Extremely loud & Incredibly Close

If the sun exploded and all went black, it would take 8 mins for us to know that it has. That's the time required by light to travel to us from that far.

For eight minutes we wouldn't be aware of what had happened and continue to receive the light and warmth.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the fourth film by Stephen Daldry. I had the pleasure of admiring two of his previous three films.

The Hours recreates the writing of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and intersperses it with two women who are living Mrs Dalloways years after it has been written.

The Reader is about a Nazi guard who serves a life sentence rather than admitting in open court that she cannot read, which would have helped in proving her innocence.

They are both fine films and melodiously intriguing in what they are trying to say.

While they let you in their world, which is your agonizing world as well, a world which beats you down with questions of Camus' Outsider, Dostoyevsky's Double and Tolstoy's Family Happiness.

The hue and cry of us being a speck in the galaxy- a small consciousness in the middle of a grand mystery.

And how worthless it is to take it all so seriously.

It wasn't untill I saw this third film that i could vaguely decipher what Daldry's cinema is all about. It is about everything and it is about nothing. And I could decipher it because it ringed an achingly familiar tune.

A man is trapped on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. He calls his wife and tells her how much he loves her while she watches the building in smoke from afar.

He calls home to talk to his son but is met by an answering machine. When the son walks in, there are 5 msgs on the answering machine.

The son isn't more than 10-12 years old and has an extremely deep bond with his father who is his whole world. They are explorers together, they invent quizzes and games and the father regularly devises puzzles for him.

They even jokingly refer to the mother as a sleeping parent.

A year after 9/11, after he has built his father's shrine in a corner of his room where he plays the 6 msgs over and over again, yes 6, the son walks in his father's closet for the first time. He accidentally finds a key in a blue vase at the top of a cabinet. They key was in an envelope with Black written on it.

Remembering his father's advice to never stop looking for an earlier impossible puzzle that he gave him, the boy decides to search for the lock of that key.

He decides to track down every person in New York with the name Black and tries to find the lock for that key.

His father had taught him that there was always a reason, always a logic for everything. He wants to find the logic in how someone can fly a plane in a building and can kill his father without even knowing him.

And in this search he hopes to find the 8 minutes with his father, between the explosion in the sun and the time it took for him to know of it.

I have no idea how this film's CD came into my possession. I don't recall either buying it or borrowing it.

the unbearabe lightness or heaviness of being

I remember coming here five years back. I remember getting off at Mumbai Central and riding through its lanes to my cousin’s house at midnight. Autorickshaws neatly lined alongside the road below the neglected mercury lamps. I remember walking early the next morning to marol naka to see my friend off for office. The air had urgency. Every foot was in a hurry. In the evening I was at Victoria Terminus for the first time. The atmosphere was still. The heart was numb. Amongst that chaos there was stillness inside. I lived that moment. I remember falling in love with that calm inside.
And now I’m here. Living that frenzy. Now I’m one of them. Though I still feel like an outsider. I’m an outsider. But I feel like that everywhere. Chuck that.
Arun
A distant, lonely, ignorant, artist stumbles on fresh inspiration after finding his gateway to the heart of Mumbai. The exciting intimacy of living in someone’s house. Walking the same corners, having the same view, meeting the same people, living the anxieties. Knowing her as intimately as one can. Interacting with her through a window with one end. A city glowing from a distance. A fire glowing in someone’s eyes. Wondering chaos inside.

Shai
A free spirit, on a break from a mad world trying to understand something madder. Or just trying to live the madness. At ease with her limit. She’ll always be an alien, she knows that. She gets entangled with someone who is trying to live in chaos.
She gets involved in the flux herself. To guide her through the flux she hires someone who is the flux himself but is not aware of it.

Munna
The Mumbai we see from the distance. The underbelly. The ghetto of dreamers. The railway track which is the pride and the shame simultaneously. The mud of the sea.
The face at the next signal. The world that we can only aspire to know.

Yasmeen
Neither world. The largest segment, the least known. The lamenting voice. Caged. Burdened. Helpless. Clipped. Walking through empty landscapes, shouting in crowded streets while no one hears.
the death of hope. the agony and the ecstasy of bourgeois.

