To each his own Cinema (part-2)
21 grams
“They say 21 grams is the exact amount of weight which comes out from a person’s body when he dies. Now how much is lost when a person dies and more importantly how much is gained. How much does t
hat 21 grams weigh?”
Scene -1. A man sitting by a sleeping woman, smoking, guilty, satisfied.
Scene-2. Another man having lunch with two girls (his daughters)
Scene-3. The same sleeping woman talking in a therapy group about her family.
Scene-4. A third man (an ex-mobster probably) giving a lesson on Christ to a teenager. “God even knows when you loose a hair from your head”.
Scene-5. The man from scene 1 lying in a hospital, all caged with tubes and needles, introspecting.
Scene-6. The sleeping woman taking drugs in her bathroom, unhappily but without choice.
Scene -7. Another woman discussing her pregnancy problems with a doctor.
Scene -8. The third man trying to make peace between two fighting kids outside his workplace.
Scene -9. The man from scene 1 sitting in front of a whole with a gun.
Scene- 10. The man from scene 4 walking into a prison.
This scene-jumbling continues right through the movie. At times it takes you away from it and you want to close it, but there is something so incorrect about everything that you are witnessing, the pain that is common in all the scenes and in every character and the intrigue builds up. When you try to recall an event or some long lost rendezvous from the debris of your memory, the order is all jumbled and you can’t quite put as to what happened when. Such is the nature of this movie.
Many people have questioned or speculated whether there would’ve been a difference in case the narration was linear? Or whether this jumbling was required? I think it’s a lost debate. The movie is there for you to see and appreciate in its present form which is an inimitable style. I found it quite appealing. Every scene is like a new story in itself, like this huge pearl necklace where each one of them has its own intrinsic value and shines like a pearl.
The performances are just breathtaking. The movie is almost entirely shot with hand held cameras. Read all about the camerawork here. (http://www.theasc.com/magazine/dec03/cover/index.html) I also wondered how your every move is so much under the scanner when the camera is within breathing distance (I would love to see De Nero in a Gonzalez movie); it can be both, an asset if you are comfortable with your character and a pitfall in case you don’t get your part well enough.
Sean Penn and Del Toro have given riveting performances but the show stealer is Naomi Watts. She leaves you wanting for more in almost every scene (revelation of her family’s death, upon knowing that Paul has her husband’s heart or the one where she is just sitting idly after making love to Paul). There are just too many to mention (there can be a separate review in which one can dissect every scene). You will fall in love with the scene which shows birds flying against a poignant bluish sky (straight from a painting). I agree the background score is not as effective as in Babel or Amores Perros but it still is very close.
21 grams is supposedly the weight of the soul as measured by
a scientist but hasn’t been accepted by most.
Babel
This movie completes the “death trilogy” by Inaritu as claimed by him. I did not understand what he meant by death trilogy. Coming back to Babel, it’s more silent than 21 grams and Amores Perros. There is a greater use of background score which is undoubtedly the best I’ve ever heard in a movie. I think Inarritu’s earlier stint as a music director really honed his skills as far as using music in films is concerned. It’s like the most difficult of situations, a very tense one at that where any dialogue would be immaterial and a musical instrument is heard in the background which serves the effect more than what was required. (Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t think we have been able to use the background score so effectively)
Again the movie is an amalgamation of four stories. All simple day to day problems expanded exponentially due to minute human errors and their repercussions.
A man in Morocco buys a gun from a man, which belonged to a Japanese hunter who gifted it to him, to protect his goats from jackals and gives it to his adolescent sons. While testing its range in a childlike curiosity, the younger one fires it at a tourist bus. The bullet hits an American woman traveling with her husband who is in that desert to find once again the reason to live together after the husband left his family once. The Americans kids are taken care off by a Mexican nanny who has to attend his son’s wedding but can’t go because they couldn’t arrange someone to look after the kids. She decides to take them with her to the wedding. The Japanese hunter has a deaf and dumb teenage daughter who is curious about sexuality and is sinking deeper into her hole due to the disability.
A dire situation brings the estranged couple together, conveying that once love is born it never dies, and it just needs to be searched or needs situations like these to resurface. The nanny’s love for the children is evident in every second she walks in the desert with them and signifies that decisions made on an impulse cannot be the parameter to judge something as complex as love or even fondness for that matter.
Once again (as in 21 grams and Amores Perros) every scene is very powerful. Especially the ones between Pitt and Blanchett after she gets shot or the one where Amelia is left alone in a black desert with two kids and a torch. The scene in which the Japanese girl walks into a nightclub and every few seconds the scene switches between her PoV and viewer’s PoV had such an impact that many people in Japan fainted in the cinema hall after watching it.
