Imagine a sunny day in the Italian countryside. Among wild flowers and a hazy line of mountains, hidden in the tall grass Tilda Swinton is naked and her nipples resemble the gooseberries that are growing around her. She and an Italian chef make passionate love in this languorous setting in Io Sono L’amore or I am Love (2009). In fact it is almost melodramatic to see their bodies – skin turning red with a sweaty pinkish glow in the sun and pores erupting into goosebumps while bees buzz and flowers bloom. Lest I sound like someone vying for the bad sex in fiction award, Luca Guadagnino, the director has made a very sensual film. Together with Tilda Swinton playing a Russian who is married to an Italian and speaks both languages here, I am Love delivers her passion for food…and love successfully onto the screen for us to savour and relish.

For it is a ‘yummy’ film for the eyes. And the ears. The lush opening sequence is set to a score by John Adams – and it recurs throughout and ends the film as well on a highly dramatic note. We enter Milan and the plush interiors of the Recchi family’s villa. Swinton’s Emma is a very attractive mother of three who seems comfortable in her environment and lovely clothes. Yet there is a constraint that we do not encounter till she meets her son’s friend Antonio – a chef in his father’s restaurant but looking out to start one of his own with his own experimental delicacies. Her break from the family towards an affair with Antonio, and her subsequent choice at the end may make people feel that the story is forced or flawed. But it represents the traditional Italian outlook towards family life (like in Godfather for example) and Emma’s digression – a break up of that system. Not just a system of family but also one of money and capital.

Being a fan of Italian filmmakers like Antonioni and Fellini and their fashionable alienation themes, I couldn’t help but to make a connection between Monica Vitti (L’Avventura, Il Deserto Rosso) and Swinton – though this seems like a very disparate comparison.  The similarity I find lies in the quest and longing for something more vibrant beyond the rich Italian society of their characters. This dynamism enters Emma’s life in the form of food and a person cooking it. A love that travels through the stomach and fills her to the brim wanting more. Yet is it but a strong physical attraction in the cliché setting of a younger man falling for an older woman? Probably. But Swinton is brilliant in making you feel for her loneliness and intense joy in her new-found life. She returns back to nature reborn and goes on to have fantastic sex in the wilderness. Whatever way you look at it, you might find it pretty tasty.

P.S: I’m not sure why story writers do not get Indian names right. Waris Ahluwalia who plays a Sikh man in the film is named Shai Kubelkian!

Somehow I have always seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) in the month of December. Huddled in the cold in a quilt, when I saw it for the first time three years ago it left me with a feeling of cuddly tearful warmth. More than that, it was such a high to decipher its screenplay and identify with all the characters. The quiet creative anti-social Joel of Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet’s Clementine as ‘just a fucked up girl looking for her peace of mind’ in Ugg boots, the infatuated pretty Mary of Kirsten Dunst, an annoying  Elijah Wood’s ‘Patrick baby boy’ or the attractive bespectacled Stan of Mark Ruffalo. So I saw it again within a span of a few days. No film before that had left me with that tremendous feeling of having found something that was as yet intangible and unexplainable.

And you get that from everybody who has seen it. They will have that look on their face and you just understand. Yes, I know what you mean. Yet, each of us relate and engage with it personally. Why would this film have such an effect otherwise? Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay after he broke up with his girlfriend and it’s amusing to think about that every time up until today even when I saw it again after all these years on a rainy windswept cold winter’s day.

It’s difficult to make romantic cinema work. You either enter the cliché mushy territory that can leave you sick and disgusted. Or you enter the chick-flick zone which is another no-no (or only maybe very rarely). The Rom-coms haven’t gone a long way ever since When Harry met Sally (or at least I think so). Else there is always Woody Allen. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind really comes in like a ray of light with its unique meld of science-fiction, romance, melancholy and philosophy.  

So I remember the dialogues and recite them along.

Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.

You know me, I’m impulsive

The operation is brain damage

My crotch is still here, just as you remembered it

My God, there’s people coming out of your butt.

