Reviewed: Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda: (The Seventh Horse Of The Sun)
Director: Shyam Benegal
Story: Dharamveer Bharti
Cast: Rajat Kapoor, Raghuveer Yadav, Amrish Puri, Neena Gupta, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Illa Arun, Pallavi Joshi, Lalit Tiwari, K.K.Raina, Ravi Jhankal and others
Some movies dazzle the viewers with a tight gripping story, some with spellbinding performances of the actors and still a few others with brilliant background music, a bit of slick action, great editing and what not, but Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda dazzles with its narration, mind-boggling as it is. I will no doubt effuse with happiness when I start describing the movie and fill buckets with my profuse applaud for a movie directed by Shyam Benegal, accepted as the master craftsman by people from all over and over all strata, so let me at the outset divide the review in two, One for those not initiated to the magic of Benegal and his crew but do want to dip in the pool of brilliance, and the other for those who are a convert. With the previous long statement, longer than most I have ever written without the Microsoft word warning me with green curly wavy lines, Let me rephrase and mention now that Benegal may be brilliant but Dharamveer Bharati is no doubt a genius. The movie is no doubt the filmmaker’s vision but the novelty is only because of brilliance named Dharamveer Bharati.
For the Un-initiated:
(For the people unaware of a gem called Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda)
Fiction: Good movies are supposed to relax the senses.
Fact: Movies should no doubt be enjoyable in addition to challenge the thinking and bringing a social message to the hearts of the viewer.
Says who? Manik Mullah (The sentence being tastefully modified to suit my future ranting)
Without my fancies running abound screaming, Let me start by asserting that Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda is a movie for audiences with matured tastes and let me clarify before any brickbats come my way, I am not being judgmental or being opinionated here, and I think there should be different movies for varied tastes. Coming back to my narrative, the movie is a near accurate adaptation of the novella of the same name by Dr Bharati who tells a simple tale of the clichéd emotions like love and betrayal ranged across a period of seven afternoons. The tales are simple narratives of low middle class families adjoined in miseries in a hot and humid, nameless (Don’t remember the name, If mentioned) town in the Hindi heartland of northern India. All these tales (connected by a common thread with common characters appearing nondescript in a non-chronological random manner) are narrated by an unreliable narrator named Manik Mullah.
When I talk about narration, I should step back a bit. The movie starts in an art gallery with a short man, ordinary looking, nattily dressed in a Safari suit, peering at paintings. He stops in front of a painting with women taking bath and guys rambling around, basically a busy locality of some sort, and suddenly starts with his narrative about a nameless town of some yester years when he was a reticent guy and a friend of a ingenious storyteller named Manik mullah who used to entertain them with impromptu stories with morals (hardly so) drawn out of it.
The stories he churns out are commonplace and have similarity with Sharat Chandra’s Devdas in content, with love and separation as a permanent motif and lust, betrayal, meekness, illicit relationships, amorality and other human emotions thrown in. But describing the movie in terms of only the content of narratives is describing the sea as only a storehouse of water. This is one movie, which I can say has the maximum usage of literary techniques, The unreliable narrator is the mainstay, then the use of Chekov’s gun, author surrogate, foreshadowing, in media res, are just to name a few. In the movie, Manik mullah comments that only a person, who doesn’t have a story to tell needs techniques, maybe this was the author’s point of reminding the viewer to take notice of the paraphernalia attached to the narratives without concentrating on the commonplace unoriginal narrative inspired from the novels of Sharat Chandra and thousand others on the politics and life of a small town.
Without riveting on the story fearing that I may involuntarily divulge information, Let me shift to the acting department. The movie when released in 1994 had some seasoned actors like Amrish Puri, Raghuveer Yadav, Neena Gupta, Pallavi Joshi, K.K.Raina, Lalit Tiwari etc. and newcomers of the Benegal stable, who in no time became the who’s who of art cinema like Rajeshwari Sachdev, Ravi Jhankal and above all Rajit Kapoor to whom the movie no doubt (co-) belongs to. Having read the English translation of the novel, I had a vague picture of Manik mullah sketched and Rajit Kapoor fits in snuggly in that picture of mine and I am confident, in any picture of Manik Mullah. The nuances of the character are so very well portrayed by Rajit that he just transforms into the character displaying hurt with a twitch of his lips, and curling up his eyebrows, anger with a hasty shift of eyes and pain with a prolonged unfocussed look. Rajit Kapoor, primarily a theatre artist has never done it better and sadly will always be remembered as Byomkesh Bakshi and not as Manik Mullah (Not that I hate BB, Just that love MM better). All others have brought life to their characters and have done a commendable job. I want also to commend Amrish Puri, Neena Gupta and Lalit Tiwari for having done a wonderful job with their characters. Amrish Puri, with a crooked grin with hopes of lust marked on his face, when dressing up for the evening, is one of the best moments of Amrish for me, ever.
Coming to Shyam Benegal, applauds don’t seem enough. With a repertoire of films like Ankur, Nishanth, Manthan, Mandi etc., Benegal has proved his caliber and understanding of human pain, time and again. During the course of the movie, the screenplay changes direction, the pace sometimes race ahead and sometimes stall to a deafening silence. The sun outside sometimes is valiant like the afternoon sun while some other time pleasant like the evening. Like the sun, the characters also change colors, with Manik sometimes appearing as a naïve observer, sometimes the oppressed individual and sometimes the oppressor himself. Like the triumvirate of Hindu Mythology, Brahma Vishnu and Mahesh, he has a different role in each of the story. This I may have to take up in a separate thread for the fear of proving spoilers here. The camera movements are pleasant without induced jerks and the visuals are pleasantly placed as well without urgency.
