86. Actor Tommy Lee Jones’ debut directorial effort "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" (USA/France) (2005): Amazing grey actions in life

The more you reflect on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the more you begin to appreciate what the value-added film has to offer the viewer.

Many have seen the film and considered it to be yet another tale on the US Border Patrol actions ensuring that economically deprived Mexicans do not cross over into US territory illegally. Some US viewers have taken to a knee-jerk dislike for the movie because it shows the US law enforcers in a poor light with touches of racism. It was probably this undercurrent of emotions that deprived the film of an Oscar, while it picked up two distinguished awards at the Cannes Festival (Best Actor for Jones, and Best Screenplay for the Mexican scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga) and the Grand Prize at Flanders International Film Festival (an official FIAPF A-grade festival held in Belgium).

If the obvious subject of the film and the non-linear story reminds you of the celebrated film Babel and its border crossing sequences it is partly because both films have scripts written by the talented Guillermo Arriaga (who also wrote the scripts of 21 Grams and the Mexican film Amores Perros). If you are familiar with the scripts of Arriaga, you will understand the writer digs deep into people’s actions, their causes and the ripple effect of those actions.

Some viewers have perceived the Tommy Lee Jones’ film as a modern Western. It does have horses, cowboys, lassos, rifle shooting, and a typical Western ending of a hero riding off on a horse to God-knows where while someone you least expect to care about the rider shout “You gonna be all right?”

This is the defining stamp of Arriaga’s scripts that evidently attracted Jones’ sensitive mind. Who are we to judge human actions? Can we judge human actions without empathy? A man who appears as a good guy with values can kidnap a man for a moral cause that he considers to be important and cross over international borders with impunity just as in the Wild West in these days when man-made laws, national and international, seem to be in place. A man who does not have empathy for his sweetheart-turned-wife or for illegal Mexicans, who have done him no harm, eventually begins to care for his brutal captor and empathize with his captor's values (is it a case of Stockholm syndrome or a new awakening of values?). A Mexican lady, who had her nose broken while being arrested by a US border patrolman, instead of seeking revenge, saves the patrolman’s life after he is bit by a deadly snake, but pours hot coffee on him when he recovers. A woman, who has enjoyed sex outside marriage to color her dull life, when push comes to shove, chooses to stay on with her husband rather than run off with her true love. A lawman who intended to shoot with a rifle an escaping kidnapper opts not to do so, even after getting the target well within the sights of his rifle. Each of these personalities presents the viewer neither a black nor a white character but a grey one that may not become obvious to many during a first casual viewing of the film.

If violence is considered an attribute of westerns, Jones’ film has its essential doses of beatings, cruel dragging of people by the rope, and shooting bullets to scare individuals into submission. Yet the violence in Jones’ film seems to serve a larger purpose, of underscoring the lack of empathy towards lesser privileged human beings, especially the lack of compassion of citizens of the developed world towards those of less developed countries seeking a better life. The violence actually reforms hitherto uncaring characters. To merely interpret this film as a depiction of US-Mexican border issues or a cruel film would be to miss the wood for the trees.

Mexican scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga made similar suggestions in Babel where characters were painted with ambiguous strokes of his pen. In Babel too, an innocent action of a Japanese gifting a rifle to a Moroccan guide leads to tragedies with a domino effect across continents. Thus good actions and intentions evolved into costly mistakes in Babel. But Arriaga shifts gears in his transition from Babel to The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. The actions of all characters (cowboys, waiters, policemen, illegal aliens and their facilitators) seem to be entwined in the micro-cosmos of the US-Mexican border, not across continents. Interestingly, the viewer will note that each character has a positive streak that comes through in the film—not one character in the film is truly evil (or conversely, a saint) This presents a remarkable shift from Hollywood scripts that loves to paint the good guys white and the bad guys black in character, to the extent that often the good guys even rode white horses in conventional Westerns.

A viewer of Babel and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada will note the emphasis both scripts lay on the institution of the family. In the latter, we have five families in the spotlight. The first is the young patrolman’s family breaking up due to lack of empathy that the patrolman rues while watching a US TV serial in the wilds of Mexico. The second is the family of the restaurant owner and his waitress wife, who is mature enough to stay married. The third is the enigmatic Estrada family, imagined or real, that "seems" to have bonds of steel. The fourth is the dream family of the Tommy Lee Jones’ character Pete Perkins with the wife of the restaurant owner’s wife. The fifth, the most profound one presented, is of a blind man and his son, the only remnant of his family, who he knows will never return to care for him because of a terminal illness. What a fascinating array of different tugs and pulls on the institution of family is presented in this lovely film.

I am not surprised that actor Jones realized this script offered a great stepping-stone for him to enter the world of film direction. I commend Jones for not letting Pete's character overshadow the other mosaic of characters because eventually this film is not about one individual. Jones' film encourages the viewer to perceive shades of ourselves in the film's characters. However, I am delighted that the Cannes Jury recognized Jones' contribution as an actor in his own directorial debut. Further, Jones’ selection of Chris Menges as his cinematographer in the film was a smart move as Menges has a penchant to capture natural beauty in all his films. The beauty of the landscape offers a a lovely backdrop for the quilt of characters that make up the movie.

There is a report that director Jones gave each crew member a copy of Albert Camus's novel The stranger. If it is true, Jones ought to be credited as a thinker among Hollywood personalities as well. The existentialist/absurdist/nihilist novel provides interesting parallels to Jones' film. The novel begins with sensual passages and ends with actions/responses deprived of emotions or empathy. The actions of Pete in the movie does somewhat mirror those of Meursault in the novel of the Nobel Prize winning French author.

It is to the credit of Jones and Arriaga that the film does not bring the story to an ideal closure. While a promise made by a friend to another, even though both belonged to different countries and financial worlds, is kept, the viewer has to reach an independent conclusion about the dead man’s family. Was it real or a product of a vivid imagination? What is real and sacred for Jones and Arriaga are that the film underscores values of friendship, religion (Pete’s refusal to kill the blind man) and respect for other individuals.

While watching the film, I was constantly reminded of the parallels between this film and a Chinese film by director Zhang Yang called Getting Home (Luo ye gui gen) (2007) another story of a man carrying his friends corpse for burial in his native village because of a promise made earlier, defying all national laws. The Chinese director has always claimed that his film made two years after Jones’s film was based on a true life incident in China. Both films are interesting movies; the Chinese film offers dark, social comedy, while the US film presents a larger canvas of serious moral and ethical issues.

P.S. The films Babel and Getting Home have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

85. British director Roland Joffe’s “The Mission” (1986) (UK): A script for all seasons

The Mission is a movie set in South America delving on the Spanish/Portuguese colonization in the 17th century. Some viewers of the film could consider it to be an interesting treatise on how the Catholic Jesuit priests went about converting the indigenous Guarani population who lived in the environs of present-day Paraguay. To other viewers, the film would be an interesting take on religion versus the state (here the Portuguese and the Spanish), where religion and freedom gets smothered by forces only interested in financial gain. To yet another group of viewers, the film underlines the capacity of indigenous people to fend for themselves in a free world ("I see no difference between this plantation and my own," comments a slave owner in the film, while a Jesuit priest answers emphatically: "That is the difference: This plantation is theirs."). And to many, the film could appear to be a disconnected effort with three heroes, or rather three anti-heroes—a well-meaning Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons), a slave-trader turned priest (Robert de Niro), and a powerful Cardinal (Ray McAnally), a man who realizes that he is actually a pawn to bigger forces, each gradually sucked into a quicksand of defeat, both spiritual and political.

Having seen The Mission twice after a gap of 20 years, I am convinced that there are two distinct ways to appreciate the film. One way is to appreciate the film’s technical (visual and aural) splendor, well appreciated separately at the Cannes film festival and at the Oscars. The Mission won the Cannes film festival’s highest honors: the Golden Palm for director Roland Joffe and another technical grand prize for Joffe. The film won a solitary Oscar for its remarkable photography by cinematographer Chris Menges. The British Academy (BAFTA) too chose to honor the music of Morricone, the acting of Ray McAnally (who played Cardinal Altmirano) and finally, the editing. These accolades underline the first approach, I suggest for evaluating the film.