Welcome to Kiran Rao’s Dobi Gat. A very well collaged, painfully exotic,moving canvas.
Lifelike in its forgetting. Divine in its reach. The unbearable lightness or heaviness of being. Held at unknown breath’s distance. The chill of a winter ride through misty unknown. The dissatisfaction of empty nights played out on newly whitewashed walls.
The echo of nostalgia amok.

“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”

A Whirling Dance of Nostalgia

It was way back in 2003 and I was going to watch India’s first sci-fi movie-Koi Mil Gaya
with my non-cinematic best friend, F. Both of us reached the cinema hall quite late and the balcony was booked. I guess it was the first and the last time in Allahabad for me when the balcony was booked for a 9-12 show. So we bought the stall tickets and amidst extreme temperatures took our seats with drunkards, rickshaw pullers, goons and other not so friendly cinema lovers. Later in the movie when Hrithik gets all fixed up by the alien, the man sitting next to me got up and started speaking to the screen-“ab aawaa, toka bataii, ab aawaa”…he was talking to the villains and tempting them to come and risk their lives with Hrithik now. His seizures grew more intense with every testosterone-raging action sequence as we concentrated sans any shirts (we had taken them off a long time back.i was wearing a vest and F was bare chest) more on him rather than the movie.
This is how I’ve seen films. Even the slightest mention of the non-acceptable social terms receive loud applauds and whistles. I remember paying Rs 80 for a Rs38 ticket for Lagaan and many others (once I’m at the theatre no price is big enough to scare me).
I had come out of cinema halls with people going nuts about a movie like Yaadein.
I’ve danced with people and shilpa shetty for “dilwalon ke dil ka qaraar lootne”.
A movie released meant I’m going to see it. Even the ones like Mast, Main Prem Ki Deewani Hun, etc etc. Every time a romantic scene appeared on screen I felt like watching it with my first girl friend because that is how I know romance.(ishq mein jalte hue saans tezaabi lage,raaz khulta hi nahin koi to chaabhi lage)
But over the past few years I sensed an alienation of my movie-going crowd from films. I thought it was due to the bad condition of cinema halls and the crowd became more and more temperate with every passing day. Few whistles, fewer shouts and a dented chaos. And that drew me away from cinema halls, actually more than the fall in the standard of films being made (meri aarzoo kamini,mere khwaab bhi kaminey)
Yesterday at the screening of Kaminey, it all came back. The same sense of acute helplessness on knowing that it’s houseful, return to the same ticket blacker who has sold me umpteen tickets, debate with friends that a Rs 40 ticket for Rs 80 is a fair deal, going into his small hut to get the tickets in order to dodge the policeman who is standing on the road and finally telling my friends euphorically that I got them. I always get them-vanity.
The movie rolled on and the shouts kept going louder and I joined them. Whistles for the kiss between Shahid and Priyanka, a loud shout at Priyanka’s mention of rape.
It also saw the return of that odd neighbor who sits next to me and it appears that he’s watching a film for the first time-giggling every time Shahid pronounced pha ko pha…
And she also knocked at the door of my memory when Shahid and Priyanka were arms interlocked, sight trapped (aji pehli baar mohobbat kit hi ahaan, aakhri baar mohobbat kit hi ahaan)
And the movie is just awefome!!
Vishal has blended all that I used to watch earlier and most of what I watch now with his own inimitable style. He entered the locked room of archetypical Indian cinema and stirred the motionless time inside it with his genius.
Every cliché of our cinema was given new wings and it all flew above my head while all his puppets were controlled with new threads (chikne chikne lach-che hain reshmi se phande hain)…
Shahid playing both roles to perfection as if played by different people, Priyanka’s totally in sync with her Marathi portrayal and every other character is a new face.
Mikhail is the new psyched chota-gangster; Bhope is your old local con cum politician blended with the new political upheaval in Maharashtra, Tashi is the latest drug lord signifying the drug mafia in Goa and all of them have their own identity, all are unique. You can write an entire 2 hour movie on any one of them individually and yet they all have been used like the finest ingredients are put in the exact amount to make the best Kadhai Chicken cooked by mom.
The best songs of the movie haven’t been used in the film because they’ll dent the pace, the look is as grim as can be because the title of the movie is Kaminey, and the camera is very close to the subjects because it’ll heighten the frenzy and the pace.
I would love to know the budget of the film because the shooting takes place either on the roads of Bombay or a few dilapidated rooms and the costumes appears to belong to the actors. Not a single thing is superfluous and it’s so rich without any gloss.

