Friday, March 28, 2014

LESS IS MORE: ON 'HER' AND 'INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS'

Now, I know that the Oscars are no reliable measure of true Hollywood talent. But I do enjoy lapping up the movies that have made Oscar hype once the award show is done. So, I have watched almost all the Best Film nominees (except Nebraska, Dallas Buyers Club - which after Matthew McConaughey's "God helped me win this award" speech I do not feel like watching, and The Wolf of Wall Street). And if I had to pick a favourite out of the ones I have seen, it would have to be Spike Jones' lyrical and profound film Her

This story of a man falling in love with his operating system 'Samantha', simple and sparse, brings home several uncomfortable truths relevant in our technology-driven world. The film is set some time in the future - and it is the portrayal of the future that I especially found refreshing in the film. The future is not a space filled with robots, the sets are not metallic, and the people don't wear tight-fitting silver-coloured clothes. Instead, the future is a world clearly run by unassuming, badly-dressed nerds. The protagonist, Theodore, is one of them, always found in ill-fitting shirts, high-waisted pants, unkempt hair and nerdy glasses. His best friend Amy dresses like this too, far removed from conventional women of the future who till now have looked like fashion models in sleek body suits. Mercifully, there are no robots walking about and talking in hackneyed staccato voices.

Theodore's love interest is a husky-voiced OS (more than suitably voiced by Scarlett Johansson). It seems from the movie that romantic relationships between humans and OS's are not quite out of the ordinary. Theodore's friends seem accepting; there are even surrogate body services for such relationships. But his ex-wife is severely critical of his inability to connect with a human being and being in love with an OS. This, too me, looked a lot like how our times view mixed race, or inter-caste, or even homosexual relationships - accepted by some, panned by others. Logically, the relationship seems to rest on shaky ground. But Theodore and Samantha genuinely enjoy each others company and share a relationship based on togetherness and happy banter. This lasts only until something as banal and human as infidelity rocks their boat. 

The film affirms human relationships over those carried out over technology in the end, but does throw up a lot of questions about the extent to which technology mediates our relationships even today. We obsess over the perfect selfie, make up and break up over text messages, and sometimes develop deep bonds over e-mails with those we may never even have met. Technology is intricately linked to the way we connect with each other, and at times is the only way we do. Our relationships have already exist somewhere in between the tangible and virtual dimension. So, a human-OS relationship is not all that hard to conceive. Jones does so without being preachy or more show than tell. He puts out the questions unobtrusively during the film and leaves them lingering in your head long after the film is over.

[Watch this beautiful song from Her called The Moon Song by Karen O.]

I'm surprised that Joaquin Phoenix did not receive an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Theodore. He brings to the role a deep sense of loneliness, heartbreak and simplicity that it is very difficult to bring out on screen with very little dialogue and minimalist acting. 

This is true of another 2013 film with no Oscar mentions - Inside Llewyn Davis by the Coen brothers. Here, to the protagonist, a down-on-luck singer, played (ironically) by Oscar Issac plays his role with the right mix of melancholy, disillusionment and alienation that is brought out by every frame that features him.

In contrast to Her, Inside... takes us back into the past. The film is set in the unrelenting winter of 1960s New York, and makes appropriate use of the harsh weather to reflect how harsh life has been to Llewyn. His kind of music is not popular anymore, nor does he have the necessary charisma to make it big in a music industry that depends on presentation and appearances. The film follows him through several bizarre experiences that take him far away from his dream of making it big music, yet it is his passion for music that gets him through.

[Another lovely song from the film Inside Llewyn Davis.]

And then there is the cat. The cat is very much a character in the film, representing Llewyn's lost and wayward state of mind, and his desperation to come home to something. The cat is called Ulysses and it does come home, but the film does not tell us of Llewyn did or not. The film's structure is strangely circular - the first scene is also the last scene, and one is not quite sure where it all began or how it is going to end. The uncertainty is effective, and you don't feel particularly unsettled that the film does not offer any easy solutions or convenient conclusions.