The other approach would be to look at the depth of a remarkable story and script of Robert Bolt, which is based on historical facts, an effort distinctly lauded by the Golden Globes and the Evening Standard film awards (both chosen by media persons, not film industry personnel). Yes, the original script is one of the final formidable works of the screenplay writer who gave us the existential Lawrence of Arabia, and the remarkable scripts of Ryan’s Daughter, Dr Zhivago, and A Man for All Seasons. The Golden Globes honored The Mission’s script (Robert Bolt) and its music (the maestro Ennio Morricone). The Evening Standard Film Awards honored McAnally and Bolt. This latter set of awards underscores the second approach I suggest to appreciate the film.

The first approach to appreciate the film would be to acknowledge Joffe’s ability in choosing the major actors, Menge's ability to capture the natural beauty of the Iguazu falls, Joffe's strong visual metaphors of religious penance of dragging heavy armour up a cliff and the eventual liberation from the emotional baggage, the intelligent editing of the shots of the crucified priest flowing down the falls or even the capturing the silence enveloping a troubled Cardinal in a near-empty church, and finally the magic of Ennio Morricone’s music that provides the core of the film’s strength, a fact that the film reminds its viewers with the symbolic shots of a broken oboe and a shattered violin towards the end. I consider these to be aspects of the movie that are more obvious to appreciate.

The second and more complex approach would be to study the script closely. To appreciate the originality of the marvellous and yet seemingly disconnected script, it is essential to know the mind of writer of the story/script: Robert Bolt. Bolt was born into a strict Methodist family that insisted on attending church three times each Sunday. It was natural that he would revolt and after age 16, when his father allowed him to make up his own mind, he never again attended church. (Not unlike the life of the formidable Ingmar Bergman to whom The Mission’s script has a strange connection, which I will discuss shortly.) Bolt became a Marxist, joined the Communist party, and then quit the party when he was disillusioned. For him, as is evident in his magnificent screenplays, the individual with a strong morality has to face constant conflicts between idealism and society’s requirements of the individual to conform.He went on to write an existential take on T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom for Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The story/script of The Mission was one of the three works written after a heart stroke that led to partial paralysis in 1979. It was written between his two marriages to Sarah Miles—marriages and a relationship that were reminiscent of the Burton-Taylor double marriages. The script was written at a time when he was physically and psychologically troubled.

Now consider a Leftist who abjured the Church choosing to write a story/script on a very spiritual subject of the Jesuits converting natives of South America into Christianity against the backdrop of Portuguese and Spanish politics of colonization and slavery of the natives. Obviously, for Bolt, the interesting aspect was not religion as much as the moral conflict between the Jesuits and the politics of the colonizers somewhat like his earlier celebrated scripts. A memorable part of Bolt’s script is when the Catholic colonizers, who enslave the Guaranis like animals, arguing and insisting that they don’t have souls. There is evidence that Bolt was egged on to write the passionate script by The Mission’s co-producer Fernando Ghia. The script adds significance when it becomes obvious that the main character is neither the Jesuit priest nor the slave-trader–turned-Jesuit in spite of the casting assuming otherwise and confounding viewers used to relating to equating importance of characters with top billed actors. The center stage is actually left for the visiting Cardinal (played by a lesser known actor) who begins and ends the film.

Yet the director Joffe almost kills Bolt’s script in the final film version possibly trying to elevate the roles of de Niro and Irons above that of McAnally. How else can one explain that the most crucial lines of the film are spoken by McAnally AFTER the long end credits of the film have rolled—not even as a voice over but as regular film! The words are “So, your Holiness, now your priests are dead, and I am left alive. But in truth it is I who am dead, and they who live. For as always, your Holiness, the spirit of the dead will survive in the memory of the living.” Why would Joffe have this appendage? I remember being stunned by the darkened screen full of alphabet soup suddenly coming alive, when most of the audience had trooped out of the cinema hall, under the impression the film was over. Even if it was a post-script, why tag this crucial scene after the end credits—it’s as if Joffe was uncomfortable with Bolt’s canvas and yet did not have the strength to delete the scene or those words and was hiding them from scrutiny. (Evidently there has been a subsequent rethink--please read the postscript.)  Somewhat like director Michael Cacoyannis hiding the crucial reference to contemporary Greek politics, after the end credits, when he made The Trojan Women, to possibly escape the domestic backlash in Greece.

Apparently director Joffe and its co-producer David Puttnam wanted to make a film related to the San Salvador conflict and Bolt and Ghia gave them a script on 17th Century that was quite different in spirit and substance depicting genocide in the wilds of South America in the 1750s.

Bolt, who had earlier in life revolted against Christianity, in this script went on to take a leaf of what Ingmar Bergman did 25 years before him in Through a Glass Darkly (the title is a phrase from the Corinthians chapter) and what Kieslowski a doubtful atheist did six years later in Three colors: Blue weave the elements of Christian love from the same chapter of the Bible, I Corinthians Chapter 13, a chapter on love and maturity read out by the slave trader (de Niro) before he takes up priesthood. Rodrigo Mendoza (de Niro) repeats the words “Though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth and love is kind. Love envieth not. Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. But now abideth faith, hope, love... these three. But the greatest of these is love.” These Biblical lines are also pivotal to and read out in another brilliant film: Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Banishment (2007).

I have mentioned the Kieslowski-Blue connection already. Blue was a film that also revolved around an unfinished musical piece of a dead composer and interestingly the widow of the composer picks up the Bible, zeroes in on the Corinthians chapter and suggests adding more flute to the additional music score for completing the composition. Is it a coincidence that another maestro Ennio Morricone, who wrote the absolutely adorable award winning theme music of The Mission, has basically built the composition around oboes and flutes?

Culture critic Michael Medved called the film “anti-religious” because “it focused on cowardly eighteenth-century ecclesiastical officials who sold out idealistic Jesuit missionaries and their converts to profit-minded Portuguese imperialists and slave traders.” The film begins with killing of priests and ends with more of the same. The final end-title is a quote from the Bible "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:5). If this was a contribution of Bolt, it paves the way for more thought about Bolt, the man, rather than Bolt the scriptwriter. Bolt’s script presents a tragedy that resembles Greek tragedies where the downfall of the hero is inevitable. Like Bolt’s script of A Man for all Seasons, the script of The Mission too is about acts of conscience. Director Stanley Kubrick is quoted as having said that The Mission “reached deeper into the psyche than words, of that uncommon plant, that endangered species, of the spirit of 1 Corinthians 13”.

For the reflective viewer, the central figure of the film is truly the Cardinal. And this film is clearly an example of Bolt’s brilliance towering over Joffe’s intelligent craftsmanship

P.S. The movies Through a Glass Darkly, Blue, The Banishment and Ryan's Daughter have been reviewed earlier on this blog. In more recent alternate versions of  The Mission, the post-credit sequence discussed above has been reduced to a silent one and the spoken lines that once were spoken in the appended scene, is now included before the credits. Obviously a rethink has taken place, But why retain a silent abbreviated post-credits scene even after the crucial spoken lines were moved within the main movie as it ought to have been in the first place?

84. Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Trzy kolory: Czerwony" (Three Colors: Red) (1994):The color at the rainbow's edge and the optical spectrum

Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge) is the last film made by a master of cinema. Having made his stunning 10-part Dekalog and following it by Three colors trilogy of Blue, White and Red, Kieslowski openly stated that he was retiring at the age of 52. He was, of course, co-writing the script with Krzysztof Piesiewicz for yet another trilogy—Heaven (later made into a film directed by Tom Tykwer), Purgatory and Hell (loosely based on Dante’s Divine Comedy). And guess what, he dies at 54, following a heart surgery, as though his life was snuffed out according to a cosmic plan that Kieslowski was aware of. Among his ardent admirers were/are Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino. It was as if, nearing the end of his life, he was stating from a cinematic cross the words “it is finished’ before he commended his spirit to the doctors and the world. Health and religion were strange bedfellows for Kieslowski, his father a tuberculosis patient, and he himself feigning physical frailty to avoid the army draft.

