Flashes of brilliance ... occasionally

"COHAAS and pertroma!" said my friend whose English is rather shaky. He meant chaos and trauma. I retain his coinage as it has all the force of the befuddlement and frustration you experienced at the 6th International Film Festival of Kerala this year (March 30 - April 6). Any delegate who did not know Malayalam could be forgiven for concluding that the language is made up of a single word, uttered in different tones and volumes - "Ariyilla! (Don't know").

The opening day witnessed scenes of utter confusion at the Kanakakunnu Palace where delegates and presspersons milled about trying to get their accreditation cards. A Japanese visitor was dazed by the heat, humidity, and the impossibility of making it to the right counter as it was blocked by a push-me-pull-you human mass. A German scholar working on Malayalam cinema was shaking her head in disbelief. The festival office had lost her papers. I made three visits during the day to collect my presscard, since a current cut delayed lamination.

The screening schedules were not ready. This came later in driblets, for each day first, and then for two days together. All that the officials knew on Day One was that the opening film was "Oriundi" from Brazil, with Anthony Quinn in the lead.

The programme book, giving the synopsis and details of each film, was to be ready only partway through the festival. Imagine how difficult it is to decide which film to see with nothing but their names on the daily bulletins, sometimes misspelt! Since you had no idea of the ifs and whens of repeat screenings, planning ahead was ruled out.

The schedules for the press meets were not to be found in the daily bulletins, or at the main screening venues - Kairali and New Theatre. You had to run to the venue each time in a state of unknowing.

The Kerala Festival is not for the dainty. The actual problems of getting in and out of the theatres had to be seen to be believed. Those within hewed themselves out through the crowd carving its way in. The authorities had not thought of clearing the hall before allowing fresh entrants.

For a soft porn film you had people outside banging intermittently on the locked doors of the packed hall, midway through the screening, with determined passion. My own passion for the Tomas Alea films was not so unquenchable. Finding only just enough space on the aisle steps close to the screen, I beat a craven retreat. Mind you, I had gone 20 minutes in advance! But the theatre (Sree) was small, and a whole host of young people had the ardour to go in earlier to await the Cuban masterwork.

The projection and acoustics were passable in Kairali, poor at other venues. Argentinian film maker Jorge Polaco ("Journey Through the Body") was baffled, "But my film has excellent photography! Here it looked dim and dull!" Jury member Mohsen Makhmalbaf was puzzled because some of the Iranian shorts were unsubtitled ("How can they make sense here?"), as was a Malayalam film that I saw ("When the Breeze Beckons").

Time to look at the actual fare? In the retros were Alea and Makhmalbaf films already seen in Kerala, and the homages were no surprise. In the Cinema of the World, major films eluded the selectors, who had to fill the slots with whatever they could sweep in - like "Goodbye Casanova" (U.S.) and "Blue August" (Hong Kong).

As for the competition films, the selectors would have had no trouble in making their choices. The Moroccan film "Ali Zaoua" (Dir: Nabil Ayouch) bagged both the "Swarna Chakoram" and the Fipresci Prize from the critics. It had nothing new in form or content, but the group of children in the film did not act, they lived through the hardships and violence of street life in Casablanca. The Japanese allegory "Maiden of the Spring" (Best Direction for Takaki Watanabe) had little more than excellent photography. The special jury prize for Best Writer went to K. P. Kumaran ("Thotram") and Dr. Hadi Karami ("Maral"). "Mankolangal" (Dir: S. Santhakumar) was the other Fipresci winner.

And why should Indian Cinema Today include films of yesterday (1999) like "Asookh" (Rituparno Ghosh) and "Karvaan" (Pankaj Bhutalia)? Especially as Ghosh has made two films ("Utsab"/"Bariwali") since then? After the promise of "Karunam", Jayaraj's "Santham" disappointed by its self conscious didacticism. Almost every happening was predictable - I mean, after the chase under the green-green plantain leaves, red-red blood had to drip ... Nor did the theme of ahimsa come through with any freshness. You felt that the film maker had decided on the message first and then found a tale to wrap it in.

"Maral" (Mehdi Sabaghzadeh)) displeased those who were looking for complexity in structure, but pleased by its sincerity and warmth. A woman proud of her piety puts it to the test by getting a quake victim married to her husband. And just like the Biblical Sarah whom she disparaged for failing in God's test, she too is preyed by jealousy when the husband falls in love with the young girl. The film critiques power manipulations in the name of socio-religious tradition. Daring for Iran.

The festival was glutted with Iranian films. The shorts disappointed by being no more than imitations of the masters, many with tedious content and unwieldy format.

The French Package and the Dogme films made their mark.

Besides the craft we expect from France, "Venus Beauty Salon" took a moving, but unsentimental, look at a pregnant woman stricken with cancer, and "The Dream Life of Angels" brought the travails of two young women in a small town where fantasy has to terminate in disaster, or in the monotony of real life. Instead of the "Dancer in the Dark" (Palme d'Or, Cannes) you had Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" in the Dogme package, along with other features by this Danish group of experimentalists.

IFFK gave you a chance to see the extraordinary vision of the German film maker Tom Tykwer twice - in "Run Lola Run" which has had a commercial release in this country, and "Winter Sleepers". The latter is electrifying. This thriller extends the scope of cinema, by making us see in a wholly new way a tangled weave involving a group of people, quite unaware of the threads which connect them. The film is clever, oh yes! But what makes it tug at your heart, echoically, rhythmically, is the elusive nature of human emotions that it lets us glimpse. We see by what slender, hazardous threads we are held - between truth and lie, understanding and misconception, life and death .... The pace is insistent and controls character, action and response. Do not miss it!

Finally we come to the open forum held every afternoon. Even a stranger to the Kerala film scenario would have known that the noisy ruckus and brouhaha were politically motivated.

Blame and counter blame flashed fires hotter than the scorching summer sun above. The exchanges may testify to democratic freedom, but it was difficult to see how the factional recriminations and the public washing of dirty linen promoted cinema or helped the cause of the festival, already handicapped by a budget cut - Rs. 65 lakh this year as against the Rs. 1 crore in the past.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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