57. Canadian filmmaker Paolo Barzman's second film "Emotional Arithmetic" (2007): Subtracting the past, adding the present and balancing the equation

It is fascinating how the horrors of World War II continue to spark off good, intelligent cinema around the world even after a gap of over half a century.

Emotional Arithmetic, based on a novel by Matt Cohen (I guess, a Jew), begins with an astounding remark "If you ask me if I believe in God, I am forced to answer does God believe in us?" The film is not about atheism. But it is a startling opening statement that makes you re-evaluate the film even after the movie is over. It reflects on the terrible scars left by war on orphans, on individuals who stand up and protest when wrong is done, on relationships forged in times of stress, pain and loss. It probes the secondary effect the scarred individuals have on their close family, who were not directly affected by World War II. Thus, a beautiful Canadian landscape seems to hide the horrors that inhabit the minds of some of its inhabitants.

The charm of Paolo Barzman's second film rests considerably in the hands of the capable actors—-Susan Sarandon, Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer and Gabriel Byrne—-all who have a maturity to carry off their parts in the film with grace. Ms Sarandon has matured into a formidable actress in recent films and this one definitely showcases her talent. Ms Sarandon plays a comfortably married middle aged grandmother who cannot forget the trauma of having experienced life in a Nazi concentration camp called Drancy as a young American-born girl. Plummer plays her husband who is constantly worried about her health (“Did you take your pills?”).

Elementary arithmetic adds these facts to tell us that her character is not very stable. Add on the sudden arrival of her benefactor at the camp a Polish dissident played by the enigmatic Max von Sydow, the first meeting after a gap of some 40 years. Another addition to the equation is the arrival of concentration campmate played by Gabriel Byrne, another character indebted for life to the Polish dissident. Old memories, old flames of love are rekindled. Possible emotional multiplication is suggested in the emotional equation. The husband seems to be threatened with an eminent subtraction from the emotional equation. What follows is not as important as the equation itself. The film offers some answers—you can get run over a speeding train at an unmanned crossing, or just be able to survive and move on with your determination.

If you are familiar with cinema of Bergman, the film offers tantalizing parallels with Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly. Both films have Max von Sydow. Both have a pivotal wooden dining table in the open air as an important prop for the story. In both films, you have rain that is likely to fall on the table. In both films, a woman is in a fragile mental state, with men hovering around her watching her with concern.

Screened at the 12th International Film Festival of Kerala, India, the film forced this viewer to compare the contents of Emotional Arithmetic also with those of a Swiss documentary A Song for Argyris, also shown at the festival. Both films underlined the difficulties in forgetting tragic events in our lives and moving on. Both films indirectly discuss the bonding of survivors of tragic events. As I watched the film I could not help but note the growing interest filmmakers in family bonds—in Emotional Arithmetic it is merely a subplot balancing a "virtual" family that suffered during the Nazi rule with that of a real family comprising three generations living in idyllic conditions in a most beautiful part of Canada.This film would offer considerable material to reflect on for the viewer, beyond the actual events shown on the screen.Though there is no mention of a divine presence, the use of the vertical crane shots of the dining table and the car at interesting junctures in the film seem to suggest this debatable interpretation. This Canadian film provides eye-candy locations that grab your attention from the opening shot. Mesmerizing crane shots provide an unusual charm to the high technical quality of the film, which becomes all the more apparent on the large cinemascope/Panavision screen. So is the competent editing of the sequences that make the viewing process delectable.

Emotional Arithmetic could fetch acting honors for Susan Sarandon, Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer (his best performance to date after his formidable lead performance in Phillip Saville’s Oedipus the King made in 1967), when the film is officially released.

Like another Canadian film Away from Her (which shares the same gifted cinematographer Luc Montpellier with Emotional Arithmetic and shown at the 11th edition of the Kerala festival more than a year ago), Canadian cinema has proved capable of dealing with serious subjects with the help of international actors, without resorting to the commercial gimmicks of mainstream American cinema, and employing high standards of craftsmanship in the true tradition of the famous Canadian filmmaker Claude Jutra!

P.S. The films Away from Her, A Song for Argyris and Through a Glass Darkly have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

56. Turkish film director Abdullah Oguz' "Mutluluk (Bliss)" (2007): Taking Livaneli and resurgent Turkish cinema to wider audiences

Some forty years ago, one went to a movie because it was based on a famous book. Today, you are more likely to ferret out a book because the movie on which the film was based was interesting and probably warrants a closer look at the written word.

One such movie that has set me on the paper chase is the Turkish award winning film Mutluluk (Bliss) based on the Turk Zulfu Livaneli’s book of the same name. Apparently the considerably well-known book has been adapted and written for the screen by three writers and the director of the film Abdullah Oguz. I believe the translation of the book is available in English but I have yet to lay my hands on a copy. My search for the Livaneli book resulted in two interesting bits of trivia. Livaneli is himself an award-winning film director (at San Sebastian and Montpellier festivals) not just a literary figure. And Livaneli is a music composer of some repute, having closely collaborated on music with Mikis Theodrakis (composer of 0f Zorba the Greek) of Greece (see my review of A Song for Argyris in this blog) and Livaneli provided the music for my favorite Turkish director Yilmaz Guney’s film Yol (the Way).

The first five minutes of the film Bliss (probably the most stunning 5 minutes in the entire film) is pure heavenly cinema—not anything remotely related to literary genius. You have a shot of a hillock and its mirror image captured in the still waters in the foreground, with heavenly music provided by (you guessed it!) Livaneli. As you are mesmerized by this feast for the eye and ear, the crane shot of the camera zooms in on a herd of sheep. So what’s so spectacular? Anyone can do that, you say. But wait, the director captures a cyclical contrarian rotation of the sheep within the herd that is idyllic, providing almost an epiphany of what is to follow in the movie. How the director got the herd to move in that fashion beats all logic and likely animal choreography.

What follows the opening sequence is a typical honor killing dilemma. A young orphan woman in beautiful lovely rural Turkey has been raped. There is no evidence of who perpetrated the crime until towards the end of the movie. The tradition is that the hapless women are provided a rope to hang themselves. As the young lass remains silent and is reluctant to kill herself, her family decides to send her to the city where her escort is charged with the job of honor killing—kill the victim of the rape.

What follows is a love story between the would-be killer and the victim, a fascinating interplay of the duo with a rich intellectual who owns a wonderful yacht and is running away from a marriage and responsibility, soaking in the natural beauty of the Aegean Sea and the picture postcard coastline. Everyone seems to be running away from some problem or the other...only to find refuge in beautiful nature. Director Oguz and writer Livaneli seem to suggest that "bliss" for the three different characters can be attained if they try to attain it, irrespective of the socio-political or religious conditions in which they (and therefore you, the viewer) are placed by providence or a cosmic scheme of sorts.

At the end of the film, you begin to wonder at what the film insinuates. At a very obvious level there is a conflict between tradition and modernity, between rural lifestyles and the urban lifestyles, between Asian cultures and European/Western values. At a not so obvious level, there are pregnant references to turmoil within Turkey. Much is lost in translation. You get a feeling that there is more to the story than what you are told in the film. Why did author Livaneli, himself an accomplished filmmaker, choose not to direct the film or even write the screenplay, when he graciously provided the music?

Perhaps there is an inverse image of the story as suggested by the opening shot of the film. Probably the novel will have some answers. Even without the answers the film is an invitation for anyone to glimpse the beauty of Turkey, with its melting pot of cultures, religions, and ethnicities. More than anything this possibly sterilized Turkish film has a positive outlook for a country seeking EU membership. Its cinema is quietly surging forward just as its writers are beginning to get noticed worldwide.

55. Chinese director Yang Zhang's "Luo ye gui gen (Getting Home)" (2007): Beguiling comedy that makes you reflect on human behavior

"A falling leaf returns to its roots” is a Chinese proverb. This endearing film is based on this proverb. It is a modern day story of mainland China--an emerging economic power. Rural migrants are attracted to the cities in search of prosperity. One such 50 year-old-migrant construction worker Zhao (a commendable performance by actor Zhao Benshan), is surprised to find during a drinking bout in a pub that his buddy is not dead drunk but dead as a doornail. As a good peasant would, Zhao vows to keep his promise made during the drinking session that if either buddy died, the other would carry/transport the dead body to the dead man’s village and bury his body there. As a promise is promise, Zhao uses all his wits and physical strength to transport the dead body to the village. The fallen leaf has to return to its roots.

