115. Russian director Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film “Kak ya provyol etim letom” (How I Ended This Summer) (2010): Psychological cinematic perspectives on old vs. new, and duty vs. freedom

For the entire duration of this captivating film that won the Golden Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Best Film award at the London Film Festival, the viewer sees merely two individuals, one young (Pavel) and the other (Sergei) much older, old enough to be the other one’s father.  Both are living on a remote island inhabited perhaps by polar bears and nothing else. Then you don’t get to see the bears (except once), you only hear conversations between the two men about bears. One is a university student, the other a meteorologist. The only other human beings that intrude the script are the voice of a man on the mainland who keeps in touch with the denizens over a fragile radio wavelength. The conversation on the radio link is often limited to transmitting scientific data that seems to include meteorological data as well as radioactivity captured on a Geiger counter.

Director Popogrebsky presents a film that first engages you visually. Popogrebsky’s two major collaborators on this film, as on his earlier film Simple Things, are the cinematographer Pavel Kostomarov (winning a Silver Bear for this film at Berlin Film Festival 2010 and the Golden Eagle in Russia) and composer of music, Dimitry Katkhanov. You first see the sea and the land and you marvel at the natural beauty of the landscape, goaded along aurally by the music on the soundtrack.  Then the director shows you rusty contraptions that are buzzing, emitting sufficient radioactivity to make a Geiger counter come alive to produce frenetic, rapid clicks. No words are spoken but the message is gently conveyed—you, the viewer, are being introduced from beauty to ugliness. Later you are shown fields full of old jerry cans that contain liquid fuel, also rusting, all left behind years ago—a graveyard of junk that had once served many people in the past. But where are those people? The people who erected the radioactive contraptions, the sheds, the few buildings, where are they? And why is a young university student carrying a Geiger counter, while listening to rock music? You are introduced to images that remind you of the dead terrain of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. If you think the connection is outrageous, you will see the video game played by the young man is also called STALKER.

Popogrebsky has made the film using his own script and is evidently influenced by Tarkovsky. He presents a tale of confrontation between two individuals who come together by fate on this lonely yet lovely corner of the world. The viewer is introduced gradually to a father-son relationship though the two are not related. You note that the old man belongs to the old school who believes in gathering and transmitting the facile data to a faceless recipient, miles away. The young man has his clear order of priorities--music, video games, sleep and lower on the priority rung, gathering and transmitting correct data. You anticipate confrontation between the flag of freedom and the flag of rules. Instead you see teacher-student, a father-son relationship that appears to develop, even though in the old school the elders taught the young using fear tactics to keep the young ones in check. It is easy for the viewer to note that the young man has a growing respect for the elder, who has a wife and child. You feel director Popogrebsky is now treading close to Andrei Zvyaginstev’s cinema (The Return).

But the psychologist in Popogrebsky surfaces later. The young man learns from a radio message that the old man’s wife and child are killed but for a strange reason does not convey the information immediately to the elder man. Why is that? Is he afraid of causing misery to a man who had gone fishing trout to salt and take that precious catch to his wife and child as a gift? Or is it that the old man has been tough with him?

The delay in revealing the facts and the eventual transmission of the vital information leads to events that provide a thriller element to the essentially psychological tale. But the film is able to go beyond the level of a thriller—a tale of an old man who was provided delayed information on the death of his loved ones by a young man whom he treated as a son.

Popogrebsky falls into trap of his own making. The script is written as from the viewpoint of the young man. Within that scope, the story unfolds from the perspective of the young and not of the elder individual. In case Popogrebsky had not resorted to this format and had presented the story as a third person’s view of the tale, it is possible the movie would have had a different impact on the viewer. Tarkovsky adopted such a perspective in his last film, The Sacrifice, where the film is from the father’s point of view while Zvyagintsev attempted it with a flourish in The Return, where the entire story was from the elder son’s point of view. But unfortunately Popogrebsky avoids extensive analysis of the narrator, a flaw that is not so obvious in Tarkovsky and Zvyaginstsev. But all three films/directors were dealing with similar themes: old vs. new, father vs. son, political allegories, etc. While Popogrebsky is able to convey the dark message of radiation poisoning, the final sacrifice of the elder for the younger and end the film with visual optimistic message of a dark sky becoming bright, the focus of the film is turned at the end toward the elder of the duo.        

The captivating film ends with the narrator in a position to write a university paper on how he spent his summer on an island with an elderly man. Is the old man psychologically unstable or is he a very wise old man capable of making decisions the import of which dawns on others much later? It even tends to glorify the lonely, elderly widower slowly dying of radiation on an isolated island. What Popogrebsky, the psychologist, does to the viewer is to make viewer think why young people refrain from doing certain actions. Is it fear? Is it empathy? Is it love? Or is it a flaw in all of us human beings that makes us stumble at a critical point in our lives?



However, if you want to enjoy the film at a different level replace the young man with modern Russia and the elder with the erstwhile Soviet Union, and ask yourself the same questions. The radioactive, rusty machines could then appear meaningful for the viewer than a mere art director's prop. This is precisely where both Popogrebsky's film How I Ended This Summer and Zvyagintsev's The Return reach a point of confluence. 

While Popogrebsky may not be of the same class as Tarkovsky or Zvyagintsev, there is no denying that he is a notable Russian director. Evidently he has a tremendous verve in dealing with actors: both his actors in this film won a Silver Bear each for acting at the Berlin Film Festival—a rare achievement. And Popogrebsky had done this before, as the actor in his previous feature film Simple Things also won best actor awards at two festivals. I do hope that Popogrebsky’s next work improves on this one—he is younger than Zvyagintsev--while continues to work with cameraman Kostomarov and composer Kastkhanov. They make a great team behind the camera.

P.S.  Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return was reviewed earlier on this blog.

114. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Loong Boonmee raleuk chat” (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) (2010): Layers of freewheeling thoughts that include philosophy, nature, politics, and life’s contradictions, crossing borders of time, life and death, illusion and reality

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is no ordinary movie. It contains a mix of age old wisdom and modern politics, the latter hidden cleverly to avoid the wrath of the Thai censors. It presents Buddhist concepts where the religion exhorts the believer to choose non-violence and abstain from killing living things. In another dimension, the movie is also an ode to nature and the Asian belief in cyclical reincarnation of souls in different life forms over time. In yet another dimension, it is also a film that often connects and refers to a region in Thailand called Nabua that had seen violent rule by Thai armed forces for three decades in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. It is most of all, a modern film that recalls the grammar of a Terrence Mallick film with long segments of silence where the only sounds that punctuate deadpan but ponderous statements are those of insects and birds.


And when statements are spoken in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, they invite you to reflect on its meaning. The lead character Uncle Boonmee is a former farmer, a former soldier, a raconteur, a widower, a father, a brother and an uncle, who knows that he is dying from a kidney disease and that his days are numbered. Lying on a bed in rural Thailand, the old man Boonmee talks of killing larvae pests on a tamarind tree, and shortly afterwards there is a conversation on conserving the life of bees while collecting and consuming the honey. There is a contradiction in attitudes here, to kill living things or no to kill. It is this duality in life the film explores at various stages of the movie. Mallick in his film The Thin Red Line (1998) asked a somewhat related  rhetoric question to the viewer: “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” Both films are examples of mature cinema that has transcended conventional box office demands and invites the viewer to a new level of cinematic experience.

An early segment of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives presents an intriguing shot of a Thai buffalo tied with a rope. The buffalo breaks free by brute strength and wanders into a forest and we see the animal lost in the forest without any clue to what it should do next. But the viewer also sees the faints shapes of simian “ghosts” in the forest watching the entry of the buffalo. The sequence can be best understood, if we recall the opening quote of this Thai film: "Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me." The life of Boonmee and the buffalo are interlinked: in cinema and in time as a key to open the chest of enigmatic visuals that follow.