The brilliant scripts of the two Krzysztofs and the music of a fascinating composer Zbigniew Preisner dazzle the inquisitive mind. (The films of Kieslowski where the two Krzysztofs did not collaborate pale in comparison with the works of Kieslowski without the other Krzysztof, which only underlines the role of Piesiewicz as a great screenwriter!) The stories are constructed as engaging puzzles that provide more entertainment as we figure out the myriad connections. While the three films of the three colors trilogy are “standalone” stories, the final film Red ends with the appearance of six individual characters, two each from Blue, White, and Red. It becomes more fascinating when we realize the three colors referred to the three colors of the French flag and that each of the three films was a meditation on the three terms it represented, liberty for Blue, equality for White and fraternity for Red. Big deal, you could say, and point out that the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone had done that before Kieslowski by making a 1981 film called Bianco, Rosso e Verdone based on the Italian flag’s colors. But Kieslowski’s allegiance to the French flag was purely pecuniary—the French were bankrolling the films.

The planning and the making of the three films Blue, White, and Red are truly remarkable. Blue was made for the Venice Festival just as White was made for Berlin and Red for Cannes—the three top film festivals. The three films made the prestigious competition grade at each of the festivals within a span of one calendar year (1993-4)!! How many directors could plan all that and actually make that grade? Again the cynical mind would say that is achievable if you know the selectors of the three distinguished festivals. But hold on, characters (and the actors who play them) appear in each of the other films, making the larger connection between the three distinct tales. Imagine getting actors to play small roles in other films, before or after they play the bigger role in another.

Viewing Red critically is nothing short of a study of fascinating, innovative cinema. Red is a cinematic rumination on "fraternity.” Fraternity envisages connections and the two Krzysztofs begin the film with telephone calls, discuss the sophisticated, illegal eavesdropping of telephone calls, and newspaper headlines and photographs interconnecting people far and near. The story of Red is of a young Swiss model living in Geneva, who through a literal accident connects up with a retired judge who is living alone. The judge is old enough to be her father, yet has no family and is a misanthrope. A platonic relationship develops between them. Another accident brings the Swiss model in contact with a new-found lifelong partner. For a casual viewer of Red that would be the plot outline. Red offers much, much more for an astute viewer.

Even the village idiot will note the color coding that Kieslowski deliberately uses, but what is less obvious is his play with the concepts of fraternity, of connections, of relationships. Undersea phone cables that begin the movie suggest the modern physical mode of making connections. The film ends with connections that are not so easily explained. Survivors of a sea accident, once strangers now bond together through a larger cosmic scheme of chance. Knowing the two Krzysztofs' penchant for biblical allusions/parallels after they made/wrote the fascinating 10-part Dekalog, I tend to agree with Dave Kehr’s interpretation in Film Comment (Nov-Dec 1994) of the “retired judge” (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) “is that Old Testament God, but a pathetically diminished one, whose power extends to light bulbs but not lightning, and whose apparent control over the winds and seas may be explained by the fact that he knows a good number to call for a personalized weather forecast.”

Any evaluation of Kieslowski's films, Dekalog and after, has to go beyond the simplistic story-line. His films offer much more. I have written earlier that a clue to evaluating Blue lies in the choral music (rendering of I Corinthians, Chapter 13, a chapter in the New Testament of the Bible), heard towards the end of the film. In Red, a dog leads a not-so religious benefactor into a near-empty church. Which intelligent dog would do that, unless its master frequented that place or lived in that abode? A close look at the character of the “retired judge”, clearly indicates that he can put strangers together like a cosmic puppeteer, that he knows the brother of the new-found friend is a drug addict even though they have never met, that he can manipulate the future actions of those he cares for, and even be truthful in confessing his guilt of eavesdropping. Much of Red can be a virtual class for aspiring directors and screenwriters as you realize a final shot on a TV news capsule is incredibly similar to the heroine’s face captured on posters for an advertisement shown much earlier in real time through a different medium. The two Krzysztofs are enticing the viewer to connect to the bigger picture. Even sequences in Red, such as the drinking of the liqueur by the retired judge and his new and only friend harks back to Dekalog 8, where two women, one a lonely woman finding a young friend, separated by time, share a hot beverage while they bond together. In all the Three color films, an old person is trying deposit a glass bottle into a trash bin, an action watched by major characters of each of the three films. However, its only in Red that the film's major character steps forward to help, underlining fraternity.

There is so much to delve into Red. There are seven rocks that get thrown at the judge’s house by angry neighbors, there are seven survivors of the sea tragedy, and interestingly there are seven puppies born of Rita the main dog. There are two dogs in the film with two owners. And the dog-master relationship survives all the turbulences in their respective masters’ lives. What a great performance from actor Trintignant, capping a brilliant international acting career that included a somewhat parallel role in Costa-Gavras’ Z, where he plays a judicial magistrate.

The bolero of composer Zbigniew Preisner is not out of place if you compare it with Bizet's bolero. You don’t see a bullfight with all the red colors flashing—what you do see on screen are two tales of two men who pass an examination because they study a lesson highlighted by an accident only to become lawyers and have two different girlfriends who betray their love and trust. The duality is not unlike a bullfight for the viewer’s mind. Are the two men, separated by age, the very same individual? The elder lawyer never has a physical relationship with the heroine, but the film suggests the younger one will indeed have a happy marital relationship. What one individual could not attain in life is found by the alter ego through an “accident’, with the help of a force beyond his knowledge. But both love dogs and ultimately the same woman.

Kieslowski made films that connected people and acknowledge a force that greater than themselves (Red and Dekalog 1). Yet many argue that Kieslowski was an atheist. I tend to think that it was a mask that he wore for convenience. Either way he was a thinker, and his later films make you think. However, if I were asked which was the best of the three films in the trilogy, I would choose White, the most enigmatic of the three (after all, white color is made up of blue. red and other colors of the rainbow, or as painter would say, add the additive colors red, blue, and green to obtain white!).

Kieslowksi told the Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Kiefer "Film is often just business -- I understand that and it's not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone."

What a great filmmaker and what a great mind!



P.S. I was fortunate to have had a brief chat with Kieslowski with the help of an interpreter at the Bangalore Filmotsav 80 (International Film Festival) in January 1980. He was accompanied by the First Secretary of the Polish Embassy in New Delhi, who was interpreting for him. The diplomat was eager that I would do an interview of Kieslowski but I was not keen about the prospect as I had only seen his Camera Buff, which even today does not impress me even though it won the grand prize at Moscow. Further, Kieslowski did not seem at home speaking in English in 1980. How he became proficient in English to give interviews to Los Angeles Times within 14 years shows yet another aspect of his personality. And it’s in those 14 years he bloomed into a genius. Instead of interviewing Kieslowski, I chose instead to interview the Cuban master filmmaker Tomas Alea attending the same festival. I was probably one of very few who was honored with that privilege. How I wish I had a similar opportunity of interviewing Kieslowski after he made Dekalog and the Three Colors trilogy!



Three Colors White and Blue have been reviewed earlier on this blog. So are Dekalog Parts 5 and 7.

83. German director Tom Tykwer’s film “Das parfum (Perfume: The story of a murderer)” (2006): Capturing the smell of the bizarre with sight and sound

German cinema through the ages has shown an incredible felicity of dealing with the bizarre. And Das Parfum is no exception. The 1920 silent film of Robert Wiene called The Cabinet of Dr Caligari laid the foundation for world cinema to deal with the hallucinations of an insane mind. The film was an expressionist classic for any student of cinema. German classics that followed over the years (Marnau’s Nosferatu, Fritz Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr Mabuse, von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, films of the Oberhausen school that included Syberberg, Herzog, Wenders and Fassbinder) have captured the aberrations of the human mind on film in a way that no other country could match in terms of quality or numbers. Then along comes Tom Tykwer holding the very torch that Robert Wiene lit almost a century ago.

Confronted with a screenplay of a bestseller that at least four major filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Milos Forman, and Ridley Scott thought was difficult to capture on film, Tom Tykwer has proved the masters wrong. He has quite effectively adapted Patrick Suskind’s bestselling novel Perfume on screen. And he was able to capture the “essential” smell of the novel on screen with sight and sound.