What a yarn, you will say! But hold on. The Chinese director Yang Zhang (also known as Zhang Yang) and his scriptwriter Yao Wang built the film script around a real incident in 2006 when a Chinese peasant did carry a dead buddy to his village oblivious of all Chinese laws that prohibit such an action to ensure that the dead man did not transform into a “hungry ghost.”

Now director Zhang, scriptwriter Wang and a fascinating comic actor Zhao Benshan weave a Pilgrim’s Progress type road-movie story that constantly shifts from escapist top-gear to formidable realism overdrive as it un-spools an array of human behavior--some loathsome, some endearing, some moralizing, some quirky but all very real.

There are vignettes of Asian values. You encounter robbers who appreciate the value of friendship and return their loot to those who honor commitments of friendship. You are shown mothers living as anonymous rag-pickers and professional blood donors, so that their offspring can pursue a comfortable career in the city. Wealthy rural folk do not know who really loves and respects them, and therefore arrange mock funerals following their own faked death to glimpse the truth. There is the philosophical young man who would like to ride to “Tibet” or the roof of the world. There is a family that lives far away from society because the wife/mother has been disfigured by an accident, and yet is a lovely person underneath the scars. There is a truck driver who having lost his love is crestfallen, but needs someone else to set the compass of his life to regain his lost love.

There are other vignettes that show the unhealthy characteristics of economic progress. Construction companies employ migrants but cheat them by paying salaries in counterfeit notes. Highway restaurants overcharge their clients and use thugs to extort money if they don’t pay up. Seedy blood banks pay money for any type of blood donor because there is money in the business. Rich families in cars do not stop to give lifts to the poor and stranded on the roads. Once-robbed travelers do not show compassion to the individual who was responsible for the return of stolen goods—they are concerned with their possessions. Women accuse men of staring at them without bothering to check if the accusation is real or imagined. The list goes on.

The movie underlines that there are two sorts of people. One lot cares for others, empathizes with their problems and helps them get out of their predicaments. The other lot lives for themselves and concentrates on their own material interests. The rural folk seem to fall into the first category, while the neo-rich fall into the other.

The ultimate destination of the “road movie” is the controversial Three Gorges mega-dam. On route to the dam, the viewer can glimpse breathtaking landscapes of China. Is the director feeling sorry for the village of the dead man (and the associated values that go with rural, simple life) that has been covered with the waters of the dam? Only the director can answer, we can only ask the question.

The funny thing about the movie is that while the characters and milieu are Chinese, the essential elements are universal in any economy “progressing” from rich traditional values to a more consumerist, urban rat race. It is no wonder that the film won the 2007 Berlin Film Festival Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Asian film NETPAC award at the recent International Film Festival of Kerala. The movie makes you laugh, but tugs at your conscience. The “falling leaf” in your soul, would like to return to “the root” or traditional life styles when people bonded well and were not out to make a quick buck.

Very close in subject and treatment to the 2004 Iranian black comedy Khab e-talkh (Bitter Dreams), director Yang Zhang and scriptwriter Yao Wang need to be complimented for painting a “celluloid” canvas that entertains those who crave for feel-good escapism (amidst all the black humor). The viewer has to discount the fact that the body does not decay and the Zhao never tires carrying a dead man around. While the escapist element is in the foreground, the real strength of the film comes from the realistic vignettes that are not Chinese but universal in values and temperament. Here is yet another Chinese film that entertains and offers ample food for thought.

P.S. The Iranian film Bitter Dreams has been reviewed earlier on this blog.

54. Chadean filmmaker Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's "Daratt (Dry Season)" (2006): Beyond the tooth for a tooth, eye for an eye equation

There are a handful of films from Africa that can leap out like a big cat from the celluloid jungle and make the viewer think.

A recent example is Daratt (Dry Season), a movie from Chad, a Central African country that was initially economically weakened by the French colonial rule and later, after gaining independence, slumped into a 40-year-old civil war. The neighboring Darfur crisis and the resulting spillover of refugees have not ameliorated the political and economic situation of this landlocked country. Imagine living in a country that is dusty and hot with the Sahara desert to its north. Imagine living in a country where two generations of its population have not encountered peace or progress but live under the constant shadow of fear and corruption. If you can empathize with the unusually inhospitable situation, you will realize the title of the film is not merely a reflection of the hot, dusty climate, but a metaphor to describe life in Chad today.

This film is a powerful mix of metaphors and fables. The atmosphere captured in the film is real. People still get their news on the radio—not on TV or by reading newspapers. People still eat freshly baked sticks of French bread. People still carry guns that often can compare with the best anywhere in the world, quite in contrast to what else is available. The younger generation includes street-smart crooks and quiet, hardworking young men yearning for normal family bonds and affection that the civil war did not allow to grow. When the young man, a fascinating study of conrolled aggression, is asked by a baker what he wants, he answers laconically—“Not charity.” Today, what Chad requires most is not charity as well, but honest, hard work that will build the nation.

What is unreal in the film? Corruption that eats into the soul of Chad is never glimpsed save for petty thieves selling fluorescent lights stolen from semi-dark streets in the night. What the viewer sees is a baker baking fresh bread and distributing it free to young hungry boys (the entire film suggests that young girls are an endangered species!). Now why would a person do this? Is the baker so rich that charity has become his vocation? It is possible that any scene of money changing hands for the baker’s bread got lopped off on the editing floor because another baker is later shown providing aggressive competition. Terror is never shown on screen save for slippers left behind by crowds that apparently fled in terror.

What are the metaphors in the film? A “blind” grandfather seeks revenge after a radio broadcast proclaims amnesty for the perpetrators of the horrors. The blind man hands a gun to his grandson, now an orphan called Atim (metaphorically meaning an orphan) to avenge the death of his parents by killing a certain individual in a far away city. This perpetrator of crimes, now a symbol of reconciliation, hard work and progress has lost his “voice” and can only speak with artificial aids. Yet he is the one with a kind heart, wanting to adopt a hardworking son, and keeps his armory of weapons well hidden.

The “good” men who seek revenge are blind. The “bad” men who seek reconciliation, normalcy and family life can’t speak (literally and metaphorically). And both men are devout Muslims. That’s Chad today!

The final outcome of the film is easily played out for the viewer because of these physical constraints of the two men. The outcome is easily played out as social mores are not tampered with—the grandfather’s command is seemingly obeyed. The “father’s” love for the “son” is acknowledged.

It would be too simplistic to draw parallels between Daratt and Argentine/Chilean Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the maiden, later adapted for the screen by American novelist Rafael Yglesias for Polish director Roman Polanski. Yglesais' and Polanski's ambiguous final scene in their film Death and the Maiden, where principal players exchange meaningful glances, is a delight.

In total contrast, Dry Season’s final scene is not of individuals but of the dry environment, as the camera zooms out. The viewer is nudged by the director to see the larger picture of the film, not the bare story line. What Polanski and Yglesias did in an American/European film, Mahamet-Saleh Haroun has equaled with ambiguity and force rarely seen in Africa cinema. Will the dry season accept a world of reconciliation that will lead to rain (a metaphoric wet season) and prosperity for future generations indoctrinated in love and traditional values? Perhaps, it will. Perhaps, not.

Dry Season won the 2007 Venice Film Festival's Grand Special Jury Prize and four other minor awards at the event.

Moolaade (Senegal), U–Carmen e Khayelitsha (South Africa), and In Casablanca, angels don’t fly (Morocco) (all three reviewed earlier on this blog) are three examples of mature works of recent African cinema, with its distinct African aesthetics, that transect the length and breadth of the vast continent and capture the tragedy and aspirations of its people. I am delighted to add Dry Season to my list of formidable contemporary African cinema.

53. Japanese director Naomi Kawase's "Mogari no mori" (The Mourning Forest) (2007): Resurgent Japanese cinema blending nature with traditional values

There are directors who write their own original stories and scripts and there are those directors who bring to the screen works of novelists, playwrights, and even biographers and historians. The directors who develop their own scripts are not just good filmmakers but arguably potential novelists or playwrights.

One such formidable director is Japan's Naomi Kawase. Her films win awards at prestigious film festivals following which the director churns out well received novels in Japanese based on her original film-scripts.