Mallick in his The Thin Red Line had included a similar opening sequence of an alligator that is capable of devouring human beings sliding into water majestically in a forest only to be shown, towards the end of that film, dead and strung up by soldiers as their food. Both sequences in the two related films might confuse many in the audience but both directors are talking about nature and the larger equation of nature with us, human beings. It is this somewhat similar duality or contradiction in life that the Thai director presents in the epilogue of Uncle Boonmee Who Can  Recall His Past Lives in which a Buddhist monk who has vowed to give up all comforts for his religion yearns to have a shower and goes to a karaoke bar, while his close family are glued to a TV channel showing inane activities of the Thai army.

I do not know how much of the wisdom of the Thai film can be attributed to the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and how much to the senior Buddhist monk Phra Sripariyattiwetti's 1983 book, “A Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, Uncle Boonmee” on which the movie is loosely based. But one thing is certain: the film is not just about philosophy and religion but one equally on contemporary Thai politics. First, Uncle Boonmee believes that his present kidney failure has much to do with “karma”: the wages of sin, as it were, of killing too many Communists as a Thai soldier and parallel to his actions of killing pests on his farm with pesticides, as a prequel in his present life. Yet his sister and nephew re-assure him that he did all that for “the sake of his country.” Later in the film there is a comment that underscores the political message: “When the authorities found past people they shone a light at them. That light projected images of them onto a screen… When those images appeared, the past people disappeared.”

An aging, wrinkled princess finds her youthful image in a water reflection, and this brings tears to her eyes. It should because the young princess had once spurned true love from her palanquin bearer. Then a remarkable dialogue follows between the aging princess and a talking catfish. The catfish has Boonmee’s voice and is perhaps an avatar of the princess’ true lover, the palanquin bearer. The princess says of her young image: "I know that reflection is an illusion"; the catfish/Boonmee responds, "I know that you're the same person I loved"; and the princess answers, "That's an illusion too."

The film is a “ghost” film as well just as two other major films made in 2010 can be classified loosely as “ghost” films—Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Anjelica and Alejandro Innaritu’s Biutiful. In all these three films from three different countries, the three film directors discuss interaction of the dying with ghosts (and the way immigrants are perceived by local populations). And the ghost appears to Boonmee when he has neared his time of departure from his current state. All the three movies employ the “ghosts” not to scare the viewer but to lift subject of the story to an unusual higher level while discussing family, politics, society and philosophy.

As in Biutiful, the importance of family is underscored. The very word “Uncle” is suggestive of this. The dying Boonmee is nursed with love by his sister and nephew. His dead wife appears as a ghost to thank her sister-in-law and nephew. Later in the film the dead wife appears more real and the viewer sees the husband hugging his ghost wife as she reassures her living husband that he has nothing to fear in death. In death and in life the family links are not broken. The father Boonmee yearns for his missing son’s company and a simian “ghost” with deep red eyes appears. The son has been missing for 13 years and had evidently taken to Communist ideology (are the red eyes a link or is the missing link the statement of mating with monkey ghosts?). The film provides reassurance for the dying because of the permanence of love exuding both from the dead and living. A poignant remark from a ghost (his wife) to the living Boonmee is “ghosts don't associate with places, they associate with people. We'll find each other.” The entire film indirectly deals with the struggle for freedom to move and migrate from the buffalo seeking freedom from its rope, to Boonmee wondering if he would ever be able to find his dead wife after death, to the Laotian workers who migrate to Thailand for a better life and yet do not find the respect they deserve, of a princess on a journey, the urban Thai seeking answers in the rural Thailand's forests and caves.

The interesting Thai film is structured in at least five segments that do not appear connected but if one cares to reflect on the film, its segments have a whole larger than the sum of its parts. The first segment deals with the buffalo, the kidney care in a makeshift hospital, and a road drive. The second deals with ghosts interacting with Boonmee and family. The third segment deals with conversation at the tamarind farm. The fourth deals with a princess and a talking catfish that transports you into the past. (It is possible, if we go by voice association, that Boonmee is the catfish in a previous life rather than the princess.) The fifth segment deals with a "magical" cave in the forest and death of Boonmee, somewhat reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker’s tunnel sequence. The sixth segment is an epilogue devoted to activity of a Buddhist monk who seeks material comforts of a shower and a Karaoke bar.

The following statement of the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul made in his “Cinema Scope” interview is revealing: “More than my other films, Uncle Boonmee is very much about cinema, that’s also why it’s personal. If you care to look, each reel of the film has a different style—acting style, lighting style, or cinematic references—but most of them reflect movies. I think that when you make a film about recollection and death, you have to consider that cinema is also dying—at least this kind of old cinema that nobody makes anymore.” It is perhaps this reason why I found Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives a lot more satisfying and meaningful than his earlier more celebrated works Syndromes and a Century and Blissfully Yours. Not having read the book on “Uncle Boonmee,” I do not know what percentage of the kudos need to go to the writer of the book and what percentage to the director of the film. All I can say is that I loved to watch Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives while I do not rate two of his afore-mentioned works that high. What I found so meaningful about the film is what the director himself stated in an interview to Bangkok Post: “Uncle Boonmee is a film about transformation, about objects and people that transform or hybridise. You can explain with scientific belief that nothing exists, nothing is really solid and everything is just a moving particle.”



While watching the credits I was surprised and encouraged to find Hollywood actor Danny Glover was an associate producer of this Thai film. I am convinced that understanding this film would require multiple viewings—but one thing I am convinced it is truly an intelligent and rewarding film experience that approaches the cinematic level of Tarkovsky’s and Mallick’s cinema. I am delighted that the Cannes jury recognized its merits and rewarded it with the Gold Palm prize in 2010, just as I am not surprised that another international jury--that of the International Film Festival of India held in Goa in the same year did not find it deserving of any award. At the Oscars too it did not make the final shortlist of five nominees for the best foreign film. Subsequently, this movie went on to win the best Asian film at the Asian Film Festival, 2011. One man's meat is truly another man’s poison.


P.S. The films Biutiful, The Strange Case of Anjelica and The Thin Red Line have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

113. Centenarian Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira’s “O Estranho Caso de Angelica” (The Strange Case of Angelica) (2010): Mixing illusion and reality with the mystery of life and death

One is never sure if any hundred year old can walk or even talk coherently. When you see a feature film made by a '102+ '-year-old that can make the grade to enter the 2010 Cannes official Un certain regard section, your jaws drop. The 102 or 103 year old Manoel de Oliveira’s reported physical handicaps are limited to walking with the aid of a stick and a minor hearing problem and, believe it or not, is busy making another movie after the recent The Strange Case of Angelica.


The Strange Case of Angelica is indeed a ghost story but to classify it merely as one would be missing the wood for the trees. If one is looking for a good ghost story movie, one ought to see The Others or Yella, not this one. If one is looking for special effects associated with ghost stories, this is far from one that can be  recommended. It is definitely not a commercial film: it is merely a film that can make you think. It provides a cinematic repast for an audience that is able to look beyond the decades-old technicalities that would annoy the impatient, modern hi-tech cineaste. Rather than a typical ghost story, this movie is all about capturing the ephemeral beauty of this world of fleeting moments of Joycean epiphanies on film, if you will, for posterity,

Director de Oliviera is probably one of the very few film directors from the silent film era still making movies in the 21st century. He has made some 60 films in the past 80 years. But what is most remarkable is that his films have a certain transcendental quality, often imperceptible to many. The Strange Case of Angelica is a tale written by de Oliveira in 1952, a half century ago for the screen but only executed today. And therefore the purist would find contradictions in the conversations in the film on global warming that are anachronistic for a film that is set in the Fifties. But then this is a sensitive tale from a man who loves cinema, photography, and sound. Had de Oliveira made this film 50 years ago, I am very sure that the mature philosophical turn of the final product would have been missing. It takes a very old man who has lived through life’s many twists and turns to make a film like this one.

