Fatal Obsession

I favor Buñuel for countless motivations. Not only his surrealistic politics and instant unfolding of storyline haunts me or the surface layers of sardonic satires taunts me a large, I adore his practice of symbols and signs. They are so implicit yet spectacular that a viewer always left with choices to delve much into the usage of the icons or not. Unlike Fellini or Tarkovsky, where these masters fashion an image “out of the world” to savor, for example, the usage of a man flying as a kite (in 8 ½ of Fellini) or the baffling representations of post-wars (in Mirror of Tarkovsky) Buñuel is always too unspoken and crafts lucid imagery of mundane objects to represent the dialects of his movies.

Well, “that obscure object of desire”, the last endeavor of Buñuel is also belongs to the same school of master filmmaking. His undying portraying of the puzzles of sexual politics and turbulence is the chief facet of the movie. Buñuel deposits a labyrinth of Mathieu’s (Fernando Rey) perplexities and desires with his relationship with Conchita (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). The affiliation is perennially thwarted by continuous break-ups and re-associations. Buñuel masterly created two countenances of Conchita as in two sides of the same coin. The protagonist Mathieu is deeply confused and threaten by abrupt, disordered and erratic behaviors of Conchita, the viewers are mystified as there are two actresses continuously interchanging the role of Conchita! With one Conchita we constantly see some kind of dilemmas and troublesome incidents, like terrorist activities, car bombing or explosions. In one word, continuous hazards from the outer world, but the hypnotized Mathieu does not noticed this that the world around him falling apart. The other Conchita is always having some clarifications of her inconsistent behaviors and there is some type of flavor of reconcilement. Both Conchita are used to convey different emotions, and the requirement of any Conchita is governed by the narration. This usage of two actresses for a leading role brings out the intricacy of Conchita, makes Mathieu so spellbound that he is unaware of the dissimilarity between these two women. He does not comprehend the character, so his all ammunitions of winning a woman (kindness, money, gift or even with brute force) fail miserably and his perceptions of captivating someone is confounded by her unremitting rejection and re-settlements.

Buñuel enthralls the audience by his sheer gripping of human psychology here. Mathieu is so desperately obsessed and gripped by Conchita, he trusts her completely and stands by her explanations of her behaviors, how mismatched or inconsistent they would be. Truly obsession sometimes misguide you, block your visions. That’s why Mathieu is ignorant of the fact that there are two appearances of Conchita (but there is one existence of her) alongside him in different shots, but he is so oblivious and obsessed understanding this is beyond him.

The final scene shows the reunited couple once more, standing behind the glass wall of a lace shop window, a woman is suing the lace of Conchita’s blood shed dress. Is the director sewing the scenes or their relation? But this testament is again spoiled by their silent arguing and a sudden bomb explosion.

This is a prime time evidence of sheer medley of imageries, surrealistic symbolism and deep commotions between sexual politics.

Cet obscur objet du désir
(That Obscure Object of Desire -1977)
Directed By: Luis Buñuel

Time destroys everything

If you assume this film also in the league of movies which disrespect the clockwise time flow (aka Tarantino or González Iñárritu style) you will commit a big blunder. We have seen movies which go fast forward or come back, or toil with asynchronous modules, meeting at a crossroad and then again move or thrust the reverse gear. Irreversible does not bother about these zigzag movements, however it flows in a counter clockwise fashion. There are nine to ten sequences in the movie, and all events are brought up by the previous sequence. All current events are actually descendant of the past occurrences.

Much ado been addressed to the gory violent and explicit initial scenes of the movie. They are gruesome and of course there are realistic reasons behind people move off theatre during the showing of Irreversible. To make you more disturbed and agitated Gasper Noé played an irritating tune in a very low decibel for the first half of the movie, as an added element to offer you a feeling of nausea. With these, again there is the whirling and spinning fast camerawork to give you a raw annoying feeling.

The proverbial tagline “time destroys everything” is purely synonymous with the film. What we experience in Irreversible is not only breaking the laws of time movement, but as time progresses in the events of the movie, it degrades. Time is a killer, not a healer here. Time takes the ingredients of “now” and in return we see a horrific “then”. As the storyline begins, we see everything in a chaos. We see the chief protagonists of the movie whose emotions are breaching from their past behaviors and merciless brutality ruling their mind. The psyche of the movie goes parallel with the characters. The camera spins a lot, the characters twirl and we see everything are unbalanced and out of control, analogous to the movie. It is completely dark, lots of murky symbols and signs.

