The Surrealistic SpaceTime

Last Year at Marienbad (henceforth, LYAM) begins by describing a beautiful ornate chateau. The camera rolls through the long corridors, huge walls, decorated ceilings, murals, paintings & other artifacts and a low voice slowly starts talking. The voice in the tracking shot repeats the same words and unwittingly we already feel eerie even though it is only a few minutes. The elegant invitees in the chateau are watching a theatre. We observe a person ("X") approaches a beautiful woman ("A") and asks her -"did not we meet at Marienbad last year"? The woman keeps her silence but X continues elaborating a familiar experience he had with her in a similar chateau last year, where she was finally ready to leave her husband ("M"') and run away with him. The woman replies she did not even know X but X persists with a passionate minute detailing of what had happened in the last year. X repeats his memory repeatedly over and over again, which changes minutely between each description, all against the milieu of the hallways, rooms, and garden in the chateau.

As the film progresses the characters and the narration of the film start becoming more uncertain. Resnais masterfully handled a mixture model where present, past, and possible fantasy worlds are coagulated together. The viewers sense a confused state with the sequence of events in the chateau, wondering whether X & A had really met in Marienbad. The events we finally observe are left to our comprehension. The events might be real (that is X is meeting with A), that this chateau is really in Marienbad, that X and Y had met last year, or else X is fantasizing everything.

Resnais created a perfectly mesmerizing mood and tonal balance to supplement the narration. The hypnotic tableau of figures and the perfect geometrical arrangement of the garden in the chateau has a deep but implicit notions of mathematics. Resnais's motif becomes clearer when we notice the guests are passing time by playing "Niim" (a logic game; can be played with cards). Often by using a surrealistic dream-imagery or freezing all unrequited physical objects in various shots or flashing a possible fantasy/memory shot repeatedly (with different time durations) Resnais confirms his grasp in connecting unclear dots in a beautiful but demanding logical progression. At the end the viewers will finally rethink “was there anything to identify with” or” does the time standing still for the last one&half hour?


Film - Année dernière à Marienbad, L' (Last Year at Marienbad)
Release Date - 1961
Directed By - Alain Resnais

Reality; Dream; Meditation

Every day, Tae Suk – a young guy in his expensive bike wanders in the different neighborhoods of Seoul. He carries some restaurant take-out menus and purposely places them on the front door lock of arbitrary houses in such a way that without tearing the menu card apart the house owner cannot enter his residence. By the next day, this homeless guy roams again in the same locality to survey which of the menus have left unobserved. This confirms a temporary absence of the homeowner; thus Tae Suk breaks in the empty house and makes him comfortable. He does not steal or creates any nuisance but cleans the respective house, waters the trees, washes clothes, cooks food, eats, sleeps and repairs any broken electrical goods. To keep the souvenir in account, he also takes snaps of himself, usually maintaining the absentee landlord's image (or, say his personality) in the background.

One day he breaks into a big lavish house which is seemingly empty but actually not. The house belongs to a powerful rich businessman; his wife (Sun-hwa) is a former print model. While continuing his usual housekeeping routines Tae suddenly realizes that he is being watched by the lady of the house, who has literally alienated herself from the world by keeping an utter silence, after a violent encounter with her abusive husband (the businessman). With time their unspoken relationship develops in a tacit but intense bond. After confronting (and hitting with golf balls) the cruel husband, Tae takes off again on his bike but this time he is accompanied by Sun hwa. Together, they continue Tae-suk's weird habit of finding and breaking new places to spend each night.

The next act of this film is the most astonishing and I surmise almost all critics will spend 90% of the reviews and discussions on the last thirty minutes or so of the film. We see Tae Suk and Sun hwa are almost forced and fated to be in a relationship; they are reluctant to speak but through the golden silence they can communicate, perhaps in some further level. Tae Suk is homeless in all meanings and for Sun hwa this hazardous but quixotic method of finding homes to stay naturally gives her the impetus of the feeling – freedom. But anyway, after a mishap while changing places to stay, the police trap the duo. Tae is sent to jail (of course Sun hwa's rich husband bribed the cops in a mainstream fashion) and the fugitive wife is back in her house.

