Freeze Frame #132, #133: Once

A man stands at a street corner with his guitar, singing. During the day, when people pass by and are likely to drop a coin or two into his box, he sings popular numbers that they may have heard. It is after dark that he starts singing his own stuff. Whether or not his music is to your taste is, I think, immaterial — it is impossible to ignore the way his intensity goes up a few notches when he is singing his own compositions. 

A woman approaches him. “Where is she?” she asks after a modicum of preliminaries about why he doesn’t sing stuff like this during the day. “She’s gone,” he replies. It is clear that music like this cannot come out of anything other than personal loss. She doesn’t know him, nor he her. This is a pretty personal conversation for two strangers to be having. 

It turns out eventually that she is a musician as well. And that, I think, is all you need to understand. Once is a movie about two people who fall in love while they make music together. But it is not so much about their “romance” as about the sense of camaraderie and respect that two people share when they find common ground in a particular activity. In that sense, it has much in common with The Girl With The Pearl Earring, that little gem of a movie about Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting. 

Two scenes really stand out for me. The first is the one where they play together for the first time. It is at a store that sells musical instruments, where she has a deal with the owner to come in and play the piano for an hour. She brings him along, and they play a song he wrote called Falling Slowly. He gives her a rough idea of the music, starts off slowly and lets her join in. They play tentatively at first, slowly getting used to another person sharing their space. And as they grow in confidence, the music begins to soar. As a scene that shows the developing bond between them, it is nothing short of perfect.

It also serves to set up a later solo where he is in his room, singing a song about his breakup with his girlfriend. Home video clippings of them together plays in the background. It is clear that he hasn’t still gotten over her. But as he sings, you hear her (the girl, not the ex-girlfriend) voice slowly coming in, providing the harmony to his lead vocals. A part of you recognizes this and says, “Yes, this feels about right.”

These days, there is at least one big budget Hollywood musical coming out every year. Most of the time, the music is just an excuse to stage a big production number. But every once in a while, a movie comes along to remind you that the music doesn’t need the help.

 

Freeze Frame #128: Caramel

Towards the end of Caramel, Nadine Labaki’s debut feature that follows the fortunes of four women who work in a beauty salon in Beirut, is a moment of heartbreaking duplicity that conveys far more than it depicts.

It features Jamale (played with barely restrained desperation by Gisele Aouad), a has-been actress hoping for a second chance. You see her attending auditions, with her skin pulled back and held with tape to make it look tighter. There is a moment when it is noticed during an audition and you see her trying to maintain her composure while still standing before the camera. Labaki shows a good sense of timing here — she lets the scene go on just long enough so that we begin to squirm.

The movie ends with the wedding of another of the characters. During the party afterwards, Jamale tries to jump the queue outside the women’s loo by telling the others that she has her period. Once inside, she pulls out of her handbag some fake blood to dab on a piece of toilet paper and an empty wrapper for a sanitary pad, and dumps them in the trash bin.

Now, I’m a guy, okay? Admittedly the sort of guy who would watch a chick flick like Caramel in the first place, but this is usually the sort of material that comes under the heading of Too Much Bloody Information.

But I kept getting drawn back to Jamale’s face while she goes through this little routine. It is clear that she has done this before. But right then, it seems like one deception too much to handle.

The movies are so obsessed with closure sometimes. Thank heaven for moments like these that are created in the knowledge that,  by the time the movie ends, not everybody has gotten that far.

 

Winter Light

Full disclosure: The idea of a movie about God’s silence doesn’t set my pulse racing, despite whatever I have led you to believe about my tastes in cinema. In my defence however, I will state that it doesn’t turn me off to the point of not watching it. So I slipped in the DVD and settled down to watch Winter Light, a Bergman film about a pastor who has lost his faith since the death of his wife.

What a quiet, sad, affecting piece of film making this is! The principal characters seem to be living in their own private hell most of the time. The conversations are mostly monologues, with the other participant simply reacting to the speaker, and the dialogue is spare but brutally honest. The only “event” in the movie is the death of a supporting character, but even this does not lead to any dramatic closure.

