Sur Mes lèvres : Read My Lips

She is lonely and desperate. He is a crook out on parole.

She leads a mundane existence as a secretary and is desperately seeking a man. To an extent that even while requesting for a trainee to help her out in doing the menial work, she says she would prefer a man, his age, physical characteristics. And she is deaf, but manages with hearing aid.

In walks the first applicant to the job, claiming he knows everything. She is more than glad to take him. Though, his being straight out of jail worries her at first.

Then begins their story, she heaps help after help on him. She makes him pull through, helping him learn the chores. He doesn’t seem as interested in keeping the job as she is.

A paradoxically intriguing character, how she wants a companion, only when she is alone or only when she is in public, but never when she is with him. You keep wondering what she has up her sleeve. What is she thinking now?

They have interesting things coming their way. The story unfolds in an unusual fashion. By the end of it you might feel the gist of it is nothing all you hadn’t seen so many times before. Though while it’s unfolding you can’t predict what will happen next. The rate at which they rush into one thing then another keeps you busy wondering.

It makes me admire the French. How easily they can make a movie which is entertaining as well as very close to the lives of somebody real somewhere.

Ridicule

Delightful ! Delightful!

The story of an estate owner in the times of Louis the XVI, whose estate is impoverished and people plagued with disease all because of the water which stagnates on their lands. Seeing no way out but to seek assistance, he decides to plead his case with the king at Versailles.

And so takes place a delightfully entertaining adventure of this man out to help his people out of their misery. But to get the help he has to literally put his wits to test. Because in those times to move up the social and ladder and be in the king's sight would have been the easiest if you were a master of the wits.

Naturally then the movie is resplendent with “quips”, “paradoxes” and “repartees” classified as different play of words by one of the characters.

Humour and curiosity keep the tone of this period film so light and fascinating that you realise period films can be so much more than a sombre narration. Must watch, changes your expectation of a period film.

Nani Cinematheque and the New French Film Festival

No one does it like the way French do.

The New French Cinema is here in Bangalore. Thanks to people like Prakash Belawadi and Alliance Francaise and many more. A lovely and interesting mix of movies of our contemporaries is being screened. No Goddard, no Truffaut. Strange but contemporary cinema should have come to us more naturally than the classics. But, then as the Alliance director said, “The fraction of the world cinema which is available in a city like Bangalore is too insignificantly small”. Another observation of his which he shared with the audience was that in a city full of book stores, of the books which are easily available and celebrated in France all he sees is one or two. “One or two”: a very small number.

I pledge my ignorance to French literary achievements. But, a nation which has produced so many cinema wizards should definitely be ruling a proud chunk of the movie market anywhere in the world. And why should they be only the movies which have won the test of decades of critical approbation. Why not what’s being served fresh and hot be shared with us.

I thank Nani cinematheque and Bangalore Bias for this opportunity. May there be more to come! Will keep you posted on all that was & would be revealed.

ChinaTown – Roman Polanski

(In the world of deep slumber) Shreds of Chinatown fused with random visual figments float in my head. I see Mr. Noah Cross, he is trying to say something. I am trying to put pieces together, justify the events. A clue still evades me. My head is spinning trying to retrace my steps. I hear a friend laugh, then I see her, she is happy, she says she knows it all.

How come I had never heard of this movie? I chanced to buy it on a whim. Is it that i am too ignorant or has this movie not received the publicity and fame of gigantic proportions which it should have.

The movie is such a rewarding experience. The story telling is crisp. Nothing is out of place in this movie. What most of the movies don’t even dare to become, it has attained. This movie paled so many other movies I had seen before. They could have been entertaining, funny, majestic, provoking. But, what they were not was this perfect a movie that Chinatown is.

The unique atmosphere of the movie is achieved by an unerring eye to detail, unflinching originality in these minute details and a million more things which I can not put a finger on. Another remarkable and rare thing: the sparing use of soundtrack. Most of the time it has silence mixed with the environmental sounds.

Its perfection also stems from the characters; to every scene to every conversational intercourse, every gesture. It is acceptable even for the greatest of movies to have a little leeway when employing characters who have a very short screen presence. You don’t have the luxury of developing characters, and in such cases clichés rescue you by providing a device handy to use anywhere. You can use them for plugging story telling loopholes or to move the story forward quicker than it can. Not to mention by detailing out too many characters (which are not central to the story) one risks losing audience’ interest.

Jack Nicholson’s character Jake is frill free. And so is Faye Dunaway’s. Brilliant performance, both of them. They have created two people who are a nice mix of very real and very cinematic. Their performances are outstanding. Jack Nicholson's character is drawn out very well in the opening scenes of the movie. The economy of space and time that has been practiced here is impressive. As the rivetting plot opens up and unfolds in front of you, at the same time in those same moments you get introduced to Jake and his world. And his cahracter just goes on acquiring more shades as the movie progresses. Faye Dunaway has also her share of spell to cast on the audience. As the wife of one of the cities rich and powerful men. The drawl in her voice, The dead pan yet strangely enigmatic look she bears on her face just heighten the sense of mystery surrounding everything and her.

The movie’s trivial-est characters are also sharp. I mean every one of them. From the woman pretending to be Mrs Mulwray to Roman Polanski’s brief part as the man who slits Jake’s (Jack Nicholson) nose, to the officer accompanying Lou who does nothing but snicker.

