the Morning Comforts

La Notte is the sophomore effort of the proverbial
trilogy (L’ Avventura, La Notte and L’ Eclisse) crafted by Antonioni. Though the trilogy essentially not having a pet name resembling the memorable “Apu-trilogy” or so, but all three are connected in a same string of troubled relationship set in the lyrically stunning architectural backgrounds, whether beautiful immense nature or pleasant glamorized 60’s urban Italy.

La Notte has a little plot to speak of. Antonioni follows Lidia (Jeanne Moreau, more celebrated in portraying the role of Catherina in Truffaut’s surrealistic masterpiece Jules et Jim) and her husband, the renowned author Giovanni (Mastroianni) in a course of a single day and night. They visit their friend Tommaso who is dying in the hospital. They wander the busy streets of Milan, attend promotional party of Giovanni’s latest book, visit clubs and attend one more party organized by a rich millionaire in night and finally they confront the cold apathy that has expanded among them. Both rebuff any sexual advances of the unknown, but they perform so only out of obligatory respects. In the next day, at dawn Lidia and Giovanni separate themselves from the crowd of barmy party-goers and make their way down a large empty field of a golf course.

They discuss their marriage in equal doses of resentment, and denial, but finally admit that their love has atrophied. Lydia accuses Giovanni for the emaciated affection but he becomes emotional, perhaps the confrontation forces him to suddenly feel a tinge fondness towards her, somehow. In a fit of passion he lunges toward her while she whispers in the screen that she wants to hear that he does not love her. Antonioni frames the vast emptiness of the field and leaves the audience in with little hope for comfort to predict their future.

The minimalist usage of symbols in Antonioni’s ventures is too commendable. From the very beginning he captures vast architectural buildings of Milan, the high rise, the chemistry of geometrical figures. This is much different from L’ Avventura yet we find a similarity in capturing large architectures as backgrounds. Antonioni repeatedly composes Lidia from different angles and communicates with the viewer. She is leaning toward walls with her vacuous interaction with life; she is walking no-direction-home or stares out from the hospital window to watch a sudden glimpse of a helicopter thus alienating her composition from her surroundings. With a microscopic detailing we see Lidia stands alone wherever and throughout the remainder of the film.

Few shots I should point out before I pause. After the millionaire throws the offer to Giovanni for a permanent job in his organization we follow the raucous party guests with a short spell framing an aviary and a bird. We recall the whole setup of the evening party and we see that numerous instances of creating patterns of vertical strong lines or series of horizontal blocks with shadows. Antonioni counter balances his compositions with these hurdles between withered relations in the premonition of a new industrial Italy.

La Notte is another aesthetically complex but critically stimulating movie.

La Notte (The Night -1961)
Directed By: Michelangelo Antonioni

Long Strange Trip...

Earnestly single Don Johnston (portrayed by Bill Murray) is dumped by his latest girlfriend (three color famed Julie Delphi) and receives a weird pink letter from his unknown son, same time. The letter addresses that his child (!) is looking for him and on an assignment to find him. Distressed by the letter (but not showing outwardly) Don seeks help from his neighbor Winston, an upcoming amateur sleuth. Rather than following the “move on” motto of life, Don tries to simulate a cross-country inspection on his old flames to resolve the anonymity of the nameless mail, to discover the origin of the letter and if he actually possesses a son or not.

Broken Flowers does not talk about relationship or bondages, though the name might imitates it. It is a brilliant adventure in a protagonist’s past to check the mile posts in the nostalgic trip. Bill Murray rules the screen superbly; he is uninterested in face about this weird situation but diligent inside to find someone who wrote the mail. The panoramas where Bill is sitting unaccompanied in his room in a dark evening and listening music are profoundly quest about his perpetual bachelorhood. Or it asks about any single man or woman in the world about their times. Don is ignorant of all the actuality, yet he is meticulously following Winston’s advices in carrying the itinerary, the same CD or following the norm of meeting his previous girl friends with a bouquet of pink flowers.

This movie must have been planned with Bill Murray in mind. I am still a novice to Jarmusch (Coffee & Cigarettes and Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai) but his signature usage of split humors or dramatic urgency are very much present here. The experience of Bill while revisiting his past is sometimes good and sometimes bitter & hostile but it is finally in search of something more eternal and true. Jarmusch wants Murray's Don to be a quiet observer to his misspent life suspended in front of him, but almost unable to fundamentally communicate to them. Murray is typically incredible here, quiet yet delicately expressive, and surrounded by an impressive collection of leading ladies to play off of. Jarmusch’s minimal use of Don’s expression is unparallel. Dejected by the recent ventures, but Don already started believing in the existence of his son. Murray perfectly portrayed the confusion or in search of happiness while believing in the existence of the unknown.

The movie does not offer you sorta happy-ending to cherish in your bag pack and to put under your pillow for a sweet lullaby, but perhaps that’s very much true with many a life stories.

Sometimes life offers you just some broken flowers.