And yet, Bergman managed to draw me into this world of oppressive silences and uncomfortable confessions. He made me care about these people. Even the pastor, who is the least sympathetic character in the film. I spent a good bit of time wondering how he managed to do that, and then it struck me.

The man doesn’t try to tell a story. He simply observes, and with such an unblinking eye that you become the man behind the lens. You simply cannot look away, and as a result, you get involved. I have seen directors do this for a segment of a movie, but rarely for the entire running length. I am so used to seeing movies where things keep happening that my initial reaction was to wonder how much discipline it took to keep so still as a filmmaker. But then I realized that I am thinking about taking things out of the movie, whereas Bergman probably thought upwards from a blank canvas.

I read that Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist spent an entire day sitting in the pews of an empty cathedral just to understand how light moves through the space. When I imagine how this would’ve happened, I don’t imagine them talking. In my mind’s eye, they sit there quietly through the day, with just a few words between them. They just sit there and do the job they came there to do.

The performances match up to the expectations this style of film making places on the actors. The camera stays focused on their faces so much of the time that it is impossible to be less than totally committed. The principal characters seem so tightly wound up that, when they speak, it is as if every little show of emotion leeches all their strength out of them.

I wonder whether I would recommend Winter Light to anyone. Films like this demand more than a passive viewing. You have to get involved, think about the issues that the characters think about and reach your conclusions without the director holding your hand every step of the way. And to make matters worse, none of these are happy people or easy issues.

Do you want to do that? Frankly, on most days, I don’t. But when I do, I am glad I took the effort.

ps: On a slightly more flippant note, there seems to be a Schrodinger’s Maa between this movie and Manoj N Shyamalan’s Signs.

 

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday)

When you watch enough comedies, you begin to get a sense of what they are like. And sooner or later, those ideas congeal into something approximating what a comedy should be like. So it is a pleasant surprise when you come across something that does’t quite fit the mold.

I had that experience while watching M. Hulot’s Holiday yesterday. It is a French movie made by (and starring in the title role) Jacques Tati in 1953. There is no plot per se, not even one of those contrived madcap inventions that keep you occupied through the running time but defy description afterwards. A man (Hulot) who makes Captain Klutz look organized comes to a vacation spot and brings chaos with him. That’s it. When the vacation ends, so does the movie. But what a trip!

Holiday is reminiscent of all those silent comedies I watched as a kid. What sets it apart, however, is two things:

1. It is less fractic, and more observant. Funny things happen whenever Hulot is around, but the level of attention paid to the fringe characters — the hotel staff, the other vacationing guests, the kids — is far more than average. You get a sense of what their holiday is like as well, not just Hulot’s.
2. It isn’t a silent movie, but it is mostly concerned with actions and expressions, not words. Tati, who had a career in mime before he got into the movies, adopts an interesting strategy while shooting the movie — he cuts out most of the dialogue and turns up the sound of the background noises. Like the door to the dining room that creaks every time it swings open. Or Hulot’s car. The effect is curious: at some level, you are aware that this isn’t a silent movie, so the “silence” Tati creates is all the more effective. I am fairly certain that his work was one of the inspirations for Kamal Hassan’s Pushpak.

As a performer, Tati is magnificient. I read recently that Fellini used to play music in the background while shooting, so his actors seem to dance through their scenes. Tati plays Hulot as if he always has the film’s theme tune playing on his invisible ipod while he is on screen. The other characters seem to have normal movements — Hulot, on the other hand, is like choreographed random walk. He seems to make up his mind mid-step as to where his feet should land next, and yet it has an inescapable rhythm.

If one had to make a comparison with some of the stars of silent comedies, I’d say he’s more like Keaton than Chaplin. But again, he adopts an interesting strategy when it comes to close-ups and reaction shots. Chaplin would use it to convey his character’s emotional state. One of the funniest things about Keaton’s performance was his experessionless visage. Tati, on the other hand, seems to focus on the reactions of the people around him. It enhances our perception of his obliviousness to the chaos he causes.