The Strange Case of Angelica is about a still photographer—the starting point of any one who loves cinema. The photographer is different, he eats little, he loves the radio, he is an introvert, and is a person trying to catch the elusive beauty of actions being erased by time. The photographer spends hours trying to capture for future generations the feel of a chain of farmers preparing a farm field to grow another crop while of all of them sing a chorus that provide a hypnotic rhythm for the actions of the group. Much later in the film, the photographer revisits the same spot and finds to his dismay the field preparation has been replaced by a clunky tractor—gone are the men and the song. Even though the camera of the photographer has captured the visual beauty, it is cinema that captures the sounds that will be lost in time. Cinema and photography can make time stand still by illusion. That is the precise beauty of the de Oliveira film.

The movie is somewhat autobiographical—de Oliveira was a farmer and obviously realizes that his days on earth are numbered. The photographer in the film is an extension of de Oliveira, the film director (in fact the actor is his real life grandson). Are the hoes in the hands of the farmers a subtle image of the grim reaper for an old man? The film is evidently a poem on the magic that you can find through the view finder capturing the elusive image that you wish can stay with you forever. Here in this film it is a moment of magic realism where a dead woman comes alive through the viewfinder. So is the image of the farmers. So is the bird in a cage.

The Strange Case of Angelica is much more than a tale of a dead woman coming alive in the mind of a young man. It is ostensibly a love story of two individuals who have never met in life, but is destined to meet and be together after death. The beauty of life and death is what this film captures through some amazing sequences. One such sequence in the film is of a cat staring at a bird in a cage, considering the prospect of the bird as its next meal. The cat’s delicious thoughts are hoed down by a dog’s bark—the cat soon realizes that it has to save its own skin. Another amazing bit of conversation in the film relates to a pet bird being fed the remains of an egg and the surprising death of the bird that results from the innocent action.




The film has much to do with philosophy—the opening quote in the film that I do not now fully recollect, had something to link time standing still and God in us. It is not without relevance that a trivial conversation within the film set in 1952 discusses “anti-matter searching for the precise opposite.” For the record the film’s tale revolves around a Jew in post-Second World War Catholic Portugal. A Jew encounters death of a Christian woman and a Jew deals with a photographic death and resurrection following visits to a Church. There is even a passing out in an olive grove. (Much of de Oliveira’s cinema contains suggestive Christian motifs for those familiar with Biblical passages.) The soul departs leaving the body behind. These are interesting images, not statements, in the film. Statements from the film have to be viewed in the context of visuals and sound.

This film has much for a viewer to reflect on. And film is not just a visual crossword puzzle to solve. It has an aural puzzle as well. The Chopin selection and application in the film needs attention. As the credits roll, you hear the very same chorus of the farmers that so fascinated the photographer earlier in the film. That’s de Oliveira’s nudge on the importance of sound that has a magic realism of its own. The bird in the cage flutters when death takes place elsewhere in the room. As the landlady closes the windows and draws the curtains to underscore death, you begin to reflect on this strange film that mixes hallucination, science, music and philosophy. It is a sensitive, delicate film that is unlikely to be appreciated by the conventional filmgoer who prefers a cut-and-dry tale. If you relish the film you will realize that this film could not have been made by a young person. Beyond the lack of modern craftsmanship lies a deep tale of mystery and philosophy rejecting modern machines (loud impersonal efficient farm machinery for one) and modern photography, all the while celebrating a mystical charm of the old world.

P.S. The German ghost film Yella was reviewed earlier on this blog.

112. Danish director Susanne Bier’s “Hævnen” (In a Better World) (2010): The importance of parents revisited in the contemporary world scenario

“Surprisingly endearing and thought-provoking” is what I consider Susanne Bier’s Hævnen (In a Better World) to be. To appreciate this Bier offering adequately, it might be useful to note that the lady belongs to “Dogme 95” group—a group of prominent Danish filmmakers who vowed in 1995 to make films utilizing traditional values of story, acting, and theme, excluding special effects or technology. Some prominent members of this group include directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.


Some directors leave you cold when you see a particular movie they made. The first film of Ms Bier that I had seen—an earlier work called After the Wedding--left me rather unimpressed. The film had dealt with orphans in India and a father-daughter relationship in Europe that was at best interesting but not convincing enough to make me sit up and take note of either the lady behind the camera or of the scriptwriter. It remains for me a convoluted, predictable and unconvincing movie.

Now, why do I describe In a Better World to be a “surprisingly, endearing film?”  I do not consider Susanne Bier’s preceding work After the Wedding to be either significant or to be a work of a promising director. Therefore, it was a pleasant surprise for me that in the very next film In a Better World, Ms. Bier has so much more to offer for the viewer in every department of filmmaking that you begin to wonder if it is indeed the very same team of Bier and scriptwriter Anders Thomas Jensen behind the film you are watching. I am not surprised the film In a Better World won the Golden Globe for the best Foreign Film and the best director Silver Peacock at the Indian International Film Festival in Goa. This film deserved those honours, even if the film is simplistic enough to fall in line with the Dogme 95 values.

It is amusing to note that the Bier-Jensen team actually has reworked on the very same theme offered in After the Wedding only to remodel it afresh in In a Better World. Both films offer thought provoking comparisons of parallel relationships on two continents (this time Europe vs Africa, replacing Europe vs Asia/India in the earlier film). Instead of dealing with the father-daughter interactions of the earlier film, the Bier-Jensen team devolves the interactions to two sets of fragile father-son relationships. The other less-important parent in both films hover in the background and are never fleshed out by Jensen. You would expect the cocktail not to work when it is shaken as it was in the earlier film, but it somehow works wonders when the cocktail is stirred, rather than shaken, by the duo in the second film. While the main parent-child relationship is discussed threadbare in the European context in both the films, the viewer is also provided a connected inter-continental relationship of love and philanthropic social work involving one of the European parents in the first equation.

I have been trying to figure out for over a month why I liked Bier’s In a Better World so much when I was left nonplussed by After the Wedding. One possible reason is that I could easily identify myself with the incredibly real characters of the two 10-year old or so schoolboys and the peer pressure to agree to do certain morally wrong actions because you value more the friendships that you develop in school than ethics that you have adopted during your upbringing. Another possible reason I liked the film was the Gandhian parent who taught his children to develop moral strength rather than give in to bullies. A third reason was the underscoring of the effect of the absence of a mother on a growing child. A fourth possible reason I loved the film was the suggestion that seeds of terrorism can be easily be sown in the minds of youngsters when parents are separating or divorcing. A fifth likely reason was the awesome screen presence of the actor Mikael Presbrandt as the Gandhian father and a surgeon, who spends time in Africa providing medical care for victims of civil strife in an unspecified country, putting his Hippocratic oath above all other values and his conscience—at least for some time.

In a Better World lifts up a simple tale of two schoolboys, essentially having good moral values, who are both missing their respective mothers, deteriorate into modern terrorists or young vigilantes. The power of the film does not lie in the story line—it is undeniably a simple, predictable one. The power of the film lies in default by what the film suggests to the viewer by presenting the simple tale. Do “caring” parents really care for their children? Are the parents there during critical moments when they are needed the most?

One of the reasons for In a Better World to work magic was the Bier/Jensen effort to concentrate a lot more on the thoughts and actions of the growing-up children more than the adults in the film. There are so many sequences in the film that remind one of the 2003 Russian masterpiece Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return (dangers of heights, troubled youngsters who find solace in retreating to dangerous and isolated places, the father-son relationship). In the earlier Bier/Jensen film, the focus was on the adults and the lack of a complete childhood. However, the adult characters in In a Better World are equally developed even though the African segment is unbelievably predictable and clichéd, even though similar African warlords have dotted the African map in recent decades.

