A Few Movies I Saw At the Mumbai Film Festival...

The Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) film festival offers a selection of the most interesting films in the world in the calendar year, along with a retrospective of old classics(this year an auteurist catalogue of key masterpieces of Japanese cinema from the 30s onwards). Given a time span of 7 days, scattered across 4 mutliplexes in different sides of the city, naturally every moviegoer has to pick and choose. Among the movies I was especially regretful to miss are David Fincher’s The Social Network, Mathieu Amalric’s On Tour, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Mikio Naruse’s When A Woman Ascends the Stairs(which I had seen before but not on a 35mm print), the documentary Two in the Wave, Nagisa Oshima’s The Sun’s BurialThe Strange Case of Angelica.

So what did I finally see? Among others...

Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki)

The first screening I attended was on the 22^nd October. It was at PVR multiplex at Juhu (next to a single screen theatre Chandan which is the official hosting ground of the entire event). Branded to Kill was playing at Screen 5. Suzuki’s boundless invention in each frame was accepted with great cheer by the audience. No. 3’s(Jo Shishido’s) famous kill of an optometrist via a washbasin sinkhole (recreated in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog) brought out an impressed silence and an appreciative applause.

Suzuki entered the production of Branded to Kill at the last moment, when the producers of Nikkatsu Studios deemed the script to be “inappropriate” despite setting a release date for the film. Given a low budget and creative freedom, Suzuki boldly ventured to create a film like nothing else. Goro Hanada is the number 3. hitman in the criminal underworld. Between hits, he’s like any man with a job. He’s married and so spends much time and hard-earned money satisfying his wife's shopping and sexual needs, he hangs out with his buddies and even finds a protégé(who gets killed early on). Relating the rest of the plot is a pointless exercise. What matters is the shift in tones, the juxtapositions of images and conceits. Suzuki layers competing ideas side-by-side, in the same shot, the same movement.

The serial-killer as existential hero achieved its apotheosis in three films made in the year 1967. Point Blank, Le Samourai and Branded to Kill. Of the three Branded to Kill is free of the humourless cold formalism of the first two and in its refusal to accord anything close to the tragic bearing Lee Marvin and Alain Delon achieve in their films, the most radical of the three.

The Story of the Late Chysanthemums(Kenji Mizoguchi)

Zangiku monogatari is for some people(such as myself) the toughest to admire of Mizoguchi’s masterpieces. One reason is the fact that the surviving prints of this film (released in 1939) has never been in the greatest of conditions. This adversity does not pose any obstacle in admiring the splendor of the film’s images; its carefully constructed staging of actions in extended moving takes, and especially the magnificently use of off-screen space to considerable dramatic effect.

The condition of the print doesn’t help us, however, in adjusting to the film’s unique rhythm and slow pace. On the big-screen with a relatively good print, supplied by The Japan Foundation, Mizoguchi’s film casts its spell. Zangiku monogatari is a bildungsroman of a pampered son of an acting dynasty. It charts his journeys, the hardships he passes through to finally attain the skill and accord of a great artist.

What’s visible and powerful in this film(one of Mizoguchi’s two or three best) is the emotions which, as in the films of Max Ophuls, suffuses even the slightest of calibrations of the camera. The suffocating world of privilege into which Kikunosuke (Shôtarô Hanayagi) is born into is rife with mendacity. Contempt is palpable in every gesture of abeyance directed, by his family and relatives, towards encouraging Kikunosuke’s acting hopes. The only person who is honest to Kikunosuke is Otoku(Kakuko Mori), a nanny of his cousin. They fall in love and leave together to pursue their destiny. For Kikunosukue, the pursuit is driven by romantic love and a need to define his identity. The painful irony is that the ultimate destiny of Kikunosuke(named after his ancestors) lies within his family, the system he sought to escape from, which Otoku comes to terms with and accepts long before he does. The devastating final moments of this film lingers for hours and days after leaving the theatre.

Bright Star (Jane Campion)

Mizoguchi's film is a story of love thwarted on account of a woman suffering out of her efforts to aid and nourish her artist-lover. The enemy in that film is mostly society and partly time. The enemy in Campion’s film is time, the brief years the couple knew each other. These years also mark Keats’ greatest period as a poet, achieving a plateau in his short life that most writers never reach despite greater age and experience. Maurice Pialat insisted that Van Gogh, his story of a doomed artist aimed to prove that the painter’s work was ultimately driven by a vision of beauty in his life, out of a love of life, which was even conveyed in his ultimate suicide.

John Keats, in Jane Campion’s film, lives a life haunted by death. The death of his brother Tom, the debts and deprivations he lives in, the neglect of his talent by the literary public. “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” he wrote in his Ode to a Nightingale(recited twice, as an excerpt in the film and then in its entirety over the credits). The looming presence of death does not make Keats morbid, nor is it a portent of his poetic endeavor, it is very much a real thing as is the love he shares for Fanny Brawne. As seen through Fanny Brawne’s perspective, John Keats comes off as very down to earth, very much the “least poetical man” self-described by Keats as the bearings of a real poet. The poetry is entirely in his words, it comes out of his brief existence.