Thank you Vishal Bhardwaj for sending me back in time and for being able to say that I’m an Indian audience and we kick some serious ass with our cinema.
The best Independence Day gift ever.

The Reader

We have been talking about the Revolutionary Roads, Benjamin Buttons, Sam Mendes, Slumdog Millionaire (we talked so much that we killed it), Danny Boyle, Amitabh Bachchan, waghaira waghaira. I was disappointed when I didn’t find even half of the few of us discussing The Reader (its up with all the buttons and millionaires on your Academy of Motion Pictures).

The Readeris a movie by Stephen Daldry based on a novel by Bernhard Shlink, a German writer. It is about the inability of successive German generations to comprehend with the holocaust. How could their fathers sit through what can be called “the worst condition in which a human being can be kept”? Shlink was basically a detective novelist which can be seen at the pace at which the movie progresses. It is the perfect pace at which a movie should reveal itself, moving inch by inch. It can be divided into three segments.

The first segment is about Michael’s discovery of intimacy with the opposite sex on a larger scale as a fifteen year old. It’s about his affair with a mysterious woman called Hannah, who is twice her age, and as an adolescent, for him Hannah’s complexities take a backseat when compared to the new experiences and pleasures that he derive from being with her.

In the second part, Michael is a student of the law at a university and witnesses court cases as part of his vocational training. On one such case Hannah is one of the defendants in a war-crime trial being committed by the Nazis. Michael is both, the guilty lover, since he loved a criminal and a confused young man since he cannot understand as to why she is accepting full responsibility of a crime that couldn’t have been committed by her alone (the other defendants accuse Hannah of writing the report since she was in charge but she couldn’t have because she was illiterate).

The third segment is the part in which Michael tries to understand Hannah (because he was her lover) as well as condemns her (because he was a war-hating German) for her acts and finds out that it is impossible to do both. It’s a tussle and he goes to which side is unclear in the movie.

The first segment belongs to David Kross. He essays the role of young Michael with so much subtlety that any seasoned actor should take a bow. Not in a single frame does he feels intimidated by Kate and has answers for all her nuances.

The second segment is all Kate Winslet, even though she doesn’t has much screen time but she sends you through a tailspin in those court room scenes and you reel for a long time. A special mention for the scene in which Michael visits one of the concentration camps to incline more towards Hannah but comes out as one who finds it even hard to justify. It’s a heart wrenching scene and I was moved to tears would be an understatement.

The third segment is Ralf Fiennes playing the divorced father of a daughter, a grown up Michael whose every relationship has been affected because of his alliance with Hannah.

He never meets her out of acrimony but sends her recorded tapes of books so that she has something to hang on to in her imprisonment for life.

The movie talks about how a war not only affects the physical but the metaphysical aspect of a complete society impairing it genetically. A catastrophe of this magnitude shatters a person so much that it is impossible to grow out of it.

The only aspect the movie is unable to touch is Hannah’s PoV. I’m still trying to figure her out. Whether it was her inability to read and write that did her or the indifference towards the crime that she committed, if there was any indifference.

The narrative is very engaging and Stephen Daldry has been able to explain an idea with the help of some extraordinary performances. When Michael hears Hannah’s voice in the courtroom and the camera slides slowly from his face towards her posture, I started having goose bumps. Daldry has done an insurmountable task of depicting on film the whole resonance in people’s lives in Germany after the holocaust and I can overlook the flaws in the movie due to the treatment of his vision.