While being in jail, Tae by practicing martial arts reaches a higher level of consciousness and thus becomes invisible to the outer world (except, Sun hwa). Others can sense his presence but cannot see him. In the end scenes, we observe Tae and Sun are united again. It is difficult to draw any plausible explanations of the end images. Firstly, the final image of the film is pretty unreal (both are standing on a weight machine where the scale reads zero) which compels the audience to think that Kim-ki Duk is composing a metaphorical unreal world. Truly, the end caption ("It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream") denotes the same notion. I found this imagery has a resemblance with one scene of Solaris (the Tarkovsky one). Remember, how Kris and Hari were both flying in the space-station, holding each other? As par Tarkovsky, this is the state of being in love; the perfect weightlessness.

Secondly, from the previous ventures of Kim (such as his most renowned film- "spring, summer, fall, winter... and spring") we can draw an analogy; the protagonists of Kim belong to a supernatural place. They achieve the state of self-realization (by hardship, by rituals, by suffering, or by the old school martial arts) and thus they become free of the reality, our daily world.

3-iron is a restrained and subtle effort from Kim (unlike SSFWS). Kim maintained his world of silence and we encounter the delicate transcending journeys of his protagonists where they finally transform themselves for higher humankind. I have not seen his latest two ventures (the bow and time) but eagerly waiting to spot if Kim took some diverse methods to depict his unspoken mystic alienated world.

Bin-jip (3-iron - 2004)
Directed By: Kim ki Duk

the Subtle Dangerous game..

In the opening scene of the film Pornography we observe that a polish middle aged artist (Frederic) returns to German occupied Poland after a long time. He is carrying a suitcase (which contains everything and nothing – paradoxically), sitting idle with few polish intellects, smoking and waiting listlessly for the end of the extended war. His close buddy, the writer friend Witold (who is also the narrator of the movie) was planning to visit the country firm of his friend Hippolyte and thus insists Frederic to come along for the trip. Pornography is all about Frederic's stint in the country side and his involvement in a dangerous and perhaps a sort of an inhumane deed.

Bored by the tranquil inactivity of the village life and by the dull routines of Hippolyte's family, Frederic masterminds a risky game between Henia (Hippolyte's teenage daughter) and Carol (a firm boy who also works in the stable); he plans to bring them together as lovers. He arranges every single possible meetings between them, prepares a theatrical romantic circumstance between them (informing them as it's just a rehearsal of a drama) and to make the situation more complicated he insists Henia's fiancé to watch this romance secretly, thus to create a faction between him and Henia. But as the movie unfolds, we find out Frederic's dark past and learn that all his present bizarre actions are actually the resultants of his feelings of guilt about his lost daughter.

Pornography is based on the novel of noted Polish author Witold Gombrowicz by the same title. As I found out form other sources, critics pointed out that the movie plot is pretty much digressed from the original novel. Such as, the character of Weronica, the teen-aged servant girl who evokes the memory of Frederic's lost girl is missing from the novel. Frederic manipulates the juvenile minds of Henia and Carole not only to fall in love but also to take part in a political murder. The consequent toying with the feelings of the others, the recklessness seems to be just a process of hurting himself, to nurture the evil inside Frederic who is deeply depressed and thus a method to prevent him from forgetting his own mistakes.

Kolski represented the war affected Germany occupied Poland in a very sublime way. We don't miss the horrified faces of polish people hiding underground nor we miss the political conflicts between the underground resistance and the army; but all are very subtle. The photography is in particular yellow-green colors and often follows isolated behaviors of animals and insects. Though the treatment of the objects (instincts, animals and human beings) is very soft, Pornography reveals the war-time depressions very cleverly. With repetitive comparison shots between the wartime politics, politics in corrupting naïve minds and the unexciting studies of the animal kingdom, Kolsky reinforces the anxiety of a very difficult time in mankind's history.

Pornografia (Pornography -2003)
Directed By :Jan Jakub Kolski

Life Caught in the Frame

"People are obsessed with cancer and heart trouble. My disease is work, phone calls and appointments."