Broken Flowers (2005)
Directed By - Jim Jarmusch

Marx and Coke

We control our thoughts which mean nothing, and not our emotions which mean everything.
~Masculin/Feminin

The central character Paul just returned from military service, disillusioned and trying to take a profession in either writing or doing something significant. He meets the “wanna be” pop singer Madeleine in a coffee shop and the film rolls on. Masculin/Feminin is an absorbing essay digest on the 60’s French young people dealing with value judgment, political views and daily existences. The unfolding is flamboyant, often with ingredients of documentary attributes, deliberately created by Godard. This film adds factors to the implicit commotion between political biasness and emerging pop culture (!) among young French guys in 60’s. Actually, this film can be showcased as Godard’s early approaches towards political movies or as a surface premonition of his later day’s anti-bourgeois contents.

The narration is elegant; there are few moments of long chat scenes, in which Godard can be regarded as a mastermind. He focuses on the protagonist’s off-dialogues; sometimes he fashions the audience as a part of the discussion by changing the focal points from person to person and suddenly spotlighting only one person for long. The discourses are also pretty cerebral, though I have grumble towards the DVD subtitles here, sometimes I felt the English captions are not coagulating properly (“deliver us from liberty?”).

There are few master strokes in the long interview shots, individuals are been interviewed throughout the movie, sometimes with repeated queries. Questions on politics, or suddenly jumping to topics of Pepsi or Vietnam War (Dylan in quoted as a Vietnik (Vietnam + Beatnik). Godard as always dismantles the predictive form of film narrating, by suitably inserting captions, titles, iconoclastic images (the death scene of liberty in the guillotine), bucketing dilemmas and insecure self-identification of French people caught in the middle of pop and Bach.

Is Godard sexist? Perhaps his remark on “masculin” word (“there is a mask in the word”) and “feminin” (“the word feminin has nothing...”) may protract this argument. Also, in the end Madeleine comments that she knows nothing, there is a big stress on the word “nothing”. Is this nothing has to do anything with Godard’s hesitant attitude towards pop culture and bourgeois?

Perhaps, the turbulence of 60’s can be best described in a slogan of the movie. The movie can be re titled as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”!

Children of a lesser god?

Masculin, féminin: 15 faits précis
( Masculin/Feminin -1966)
Directed By: Jean-Luc Godard

Living the life...

My life to live is an unnatural cinematic experience. This is a movie not only about style and intelligent film making; it is more about the ongoing commotions of delving into values of life and pathos. Godard, one of the most cerebral movie makers of all time (perhaps, his contributions can be summed by a single critical comment, that his worst movie is also so stylish and revolutionary, can be seen many a times and beat hands down other celebrated movies) is at his zenith, for my personal opinion just for my live to live, he can be remembered through space-time.

The main protagonist Nana, (portrayed by the amazing Anna Karina) is a stunning naïve young woman, who is in the search of joy and meaning of happiness and freedom in life. She has left her family and tries to take an acting profession but ends up in being a prostitute. The film starts in a coffee shop, Nana and her boy friend Paul having an uneasy conversation. Godard’s proverbial camerawork follows the scene from uncanny and uncomfortable angles depicting the turmoil of their affiliation and the emotional distance between them. From this shot, we follow the beautiful narration of the movie by seeing numerous times the dismayed and suffered face of Nana. Godard splits the movie into twelve tableaux, with very significant sub-headings. This unformulated adaptation of creating different sections for the movie been used to show different layers of Nana’s different personas, uncomprehending agony and run for freedom. The camera follows her face from various angles, stunning long shots showing the turbulent, lost and desperate countenance of Nana. She is a sensitive person, emotionally breaks down while watching Maria Falconetti in “Passion of Joan of Arc” (a classic from Dreyer). She sees herself in Joan of Arc’s role, tries to come out from the sordid mundane lifestyle of her, to achieve something more bigly.

Godard personally has put up few questions with this using of mazes in the film. We see a photographer takes a little interest in Nana to give her a chance to enter into film world. Soon we see Nana meets a pimp who imitates the photographer. Are both professions replicas of each other?

I cannot forget the mesmerizing scene of Nana’s free flow dance while playing the juke box. Relentlessly, she moves and dances beside the pool tables, just as a weightless cloud. It is a very short fleeting glimpse of happiness and joy in her life, she has ever known. Such a brief but fresh air brought by the scene! You will feel deeply how truly she is desperate to find out bits and bytes of cheerfulness from the banality of life.

In the end wee see a petite scene while Nana consorting with a guy, just after her degraded and discarded experience. This guy reads a story of Poe which ends with the death of the artist’s love. Similarly, Nana’s life is also judged by mankind and experience a sudden tragic end, resembling the character of Joan of Arc.

Godard was the part of French New Wave of filmmaking, and this is one of the finest austere moments of movie history. He creates layers of layers of Nana’s vacuous and empty lifestyle and brings a shocking unexpected conclusion. Perhaps, there was nothing left to articulate her pains. This is one finest instance in films to fashion perfect characters, no matter how much you taint her, but you will always memorize the mournful but hopeful expressions of her. It is a remarkable film, a ballad of the director’s own doubts on today’s world blended with desolations and sufferings of human life.

My life to live is an astonishing fable of an existing tragedy.

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux
(My Life to Live -1962)
Directed By: Jean Luc-Godard

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