Meet me in Montauk

The story and dialogues get a new life with Michel Gondry’s direction. I can see the visual tricks and the turns and Clementine’s changing hair colors that express her personality and stages of her relationship with Joel.  Just like her changing blue, green, orange and red hair – this film is also eternal because it means something different every time. Sometimes it is catharsis, sometimes it is longing.  The white snow at the end of the film falls like a clean slate. We fade out into the color of whitewash or even cold dew. We can feel its droplets condense to Beck’s soundtrack. Yes, I need your loving like the sunshine, everybody’s gotta learn sometime.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d. – Alexander Pope

Happy New Year!

How does it feel to be
One of the beautiful people?
Now that you know who you are
What do you want to be?
And have you travelled very far?
Far as the eye can see.
How does it feel to be
One of the beautiful people?
How often have you been there?
Often enough to know.
What did you see, when you were there?
Nothing that doesn’t show.
Baby you’re a rich man,
Baby you’re a rich man,
Baby you’re a rich man too.
You keep all your money in a big brown bag inside a zoo.
What a thing to do.

This classic ‘67 song by the Beatles plays over the last shots and rolls up for the final credits of The Social Network (2010). Mark Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg dreamily, desperately, maybe even stalkishly ‘refreshes’ his browser over and over again, waiting for his friend request to be accepted by a friendly lawyer lady. And why not I guess after a couple of gruelling court settlements. And I gauge that the Facebook stalker amongst most of us began with Zuckerberg himself.

Well, this unhealthy stalkish behaviour has made him a rich man, portion of which he also proposes to donate off late. Meanwhile, David Fincher’s The Social Network presents to us the figure of the founder of this network that governs our lives today in some way or the other as a super intelligent nerd in a sweatshirt and slippers but mean and unkind towards women, and sometimes, to borrow Bibek’s phrase –  an annoying turd. The film wants to tell us that some big ideas in networking happen because of a broken heart. It’s not just Zuckerberg, who gets the idea of Facebook after he is dumped by a girl, but also Sean Parker, the guy behind Napster and played by Justin Timberlake. I am wondering if it’s a male fantasy to conquer the business world after failing to ‘conquer’ a woman’s heart. Or vice versa – having successfully conquered the business world makes it easier to get attractive women by your side. Well, that is all that this film is about. And Ivy League snobbery dominates the discourse. (Not to miss a girl’s Stanford labelled undies!)

I remember logging onto Napster as a teenager. I downloaded and uploaded a lot of music there and I was sad when it was no more. It felt great to be just sharing music with a lot of people. And I remember the first time I used Orkut and Facebook. They were mostly a means to stay connected with friends while at work. To kill boredom at work. To see profiles of people you were curious about, or had a crush on. This social network brought social life to the web. But after watching the film I feel like a number, a commodity – that is saleable. I’m an account that can be marketed to. Just as we click ‘refresh’ on our news feed on the Facebook home page, the headquarters in San Fran refresh to see new hits, new members and more advertisers.

Nonetheless, The Social Network is a well-made watch (in a typical Hollywood classic-edit way) but for me it threw up many questions about how we look at our virtual lives on the internet, on Facebook. So much so, that things we do ordinarily in reality are dominated by how well they will be publicised on Facebook. Well, it’s made Zuckerberg the Time person of the year for 2010. What has it made us? A Facebook Profile.

“Every night and every morn, some to misery are born. Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight; some are born to endless night.”
- William Blake

Taking off from Easy Rider (1969), which itself is a countercultural twist on the western genre, in that it converts the American highway and the wide wild landscape of the west into a space for bikers instead of white horsemen and Indians, is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). It transposes the reddish-brown landscape we have associated with the genre into surreal high contrast black and white. It’s protagonist, Johnny Depp as the namesake of the literary William Blake, is an accountant from Cleveland thrown into a savage country and turned into an assassin by fate – a wanted man, a dead man.

“Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

Yes, why is it? Jarmusch’s camera captures the landscape from mountains to lush alpine forests as the characters traverse through it on horses. Together with Neil Young’s mystic soundtrack, it is a chase of whose end we know from the beginning. For as the opening title by Henri Michaux suggests, “It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.”  The opening sequence in the train gives us a glimpse of the various forms of landscape that Depp’s character will eventually have to cross again with a foreboding by the train’s fireman – “Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later than night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape.”