The Bier/Jensen treatise on relationships works this time around because it connects relationships with seeds that sow terrorism. The treatise worked even more because it seemed to promote Gandhian values. It works because it underscores the importance of parenting over philanthropic social work. The movie seems to scream “Look after the emotional needs of your family before you go out to help others in distant lands.” When a child needs his father most of all to talk, the father is too involved and tired by his well-meaning actions in a physically distant world. These are real scenarios today, and that is the key to the success of this film. All the elements of the film are real and that is what makes the film connect with the viewer. Perhaps Jensen ought to be complimented for his wonderful screenplay. The film has an optimistic ending though the English title suggests an element of doubt and presents a pessimistic nuance. The film does leave the audience yearning for a "better world" for all youngsters growing up today in this complex but interconnected global village.

Susanne Bier, as the director, needs to be complimented for the superb convincing performances she has elicited first from Mikael Persbrandt, as the surgeon and father of the one of the boys, and then the two boys Elias (Markus Rygaard) and Christian (William Nielsen) that recall similar performances of young actors in certain films of François Truffaut and Louis Malle. Bier needs to be eqully complimented for her choice of locations that add to the veracity of the tale.



For viewers who value cinema that concentrate on “story, acting and theme” as the Dogme 95 group projects, In a Better World is a great film to watch and enjoy. The film having won the Golden Globe is now in the Oscar race, once again competing against the remarkable Mexican/Spanish film Biutiful. (And do the two films have a common link? Yes, both deal with parenting! And both have mesmerizing performances by the respective lead actors.) If the viewer goes solely by traditional filmmaking that the Dogme group propounds, then the Bier film would pip the Mexican/Spanish film to win the foreign film Oscar. However, if you step out of the Dogme world, Biutiful deserves the Oscar.

In a Better World, apart from the accolades mentioned above, also won the Grand jury award at the Rome International Film Festival, the Thessaloniki film festival's audience award, Best male actor for Mikael Presbrandt at the Tallinn Tarta Black Nights festival, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Sevilla Film festival.



P.S. The Mexican/Spanish film Biutiful and the Russian film The Return have been reviewed on this blog earlier.

111. Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s “Bal” (Honey) (2010): Joseph and Jacob relationship revisited in a contemporary scenario

Turkish cinema is on the march. Decades after Yilmaz Guney’s Turkish films made an impact on the minds of connoisseurs of the finest in world cinema, came the formidable Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the less impressive but yet notable Abdullah Oguz. And now we have a new Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu who can match Ceylan’s sophistication in a different way. Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Bal (Honey) is an unusual film in many ways—it has no music at all, it grabs your senses by focusing on natural sounds and sights, indoors and outdoors. It is different.

To appreciate Bal beyond the obvious sights and sounds, one has to be well read on the theological tale of Joseph and Jacob (or Yusuf and Yakub) common to three great religions of the world—Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The intricate relationship of father, son and God/Allah, paves the way for the “spiritual realism” of Semih Kaplanoğlu’s cinema.

The story of Bal appears to be simple, but it is not so simple. It is a tale of Yusuf (read Joseph), a young boy, with a narrative structure that uses an Islamic perspective. Like the Joseph of the Bible, Yusuf dreams, and shares them with his father Yakup/Yakub (read Jacob). Yusuf/Joseph is an interpreter of dreams. Yakub/Jacob advises his son in the film Bal/Honey never to share his dreams with others. To understand the importance of this seemingly innocuous statement the viewer has to be familiar with the religious books of any of the three religions. When Yakub dies (the death of Yakub is captured cinematically in way that is reminiscent of death captured in Iñárritu’s Biutiful, both films made in 2010, amidst visual references to tall trees and metaphors of unusual birds, owls in one, hawks in the other), his son Yusuf stops speaking and searches for his father on his own using his dreams as clues. The intense but silent bonding between father and son (a superb performance by child actor Bora Atlas) is amazingly and sensitively captured in Bal,  again recalling a similar bonding of a father and his children in Iñárritu’s Biutiful. All elements of the film comes together seamlessly because Kaplanoğlu is the co-screeplaywriter and co-editor as well.

This notable and uplifting Turkish film, set in the Black Sea region of the country, is an odd film if seen from a conventional movie viewer’s perspective. It is the third and final film of director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Yusuf trilogy—three films named after Yusuf the lead and part-autobiographical character in all the three films somewhat like the Apu trilogy of Satyajit Ray. The three films are called Süt (Milk), Yumurta (Egg), and Bal (Honey). Odd names indeed to describe the life stages of a human being! But wait the oddest bit is that one would expect the three films to be chronological segments: first of the child (and the death of his father), the second of the coming of age of young man struggling to be a poet, and the third segment on the established adult poet (and the death of his mother). But for director Kaplanoğlu that does not work: his three films are not presented in chronological order.

The last film in the trilogy Bal (Honey) is all about the child Yusuf. This film won the 2010 Golden Bear (the Grand Prize) and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, while the earliest film Milk is about the struggling poet living with his mother, and the second film Egg is the presentation of the matured poet, whose mother dies and a new young woman enters his life. Unfortunately all this critical (and to some trivial) information is often not available to a viewer watching Bal as the first Kaplanoğlu film; I had to dig up this information from various sources to appreciate the film better. But avid filmgoers will understand this to be a familiar problem with appreciating any major trilogy whether the director is Satyajit Ray (Apu trilogy), or Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors trilogy), or Grigory Kozinstsev (Maxim’s trilogy) or Ingmar Bergman (Faith trilogy). To appreciate any single film in a trilogy of a good director, one needs to see all the three films and hopefully grasp the connections. Therefore, to have seen the last segment (Bal/Honey) first, before seeing the other two was not disconcerting in the case of Kaplanoğlu as you were seeing the early years of the poet first. And what a segment that has proven to be!

Fortunately, the directors’ own statements provide many insights for the viewer to comprehend Bal further. Kaplanoğlu’s statement available on the European film awards website: “Bal is the third film in my "Yusuf trilogy." The idea of the "Yusuf trilogy" took form while I was revising a script which I had written long ago and which was more or less the story of university aged Yusuf in Süt (Milk). While I was elaborating on the character of Yusuf, I started to think about this young man's future as an adult (Yumurta/Egg) and his past as a young boy (Bal/Honey). Those ideas helped shape the trilogy. I started with Yumurta (Egg), maybe because I wanted to peel down the character slowly and reach his core. The trilogy could be considered an extensive flashback. However, they are not period films. All take place in the present day amidst various places, relations and economic standards in Turkey. I have been asked if all three Yusuf characters are indeed the same man. I choose not to answer so as not to disclose the secrets of the character, the direct and indirect relationship between the films, the mysteries to the films.”

“I drew on my own past experiences while shaping the character of Yusuf. So we can say that Yusuf has parts from me. I referred to my own youth and childhood while writing the three scripts and I believe I was able to handle the issues about Yusuf’s life, troubles and quests realistically. My own childhood served as a point of reference for the script of Bal (Honey) as well. My troubles at school while trying to learn how to read and write, my questions which grown-ups left unanswered, the intense cruelty and richness of nature... In a way, a child forms his personality while discovering the world with curiosity. An occasional misunderstanding leading to naïve mistakes, dreams, joys and sorrows allows him to reach the truth. I hope Bal (Honey) allows us to reach the truth of Yusuf.”