Babel was nominated for seven Oscars including one for Innaritu (which is a first for a Mexican filmmaker). It won for the best background score.
According to the bible, when humans tried to build a tower to heaven, he punished them by introducing different languages and the concept of miscommunication. Babel was the name of that tower.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has also directed a segment each in two films. The story Anna in the movie To each his own Cinema which has 36 different filmmakers each of them trying to explain cinema from their PoV. I haven’t seen it yet. Another one is on 9/11. This one has 11 stories from eleven different filmmakers all across the globe, each conveying the impact of 9/11 all across the world.
Sometimes when you watch a movie it leaves a lot unsaid or untouched due to the complexity of the subject which cannot fit into the proposed duration of a movie which ranges from one and a half to two and a half hours. And then there are the ones where you feel you just can’t take anymore since so much has been shown and conveyed in that precise time format. You watch his films and you think I haven’t seen the human element being exposed and celebrated to such greater heights in any cinema as yet and with such consistency. (Please let me know about the ones you know).
I apologize for the eulogical tone of my articles, but I don’t think life can be talked about in any other tone and so is Inarritu’s cinema.
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
How I love Innaritu’s work! I am such a biiiiiig fan of Amores Perros! I need to see 21 grams.. Not seen it yet :( thanks for this!
All his films are sublime. But to get a get a good approximation of his talent you really have to watch “Powder Keg”, the short film from the BMW film series. In just seven minutes he manages to completely blow your mind with his consummate story telling. Waiting eagerly for his next…
Non linear film making is a treat to watch.. somehow I feel it gives a new tempo and rhythm to the story narration… and treats audience somewhat intelligently… it doesn’t tell that A->B->C it just said.. there B , A and C for you … make the most of it now !!
innaritu’s cinema is poetry in motion
21 grams, Amores Peros and Babel are powerful enough to make you think about them for days.
There is not one character, not one emotion you cannot associate with.
i LOVE LOVE LOVE 21 grams. 3 of the greatest actors in one movie…and they bring out everything they’ve got in every scene. i don’t think i’ve seen many other movies that tackle themes like pain and guilt better that this one.
the style of non-linear narration in this movie was a first…at least for me.
Loved Amores Perros, liked 21 Grams but Babel no, it felt like Innaritu was exploiting the charecters to create an effect…if you know what I mean…nevertheless music was AWESOME and so was Camera especially the lighting in the Japanese Club scene…
My recco would be Dekalog
@arati:my pleasure.. also don’t forget to see babel incase u haven’t!!its actually better than 21 grams!!
@shiv:would love to see that brother!!
@papaji: u would be delighted to know that non-linear narration was first adopted by Satyajit Ray in the 1962 movie kanchenjunga!!
Ah Inaritu..what can I say about this man.. Each of his 3 films have given me a beautiful sense of fulfillment as a cinema lover.
@ ahmad – i think non linear narration probably goes back even further than 1962. i was talking about the kind that was in 21 grams – where scenes are jumbled up randomly (but thoughtfully) and slowly get sorted out like a piece of puzzle.
This just reminds me of someone who once told me “Multiple stories like Amores and Babel and Crash are coming because people are not able to tell one story at leisure with just 3-4 protagonists!” LOL! I disagree of course, but I wonder why he said that.. Are we really getting that impatient a generation of story tellers? Or just a conservative and incorrect view of the changing language of cinema?
Hi,
For me the best director of this decade!
Regards,
Santino
What is non-linear narration? Does it refer to jumping from one scene to another not connected. In that case, doesnt that make a very bad movie. Because audience’s brains would be unnecessarily taxed.
@Vinay
in a non linear narrative the story doesn’t follow the conventional flow of events (though it might still be logical). And NO, it doesn’t make a bad movie.
See, a filmmaker doesn’t only want to tell a story, s/he wants to show a story. Otherwise we would have had just story recitals in big halls.
Now the thing to note is why the basic narration style is tweaked by the director? Does it fit into the mood of the film? Does the altered narration serve as a constant jarring factor in the minds of the viewers to make them uncomfortable? Well, i am getting a bit over the top here but the main thing is that cinema is an art form and should not and will not be viewer driven. if some director wants to jump between scenes and make the viewers tax their brains…so be it.
Look at greats like Tarantino, Ghatak, even Chris Nolan.
Watch Funny Games (by Haneke) to really feel taxed.
@ Ahmed
Have you seen No Man’s Land? The human behavior and emotions in a war are shown without the shouting and screaming and killing. A must watch.
So is The Shop On Main Street. Showing holocaust in such a subtle way was never imaginable. Just like showing death, fear and uncertainty in Babel and 21 Grams.
@kashan: thanks brother!! call me Raza!!