Today, like Kawase, there are exciting filmmakers such as Mexico's Carlos Reygadas and Spain's Alejandro Amenabar (The Others) and Pedro Almodovar (Talk to her/Hable con ella) who need to be appreciated as a breed apart from the regular directors who prefer to ride on the shoulders of other worthies. Kawase's The Mourning Forest, won the Grand Prize at the 2007 Cannes film festival. Many Western critics missed out on the loaded Asian/Japanese cultural subtexts in this remarkable film and even expressed surprise that it won the honor. After viewing the film at the recent 12th International Film Festival of Kerala, I applaud the Cannes jury's verdict.

The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori) is a film that centers around a 70-year-old man with senile dementia (Alzheimer's disease?) living in an old age home in Japan—somewhat similar to Sarah Polley's Canadian film Away from Home. However, the two films approach the problem from totally different perspectives—underlining the cultural divide between Western and Eastern sensibilities. In both films, young people admire the values of the older generation. Both films are indirectly family films—underlining undying love for spouses. That's where the similarities end.

The Mourning Forest is a sensitive film tracing a senile old man's quixotic pilgrimage to his wife's grave in a forest interlocking a mystical relationship with nature. An old man with depleting memory is cared for by a young woman Machiko, a new nursing recruit, at the retirement/old age home. But her name, which has similar syllables to the name of his wife Mako, who died 33 years before, triggers a passion in him to visit her grave in a forest.On the 33rd anniversary, according to Japanese Buddhist beliefs, the departed must travel to the land of Buddha—somewhat like the Roman Catholic Christian belief of the dead reaching heaven /hell after a stay in purgatory. The time has come for the couple to part forever unless he bids farewell soon before the anniversary.

The Mourning Forest can be divided into two parts.

The first part introduces the viewer to the two main characters--the nurse and the nursed. Both have suffered personal loss and are grieving—the nurse has lost a child for which her husband holds her responsible; the nursed has lost his wife and evidently never remarried and keeps writing letters to his dead wife that must be "delivered." The nurse dominates the first part. We view the two figures chasing each other between rows of tea bushes, their heads clearly visible over the verdant green landscape. There is warmth of the sun. There is an allusion to life.

The second part inverses the earlier situation with the action taking place within the forest (a literal and figurative forest). The nursed dominates the nurse. The nursed tricks the smart young woman as he trudges to his wife's grave. Whether the spot is really her grave or not is of little consequence—the act of undertaking the pilgrimage is of consequence as he has to deliver his letters to his wife before 33 years of her death are completed. The forest covers the human figures (Compare the two scenes above). There is cold, darkness and mystical overflowing streams that threaten hypothermia. There are definite allusions to death and regeneration.

In an interview to a news agency, Kawase said "After the two enter the forest, the forest becomes the force that supports them. It watches over the two of them, sometimes gently, sometimes more strictly."

The film's title roughly translates as "Forest of Mogari" and at the end of the film the director states the meaning of the term "mogari." Mogari means "the time or act of mourning."

Unlike Away from Her, the Japanese film dwells on understanding the richer complexities of life and death. "Running water never returns to its source," says the old man Shigeki to his nurse, words of solace for a young woman to look afresh at her marriage after losing a child.

"If sad things happen, you shouldn't be sad about them or fight them, but vow to make the world a better place for children still to be born. That's my message," Kawase told the Reuters news agency. At the Cannes festival, director Kawase said she made The Mourning Forest because "her grandmother was becoming slightly senile, and today such people are looked down upon somewhat, and pitied, forgetting that it could happen to us someday." Kawase said she hoped viewers would learn kindness and a new way of handling difficulties -- which she said could help people around the world overcome religious and cultural differences.

The nurse strips off her clothes to provide warmth to her ward and protect him from hypothermia—an action that would seem unusual to Western sensibilities. There is no sex here; mere practical help in time of need. There are streams that suddenly flood as if they have a life of their own and emerge as characters in the film.

There is one Japanese film that is somewhat similar in spirit and content—the 1983 Cannes Golden Palm winner Shohei Imamura's Ballad of Narayama, where an active and economically productive old woman is forced to make a last trip up a mountain to fulfill local traditions and her consequent interactions with younger generations in the village. While Imamura used a famous novel to build a film classic, young Kawase has made a rich film using her own story. Kawase is treading in the footsteps of directors Terrence Mallick, Carlos Reygadas and Andrei Tarkovsky when the forest itself is suggestively transformed into a metaphor of memories and traditions, and eventually becomes a source of eternal strength. Kawase is encouraging us to reflect how we can take solace from nature when we face difficult times ("Running water never returns to its source"). Kawase represents the finest in contemporary Japanese cinema today, blending nature and tradition in storytelling.

P.S. The Canadian film Away from Her was reviewed earlier on this blog.

52. Mexican director Carlos Reygadas' "Stellet licht (Silent Light)" (2007): Visually and aurally breathtaking cinema

Can light have sound? So what is silent light? Something surreal, somehow related to the Christian hymn Silent night? The intriguing answers are provided in the film to the patient, thoughtful viewer. This is not a film for the impatient viewer. “Starlight” (accessible cosmic wonders) begins and ends the film—silence dominates the soundtrack, except for crickets, lowing of cattle, and an occasional bird cry.

This opening shot sets the tone for a film made with non-professional actors (real life Mennonites from several countries, according to reports) . The film won the Jury’s Grand Prize at Cannes 2007. It is a spectacular film experience for any viewer who loves cinema. This is my first Reygadas film and I have become an admirer of this young man.

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas writes his own scripts. He is one of the few filmmakers of importance today who does that—alongside Spain’s Pedro Almodovar and Japan’s Naomi Kawase.

Reygadas’ stunning movie Silent Light dwells on a collapsing marriage within a religious Mennonite community in Mexico, speaking not Spanish (the language of Mexico) but a rare European language (Plautdietsch) that mixes German and Dutch words, leading up to the eventual renewal of this fragile family. Reygadas begins the film with a 6-minute long time-lapse photography of dawn breaking to the sounds of nature and ends the film with twilight merging into the night.

The opening shot was lost on many in the audience as a noisy viewer kept talking three minutes into the film, unaware that the film was running, until I had to reveal this fact to him at the 12th International Film festival of Kerala. The film's opening shot was so stunning that after the 6th minute the audience who grasped what was happening began clapping, having savored the effect. The last time I recall a similar involuntary reaction from an audience was when Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi was screened decades ago in Mumbai at another International Film Festival.

There is something magical, supernatural in nature if we care to reflect on daily occurrences. There is a touch of director Andrei Tarkovsky in Reygadas’ Silent Light as he captures the magical, fleeting moments in life that all of us encounter but do not register. There is a touch of director Terrence Mallick’s cinema as he connects human actions with nature (a heartbroken wife runs into a glen and collapses trying to clutch a tree trunk). And there is a touch of director Ermanno Olmi in the endearing rustic pace of the film. Whether he was influenced by these giants of cinema I do not know—but many sequences recall the works of those directors.

That the film recalls Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) is an indisputable fact. Ordet was based on a play by a Danish playwright Kaj Munk. Reygadas film is based on his own script that almost resembles a silent film because of the sparse dialog. Both films are on religious themes, on falling in love outside marriage, and leading up to an eventual miracle. Reygadas uses these basic religious and abstract ingredients to weave a modern story that is as powerful as Dreyer’s classic work by adding the realistic and accessible components of nature—automated milking of milch cows (without milking, the cows would be in distress) and a family bathing scene—do seem to be included as daily occurrences that have a cyclical similarity to the main plot—the collapse and rebuilding of a marriage. Reygadas’ cinema invites the viewer to look at nature captured by the film and discover parallels to the story-line. This film is one of the richest examples of cinema today that combines intelligently a structured screenplay, creative sound management, and marvelous photography that soothes your eyes, ears and mind.

Early in the film, the “family” is introduced sitting around a table in silent prayer before partaking a meal. The silence is broken by the tick-tock of the clock. The children are obviously unaware of the tension in the room, except that they would like to eat the food in front of them. The adults are under tension. When the head of the family remains alone on the table (symbolic statement) he breaks into uncontrollable sobs. He gets up to stop the loud clock (symbolic) that evidently disturbed the silent prayer. This action becomes important if we realize that the clock never bothered the family silent prayers before. All is not well. Time has to stand still.