Most classics come with some baggage. The commentary on the DVD mentions how the movie was supposed to be an indictment of the interaction between various social classes. Frankly, I know little of France’s social classes and understood even less about how this movie lampoons their interaction. But simply as a comedy about a man who goes on holiday, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is a fantastic watch.

ps:  Roger Ebert’s wonderful essay has a different but very interesting take on the close-ups in Hulot. Check it out.

 

My Sassy Girl

I am currently in Seoul, S.Korea, working here on a long term assignment. Been here for close to 3 months, and must say, am enjoying the stay out here, though had some really weird experiences too. Now coming to movie watching, as far as Indian movies are concerned , the only way is by DVD, though there are Indians here, its not such a large community as in UK, US or Australia. Hollywood is quite popular here, but again most of the English movies come dubbed in Korean, however there are some theaters, where you can see English movies with Korean titles. On it’s own Korean cinema, is quite strong, and has been able to withstand Hollywood, and create it’s own nice market. In fact the 1999 espionage drama Shiri, outperformed Titanic at the box office and Old Boy was of course a cult classic hit, which became famous later courtesy Zinda. Korean cinema has a wide range of influences ranging from Hollywood to Hong Kong action movies to European non linear narrative style. Most of the Korean movies strongly explore themes like division of the Korean peninsula, Korean War, family structure and contemporary Korean culture. One of the earliest Korean movies I saw in Seoul, was My Sassy Girl, a romantic comedy released in 2001.

This movie was a major blockbuster hit, not only in Korea, but also the entire East Asian zone  and even the ASEAN zone of Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. Asian Americans hailing from this region made it a sleeper hit in the US, by word of mouth, and Hollywood is releasing a remake of this movie some time later this year. The movie is about a young college student  Gyeon-Woo( Cha Tae-Hyun) who is a  big time loser and a failure in his romantic life. He has to live with a domineering mother to make matters worse. His mom asks him to go and meet his aunt, who has set up a girl for him to date with. Also he reminds his aunt of her own son, who died some time back in an accident, and she wants to introduce him to the same girl who dated her son.

Gyeon-Woo is reluctant to visit his aunt, and in the subway, he sees a girl about to fall under an incoming train and rushes to help her out. She is totally drunk, and throws up in the train, but before passing out she calls him “honey”. The passengers assume she is his girl friend, and ask him to take care of her. And then begins a series of misadventures, where he takes the girl to a motel, is arrested by some female cops on charges of assault, and is bullied by some hoodlums in the jail. After release he goes home and his mom is predictably furious for not having visited his aunt. The Girl( throughout the movie she has no name) again calls him up demanding to know what happened in the motel, and things get progressively worse, as he finds that she is a shrew of the first order.

She dominates him, demands his attention to the extent where she determines what to order at a takeaway joint. But he has a soft corner for her, as he tells “she looks so pretty when she is not drunk”. Slowly she becomes closer to him, and he finds out she is an aspiring scriptwriter. Throughout the movie she keeps giving him 3 different screenplays from different genres. One is an action movie called Demolition Terminator, where she keeps on saving her helpless lover. Second one is a kind of wild fantasy where she asks that having died, her lover also be buried with her. The third is a typical Samurai movie.

In spite of having to put up with The Girl, who seems to be a cross between Lalita Pawar and  Rasika Joshi, he endures hoping he could cure her pain of losing her boyfriend.  The second half of the movie shows The Girl revealing her vulnerable side, and that is when we come to know the real motivation behind her cranky behavior. Now why she behaves in that way, the budding romance between the two, and what happens between The Girl and Gyeon Woo, is best left to be seen on the screen.