The first and only colored scene in the movie illustrates two women (Cleo and a tarot reader) sitting on opposite sides of a card table, while the tarot reader foreseeing Cleo's future. The camera concentrates on the laid cards, and the cards display a premonition of something tragic might happen. The film then slips back to black and white for the rest.

Cleo, a young pop singer waiting for her results from a cancer test (she has to call the doctor at 7 o' clock in the evening for the biopsy report) and the movie reveals her story between five to seven in the evening. The film is almost a real-time description of this two hour in her life; it is around 90 minutes long but pretty much close to the fixed time frame. This is a crucial two hours in Cleo's life and the director (Agnes Varda) meticulously and beautifully crafted the story; Cleo's wandering in the streets of modern Paris, her narcissist behavior and most prominently how she is learning about the true essence of life during this hours. The film is marked by chapters (same as many French new wave films) and emphasizes the progression of time by captions.

Agnes Varda, a prominent figure of the French new wave movement (along with coveted names like Godard, Trauffaut or Rivette) typically displayed a tendency for flat narration with amalgam of reality and clever symbols. Truly the film is very rich with symbols and there are so many thought provoking incidents in the film; capricious Cleo wearing black glasses in the restaurants and searching if people can identify her, opening her pop-singer's wig to disclose her natural self beauty during her sad ness, narrating to her friend (that Cleo might be a victim of cancer) in a dark tunnel, the collective psyche of the city life in Paris; building, staircases, art students, how the passerby observing the main protagonist (here, Cleo) such as they are suggesting to open herself to the world and how everything can be referenced back to the collective contemporary culture in a nutshell, a typical film inside a film (Godard and Anna Karina did a cameo) which critics say – served as a mechanism to pick Cleo up out of her self-obsession and move forward.

Somehow from the center of the film, you will feel a strong resemblance between the protagonists Cleo and Nana in Godard's masterpiece "my life to live". But where as, Nana drags more sympathy from the viewers through the development of the film and Cleo does not, Varda herself is much more sympathetic to Cleo than Godard was to her Nana. Personally, I feel this is again a striking dissimilarity in both the films in treating the main character. May be this is due to the dissimilarity in attitudes of the both directors towards the characters in general.

If you feel interested, also watch Vagabond by the same director. You won't be disappointed.

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7 -1961)
Directed By :Agnes Varda

to the Other World...

William Blake (Johny Depp) is an accountant by profession. He is traveling from his hometown Cleveland to the western city of Machine to join a steel factory. Blake’s parents are dead and he is in desperate needs of a job. Unfortunately is not aware of the fact that the job position has already been filled. Depp comes across a former prostitute beside a dingy bar in a muddy street at night. The woman, a paper flower seller insists Depp to come with her. This woman had an affair with Mr. Dickinson’s (the fowl mouth steel merchant) son and soon unhappily the night gets tinged with gunfire between all of the three. Both the merchant’s son (his name is Charles) and the woman is killed, Depp with a fatal wound escapes with Charles’s horse. Mr. Dickinson puts a hefty price on Depp’s head and hires three qualified murderer to bring him back dead/alive (firstly – he has stolen the prized horse, secondly – murderer of his son and thirdly – probable murderer of the woman). The Next morning, Depp meets an aboriginal Indian (named – Nobody) in the jungle who mistakes Depp as the original Blake (as in the poet) and from this point on, Depp’s journey begins. In other words I can put this as – the journey of one of the longest and beautiful death sequences in movie records.

Not surprisingly Dead man is a B&W film (Jarmusch’s major ventures are shot in B&W - stranger than paradise, down by law, coffee and cigarettes) but the interesting fact remains that dead man has a western charm (or, neo western) and the movie is all about Depp’s reallocation from the western planet to the other side, say the native world. Culture clash or fights between different paradigms has always been a prime motif of many westerns and Dead Man is no exception but certainly with a twist. From the very beginning we see that Depp is not appropriate in the big-picture of the movie (he is polished, sober, clean outfit, round spectacle – diametrically opposite with his fellow travelers in the train or the city of Machine residents) and by little by little how he is trying to fit in the spiritual stance of the movie. I can recall a beautiful shot in beginning: - Depp is mostly sleeping in the train and with every single crack he watches how the fellow passengers and the nature outside the window are changing. He is sober, polite, no action hero but quicker he is getting the taste of blood in his hands with sporadic killings. I think Jarmusch draws this allegory with the theme of “violence in poetry” and fascinatingly used the metaphor of William Blake.