Composition of frames (see above) in the film remind you of Terrence Mallick—the balancing visuals of men and children sitting bales of hay on trailer—again recalling a cosmic balancing force in life

Both Silent Light and Ordet revolve around a miracle, where a woman’s love for a male lover and tears for his dead wife leads to calming a turbulent marriage. The film is not religious but the Mennonite world is religious. Religion remains in the background; in the foreground is love between individuals, lovers, husbands, wives, sons, parents, et al. What the film does is nudge the viewer to perceive a mystical, cosmic world, a world beyond the earth we live in, which is enveloped in love. There is a cosmic orbit that the director wants his viewers to note—a similar cyclical orbit to the erring husband driving his truck in circles as if in a trance on the farm. Mennonite children who are not exposed to TVs seem to enjoy the comedy of Belgian actor and singer Jacques Brel in a closed van. While Reygadas seems to be concentrating on the peculiarities of a fringe religious group, the universal truths about children’s behavior and adult behavior captured in the film zoom out beyond the world of Mennonites. They are universal.

The film begins in silence and ends in silence against a backdrop of stars in the night. The indirect reference to the Silent night (Stellet nacht) hymn is unmistakable. For the patient viewer here is film to enjoy long after the film ends. Reygadas' mastery of the medium is obvious. This is one of the most interesting films of the decade, but sadly will be lost totally on an impatient or distracted viewer.

51. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev's second film "Izgnanie (The Banishment)" (2007): A director challenges the intelligent viewer

Andrei Zvyagintsev's second film The Banishment, if evaluated closely, could arguably be as interesting as his first film The Return, if not better. Both relate to related concepts "Father" and "Love/Absence of Love." In both films, there are few words spoken. In both films nature plays a major role as any of the characters on screen--streams that dry up come back into life, winds lap the tree leaves to a sing a song of their own making, mists and rain provide graphic punctuation to the tale. Towards the end of the film, again we find nature providing a harvest of grain. In The Banishment, the camera constantly captures the wedding rings of Alex and Vera, husband and wife, but shows brother Mark does not wear one. The photographs and the conversations bring Alex's father into perspective. Thus, the film introduces three crucial relationships--husband and wife, brother and brother, father and son (Alex/Kir and Alex/Alex's father).

Evaluating The Banishment is akin to completing a challenging crossword puzzle. You would agree with this unusual comparison if you have seen The Return. To begin with, The Return was not based on a novel. This one is. That, too, a William Saroyan novel—The Laughing Matter. Yet the director is not presenting us with Saroyan's novel on the screen. He develops the wife as a woman "more sinn'd against than sinning," while in the novel she is mentally unstable. Understandably, the director decides to drop the Saroyan title. Thus the words "I am going to have a child. It's not yours" provides two utterly distinct scenarios depending on whether the woman who speaks those words to her husband is a saintly person or a mentally unhinged woman. The change in the character of the wife by the director opens a totally new perspective to the Saroyan story—a tool that contemporary filmmakers frequently use, not to wreck literary works, but creatively revive interest in the possibilities a change in the original work provides.

Viewers, familiar with the plethora of Christian symbolism in The Return, will in The Banishment spot the painting on which the children play jigsaw is one of an angel visiting Mary, mother of Jesus, to reveal that she will give birth even if she is a virgin. This shot is followed by a black kitten walking across the painting. Soon the forced abortion operation at the behest of the husband begins on Vera, the wife in Zvyagintsev's film. By the end of the film, the viewer will realize that the director had left a clue for the viewer—not through conventional character development using long conversations. The Banishment is representative of contemporary cinema provoking viewers to enjoy cinema beyond the story by deciphering symbols strewn around amongst layers of meaning structured within the screenplay.

As usual, the cinema of director Zvyagintsev is full of allusions to the Bible. This is the third famous film that refers to a single abstract chapter in the Bible on love: 1 Corinthians Chapter 13. In The Banishment the chapter is read by the neighbors' daughters. In Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue, the musical score is linked at the end of the film to a choral musical piece that uses the words "If I have not love, I am nothing" from the same Biblical chapter commenting indirectly on communication breakdown between husband and wife and the slow and painful reconciliation with the husband's lover. Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly is a phrase on taken from the same chapter of the Bible, a film also on lack of communication and love between father and son, husbands and wives. The banishment alludes to the banishment of Adam from the Garden of Eden represented in the film by the anti-hero's tranquil family house, far from the inferred socio-political turbulence elsewhere. The jigsaw puzzle depicting an angel appearing to Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, alludes that both Vera's child and Virgin Mary's child are not born out of sin. It indicates to the viewer that wife was innocent. Even to the selection of classical music Bach's Magnificat or the Song of Virgin Mary is not out of context.

While the story and structure of The Return is easier to comprehend, The Banishment is more complex. The first half of the film entices the viewer to reach the wrong conclusions. The Father is correct, the wife is wrong. The second half of the film surprises the viewer as all assumptions of the viewer made from the preceding episodes are turned topsy-turvy. Men are arrogant, egotistical and father children without love. There is no love in the silent train journey of the family while the wife is looking at her husband with love. Like Kieslowski's Blue, the woman, though having less screen time in the movie, appears stronger than the man—and in an apt epilogue it shows women (harvesting a field), who are singing a song of hope and regeneration.

A supposed major flaw noted by critics is the lack of character development. In this film, Zvyagintsev progresses from the earlier film to develop characters using silent journeys (lack of communication) and misconstruing reality ("child is not ours"), recalling the basic structure of the storyline of the director's first film. Actually Zvyagintsev progresses in this second film by extending the relationship of "Father and children" in the first film, to "Father and Mother" in the second. In the first film, children do not understand the father; in the second, the father does not understand his wife. When he does it is too late, just as the kids in the first film of the director. This is a film that requires several viewings to savor its many ingredients of photography, music (of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt) , and screenplay writing. Zvyagintsev is not merely copying legendary directors Tarkovsky (sudden rains, the winds, and the similar choice of music), Bergman and Kieslowski (theological inquiries)—he is exploring new territories by teasing his viewer to "suspend his/her belief" and constantly re-evaluate what was shown.

The lead actor, Konstantin Lavronenko, playing the role of Alex deservedly won the Best Actor award at Cannes Film Festival in The Banishment. Director Zvyagintsev's fans will recall the same actor had played the father of the two young boys in Zvyagintsev's first film The Return. This Russian director has proven that he is one of the finest living filmmakers with a modest tally of just two films that has won him over 20 international awards, including the Golden Lion at Venice, already. What an achievement!

P.S. The films The Return, Blue, and Through a Glass Darkly were reviewed earlier on this blog.

50. Iranian director Hana Makhmalbaf 's "Buda as sharm foru rikht/Buddha Collapsed out of Shame" (2007): Using kids to discuss adults' shameful acts

This is an unusual film, though not one that can be considered a major work of cinema. It gains importance because it shows how children can be used as a tool to discuss serious social and political issues. The film is about a young Afghan girl who yearns to read and write as the boys of her age. The film provides a chilling account of the Taliban’s intolerance of girls attending school, of women using lipstick and stoning of women to death for trivial reasons—all reprised through games of children imitating the disturbing adult actions.

The Iranian film is shot on Afghan locations very close to the spot where the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban destroyed the centuries-old rock hewn gigantic statue of Buddha. Had it existed today, it could have been a modern wonder of the world. Hence the title--Buddha collapsed from shame. The film's location, Bamyan, probably does not have not a single Buddhist--at least officially. It is habited by gentle, peace loving Muslims terrorized by fundamentalist Muslims. Women are forced to wear burkhas--to cover their hair. If the women use lipstick, they are brutally punished, even stoned to death, after being given water to drink before they die! Girls are not allowed to attend school, while boys are. The film begins with the documentary footage of the destruction of the Buddha statue.The film is an interesting film for several reasons.

It is directed by a 19-year-old girl--daughter of a famous Iranian director. For a teenaged Iranian Muslim woman to take on the powerful Taliban while living in a theocratic state of Iran is commendable. It is the first known Muslim filmmaker's attempt at criticising the Taliban. Like Sofia Coppola, her famous filmmaker father must have encouraged her at every step.

