67. Russian (former Soviet) director Elem Klimov's "Agoniya (Agony)" (1981): An intriguing film

There is much that would intrigue a viewer of Agoniya.

Many may not be aware that this film was considered “worthless” in the Soviet Union after it was made and shelved for years. Director Elem Klimov made several changes to the 1975 original version and it was ultimately released in 1981 and shown at the Venice Film Festival 1982 (where it won the FIPRESCI prize) out of competition. Soon after this period, Klimov emerged as a top executive in the Soviet film hierarchy at a time when other peers, the Soviet directors Tarkovsky and Paradjanov, were considered politically “incorrect” filmmakers in that country. Interestingly, following the sudden burst of publicity following Agoniya's release, Klimov was even selected to serve on the Berlin Festival Jury in 1983 and, later, on the Venice and Cannes juries as well.

The original name of the film was Agony (Agoniya) and not Rasputin, a name by which the film was marketed for a while. The title Agony was evidently in line with what the director had in mind. If we were to accept that argument, was the director’s original film about the spiritual agony of the controversial holy man? Or was it meant to reflect the agony of Czar Nicholas, who could not go against the Czarina's total faith in Rasputin? Was the title meant to depict the agony of a great nation afflicted by the abysmal corruption among the monarchists who were there to make money while the poor starved and the indecisive Czar painted flowers to distract himself from the more pressing political problems (One fine sequence in the film soon after the Duma castigates the Czar shows the silent but mentally tortured Czar, with tear filled eyes looking for comfort in the sympathetic gaze of his loyal butler). Was the title also meant to depict the agony of the Russian Orthodox Church which was suddenly losing its grip on the lay worshippers with the rise of the Bolsheviks and “holy men” like Rasputin? We will never know unless we see the original version the director made. My guess is that the director wanted to combine all these agonies and that Rasputin, the individual, dominated only a segment of the agonizing events. What we do know is that this film and its many versions that were put out by Soviet and the post-Perestroika Russian authorities were at no point of time expected to depict Rasputin as the sole villain that led to the to the 1916 October Revolution.

The film does offer several insights into the enigmatic character of Rasputin. He did indeed accept bribes from those wanting favors from the Czar, while the film distinctly indicates that it is debatable that he loved money and wealth. He was least concerned about getting rich, because he could get what he desired without pelf. Rasputin had an ability to foresee the future but could totally misread his dreams (The film includes an interesting sequence where he rolls in a pool of stagnant water, as he can foresee his fall from grace at the Czar’s palace). He could perform small miracles, could utter saintly statements (“the cowl does not make a monk”) and believed like a village bumpkin that you could sin and then start life with a clean slate! No wonder the Russian Orthodox Church saw in him an evil rascal. What happens to him after the Church's clergy traps him is totally unclear in the version of the film I saw. Was he castrated? Klimov's Rasputin is unusual--he is an animal waiting to ravish a beautiful woman one moment, and then a religious zealot throwing out the woman for having tried to seduce him the very next moment.

While a lot has been written about actor Aleksei Petrenko’s interpretation of Rasputin, I found actor Tom Baker’s version of the historical figure in the Oscar-winning US film Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) equally fascinating. (Baker incidentally was nominated for two Golden globes for this performance--Best supporting Actor and Best newcomer). Even after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini picked Baker for his film The Canterbury Tales (1972) following his performance in the US film, Baker found comfort in performing less-demanding TV roles.

I am convinced that Klimov’s film is less about Rasputin than about the people that surrounded him. Take the Czar, for one.

Klimov’s cinematic essay shows him scurrying away from a meeting on war preparations in dark passageways behind wall-maps worried equally about his haemophiliac son Alexei, the crown prince who is depicted as a brat. The personal worries of the Czar (in the photography dark room, in his relationship with the Orthodox Church, his empathies for his worried wife doting on her children) have been given importance, unlike Franklin Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra that seemed to focus on the Czarina (Janet Suzman) more than the Czar. Interestingly, Klimov’s film downplays the Czarina’s role focusing more on the Czar.

Klimov’s range of agonies does not end here. Even the assassins of Rasputin are agonizingly guilt-ridden. Most Russians are Church-going Orthodox Christians and Klimov understood his audience quite well. The dubious role of the Orthodox Church in those troubled times are pitch forked into prominence—the film shows the burial of Rasputin officiated by the Church in the presence of the Czar.

Finally, Klimov has wonderfully used documentary footage to show the agonies of the common man—by splicing documentary footage with acted sections at every given interval to add validity to his essay on the various agonies he captured on celluloid.

While Klimov’s film shows patches of brilliance, one needs to recall that he initially made his mark as filmmaker decades before Agoniya having made remarkable satirical comedies like Adventures of a dentist. (I have yet to see the latter film; however, what both films have in common is that wonderful Russian actress Alisa Frejnlikh, who played the Stalker's wife in Tarkovsky's Stalker.) His last few films Agoniya and Idi o simotri (Go and see/Come and see) proved that he was now looking at life grimly. He was then working closely with his wife, actor and director Larisa Shepitko and was reported to be a devoted husband. Equally enigmatic is the role of Lady Vyrubova played by Alisa Frejnlikh. What was the relationship between Rasputin and Vyrubova? Probably the answers lie in the director's cut of Agoniya, which is possibly lost for ever.

I was privileged to have met Klimov at Hyderabad, India, in 1986 during a Film Festival. It was after his wife’s death. I recall that he was withdrawn and less than forthcoming to questions. Was he afraid to talk? Was he a genius who was never allowed to prove it, because of political pressures? This is probably why both Agoniya and Klimov remain enigmatic for me to this day.

Interestingly, the current Russian Prime Minister Putin was reported to have attended Klimov's wife Larisa's funeral, a very rare honor. Soon after this, Klimov who made “worthless” films was accepted within the Russian film hierarchy and even given rare prominence. But this film is definitely not "worthless," if you keep in perspective the conditions under which the film was made and under which the various versions of the film were subsequently marketed.

66. German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s “Yella” (2007): Life beyond death

Germany’s Christian Petzold belongs to the new breed of European directors that loves to make films layered with meaning for the astute viewer. Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev mesmerized serious film-goers with his multi-layered films that urge film-goers to approach cinema as one would approach a challenging and intelligent puzzle to derive maximum entertainment. Spain’s multi-talented Alejandro Amenabar has proved that a holistic mix of good screenplay, music and direction can result in films that recall the precocious brilliance of the young Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane made so many decades ago. These are films that are delectable for the intelligent and patient viewer who does not demand to be spoon-fed by the director. Members of this exclusive club of directors include Austria’s Michael Haneke and Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki. In Yella, Petzold throws morsels of visual treats at the viewer. The attentive viewer will ask for more, for the less attentive it will be an invitation to snore.