“For Yusuf and his father Yakup, the forest represents a fairytale place containing many mysteries at its heart. The forest is a magical realm into which they vanish and appear back again. It is no ordinary place where they walk to and from for a means of livelihood. It constitutes another world with big old trees, various mysterious creatures, like the mule and the hawk which accompanies them into the forest. It was quite difficult to find a place where there were broad and tall trees with big trunks. I tried my best to find a location both suitable for placing the hives and the visual world that I wanted to create in Bal/Honey. We worked in various forests, particularly in those where beehives have been placed for centuries. They were located 30-40 km from each other and at different heights way above sea level, and Yusuf's father Yakup is a beekeeper who gathers black hive honey, considered some of the world's finest honey and specific to the region. This therapeutic honey is the essence of an older world, untouched nature and holiest knowledge for the inhabitants of the region. It is produced by a dwindling number of beekeepers. Yakup's occupation will soon die out. This tough labor includes placing specially-made hives on tall treetops in mountainous areas. This profession is as dangerous as it is grueling. Yusuf’s admiration of his father certainly owes something to his unconventional job. In my point of view, it has something in common with Yusuf’s future vocation -- writing poetry, which feature many different kinds of trees.”

On the website of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, director Kaplanoğlu summarizes his film, “Before the trilogy I quest for answers to the questions in my head regarding myself, my life, what I’m doing here. I tried to create a perspective on the Creation by departing from a poet’s questions. Aren’t the cinema and the arts trying to get closer to the secrets of the human’s existence?”

“Those ideas helped shape the trilogy.”,  Kaplanoğlu adds.

To revert to the awesome movie itself, the fine narrative is punctuated by the visit of young Yusuf to his grandmother’s house during which on a magical night he learns of the story of the Prophet Mohammad’s arrival in Mecca after climbing the Miraj (ladder) and conversing with Abraham, Moses and Jesus, after meeting Allah (God) to retell his experiences in heaven. For young Yusuf he uses clues from his dreams and the tale of Prophet Mohammad to unite with his dead father Yakup in spirit at the place he died.

Beyond the magical/spiritual realism the film Bal provides a great essay on the classical father-son relationship. In the classroom (an interesting inversion of the dense forest), young Yusuf struggles for social acceptance, sometimes with perseverance, sometimes with guile, passing off his bench mate’s homework as his own. The film is able to capture Yusuf alone in his classroom (even when the class is full of students, Yusuf is strangely alone) just as it captures Yusuf alone in the forest. Interestingly, the film underscores a factor often missing in today’s society: a child with a speaking disability gets total undiluted support from his father, building a bond that matters in life, even after the father's death. Again to truly appreciate the father-son spiritual bonding one has to study the Joseph/Jacob dyad from the religious texts that goes beyond a mere social relationship. The last shot of the film may be silent but it is one of the finest sophisticated and subtle endings in cinema’s history. Kaplanoğlu and Ceylan have truly lifted Turkish cinema to soaring new heights of quality in world cinema.

Apart from the major awards at the Berlin Film Festival 2010, Bal/Honey has won the Best Cinematography Award at the Istanbul International Festival 2010, the UNESCO award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for its outstanding contribution to promotion and preservation of cultural diversity through film and the best film award at the Adana International film festival.

P.S. Turkish directors Ceylan's Three Monkeys and Oguz' Mutluluk/Bliss have been  reviewed  earlier on this blog. Semih Kaplanoglu's later films Grain; Milk; Commitment; and Commitment Hasan have been reviewed in detail on this blog.

110. Mexican director and screenplay-writer Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film “Biutiful“(2010) made in Spain: Preparing for death and communicating with the dead

Iñárritu gets better with each film he makes. His screenplay (with co-scriptwriters Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone) in Biutiful takes a quantum jump in quality from his earlier Babel. In Babel, Iñárritu toyed with global ramifications of one person’s innocent actions, often an outcome of a knee-jerk reaction due to lack of empathy and/or of sympathy. Biutiful inverts somewhat similar connections and concerns from souls connecting beyond the grave with the living approaching their own death.


While it is easy to be swayed by the riveting (Cannes Best Actor, 2010) performance of the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, the real winner in this remarkable movie for me is its writer-director Iñárritu. Biutiful is a movie that deals with people living on the fringes of urban poverty, flirting with communication with souls in their after-life. The film begins with an absolutely stunning conversation between a man about to die and a man (the father, or is it his grandfather?) who is already dead. The film essentially discusses the last days of a man who has the gift of communicating with the dead. Just as one glimpsed Iñárritu’s concern of one stranger for another in Babel, in Biutiful this empathy/sympathy is underscored in the context of approaching death. The film is also a realistic attempt of a dying man putting the remnants of his fragile family in secure hands, when he eventually has to depart from this world. It is a film in which the director/scriptwriter uses the concept of death and extra-sensory gifts of communication to really communicate with different personalities already dead. Here is a film set in Bercelona, Spain, in which a father of two kids totally dependant on him  reaches out to empathize with Senegalese and Chinese immigrants in Barcelona, as much as a woman who wants to love her husband but is in no mental state to do so without sending contrary signals, all of which are an extension of the essential idea of Babel, only more refined and escalated in a spiritual context. As in Babel, there is a closure offered in Biutiful achieved by doing good for the lesser privileged and the less understood by basic human goodness in human beings however outwardly corrupt they may seem. And this goodness, Iñárritu seems to emphasize exits in the common man, often representing the negative elements in our society (involved in peddling drugs, corrupt middlemen dealing with corrupt cops, and even cheats who sell gas-based room heaters that could kill from leakages).

Biutiful is a beautiful film, simply because the title is taken from a semi-literate urban street hustler’s attempt at teaching his kid how to spell the English word “beautiful” to his Spanish offspring learning English in school.  The incorrect spelling of the title reflects beautiful aspects of the 'bad" people. The film Biutiful has an awesome screenplay that seamlessly combines parenting and death. The film is all about death but after you view the film there is good likelihood that the viewer will not consider it to be so but merely see the corruption, fragile marriages, drugs, immigration and gratitude for favours rendered as the more overriding elements than death itself.

The opening sequence and the end sequence are almost the same. Dead owls, that collect a bowl of wool, are discussed. Death is captured by sound and a blank screen. Uxbal (Javier Bardem) earns from the dead—he has the uncanny ability to converse with the recently dead—and helps the souls of the dead pass on un-communicated messages to the living.

Like director Carlos (Silent Light) Reygadas, Iñárritu is an amazing modern cinematic talent from Mexico. Iñárritu’s forte is to link various subtexts of life in a larger mosaic of life that is positive and giving, not destructive and revengeful. There are contradictions that the movie throws up: good people can get killed (e.g., the Chinese lady who baby-sits Uxbal’s kids, Uxbal’s wife who loves her husband but sleeps with his brother).

In Biutiful, a dead kid wants to set right the wrong notion with his parents about a stolen watch. In the same film, the bad conscience of Uxbal prevents his communicating with the recently dead Chinese woman and child, who were his well-wishers. A Senegalese immigrant could walk out on her benefactor Uxbal and return to Senegal with a wad of cash but prefers to stay back and thank her benefactor by taking care of his kids. None of the characters are essentially good “individuals” or heroes of our society, yet Uxbals of any society mean well and are silent heroes in their own limited space. That is the irony captured by the misspelled title.

Biutiful is a tale of generations: Uxbal and his father/grandfather, Uxbal and his children, the Senegalese couple and their child, the Chinese woman and her child, and a dead Barcelona kid and his parents. It is also a tale of a man realizing his role in a limited canvas of history in the winter of his life (literally at a snowy locale). The movie is dark but an uplifting undertone reflecting the goodness in most of us.