The most valuable part of the film is that the criticism is indirect as perceived from a child's perspective. A lovely, persistent, young girl child wanting to learn to read and attend school, makes intelligent use of her mother's lipstick and four eggs taken from her home to attain her aim in life. Her mother is away, working. (I guess here shades of director Hana Makhmalbaf's personal aspirations are mirrored, though she led a much better life than the Afghan girl.) The film is a wonderful example of use of kids in world cinema. What credible performances!

However, there are problems with the film. Many sequences seem to remind you of Lord of the Flies. Then there is a sequence where the girl child ties a baby with a rope and leaves for school--but this scene is never followed up. There is another scene where the girl rings the school bell, and no one in the school seems to be bothered by her action. Pleasant humour takes its toll on credibility. Yet Hana needs to be commended for her brave and intelligent work. The film was chosen to open the 12th edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala, India, to drive home the point that cinema today can be effective without sex and violence and be able to provoke a viewer to reflect on grave issues affecting lives today in remote places.

Young Hana's achievement in cinema makes you think about the increasing use of children to deal with adult issues. In this film, the story is almost entirely seen from a children's point of view--making the film agreeable to the viewer, instead of employing shrill adult views on the brutal and non-secular Taliban. Mark Twain did it, and we laughed and enjoyed his work. Some would say children ought to be left to Peter Pan type of stories...or should they be used to discuss what adults are afraid to discuss?

Late news 16 Feb 2008: The film won the Crystal Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 2008 in the Generation section.

49. Swiss filmmaker Stefan Haupt's "Ein Lied fur Argyris/A Song for Argyris" (2006): A thought-provoking documentary on grief and historical guilt

Here is a powerful 106 minute documentary all of us need to see and then reflect on dealing with grief and the touchy subject of historical guilt swayed by the waves of current European politics.

While most of the world believes that the horrors of the Nazis targeted only Jews, this documentary provides the viewer first hand narration from Greeks, some who now have Swiss citizenship, of the incredible sadistic acts of the German army as they mutilated and tortured hundreds living in a Greek village called Distomo before killing them. None of those killed were Jews, they were all Greek Orthodox Christians. Swiss director Stefen Haupt proves the incredible power of documentary cinema, with the use of old photographs, music, fine narration and seamless editing.

The main narrator is Argyris Sfountouris, who was a Greek child orphaned in the brutal massacre. His house was set on fire. Overnight he lost all. As he was found to be intelligent among the hundreds of other orphans he was picked by the Swiss Government along with few others to grow up in Switzerland. Today he is an astronomer and a scientist. One of his statements is "When will reconciliation begin and hate end? How can one forget what we experienced and forget those who died? When will we learn to forget our memories and move on?"

The strength of the pivotal narration is its low-key account, honest but sad. Argyris is confounded that a country that produced the soothing music of Beethoven could centuries later produce savage brutes.Another narrator is the famous Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis of Zorba the Greek fame. He recalls the German soldiers were interested in art and Parthenon. Yet the same soldiers would break the arms of hungry Greek children stealing bread. These are some of the contradictions in human behavior, the Swiss director Stefan Haupt highlights with remarkable effect.

Theodorakis also recounts a horrible account of the Greek Orthodox Priest and his family being stripped naked, mutilated in a horrible manner, forced to do unthinkable acts and then killed.

The more jarring facet is that when the Greek village survivors appealed for compensation from Germany, the German government refused to acknowledge guilt until a few years ago when the German Ambassador to Greece finally visited the village and apologized. Even today the German official stance is that Germany and Greece are now NATO allies and compensation is ruled out. Argyris tries to forget his loss and hate by working for the underprivileged in Somalia, Nepal and Indonesia. But can one forget what one remembers in childhood?

This film is powerful—only Hans Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler-A film from Germany (a 10 hour long documentary that provoked essayist Susan Sontag to write so many essays on it) was superior to this film on a linked subject. More people need to see the Stefan Haupt film so that similar horrors are not perpetrated elsewhere in the world. Haupt offers open-ended options to deal with grief, which makes you think how you ought to deal with personal grief. These are documenatries that offer more value than some feature films!

48. US director and actor Billy Bob Thornton's "Sling Blade" (1996): A minor 'Citizen Kane'

It would be missing the forest for the trees to merely state that the story of Thornton's film and/or the performances were stunning.

No doubt the screenplay is good, if not captivating, in structure. The prologue before the credits balances the measured calmness that follows the remainder of the prologue of the film. Both segments have an uneasy and unreal muteness that is deafening to the viewers' sensibilities. The chair dragged by J.T. Walsh makes a noise that irritates you, while preparing you for the rest of the movie. The deliberately darkened room for the interview with the school girl seemed out-of-place for an inmate about to be released into the sunny world of freedom. The screenplay does seem to dig at a layer beyond the obvious—a corrections system that is far from perfect. The response of the lead character to J.T. Walsh at the end of the movie offers more for the viewer to re-evaluate what has preceded in the film. Having viewed Lars von Trier's Dogville, within hours of viewing Sling Blade, I could not but the see the parallels that emerge in both films—the vigilante element in the best among us and a critical appraisal of society we live in. Is it the sick person that takes the center stage or is the sick framework in our society taking the spotlight? Neither film is religious but both are asking humanistic and theological questions of the viewer.

Thornton's performance is interesting and in many ways comparable to Malkovich's performance in Of Mice and Men or Duvall's performance in To Kill a Mockingbird. Are the viewers mesmerized by the actor's performance or by the writer Thornton's character? In my view the character Karl in Sling Blade is more interesting than the performance of Thornton. The director Thornton exploits the physical imperfections of the actor Thornton. Unlike Giullieta Masina in La Strada or Sir John Mills in Ryan's Daughter, the rare examples the performances outdid the character, Thornton, Malkovich and Duvall have all presented powerful imperfect characters that interest the viewer more than the performers. Thornton was able to gain the viewer's attention with his gait (with crushed glass in his shoes), his voice, and his facial contortions. In my view, Thornton was more impressive as an actor in Monster's Ball because the character was less "attractive" to the viewer.

Thornton's cast weave a quilt of outstanding brief performances: J.T. Walsh in the hospital, Duvall as the father, and Ritter as the endearing gay character.

More than the performance or the screenplay, the finest part of the film was the music. Now Thornton himself is a drummer and musician. Thornton, the director, was able to get top-notch strains of music from Daniel Lanois that embellished the film. I think the film would have been a lot less impressive without the music which was evocative and yet not intrusive. This includes the singing during the baptism sequence. It is a film that cajoles a sensitive viewer to pay attention to the intelligent management of the soundtrack.

Thornton needs to be commended for his care in managing the sound throughout the movie. Apart from the dragging of the chair at the start of the film, the sound department did a marvelous job (you see this in films of Michael Mann, Terence Mallick and Julie Taymor among contemporary US filmmakers).

All in all, the movie belonged to Billy Bob Thornton—director, screenplay writer, and actor. An amazing effort indeed, almost recalling the more sophisticated effort of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane!

47. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (1954): Opening new windows to reflect on the classic thriller

After viewing the film three times over a span of 20-odd years, the film urges a keen viewer to go beyond the appreciation of the cinematic challenges that Hitchcock sets for himself to overcome. For instance, one need not merely appreciate that this film is one of the rare instances in cinema where all the sounds are "diegetic"— recorded on the soundtrack are sounds from within the visual world captured by the camera. Further, one need no longer be intrigued by the amoral perspective of the voyeur, represented by L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), the good, average American bachelor with a robust, modest, creative career and a rich doting girl friend, Lisa, trying to rope him into marriage. After three viewings you are no longer wide-eyed about the blending of the viewer's perspective with those of Jefferies' perspective, historically a major feat of Hitchcock.

Newer perspectives of the film crystallize if you have seen over 20 Hitchcock films as I fortunately have.

First, Rear Window is one of the rare films of Hitchcock where women emerge smarter and stronger than men—the last scene has the hero with two legs in a cast and his lady love switching reading material to what she prefers to read over what the hero would prefer her to read, even though for the first time she has switched to trousers to humor her future husband's vision of his kind of wife. Similar ends were obvious in Family Plot, Spellbound, Rebecca and, by inference of the final choice, in Marnie. The final shot in Rear Window is a sexual reversal of the final shot of Mr and Mrs Smith.