“Yella” is the name of the main character of the film. (Yella is creatively linked to Wim Wender’s key character in his film Alice in the Cities, a character without a mother moving from city to city.). Petzold’s Yella has a father but the mother is either absent or not discussed, not far removed from Wender’s Yella.

Yella wears red most of the time. Now bright red is worn by many women in Europe but the color acquires a different meaning when you realize its political association with East Germany. Petzold’s Yella lives in former East Germany, full of birds, trees, rustic atmosphere and warmth. Petzold’s Yella yearns to make big bucks in the former West Germany, less populated, richer and more corrupt at corporate and personal levels.

Halfway into the film, there is a suicidal motor accident. What follows teases the mind of an attentive viewer. A desperate woman boards a train with empty compartments. A male person peeks into her compartment but leaves her alone. Much later, she realizes that the train has reached its destination and has been parked in a yard. As she strolls into town, her eyes meet with those of a woman, who is apparently well off financially and secure in an urban house. This was in my view the most powerful and enigmatic sequence in the film. Who is this woman? Is it Yella comparing what she would be like in future? When her future benefactor turns out to be a crook, Yella “helps” him. Yella herself slowly transforms into a crooked woman as a chameleon would in new surroundings, all the while yearning for the old life of her father and financially crippled husband.










The second half of the film with its almost empty hotels provides clues to understand the film, just as Amenabar progressively provided several clues in his well-made ghost movie The Others that there is something unreal. Can characters enter locked hotel rooms, eat food and disappear? Would characters who once stalked Yella be transformed into characters that Yella would herself pursue in dark alleyways outside her hotel instead of hiding from them? Who is alive and who is dead? What is real and what is imaginary? Why is the sale price of the husband’s business, eerily the same figure as the figure quoted to purchase computers? You are coaxed by your own inquisitiveness to go backwards in the film to figure that out. Somewhere floating in the water after the accident you can spot an empty can of Coca-cola, a symbol of western materialism and prosperity.

There are aspects of the film that bothers me. Why did Yella leave her husband? Because he was obsessed with her? Why is the mother figure absent? Is true love absent?

Yella is portrayed by actor Nina Hoss and the performance won her a Silver Bear for the Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival. The film’s editor, cinematographer, and director—all three have been separately honored with minor awards for their contributions in this film. The surprise for me was that the story was written by first time writer Simone Baer, basically an established casting director. It is remarkable that Baer and Petzold should weave an interesting film around personal guilt, aspirations and quality of life. I was intrigued how a male director could delve inside the female psyche so well until I was amused to spot that the original writer was Simone Baer, a woman.

Petzold and the "club" of like-minded European directors invite the audience to think and reflect about themselves after they view these movies. These films offer interesting views on politics, ethics, business and love. They may or may not be obvious. It is for the viewer to spot them. They are not served on a platter. The story on screen remains as a pivotal point for the debate to begin among viewers. These films urge you to consider your own situation in life and reflect how you would react under similar circumstances shown in these films. Even though I viewed Yella while on a trans-Atlantic flight, I found the film worthy to be included on this blog. Petzold is definitely worth your time if you are a viewer of serious, quality cinema.



P.S. Works of Michael Haneke, Wim Winders, Aki Kaurismaki, and Andrei Zvygintsev have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

65. Alfred Hitchcock's "Marnie" (1964): Unusual Hitchcock—where marriage is preferred over jail by a strong-willed woman

This is NOT the stuff that director Hitchcock usually dealt with. The subject and the treatment of the subject are different from most of his other films.

Hitchcock was scared of jails. In this film, the lead female character prefers to be bridled by marriage rather than go to jail. It is an intriguing choice for a character who had earlier stated to her husband "You don't love me. I am something you have caught. Some kind of wild animal you have trapped." Aware of this, the young lady who has so far fooled a lot of rich men and escaped the law, prefers marriage to jail. She is smart, a woman who embezzles her employers to buy rich gifts for her mother, aware of modesty in dress (keeps pulling her skirt over her knees) and a convincing liar. Like Hitchcock's Notorious, the marriage in this film is one of convenience, or so it appears—the end of the film is open-ended.

Hitchcock fired the initial scriptwriter (a male), who honestly felt the rape of the wife by the husband was out character with male lead played by Sean Connery. The replaced scriptwriter (a lady) wrote the sequence which was used, in a suggestive way rather than a graphic way. Hitchcock loved to slip in sex even if it was out of character.

Lesbianism is suggested by the husband's sister-in-law's remark "What a dish!" a remark one would associate from the opposite sex. (Hitchcock similarly played with homosexuality in Rope). A critical scene that could be mistaken for child molestation was probably an innocent gesture mistaken by the mother.

Hitchcock usually was attentive to visuals and sound. This is an unusual film where the director swings from one extreme of high sophistication to absolute stupidity. The opening shots of the woman walking away with the yellow handbag are stunning. The silent "cleaning" of the office safe, while a deaf woman cleans the office is simply outstanding. Yet the crass painting of a dock near Marnie's mother's house would make a school kid laugh out loud.

Why would a woman who is scared of red wear red lipstick or not react when her husband's sister-in-law wears red at a party? Similarly, the shot of Marnie's hand not being able to pick up the money in the safe is an unconvincing shot, if ever there was one.

The film can be appreciated and be equally dismissed. The acting by all the main characters was good but Louise Latham performance (and make up!) needs to be singled out for praise. Director Stanley Kubrick seems to have copied Hitchcock's Marnie's differing voice patterns in the young child's voice in his film The Shining.

I am not surprised if people swing from loving the film Marnie to trashing it, and back again. It has memorable elements and elements best forgotten. During the much discussed rape scene, half the faces of both actors are in full light and the other in darkness--cleverly suggesting the duality of character in both individuals. Yet the bottom line is--the film entertains! And it makes you think!

64. Russian (former Soviet) director Grigory Kozintsev’s "Korol Lir" (King Lear) (1971): An unsung masterpiece on "civilization heading to doom"

Time and again people have asked me which movie is my all time favorite. I have often said without much hesitation: the Russian film Grigory Kozintsev’s King Lear. Even close friends wonder if I have lost my wits because they expect my favorite would be Orson Welles's Citizen Kane or a work of Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, or even Terrence Mallick, my favorite directors.