Tykwer presents the viewer a film on a murderer with little or no visual violence (recall Fritz Lang’s M). There is no sex either. Tykwer presents a not so ugly-actor, Ben Whishaw, as an ugly/repulsive personality Jean-Baptiste Grenouille on screen. The character speaks only a few lines but has to "speak" instead with his body (recall the silent films Dr Caligari and Marnau's Nosferatu). Tykwer presents visuals that are strangely expressionist in character (the abject filth of the fish market, where the lead character is born or the amazing, sudden, metaphoric collapse of the house of the leading Parisian perfumer, Baldini, played by Dustin Hoffman, in which he lived and worked). Tykwer is able to visually suggest the foul smell of the fish market, just as Goscinny and Uderzo created the “foul smelling” fishmonger Unhygienix and his wife Bacteria in the Asterix comic strips. If the viewer has been fortunate to have viewed Wiene's Dr Caligari or Marnau's Nosferatu one could spot an unnerving resemblance with Tykwer's visuals. Both visually exaggerate to drive home a psychological perspective. The lengthened black and white shadows of the earlier films are not far removed from the visual repulsion of the fish market captured in color in Tykwer's work or even the strange abode of perfumer Baldini designed for the film. In Tykwer's film, realism is replaced by a new type of expressionism. Anyone looking for conventional realism, will not find it in this film.

The film and the book, on which it is based, present the 18th century fictional story of man born in filth and foul odor who has a highly developed sense of smell and can even smell stones and glass that most of find odorless. He is ugly and despised. He is hated by one and all. Tykwer’s film initially encourages the viewer to hate the character who has killed 13 beautiful virgins for the bizarre requirement of their body smell to make the ultimate perfume that would diminish hate and develop love. Perfume is not a real story; it is a modern fable that digs at the viewer’s sensibilities. A viewer is prodded to figure out what the director and the story-teller are suggesting. How much science is there in this fable? We do know of plants and animals exuding pheromones. We also know that the females of species exude them. The main character of the film/novel likewise collects the odors of young women, not of men.

An interesting aspect of the film is that most of the talking is done by the peripheral characters in the tale. Ben Whishaw has to emote in different ways while animating his extraordinary olfactory sensibilities and Tykwer aids this by employing close-ups of his nose. The casting is an imaginative one—Whishaw is a talented Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) alumnus while the three major conventional roles are given to established actors Dustin Hoffman, John Hurt and Alan Rickman.

 "It could not turn him into a person who could love" 

A casual viewer would approach the film as a thriller about murders--which the film is indeed at the most basic level. But the film is much more—it is a film about love in a world full of hatred. Can we love the wretched of the earth that are ugly, smelly and poor? Novelist Victor Hugo wrote about the unforgettable hunchback of Notre Dame who was only loved by one person and hated by all others. Can a perfume-like agent change our attitudes? Can a perfume-like agent transform the appearance of an ugly person into a desirable one?

For those interested, Suskind’s novel and Tykwer’s film are replete with parallel Christian symbolism, with ugly Grenouille representing both the devil and Christ, the "crucifixion", and the change of heart of the average person after “the event,” the importance of love in a world bereft of love, etc. The list goes on. But the film entertains even without the suggested symbolism. Over the years writers and filmmakers have come up with individuals who personify both the good and the evil. This movie is another example of cinema where the viewer will be encouraged to read the novel after enjoying the film, if the viewer has not read the book already.

For some, the film will serve as a source of knowledge of the two methods of extracting perfumes—maceration and enfleurage. The film’s story takes us to the fields where flowers are grown to extract their essence/oils and this practice is prevalent to this day.

Tykwer’s film uses the narrator (the soothing John Hurt’s voice) to infuse the element of a chorus as in Greek play. “There was only one thing the perfume could not do. It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else. So, to hell with it he thought. To hell with the world. With the perfume. With himself.” This technique allows for the viewer to believe the narrator to be neutral.

The film ends with the narrator stating “For the first time in their lives, they believed they had done something purely out of love” Tykwer’s end is philosophical, positive and seemingly uplifting. A reader of the novel will know what actually transpired. Tykwer opts for visual suggestions on screen at the end of the tale thereby avoiding a graphic description of the end. A close look at the final shot will reveal the director's contribution. It was an astute move by the director to win his audience. Tykwer needs to be complimented for every decision he seems to have taken, in making this movie. He made an impact with his unusually different cinema in Run, Lola Run (his debut film ) and I believe he was equally successful with his second film based on the late Kieslowski’s script Heaven, which I have yet to view.

Tom Tykwer, luckily for us, seems to have identical cinematic genes as those of Wiene, Marnau, von Sternberg, Herzog and Syberberg. Predictably, the film has won many awards in German speaking nations but not elsewhere. You might not like Tykwer's films initially, but they are films that will not be easy to forget not just because of the unusual subjects but equally for his cinematic treatment of the subjects.

82. US director-screenplay writer Tony Gilroy’s debut film “Michael Clayton” (2007): A screenplay, a writer would like to direct without compromises

Michael Clayton is an unusual Hollywood film of substance. Unusual it is, for several reasons.

Rarely does a Hollywood film get released with a title of a fictional non-entity because it defies reasonable marketing strategies to win audiences. Erin Brockovich was a somewhat related film but there was a real person and real events behind that film’s title to attract audiences. Ed Wood was another example of a film with such a non-descript film title with just a person’s name-but again it was a biography of a real person. People who knew Ed Wood would show interest. But, Michael Clayton? The character Michael Clayton (played by George Clooney) is the product of screenplay-writer Tony Gilroy’s figment of imagination. And more surprisingly, the title character is not that of a fictional superman or a ladies man or even a high-flying lawyer. The burnt-out lawyer’s own admission in the movie is a hyperbole that rings in your ears as the film un-spools “I am not a miracle worker. I am a janitor.” Any sensitive viewer would be hooked by the Graham Greene like anti-hero’s pronouncement. And cleverly, the statement is placed early in the film by the screenplay-writer to hook the viewer.

Further, the movie is not based on a novel. It evolved from the observations of a talented screenplay-writer Gilroy who was astutely observing life in major US law firms while writing the screenplay of The Devil’s Advocate which had Al Pacino playing a leading role. Following Gilroy’s success as the screenplay-writer of the trio of fast-paced action films—Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum--Gilroy seems to have gathered confidence to weave a yarn bereft of the Bourne-type action but instead infused the tale with the adrenalin surges associated with insidious yet deadly corporate games. Here devious murders and explosions take place along the periphery of the main story—personal battles of three individuals, two men and a woman—all legal worthies of different hues--while confronting ethical issues.

Is the film offering entertainment that Hollywood never presented before? Yes and no.

A personal favorite, Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974), is somewhat similar. That film is another infrequent example of a director filming his own original screenplay that was not adapted from any novel or play. A film of similar hue is another personal favorite--Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) made a year later based on the writing of little-trumpeted screenplay-writer Alan Sharp. Along with the Coppola film, another interesting cinematic effort crawled out of the Hollywood wood works—Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) made with an intelligent script of Robert Towne (uncredited) and two others, which in turn was based on a book by a certain Loren Singer. All the three movies underscored evil that is often not perceived by the common man.

More importantly the directors of these three films decided to examine individuals caught up in the quagmire of evil, where the viewer could put in perspective the troubled world of the individual pitted against the larger evil forces. These three films made an indelible impact on me with their brilliant final sequences—ones that capture complex troubled individuals pitted against murky macro-scenarios. In Coppola’s film, we see the protagonist seeking comfort in playing a saxophone all alone and morally beaten; in Penn’s film, it is the protagonist drifting on a seemingly rudderless boat going around in circles in an empty sea-scape; in Pakula’s film, the media are not allowed to ask questions but told to await a future report.

Three decades after the three interesting films came out of Hollywood, Gilroy presents a similarly evocative but different ending sequence—the protagonist hires a cab to say “Give me 50 dollars worth. Just drive.” The camera captures the silent facial expressions of Michael Clayton for a long while before the credits begin to roll. Unlike the three afore-mentioned films, here in Gilroy’s script/film there is a closure. But the audience is encouraged to relive the events of the film as we stare at George Clooney's face. Does the individual win against the system? If he did, at what cost we ask ourselves.

Many would question the above viewpoints to say that these are indeed the signatures of the directors and not those of the screenplay-writers involved. I agree it is a thin line that separates the two roles especially when they are different individuals donning the different hats.