Biutiful proves Iñárritu is convinced of the larger cosmic plan in a seemingly chaotic world. Biutiful is not about rational abilities and actions of Uxbal, but then what is rational about any one of us? Can one really deny that communicating with the dead is impossible? The string music of Gustavo Santaolalla (Director Michael Mann, who has a great taste for music, used Santaolalla's music in Collateral) often emphasizes the irony that the script offers. Here is a film that unlike Babel is able to flesh out the main lead character, provide great music and offer tale that you can reflect on even after the film has stopped rolling. And more interestingly as a director he has an interesting and arresting way of depicting death—not very much removed from a somewhat similar depiction of death by director Semih Kaplanoglu from Turkey in another remarkable movie made this very year called Bal (Honey) that won the 2010 Golden Bear at Berlin. Both Bal and Biutiful are spellbinding films of 2010. The world is indeed small and interconnected.

P.S. Iñárritu’s Babel and Reygadas' Silent Light have been reviewed on this blog earlier.

109. Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko’s “Ovsyanki” (Silent Souls) (2010): A requiem on love, death, birds, water, and our past

Good Russian cinema has always gripped me like no other; Kozintsev, Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Zvyaginstsev are imprinted in my mind’s eye and ears. And then along comes another, a certain Aleksei Fedorchenko. His Silent Souls happens to be his third feature length film, which recently picked up the Venice award for best photography. (Venice could claim to have introduced him to the wider cinematic world when his debut film First on the Moon won a significant award at that festival). Russian cinema often suggests that melancholia can be appealing if dealt with intelligence that Silent Souls proves as did works of the afore-mentioned Russian/Soviet filmmakers. And the camerawork of Venice award-winning cinematographer Mikhail Krichman remind you of the lensing of Jonas Gritsius, Kozintsev’s cameraman. It is not surprising to find Krichman was the cinematographer of Zvyagintsev’s two feature films. Small world, this world of good Russian cinema! Krichman also bagged the prestigious Plus Camerimage award for 2010 for the work in Silent Souls. Silent Souls also won the Black Pearl award for the Best Narrative film at the Abu Dhabi film festival.


Silent Souls is an amazing and complex work of cinema. Fedorchenko has made a film based on the novella/short-story called The Buntings, by Aist Sergeyev, with a screenplay by Denis Osokin adapting Sergeyev’s work. The main character in the film/story is also named Aist, obviously the alter ego of the novelist, who narrates the tale. The narration begins by self-introduction--the narrator is a Merjan, a 400 year old Finno-Ugric tribe in North-West Russia. His dead father was a poet--'He was a queer fish, that self-taught Merjan poet.' The narrator says the Merjans don’t talk much—much of the real “talking” in the film is done by the camera and the imaginative direction, not the actors.

Two essential elements of cinema lurk in the screenplay: the camera and the written word. Aist, the narrator, is a photographer. Early in the film interesting Russian faces smile into Aist’s lens as he directs them to smile or tilt their faces. Is he a ladies’ man? Aist has no family but has gifted a trinket to his best friend’s wife. Much later into the film Aist recollects his father, the self-taught Merjan poet, throwing his most prized possession a typewriter into a semi-frozen river. The only song in the film is sung by an admirable choir and we are told it is a song written by a local Merjan poet. The story/screenplay/direction nudges the viewer to the unwritten tale of the Merjan nation underneath the obvious tale. Most interesting trivia for me was the dedication of the film: not to the father of the director or screenplay-writer but to the father of the original story writer (who probably in real life threw his typewriter into the water!).

The only relationships discussed in the film relate to son and father (so much akin to Zvyagintsev’s The Return), women are objects of pleasure (as wife, illicit lover, and prostitute) and memory (to be captured on still film, as well). Aist the writer has called his story “The Buntings”, birds of the sparrow family. We are shown two buntings in a cage which accompany the two main characters on their journey. One would have assumed the suggested parallels are between Aist, the narrator, and the widower Miron. When you sell a pair of buntings, it is often a pair of birds of the opposite sexes. The parallel suggested by Aist the story-writer relates to Miron and his dead wife, Tanya.

Male-dominated as it may seem, the film is paean of a man for his dead wife, an object of love even in death. He is so broken in spirit that he rushes out of his car in remorse to kick a birch tree. Director Fedorchenko stated in his press conference at the Venice film festival: “The slogan of the film was tenderness. We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. This feeling, this representation of the Merjan, was something we felt the whole time we were staying in that region. Also the names of the rivers bring us back to the Merjan people, and the expression on the women’s faces us reminds us of that people, that there was something different. We wanted to recreate this world that didn’t exist any longer, but was constantly present with us.”

But to assess this film further one has to shift gears. The film transcends love. It grapples with death and “water” (read nature) as major belief of the Merjan community. Merjans believe that all souls live in the flowing waters. Flowing water is as holy for the Merjan as the river Ganges to the Hindus. And believe it or not, the two communities separated by a continent believe in cremating their dead and collecting the burnt remains and consigning those remains to the flowing waters. Even the wedding ring worn by the husband is thrown into the water. Amazing that two communities so distant believe in the same rituals. Aist, the narrator, states “Our cemeteries are almost empty, only the young are buried there.” The incredible end of the film has the husband and wife meeting in the waters of the river, while another son, father, mother and the poet’s typewriter all meet in the sacred river. The narrator mentions he now writes on the “fish’s bodies.” Of course the narrator is speaking from a watery grave. Meanwhile, the end credits show Merjan couples locking locks on bridges and throwing the keys into the river. The everlasting Merjan story seems to continue to be associated with rivers over generations.

Death is another key element in this movie. Miron’s wife Tanya is dead early in the film. The Merjan rituals of preparing the dead for their last journey take up a chunk of the film. The journey to the river to consign the dead to flames and the waters of the river provides opportunity for “smoking.” “Smoking,” for the Merjans, is when intimate details of the dead are revealed to close friends to facilitate emotional release for the bereaved, a rough parallel with the Irish “wake.”



A conversation on immortality leads to the buntings falling silent in the car. Just as Hitchcock’s birds in his famous film The Birds become ominously silent before tragedy unfolds so do Fedorchenko’s buntings fall silent. But the image of a large bunting-like bird capable of smashing a windshield transforms the sequence into a dreamlike imagery from the realistic body that make up the rest of the movie. But surprisingly, the brief change in style fits into the scheme of the narration, as more facts are revealed by the narrator.

Silent Souls provides much to ponder about right from the first shot of the narrator with his cycle on a pontoon bridge to the final shot when the viewer realizes the true identity of Aist the narrator. Is it only love that gives meaning to life, as Aist, the narrator states, as he wishes he could live forever? But if you reflect, those are meaningless words as Aist has no family or friends, only the two buntings are his “family” apart from Miron his best friend who Aist has cheated in love. But then for the Merjans everlasting love has its abode in the flowing waters. The past and present merge as the narrator is not a hero but someone that resembles a chorus in a Greek tragedy. So do love and the flowing waters merge for the Merjans in the epilogue as the end-credits roll.

Fedorchenko may not be the finest Russian filmmaker alive, but he is definitely immensely talented and worthy of following closely.


P.S. Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment with Mikhail Krichman as cinematographer have been reviewed earlier on this blog. 

108. Iranian screenplay-writer and director Majid Majidi’s film “Baran” (Rain) (2001): A Sufi take on the mosaic of Iran

Many would assess and dismiss this delicate Iranian feature film as an interestingly made love story between a young Iranian man and an Afghan woman refugee in Iran,or even as interesting cinematic tale where the woman lead actor does not speak a word. However, the film communicates much more than a regular love saga. Baran won the the Grand Prix of the Americas at the 2001 Montreal Film Festival and the Freedom of Expression Award of the US National Board of Review.

The story of Baran, the film, is a based on a delectable screenplay conceived by the director himself. First, the name Baran is the name of the young Afghan lady in the film and Baran also means “rain.” So big deal, one would say. But rain is the ultimate scenario for the final sequence of this Majidi movie. Again rain might not mean much to a casual viewer of this film. Majidi, the screenplay writer, has deliberately chosen the word Baran to link the two elements of the movie, the human and the natural.