I fell in love with the Ukranian-born director Kozintsev’s King Lear some 30 years ago and I continue to be enraptured by the black-and-white film shot in cinemascope each time I see it. Each time you view the film, one realizes that a creative genius can embellish another masterpiece from another medium by providing food for thought---much beyond what Shakespeare offered his audiences centuries ago. Purists like Lord Laurence Olivier and Peter Brook offered cinematic versions of the play that remained true to what the Bard originally intended, only refining performances within the accepted matrices.

But Kozintsev’s cinema based on the Russian translation of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak added a “silent ghost” that was always present in Shakespeare’s play—nature. Mother nature is present as a visual and aural force in the two Shakespeare films of Kozintsev, more so in King Lear. Shakespeare had intended to draw parallels in nature and human beings—only Kozintsev saw the opportunity in highlighting this. The team of Kozintsev and Pasternak took another liberty—the last shot of the film includes the silent Fool dolefully playing his pipe, while the Bard had got rid of the Fool in Act IV of the five-Act play.  Kozintsev had more than one reason for it—the Fool is akin to the chorus of Greek stage and much of Dmitri Shostakovich’s haunting musical score for the film involved woodwind instruments. Kozintsev and Pasternak also bring in the Fool, in another departure from the play, looking on silently at the meeting of the almost mad King with Cordelia on her return from France. Further, the poor, beyond the portals of the army and the courts, occupy “screen-space” never intended in the play. Kozintsev and Pasternak remained true to the basic structure of Shakespeare only adding details that offer astounding food for thought.

The opening sequence of the film is simply brilliant. You see a pair of feet covered by rags trudging slowly. Then the camera reveals that the feet belongs to a pauper. Then you see the pauper is not alone; he is one among many ragged people resolutely walking in single file on a path. Soon the camera pulls back and you realize that there are several such lines of people. A horn is blown by one such ragged man and you see a huge gathering of people looking expectantly and respectfully at a castle. Kozintsev has shown the plight of the common man before he introduces the viewers to the goings-on inside the castle. It is an introduction of the real economic condition of the common people pitted against the intriguing tales of kings, princesses and nobles in a manner Shakespeare never dreamt of achieving on stage.

Today, many know of Shostakovich’s music and few about Kozintsev’s cinema. The fact is that both were friends and close collaborators. While the Communist world was in raptures about the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Kozintsev was making path-breaking experimental cinema (FEX or the Factory of the Eccentric Actors) in the 1920s—the most notable being The New Babylon (1929) with music of Shostakovich added to the footage later and Shinel (an unusual film made in 1926 combining two literary works of Nikolai Gogol). The New Babylon, a tongue in cheek look at life in the Paris Commune, now a film considered to be a major work by scholars, was promptly banned by the Soviets as it did not conform to the accepted norm of social realism. Kozintsev’s creative freedom diminished under Stalin’s dictatorship but his talents revived during the Khrushchev era. Kozintsev’s cinema was banned in the US (Communist propaganda was considered immoral by the Censors in Michigan) and within USSR had an equally rocky ride (for not conforming with accepted political views of the State) with very few getting to see his non-propaganda films. Kozintsev is arguably the only filmmaker to get his different cinematic works banned in both the former USSR and the USA, on both occasions for their "political" content and/or approach!!! (Luckily I got to see some of his early works at the Pune film archives in India, courtesy its then curator Mr P K Nair). I am convinced Kozintsev would be the toast of the cognoscenti if only they could access his works.

Many assume I like Kozintsev’s King Lear because I like Shakespeare’s plays. I do like King Lear as a monumental play but the Kozintsev film offers much more than the sum of the virtues of the play. Now many worthy directors have adapted Shakespeare on screen including Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Peter Brook, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, and Julie Taymor. Kozintsev made two Shakespeare adaptations: Hamlet and King Lear. The first went on to win awards at Venice Film festival and in the UK. While Kozintsev's King Lear offered much more substantive cinema, awards eluded this movie. Yet, it was a film version that Lord Olivier himself found to be brilliant….

"A generalized picture of a civilization heading towards doom", is how Kozintsev described his King Lear. A close look at Kozintsev’s King Lear gives glimpses of political criticism beyond the obvious references within the original play. Kozintsev possibly saw parallels between the king and himself, an aging director who once made films that must have rankled him in later life and career. One must recall that Kozintsev courageously and openly supported Boris Pasternak at a time when the Soviets were trying to decry the Nobel laureate. Is Cordelia merely a character, a loving daughter, or is she personifying truth, innocence and unpolluted nature? Is King Lear more than a king--is he representing all the mistakes of humankind?

Kozintsev himself wrote to friend and filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich after making King Lear, "I am certain that every one of us . . . in the course of his whole life, shoots a single film of his own. This film of one's own is made . . . in your head, through other work, on paper . . . in conversation: but it lives, breathes, somehow prolongs into old age something that began its existence in childhood!"

The contribution of co-director/assistant director Iosif  Shapiro in Kozintsev's King Lear and Hamlet is speculative as very little is documented. What is evident is that Shapiro was a co-director/assistant director of several major Soviet films of quality in the Sixtes and Seventies.but rarely made a film directed solely by himself.

Kozintsev’s choice of actors in the film is truly remarkable. For true film buffs, it is perhaps not surprising to find Juri Jarvet (Lear) and Donatas Banionis (Duke of Albany) were to play, a year later, the lead roles in Tarkovsky’s Solyaris. Estonian actor and national hero Juri Jarvet has been compared to Klaus Kinski, but the wail of Jarvet (King Lear) on finding Cordelia dead is perhaps the most riveting sound bite in cinema history for me. Kinski could not have done that ever. Kozintsev's choice of actors was immaculate. I have often wondered about the creative relationship between Kozintsev and Tarkovsky--but very little is on record. Kozintsev died soon after making King Lear.

For lovers of quality cinema the emerging grey hair covered head of a fallen king among the grasses, the sea gulls and waves that add punctuation and “color” to the Bard’s words in profound selection of camera angles by cinematographer Ionas Gritsius are true gems of good cinema. Many directors have tried to copy facets of this remarkable film but failed. The poor and landless emerge as silent but powerful characters.

Kozintsev teases our senses by getting Gritsius to capture the face of Cordelia against the figure of an older woman--could she be a relative of Cordelia's mother that Shakespeare never discussed? These are cinematic touches that make this version more complex than those of Brook or Olivier, for an attentive viewer.

At a time (1971) when directors would have opted for technicolor extravaganza, Kozintsev reverts to his own expressionist style of the twenties using back and white to bring color to the viewer’s imagination. Each frame of the film has the quality of a well thought-out painting, combining light and shade and gives importance to balance. The maturity of the camera-work is staggering.