The name Nobody surely gives a budge; he is nobody and so can be anyone to guide Depp. Jarmusch meticulously planned this character to give a wider characteristic, to give a taste of an open world but closer to nature. That’s why the dialect of Nobody is a mixture model of various American Indian clans!

Dead man is all about a journey en route for a spiritual uplift of Depp. It is a lonely expedition of a wounded man who will be dead soon. Remember from the very beginning how Nobody (who seems to be almost a scholar) helps Depp in preparing him for the journey. Nobody is more interested in healing Depp’s western soul than his wounds. Being with Nobody, traveling through the woods, meeting and facing merciless fates Depp is a learner here. The film and Depp both gradually transit to a native terrain without any “intrusion”. His physical condition is worsening; his eyes are just open to see the fragility of the cruel world that defines the realms. There is no explicit camera trickery or motivating speech or preach yet the transition is sleek and very smooth.

In the ending we observe Blake’s solo voyage into the sea where his death is waiting, a lone ornamented boat is drifting away with him and suddenly we realize our regular so called refined world is such temporary and short-lived.

Dead Man - 1995
Directed By : Jim Jarmusch

Alienation & the Millennium

Though the hole was made in ’98 the story narrated the last few days of the previous millennium, in Taipei. A bizarre virus has spread like epidemic (scientists coined – Taiwan fever) and the government is taking harsh steps to quarantine the suffered ones. The media is encouraging the uninfected people, who are living in the danger zones of Taipei, to evacuate their houses and to move into temporary arrangement planned by the government, till the spread of the virus is controlled. But there are a number of residents who are uninterested in moving out, so as a last resort to vacate those buildings, the government has threatened the residents to shut down the water supply and garbage disposal service from the beginning of the New Year.

The protagonist (Lee Kang-sheng) of the movie, a young man (a grocer by profession) lives in a shady apartment in the hazardous sector of the city. The other protagonist, a young lady (Yang Kuei-mei) lives just down below his apartment. Both are reluctant to move, knowing that the virus has crippled the lives of the city. One morning a plumber comes to the grocer’s apartment searching for the source of a water leak in the apartment downstairs. The grocer goes out for his job, after his return discovers that the utility worker has left a drilled circular hole in the concrete floor; the one unraveling his and the woman’s apartment below. Initially this hole becomes an apparatus for sort of peeping into a mysterious territory for the man, watching the woman piling toilet papers, mopping the floor from watering walls or eating Chinese noodles. Mutually they feel irritated by this convenient but weird method of observation; an estrangement breeds (the man uses the hole as ashtray, the lady sprays cockroach repellent through the hole replying this act) but sooner as the oppressive weather and the catastrophe continues to hit their mind and spacetime, the hole turns out to be the last standing channel for communication, the final hole for contacting another human life.

Tsai Ming-Liang is a prominent powerhouse representative of the second new wave of Taiwan film cradle (post Hou Hsiao-hsien?). And personally, I feel the hole as a very innovative and modern piece of art, a cross movie between Liang’s perennial pessimism about the “economic miracle” of Taiwan & isolation between urban lives but presented with a sci-fi odor and a savor of typical Hollywood musicals. Indeed the movie is continuously stroked by song-dance sequences (songs of 50’s Hong Kong staple Grace Chang), especially to reflect the inner mood of Yang. Liang used an innovative brush of contrasts (the slapstick song-dance epochs) to fill the ever depressing and soggy nature of the movie/Taipey, the extended silence of the outer world (except unremitting sound of rain) thus hitting the reality with the opposite style. I personally favored the song on “sneezing”. Yang is slowly catching the fever, the syndromes of the fever (unusual longing for damped weather, cockroach like crawling on the floor) are getting acute, and she is “sneezing” repeatedly, but the melodramatic unlikeness is making her believe that may be a school of guys thinking of her and vying for her attention.