I haven’t seen Frost/Nixon and Milk but this movie is definitely better than both, Benjamin Button and Slumdog.

originally published for passionforcinema.com at http://passionforcinema.com/a-less-talked-about-the-reader/

revolutionary road

“If being crazy is living life as if it matters then I don’t care if we are completely insane”
That’s the whole issue. Living life as it matters. How does life matters? By what possible activity? Making money, driving a Bentley, having the girl of your dreams, your name on everyone’s lips and lives, a Mexican mistress with whom you can run off to Paris whenever you want to or drink beer with friends over a heated argument of what’s right for this country? What is it?
Sinking into a routine which has been decided for you by those you don’t know or have never met, squeezing every little possible drop of hope that you matter, at least to yourself if not someone else. Having a job, a lovely wife, having kids and dancing with them in the rain you just pass off as a couple which is perfect in all that makes sense to everybody, except that it doesn’t makes any bloody sense to you at all. What is the point? I’m putting myself to the torture of spending 8-9 hours of my life in an office which does what and why, I don’t have the slightest idea. I come back home and my wife looks at me more out of pity that one feels for a stray dog when it gets hurt, than due to love and affection we promised each other when we decided to get married.
Now a wife who thinks like that and doesn’t says anything either because she is not driven enough herself by that sacrilege that they are doing to both their lives or doesn’t have words good enough to pull you from that misery, is probably not the kind you married into but secretly wished to turn out into.
The wife in this case is exactly the opposite of what had been just described. She not only feels that void being created inside her husband but also experiences that it is also ruining the slightest possibility of being in her as well. So she revisits the past and recalls an incident in another time zone where her husband used to be somebody with a zest for life. “I just want to feel things, really feel them, and how is that for an ambition”. In order to bring him back so that she can find the tracks of her journey as well, which she seemed to have lost due to him, opens the Pandora’s Box. All hell breaks loose because what has been going on real quiet inside them comes out on the table, and each one them start finding fault with what the other has to say or think.
The movie deals with the ifs and buts of ones motives in their respective lives, more importantly whether one has a motive at all or not. Being alive even once in a day built out of a cacophony because some strings of the guitar aren’t tight enough inside your head. When you make love to your wife it shouldn’t be out of charity which you are doing to your own self, but because of the shear beauty of that connection that transpires between two people and appreciate life as it should be.
Kate Winslet towers in a role that only a husband could write for his wife for the magic that a partner expects from his counterpart to bring about in his life, which ironically is true in this case. She as a wife of the fifties with her dreams gone astray is like Frost sitting in the forest and mourning his dead brother. Leonardo on the other hand convinces me more that he is restricted as an actor and beyond a certain limit he fails to deliver (reminds me too much of Howard Hughes’s portrayal).
The splendor is definitely the pace at which the movie makes its way into your heart leaving you baffled with all those dilemmas in life. Shades of American beauty can also be seen when April is dancing with Shep-her neighbor, (remember the Angela Hayes dance), took me back in time. When I saw Jarhead I felt that Sam was inclined with a strange arrogance towards Kubrick and this movie gives a proof to my hypothesis.
The only flaw in the movie is that it’s predictable, especially in the second half. You can literally vent out some of the dialogues because you have lived in that realm for more than what you can bear. The conversations between Leo and Kate are breathtaking in the second half, despite being predictable, because sometimes you don’t say those things even to yourself also and you have to love someone really badly to feel so sorry for her.
I heard this incorrigible line somewhere “If human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed”. Well the movie is about that reason which is destroying the possibility of everyone’s life.

originally published for passionforcinema.com at http://passionforcinema.com/monotonic-road/

only Cholera, no Love

Think of love as a state of grace not bemuse to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.

How long would you wait for the one you love?
Is a lifetime enough, I guess not.
Love in all its beauty is a little more than attainment and a little less than salvation.
Is it possible to spend all your life under the pretext that you will survive its rigors, turn your back towards death and relive your long cherished dream of being in her arms one day?
Possible seems too trifle of a word and patience its accomplice.
Can you live with the thought that you’ll wait for her all life long knowing that it might take God to give it a second thought about you two?
God will!
Cinema and writing are both forms of art, no doubt. Both ways of expression and I always believed that cinema was a more complete medium than any other. The visual experience combined with all its nuances was a different world altogether.