The movie runs on a totally narrative style with the hero narrating his story, and it starts off in a flashback mode, where the hero is reading letters from a time capsule buried on the mountain side. The movie is split into 2 different halves, the first half with the hero and heroine’s misadventures, the hero enduring the Girl’s weird behavior is more of a comedy. Some of the scenes are really funny, my favorite would be the hero having a flashback, where his father keeps on scolding him for not being academically successful. That is a pointer to the Korean society, where parents are obsessed with their kid’s academics, and yeah just like the coaching classes in India, we have the cram schools in Korea. Also the scenes where the girl gets drunk, throws up and quite often creates a ruckus, is quite a familiar sight for me in Seoul. Koreans are die hard boozers, and while most of them are generally friendly people, they just get totally boozed out. I myself have seen many Korean girls, getting totally boozed, and passing out on the streets. Again the concept of the hero’s aunt fixing up a date for him is something quite common in Korean society.

The second half takes on a more serious and dramatic note. One of the most romantic scenes is when the hero, is about to leave a packed auditorium, when he hears the wonderful piano strains of George Winston’s variations on Pachelbel’s Canon. He follows the music, and finds her playing the piano on stage in front of all her all female classmates, who then spontaneously applaud him for his romantic gesture. Beautifully shot scene.

One more scene which I loved is when Gyeon-Woo meets The Girl’s date during a dinner, and he offers him advice on how to make her happy by following the 10 rules. These were the rules he devised based on his experiences with The Girl. He leaves, and when the Girl comes back, her date starts to tell her these rules. As she listens to them, she is convinced that Gyeon-Woo really understands her, and she rushes to see him. Pretty much Bollywoodish sequence, but quite well shot.

To those seeking to explore Korean cinema, this would be quite a good movie to start off with. Its simple, charming and has quite an intelligent script. I would not be too surprised to see a Bollywood version of it soon. For me a major part of the second half seemed straight out of a Bollywood movie, including the ending. But it is quite engagingly done and manages to grab your attention till the end. Love stories and rom coms are quite popular in Korea, and the hero Cha Tae Hyun, is well known as a romantic lead. This was second movie, and he shot into stardom with this movie here. Jun Ji Hyun who plays The Girl, is quite cute looking and gives a pretty good performance. She is a well known model herself, appearing on cover of Elle, and she also acted in Il Mare, the Korean original of the Keanu Reeves dud, Lake House. So do go ahead and watch this movie with sub titles. And yes You Tube has a whole set of clips covering this entire movie. 

 

Hors de prix (Priceless)

Eighty-odd movies to choose from, including Oscar winners, multi-starrers and the like. And what do I pick? A nice little little French rom-com called Hors de prix. That it stars Audrey Tautou might make things easier to understand.

This, however, is no Amelie. Tautou stars as a high-class hooker Irene (I’ve seen the term adventuress used in some blurbs, but I’m not sure what that means) who mistakes Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a waiter at the hotel she’s staying it, for a millionaire. She walks away when she learns that he isn’t, but he’s fallen in love with her and goes after her. Through a series of incidents, he becomes a gigolo, and she trains him in the art of milking his sugar-mommy (does that term exist already? Or do we not discuss gigolos enough for it to have been coined?) to the maximum. That she will end up falling in love with him but would take her time to admit it to herself goes without saying. If it feels vaguely familiar but not quite, think Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the movie, not the book). In all, a predictable but delightful movie.

One interesting difference from the standard rom-coms you get from Hollywood is the sex. Which is to say that there’s quite a bit of it, and not just between the leads. Most rom-coms would’ve found a way of ensuring that the leads don’t sleep with anyone else after they’ve slept with each other. Not this one. Irene even gives Jean seduction tips. I’m not sure if this is because of the “professions” they are in, or because this is a French movie. Maybe a bit of both. Is it just in the movies, or do the French really have this very matter-of-fact way of dealing with sex?

