Movies

Grave of Fireflies

There can be few (animated) movies so shot through with bleakness, with such a downward spiral in the luck of its protagonists as Grave of Fireflies...you look for some real Studio Ghibli magic, some pixie dust, some soot gremlins, magical fireflies...but there is none of that happening here. It is a story of Seita and his sister Setsuko...and how they fend for themselves during the war...it is heart-wrenching, it is beautiful in parts especially seeing Setsuko's innocent actions, it is brutal...how much the war - the second world war made an imprint on the Japanese seems to be expressed by such films, which try to show the effects on ordinary people's lives...watching this soon after having watched In this corner of the world...one is suddenly transported in the midst of war, of air-raid sirens and air-raid shelters, of bombs and food-rationing, of lost limbs ans scorched bodies, of death and devastation...of struggle and despair...

Happy to know - quite fortuitiously - that Brattle theater is holding a tribute to director Isao Takahata, who directed Grave (among many other Ghibli films) - in the upcoming two weeks...

My Neighbor Totoro

The World Is Enchanted

Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki are not shy about wonder and fantasy. My Neighbor Totoro is suffused with simple and lush sense of wonder. There are haunted houses. There are soot sprites that scurry about. There are gigantic trees that remind one that humans and trees were once friends. Then there are lovable Pikachu like creatures that only the truly innocent can see. The world of childlike wonder extends and embraces the natural world. Birds, beasts and trees respond. The humans are watched over. Magic happens. Because Totoro is real even though it lives down a rabbit hole. Like other Studio Ghibli films, this one is awash in color and presents the stunning simplicity of an idyllic Japanese countryside...miles and miles of deep green, flat rice-fields intersected with narrow mud paths. Butterflies and dense foliage. Wide-eyed wonder of children and billowing dresses. What does all this call to mind? Gaugin's sunflowers? Monet? Some other impressionist painter's imagination? You will be a child again, running around in enchantment...

The Yacoubian Building

Watching a movie, like I do sometimes over a certain length of time, is like reading a novel. You begin living it...you start breathing with the characters...

One such movie that I lived and breathed for a while was The Yacoubian Building, an Egyptian movie based on a novel of the same name. It tells the story of a colonial-era building in Cairo, the Yacoubian Building, and its various tenants. Through the diverse lives of the tenants of that building, the story weaves a narrative of class, religion, urbanism, relationships, corruption, power, government...

First off,  I am not sure I have watched any Egyptian cinema before. I have watched snippets of some Egyptian soaps - some pretty funny and even risque - but nothing really more than that. I have watched more Iranian and Palestinian films than films from any other part of the Middle East...certainly not Egypt...

So I did not know what to expect...I did not expect such a polished production and such competent acting as I came to relish...I also did not know what to expect of Egyptian social life...Iranian movies, on many occasions, took on social issues such as the freedom of expression or a traditional society...they made beauty from among a seemingly "more-traditional" world, a world where religio-patriarchal norms clash with more free-spirited ones...a world of chador-clad women - with very distinct minds of their own...

The Cairo of Yacoubian Building definitely exhibited a lot of the more well-heeled side of society - alcohol-imbibing pashas and other minor potentates, people with lavish houses and an education in Paris. But not just that - it also showed a society with a remarkable mix of mores and beliefs, with the ravishing Bothayna (Hend Sabry), as a poor store-assistant, tells her boyfriend Taha who seems to have fallen in with the religious types: "You wear a beard and I wear mini-skirts."

There is the lonely playboy Zaki (a Pasha), growing old and still seeking love in Cairo's bars - with "tramps" as his sister Dawlat accuses him; Dawlat, a ferocious, catty sister always at odds with him...

There is Haj Ali, a shoeshine boy having made it big in the world of business who is troubled by "exciting thoughts" while sleeping after being a father of four grown up children - and hence seeks [or is advised] a second wife. But that is not so simple, at least in Egypt, where I guess secular law is always in conflict with religious law...

And then there is also Hatem who must trawl Cairo's shadows to find his mates; who must justify his love and longing also from within - and in counterpoint to - religious conventions and social mores...

Everything is rich and lavish and seamy at the same time; there is seeming opulence and wealth but there is also decay and dying and nostalgia; there are old ways of life and new hope getting crushed - and finding different outlets...there are Muslims and Copts, there are polished Caireans (is that a word?) and then there are the upcountry hicks, so to say, from "Upper Egypt"...

All through this the story and acting remains taut and very mature...unlike the melodrama that Bollywood often lapses into...what is about storytelling and performance that the Iranians and several others, including the Egyptians, know much better that the South Asians/Indians? How does an established industry like Bollywood still not get the way to tell stories without that extra bit of cloying emotion? Why can Bollywood not handle loss and humiliation and yearning as beautifully as others do? I don't know the answer to that but it has to be something to do with various philosophies of life, of poetry and philosophy always intertwined with daily, common life...it is also a society's ability or willingness to face up to its realities, to wrestle with them - and not to paper over them...