Dead Man also touches upon issues of race. The early westerns of John Ford for example depicted the Indian race in America as uncivilized and one that needed to be conquered by the white man. Here, the character called Nobody – an Indian who knows English and has travelled across the seas as an exhibit for his colonial masters talks about mimicking the white man and lauds the poetry of Blake. But they are still “stupid fucking white men” for him. He is nobody – caught between his tribe and the white man’s ways and his words flow in a poetic way like the poet he so admires.    

A fear of contamination and heresy is also reflected by a catholic shopkeeper towards the end as Depp and Nobody buy tobacco at the banks of the river. Thus the film not only comments about the decaying form of the old western, but by making it in black and white much like the old westerns, also adapts it in a unique way. I have always enjoyed spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone for they combine beautiful photography of a mesmerizing landscape and the ever-present question of modernity taking over an older way of life with motifs of trains cutting through untamed lands. Dead Man opens in a similar way – a steam engine chugs along a snowy countryside. William Blake is in a similar position – a modern city man heading into gun country on a train. It is combined with more spiritual questions for a modern man – those of life after death. This is apparent with the ubiquitous presence of skulls and bones – both animal and human, in both the American and the indigenous Indian’s living spaces.                          

The pace of the film is slow and contemplative, very much like Blakes’s poetry. A poet of words combines with a poet of images. The sequence at the end as Depp grows weaker in the Makah tribe’s camp has a mesmerizing quality as the camera movement follows Depp’s headiness. The film is also humourous with secondary characters like Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton, a cannibalistic assassin, a gun-toting businessman and a dead Marshall who looks like a religious icon.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”

Jarmusch’s Dead Man is an infinite visual treat with meditative photography, gentle pacing and fine acting. It’s all about a metaphorical death in the dying season of winter that passes on to another life as a dead Blake in a canoe rocks gently over the ocean.   

Further Readings: Mad Poets: William Blake, Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man, Dead Man (Senses of Cinema)

As someone who is a fan of Jack Kerouac, and a fan of all the crazy souls who love and live to be on the road, Easy Rider (1969) is a film that is affecting. Today, on the day of Dennis Hopper’s death, I decided to sit and watch the film, his debut as a director. Hopper won for Best debut at Cannes in that year for the film.

Prepare for a real trip (drugs included) with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson across America from L.A to New Orleans, through mountains, down rivers, meeting freedom-loving hippies trying to live off the land to the other extreme of conservative white Americans who could hate you for growing your hair.

What is freedom? What is it today – to be free…?

“I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.”

I’m amazed to read online, that Hopper made a film that was almost 5 hours long, and it was edited for over a year and brought to its current size. I enjoyed the way the acid trip sequence was edited, to be able to translate the experience of a trip onto film, is usually a work of art.

The music is great! Good ol’ Steppenwolf, The Byrds, Hendrix and whole lot of others I must listen to. The opening credits cut to Born to be Wild…I don’t think anyone can re-create that magic of Fonda and Hopper on their bikes riding out onto the great U.S Highway…looking for their America. Like a true nature’s child, we were born to be wild, we have climbed so high, no never gonna die….

No, you are never gonna die.

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

What is it about Charlie Kaufman, that throws you into the delight of complication?
I’ll call this the Kaufman emotion – one that I feel after watching anything written by him, or as right now in the film Synechdoche, New York —his first directorial venture.

Kaufman speaks in the same convoluted manner that we all speak to our own souls and those of others around us. Because this is your story….and also ours. Exactly how Cayden in Synechdoche says, “There are millions of people in the world. And none of those people are as an extra, they’re all leads in their own stories.”

In this film, he has so successfully given some words, characters and visuals to the ever difficult questions of life and death. Questions we ask ourselves at so many points of life. When the character of Cayden (fashioned after Kaufman himself?) is not sure of what he is trying to achieve through the concept of his next play, his actress (played by Michelle Williams) says, “It’s good that you don’t know…when you know that you don’t know, it is the first step to knowing.”

The beautifully constructed screenplay, is nothing but the circle of life that gives birth to its real, fictional and on-stage characters, lives and dies like a being and a world unto its own.