The hole is a slanted reflection of the industrial urban life. The vigor of isolation between human lives is becoming terrible, forcing mankind to creep into the future. The hole remains as the metaphor, may be the bond to the unknown world, the future. The world is getting claustrophobic but inspite of the oppressive nature it still makes Yang fantasize about the anonymous person of the floor above. I feel rather this positive desire forced Liang to create a connection for our primal needs; in the last scene Lee passes a glass of water to Liang through the hole and aids the feverish woman with a pull, a pull towards the next millennium.

Tsai Ming Liang is original.

Dong (the Hole - 1998)
Directed By: Tsai Ming-Liang

Conversation with the Dead

I was eagerly waiting for the DVD release of Herbert (directed by prolific theater person Suman Mukherjee, incidentally Herbert is his debut venture into big screen), not due to the political meddles it created while releasing in Calcutta (last year) but due to the sheer information that I was absolutely blown away by the original novel (winner of Sahitya Akademy award, circa ’97). Herbert is something which I never read before; the aboriginal dialect, layered unfolding, an implicit carnival spirit…

The protagonist Herbert is a person outside our mundane matrix. At times he is the simplest, possessing a golden heart but with a complex thought processing (similar to the story telling) leading a quixotic life. Herbert belongs to a deceasing north Calcutta family (families inheriting a babu traditions) where cultures, values and lifestyles are shattering day by day. In incessant flow of flash back & flash forward visuals we see how Herbert enjoying a lavish birthday party (why his name is Herbert? his father answers that he could have been Humphrey as in H. Bogart) and in the subsequent scene we see how Herbert is celebrating his birthday with cheap liquors and the local goons, today. Herbert is stranded in a desolated island, where his existence in the world is simply unworthy. He is orphaned, neglected and brought up in charity in his uncles debauched family. He has lost everything, everything he loved in his life is/was snatched and finally Herbert found his solace in communicating with the *dead ones*! The contact helps him elaborating the *business* (some elegant process of communicating with the dead souls) until the rationalists (mimicking the rationalist society of Bengal) threaten him for this counterfeit deed, declare him a fraud and eventually Herbert commits suicide.

Herbert’s life is centered on the small room in terrace and by flying kite. Director Mr. Mukherjee has brilliantly captured the changing faces of people with the backdrop of Calcutta; socially and politically. Herbert goes to see Battleship Potemkin with his leftist uncle (the role of his naxalite cousin is one striking role in the movie) and in the turbulent ‘70s bengal the Odessa steps resembles the steps of Presidency College. We see how dish antennas are replacing pigeon holders in the terraces, karate classes are mushrooming and replacing the evening roadside caroms; all are such minute subtle but sturdy details of the north calcuttan lifestyle, u need to be there....

I read elsewhere that Mr. Nabarun Bhattacharya, the author of Herbert is fascinated by the carnival spirits of story telling; what I really appreciated is that Mr. Mukherjee also was very aware of this fact (scene – Herbert’s death procession, his mom mourns but his daddy remarks – why are you crying? Are you not watching a carnival?). The movie is shot behind the camera of his father (enlightened one will find a Brechtian connection).

The layered story telling is something little weird, but not due to the complexity of the narration, the narration is actually flawless and an amazing editing table really did a great justice to make the movie easier. An explosion takes place while Herbert with his dead bed enters the electric cremation chamber. This unbelievable occurrence hits the media as a posthumous terrorist act, and a top-level investigation is launched to expose the mystery behind. The police hunt relentlessly the connection between Herbert and any terrorist organization but finally end up in delving nothing. The complex desolated life of Herbert finally stays untouched for our everyday civilization. Charlatan or Clown? Innocent or Insidious? Terrorist or Trickster? No rationalist organization with their sheer truth seeking tongues (“Stalin is the best therapy for the ones communicates with dead”) has the final answer....

Herbert (2005)
Directed By - Suman Mukherjee