Black and white cinematography of Ionas Gritsius, the music of Shostakovich and the enigmatic face of Jarvet, make all other versions of King Lear smaller in stature. Oleg Dal's Fool lends a fascinating twist to the character. The "Christian Marxism" of Kozintsev can knock-out any serious student of cinema and of Shakespeare. Kozintsev is one of least sung masters of Russian cinema. His cinema is very close to that of Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov. Kozintsev's Lear is not a Lear that mourns his past and his daughters--his Lear is close to the soil, the plants, and all elements of nature. That's what makes Kozintsev's Shakespearean works outstanding. Thankfully, even if the DVD of the film is difficult to obtain some sequences are available on the U-tube for the casual viewer to taste the remarkable cinematic work. It is time the world wakes up to the cinema of this unsung genius from Ukraine (or former USSR, depending on your personal perspective).

P.S. King Lear is one of the author's top 10 films. The cinematographer Ionas Gitsius was brought to Hollywood by director George Cukor on being impressed to film his The Blue Bird (1976)--but the cinematographer did not find color film to be his forte.

63. Spanish director Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo’s feature debut “La noche de los girasoles (The night of the sunflowers)” (2006): A fascinating thriller

Here's a thriller with an interesting title that seems to query: Where do sunflowers face in the night?

“When the sunflower plant, Helianthus annuus, is in the bud stage, the head and the leaves do indeed track the path of the Sun. The genus name Helianthus is from the Greek helios "sun" and anthos "flower". Interestingly, however, and contrary to popular belief, once the massive topmost flower opens into the radiance of yellow petals, it slows and then stops moving, ending up permanently facing east.” ---Solar flower, New Scientist, 3 August 2002

Why am I quoting this interesting bit of trivia? Sunflower buds, we all know, keep moving but a stage comes when it does not move any further. Why am I discussing the night? That’s the name of the film. The only teeny-weeny bit about sunflowers in the film is over as the opening credits end. But then the sun is not relevant for the night, is it? The near oxy-moronic title give a life to the movie after the film is over—in many ways similar to the disturbing Austrian-French film Caché made by Michael Haneke.

For a cineaste, who can sit through the film right up to the end of the film, the real punch line from the director/screenplaywriter comes in the form of an audible TV program statement about bees in a beehive, that do not attack unless provoked. It is stated while the end-credits are rolling. This is an innocuous fact but is loaded with meaning in the context of the film's ending. This is a statement heard by the unpunished rapist still on the prowl.

The Spanish director Sánchez-Cabezudo’s film is based on his own script. (He is the latest among formidable Spanish directors making good films based on their own scripts, following the tradition of the gifted directors, Amenabar and Almodovar). Most viewers would appreciate or find good entertainment in the film while mulling over in the different non-linear narrative segments of the story of rape, vigilante killing, extra-marital sex, corruption, village vs. urban comparisons, love for a dead spouse. Each segment provides a different Rashomon-type perspective of sections of the same story from a different angle, as seen by a different character. The director uses a technique used in modern pulp literature most recently used by Dan Browne for his book The Da Vinci Code. While the technique might baffle a few, most viewers would derive entertainment as they are constantly challenged to figure out the plot.

The film offers dollops of entertainment ice-cream that most viewers want—mystery, exploration of new found caves, a rape scene, a brief scene of violent death, and some endearing performances from the actors. If presented as a straight chronological narrative—the story could be ideal for a typical Hollywood thriller. But why is it different? It is different because of its end.

That is where the director and screenplay writer scores a bull’s-eye—for a patient viewer who does not leave the theater once he sees the end credits begin to roll. The comment about the bees drive home the uncomfortable, parallel moral issues that Austrian filmmaker Haneke raised in Caché.

Europeans and many of us prefer to retain status quo rather than rake up disturbing moral and social issues. It is convenient for us to do so. It is not because the issues are resolved. In this film the main culprit, a rapist is never brought to justice. If an attempt was made to bring him to justice, three persons would go behind bars for manslaughter, a homicide would surface, the reputation of an erring wife would become public knowledge, a good policeman’s daughter would find out that her husband and father of her unborn baby is a corrupt cop and so on.

The film is, therefore, not merely a film to be appreciated for its structure but its underpinning question of morality. The film shows us that evil is not limited to a rapist but the best of us. A good man could do evil in a fraction of a second. And to defend lesser evils, the bigger evil gets away. Only to scar our conscience for ever.

Spanish cinema is on the move this decade. This film has won several Spanish national awards. Sánchez-Cabezudo’s film is good but the post-script in his screenplay is truly formidable. Figuratively, the film suggests there indeed comes a time these days when "sunflowers" mature and stop turning towards the sun and only to face the east.

Because it is convenient!

P.S. The Austrian-French film Caché directed by Michael Haneke was the first film reviewed on this blog.

62. Haitian director Raoul Peck's US/French film "Sometimes in April" (2005): Remarkable feature film on the Rwandan genocide

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Opening quote from the film)

After I saw the Hollywood’s multiple Oscar nominated film Hotel Rwanda (2004) in a regular theater, I could stand up and be counted as one who felt that that the noble efforts of a hotel worker (based on a real person who worked at Hotel des Mille Collines) to save so many lives were worth emulating, if I was ever to be in his shoes.

Just a few days ago, I chanced to see Sometimes in April (2005), on the Rwandan massacre on television’s HBO channel, released a year after the release of Hotel Rwanda. You begin to wonder why so few have written about this wonderful little film made for TV, partly with US financial support. This small film is undoubtedly far superior to the acclaimed Hollywood product in both content and style, even though the subject matter of both films pertain to the real events that surround the genocide in Rwanda. The genocide took place in the month of April, when the rains begin, and hence the title of the film.

Yet the two movies are as different as chalk and cheese. To any discerning viewer Hotel Rwanda would be easily identifiable as a commercial effort using “star” power of Don Cheadle, Nick Nolte and Joaquin Phoenix to highlight one of history’s darkest chapters by developing a “feel good” screenplay that builds on the typical Hollywood mantra of success: an individual’s heroic acts against all odds. It won some Oscar nominations (two of those were predictably for acting), a minor Toronto festival award and an Irish award. But the film did not make the competition grade of Cannes, Berlin or Venice film festivals.

Then a good one year later, along comes Sometimes in April made with one big star name Debra Winger and loads of African actors. The Africans are so realistic in their roles that Cheadle’s laudable effort pales in comparison. In contrast to the Cheadle film, Sometimes in April was nominated for the Golden Bear at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, won the best film award at the Durban International Film Festival, and a minor award in Norway. What is startlingly different is the mature screenplay and direction that discusses the genocide not merely by concentrating on individual heroic acts but by discussing some key facets on the genesis of the genocide, the reasons for the delayed international reaction to the genocide, and the aftermath of the genocide when the international community rounded up a few perpetrators who had fled the country to face justice. The screenplay is a clever blend of fact and fiction, even recreating an international court set up in a hotel at Arusha, Tanzania. (By a coincidence, I had stayed in that very hotel in Arusha, while participating in an international workshop a year before the court began its activities.)