To Michael Clayton’s credit the film does not have to merely survive solely because of its final sequence. The film reverberates not from gun shots but from the vivid and intelligent script. A second character in the film, Arthur Edens (played by Tom Wilkinson), when described as a legendary lawyer says “I am an accomplice”. Simple words, “accomplice” and “janitor” are used by two big lawyers to describe their own status as they deal with corporate intrigues on a day-to-day basis. Like Coppola’s creation Harry Caul in The Conversation, Michael Clayton and Arthur Edens of Michael Clayton are good guys with ethics who are perhaps psychologically and socially challenged compared to others. Edens' statement “I am Shiva, the Lord of Death (sic)” (it ought to have been 'Lord of Destruction' or 'the Transformer'), is repeated by Clayton towards the end of the film.

A third lawyer (played by Tilda Swinton in an Oscar-winning performance), a general counsel of a chemical pesticide company, is a woman executive who is climbing the corporate ladder, who spurns ethics and even stoops to kill in the process of her climb. With minimal screen time, the lady counsel's character is dissected for the viewer, thanks again to the clever script. So much is said in so short a screen time, if the viewer pays attention, and needless to add the short performance won an Oscar for Ms. Swinton.

None of the three main characters are normal, each of them are essentially loners and losers. Yet they are real and utterly believable. Only Clayton has a precocious son to care for, a young son who has advice picked from obscure children's tales for elders.

Finally, I am not surprised that the late director Sidney Pollack bankrolled this film and acted in the film as a morally ambiguous individual–a choice of roles he loved to portray on screen including his turn in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Pollack belongs to the rare clan of Hollywood directors who made remarkable offbeat films such as Castle Keep.

I guess that Gilroy and Pollack insisted to the studio marketing team that Michael Clayton be retained as the title because this colorless name could help an average viewer identify with the character and empathize with him/her and his/her eventual actions. Gilroy probably knew this was a film best directed by himself and took the plunge into direction. The film does look at three unremarkable individuals plotting their own interesting road maps while making compromises to reach their individual career goals. Somewhere along the story-line you encounter an ethereal scene of the protagonist trying to talk to three horses in a field as dawn breaks. Silent poetry in the midst of prose? And what’s more, Gilroy’s nonlinear narrative and word-smithy keeps a mature viewer delighted for a full two yet very short hours. Gilroy has proved that he can match Coppola's brilliant The Conversation, made three decades ago, with this film. A rare Hollywood film, indeed, from a very talented screenplay-writer!

81. Sergio Leone’s "Giù la Testa" (Duck, you sucker!/ Fistful of dynamite/Once upon a time—the Revolution) (1971): Revolutions as black comedies

The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence ... -- Mao Tse-Tung

Believe it or not, that's the quotation that opens the spaghetti western with Rod Steiger and James Coburn!

The uncut 154-minute version brings into focus three revolutions on three continents—the Chinese revolution, the Irish revolution of the IRA, and the Mexican revolution of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata—and yet none is discussed at length. The Chinese revolution is merely alluded to in the opening Mao quote and some aspects of the quote can be associated with the opening stagecoach sequence. The Irish revolution is glimpsed through flashbacks of a revolutionary on the run “on a motorbike” (while everyone else is on horseback, trains or horse-pulled carriages!) carrying with him published evidence that he is “wanted” and he has a price on his head. The Mexican revolution is never directly shown except for the mass killings of the poor and wealthy by soldiers that often remind the viewer of the Nazi atrocities in Europe. What is discussed by the director Sergio Leone is the emergence of the accidental, fictional heroes during two of these three revolutions and the impact of the Mexican revolution on the poor.

The most important line in the film for me was “The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, 'We have to have a change.' So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? And what happens to the poor people? They are dead!” spoken by actor Rod Steiger, playing a small-time Mexican bandit Juan Miranda. Sergio Leone, the director, has an even better "unspoken" line that follows that statement. Leone gets actor James Coburn playing the taciturn IRA revolutionary, John Mallory to throw down in the mud Michael Bakunin’s famous book Letters on Patriotism on hearing the fiery outburst from Steiger. That small sequence in the long movie might mean little to those who are not familiar with the book but Leone was making a statement that one only saw him develop further years later in Once upon a time in America, the film he opted to make when he was first offered the chance to direct Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, subsequently directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Both films have closely related themes.

But the viewer or any Sergio Leone fan will realize that Leone is a director who mixes action, comedy and music, while politics lies underneath raising its head once the smoke settles and destruction is evident. This film offers all that and more even though the screenplay is full of holes. There are times that calls for suspension of logic--for instance, how does a family of Mexican bandits in the middle of nowhere repair the tyres of a motorbike punctured by bullets? But comedy compensates the thinking viewer. Take this fine gem spoken by Steiger “I don’t want to be a hero. All I want is money!” after he has 'robbed' a bank which, surprisingly for him, does not hold any money.

Though the film has a serious tale it is punctuated with wit—often visual. A man dies from a dynamite lit with a short fuse and the viewer never sees the body after the explosion--only his burnt sombrero falling on the ground. A bird defecates on Juan and the bandit responds “You sing for the rich and shit on the poor!”

The story of the film is essentially of Juan Miranda and his family (no women remain) wanting to be rich by robbery. Fate brings Juan together with John Mallory, a dynamite expert. Juan becomes a revolutionary without realizing he is being manipulated by John. Fate again leads them into the vortex of the Mexican revolution only to make Juan repeatedly an accidental hero. In the midst of all the explosions and gunfire, revolutionaries become traitors, bandits become heroes, and the poor die as the ants being urinated on in the opening sequence. At the end, the viewer begins to attempt computing the cost-benefit ratio of the revolutions...

The opening shot of a man urinating on ants is a visual allegory to tee off what follows and what Leone wants to communicate to the viewer. The opening stage-coach sequence that lasts a good 15 minutes is perhaps a gem of cinema history that no viewer is likely to forget. That sequence introduces the viewer to arguably Rod Steiger’s finest role comparable only to his brilliant turn in The Pawnbroker (1964) picking up a half-eaten sandwich thrown on the ground with the respect one associates with picking up a $100 note. This is also a sequence that distills the finest of Leone’s talent that seems to poach on what one remembers as the finest elements in the “Dollar” trilogy and the other films in the “Once upon a time” trilogy. For those who are familiar opening sequences (e.g., Fistful of Dollars that copied Kurosawa’s Yojimbo) of Leone’s films, the importance the director gave to them were consistent and often link up with the final sequence of each film. This was one of the major reasons why Leone’s cinema stood out amongst the huge body of spaghetti westerns that Italy produced half a century ago.

Another major factor of Leone’s appeal was his enduring collaboration with the composer Ennio Morricone that Leone fans will not forget that used natural sounds and choral music in musical scores with fascinating aural outcomes.

The brilliant stamp of Leone’s work is his ability to edit shots of ultra-closeups, closeups and long shots to the tune of Morricone’s music. In Duck, you sucker, the close-ups within the stagecoach could be the ideal first lesson in cinematography for a student of cinema where all the rasas of Bharat Muni’s Natyashathra are paraded.

It is interesting for me to note Leone, an Italian with some Christian values (if I note his comment on Scorcese’s choice of Willem Dafoe to play Christ), criticizes the Bishop’s/priest’s actions and statements in the stagecoach, followed by Juan’s growing disillusionment with the cross on his own neck in the middle of the film and the eventual return of the cross by John to Juan towards the end of the film. Even here there is a personal statement that Leone provides that an astute viewer can note..

Here is a film (released separately with three different titles) that reinforces the mastery of the director and the capabilities of two great actors—Rod Steiger and James Coburn. Here is a film that was butchered by the studios and initially released in a 2 hour long version. Thankfully, the restored version of 154 minutes is now widely available on DVD and even shown on regular TV! Many well-wishers suggested to Leone that the title Duck, you sucker! was inappropriate and not suited for US audiences as Leone thought. Leone persisted, even when distributors came up with two other titles. Reflect on the content of the film awhile, and I think Leone was hitting the nail on the head! There is always a sucker getting manipulated before you hear the big bang...