As always in Jane Campion’s films the sensuality of the images, and the actor’s performances carry the real weight of the film, it’s one of her strongest recent efforts and very much a must-see on the big-screen.

Akitsu Springs (Kiju Yoshida)

Kiju Yoshida (credited as Yoshishige Yoshida in this film) was one of the banner film-makers of the self-styled New Wave promoted by Shochiku studios in the early 60s. David Desser notes in his book on 60s Japanese cinema (titled Eros + Massacre, after a Yoshida film of the same name) that the attempts by Shochiku to create an alternative kind of film-making within the system, rather than the film-makers themselves establishing alternatives outside the system led to inevitable tensions in the early careers of Oshima and Yoshida. Eventually both of them as well as others, made films under the Art Theatre Guild. Of Yoshida's Shochiku films, Akitsu Springs is the most well-known and admired.

Shot in colour and CinemaScope(the early scene on the train is especially powerful on the big screen), Akitsu Springs, has an ambivalent relation to the 50s melodramas of Ozu and Naruse, in particular the latter's Floating Clouds. Its narrative is charted against social, economic and film history. Yoshida looks at the characters critically, their feelings towards each other are presented with a retrospective awareness of the failure of a generation. Their feelings, at the beginning of their relationship is bright and passionate, yet as they move away from each other and as time passes, their passion becomes a memory of time passed.

The titular Akitsu Springs is the central location where the lovers encounter each other for more than ten years. The location is shown in different seasons, evoking pastoral idyll in the early years of Shinko(Mariko Okada who also produced the film and designed the terrific costumes) and Shusaku's(Hiroyuki Nagato) relationship and cold winter in its elegiac moments. The use of landscape and colour at times reflects the strife in the relationship but at other moments it serves as a counterpoint to their individual problems. The final moments of the film, a remarkably edited and timed denouement, takes place in bright sunlight, completely at odds with the tragedy of the scene.

Immortal Love (Keisuke Kinoshita)

With all due respect to partisans of Seijun Suzuki, the strangest and weirdest of the films on offer at the film festival is this shocking film by Keisuke Kinoshita, starring Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai. I haven’t seen many of Kinoshita’s films, but his reputation as a maker of humanist message movies means that Immortal Love isn’t as well known as it should be. This is a film that’s unmerciful towards its characters and the audience. The story is about an anti-couple. She(Hideko Takamine) loved another who fought in the Manchurian conflict of the early 30s, a fellow farmer’s class citizen, while He(NakadaI), the son of a landowner came from the conflict crippled and in love with Her. On discovering her affections for someone else, someone beneath his class, he rapes her. She tries to commit suicide but is rescued by her brother, is married to her rapist and gives birth to their son from the attack. This plot, enough for a three hour movie, forms the prologue of a 103mins film. The film then goes on and shows what kind of marriage these two have, how they raise their children in a house of bitterness and disgust. The film divides itself into chapters and at the end of the chapters, a Brecht/Weill-esque ballad intones repeatedly Takamine’s anger and sense of injustice which she carries all her life.

The pace of this film is fast but the speed carries exhaustion. The tone of this film is deadpan but there aren’t any laughs at all. The film has one of the most jarring musical scores in film history, its Spanish guitar and percussion making this melodrama that spans nearly thirty years feel like science-fiction, not unlike Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

Certified Copy played to a nearly full audience at the Chandan theatre, an old-fashioned movie auditorium. The old movie-screens permit the kind of audience participation celebrated around The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a nearly every day basis around commercial Hindi films. The relatively sophisticated audience still found time to clap and cheer Juliette Binoche’s name when it appeared on the credits and added a whistle on seeing “Un film par Abbas Kiarostami”.

Kiarostami had once stated that he would never leave Iran to make a film and he has done just that for Certified Copy. It’s a kind of film that’s easy to call serene and leisurely if it wasn’t so enigmatic. Juliette Binoche gives a wonderful comic performance as a married housewife and mother who juggles a smart-nosed son(similar to one of the early passengers in Ten), while finding time to pursue a visible attraction to a writer James Miller(Wiliam Shimell) who is in Arrezo, Italy(where she, her name is Elle, has lived for five years) for a book tour, his book of course has the same title as the film. The subject of the book-within-the-movie is for once worthy enough to pursue and publish in real life. As non-Italians, the landscape of Arezzo very rarely veers away from being a tourist space. The occasions it does, a hilarious conversation with a coffee-shop owner and Binoche in Italian, are few in this film. The couple are strangers in this film(Strangers is one of the many titles of one specific film by Roberto Rossellini, a key Kiarostami influence) and they form a connection but the overall experience is ambivalent as is the end of the film.