You watch Jack Nicholson in this movie, and you marvel at the expert dexterity with which he has brough the character to life. You can revisit this movie just to study his character (and few more for other reasons), and his magnificent performance. Unlike the "teeth baring", "raised eyebrow" specimen he has become. The numerous characters he has done in the last few years, one seems an evil twin of another. The Jack Nicholson typecast that had crept into his character reminds me of the woe of Nana Patekar. Both fine actors, victims of gruesome typecast.

This man Roman Polanski is a master craftsman. This movie can be treated as an example what cinema achieves for you, how it should be treated; and in Roman’s hand it’s a toy. He has made this movie so compact, not even a whiff of air from the world around would seep into it. No moment in it has been put callously. No turn careless. While you are watching it, you are seeing a beautifully well knit story.Though it is a plot driven thriller, its greatness lies in the perfect execution of this film. Even a thesis on this movie might not be able to cover, all that this film has achieved. And what others should look up to, before daring to think they are filmmakers.

The Dreamers

There is this new rating in movies I have been introduced to: NC17. It is for arty porn. Or as Wikipedia says, “that MPAA rated NC-17 films were legitimate motion pictures with actual stories and developed characters, as with the first such film, Universal Pictures' Henry & June (1990), rather than merely prurient/pornographic fare.”

Henry and June is highly pretentious crap. It might as well have been awarded X rating or well there was no point in exploiting the NC17 rating. Oh yeah they didn’t have a story but then they were bland too. And they had better production values, better paid actors who just shammed at their jobs in this movie.

As for dreamers, the three characters are adorable, especially Isa (played by Eva Green of Casino Royale). They are amusing, till their twisted selves are revealed. Isa captures your heart when she declares the first word she ever spoke, “New York Herald Tribunes”. The abrupt cuts to older movies, like for “New York Herald Tribunes” the cut from Breathless. I was smiling all over. Bernardo jumps to these scenes intermittently. It seems a sort of loving tribute to the worthwhile cinema that has been. The trio’s run through Louvre, just like in the movie Bande a part. Their delightful cheering at the end of it, “We accept him, one of us!”

Exactly five minutes from the moment Matthew is stripped, the movie loses the level it had promised. Matthew’s character doesn’t come out strong. Looks like both the script and the actor had to contribute for that. The God’s hand appears in this one as when the filmmakers could not decide how to justify the change in Matthew’s attitude from violent protests to active derivation of pleasure. So suddenly he is made to faint, and when he regains his consciousness a few seconds letter he is all eager for the act to begin. This bit was too damn insipid.

Matthew seems a big misfit, he is with the twins but he is not with them. He plays along with them, till he has had enough and then starts talking as if he just walked in form the world outside and is startled by their prurient ploys. Matthew’s character leaves too much in want. His sudden outbursts and speech would make you suspect that maybe he was just pretending to be like them, understand them. Not what I felt while reading the book. Matthew’s is a very weakly developed, under justified character and Michael Pitt does no wonder to hide it or pull it off some how.

Hats off to the actors, the amount of time they are naked is appalling. I don’t know how they could have been so comfortably rattling off the dialogues, it was awesome. Maybe the least the rest of the crew could have done for them to be comfortable was be naked themselves.

Apart from the glaring flaws in Matthew’s character, and the casting of Michael Pitt as Matthew, the movie is watchable if you can down an NC-17. Or rather if you haven’t seen one, and want to see what the fuss is all about. Actually what else would you want to watch it for, it becomes a drag once the first half an hour has passed by. Maybe you can keep a book by your side, or a su-do-ku to go along with it.

The crooked line (Tehri lakeer) -Ismat Chughtai

Read Ismat Chughtai’s The Crooked Line this Saturday. I had really boring work planned for the Saturday all of which I dropped more than happily, as they concerned no one else more than me. The book reminded me of Prem Chand. It brought India of those days to me, the India of Prem Chand. But certain things were different now. Now I was in affluent city instead of the villages where his characters thrived. The social circles were more affluent as well. And somehow everybody was not worshipping Gandhi. Rather one of the characters even says something to convey the irreverence. It was a revelation to realize that not everybody was idolizing Gandhi those days.

I did not know there was so much that can easily be communicated even from under a burqa. There is this bit in the story where these girls go around flirting (in their own way) while being confined in burqa. Somehow I assumed the life within burqa to be quieter. Our protagonist and her friends don’t seem to even sense the presence of it. It seems to compliment their coyness.

The first few pages of the book; I found the little protagonist in her early days vile and mad. I found this little demon’s life loathsome. On the other hand there was this quick and riveting change in events and characters around her. Her madness had a repulsive appeal. At times she reminded me of Gabriela Marquez’s Amaranta as a little girl. But while Amaranta seemed a little surreal; this girl was too real. A live and breathing creature she was becoming with every passing passage. Hence more was the revulsion and more the attraction.

The novel warrants a read primarily because of the geographic location of its characters and their placement in time. Towards the third and the last phase of the book, the novelty has worn down. There are lots of conversations which fail to interest one. And the protagonists a life has moved to a territory where nothing seems to be as significant as to be narrated. She could have shrunk the third bit and finished it a little sooner.