“The end is written into the beginning”…..a line uttered by Cayden’s love-interest……..says it all for me. For it is, isn’t it, in any written, spoken story just like life? A story that goes on and on, and never sees an end till death. Yet, it still goes on.
And as always, Kaufman blows you away with that one long monologue from one of his characters:

“As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving – not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time.”

Some of the songs have been written by Kaufman himself……and my favourite goes, “Somewhere maybe someday maybe somewhere far away………….”

I cannot express myself anymore. Excuse me, as Cayden says, “It’s Complicated.”

[I wrote this in March 2009]

“What we had in common – our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road.”

I had read an interview recently of the actor Peter Greenaway in The Guardian, where he states that every religion is concerned with death, while art is concerned with life – which is essentially all about sex. How far you agree with him, need not matter here….but Dibakar Banerjee’s LSD (2010) does have sex at its central theme. And some other truths about life.

When I use the word truth, I use it in the sense, that the director or storywriter, would like to present his/her observations of the world around us through their story. It brings to my mind the ever present debate of cinema being an escape from reality or as Slavoj Zizek says, being even more real than reality itself and representing the ultimate truth about life. Think of the most unreal Bollywood film, or television soap..and it will still show you the truth…culturally and socially relevant themes, positive or regressive, made intentionally or unintentionally by the filmmakers.

But is truth stranger than fiction? And how far is the ‘reality’ shown on television really real? That is the underlying message for me in LSD. Cameras are rolling all the time, be it for a student filmmaker (his institute has a very sardonic name that I can’t recall right now), a Hindi TV news sting journalist or a CCTV camera follower in a supermarket. And we in the audience watch their camera footage, through the director’s camera.

True to his style, each one of Banerjee’s characters are so very well etched and rooted. His actors anonymity lends even more credibility to the story. Equally, it is socially relevant to our times, our vouyeristic age of technology coupled with mass media outlets, and their eventual corruption and lies. It is relevant to our social setup, wherein, a father is ready to let his daughter act in a film where she runs away to marry whom she chooses to….but his role as the patriach doesn’t budge outside in the reality away from the film sets. The women are strong, but are duped by their male counterparts be it in a family, a supermarket or a casting couch. The only woman who calls the shots here is the one at the head of a television news channel! It is gritty, funny, sardonic and sad….

For the only two people in this story who apparently love each other, face the worst of what reality can do.

I think LSD is a very important film for Hindi cinema…not just because it is termed as radical (that it talks about sex and is graphic, or uses digital techniques, does away with famous actors etc.) but because it is clever in sending across a message through humour, that what you see is not what you always get. The third eye here or the camera – reveals reality…which can be hyperreal as in the case of reality TV….or it can be an escape from a reality which is essentially cruel to its characters….or there is the reality….of Dibakar Banerjee’s camera itself.

I digress but I can’t help but end with a quote from Michael Haneke: “Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.”

Kathyrn Bigelow’s film, The Hurt Locker (2009) opens with a black screen quoting – War is a drug. And then we immediately enter the thick of the action in Iraq. A U.S Bomb diffusing team or EOD, tackles tricky ‘enemy’ bombs day in and day out in this war film, which is more of a sequence of events – of well, bomb diffusing.

The film is well made with its cinematography, camera and direction keeping you riveted, considering the subject is in itself intense. It is thrilling in a very video gaming way. Which in turn makes it devoid of layers. Does that make it an interesting war film? A.O Scott in the New York Times writes here about how apolitical the film is. I agree, it is engaging on a superficial level – bombs, timers, close calls, soldiers, Ralph Fiennes (who dies an untimely death). Pity that. But it is empty on an intellectual level. Here are three men, who have close shaves with death everyday. Our protagonist is the wild one, there is an African-American soldier who is the saner of the lot, while the third chappie is scared nuts. Do they ever question why they are in Iraq in the first place, admist their drinking binges or sado-masochistic fights? We only see action in this film, and a one-sided point of view of the American soldier. Though there is a sub-plot of the protagonist getting affectionate of a local boy and taking things personal.
But is the film depicting reality truly? Going by this article, the director has taken many liberties, and the way the events unfold in the film, are simply a dramatic staging. How then does this become a reality of a group of soldiers?