As the movie progresses, the story unfolds in the opposite direction, and we see how brilliantly the director regulates the control of movie making. The audience feels the personal despair in every shot, as they are well aware of the facts what hardhearted fate is coming in the next shot but no one can control the motion of time and us. The movie offers you better scenes than just before what you see. Colorful, cheerful elements are embracing life, protagonists are bartering jokes, people are partying, and kids are playing.

The end shot is a masterpiece. Bellucci is resting in a park and kids are playing with water valve. There is Beethoven’s seventh symphony in ambience, everything beside us so vibrant and smug in happiness. The camera lifts up and suddenly starts rolling, yet once more in an anti clockwise route. You see everything rolling down in an opposite way and the screen collapses in total white background.

Irreversible leaves you with many unanswered questions. Are we really puppet in the arms of time? Is there really a vicious and evil mask is hidden under our face which might recuperate anytime? Is everything really pre-defined and we are walking on the thin strip of chances?

A must must watch for any strict film buff. A must must not recommended else.

Irreversible (2002)
Directed By: Gasper Noé

the Story of Us

An elderly couple from the town of Onomichi traveling to the contemporary city of Tokyo, to congregate with their children, to spend time with them in Tokyo. In return they are sidelined by the children, as they are busy with their selfishness or to say in a proverbial tone, the time demands them to be like this. Only their widowed daughter-in-law seems genuinely pleased to see them, takes a day off from her job and expends a day with the couple for sight seeing. The couple leaves Tokyo and the audience faces the fractured countenance of culture, tradition and generations, overruled by modernization and self-absorbed consumerism.

This is an effortless languidly paced yet poignant story of mankind. Nothing is spectacular but the film spreads its wings slowly in a quite customary grace, with its mundane dialogues, undemanding mannerism, and subtle gestures. Without any external mechanism Ozu creates an environment of the familiar family structure around the viewers. We Indians might find resemblance of this story with a zillion other Indian narrations, in movies, theatres or novels etc. but in Tokyo Story, nothing is overcooked, there is no peripheral catalyst to ask about or to show reasons for the dysfunctional family constitution.

As a typical Yasujiro Ozu endeavor, he breaks the laws of normal camera angles or movements. Except one shot (the camera follows a brick wall and moves to the evicted couple) the camera never in motion, stands immobile and edits short shots entering the characters in detail. As the conventional Japanese populace always sit on the ground (whether to talk or to eat or in customary works) Ozu uses a very low height for the camera.

Throughout the movie, there is a persistent motion of elements; the ships, the train, the bus or the younger generation, however the frames never move. Perhaps, Ozu wanted to demonstrate the gorgeousness of life still remain in simplicity or in slow going, but this is too demanding from today’s world which is over infested with fast eating consumerism or slow poisoning self pompous attitudes of us.

Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story - 1953)
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Persona: Appearances and Existence

Though entirely sane in body and mind, actor Elisabet Vogler abruptly stopped communicating with anyone. She was taken to a hospital where Nurse Alma will look after her. Vogler’s doctor decided that the hospital of a less use, so she lent her beautiful beach house at Faro to Elisabet, Alma also went with her for Elisabet’s healing process. Sooner, Elisabet and Alma get friendly and their personalities started to slide into each other. They get trapped into other; lose their individual roles gifted and start playing the character of the other woman.

Bergman always commented that his movies are basically poetry in images. As my favoritism, Persona proves that most. Persona is a pristine blend of real intellect and illustrative metaphors. From the standpoint of Elisabet, she used to maintain her Persona throughout her life (that’s what we perform every day, maintain our dissimilar countenances and appearances for different paradigms) but when she wanted to disapprove she ceased all contacts with the external world, by silence. Here, silence is truth.

While Alma started reading Elisabet during the learning process, she projected herself into the other character. Truly, in our real world, what we believe in a different person is greatly due to the acknowledgment of that person, like we have estimated ourselves into their survival, wearing the Persona or the mask of the other.

Persona shows the visual brilliances where Alma is slowly getting entrapped into Elisabet, whether it is the dream sequence (with Mr. Vogler) or in the coveted sequences of monologues. Bergman’s long standing celebrated cinematographer Sven Nykvist brilliantly took continuous long close shots of the two actor’s faces, keeping each half of the face in dark and in light. As the movie progresses (may be it’s by my mistake or no matter what) I feel both the faces look similar.