What makes Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April tick? Minutes into the film and the viewer will realize the scriptwriter knows Africa well. Radio is the mass medium in most parts of Africa, not the newspapers or the TV. If a popular radio host decides to call the Tutsi community “cockroaches” that need to be exterminated thousands of listeners will accept the verdict because they have no access to another viewpoint. That is precisely what happened. That’s the power of radio in most parts of Africa. Hate spewed out of a radio station and countries that had the power to jam those broadcasts, refrained from doing so in the name of “free speech” and “democracy” as death tolls rose to 8000 victims a day. Western nations and the UN did intervene—only to rescue expatriates, Tutsis did not matter. Christian priests in the film are shown as reluctant collaborators as they are forced to identify Tutsis taking refuge with them so that other Tutsi’s might survive the carnage. The high point of the movie for me was when Hutu girl students of a convent school collectively refuse to be saved from death and stand as one only to be butchered when vigilantes try to identify and kill Tutsi students. And this is not fiction but a fact. (For those who care to read about the subject I suggest Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire's book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.)

How else is Sometimes in April different from Hotel Rwanda? The core strength of the film lies in its attempt to analyze the effect of the difficult period on Rwandans right up to the recent past. The film examines the conflict of interest of Hutu soldiers who carry death lists of good Tutsis as good soldiers. It examines the conflicts of families with spouses from the two communities. The film explores family bonds that rise above career interests (here those of a radio host). There are shots of women who prefer to blow themselves up (see picture above) than be raped again and again. Finally, the film looks at how individuals facing trial accept their guilt—a very rare example in cinema.

The director of Sometimes in April, Raoul Peck is an unusual filmmaker from Haiti switching between documentary and feature films with remarkable felicity. He grew up in Zaire (Congo) and then lived in France. Peck served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture similar to the honor accorded by Greece to late actor Melina Mercouri. Peck’s first feature film feature L’homme sur les quais (1993) (The Man by the Shore) was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1993. His documentary film Lumumba has been hailed by critics and I look forward to see it. He has already won a lifetime award from the Human Rights Watch in New York and the Nestor (cinematographer of Mallick, Rohmer and Truffaut) Almendros prize. Evidently Peck is a director worth noting.

In the marvellous 10-hour documentary Hitler-a Film from Germany, German director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg explored the reasons for the rise of Hitler and the hidden Hitler in each of us. Peck's Sometimes in April offers the viewer somewhat similar perspectives.

It is interesting to note that the two last words that flash on the screen as the film draws to a close are “Never forget”. I will not forget this film and what this film has to offer for any viewer. One should not forget the bigger picture—Peck’s film is not about Rwanda alone, it is about human actions and the consequences anywhere. That’s what makes the film interesting.

Thank you, HBO. Thank you, Mr Peck. I only wish this film gets a wider audience.

61. Iranian director Jafar Panahi's "Dayereh (The Circle)" (2000): Interesting cinema that calls for close evaluation

After making two feature films and many short films on children, director Jafar Panahi made a third feature film, The Circle, where he dealt with the condition of a wider gamut of the female gender in Iran. The new canvas included a girl child, a girl toddler left behind for adoption. a wide-eyed teenage girl, a pregnant mother whose spouse has been executed, a prostitute, the only wife of an expatriate doctor, the less-preferred first wife of a husband with two wives, a grandmother who wishes for a male grandchild and a possibly unmarried mother who can no longer support her girl child in Iran. The film's structure is somewhat similar to the later films of Robert Altman, presenting a collage of separate incidents involving varied characters that are somehow connected and come together at a crucial point.

The Circle begins and ends with a name of a woman--Solmaz Gholami--being called out through a door hatch. Interestingly, the film never introduces us to this character. It is apparently the name of a woman who has given birth to a girl child. The film instead introduces us to the grandmother of the child who is informed by the nurse that she is now has a girl grandchild. The hatch belongs to a white door of an operation theater in a hospital.

The film ends with the same name being called out from a similar hatch of another door—this time, it's a hatch of prison door of a room that holds most of the female adult characters that the viewer encounters in the film rounded up by the police for varied offences. Implicitly, the film states that women face discrimination from birth until death in Iran.

Evidently, the film suggests that someone had uttered a white lie earlier that the unseen Ms Gholami was to going to give birth to a boy after an ultrasound test of the foetus. The revised information of the arrival of the girl child upsets the grandmother living in a society that prefers a boy to a girl child.

In between the opening of the two hatches, the roving handheld camera underlines the state of an unusual group of women in Tehran, without identification papers or male chaperons, evading the police and a few eve-teasing males. The viewer is informed that most of the women (except the grandmother and two children) have either been paroled from prison or have escaped prison and are, therefore, on the run from the cops. Their original crimes are never stated. One woman is picked up by the police while she is making a call from a public phone booth. Once imprisoned, the women are afraid of the blot in their lives to the extent that they hide it from their husbands! They even run away from their own brothers who disapprove family members bearing children out of wedlock. Were these women imprisoned for possible sexual offences? None of the women seem to be politically active. They do not behave like petty criminals either. However, the film underlines one fact—if they are accompanied by either a husband or a father, or possess student identification papers, they would be relatively safe to move around freely. Some of these women are desperate to smoke a cigarette in public. They can only do so when the men (in the film, a policeman) are smoking in public! Yet these women do not wallow in self pity. They move on with resolute energy.

Mr Panahi is able to present interesting aspects of female bonding in Iran. Some women travel the extra mile to help other women in distress. Even a prostitute helps another woman to dodge the police. Then there are women who do not help others because they do not want their husbands to know that they were once behind bars. A mother leaves her girl child in the street in the hope that a stranger will provide a better life for her child. Who are these women ex-prisoners with no husbands? Are they representing the typical Iranian woman?

Any woman or sensitive man could be seduced by the subject of the film. However, the film ought to be evaluated beyond the obvious feminist issues. The film equally serves as a study of individuals (not just women) born into any society (and not just Iran) that deprives them of equal privileges. Many men shown in the film are caring men who help women in trouble rather than become their exploiters. Some policemen are arguably corrupt, yet decent, helpful cops are also shown. It would be presumptuous to classify The Circle as a feminist film merely because the female form covered in burkha/chador indicates a symbol of repression. The film is more humanist than feminist—which the director has asserted in interviews. One tends to agree with Mr Panahi on this point, if you accept the socio-cultural norms of Middle-East society, markedly different from Western and many Asian and African societies.

