My Merry Evenings: A Love-Affair with Cinema
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S. Goyal (New Delhi, India)
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My Merry Evenings: A Love-Affair with Cinema
As a graduate student at Columbia University, struggling to finish my doctoral thesis in economics, days and nights were rough going. Seventy hours of non-stop work was commonplace; mind, body and soul were pretty shattered. That is when, one evening, moping around the campus with math equations on my mind, I hit upon the university’s film library. Desperate to do anything but work on my thesis, I decided to watch a film. I checked out a Spanish one that I had never heard of, clutched it hard in both my hands, found myself the corner-most booth to sit in, plugged the DVD in, put on the head-phones and gave over all responsibility of restoring some mental health to me to this unfamiliar film in Spanish from a barely known to me film-maker. At that moment, I did not know that I was embarking on a (surprising in retrospect) long love affair with films in an entirely new way. What followed was a run of merry evenings where film after serendipitous choice of film sealed my relationship to cinema.
Monday: Pedro Alomodovar’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother)
Almodovar dedicated this film to “To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To men who act and become women. To all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” At last count, I have seen this film four times. Each time, enamored anew, I have marveled at Almodovar’s imaginative re-invention of all that outrages society – transvestitism, AIDS, drug-addiction, violence. A nurse loses her son, goes out in search of the father to tell him (or her) the news. The father is a transgender and a junkie who is dying of AIDS. In the meantime, he has managed to impregnate and infect a nun who nursed him through detox (the nun belongs to a convent which has experienced a series of inexplicable murders of its denizens). There is the aging theater actress who unknowingly may have been the cause of the son’s death. She herself is undergoing a painful relationship with a younger woman who is also a drug-junkie. Both the nun and the stage-diva come to rely on the grieving mother to figure out their own redemptions as she herself begins to come to terms with her son’s loss. The cast of characters cannot get more outlandish but their inter-connections and the story create a web of emotion and drama so powerful that for this viewer at least, each re-viewing of the film has been an opportunity of shedding some inhibitions about people and relationships. The story told in an almost soap-operatic mode and in vivid celebratory color could have become merely quirky but ends up as epic in its impact – a sublime, authentic and mature piece of film-making.
Tuesday: Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love
Nothing much happens in this one set in Hong Kong of the sixties. People live cheek by jowl in tiny apartments crushed together in tenement like buildings as do the two lead characters. Increasingly and silently lonely without their cheating and mostly absent spouses, they develop a bond which is neither of many words nor of much action as can be expected to take place between a man and a woman in their circumstances. The two meet, talk and eat only to discover their spouses’ infidelity. As they spend time together to help each other out in their confrontations with their respective husband and wife, emotions develop between them that can only be inferred by the way the two hold themselves back. The performances of the two lead characters are outstanding – using as they have to do their whole body to convey many emotions of longing and restraint. Fate gives the two another chance to ask the unasked when they accidently meet in Angkor Wat –what we get instead is a visual demonstration of heart-break – a lonely, total, tender and tragic moment couched in dialogue that literally would be considered as only polite conversation. That is what I suppose must be film-magic. The background score of the film matches its pace – heightening all the emotions that one associates with a slightly accelerated heart-beat felt in the confinement of one’s own body.
Wednesday: Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies
The performances in Mike Leigh’s films are usually improvised as the director allows the actors to create their own lines in responding to the situations the characters find themselves in – a risky strategy for anybody else but a successful modus-operandi for Leigh. Hortense is a black girl who after her adopted mother’s death seeks out her birth mother who turns out to be white. This is enough to know that the film is about reaching out and rebuilding relationships – between the mother and daughter, and the mother and her own family after the secrets and lies are out. One could be watching a documentary – so painfully close are the characters to being real. They screech as only London’s East Enders can (‘innit), yet the viewer is calm and meditative – aided by the simplicity and clarity of clean colors that forms the palette of the film. Leigh is a great observer of small details and paces his films slowly enough for everybody else to observe them as well. Folks in his films are ordinary – story-wise and depiction-wise – they are not beautiful people, nor accomplished and mostly not successful even in their own ordinary lives. They are struggling, discontented and resentful – holding grudges and being disappointed. The film comments gently, humanely and with wit on the individual, who amidst the debris and clutter of daily living, struggles to find and form acceptance – with self and others.
Thursday: Conrad Rooks’ Siddhartha
I had read the book by Herman Hesse in the transition period every teenager goes through from school to college. I remembered being very impressed by the young Brahmin’s steadfastness and resolve when he tells his father of his decision to leave home in search of truth. When asked whether he had it in him do so given his so far sheltered life, he gives as his credentials his ability to think, wait and fast. To an available impressionistic mind (mine), the words sounded like they could be keys to life (such naivete then). I also recalled seeing a black and white version of the film on TV in Calcutta and the first few lines of the Qazi Nazrul Islam song ‘O Nodi Re’ sung by Hemanta Mukherjee for the film. But all of this was just a haze. On this merry evening, I dithered, not sure I wanted to see this one having grave reservations about the film-ability of the book. What proved decisive was the cinematographer – Sven Nyquist who I knew had shot all Bergman’s films. And I was not disappointed by what I saw in Siddhartha. Shot in Bharatpur, an alternative location desperately found by Rooks when declaration of emergency in India made the original location inaccessible. Everybody who has read the book knows the story. The art direction of the film is spare in keeping with the spirit of the book – neither intrusive nor very impressive. The characters speak English which gives the film a stilted, stagy quality. But it is the visual space that enthralls – mostly sky, earth and water creating a sense of space that is empty and of emptiness that is space. For minutes after the movie was over, the world to my eyes shimmered with clarity and brightness. It was like seeing everything for the first time.
Friday: Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees
Kiarostami I had heard of through paens to him in newspapers and magazines. He was Iranian and celebrated in the West – surprise, surprise. So when I found this movie available in the library, I checked it out. I did not really get it when I first saw it. Or perhaps I got the story of the film (a limited thing) but not Kiarostami. Then I saw it again, and began to get accustomed to the cinematic mind-set of the director. He never lets you forget that you are watching a film that is being made and directed by him. He manipulates the characters as much as he manipulates the audience but only to reveal the power of cinema to do so. In that he is charming, if a little self-approving. One is almost surprised at moments in media-res when one regains the disbelief so inadvertently and unconsciously suspended a few scenes ago. In the end, when the two lovers run through the olive trees and I watched them along with the camera from on high, I found my own self exhilarated with a newly minted as yet fragile understanding of cinema spliced open for me by this odd director who keeps you guessing for meaning.
That magical week was many years ago. Nevertheless the merriment continues…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
what a week it must have been!
you make me want to see these films again in the same order.
K
Gals n’ Guys..can any1 tell me where can I find rental DVD shops in Hyderabad with a good collection of world cinema…..:-?:d
Oh man..I envy you for that week..and the univ library!
You made me watch these five films thru your beautiful narration. Keep writing coz u are good at it.
I have seen some of these movies, but I enjoyed reading your views of them even more. If you write again, I want to know what you thought of ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ and ‘Run Lola Run’ Both deserve mention in a list of great films.