Oscar or no Oscar - both these films have been added to my list of favourites for their subtlety and their depiction of real people quietly reacting to human difficulties. 

Thursday, March 20, 2014

THE MAGIC OF ORDINARY LIVES

This weekend at the movies was a good one for me. I saw two films that left an indelible impression on my mind, and I suspect that they will end up leaving one on the canvas of Hindi cinema as well. The two films I saw were Queen (Vikas Bahl, 2014) in the cinema hall and Shahid (Hansal Mehta, 2013) on DVD. The stories that these two films tell are vastly different, as are the disparate worlds they inhabit. But what is common to both is that they are brave films --brave films about small people with extraordinarily large lives.

Queen is the story of Rani, a girl from the closeted world of Rajouri in Delhi, who finds freedom, new experiences, friends, and most importantly, herself when she decides to go for her honeymoon all alone. Jilted just a day before her wedding by her fiance, Vijay (played with spot-on wimpiness by Rajkumar Rao), Rani goes on a journey to two places (Paris, then Amsterdam) far away from the milieu that she has grown up in. The primary metaphor of the film is that of journey and self-discovery. Shaky at first in foreign lands, Rani soon finds her footing with the help of the new people she meets - Vijaylaxmi, a free-spirited Parisienne, and Olexander, Taka and Tim, three backpackers she rooms with in Amsterdam. 

Kangana Ranaut in Queen


The film offers a completely new perpective on the clash, or in this case a happy and fortuitous collision, of the East and the West. The East is no more the vessel of Culture and Tradition, and the holy site of the Virtuous, Virginal woman. Nor is the West the spoiler of the said virtue, and the space where progressive means morally corrupt. So Vijaylaxmi smokes and drinks with abandon, and has a son with her boyfriend out of wedlock. Rani gets over her initially wariness to join in the fun in her own way. She does not reliquinsh her inherent conservativeness, but participates in Vijaylaxmi's wild ways without judgement and without feeling threatened that she herself needs to change to fit in. In Amsterdam, Rani is hesitant about sharing a room with three men at first, but then comfortably settles into these new friendships that she had formed on her journey, even sharing a "first kiss" with an Italian! 

But the merit of this film really lies in the fact that it never shifts focus from its female protagonist, perfectly enacted by Kangana Ranaut. It does not compromise with silly item numbers or mandatory romantic angles. The film is Rani's only, and the rest is what helps her form her identity by the end of the film. The film, thus, becomes a comment on patriarchy.This is not just the patriarchy that pervades our society, embodied by Vijay in the film, who does not want Rani to get a job or dance at a party, and flips out when he sees that she is sharing a room with three boys. It is also a comment on the patriarchy that lurks in commercial film industries, which are reluctant to put their money on "female-centric" projects. The film proves undoubtedly that it does not matter who is the "hero" of the film, it's ultimately the story that makes the movie.

The poster of Shahid


The second film I watched, Shahid, is also one where story rules. Shahid is a intrepid human rights lawyer, who fights on behalf those done in by a discriminatory and faulty system. The metaphor operating in this film too is one of discovery and self-realisation. The Mumbai riots of 1993, Shahid's stint in a terrorist training camp and then his languishing in jail, all help build-up his strong sense of ethics and his empathy with those who have suffer the same fate as him. Shahid's experiences teach him that the political is sometimes very personal, and one has no other choice but to take action against the injustices that plague the world around us.This film too does away with all the trappings of a commercial film - no songs, minimal background music, dialogue only when necessary, and shots of lingering silences when the camera does all the talking. Queen's Vijay is this film's Shahid, so completely the character he plays that it breaks your heart.

There is nothing flashy or big-budget about either Shahid or Queen. The films have no stars, no larger-than-life situations, no glossy song sequences, and absolutely no pretensions of being more than what they are. Both films are trying to tell a story, going about this with honesty and focus. And that's exactly why both these films work so well.