Strangely enough, for the most part, Hors de prix plays like a standard Bollywood movie. Consider this scene: after Irene has discovered Jean’s deception and left him, he pursues her and asks her to spend a day with him. She warns him that he cannot afford her, but he replies that it’s his problem to solve, not hers. To finance her shopping spree (as far as I could discern, in the entire movie, when she’s not earning her keep, she’s spending it), he blows up pretty much every cent he has. When she realizes that he’s broke, she says goodbye, but he stops her, pulls out a 1 Euro coin from his pocket and says, “10 more seconds?” They gaze at each other for 10 seconds, he with a little smile on his face, she with an expression that suggests that she’s falling for this guy but Absolutely Doesn’t Want To. Then she says goodbye. Two things occurred to me when I saw this scene:

1. Nicely done!
2. This is the sort of scene SRK dines out on.

I strongly suspect that , in the fullness of time, a version of this movie would appear in Bollywood. Whether or not it would jump through all sorts of hoops trying to evade the sex is the 1 Euro question.

 

Freeze Frame #81: Life is Beautiful

I wasn’t very pleased when Roberto Benigni won Best Actor at the Academy Awards, danced on chairs and expressed a fervent desire to make love to everyone in the auditorium. I felt Tom Hanks deserved the statuette that year, for his portrayal of Capt. John Miller in Saving Private Ryan.

Having said that, I did think that Benigni did an amazing job in this simple yet powerful tale of a man who fights the Nazis for the sake of his kid, but uses humor to do it. One criticism I have heard leveled against it is that it trivialized the scope of the tragedy. I don’t think something like the Holocaust can be trivialized, nor was it the movie’s intent.

Benigni’s performance is quite interesting, in that its impact is mostly created by its contrast to its environment. He does more or less the same thing throughout the movie – play a cheerful character who finds a way to laugh at most forms of adversity. The situation around him goes from relatively benign danger to deadly horror, but he acts the same way. Up to a point, it is his disposition. Beyond that, it is his mask, worn for the sake of his son.

The scene that really stood out for me is the one where the mask visibly cracks. He encounters a senior Nazi doctor whom he has struck a rapport with before his incarceration. Their camaraderie was based on a shared love for riddles. Upon seeing him in the concentration camp, he feels that his camaraderie with the doctor might be his ticket out of there. It is a belief that is reinforced when the doctor calls him aside, presumably to give him some valuable information. Instead, the doctor asks him for the solution to a riddle that has puzzled him for a while. The look on his face speaks volumes. For a moment, he cannot comprehend how the good doctor could refuse to comprehend. Then despair settles in.

 

Freeze Frame #65, 66, 67, 68: Ikiru

There is so much about this movie that is memorable. Still, if I pick the scenes that have stayed with me, they would be as follows:

1. A young journalist takes the old man on a tour of the Tokyo nightlife. They end up in a bar where a lot of people are talking, some women are dancing and there’s a man playing the piano. The piano player asks if anyone has any requests, and the old man says, “Play Life is brief.” It’s a old Japanese love song, and as the man begins to play, the old man sings it. He has a very quiet voice, almost a whisper. There’s a woman sitting in his lap when he begins. She gets up and moves to the side. The people walking around stop and listen. This is a young crowd, full of gaiety and with no conception of death, but for a few minutes, he has made them step out of the rhythm of their lives. In some ways, their reaction in this scene is representative of the reaction of everyone around him. They are all immersed in their own lives until they hear the music, and for a moment there, they pause, listen and reflect.

2. A replay of the song comes towards the end, when the old man is sitting on a swing in the park he has helped build. It is snowing, and given his health, this isn’t a night to be out – indeed, he is found dead the next morning. But he sits there on that swing, singing the same song. But this time, it is not in sorrow. I found that moment so powerful that I ended up crying quietly and couldn’t stop for a while.

3. The turning point for his character comes when he asks the young woman he has been spending time with, how she manages to be so alive. She responds that all she does is work, where she makes little wind-up toys. She says it makes her feel like she’s playing with every baby in the world. It makes him reexamine his own work, and wonder whether he could make something there. All along, in the background, a group of girls are getting ready to celebrate their friend’s birthday. The old man looks up, his eyes shining with newfound resolve: he shall find something valuable and useful to do at work. He shall find a reason to live. As he walks out of the restaurant and down the stairs, the birthday girl walks up while her friends sing Happy Birthday To You.