But then I read Marquez and had doubts about my belief. He was able to weave a phantasmagoric world with the threads of poetry and his characters revealed themselves to me in physical, metaphysical and delusional. With every line I read I was able to understand myself better with the characters, so it was more than just a treat for my five senses but also the supreme one, that of feeling.
When I came to know that one his books, and the most enchanting one, has been made into a movie which was available at the mere click of a button, I couldn’t resist the temptation of watching those characters come to life on screen with all their eccentricities and earthy touches. The lifetaking Caribbean landscape which I have only imagined as Marquez has made me, with the boleros and accordion sounds humming in my ears.

The manifestation of a novel so vast in its canvas, appeal and thought is a daunting task in itself, and an impossible one. It was a let down in all its meanings. The movie tries to capture too much, the whole spectrum of the novel in a mere time span of two hours where every page in the book is so exquisite that it might take the length of an entire film. It tries to say too much and ends being nothing but a stepchild of a proud parent. When one reads a book he creates a world of his own which twists so much, especially in Marquez’s case, that he is left with an avalanche of a thousand images where no world seems perfect. A film, based on such a book, needs to say at least a hundred different things in one shot. Now that’s quite a task. Every character in the attempt of giving justice has been shrunken to such an extent that they seem like dirty water squeezed out of a sponge. There are so many questions left unanswered, especially about the dilemma of Fermina that the character seems farce. Dr. Juvenal Urbino has been thrown in the inferno and Femina stays in purgatory as far as the integrity of their characters is concerned. Only that of Florentino comes close to the doors of heaven, not enters it though. The movie tries to look at three viewpoints as the book but ends up explaining none, to some extent that of Florentino’s.

The most powerful moments in the movie are its last 30 minutes where the book and movie becomes one. The dilemma of Fermina and the resolve of Florentino are shown just as they are in the book and that’s the period in which you weep and rejoice for both of them at the same time. I’ve never seen a movie with such a lousy opening and such a powerful end. It’s more of a writer’s flaw in Ronald Harwood, who has written a powerhouse in Pianist, than in Mike Newell, the director. Ronald didn’t give Mike enough to direct.

If you try to see the movie as an orphan then your confusion would expand exponentially, so a reference to the book is inevitable here.
I had pre-decided that it would be a disappointment as no mortal soul can bring Marquez alive on screen, and I have been delivered with just that and in the exact amount.

Originally published on PassionForCinema.com at http://passionforcinema.com/love-in-the-time-of-cholera-review/

Live your DReam

No words are good enough to describe an honest attempt. However, I’ll try to do so. Rock On clicks because it has all the ingredients of a good recipe. Well scripted, equally well executed, commendably performed, sounds fresh, stays with you for some duration and completes the journey which it starts.
Yes it lacks the nuances which we associate with a rock band-marijuana rings, booty flashing, booze splashing, psychic breakdowns and all the hysteria. But the soul of a rock band is pretty much there in Magik. It’s in a league of its own and has his own elements which ape nobody.
Rock On is about a rock band called Magik who aren’t able to make it big because of certain lapses within the band as well as a crude music market where people give spotlight to features that has nothing to do with creativity. There eventual reunion is orchestrated by Aditya’s (band’s vocalist) wife who realizes that her husband is trying to run away from something which is affecting their relationship. K D (drummer) is looking after his father’s jewelry store and holds precious stones like drum sticks. Rob (keyboard player) makes jingles for Anu Malik and watches his originality being killed everyday. Joe (lead guitarist) refuses to go Rob’s way and like Aditya isn’t able to let the past go.
The present as well as the past runs simultaneously which blends pain with nostalgia.
It’s about the biggest question that every single individual faces in his life. To live for ones needs or ones dreams. To become a slave of the order of the day, or its master. And it shows the aftermath which is playing to the gallery actually, but true.
Farhan lends freshness (much needed) to the script as well as the soundtrack, had any known face done the role the authenticity of the role would’ve diminished; Mr. Rampal has actually picked a role carefully where he doesn’t has to do much and look his usual self which is the demand of his role. Rest of the cast is impressive in their usual bits.
Rock On is yet another chapter in the changing face of Indian cinema. So it’s a double treat for a rock fan whose heart yearns for a good Indian movie.