Palm Springs 2009 : The amazing stories around the world!
It beats me. The Hindi Movie Industry give us hardly a handful of movies with lovely stories that you carry with you for years. Over a billion population. Cash rich. Making more movies than entire continents. And when I sit at the end of the year, to recap the movies I loved, I can count them on my fingers… of one hand.
And there are people around the world telling us wonderful stories. Stories that shoot your brains out. Leave you stumped. Or simply leave you with a dropped jaw that you carry out of the theater. What the hell!!!
Today was such a day. If I though yesterday was a great day at the Film Festival… today should be labelled as my ejaculation day off movies…
The day began with…
The Past is a Foreign Land
A criminal lawyer (fall-in-love-performance by Elio Germano) sits in court wrapping up his day’s proceedings as the camera so poetically focusses on him, while the sound design plays poker with the people on the other side of the camera. As it will throughout the movie, the camera moves-in-an-arc highlighting who the criminal lawyer was in conversation with. As the lawyer packs his bag and walks out, he is followed by a woman, who stops him and asks “Don’t you remember me?”
The lawyer can’t remember her however hard he stare in her face… which is when the trigger goes off and the movies movie flashbacks to the lawyer in his youth trying to get through his law examination to get a law degree. It is then when he, at a party, ends up befriending Francesco (effortlessly played by Michele Riondino)
Francesco introduces the straight student, Giorgio to the world of playing cards and the tricks needed to win each and every game. And slowly Giorgio gets entangled in the web of deceit and darkness, that gets him all the money and luxury he would ever need, but biting more and more of his conscience at every step.
Directed by Daniele Vicari based on a book by Gianrico Carofiglio, Vicari uses the sound and visual medium (cinematography by Gherardo Gossi) to raise the story by a few hundred thousand notches. For example the camera arc movement to move from the target coming into the scene, to panning to the other side of the scene that the actors are focussing or talking to, has been used so effectively that at times you feel Vicari and Carofiglio use it on purpose in an attempt to drug you to believe a line of thinking which they twist and turn to highlight a scene. This is an extremely intelligent way of using the camera to create an expectancy in the viewer without letting them know how the director is using the visual tools to play with them.
The movie has some extremely disturbing scenes depicting drugs and violence that eventually leads to a hard to face up to situation for Giorgio. The last shot is worth a million bucks as Giorgio sees the woman (at the courthouse) bid adieu… the guilt trapped in his heart forever tells it all…
Watch this one at the first available opportunity… if only we in India had a more liberal platform for such storytellers who are shackled from expanding beyond the usual fare…
Watch the trailer (no subtitles)
V'¡clav
V'¡clav could as well as be on the lines of Bollywood’s Taare Zameen Par, but with many more layers, an East European film feel, the Czech countryside and a peek into the Czech life before the raising of the Iron Curtain. Ivan Trojan, playing the lead with an ever suffering from his antics mother, portrayed so lovingly by Em'lia V'¡s'¡ryov'¡.
V'¡clav may be medically be termed as retarded, but he has a sharp mind to build a hand cart for his mother or even build a motor-cycle. Yet his emotional impulse keeps getting the better of him, landing him in trouble all the time with the villagers and causing considerable pain to his mother.
V'¡clav would have been just an ordinary story, told in a typical East European story-telling style, had it not been for it’s brilliant capture of certain scenes which included V'¡clav’s mother standing all alone in the doorway wondering where her son is, or scene where you feel for the character when he is helped to an orgasm by the girl of his dreams… or even when V'¡clav’s mom stands in the rain with a petition in her hand for her son.
V'¡clav, is completely told in an East European style, which means it is for many… just like cheese… an acquired taste… you may hate it or like it extremely – so it may not be for everyone. But wish you would have enjoyed the young director Jir' Vejdelek’s pre screening speech… so humorous and rib ticking, that you know, here is another potentially great story teller you can count on in the coming years… damn it… I wish we could have such a story from India!
Watch an 10 minute piece (without subtitles)
Captive
O Boy! The wonders one can do with a shoe string budget. Captive from Bulgaria (natively titled Plenniy), opens with one of the simplest and yet best opening sequences seen in the last few years. Director Aleksei Uchitel uses the visual and sound medium to a smashing impact. The camera focuses on a convoy of Russian army trucks passing through a mountain pass, cut to, two men hunched low in one of the trucks. It’s dark inside and as the convoy moves you can hear the sound of machine gun fire and explosions. The convoy is under attack from Chechen rebels. But once inside the truck the camera is just not moving out. The two men remain still hunched in… the bullets at times pierce through the canopy of the truck piercing thin daylight in.
The rebels caught in the mountain pass send Rubahin (Vyacheslav Krikunov, superlative performance) and Vovka (Pyotr Logachev) to find them a local person from the surrounding villages who can guide them through the terrain. The problem is they are in Chechneya and to find a guide they’ll have to kidnap one. Which they do, during a raid on local Chechen rebel group Rubahin and Vovka get a Chechen youth, Jamil (Irakli Mskhalaia).
It’s a short film (about 80 minutes), that has you yearning for more. The end may puzzle some, confuse some, but I guess that’s the way director Uchitel wanted it to be. He is a tight control over the cinematic medium of story telling, and Captive proves there’s no doubt about it.
Female Agents
A movie from France. This, I need to tell you is a fiction. But the treatment and wrapping of this movie gives you a feel that these events actually took place.
The story is based in World War II where a group of French female agents go in to rescue a geologist in German occupied France. And how things spiral out of control leading to quite a few twists and turns, plots and sub plots.
I’ve mixed feelings about this. I’ve seen quite a few trained-group-sent-to-Germany-for-rescue kind of films and plus I’m a big fan of Band of Brothers, having watched it some 18-20 times. I couldn’t be glued all throughout the movie because of this, but you may have different experience. The screenplay is tight and moves at a fast pace, constantly bringing up what is not expected… still I wasn’t too sucked into the plot… perhaps it is movie fatigue of the day…
Got home, crashed. It’s Saturday Morning and I’m about to rush to watch
Love and Other Crimes (from Serbia)
This sardonic, bittersweet drama set in New Belgrade poignantly portrays the struggle of those who immigrate versus those who remain, as well as postwar Serbian society’s difficult transition from small-time criminality to big business-controlled consumerism.
and hopeful to catch the following two later during the day…
IL DIVO (from Italy)
Director Paolo Sorrentino’s portrait of seven-time Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (a brilliant Toni Servillo) is packed with wicked wit, brilliant cinematography and drama galore. Andreotti dominated Italian politics until undone by scandal and the predations of the Mafia. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes 2008.
Opium War (from Afghanistan)
Winner of best film at the Rome festival and Afghanistan’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Feature Academy Award, Siddiq Barmak’s combo of ultra-realism and absurdism — both comic and tragic — relates the interactions between two US soldiers caught behind enemy lines and an opium-producing Afghani family.
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
I’m going to catch “Female Agents”.
like the storyline.
A reason we dont have different stories can be the size of the market. As far as I can see, the smaller film industries are much better in terms of innovative stories.
May be, when there is a probability that you can have high return, no one can resist the temptation to follow ‘market safe’ rules. When the difference in collections between an ‘average hit’ and ‘block buster’ decreases, there is more courage to try new things.
Past is a foreign land and Captive sound interesting.