The last long monologue is masterfully crafted when Alma conversed about Elisabet’s past life, the same dialogues been shot from two angles, once showing Elisabet’s face and then Alma’s. Alma talked about her personal viewpoint, comments about how Elisabet neglected her child. Then at the end, both their faces suddenly merged into one!

Bergman was privileged with these two gifted actors (Liv Ullman as Elisabet and Bibi Andersson as Alma). In the entire movie Liv Ullman uttered only few words (nothing…nothing...) and kept a Persona of torment and tragedy. Her silence as a blank is truer than anything. Bibi Andersson is remarkable and perfect as her other Bergman ventures (the seventh seal, all these women, wild strawberries etc.) in showing her mental distresses and of course in the scene while she is slithered in other persona, but trying to return.

The film starts with some very chaotic shots which Bergman left for the audience. For instance, it shows some reels of a silent movie, a spider (the spider-god from his chamber trilogy?), and a crucifixion (from his undying question on existence of god?), a kid places his hand on a blurred face of a woman (Elisabet’s son or Alma’s unborn child?) and so on.

Well the above, is my explanation. I am also wearing a Persona to think as I am.

Persona is a haunting brilliant masterpiece from the living legend.

Persona (1966)

Directed By : Ingmer Bergman

Love is a...

Three anecdotes are in a zigzag movement. No correlation as such, no overlapping or any connection. All three stories are tied up in different threads but meet in a same shot, which approach to the viewers in different intervals. Everything finally summed up Amores Perros.

One story focuses on a young mother and her association to her brother-in-law. The second narrates about an ad-businessman who leaves his family for a gorgeous model. In the third a disillusioned ex-revolutionary, playing his criminal trade and obsessed about his daughter.

This was the introductory feature film of Gonzales Inarritu and no doubt he mastered the art of visceral excitements and cinematic dynamism in his earliest. It never pauses to hold a viewer's concentration, simply as a result of the pulsating energy it displays and the coarse tension it manages to sustain, over two and half hours. All the three stories have a canine motif and are connected by a horrendous car accident; you can comment that’s the only bond between the threes.

The movie is pessimist; the ending of Amores Perros is depressing: no one really comes out as the winner and everybody's hopes are banished. The end shots of all the three stories are breathtaking. Octavio’s (acted by Garcia Barnal) futile wait in bus stop for his sister-in-law, Valeria (the model) in the wheel chair with her amputated leg verifies her poster in the billboard (again a futile attempt, the billboard says “disponible” means space-available), El Chivo (the revolutionary) records his last statements for his daughter, but the recorder stops before he can remark “I love you, my little girl”.

Out of the three narrations, my ballot walks off for the second story, involving the businessman and the model. Their love dies unborn, the sufferings and distresses are metaphoric with their lost dog.

Though the ambiance of the movie as a whole is grim and unpleasant; the kinetic technique of Amores Perros is dazzlingly remarkable. It is a vibrant demonstration of pure filmmaking styles: many of the sequences were edited for more than thirty times, even the screenplay was tailored with thirty six drafts in beginning!

You might feel repulsive about Amores Perros due to the rough gloomy gory detail of human life. However, that is the movie’s premier asset.

Love, as the title designated, does not triumph.

Amores Perros
(Love is a Bitch - 2000)
Directed By : Alejandro González Iñárritu

Eternity and Angelepoulos

In the past, I made some futile efforts to write about the movie – Eternity and a Day, and each time I was left with a vacant on the paper while scratching some misleading words on MS Word. Each time I felt there is still something missing in me to contact the sheer dimensions of this film; a work of fine art and every time I found myself adjusting once more before the screen, to watch poetry lifted from dreams, drifting in , which can shred all the logical existences in a day or the eternity.

I generally don't feel to talk about the plot. But Eternity and a Day leaves such a punch, I should pen down the storyline in few words. Alexandros (played by European film staple Bruno Ganz) is an aging poet, suffering from a terminal disease and destined to stay in a hospital from tomorrow. He is fated to die tomorrow or so, and we expend his final day trailing him from morning to next morning. For Alexandros, tomorrow is a meager 24 hour day or eternity! We tag along with the unfolding of the movie slowly; he meets an Albanian refugee boy and spends the day with him on a metaphysical journey. He saves the same kid when ready to be sold to foreigners. He visits the frontier of Albania looking like a Nazi camp with spectators watching while hanging on the wire fence. He speaks with Dionysios Solomos, a poet who used to pay people to acquire a word for poetic exploitation. Alexandros tracks his past, in customary intervals, he congregates with the unread letter from his wife, he meets the symbols, the signs of life and the morning comes again, for eternity.