Many would assume the principal subject of the film to be the female protagonist Baran. Yet Majidi surprises the viewer by a clever inversion of the subject—the film turns out to be a tale about the man who falls in love with Baran rather than Baran herself. The film traces the gradual change in the male character before and after falling in love with the girl. Once in love, Lateef the young Azeri Iranian evolves from the cheeky young  fighter-cock constantly conscious of the importance of accumulating savings at each opportunity, to an individual who slowly transforms into an ascetic giving up all his wealth and the costly identity papers for his love’s family who needs those items of “pelf” more than him. Lateef in love is a transformed individual, he doesn’t chase away birds but feeds them. This is close to the Sufi ideals that one needs to adopt in life to be “united/aligned with the Beloved/Divine forces.” Somewhere near the middle of the film a troubled Lateef encounters an Afghan shoemaker with a "Rumi-like" visage who says the enigmatic words “From the hot fire of being apart, Comes the flame that burns the heart.” Probably these lines are from the Sufi poet Rumi, I do not know for sure. It is important for the viewer to note that that the shoemaker is never seen again by Lateef, and that the end of the film is also about a shoe that is returned to the owner and footprint of the shoe is shown being erased by rain.

In Iranian cinema, one hardly encounters physical touch by the opposite sexes, and true to this spirit the only acknowledgement of love is a smile or a furtive glance acknowledging the lover. With such constraints, memories become valuable than touch and more so in a movie like Baran, which transcends a love tale to enter a higher level of philosophy knocking at the doors of Sufism (and perhaps Tabula Rasa?).

The movie Baran is replete with minor details that indicate ethnic differences within the Iranian population that becomes apparent in the film but not to a casual visitor to Iran (I have visited Iran more than once on official work but never noticed the mosaic of ethnicity beyond the sprinkling of Armenians in Teheran and the bulk of the Persian Iranian population). Baran could be essentially classified as a tale of the Afghan refugee and the Afghan's eventual desire to return to his homeland, but Majidi’s Baran introduces colourful vignettes of Azeri Iranian (as associated with Azerbaijan), the Turkmen Iranian (as associated Turkmenistan), the Kurds and the Lurs. The official website of Baran explains the details. The construction site brings the different ethnicities together. Majidi’s screenplay knits the logical interplay between the communities: the Persian Iranians play the Inspectors, the Azeris bond together and take care of each other, the Kurds and the Lurs are easily provoked to fight the Azeris, while the poor Afghans, without identity papers, toil away for a fraction of what the others earn always fearing deportation if spotted by the Persian Iranian inspectors. And in Majidi's script and film, each ethnic group lives in separate rooms while they work together at the same construction site. Forget the love story, because these details, lovingly crafted, tell another realistic story that is perhaps more interesting than the obvious love tale.



There is a strange similarity that I note between Majidi’s Baran and Aki Kaurismaki’s Man Without a Past. In both movies, the past of the main persona is forgotten and a new person emerges harking back to Tabula Rasa--to start life anew. In both films “rain” is a mystical symbol—in Baran, you see the footprint of the beloved (or philosophically the one you seek) in the rain towards end of the film; in Man Without a Past there is rain on a clear day to grow potatoes, rain that grows six or seven potatoes on a small patch of land, and the last half-potato is given away to a stranger who wants to eat it to avoid scurvy! Futrther, in Baran there is a departure by a hired vehicle for Afghanistan, in Kaurismaki’s film there is a train that is moving forward, a visual metaphor used to punctuate past and future. Both Majidi and Kaurismaki seem to have similar minds and affinity in their personal philosophies.

A closing thought. Did Majidi, when he wrote the script, intend to make a love story relating to one dazzling individual that struck a chord in a boy’s heart and mind or did Majidi want to make a philosophical film on the life of a young man maturing into one that cares for others less fortunate than himself? I feel both stories co-exist in this film and it is the viewer who has to choose which tale is the more powerful strand of the two.

P.S. Aki Kaurismaki's film Man Without a Past has been reviewed earlier on this blog

107. Canadian director Neil Diamond’s documentary film “Reel Injun” (2009): A documentary that helps a viewer re-evaluate what cinema makes the viewer believe to be true

Who is the real Native Indian of North America or, if you prefer, the American Indian? The images that many will recall of the Native Indian of USA and Canada are often closely related to the images of the native Indian conjured up by Hollywood, often images that have been stretched far from an accurate depiction for the sake of convenience by Hollywood directors, scriptwriters, and costume designers. And we the viewers after watching several such depictions begin to believe in these inaccuracies. For instance, one associates Native Indians to wear headbands while in reality the headband was common headgear only for a small fraction of the Indian nations on that continent. The headband was used by Hollywood initially for stunt actors to keep their wigs in place as they performed amazing acts for the camera. Gradually the headband became the norm of the Native Indian’s regalia. This is one of the many interesting insights provided by Neil Diamond’s Reel Injun.


Neil Diamond, the director of the full-length documentary is not the singer Neil Diamond that my generation would fondly recall. He is a Native Indian from Canada, of the Cree nation, and a filmmaker. The film is an interesting mix of interviews and film clips of Westerns made over a century with Native Indians. Reel Injun looks critically at how cinema can blur the truth about the Native Indian. The interviewees include Native Indians and Hollywood icons such as Clint Eastwood and independent director Jim Jarmusch, who are obviously not Native Indians. The film discusses the controversial incident at Wounded Knee in 1973, which has a direct bearing on the several Hollywood films recalling the century-old but more important incident at Wounded Knee in 1890 and of the more famous Little Big Horn incident in 1876. Both incidents are history; the moot question is how the incidents were recorded in history and on film. Poet Stephen Vincent Benet immortalized the former incident in his poem “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,” and popular songs and films such as Hidalgo (2004) and Into the West (2005) followed in Benet’s footsteps.

I am not a US citizen but I grew up watching Hollywood cinema that recorded the 1876 incident. One particular film etched in my memory as a kid was Lewis R Forster’s Tonka (1958) produced by Walt Disney and thanks to that film even as a kid the viewpoint of the Native Indian struck a chord with me. It is unfortunate that no clip from Tonka was included in Reel Injun because it was one of the few Hollywood movies that came very close to portraying a positive view of the Native Indian. Forster’s film is an important one for Native Indians as it provided the “unromantic truth of the warfare on the plains” (General Custer’s last stand) as one writer wryly noted. Tonka was not the only Hollywood film that portrayed native Indians positively: there was John Ford’s important film Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) , Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Terence Mallick’s The New World (2005) and finally my favourite Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969). Each of these top-notch films are important takes on the Native Indian but Mr Diamond only chose to discuss the Arthur Penn film and the Michael Mann film to drive home his point of view.

A major point of discussion in the film is Marlon Brando’s support for the Native American and Brando’s decision to decline the Godfather Best Actor Oscar in 1973 by sending a Native Indian to read out his message protesting the depiction of the Native Indian by Hollywood. John Wayne was so incensed that he wanted to physically attack the Native Indian who came on stage to refuse the award. Other critics claimed the lady was not a Native American at all but was of Italian descent and so on. But the brave lady Sacheen Littlefeather (born Marie Cruz) made a point that made the world sit up. For me, Brando was not just a great actor, but a man who was sensitive to social issues around him. This action of Brando is in line with his comment that his lead role in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Quiemada was the finest piece of acting he ever did. Quiemada has only seen a fraction of critical acclaim in comparison with Brando’s work in mainstream Hollywood films.



