Joyless cinema, listless fare

There is no longer any joy in cinema, says GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN, about the films featured at the International Film Festival in Delhi. Most of the directors were intent on featuring the darker sides of life. The saving grace was the few films which were refreshingly watchable, and of a high quality.

SURELY, life is not joyless. The human mind and the human heart find peace, happiness and even excitement in the darkest of times and in the darkest of crevices. Men and women always seek out an excuse to celebrate, however deep be their grief, however intense their suffering.

But cinema seems to have fallen into a black pit, where there is no pleasure or merriment. At least, that was the case with the cinema I saw at the recent International Film Festival of India held in New Delhi. Directors made it a point to paint their canvasses with gore and sadism. The unnatural became natural, the disgusting was dressed up to appear almost stylish. Incest was in. Men made love to the dead. Women paraded in male attire and innocence and beauty took a hard knock.

Except for a few movies. Majid Majidi came from Iran with an exceptional work of art, "The Colour of Paradise". He talks about a blind boy, whose father asks God why such tragedy should befall him. The man's conscience troubles him in a moment of great dilemma when his son falls into a swollen river. Should he save him? Should he let him go ? Majidi captures the father's predicament excellently through sheer cinema, and the way the film ends will remain etched in my memory. We see the father clutching his son, whom he finds on the bank later, and crying almost hysterically, thinking that he is dead. The camera moves away, and focusses on the boy's hand, which slowly stirs to life. "The Colour of Paradise" stunned me with its remarkable note of hope and colour (there are haunting images of nature's grandeur).

Why was this not the opening film of the Festival ? Shocks never cease. Fernando Perez was given the honour. His Cuban work, "Life is to Whistle", is a satirical tale of three immensely different characters - a ballerina, a petty thief and an assistant who works in a home for the elderly. It is comic to see the dancer pledge her excessive sexual urge to God in return for a role she dreams of. The thief is a laugh; he is obsessed with the women whose handbags he steals. The assistant is torn between guilt and religion, and Perez interprets human follies with a dash of humour. And this does make "life" a "whistle", although the director - who once worked with Tomas Alea and was deeply influenced by him - says that there is something profound about our existence. "I sometimes wonder why I live in a world like this. There is so much of evil and selfishness around".

I do not know about that, but the screen revels in them. Canada's "Post Mortem" (Louis Belanger) says that the end justifies the means. So Linda plunders by the night and plays mother by the day. She wants to earn quickly to be able to move to the country with her daughter. But her path is barricaded with stranglers and necrophiles.

Germany says the same thing with a slight difference. Nico Hoffman's "Solo for Clarinet" has a cop chasing a pretty murderer, and in his infatuation for her, he destroys evidence and finally destroys her. The movie is slick with dramatic elements to keep you chewing your fingernails.

In "Numbered" by Tassos Psarras from Greece, a young man breaks into the bank accounts of an industrialist, and makes merry till his crime betrays him. A Russian "Mama" (courtesy Denis Yestigneev) takes her big boys on an airplane and asks them to hijack it. Never mind, one of them dies, and another gets demented, and Mama herself is jailed. Hunt Hoe gets father-in-law Mohan Agashe to paw his celluloid daughter-in-law, Nandana Dev Sen, and when the scandal blows up, there is not even regret and repentance in "Seducing Maarya". In yet another work, Om Puri beats up his screen wife in "East is East" (Damien O' Donnell) and acts the tyrant, but at the end of it, there is nothing to indicate that he has mellowed. There is nothing to suggest why he is brutal in the first place.

Kimberly Peirce, the American director of "Boys Don't Cry", tells me that violence is fine so long as one explains it. She does that in a story - based on a true incident - that traces the life of a girl who feels she is a man. When she falls in love with Lana (another girl), society gets mad, and the price to be paid is heavy. Peirce does admit that there is a fine line between what can brutalise an audience, and what can humanise them, and though I did not quite cherish some of the scenes in this picture, it will be unfair to say that Peirce had not handled the subject with some abject sensitivity.

Nadia Tass's "Amy" sits a little more lightly on your shoulders. When little Amy's rock singer father dies in a horrible accident, she stops talking. Tass juxtaposes tragedy with some really good comedy: an alcoholic terrorises his family, while a posse of policemen walk up a hill singing, because Amy, who is lost, hears only when someone sings to her ! Call it elective mutism or what you may, "Amy" has the power and punch to tickle and provoke you.

A few more films in the first half of the Festival added feathers to an otherwise listless fare. Istvan Szabo's "Sunshine" sparkled. It is a tale of three generations, each enriching the other with its experience and spirituality. The director's searing intensity and the ability to study a character in its finest detail help him to picturise a period with utmost precision.

"Mifune", by Denmark's Soren Kragh-Jacobsen lives up to the Dogma 95 that Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg formulated. This means no artificial props, no artificial lighting, hand-held camera and so on, and "Mifune" sends its protagonist, a newly wedded man, into the country to tidy up the place after his father's death. But our hero finds his retarded brother and the prostitute he hires to keep a watch over him quite a pie to handle.

Sight and Sound makes an interesting remark about "Mifune". It says : "Mifune's claim to chastity is more a publicity stunt... For, if the manifesto were a critique of Hollywood or of anything else, the manifesto's eighth rule ("Genre films are unacceptable") would surely disallow any story centred on a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold... The arrival too soon of Dogma Lite." Nonetheless, "Mifune" is refreshing and eminently watchable, and the Delhi Festival had some others of this calibre. About them, next week.

(To be Continued)

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