frank’s reserved daughter Peggy takes a liking to Hoffa. It is at this juncture, that I’d like to interject how relationships shape the film.

Early on in the film, there happens to be a scene where Frank confronts a store-owner who shoves Peggy, and breaks his hand as onlookers lurch. After the incident, Peggy distances herself from her father. Her father’s relationship with the mob irks her and she doesn’t like Russell or anyone else her father dabbles with. When she meets Hoffa, he seems different from everyone her father meets. She campaigns for him in classrooms and views him as a father figure. It strains her relationship with her own father, whose affinity seems more towards his Italian family than his own. Frank’s life, is a plexus of relationships, starting from his own family, to Russell’s and then Hoffa’s. We see the journey of his relationships as time weighs on us. Amidst all this, Scorsese slips in the changes at the political epicenter: The JFK assassination and the Anti-Fidel Castro movement, invoking us to react alongside his characters. Frank teeters to maintain the precarious balance of these relationships, to try and be an all-pleasing man, but his hand is forced by circumstances.

Taking the liberty to digress, I found that Scorsese, in what would be one amongst his last few ventures, paid homage to films that he grew up loving. Be it Patricia, the titular track of La Dolce Vita composed by Perez Prado, yammering as Hoffa walks out a free man from prison, and elongates over the next few sequences, as he cherishes this long lost age that he once reveled in. The Italian Restaurants and the sequence with Joe Gallo all seem to point me in the direction of Goodfellas, his own mob tale. This distant world is seared in my memory, its vivid colors paint my thoughts, and I have to say, I feel deep sadness in acknowledging that down the road, Martin won’t be making movies anymore. The hard fact that soon enough Bob or Pesci won’t breathe as his Italian- American scions. In a way, the film to me is metacinematic. It doesn’t just envelope Russell or Frank as wise guys, it encompasses both these actors in a sort of way that is reflective of their own journey through Martin’s films. It was a poignantly beautiful signing off.

As the film reaches its final hour, tensions seethe. The mob wants Hoffa’s neck and Frank has to be the man to do it. There are no gaudy theatrics leading to the event, or some pumped up tension through the form of background scores or close-ups. I often reiterate that silence is far more powerful than any effect the editing room can conjure. After all, a straightforward task needs to be done with no ballyhoo. Frank shoots Hoffa and leaves. It isn’t dramatic as he recalls it, it was stoic. The murder in itself didn’t make him feel overwrought. The remorse that flooded him later crippled him. His daughter realizes that when her father remains stoic even as she questions him, he was responsible for Hoffa’s disappearance and vows not to talk to him again. He is found in an austere state as he staggers through his life as it cuts back to the present. There is a beautiful little scene when Frank goes out to pick a casket in a wheelchair. He chooses a bright green one, alluding to I believe the colors of Ireland. The storekeeper questions him who the casket is for, and he admits that he was shopping for his own casket. It’s one of those classic Scorsese aphorisms. Before you know it, you’re going to be picking your casket and all that went down seems like a chaff in the summer breeze.

Was it Scorsese’s best venture? Now, best is a subjective word. From my perspective, The Irishman was a journey back in time. It chugs on and finds pockets of space to get the audience acquainted with the characters. But it doesn’t have those trademark Scorsese moments. The palpable tension in the opening shot of Goodfellas, as Jimmy, Henry and Tommy drive with brazen expressions or the renouncement of faith in Silence by Father Rodrigues or the dainty coffee shop scene in Taxi Driver that speaks volumes in a language void of words. The Irishman sure had its moments, but nothing that penetrated me. It was a reflective, or rather, meditative film on a spectrum of events in a time that was so near yet so far. In his own body of work, The Irishman is a well-crafted addition, worthy of his name, but didn’t plunge me into thought. It gave me a nostalgic trip down the Scorsese alley and gave me a full view on the life of Frank Sheeran, but I’m afraid it didn’t do more than that.

As a personal confession, I do feel sad that soon enough Scorsese would have to step aside from film-making, and his work would live on through the negatives of then and the digital copies of now, as the form of cinema gets bombarded with mass market films that offer only the two insipid flavors of thrills or tears. This film needs to be celebrated for its auteur, and all that the media can think of is to question him on his apparently scandalous remarks on Marvel movies. I’m afraid as Scorsese says, film exhibition is indeed in a perilous time.