Women are indeed less equal than men in many parts of the Muslim world. I was privileged to visit Iran twice in recent years and interact with a cross-section of its population. Many women in Iran that I met are well educated, outspoken and enjoyed considerable freedom of movement without a shadow of obvious male dominance that Mr Panahi’s film indicates as an implicit requirement in the specific cases of his characters in this film. While Iranian women may not enjoy political clout, Iranian women do hold influential positions in education, law, research and business. They definitely do not require a man to chaperon them as suggested by the film.

However, it is likely that to abort a child in Iran is a difficult proposition as it would be in most other countries today. Similarly, it would be difficult in most countries for any young girl without identification papers to take a long distance bus ride all alone in the night. (Iranian women enjoy more relative freedom than their counterparts in Saudi Arabia—where women cannot even drive a car!) The unknown crimes of Mr Panahi’s women in The Circle are never clearly elucidated in the film except in the case of the prostitute. If they were political prisoners, there is no clue to substantiate this except that a pregnant woman states that her spouse has been recently executed. There is a wide-eyed girl who has never seen her village in recent years, who has evidently been in prison for some time. Why was she imprisoned in the first place? Do young women get imprisoned for no apparent reason?

Mr Panahi’s film seduces the viewer, until you begin to wonder, if even the fact that it was banned in Iran, is a viewer-seduction tool (many of the good Iranian films are banned in Iran, even though they do not contain sex or violence, merely because they are remotely critical of the current regime). The film was shot in Tehran and evidently the government did not have any problems at that time with the script. And then, bingo, it gets banned!

An interesting trivia to note is that the multiple international award-winning filmmaker Mr Panahi, who does not speak English, was treated like a terrorist in New York recently while changing international flights and kept in chains for a good part of a day just because he refused to be fingerprinted. The flip side is that Iranian immigration authorities are equally xenophobic of any non-Muslim entering that country even if they have proper papers.

I went up to Mr Panahi, 3 days after I viewed his film The Circle in Trivandrum, India, and congratulated him on having made an interesting film because I genuinely loved the film’s interesting elliptical structure and its wonderful performances by mostly non-professional actors. But some 3 months after I had viewed the film and reflected further on its contents, I am not sure if the film is as credible as I initially thought it was. Mr Panahi is obviously a very intelligent director who prefers to walk a tight rope by insinuating facts rather than stating them.

The Circle is an interesting film (made partly with Italian and Swiss resources) that offers considerable fodder for thought. As cinema, it is without doubt an intelligent work and deserved the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. It deserved the FIPRESCI award at San Sebastian. Yet it is a film that calls for close evaluation with an astute mind rather than with the heart of an impartial, impressionable viewer.

60. Spanish director Carlos Saura’s stunning documentary on the Portuguese folk song tradition "Fados" (2007): Direction upstaging the song and singer

Seventy-six year young Carlos Saura charmed film lovers with several melancholic dance, music and song styles: flamenco in Flamenco (1995), Blood Wedding (1981) and Sevillanas (1992); tango in Tango (1998); and finally, opera and flamenco in Carmen (1983). Then comes his latest film Fados, a heady mix of dance and melancholic Portuguese folk song rendered by mesmerizing singers such as Mariza and Carlos do Carmos…If you thought as I had, that I had seen all that the wizened genius from Spain could do, you will be pleasantly surprised. Fados is undoubtedly one of his finest films—forget the music, forget the song, forget the singers (if you possibly can!) and enjoy the art of fine direction.

I am forced to recall the US film Woodstock (1970). Millions would remember that wonderful film, but few would recall its director Michael Wadleigh. The gifted Wadleigh not only directed the fascinating documentary film, he was one of the cinematographers and one of the editors of the film. His assistant film director for the film was Martin Scorsese! If you enjoyed Woodstock’s groundbreaking editing, it is important to note that Wadleigh's editing collaborator was Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited each and every Scorsese movie since 1980. Now why am I writing about Woodstock instead of Fados? It is because, like Woodstock, Fados is very likely going to be discussed in years to come for its endearing music, song and dance, bypassing its vibrant cinematic ingredients. (See the shot of the film above and note the varied perspectives of the same scene, captured through multiple projections, recalling the shots of Woodstock--only Saura does the cinematic flourishes a lot better.)

The first few minutes into the film introduce you to breathtaking effect of the cinema of Fados. You have shadows of live individuals walking as they do on a street (you do not see them under direct light). These shadows fall on a screen where another film image is projected. The present and the past merge. As the opening credits roll, you realize you are being seduced by the kinetic images. And even up to the final shot of the film, you realize that you are under the spell of creative use of shadows, images, mirrors, projection screens and shiny reflecting dance floors. The final shot is of the film camera lens, which is the appropriate mainstay of the film—not the music, song and dance, which merely provides the subject for the director. Even the English subtitles were aesthetically placed in the left corner of the frame, so that the beauty of each shot is maximized for the viewer. The director conveys his viewpoint by using light and shadows that say a lot without words.

Saura has a great ear for music. No wonder he made all these movies on music, song and dance. Go back in history, and you will recall his most famous film, Cria cuervos (Cry ravens) (1975) featured a song called Porque te vas (Because you are leaving) sung by an American singer called Janette who was living at that time in Spain. The song had been released by the singer earlier but few took note of it. After Saura’s film won honors at Cannes, Janette’s song soared in popularity and became a worldwide hit. (Somewhat like Antonioni’s boost to Pink Floyd in Zabriskie Point, even though Pink Floyd was arguably quite famous by the time of film’s release) That was unfortunately the career high for the singer. Today, some 30 years after I saw Cria cuervos during a Saura retrospective in New Delhi, the notes of the song resound in my ears. Fados, like Cria cuervos, is a delight for those who can appreciate good music.


In Saura’s Fados, achievements are many. The film is entirely made on a set, eliminating extraneous sounds such as street noise. The Portuguese icons of song come to Spain to film the scenes—a clever canvas of light and shadows, dance and song, mirrors and projection screens that recall the brilliance of another of my favorite documentary films—Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler--a film from Germany. Like all Saura’s films there is some politics at play—his work is a cry for Iberian unity between two neighboring nations that never historically trusted the other. In an interview Saura stated that he was deliberately removing artists from their natural surroundings so that they could create “something new”. To Saura watchers, he is continuing his favorite exploration merging theatre and film, without being hemmed in by the boundaries of a written play.