4. At his wake, his colleagues discuss his strange behaviour towards the end. After much discussion, they finally piece the clues together and realize that the knowledge that he was about to die made him change. It makes sense, they all agree. They would’ve done the same in his situation. And then one man pipes up: But any of us could suddenly drop dead.

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens
Before the crimson bloom fades from your lips
Before the tides of passion cools within you
For those of you who know no tomorrow

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens
Before our raven tresses begin to fade
Before the flames in your hearts flicker and die
For those to whom today will never return

 

Ikiru (To Live)

If I had to pick just one director who has enriched my life the most through his work, it would have to be Akira Kurosawa. I have not watched many of his movies. Just three, in fact. But two of them have left a profound impression. The first was Rashomon, which I saw years ago and could not stop thinking about for weeks afterward. The second is Ikiru.

This is a quiet, slow yet fascinating tale of an old man who finds out that he has cancer, and decides to spend his last days finding out what living is all about. He works as a section chief in an office where his job is to put his little seal on a stack of documents. He has been doing this for years, and has become as lifeless as those documents themselves. A young female colleague nicknames him The Mummy.

Finding out that he has cancer wakes him up from this stupor. “I can’t bring myself to die,” he says. “I don’t know what I have been doing with my life all these years.” So he withdraws his life’s savings and decides to live a little.  Takes a tour of the Tokyo nightlife. Spends time with a vivacious young woman who used to work under him. Finally, he decides to do something useful at his office before his time runs out.

His department has received a request from the residents of a poor neighbourhood that a park be built over a mosquito-infested cesspool in that area. The residents have been asking for a while, but have been shunted from department to department in a vain quest. He decides to make it happen.

It is here that the movie makes an interesting structural choice. Instead of proceeding with the linear narrative, it cuts to the wake after his funeral, where his colleagues get together and discuss his life and the manner in which he suddenly transformed himself in his last days. Some colleagues believe that his accomplishment was a mere coincidence and that he did not influence any of the major decisions. Some believe that he knew of his cancer, and that it caused him to turn his life around.

After the movie ended, I wondered why Kurosawa chose to narrate this story in this manner. Why did he flash forward six months, and then have them discuss his crusade through the prism of their memories? Surely he could have generated more dramatic effect by taking a linear path?

Then I realized something: Kurosawa’s agenda was not the crusade itself. It was simply the fact that the old man had chosen to live. The significance of this decision is understood completely by nobody but himself. To his colleagues and his family, he is just an old man who went a little crazy towards the end. To the residents of the neighbourhood for whom he got the park built, he is a guardian angel. But all this is incidental, and irrelevant to how he views himself.

When the film begins, you see everyone else, including the narrator, talking to or about him. You don’t actually see him say anything: you just see him through their perceptions of him. And in the lengthy wake sequence,  you again see other people examining his life. It is in the middle segment, where he wakes up, that the story focuses on him.

Many years ago, I listened to an mp3 file of Dylan Thomas reciting his own poem: Do not go gently into that good night / Old age must rave and burn at close of day / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It is not a feeling that is easy to describe. I just remember closing my eyes, letting myself drown in those words and feeling really old. I remember finding that my eyes were wet when I opened them again.

Watching Ikiru was like that.

ps: Also read Roger Ebert’s amazing essay on the movie – this is my favourite piece of writing about film.

 

Obit

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni are no more. I know little of their work, so I cannot speak knowledgeably of them. They haven’t done much in recent years, so there’s no point talking about the great loss to cinema.

But maybe it’s a good occasion to remember what they did when they were alive and working. To watch some of those movies. Like The Seventh Seal (Bergman) and Blow Up (Antonioni). Watch this space for the reviews.