One of the earliest films I recall loving as a kid was Sergio Leone’s debut film Colossus of Rhodes (in the glory of a 16mm print) in a corporate club in Bihar, India, in the early 1960s. The name Leone did not mean a thing to me at that time but the images of that interesting film remain fresh in my memory some five decades later. That’s Leone’s power over his audiences. His images and sounds remain with you for ever. But for me his best work remains his last film, which was not a western, Once upon a time in America.

P.S. Sergio Leone's Once upon a time in America was reviewed earlier on this blog. And Kieslowski was not the first to think of making films based on the colors of a national flag (Three colors: Blue, White and Red based on the French flag)--Leone had bankrolled an Italian film earlier on the Italian flag called Red, White and Green (Bianco, rosso e Verdone) (1981), directed by his friend Carlo Verdone, with music by Ennio Morricone, and script by Leonardo Benvenuti (the scriptwriter of Once upon a time in America) two of his other buddies!

80. French director Laurent Cantet’s “Entre les murs (The Class)” (2008): A beguiling, stimulating feature film on education resembling a documentary

It is not often that you come across a movie that has as its lead actor, the very writer of the novel on which the film is based. Laurent Cantet’s intriguing film The Class has in its lead role of the class teacher, the novelist and co-screenplay-writer Francois Begaudeau. That’s only the first surprise the film pulls on the viewer.

If you went to into the film theatre without knowing much about the film you are likely to think you are watching a documentary. That’s the second surprise—it is not a documentary.

The film is apparently a semi-autobiographical story of the novelist and lead actor Begaudeau. Begaudeau himself was primarily a school teacher before he morphed his own life into a novelist, journalist, and an actor. But wait a moment. Even director Cantet’s parents were teachers. Therefore, it is not surprising that the intimate knowledge of the teaching and the film-making processes get married seamlessly within the film and this contributed substantially to the film being honored as the first French film to win the Golden Palm at Cannes in 21 years!

The literal translation of the film’s title Entre les murs is “between the walls” yet it being distributed outside Francophone territories as The Class. The original French title provides one perspective of the film's content and approach to the content; the other title, yet another perspective. As the film rolls before your eyes, you are mesmerized by Begaudeau, little realizing that the true Svengali of the film is Cantet the director.

Cantet allows the viewer to study the process of educating a fresh class of bubbly and street-smart adolescent kids in a Paris suburban school. Classroom education today, in many parts of the world, has evolved from the dictatorial British format where the learned teacher lectures and the student imbibes what he sees and hears without question. Today, teaching in progressive schools is more democratic, where the teacher allows student participation, where the student is encouraged to talk and become an integral part of the education process, contributing knowingly or unknowingly and “democratically” to the education of other students in the class just as much as the teacher. It is not without intent that one of the bright Internet-savvy kids in the film brings up the subject of Plato’s Republic into discussion, but then the intelligent viewer is forced to recall that teaching for Aristotle’s own students centuries ago was democratic and peripatetic. Begaudeau the teacher is flummoxed and that’s precisely what Cantet the director of the film stresses to the viewer—the very quality (and process) of imparting knowledge today is dissected. Plato wanted a philosopher king to provide for the common good. He also believed democracy would just lead to mob rule, which is basically an oligarchy. Cantet appears to ask the viewer if the teacher is the Platonic philosopher king. Aristotle studied under Plato and disagreed with Plato on almost fundamentally everything. Cantet’s film introduces parallels of bright adolescent kids being educated in the classroom as Aristotle would have been in Plato’s class. Begaudeau teaches his students often like Plato would while adopting the peripatetic approach of Aristotle's own teaching style though confined within the four walls of the class.

Viewing a Grand Prize winner of Cannes at a late night screening of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), having seen four other remarkable feature films earlier in the day can be demanding on any viewer. Surprisingly a few minutes into the film, I felt rejuvenated and alert. Good cinema does that to me. Here was a “documentary” clearly enacted, in some ways like Oliver Stone’s JFK. In JFK, one had professional actors. Here was a film with a script played by young teenage non-actors. It was the first public screening of the film in India.

The film is demanding of the viewer. Many viewers at the IFFK first screening, who had sat through lesser films in content and maturity at the festival, trooped out of the hall while the film was running just after half an hour of the run-time. The film is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea.

To a casual film goer, the movie would resemble a live recording of a high-school class of boys and girls with a teacher probing the minds of his students, made up of different backgrounds, races, religions and representing various continents. There are tense moments, hilarious repartees, behind the scene meetings of teachers evaluating students, parent teacher meetings and even stocktaking of a year gone by in the school. The film’s content can disappoint some viewers looking for conventional action, sex or heavy intrigue. Cantet's approach to cinema is far removed from the typical Hollywood film. Yet Cantet and the screenplay writing team that included Begaudeau urge the viewer to zoom-out his/her mind from the microscopic events taking place within the confines of the four walls of class--the ethnic tensions, the psychological warfare and the social criticism--as they are equally likely to take place in the wider world outside the class, beyond the school, even beyond France. That is the beguiling aspect of Cantet’s film.

True the film is packed with psychological, social and ethical issues. How all this has been captured on film with verisimilitude is just incredible. There is not a fleeting second in the film when you feel the film is acted out by the students and the teacher(s). It all seems so spontaneous and easy, when it is quite the opposite. How did they do it? They pick up real bubbly Parisian adolescents and tell them they are going to act as students. During rehearsals they are provided a rough idea of what is expected to take place in the class and how they are expected to react. Three cameras are placed in the class room, according to the movie’s official website. And the actors, with no previous experience, act out the “documentary” providing the viewer with a feel of somewhat spontaneous reactions in a real Parisian class. It is quite likely that many of the statements and moods were spontaneous and not "acted" out while being consonant with the screenplay.

The innovation apart, what is extraordinary in this film? One, the film clearly indicates the classroom has evolved from the classroom of To Sir, with Love, or Dead Poet’s Society. Today teaching adolescents is no longer a simple task. Students are well-aware of current social and political issues, thanks to the Internet and related technology. Teachers need to be aware of several bits of information and trivia to be on top of their class. Second, The Class progresses to reveal manipulative student behavior towards their teachers that British cinema revealed decades earlier to us. British films such as Absolution (1978, with Richard Burton as the manipulated educator) and Term of Trial (1962, with Laurence Olivier as the simpleton guru) are vivid examples. Unlike the two entertaining British movies, all the action in Cantet’s The Class is restricted to two school rooms—the actual classroom and another room where teachers interact among themselves or with parents. Third, the film grapples with the question of the broader issues of equality within a classroom, a school and elsewhere in society (director Kieslowski so effectively dealt with the last in his French/Polish film in Three Colors: White). Fourth, the film is about current issues of integration of different cultures that perhaps confront Europe, Canada, and Australia more than it does in the USA. Africans and Asians are now citizens of France but do they get understood by the majority? A student Suleyman says in the film: “I have nothing to say about me because no one knows me but me.”

How many teachers allow for two-way communication in a class? The film presents a growing challenge for educators of today. Can we go back to the days of Aristotle or do we prefer to learn under the teacher who “dictates”? Are we providing the turf for democracy or for dictatorships to emerge in society from the lowly classroom? A related film (and play) dealing with the theme of the "teacher as a dictator" is David Mamet's US film Oleanna (1994) based on his own play with William H. Macy playing the teacher. Both The class and Oleanna provide interesting parallels on student-teacher relationships and real/perceived "sexism" within conventional education.

This is a sensitive film meant for film-goers expecting more than frothy entertainment. The two final shots, somewhat similar, of the film graphically (and silently) capture the entire case of the film that preceded those shots. That was truly remarkable. It deserved the Golden Palm, because it is truly a film that makes the viewer think beyond what is presented on screen. It is a film that uses silence most effectively. Whether it eventually wins the foreign film Oscar in 2009 and whether it wins the heart of the average film-goer are to be seen. What is indisputable is the beguiling felicity with which Laurent Cantet walks on the tightrope between documentary and fiction, holding in his hand a wand to provoke and open the viewers' minds.

79. French director Laurent Salgues’ debut film “Rêves de poussière (Dreams of Dust)” (2008): Infusing dignity and elegance to cinema on Africa

The opening sequence of films often indicates the quality of cinema that follows. Writers and journalists are aware that they need to grab the attention of the reader at the outset, not later, if they have to win longer-term attention. In Laurent Salgues’ debut feature film Dreams of dust, the opening sequence will remain an amazing one—one that sets the tone for what would eventually follow.