Why the film is a stunner? Why does the film leave with such a bang into yourself that left you with relentless thinking and thinking? Is it due to the absolute performance of the actors? Or the magical theme music of Eleni Karaindrou? The poetic narration of the film? Or what it is?

The film handles flawlessly the concept of "time" and "symbols" in life. What is a day? ?Only a progression of 24 hours? The director addresses a day as a cyclic array of life, it moves round and round and while progressing, time meets with the past and present in a descriptive way. Remember, the shot where Alexandros and the boy take a trip on the bus and three bikers dressed in yellow follow them and make you feel "yes, this is the circle of life".

The bikers draw attention from Greek mythology, they are the daughters of necessity; they are the three forms of time, out of which human life is woven, past, present and future.

For an individual, the facade of "tomorrow" can be expressed in two ways, either tomorrow is an ordinary day or an eternity (since we don't know how tomorrow will last), we call for the force of "logos" to resolve this confusing situation. For Alexandros, the use of logos, the accumulation of word-wealth, brings order to his disordered world. Alexandros remains the same old ill person, but the past remains alongside him in the present day. Past events are now present in his mind. Is the time static?

The film canvasses for an eternal truth; change of appearances is a mere illusion; but the existence is one.

Alexandros, wants as many words as he can find, to make intellect of the time he spends being alive. He is equipped to buy them (words like "outsider" or "very late") and expands his freedom, freedom from the tyranny of time, from the dictatorship of death. In the spirit of capitalism, he chases the footsteps of his predecessor, Dionysios Solomos who was buying words to write the Ode to Freedom that became the Greek National Anthem. Alexandar haplessly looks for words to save him in his awe.

In the end, I believe Alexandros gained his liberty. At the dawn he was still making plans for tomorrow." Tomorrow" after all, did not appear for Alexandros until the end of time. In the final shot, still, somebody calls his name from the seaside..."alexandros"..."alexandros"... as at the beginning of the movie. Yet, again the concept of a circle of life.

Personally, without any squabble, Eternity and a Day is one of the finest movies I ever saw. It is a clever blend of poetry and theatre. Theo Angelepoulos here draws the stringent line separating the "best" directors and the "master" of movie makers.

I can't award a 10/10 for this masterpiece, perhaps it is far ahead of all boundaries of evaluations.

Mia aioniotita kai mia mera
(Eternity and a Day -1998)
Directed By Theo Angelopoulos

It is education time

Bad Education is a distinctive Pedro Almodóvar venture. I was predominantly fascinated in the movie for one of the front men, Mr. Gael García Bernal. I was captivated by Bernal in Amores Perros and in ‘course The Motorcycle Diaries (in the very demanding role of Che Guevera). Surely, Bernal once more amazed me in his triple tasks of Ángel/Juan/Zahara in Bad Education. Mind that, all three persons were unusual in all logics; additionally the role of Zahara was too intricate as an imaginary transvestite.

The opening credit of the movie will surely strike a chord for you of a-la Hitchcock's Vertigo style with some dazzling color flows into the screen. Gradually, the complexity of the story turns you on, where you will see all of past, present and fictitious scenes are jumbled in a string but skillfully edited. The followers of David Lynchs’s Mulholland Drive can share to the surge of the movie, especially in the scenes of Zahira.

The movie is good quality, but I have a void in myself (personal link up, you see!!!). The mislaid linkages revealed little earlier than I anticipated (almost identical problem as in 21 grams). This left me with little hmmmm. Otherwise, it’s a must watch, but not for the homophobic crowd.

I know it will be little over reacting, but I can’t take a hiatus myself in mentioning Mr. Bernal once more. He is dazzling, remarkable, powerhouse in a sentence. He is multi-dimensional and can do anything in a wink of an eye.

Way to go man!

For the plot you can surrender towards IMDB. I am too lyad to write the same.
Mala educación, La( Bad Education - 2004)
Directed By Pedro Almodóvar