Second, Rear Window is yet another film on marriage—a recurring theme in the Hitchcock films. Jefferies and Lisa do not tie the knot but the end inferred this would eventually happen. But the switching of the reading material gives the viewer a clue who among the duo would rule the marriage. In another perspective on marriage, within the film a husband kills his wife. A wedding ring is stolen of all objects. Other perspectives in the film reflect on the sex in marriage and another looks at a woman dreaming of a virtual husband, a dream to which Jefferies involuntarily raises his own glass!

Third, this is a film on photographers, photography and voyeurs. Only the photographer looks out of the window, when all have windows open, except when a dog or housebreak is involved. Four decades after Hitchcock made the film, the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski in his Dekalog no. 6 /A short film about love explored the same theme with even more astonishing results. Recently, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's Cache presented videos of an anonymous voyeur as the pivotal essay on racial interaction. All the three films infer that the crime is in watching other people commit crime. The watcher and the watched emerge as flip sides of an individual or alter egos. The magic of Hitchcock enamors more and more later geniuses of cinema even today...

For a mature viewer, there is more entertainment in the film than the obvious story-line woven around a wheelchair-bound voyeur suspecting a murder has been committed close to his apartment.

P.S. Cache is reviewed earlier in this blog.

46. Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman's "Nattvardsgasterna" (Winter Light) (1963): Stunning cinema for some, dreary for others

Winter Light is simply stunning cinema. Ingmar Bergman realized this was the film (with the arguable exception of Fanny and Alexander) that satisfied him most among his entire body of work. And this was not a casual remark made by a director to promote his film soon after he made it, it was instead a written statement he made 25 years after the film was made. Viewing the black-and-white film a few days after Bergman died, I could not but agree with his view. It is a great film from a great director. It is a film that average audiences might never appreciate. Even Bergman’s wife (at that time) found it dreary. It would make sense to viewers familiar with theology (Bergman was the rebellious son of a Lutheran priest) and much of the gravity of the film will be lost to those unfamiliar with the issues presented in the film. Yet it is a film that would provide adequate material to atheists and believers alike in equal measure. It’s a thinking-person’s film.

If the rules of aesthetics of Aristotle’s Poetics were to be applied to cinema, Winter Light would be perfect cinema. It begins and ends in a church (though the churches are different ones close to each other with the same organist and the same sexton). It begins and ends within a 24-hour period. Much of the action can be correlated (mimesis) to Christ’s Last Supper leading up to his death on the cross. Catharsis abounds both for a believer and non-believer. The main character undergoes anagnorisis or self realization through the accusatory statements of his lover. There is arguable peripeteia (reversal of circumstances) as non-believing lover prays by kneeling with folded hands in the penultimate shot soon after the organist who also attends Free Mason rituals exhorts her to leave the Church and her love, the widower Priest.

Most critics bypass this particular work of Bergman for good reasons. It is totally devoid of music, if you discount the church bells and the organ played in the church. It does not have the hypnotic visual allure of The Seventh Seal or of Sawdust and Tinsel. It has unusually long sequences of actors speaking into the camera. Its actors are all ugly, anti-heroic, and stunted (even the beautiful blonde Ingrid Thulin appears here in major role as a homely brunette destined to remain a spinster). It’s a film about suicide, about physical suffering, and about cold Scandinavian winters. Like David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter and John Huston’s fascinating adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, the film is populated with anti-heroes, cripples and losers. Finally, the film is overtly theological. All these are facets of cinema that rarely makes viewers sit up these days.

Why then is this movie stunning?

It has an absolutely flawless structure for its screenplay. It begins and ends with a church service. The number of worshippers seems to diminish towards the end of the movie but the few believers are stronger in faith. The scene after opening service and the scene before the final service are both in the vestry. The middle sections take the action out of the church. This structure would have pleased the ancient Greek playwrights and Shakespeare alike.

Every scene, every sequence is carefully created. You remove one and the whole film collapses. The use of light and shadows is awesome in each and every scene (see the scene above). Each scene provides fodder for reflection. Take the scene where the priest and his lover stop at a level crossing. The line spoken by the priest is that he entered priesthood because his father told him to become one. An innocent statement, if you do not know Bergman was the son of a priest and that Through a Glass Darkly the previous work in the trilogy ended with a crucial conversation on God between father and son. Through a Glass Darkly ended with the son (Minus) asking his father (David): “Give me a proof of God.” His father answered: “I can only give you an indication of my own hope. It’s knowing that love exists for real in the human world. . . . The highest and lowest, the most ridiculous and the most sublime. All kinds. . . . I don’t know whether love is proof of God’s existence, or if love is God. . . . Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and hopelessness into life. It’s like a reprieve, Minus, from a sentence of death.” Visually, too, the stop at the railway crossing offers food for thought. Some critics aver that the railway wagons passing by the stopped car have remarkable similarity to coffins.

The spoken words throughout are intense and often interlink this film with Bergman’s previous film in the trilogy Through a Glass Darkly, where the leading lady having a nervous breakdown has visions of God as a spider. In Winter Light, the connection is made with the words of the priest: “Every time I confronted God with the realities I witnessed - he turned into something ugly and revolting. A spider god, a monster. So I fled from the light, clutching my image to myself in the dark.”

Similarly, the link to the next film in the trilogy The Silence, is made by the words: “When Jesus was nailed to the cross -and hung there in torment - he cried out -"God, my God!" "Why hast thou forsaken me?" He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.”

Doubt about the existence of God is the underlying theme of the Bergman trilogy. It is not a coincidence that the main character is called Rev. Tomas after Thomas the doubting Apostle who refused to believe in Jesus' resurrection until he put his finger in his Jesus’ nail wounds.

The film’s end offers both a comforting interpretation to non-believers and another one to believers. When Bergman wrote the script, he was rebelling against his father who was a devout believer. The end of the film was crafted by Bergman after he saw his old father insisting on all the prayers said in a church when the regular priest was too ill to say them.

Existential non-believers will argue that in the final scene of Winter Light, the priest who knew he could not honestly help a man about to commit suicide, lamely continues his vocation without conviction. Believers will interpret the same scene to mean that the wretched priest realizes that silence from God does not mean that God does not exist but that he has to toil and suffer with added conviction and begin once again with a single worshipper to populate the near empty church. We can surmise that the priest will marry again because his new wife will now not be struck by his “indifference to (his) Jesus Christ” and that the crippled sexton finds a new supporter for his viewpoint that physical pain is easier to bear than loneliness.

For those viewers familiar with an Indian/Malayalam national-award winning film Nirmalayam, (directed and written by M T Vasudevan Nair in 1973), the end of the two films are worthy of comparison. The major characters in both films suffer psychological stress. Both characters are priests and religious (though practising different religions). Yet the final action of both are interestingly different. Both are interesting screenplays and worthy films. Both movies give ample room to the viewer for thought.

Either way, the two films offer considerable options of interpretation for a sensitive, intelligent viewer.

P.S. Through a Glass Darkly was reviewed earlier on this blog. Winter Light is one of the 10 movies that director Andrei Tarkovsky listed before his death as the best works of world cinema.

45. British director John Boorman's US film "Point Blank" (1967): Alienation at its best surfaces in a Hollywood action film

The toast of the Cannes festival awards ceremonies on three occasions, director John Boorman has made films best forgotten and films that are unforgettable. Point Blank belongs to the latter category. Many critics have dismissed it as a Hollywood B-grade action film. Evaluate it closely and you will spot a gem. Arguably Boorman has made three other major films--The General, Deliverance, and Hell in the Pacific, but this film had material--visual, aural and philosophical--that made it stand out among the Hollywood productions of its day. The film was remade recently as a Hollywood action film Payback, a version that did not urge the viewer to think beyond its gripping action.

I first saw this movie when I was in college in the Seventies. I viewed the film again in 2001. The power of the film was the same on my senses. Several reasons come up: British Director John Boorman was at his best trying to outdo Don Siegel's The Killers (1967)-which also stars Marvin and Angie Dickinson in somewhat similar roles, and was based on an Ernest Hemingway story. I will really be surprised if Boorman denies that he was not influenced by the Siegel/Hemingway movie.