The opening sequence here captures the rural, dusty, semi-arid Burkina Faso, a West African country on the fringes of the massive Saharan desert, an area known to many as the Sahel. The viewer doesn’t see anyone for a while. Not even animals seem to inhabit the horizon. In the foreground, the viewer sees mounds of dust, like anthills. Suddenly you see, dust-covered humans emerge from holes in the ground, like rats emerging from their holes. These are prospectors digging in archaic mine-shafts (now apparently banned in Burkina Faso) for gold in a god-forsaken part of Africa. That opening shot reminds you of a choreographed musical—only there is no music, only silence and the sounds of workers’ tools. The workers are emerging after toiling underground for several hours constantly at the risk of being buried alive with no one to rescue them if the mine ever caves in. They would leave behind widows and fatherless children, if that were ever to happen.

Dreams of dust is an important film on Africa. First, it exhibits the vigor and competence of a talented French director making a debut feature film armed with his very own script that evolved from an initial idea of a documentary on the lives of these gold miners hunting for gold under unusual circumstances. Second, it is a film made by a European on a real sub-Saharan African subject in a real location. The film is able to raise the cinematic content to a level above mere actions and words (say, compared to the recent award-winning Chadean film Daratt or Dry Season) as it gradually transforms into a metaphysical cinematic essay on the continent’s people, their dreams, their despair, and their infrequent quests for a deeper meaning of their trials and tribulations and an eventual resolution of personal loss in this transient life. Third, it is a film that does not end with the typical hero and heroine riding out into the setting sun, but instead offers an end that would evoke feelings in the viewer’s mind that are similar to those while viewing the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, although the visuals in the two films couldn’t be more starkly dissimilar. Fourth, it underscores the dignity and integrity of the sensitive and pensive African, rarely captured on film or in literature that transcends physical strength. Finally, it attempts to poetically bring on screen the King Arthur like quest of a Holy Grail at the end of the film leaving an open end for the viewer and filmmaker alike, alluding to the literal meaning of the word “Sahel,” which in Arabic means “the shore” as the hero symbolically, as in a mirage, walks into the desert.

The film is a story of a male Nigerien (from Niger, not Nigeria) gold prospector seeking to make a fortune in gold in the neighboring country Burkina Faso. He is an intriguing individual, tall, strong, and an honest worker. He is also a “man with a past”. The film does not reveal much about him; only that he was once a farmer, was married and had a daughter. He is evidently a person with heroic qualities that separate him from his co-workers. He does get attracted to a local attractive woman and her girl child, who naturally remind him of his own family. While several strands of the film are incredibly close to stories that made Westerns and Hollywood films so successful at the box office, Salgues deals with the subject in a way Hollywood would never attempt to shape, by injecting dignity and detachment in the principal character to the world around him.

Initially the viewer would think the film is Blood Diamond revisited in a different and less hospitable environment. Towards the final half hour of the film, the story evolves from a mere “sweat-and-blood” tale of an expatriate into a metaphysical, psychological tale of a man seeking redemption from some sad events in his past. The film makes the viewer to ponder over the common dream of the African immigrant to acquire wealth. Here the African immigrant is not in USA or in Europe but in a neighboring Sahelian country. Here is a fascinating tale of a farmer with money in his pocket opting to become a voluntary slave in a tough environment, quite confident that he will eventually get to his pot of gold. The gold mine could suggest a metaphoric transit point in a long personal journey in the life of a thinking individual, if not the average African immigrant.

There are social pointers in the film that a viewer is not likely to miss. The fatherless girl plays with a doll but interestingly the face of the doll is blackened. The tyrannical boss of the mine is eventually replaced by a hardworking miner who is more understanding of the plight of the workers—perhaps suggesting the waves of change taking place on the continent. However, the title of the film reiterates the intent of the director/writer Salgues. Would the dreams of the African really lead to gold or would it lead to dust? The optimistic film shows both taking place, to different individuals, in different ways.

The film presents the nobility and elegance of African men and women, rarely seen on screen. Words spoken in the film are few and yet the few words contribute inversely to the strength of the film. Senegalese actor Makena Diop plays the intriguing Nigerian farmer Moctar who comes to neighboring Burkina Faso to try his hand in prospecting for gold in a mine in Essakane, where such gold mines did exist before Canadian and South African mining companies earned licenses to excavate gold with more efficient scientific methods recently. Filmgoers could note that the beautiful actor Fatou Tall-Salgues who plays Coumba actually married the director Salgues prior to the filming.

I had the advantage of having visited the rural areas of Burkina Faso and Niger (indirectly discussed in the film) as part of my principal vocation, which involves participating in international efforts to improve livelihoods in the Sahel through increased appropriate agricultural production in the water-scarce environment. However, there were odd bits in the film that did not look real—for instance, the mining boss asks for his fees in Euros rather than CFA, the currency of the region.

I saw the film at the recent edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK 08). Director Laurent Salgues and his cinematographer Crystel Fournier were so impressive with this film that a particular shot of a woman seen through a cascade of water elicited spontaneous clapping from the cine-literate audience. At another juncture, the film showed Indian superstar of yesteryear's Meena Kumari dancing in the Bollywood hit Pakeezah making the Kerala audience wonder if the projectionist had mistakenly switched reels of another film. Salgues was merely showing reality—the workers do watch videos of Indian films in Hindi in the Sahel which are more popular than Hollywood blockbusters.



The film is an interesting tale that insinuates that a sequel could follow. If a sequel does appear, it would be interesting to trace the growth of this interesting director who has so efficiently pooled the technical mastery of Canadian and French production teams to fashion a film with top-notch digital quality that will bring pride to cinema on African subjects. The film won attention at Sundance Film Festival. I am not surprised. It is a film that deserves to be widely seen and critically analyzed, just as Portuguese director Teresa Prata’s film on Mozambique, Sleepwalking Land. Both films provide excellent cinematic examples of Europeans empathetically getting inside the African mind.

P.S. Teresa Prata's Sleepwalking Land was reviewed earlier on this blog.

78. Algerian director Amor Hakkar’s French/Algerian film “La maison jaune (The yellow house)” (2008): Underscoring goodness in humankind

Directed, written, acted (playing the lead role of Mouloud) and co-edited by Amor Hakkar, The yellow house will win hearts anywhere. It is humanistic, deceptively simple and uplifting. Having seen the French/Arabic/Berber language film, the viewer will leave with one thought--there is goodness in all of us, whether Algerian or a citizen of any other nation. It is rare to encounter such movies when violence, evil, and bitterness pervade most films being made these days. Some viewers tend to disparage “feel-good” films because they tend to be escapist, but here is an example where realism rarely goes out of focus.

This Algerian film is apparently the second feature film of the director, who studied in France. The story/screenplay written by Hakkar is simple: a poor Algerian agrarian family, who survives by growing and selling potatoes and vegetables, deals with grief following the untimely death of the eldest son in an accident. The filming appears simple too: no flashy editing distracts the viewer, camera angles are unobtrusive, and the viewer's sensibilities are soothed by the delightful strains of evocative oudh (a string instrument) music. The oudh player Faycal Salhi, who provided the music for the film, was present at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) 2008 to collect on behalf of the Algerian director, the deserving Special Jury Award. The movie had earlier won the top award at the Valencia film festival, the best actor award at the Osian (New Delhi) festival, three awards at the Locarno festival, the special jury prize at the Carthage festival, among other honors elsewhere.

Sociologically, the film criticizes the lack of electricity in some villages of the oil rich country and yet commends the quick remedial, intervention when lapses are brought to the notice of the Algerian government officials. The film is not about economic injustice or government apathy; even though these real issues are present in the backdrop. In the forefront of this wonderful film are issues that are more universal: strong family bonds between husband and wife, between father and children, dead and alive.

The first half of the film deals with the impact of untimely death of the farmer's eldest son in an accident while serving in the police force and the father’s journey to Batna to identify and collect the mortal remains. The second half deals with the husband’s quixotic but dogged plan to bring the shattered life of his wife to normalcy with the help of a video recording made by his son before his death.