After you enjoy the film, you might like to ask yourself the following questions. Why is the aging cinematic genius obsessed with melancholic music/dance styles? Is he urging his viewers to go beyond nationalism and adopt global perspectives in the very manner the Fado evolved? You get a feeling as a viewer that this old man is communicating through the camera more than what is obvious. He is able to present a melancholic song style with pulsating positive resonance, using all the tricks up his sleeve. Now that’s good cinema.

59. Veteran Czech director Jiri Menzel's "I Served the King of England" (2006): Social and political satire at its best

The works of Czech director Jiri Menzel constitute a tasty cocktail of humanism and laughter. In I served the King of England this cocktail is personified in the words spoken by the narrator and lead character early in the film: “It was always my luck to run into bad luck.” As in this film, Menzel’s innocent male country bumpkins have simplistic goals in life—get rich and charm the beautiful woman in their horizon. His films remind you of the social satire embedded in the works of Charles Chaplin and the visual gags in the cinema of Buster Keaton. Only Menzel’s body of work adds a dose of moral ambiguity that would be apparent only if you reflect on what was presented.

While Menzel’s cinema is often mistaken as being essentially portraying his genius, he actually rides on the shoulders of three major literary giants of the former Czechoslovakia—-Bohumil Hrabal, Vladislaw Vancura, and Zedenek Sverak. Menzel’s cinema provides a convenient “easy read” of the fine literary tradition to which Milan Kundera belongs, by bringing slivers of statements and observations, as recorded by these novelists, on the cinema screen. Menzel’s true artistic contribution is making the written word look attractive on screen with imaginative visual gags. Menzel's use of the camera angles and perspectives to bring out what was literary humor is truly remarkable for any student of cinema. The spoken words used in narration (the writer’s contribution) and carefully chosen actors serve as the pivot to enjoy the visual feast of Menzel’s cinema. His mastery of visual comedy has made a major difference to Czech cinema being associated with comedy and the related world of animated comedy rather than drama, quite unlike other East European cinema where tragedies and serious drama overshadowed the comedy genre.

I served the King of England is the sixth work of Hrabal that Menzel has adapted on screen—-the first being Closely watched trains (1966), a comedy film that is included in the Time magazine’s list of 100 most important films ever made.

Politicians find satire uncomfortable. It is not surprising that Hrabal’s novel I served the King of England was banned for years. When ultimately Menzel made it into a movie in 2006 using Hrabal’s script it won the FIPRESCI prize at Berlin and a handful of other minor awards. Menzel’s cinema (and Hrabal’s novels) has considerable political and social criticism. The film opens with clemency/pardon given to a prisoner who has almost completed his jail term. Communist political bigwigs wish to ape the capitalists, without a clue of what is required to gain social respect. Hrabal’s script is clearly critical of the communist regime: “People who said social work was ennobling were the same men who drank all night and ate with lovely young women seated on their knees." Butlers act superior to their new masters who do not know social etiquette. The new Czech communist politicos bend over backwards to please any one with the remotest of Russian credentials. It is no small wonder that Hrabal got into trouble with the authorities until the political regime changed in recent years.

Apart from political criticism, social criticism of Czechs get liberally dished out in the film. When the physically short-statured waiter Jan Dite (literally translated as Johnny Child) throws coins on the floor for fun, rich and poor Czechs crawl without social distinction on the floor to pick up the money, allowing the short-statured waiter to look down at those he was serving and emerge physically and socially “tall” for a brief period. There is another line that Hrabal/Menzel uses to describe Czechs and their actions over the decades “Czechs do not fight wars—therefore we were not invaded, we were annexed.” These are lines that will make many laugh, but these lines could make the author/ the director unpopular with a few who cannot take self criticism.

The quest for money and riches underpin I served the King of England in particular and much of Menzel’s cinema and any critical comment on such aspirations went down well with the old Communist regime in the former Czechoslovakia. Early in the film, the lead character is shown selling sausages at a railway station. So engrossed is he in counting the change he has to return to a customer who has given him a big bank note, that he is too late to notice that the train is pulling out with the angry customer fuming that he has been cheated of his change. But Hrabal and Menzel, you will recall, had together done a similar scene in Closely watched trains where a train pulls out as the young hero is about to kiss his love with eyes closed, taking away his beloved girl whose eyes are ironically open and the girl is agitated that the kiss was missed.

Chasing opportunities to make money is a recurring theme in I served the King of England. The anti-hero of the film has one ambition: become a millionaire. Another colorful character in the film keeps himself amused spreading out cash on the floor like a carpet. Money is what waiters get as tips if they are good and smart, sometimes enough to buy up the hotel as shown in this film. He gets a medal from an Ethiopian Head of State, modeled on the physical attributes of Haile Selassie; merely because he can bend down to receive it. He gets a huge tip because he is always strategically near to a rich guest doling out largesse.

After one has laughed sufficiently, one could reflect on the less obvious but darker side of Hrabal/Menzel’s contribution to cinema. Their women are lovely to look at. They bear a striking common factor—-they are all there to be won. They are to be used, often as useful commodities, by people with money and power. One Nazi girl makes love with our anti-hero, thinking of Hitler during the act. Interestingly, you do not see Hrabal and Menzel developing the women characters as they do their male ones. Hrabal lived alone with cats until he died precisely as he described a character’s death while feeding pigeons in a story he had written, which could well have been a suicide. Hrabal's own life seemed to be a lonely one, preferring cats to women. Hrabal and Menzel’s anti-heroes are “outsiders” in the society they live in, even though they made so many of us to laugh. In this film, the anti-hero is dismissed from his job because he is not a "good" Czech. But we, as viewers seem to love the "bad" Czech.

I served the King of England are the spoken credentials of a respected waiter in the film as he trains the lead character of the film. Yet the film is about a successful Czech who became a millionaire as he had dreamt, who married a Nazi and had enjoyed life when other Czechs were being led to the gas chambers, and was finally imprisoned when the Communists came to power. Was our anti-hero a winner or was he a loser? Hrabal and Menzel may have given us great comedy over six films. Evaluate the content closely and there is more to their work than pure comedy.

P.S. The famous Hungarian director Istvan Szabo gives a rare cameo appearance of a rich stock-market investor in this movie.