The Pasha is robbed by a woman he brings home, castigated and thrown out of his home by his sister...and he ruminates on never marrying, never having children...Haj Ali eats crow finally at the hands of the political class...Hatem meets with tragedy in his quest for new love...Taha, similarly, meets a tragic end...and yet the movie is not a tragedy - as love blooms and blossoms in the most unlikely of circumstances and some hearts are gladdened...is it a triumph in the end, a happy story...? Hardly. But it is all that - and in the fact that there could be improbable romance amidst haplessness and misfortune suggests the multifaceted nature of the experience of life

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October 21 – December 3, 2016@ Harvard Film Archive

Say It Loud! The Black Cinema Revolution

Sunday Nov 13 

Angela Davis at Malcolm X College

The New-Ark

Baldwin’s Nigger

Baldwin's powerful, yet delicately articulated, speech is quite riveting as he addresses the mostly West Indian audience in this documentary...he minces no words as he launches into a scathing criticism of slavery...drawing from personal experience and from wider exprience of the "Negro" - on which he gets called out during Q&A as to why he (and other Americans) do not use the term "Black."

"We're not just the innocent expressions of the primitive people," he says, hand making cynical circles above his head, "but extremely subtle and dangerous and tragic [pause] expressions of what it felt like to be in chains."

"They've always known you're not a mule, they've always known that no one wishes to be a slave, they've always known that bales of cotton...and entire metropolises built on black labor...that the balcks were not doing it out of love...he was doing it under the whip."

Dick Gregory's brief statement following Baldwin's is very punchy also - "Color is an attitude," he says.

Thurgood - 

A movie in a college-lecture format - certainly something very different...quite a masterly performance by Laurence Fishburne...but what it does illustrate, if you do not know the story, is what it takes to make a struggle - how many little battles make up a war against injustice. In this movie, we see the legal battles that Thurgood Marshall witnessed and participated in...from getting his mother equal pay to...voting rights in the south to...Brown v. Board of Education...and more...

The sheer variety, inventiveness and art that Iranian cinema can bring forth - and together - is quite remarkable.  A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night directed by Ana Lily Amirpour is a surreal film set in "Bad City," somewhere in Iran, I guess, but it could have been any other industrial landscape, especially as stated in the DVD jacket, some setting of an American film, especially set in the 60s. The film is shot in black and white and the male protagonist wears a white undershirt and jeans and drives around in something like a Cadillac. The streets are eerily empty except for the actors in the scene. There is strong streetlighting in the backgound as are glimpses from various industrial units...you can even see the smaller hammer-head oil-rigs in some of the shots. The contrast of the light and dark, of black and white is stunning and pristine. The bareness of the story - and its de-centeredness - is enhanced by the vast expanses of the shots bereft of people...save for the one or two actors on screen...there is enveloping silence, the sense of this-could-be-anywhere, this is fake yet real, and maybe this is all just a dream.

It is a minimalist love story, or, at least one with a romantic angle, and yes, all that with a vampire and a prostitute...maybe there is something about luminescent faces of the Iranian women enframed in scarves and donning slightly voluminous  black chadors that fit in the aesthetics and color-scheme of the movie...it is modern, yet 60s, it is Iranian yet it has a universal appeal and feel, it has a vampire but it isn't solely about vampires...

A very slickly done, enigmatic movie that moves rapidly, that dares experiment with different genres and comes out bold ad beautiful

The Last Supper: Sham-e-Akhar

Never judge a DVD by its cover...also...or by its title, for that matter...what seemed like  movie set in coastal Italy turned out to be a finely-wrought-and-taut drama set very much in Iran, centering on a university professor, her family and her immediate world.

Even this small world - comprising chiefly the professor (the glowing, beneficent Katayoun Riahi), her husband, her daughter, a nanny and her student - is handled with just the right amount of emotion, the right amount of tension and strife. Significantly, this movie foreground its woman lead, the professor, but also follows the turmoil of her daughter as the latter navigates a difficult terrain, between the crumbling marriage of her parents and the emergence of new emotions around her.

Katayoun Riahi, playing the professor, display a remarkable maturity and inner strength as she confronts her changing world...her face always seem lit by a deep happiness - or at times, a deep pain.

It certainly is a credit to the filmmaker that the story deals, in dignified manner, with the relationship between an older woman - a mother, a professor - and a younger man, almost as old as her daughter. While the opposite scenario - an older man and a younger woman - is depicted quite commonly, the boldness and directness of the more "contrarian" depiction is rarer. In fact the movie anticipates society's reactions to such a relationship when the professor dreams of a scenario where she is being stoned for her violation, and, more touchingly, explains her inclination to even entertain the romantic overtures of her student thus to her confidante Afagh: "I am 45, Afagh...at my age, how do you not feel flattered when a young man almost half your age professes his love for you...?"