Why did Point Blank make an impact on me? Was it Lee Marvin's raw machismo? No. It was Boorman, who gave cinema a brilliant essay on alienation. When Dickinson's Chris asks Marvin's Walker `What's my last name?' after a bout of sex and gets a repartee `What's my first name?' you can argue the alienation is embedded in the dialog. It goes beyond the dialog, it is present in the entire plot and the open ending that urges the viewer to think as he or she leaves the theater. The screenplay was developed on a novel by American Don Westlake (whose large body of work is not noteworthy), by three intriguing Englishmen who I suspect made the difference--Alexander Jacobs and two brothers Rafe and David Newhouse. The Newhouses' only other screenplay was Where's Jack? an impressive British musical that desperately needs to be appraised beyond the obvious. My guess is that Point Blank owes much to the team of British screenplay writers and the British director for the film blossomiing into a thought-provoking work in the in the garb of an action film. And probably the stony look of Lee Marvin helped even more. Further, this was one of the early works of Boorman made while the flow of his creative adrenalin was peaking.

But Boorman's cinema includes the loud footsteps of a determined Walker on the soundtrack, very similar to the effect Jean-Luc Godard achieved in his Alpahaville, contrasting bright wide open spaces for the exchange of money that goes according to plan and closed dimly lit confines of Alcatraz for those that go wrong. There is laconic humour without laughter, pumping bullets into an empty bed, guards who narrowly miss Marvin going up the lift, the car salesman's interest in an attractive customer than in his job, the sharpshooter's smug satisfaction not realizing that he has got the wrong man…The list is endless.

The camerawork of Philip Lathrop is inventive, but was it Lathrop or was it Boorman that made the visual appeal of the Panavision format of this film come alive? If you look at Lathrop's body of work, my hunch is that the unusually fascinating visuals were prompted by the director. The use of shadows, open spaces, stairs, almost deserted streets, enhances the isolation and alienation of the main character, Walker.

Viewing the film in 2001, after a gap of decades, many aspects of the film were underlined and reassessed. Getting back his $93,000 was important to Walker (Marvin), nothing more nothing less. But was it money he was after or was it the value of an agreement among thieves? The open-ended finale runs parallel to the end of an Arthur Penn film (also built on alienation) called Night Moves made some 10 years later. What surprises me is how a good movie like Point Blank never won an award or even an Oscar nomination.

There is a strand of despair that links all the major Boorman films. The main characters are somehow isolated from the larger crowd. This clever amalgamation of alienation, humor, action and intrigue makes Point Blank remarkable. Reflect on what the film states--you are alone, you have fight for what is yours, and options in life are open-ended for you to choose. There is no black and white, only grey.

44. Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961): A truly remarkable, ageless film that makes you think

This film's title is taken from the Bible: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Cor 13:12).

The film is a major work of cinema and a major work of Bergman. If one looks at the body of Bergman's films he was probably approaching his peak of artistry, which he would achieve in his next work Winter light, a film that Bergman himself called perfect. The reason most viewers do not grasp the importance of the magnificent "Man-God trilogy" or "the Silence trilogy" or "the Dark/Faith trilogy" (three films: Through a glass darkly, Winter light, and the Silence) is that the trilogy deals with the theological question of God's existence. It is essentially a thinking person's film. If you can reflect on what you see, these three films are a treasure—a treasure that influenced major directors several decades later, specifically Kieslowski who made Three Colors: Blue also almost entirely based on 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, Tarkovsky who seems to have borrowed some ideas like the sudden baptismal rain from this film that he employs in Solyaris and Stalker and finally the exciting new talent from Russia Andrei Zvyagintsev (director of The Return, where the Russian director took a leaf from the Bergmanesque son–father relationship of this film). All these films seem to have been influenced by this seminal work of Bergman.

To those viewers, who are not spiritually inclined, the film could be reduced to the obvious action of Harriet Anderson's character Karin insisting on wearing goggles as she steps out of her home to live the rest of her life in a hospital. It could easily be interpreted as a study of mental illness, a film that gives credence to the theory that god does not exist. The film can equally be interpreted as a film on mad people who feel they are in communion with god, who at other times are slaves to dark forces (voices).

On the other hand one can argue the intensity of the light is a metaphor for a sign that God exists—the basic question that troubled Bergman, the son of a priest, in real life. Even the young Minus kneels down to pray to God as the rain (baptismal?) falls suddenly. A keen viewer will note that there is no sign of rain on the island or of rain drenching the two men in an open boat after the event. Only Karin's hair is wet. All three films seek an answer that God exists from a silent, "inscrutable" (to quote a word from this film) God to whom millions pray. The spiritual troubles of Bergman are not far removed from those of Mother Teresa, who according to her recently revealed letters to her confidant, a priest, was also troubled by a silent God for over the 40 years she spent working for the poor. Through a glass darkly opens with a shot of the almost still, dark waters of the sea mirroring the sky. The film ends with several references of light. For the cynical, Bergman was disillusioned and felt that God was a "spider" (the intriguing image for the DVD covers of the three films), a reference to Karin's outburst towards the end of the film. If Bergman, was truly disillusioned, would he have added the final epilogue where the father tells his son "God exists in love, in every sort of love, maybe God is love." These last words make the son say my father has "talked to me" the penultimate words of the film—a seemingly spiritual response even Jesus on the cross wanted ("Father, father, why hast thou forgotten me?") before he died.

It would be ridiculous to see this work merely as a film seeking answers to God's existence. Like Three colors: Blue, this is a film on love. There is the undiluted love of an atheist husband (shades of Bergman?) for his ailing wife (note the film is dedicated to Kabi, Bergman's wife at a point when divorce was looming large). There is love of a father for his daughter, son and son-in-law triggered by a failed suicide attempt (only recalled in the film). There is love between siblings.

The film is also about marriage (the film is dedicated to Bergman's wife Kabi, with whom he is supposed to have had a 'non-communicative' marriage and, more importantly, he adds two words "my wife" after Kabi in the dedication). Visually, the film emphasizes the wedding ring in the scenes involving husband (the camera captures the wedding ring on the finger several times) and wife (she puts it on after she washes her face). The son asks with an innocent cockiness of the father who has recently divorced his second wife Marianne (never shown on screen) if "he has lost all stability, spiritually"? Structurally Bergman doffs his cap to Shakespeare by adding a one act play within the film on the lines of Hamlet to drive home a point to the father and his illusion of love for his perfect work of art at the expense of depriving love for his near and dear.

In more ways than one, this is a thinking person's film. After viewing the film several times, one is in awe of this filmmaker so prolific, so perfect and so sensitive. What he has written for cinema can be compared to the output of great writers like Tolstoy and Shakespeare. He was truly a genius. I do agree with Bergman when he avers that the three films in the trilogy are not connected and are stand alone films. The only common link among the three films is Bergman's personal quest for a response from a silent God that his father believed in and in whom Bergman was brought up to believe in. These are not films of an atheist but works from a genius "flirting with God" to quote from the film itself.

Many years after he made the film, Bergman was uncomfortable with the final scene. The doubting Thomas in Bergman had resurfaced. Yet he never reworked on the film. The film has much to offer for a student of cinema: it is made of fine photography, art direction, acting, scriptwriting, editing and sound (Bach plus the horn of the lighthouse). Undoubtedly one of Bergman's finest works, it anticipates the perfect Winter light, the next film that Bergman wrote and directed.

43. South African filmmaker Mark Dornford-May's "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" (2005): Different strokes of Bizet's opera 'Carmen,' and the best is....

There are examples of cinema when music can provide fodder for thought. Great directors have always chosen music to communicate viewpoints, not merely to soothe our aural cravings. Bizet's Carmen can be appreciated as a musical work without much thought. It can also be appreciated in the context in which the musical work is used on celluloid.

I had seen two of the most fascinating film versions of Carmen in the mid-Eighties: (a) Francesco Rosi's Italian version that won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award with two of the most accomplished tenors (Placido Domingo and Ruggero Raimondi) playing leads roles that had spoken dialogs to punctuate the singing, and (b) Carlos Suara's Spanish version with flamingo dancers that won a Prize at Montreal film festival and a Bodil award for the Best European film. It was difficult to conceive that another production could be made to outshine either of these. Yet here was a South African director making a version of Carmen (his debut at that) in South Africa's tongue clicking Xhosa language capturing all the elements of accomplished filmmakers Rosi and Suara with a felicity of a veteran filmmaker to walk way with a Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival in 2005.