58. Portuguese director Teresa Prata's Mozambican film "Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land)" (2007): A lovely film based on a major African novel

Not many filmgoers may be aware of Portuguese director Teresa Prata’s Sleepwalking Land. A film that took Ms Prata some 7 years to complete, it is yet to be extensively screened beyond the international film festival circuit. The movie is evidently Ms Prata’s labor of love after she spotted a goldmine in Mia Couto’s Portuguese novel Sleepwalking Land published in 1992. The novel is now widely recognized as a major literary work from and on Africa in recent years. Extracts (translated into English) that I read indicate a remarkable, powerful literary work, falling within the realm of magical realism. It was indeed a work screaming to be captured on celluloid with the help of special effects and convincing local acting talent. The young lady grabbed the opportunity to shoot the film in Mozambique and do the special effects in Portugal. Today, her interesting movie adaptation is helping publicize Mia Couto’s writing even further and is bringing global attention to both the Mozambican and the Portuguese cinema.

Sleepwalking Land is one of the most interesting and realistic films on Africa. In the past two months, the film has won the international FIPRESCI award for the best film in competition at the recent Kerala film festival, and an award for best director at the lesser known Pune film festival.

African films, in my view fall into three distinct categories. The first category includes films made on African subjects by native Africans, as exemplified by the cinema of the late Ousmane Sembene. The second category includes movies made by African Arabs on subjects relating to north Africa and the Horn of Africa (e.g., films of Youssef Chahine in Egypt, Mohamad Asli and Souhel Ben Barka in Morocco, Mahamet Saleh Haroun in Chad). The third category is African cinema made by expatriates with a short exposure to Africa, blending external sensibilities with those of native Africans (e.g., Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala). Teresa Prata’s Sleepwalking Land will fall within that final category.

The book Sleepwalking Land and the film based on the novel are both set during the 15-year civil war that crippled Mozambique. Mia Cuoto has a gifted philosophical turn of phrase to describe the catastrophe of the war: “what’s already burnt can’t burn again.” The film (as in the book) looks back wistfully at the tragedy of the unrest through the eyes of a dreaming orphan boy and provides a glimmer of hope for the survivors of civil anarchy to cope with what is left to build anew. While Mia Cuoto and Teresa Prata focus on the social and economic plight of Mozambique, their respective works can equally mirror the problems of the continent.

The film follows a young orphaned Mozambican boy Muidinga (an endearing performance by an acting novice, Nick Lauro Teresa), who can fortunately read as he had once attended school and is even familiar with Melville’s Moby Dick, and his unrelated, illiterate guardian, a wise old man called Tuahir (played by non-professional actor Aladino Jasse), tossed accidentally together by the civil war. The film and the book trace their common will to survive the difficult days. The young boy might have read, or rather heard, the story of Moby Dick, but the name is indelible in his memory. Director Teresa Prata, who adapted the story for cinema, therefore takes creative license, and allows the young boy to call his pet goat “Mody (sic) Dick.” (When I queried the director on this detail, she stated that she was responsible for this change and that it was not part of Couto’s book.)

The film and book have two parallel plots. The young boy and the old man, on the run in the bushes from marauding, gun-toting factions of the civil war, come across a charred bus with burnt corpses and their possessions that escaped the fire. Among the possessions of the dead passengers are notebooks that describe a story of a woman named Farida, a squatter on an abandoned ship, waiting for her young son to find her, and a hardworking young man Kindzu, who has fled his burning village that has faced the wrath of the civil war-mongers. In this discovered manuscript, Kindzu meets Farida. Subsequently, Kindzu goes searching for Farida’s lost son.

The young boy narrates the tale to the illiterate old man, after reading the manuscript, and begins to associate Farida as his lost mother. He even imagines the name of the ship she is squatting on is called “Mody (sic) Dick” (again, Ms Prata’s contribution to the story).

A strength common to the book and the film is that the parallel love story of Farida and Kindzu never takes center stage—the backbone remains the dreams of the young boy under the guiding spirit of the wise old man. Between the two, the viewer of the film is introduced to the problems of Mozambique, of Africa, of any developing country. As in a Greek tragedy, you trudge along a path that gives you a notion of travel and progress, only to return to the same spot, literally and metaphorically.

Here is a sample dialog from the film/book:
"But isn't it more dangerous on the road, Tuahir? Isn't it better to hide in the bush?"
"Not at all. Here we can watch the passersby. Don't you see?"
"You always know everything, Tuahir."
"It's no use complaining. You're to blame: isn't it you who wants to find your parents?"
"That's right. But the bandits are the only ones to pass by along the road."
"If the bandits come, we'll act like we're dead. Pretend we died along with the bus."

Pretense and dreams make the film move forward. To aid the young boy on his “journey” to his “loving mother Farida” squatting on “Mody (sic) Dick,” the old man devises the means to reach the sea (Indian Ocean) from the bushes of Mozambique. The old man digs a hole in the ground. Water sprouts and a stream forms. The stream becomes a river and at the end of the river there is the ocean. In the Ocean, the lead characters find the derelict “Mody (sic) Dick” with Farida on it. Obviously, if you demand conventional realism—there is very little that the film can offer. If you accept magical realism as a tool to narrate a realistic socio-political scenario in Africa, both Mia Couto and Teresa Prata have much to offer and delight your senses.

The viewer gets a glimpse Couto’s Mozambique. An elderly Portuguese lady chooses to remain in her house even when her servants have fled. A Gujarati shopkeeper family that opts to return to India, when their shop is ransacked during the war. There are railroads that have no trains to run on them. But among the ruins, Couto and Prata, show a glimmer of hope in the form of an orphan, learning hard lessons of life in the bush. Ms Prata has made a fine effort to extract remarkable performances from non-professional actors and has proven her capability to adapt and direct an interesting work that would be interesting for any person interested in good African cinema. This film may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it is certainly a fine example of good African cinema made by a gifted and persevering lady from another continent.

For the intelligent viewer, the writer and the director throw a silent challenge. Spot the real Captain Ahab and spot the real Moby Dick that confronts Africa today and you could enjoy the film even more. The description of a civil-war torn country as a sleepwalking land offers fodder for thought, beyond the usual images of violence, poverty and carnage that adorn the typical African cinema.

P.S. The above review was included in "The Directory of World Cinema: Africa (Intellect Books, UK: eds. Blandine Stefanson and Sheila Petty; 2015; 302 pages; ISBN 9781783203918)."

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. A more detailed evaluation of this film and two others by three directors who belong to the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers appear in this author's academic paper "Family Values and Tradition: perspectives of three contemporary Chinese filmmakers." Films of China and Korea (2009) Silhouette VII: pages 42-53." The other two Fifth Generation filmmakers of China in the academic article are Zhang Yimou and Zhang Yang. A peculiar aspect of this generation is that the surnames and first names of directors often get changed in order of appearance. Two other films discussed in the above article are reviewed on this blog: Zhang Yimou's Not One Less and Changwei Gu's Peacock. (Click on the names of the films in this post script to access the reviews)