After you have viewed Neil Diamond’s documentary you will have a definite position on the subject. You might agree with Diamond or you might not. Arguably Reel Injun is not the finest of documentaries but it is definitely a documentary that will set the viewer thinking. Diamond underscores the fact that often the viewer assumes that what he or she sees on screen is correct while cinema is a potent hidden persuader. Diamond fleshes out the real personalities of Native Indian actors such as Russell Means and Wes Studi, who played major roles as Native Indians in Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. Diamond’s film, most of all, will effectively persuade a true filmgoer to seek out the revisionist films from North America that put the Native Indian in a better perspective than the traditional Western with the stereotype roles of scalp-hunting savages. Diamond’s film discusses roles and personalities of Native Indian actors Graham Greene (I often wonder if the celebrated late novelist Graham Greene knew of this Canadian actor, best known for his Oscar-winning role in another revisionist film Dances with Wolves and who shared his name) and American Native Indian actor Will Sampson who played the unforgettable role of Chief Bromden who pretends to be deaf and dumb in Milos Foreman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Finally, Diamond’s film includes Clint Eastwood’s statement made in an interview to Mr Diamond that relates to the Oscar Academy debating whether Native Indians portraying themselves can be considered to be essaying a performance worthy of an Academy Award! However, the following personal quote of the late actor Will Sampson best encapsulates the point of view of Reel Injun: “Hollywood writers and directors are still using 'em for livestock. They somehow just can't seem to bring it around to give the truth about Indians.”

P.S. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man and Gillo Pontecorvo's Quiemada (Burn!) have been discussed earlier on this blog.

106. Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “Safar e Gandehar” (Kandahar) (2001): An ode to a tragedy called Afghanistan

Time magazine selected Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar as one of the top 100 films of all time. If one judges quality of cinema solely by the story or the plot, Time magazine is not off the mark. It won minor awards at the Cannes and Thessaloniki  film festivals as well. 

Afghanistan, like Darfur (Sudan), would make any sensitive human being wince on viewing on screen the tragedy of a great nation buffeted by forces that do not get weaker but stronger each year. Generations of Afghans have faced hunger, fear and a life deprived of democracy, equality and education and, last but not least, economic and social progress. Take the Afghan factor out of the movie (something quite unthinkable!) and the film would be no better than a clever documentary. This remark does not indicate that I do not admire Mohsen Makhmalbaf as a creative filmmaker; I sincerely do.

Mr Makhmalbaf loves Afghanistan. He makes any viewer of Kandahar empathize with the problems of that country. Women of Afghanistan have less freedom than women elsewhere. They are forced to cover their bodies in a gown called the burqa and have to apply lipstick within the confines of the gown—one of the many tragi-comic details the director provides the viewer. Grown-up women have to be led by young male kids, because a male kid has more social power than a female. Children grow up in constant fear of land mines that can take away a limb and have to enrol in schools (madrasas) where education is centred on learning the Koran by rote and the importance of Kalashnikovs. Any journey to the countryside is fraught with many dangers: robbers, well-water contaminated by worms that could make one sick if consumed without boiling, check-posts governed by the Taliban that deprive you of any books that they suspect to be socially subversive. The film is definitely a great attempt by Mr Makhmalbaf to introduce the travails of the ordinary Afghan to the wider world.

An amazing visual sequence in the film presents a group of men running on crutches to grab artificial limbs dropped by low-flying aircraft near a Red Cross Centre that tries to help the growing numbers of victims of the myriad landmines. While the problem is a real one, the sequence would make any intelligent viewer wonder at the fine line dividing reality and illusion. Look closely and you will find the Afghans are caught on camera smiling when they are supposed to be running desperately to procure a prosthetic leg! There is another sequence where the director underscores the need for constant medical care for the average Afghan and that lack of proper medical care. To the credit of the director, the problem of treating a sick woman with a curtain separating the patient and doctor drives home the tragedy, however comic and unreal the scenario appears to the viewer. Somewhere in the periphery of the plot is a woman about to commit suicide. The Afghan tragedy, in spite of the unwitting comedy in the movie, is endless. Mr Makhmalbaf is not the only individual in his family concerned with the Afghan problem; his young daughter Hana made a beautiful film Buddha collapsed out of shame also on the Afghan tragedy where the historical Bamyan statues of Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban and how young girls in Afghanistan are deprived of education that young boys can access. Hana’s elder sister has made another evocative tale called Blackboards, another true scenario near the Iran/Iraq Kurdish border, where teachers literally carry blackboards to impart education to children and earn a living. The Makhmalbaf family is truly an amazing family of filmmakers from Iran.

If you want to see the creative genius of the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and head of this family, one needs to view his earlier but lesser known work Gabbeh, which I consider to be very close to magical cinema of the Armenian maestro Sergei Paradjanov. Gabbeh did not have rely on the subject to prove Makhmalbaf’s abilities, it transported you to the breathtaking world of cinema by the inherent merit of its visuals and sound. Here was a tale of love and lovers with the magic of Iranian carpets for a backdrop. (Incidentally, Mohsen Makhmalbaf won the Paradjanov award for cinema, a few years ago for his contribution to cinema).

Mohsen Makhmalbaf made yet another amazing film in Tajikistan called Sex and Philosophy years after he made Kandahar, where he once again showed his real talent that we glimpsed in Gabbeh. That film, unlike the suggestive title, has neither sex nor nudity—the subject of sex is merely suggested by a male hand and a female hand caressing each other, in lyrical synchrony to the violin of Vanessa Mae. The director states on his website that the four women shown are his vision of the development of the adult women. The story is constructed on a series of intellectual debates of a cynical male philosopher and his women friends, eventually retracting from the world of a lover to one of self imposed loneliness (shades of the Iranian Mehrjui's The Pear Tree and Allan Sillitoe's short story The loneliness of the long-distance runner hover, as the subject balances social concerns and politics without making either one obvious) while paying tribute to Russian literary geniuses Chekov and Tolstoy (whose names are thrown by the shopkeeper who sell three antique watches). Do not miss out the hidden, mischievous comment that the third watch on sale, indirectly connected to Stalin, is picked up by the protagonist's third lover who likes to erase the protagonist from her memory, preferring the watch to the ones related to literary figures! The film tries to imitate the colour coding of the late Polish genius Kieslowski. In this Makhmalbaf film, the four women wear black, red, blue and white and the colour coding is accomplished quite well. Evidently the second lover had shades of the last of the four characters as she wears one red shoe and one white one. The switch from one colour to the other is gradual.

The film is very well made with touches of the absurd (talking to each other within the same car using mobile phones, "a cold coffee with a cold smile", a poodle in a woman's bed preferred to the human lover) and the surreal (a big passenger plane with just one passenger, autumn leaves covering a dance hall, the lighted candles on the dashboard of a moving car, etc).

To revert to Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar, I applaud the director’s intentions. The colour of the bridal party of burqa clad women looks lovely. With the same breath, I wonder if those colourful burqas can be associated with Taliban ruled Afghanistan where black and grey are often the colour of burqas that one would tend to associate lifestyles of Afghan women in the remote parts of the country. But then this is Mr Makhmalbaf of the colourful Gabbeh and Sex and Philosophy as well. In any case, whether you loved Kandahar or not, it would make you reflect on what it showed. As an Indian national, I loved the Sanskrit shlokas being recited on the soundtrack from time to time. Was Mohsen Makhmalbaf trying to be ecumenical? Or was it his family's love for Indian culture that made this addition?



But if you want to see the director at his best—I recommend Gabbeh or his later film Sex and Philosophy. The moot question is what do you want in good cinema: do you want the subject or do you want an intelligent presentation of the subject to overpower your senses? Mr Makhmalbaf can present both types of cinema in separate films that he has made.

P.S. Hana Makhmalbaf's Buddha Collapsed from Shame was reviewed earlier on this blog.