A bullfight in Cape Town shantytown suburbs? Director Mark Dornford-May suggests the bullfight with a single shot of a bull in a paddock, an actor holding a dagger, and the sound of an animal in pain—nothing else. Sex is suggested off-screen, never shown. The story and music of the opera Carmen is retained religiously with local color thrown in: a Bible-reading police sergeant who had earlier killed his own brother and glibly lied to his own mother and police about the incident, women who taunt men in almost equal terms, and the singing talent of black South Africans.

There are two ways to enjoy the film: (a) Imbibe the variation of presenting the famous musical work in an unusual setting and (b) savor the film as a documentary of modern-day urban South Africa without the music/operatic songs. Either way you will have a treat. I have been to South Africa and what is shown is very close to reality.

The film belongs to the lead actress Pauline Melafane who exudes sensuality, without having to take off her clothes and is the epitome of the opening line: " ..for every fault she had a quality that came out from the contrast…" Her screen presence is incredible and outshines all Carmens on screen to date that I have seen. She is able to blend tragedy and cocky image of a college going student (forget that she is playing an illiterate shantytown dweller!).

Director Dornford-May achieves two objectives with this work: he proves Bizet's Carmen is universal not a mere European work and that the opera can be well produced in obscure languages, if there was a will and talent. Bizet would have been proud of this film. The red (the primal color of bullfights) color comes to the fore only in the finale as the color worn by the women and the sheet covering the dead. To win a Golden Bear for a debut film is no mean achievement—more so when the experiment has been attempted by others in the past. The director injected realism in this film, not being limited to mere romance and gallantry—in fact Carmen's lover in this film is an anti-hero, a liar, and a modern-day Cain seeking forgiveness. Rosi and Suara need to take a back seat!

P.S. This powerful film overshadowed Fateless, the remarkable Hungarian film discussed earlier in this blog, at the same edition of the Berlin Film Festival. It shared honors with another remarkable film, the Chinese Kong que, also reviewed earlier.

42. Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Trzy kolory: niebiesky" (Three colors: Blue/Trois couleurs: Bleu) (1993): Not merely an essay on grief

A film on I Corinthians Chapter 13, just as Kieslowski's Dekalog was based on The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament! The later works of Kieslowski never cease to amaze me. Here is a film that made me read more (this time, the Bible!) after seeing the film. A choral rendering of the chapter in Bible towards the end of the film and its link to the films entire musical score--provide the clue.

Here is a film so spiritual in content with no obvious markings of being a cinematic essay based on an entire abstract chapter in the New Testament—-a chapter that could fit into the holy books of any religion and is not strictly limited to Christian theology but universal philosophy that could find equal acceptance by, say, a Sufi scholar or a Hindu mystic.

But then Kieslowski made 10 marvelous short films called Dekalog each loosely based on one of the Ten Commandments. But if the viewer is not well versed with theology or philosophy, the film can be viewed as a story far removed from such lofty heights. Blue would be a mere story of grief and reconciliation to loss of kin (but then Ingmar Bergman did a better job of this subject in the little known 1971 film The Touch (Beroringen) with Bibi Andersson and Elliot Gould).

Kieslowski, was a product of Communist Poland but a Christian in spirit and upbringing. He is reputed to have professed atheism but his later works negate this. It is possible that his collaborator on the screenplay Krzysztof Piesiewicz was more religious than Kieslowski. Both of them knew that all of us had to make difficult moral choices in life constantly, more so in a once Communist environment. Interestingly, Ingmar Bergman made another film taking a leaf from the very same Biblical chapter—Through a glass darkly. In Blue, the moral choice the lead character makes is to love. Love whom, one may ask? Love the boy who makes a great effort to return the stolen necklace with a cross, the husband who cheated on her marriage, the mistress of her husband with his unborn son in her womb, the husband's colleague who seeks fame from adding final touches to another person's unfinished masterpiece, the unfinished musical work that needs a loving inspired end, love the neighbor who is a prostitute, the servants of the house, the mother in the old age home (most of the images are reinforced towards the end of the film, as excerpts from the Biblical chapter are sung). Ms. Binoche was able to allude to a faint smile at the last frame, the actor's contribution to the film after her understanding of the end of Anton Chekov's play The seagull. Kieslowski retained the contribution of the literate and sensitive actor.

Blue--one of the three colors of the French flag. It is the color that defines melancholy in the English language. Blue is the "untrue" reflective color of water in a swimming pool—a cathartic venue where the lead actor swims to rid her fear of rats, a venue that suggests purging of her past fears and marital shackles, a venue where she curls up like fetus in a womb to be reborn.

There were unresolved passages in the film—-the despondent face of the daughter staring out of the car, the lead actor's obsessive interest in her dead husband rather than the loss of the daughter and why the mattress was the only furniture left behind in an otherwise empty house. Wish Kieslowski was alive today to explain these loose ends! The film is a superb example of sound editing, music composition and camera-work—each technical department competing for top honors. Blue was made for Venice Festival just as White was made for Berlin and Red for Cannes—the three top film festivals. Venice Festival loves such subjects as Blue presented—Blue was designed for it, each shot from the dunking of the sugar cube to epiphany of the street flute player to the laceration of the hand (spiritual reference to shedding of blood?) on the stones in self mortification.

In the final evaluation it is product of teamwork—making a swansong triptych of a talented director who probably knew his time in this world was limited. If I had not seen Bergman's works mentioned earlier, I would have voted this film as the best of the trilogy. My vote therefore is for the later work White, as it is more original in style and more complex of the two. Yet each of the "three colors" is a work of a master of cinema. I consider it a privilege to have met Kiesolowski briefly and talked to him, through an interpreter, in 1982 in Bangalore, India, much before he had bloomed into a great filmmaker in the early Nineties. At that time he had only made Camera Buff with Jerzy Stuhr—a film that impressed me but clearly lacked the maturity of his later works. Poland should to be proud of its great son.


P.S. Three Colors: White and two episodes of Dekalog (5 and 7) have been discussed earlier on this blog.

41. Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's US film "Zabriskie Point" (1970): A film that lost its shine over the years

When I saw the film for the first time in the early 1970s, I was in awe of this film. Visually, it was stunning and the events on campuses in Europe and USA made you relate with what Antonioni was trying to say so well visually in the final 15 minutes of the movie: blowing up in your mind the "tyrannical" establishments and big business interests. It was a not so veiled comment on American values. Antonioni was probably affected by the popular French student uprising in the Sixties, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

The repeated blowing up of the beautiful house in the middle of a desert, the lead female character enjoying the natural stream of cold water, painting an aircraft in psychedelic designs (even the staid British Airways did it a few years ago) are some of the images that were copied by advertising personnel all over the world for decades. Even Pink Floyd increased their fan following after the film was released.

You see this film some 30 years later and you begin to wonder why the same film has lost its sheen. Today, anti-establishment films have more substance--facts, documentation, fine performances, and superb screenplays. Antonioni seems to be out-of-date; a flawed genius. Even viewing Antonioni's Blow Up today gives you the similar feeling that this genius of the 60s and 70s is passe. Filmmakers have learnt a lot from his cinema over the years and brought forth more complex and mature works over past few decades.

Zabriski Point needs to be evaluated for what it was when it was released. It was a great film if you were to see it on a wide Panavision screen as opposed to the dwarfed TV screens. The visual and aural (Mick Jagger, Kieth Richards, Pink Floyd, et al.) allure of the film still remains. The lead pair were not great actors but they were cute and natural. One of them (Mark Frechette) died in prison in USA extending the reality of the non-conformist values he personified in the film. Today, Antonioni seems out of "sync." But watch carefully and you will appreciate the muted sounds of the regular actors--Rod Taylor, G.D. Spradling, the ladies at the swimming pool, the cops at the air-strip. The realistic sounds that you hear well, by contrast, are from the non-conformists. Antonioni was relevant 30 years ago but his grasp of the medium cannot be questioned even today. He knew what he was doing.

Antonioni's screenplays were laconic but loaded with meaning. In Zabriskie Point, his leading lady character Daria says these lines about a river: "There's a thousand sides to everything - not just heroes and villains. So any way... so any way... so any way... so "anyway" ought to be one word. Like a place or a river. So 'Anyway River.' " Interestingly in this film, US playwright and actor Sam Shepard and another interesting screenplay writer Clare Peploe (collaborator and spouse of director Bertolucci) contributed to Antonioni's screenplay.

He passed away this week. R.I.P, Mr Antonioni your contribution to cinema cannot be denied.