Oversimplification is something that affects many a Hollywood film. Clear cut good vs bad characters make the bedrock of the other blockbuster Avatar poised for awards, and made by Katherine Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron. Close to Hurt Locker, Avatar is also about an ex-army protagonist, who is also wild in his ways, and pushed into the position of a savior (in this case, the world). The 3-D technology it uses (effectively or not) is a video game in itself.

Calling The Hurt Locker reality cinema, without referring to the larger context of the politics of war, without delving into characters and their reasons for being in their immediate environment, without understanding them in the larger perspective – where then does cinema go?

If war really is a drug, an addiction for the protagonist of Hurt Locker – isn’t it then also a drug for governments that send out their foot soldiers into war? Isn’t it a drug for filmmakers as well, for whom the setting of battle is the epitome of a great story?

How trite the story, and how cliched the speech.

Mohabbatein (2000)

Many a Hollywood and Bollywood romantic film has stuck to stereotypes. Either the audience can revel in these stereotypes as an escape into the life of characters and plots that they can fantasize about. Or discard them as over-the-top simplifications of an otherwise complicated life. In most cases, there is distinct sexism. We usually use the word “hero” for a Bollywood male character. The entire connotation, is that he is at the centre and everyone’s world revolves around him. Today, the form of the Hindi film may have changed but this standard stereotype still exists in the content subtly.

Or there is another kind of romantic drama – a tragic comedy, where no body stays together forever and the ending is open-ended. Their characters are more true to life, also more likable and identifiable….and to some extent aspirational.

I’m picking two films, for reasons being, that both bring out complexities of human relationships. They define the mysteriously tragic and comical ways of the heart, and still leave you with hope.

Sparsh (1980)

khaali pyaala, dhundla darpan (empty veseel, blurred mirror)

I saw Sai Paranjpaye’s Sparsh once again a few months ago. I saw it last as a student in college and it was a thoroughly moving experience then, if not greater now. No doubt Naseeruddin Shah as the blind headmaster of a children’s blind school is masterful, but so is equally Shabana Azmi as a woman in grief over the loss of her husband.

Both these characters want to step out of their loneliness but don’t know where to begin and how. Individually before they come across each other, they are almost self-sufficient in their pre-occupations – hers being music and his being his profession. But they come together, touched by something that each offers the other. At one point, Shabana’s character Kavita feels close to being selfish – in her quest to regain her happiness through the love of the children in the blind school where she begins volunteering. Is she being only pitiful? Or is there a genuine inspiration and love in her for the children and Naseeruddin’s character Aniruddh? And is Aniruddh being too harsh on himself and Kavita and letting go of a real chance at love?

I really appreciated these faults, the apprehensions on both sides, fears, complexes and baggage of the two leads. And it’s all coming together into something beautiful.

Manhattan (1979)
“I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.”

Why is life worth living? Asks Woody Allen’s character in his film Manhattan.

This is one of my favorite Woody Allen films, it has the signature Woody characters, humour, monologues and conversations, and the ironies of love. The cityscape in black and white and the classical and Jazz musical score transport me into old world Hollywood, while watching a very contemporary story. In the above scene, after Issac’s monologue ends, his desire to meet Tracy who he has dumped, gives the scene an almost a fairy tale feeling….where he, the protagonist is seizing the moment, to get back what he lost in one last-ditch effort. And it’s the monologue in the opening of the film, that sets us for the rest of the story to an end that depends upon our imagination and point of view.

Issac: Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be..

Diane Keaton’s Mary is pretentious, intelligent and confused. The brief appearance of Meryl Streep as Issac’s lesbian ex-wife is hilarious. And one of the most touching scenes – Issac with his young son in a restaurant on their day out in the city of New York. Issac is disillusioned with his television writing job, his best friend doesn’t mind cheating his wife for Mary, a snobbish art journalist. This to my mind, leaves the very young Tracy as the only character, pure in her intentions and passions in the bustling metropolis.

And to end, here’s a song by Julie Delpy and Nouvelle Vague from her film 2 days in Paris! A wonderful directorial début after her roles in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Before Sunset….films I have seen repeatedly, and never tire of.

“I want to stay for a while…until it’s time to let go.”