The film underlines everything that is positive about the Muslim world in a charming way that is not didactic. Policemen, who have never met the farmer before, help the man by providing him with a hazard light free-of-cost as he travels in the night on a three-wheeled farm tractor without headlights to bring his son's body home. Taxi drivers go out of the way to help him locate addresses in the city. An official at the morgue, instead of taking the farmer to task for “stealing” his son's body circumventing official procedures, takes the trouble to catch up with him on the highway and hands him the signed legal papers approving the release of the dead body. A pharmacist is asked by the farmer for some medicine to cure his wife’s depression from the tragedy, and the well-meaning pharmacist who has heard of a cure (painting the walls of his house yellow) that shares that information with the farmer. Ordinary individuals, who could easily have been indifferent to a poor man, go out of the way to lend a helping hand to man coping with grief. Would such good deeds happen in real life, one could well ask. My answer would be that human bonding when we recognize another person’s grief or loss is quite extraordinary.

What is remarkable about this film is the contribution of one man Omar Hakkar who acts, directs and edits a delightful film that does not criticize at any point what is wrong in society and yet presents a realistic canvas of Berbers in Algeria. The farmer might appear simple and poorly educated, but the film is intelligently crafted killing several birds with one stone. There is criticism of the economic disparity in the film but it is latent. The film also silently underlines the important supportive roles of young girls in a Muslim family, rarely underlined in Arab films.

Hakkar’s film is one of the finest films to emerge from North Africa in recent years almost comparable to Mohamed Asli’s lovely Moroccan film In Casablanca, angels don’t fly, also on the Berber community made in 2004. Hakkar has not just proved his mettle as a director but also as an interesting screenplay writer, who is capable of merging tragedy with low-key visual humor that never goes overboard. Hakkar’s dignified performance in the main role seems contagious—every other character in the film rises above petty minds to lend him a helping hand. The film’s screenplay underlines the need for all of us to tackle grief with courage and adopt a positive outlook at life’s continuity in all weathers. It is a film that reiterates that one can attain the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow through dogged persistence in life, while being gentle and considerate to others.

P.S. In Casablanca, angels don't fly was reviewed earlier on this blog.

77. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Üç maymun (Three Monkeys)” (2008): Mastery of contemporary, contemplative cinema

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film Three Monkeys proved to me that Turkish cinema can rub shoulders with the very best in contemporary cinema. I watched the film at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) 2008, a week ago, months after it had won the Best Director award both at Cannes and at the Osian (New Delhi) film festivals earlier this year. The film is now Turkey’s deserving, official submission for the best foreign film Oscar 09. It has a certain maturity and mastery of the medium even if it follows the patterns of Tarkovsky, Terrence Mallick and Zvyagintsev, with its ability to externalize the internal feelings of individuals and catapult those feelings within the context of the well-chosen exteriors—sometimes natural environments and sometimes man-made structures. It’s a film that makes the capability of a director and art director stand out even to a village idiot viewing cinema.

The title of the film does refer to the proverbial three monkeys; one who refuses to hear, one who refuses to see, and one who refuses to speak. It is an interesting contemporary tale revolving around three adults that make up a Turkish urban nuclear family. The husband drives the car of a politician to make a living, the wife works in a kitchen of a large establishment, and their adult son is a student dreaming of owning a car. It is a tale that could take place in Turkey, or any other part of the world, suggesting that tales of individual angst fall within some external matrix that a viewer can either glimpse or reject as a cosmic play of dice.

The three “monkeys” are a husband, a wife and a son living a cohesive, stable life. A fourth character is a typical, creepy politician whose actions disrupt the tranquil life of the cohesive trio by a chain of lies, deceit, lust and avarice—all brought about by the ripple effect of an external request. Here is a tale of three essentially good people who become entwined in actions that threaten to break up their happy but mundane middle-class lives.

What is the external request that leads to the domino effect on the family? The politician falls asleep while driving a sedan and knocks down an unknown person on a remote road and the incident is noticed by a passing car. To preserve his political chances at the soon-to-be-held elections, he requests his regular driver to take the rap and go to prison for the crime he did not commit, while the politician promises to continue paying his salary and provide a large sum at the completion of his jail term. The first “monkey” gets hooked to the suggested plan that he hears.

The son dreams of a family car that could be acquired with an advance on the politician’s final payment to his father and goads his mother to meet the politician with the request. And you soon have two other “monkeys” trapped by their own innocent actions that spiral into grievous crimes because they choose not to see, hear or speak. Interestingly, each of the three persons is essentially a well-meaning, ethical individual. However, the external request of a politician to the head of the family of the trio opens up vistas for three good persons to choose deviant paths they might not have chosen otherwise.

The filmmakers go on to suggest that the pattern could spillover to upset another sedate life of a good man at the end. The cosmic tale carries on like a Shakespearean or Tolstoyan tragedy, even as dark clouds gather over the magical landscape on the coasts of the Marmara Sea or Black Sea captured with digital magic of Gokhan Tiryaki (the cinematographer of Ceylan's Climates as well). Are we individuals truly in control of what happens to us in life? This is the implicit question the film asks of the viewer. Do events in our life force us to take paths we never would have taken otherwise? Do we learn from our mistakes or prefer to make bigger mistakes like a "monkey"?

Interestingly the film itself is a product of another family—but this one is incredibly talented. The husband and wife team of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (director, editor, and writer of Three Monkeys, and actor of his earlier films Distant and Climates) and Ebru Ceylan (writer and art director of Three Monkeys, actor of Distant and Climates and an award-winning short-filmmaker) team up with Ercan Kesal (actor in Three Monkeys, playing the politician in the movie) to write up this interesting film.

The story is only a small part of the film's broad enjoyment spectrum. Take the art direction—the building in which the trio live looks imposing at the start of the movie. Only towards the end of the movie as the lives of the individuals fall apart you see the building has an imposing front but is actually a poor tenement with a fabulous view. The railroad becomes a flight path to freedom from the drudgery of the house, but tenants of the house need to cross barriers to reach the station. Interestingly, the head (and face) of the son poking out of the train window form a poster of the film, a shot that is repeated with differing expressions as the film progresses.

In this film, the husband-wife team of the Ceylans stays behind the camera. They introduce a TV actor Hatice Aslan who plays Hacer, the mother/wife role in the film. The performance is nothing short of spectacular. The sudden action of kicking up of her shoes while sitting and breaking into smiles of freedom is unforgettable; the true implications of the scene revealed to the viewer only much later.

I am forced to compare this work of Ceylan with his earlier work Climates, shown at an earlier edition of IFFK. Climates was the more demanding film of the two, dealing with quest for unattainable happiness of a husband, a wife and the husband’s lover as the events in their lives take place in parallel to the external climates of summer, fall and winter. The title itself indicated the path the director would take, even before you enter the theatre. In both Climates and Three Monkeys the interplay of relationships revolve around three individuals. But in Three Monkeys the film is comparatively more accessible for the viewer as the chracters are less complex. The plot is clear and linear, not as complicated as Climates. Yet, Three Monkeys shows Ceylan’s ability to make the viewers wonder if they could become "monkeys" given the throw of the cosmic dice. There is a single sequence of the husband paying a visit to a mosque which probably results in partial reconciliation with his wife; the film is not religious though an obvious spiritual odyssey. There are a few unexplained shots of a dead child of the family that appear as soothing images to the two men. It is a poetically rendered story captured on digital film that brings out the best in cinema today.

A small sequence in the film at the beginning of the film struck me—a car accident takes place off-screen. Hollywood and Bollywood would have shown the incident graphically. One wonders if the explosions and fires (and wrecked vehicles) that we enjoy so much in commercial cinema are contributing to the global warming. If so, filmmakers could learn from this film.

Turkish cinema has thrown up great filmmakers. Yilmaz Guney was my favourite Turkish filmmaker. Now I have added Ceylan (and his talented wife) to that list. Guney took up subjects that mirrored politics and got into trouble for that. Ceylan appears to be apolitical except for his dark universal swipe at politicians as a tribe. Or is he?

P.S. Three Monkeys is one of the author's top 100 films and one of  the top 15 films of  the author's top 15 films of the 21st Century. Ceylan's two subsequent films Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014) have been reviewed later on this blog.