The usage of music is one, which I would so love to describe. There is just one song, “Yeh Shaame, Yeh Sab Ki Sab Shaame ”, which is a romantic song shot with Lily (Manik’s second lover) and Manik and shot in the outdoors describing the afternoons spent together. The only other song is a folk song (Hindora, if am not wrong) sung by Neena Gupta that pierces the heart with a non-indulgent music hanging around while the loud high-pitched voice takes over. The background music is used intelligently enhancing the sketch on the celluloid and creating a human picture.
The movie should be seen without expectations and with a pinch of salt and best viewed at a time when the mind is relaxed and receptive to ideas that keep churning out like the nectar and the poison inter-twined like the first ever churning of the sea by the good and the evil combined.
For the Believers:
(People who have seen and love Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda)
Caution: Spoilers Ahead
At the outset let me set the agenda correct, the following is an interpretation of the movie according to my understanding and I take full blame or credit for the same. I would love to discuss if there is any point, someone take offense to.
For me the key to the movie lies in the title, “The seventh horse of the sun” and like the movie there can be multiple meanings to the same and all of these may be the correct explanation to it. Similar in trying to understand the meaning of life, each Individual on seeing the movie may have a different interpretation and if it suits the character of the view that’s the truth. Let me voice my varied interpretations, May be the sun is life and the seven horses together pull the existence, sometimes these horses race ahead and sometimes slow down to a standstill describing the ups and downs in life. The seventh horse, which is the slowest horse, makes everyone else slows down as it is the weakest as well but that, like Manik said, is the horse of future that later will decide the course that life would take. If we look at the movie, may be the master narrator played by Raghuveer Yadav, is a taking a biographic dig contemplating that the weakling like him, mostly snubbed and hardly given importance became a writer while fibbers and storytellers like Manik Mullah just faded away. Maybe the movie is about potential and the lack of rising to it. Manik Mullah with his impromptu story telling could have reached the level of his ideals like Flaubert, Maupassant and Chekov but in the end he failed to rise to the potential.
The second interpretation is based on the key word “Weak Horse”. Maybe the movie is about the lack of strength in character of Manik Mullah. In the first story, he is a naïve teen who enjoys the company of the childish Jamuna but fails to stand up for her. He also portrays himself as the blameless child with Jamuna taking over the primary role in their relationship. In the second romance between him and Lily, he floats over the border between friendship and romance and again fails to take a stand when Lily is forced to get married to a guy she hardly knew. In the third romance of his, Manik as a narrator, comes out as a lover forsaking his love and sacrificing it, at the alter of social correctness. From a character with a halo, he transforms to having shades of gray and finally being a villain in the piece. Like discussed earlier, Manik plays each of the triumvirate of Hindu mythology in the stories. In the first, he is the progenitor of Jamuna’s desire to continue living, in the second, he the preserver of Lily’s chastity and in the third he is the destroyer of Satti’s hopes and ambitions.
The third interpretation stems from Manik’s statement that the seventh horse is the horse of future, which holds all dreams and desires and visions that stories are made of. For me the movie was for literature what “The Dreamers” is for movies. So maybe the author (Raghuveer Yadav) intended to provide a clue to Manik Mullah being a figment of his imagination after all. All the characters cease to suffer anymore and become fictional ones and the visions that Shyam saw reminiscent of Dante’s Divine comedy all becomes lifeless visions.
This leads me to the most interesting part of the movie, the convergence of reality and fiction. The movie begins with the surmise that Manik was a storyteller par excellence, his existence never in doubt. The story begins with Jamuna as a sweet love story without much value then takes up the social context on Shyam’s mentioning dowry system as an social evil. The third story takes up Maheshwar Dalal (Amrish Puri’s Character) and talks of filial oppression and amorality in lower middle class families. While the first two stories had ended in a happy ending the third does a U-Turn to end with a violent death. The fourth story again meanders on the border of love and separation with the mood generally light and the last story begins with a violent surmise of a quick shot of Satti interspersed with lazy medium shots and end with a death and introspection. The viewer now is led to believe that Manik is a fibber who can create impromptu stories and dazzle listeners but all these fizzle out when Manik is made to face Satti with the listeners in tandem. At this point, the question is put forward as what was real? Was Manik real and everything else just fibbing, if so, then what of Sati? Or was it that all the stories were true and Manik was telling stories of his life, strange, as it may seem? The other possibility could have been that Manik himself was fictitious and thus the smile in Raghuveer Yadav’s face when he says, He became a writer. The smile may be symbolism of the viewers intelligently fooled and thus dazzled.
Whatever the case maybe, I believe the movie is a cornerstone of art-house movies, that similar to Rashomon and Ek din achanak brought narrative techniques to world cinema. I adore the movie with the reference to Devdas, with narratives taking shape with change in landscape. The cow in the beginning of the first scene, the knife in the fifth. The reference to Devsena in the 4th story when challenged by a friend and so on.
The movie should be watched and relished for one self. I saw the movie first as a kid, twelve years may be and I didn’t understand a bit. Each time I saw it, I added a little bit to it and today after 4-5 viewings my movie is far from complete. And all the afternoons I spent watching this movie, sing to me:
“ Yeh Shaame, Sab Ki Sab Shaame, Kya inka koi Arth nahin,
Ghabra ke jab inhe yaad kiya, kya un shaamon ka arth nahin “
Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Perpetual Wound: Part 2-Dekalog:
(There may be spoilers ahead, but Decalogue is not about some plot, not about the visuals, not about the music but just the feel. It is like you are a silent narrator who observes without judging, maybe like the angels in “City of Angels”, being there but not involved.)
Let me set matters straight, Decalogue is not a movie in a conventional sense. It’s a series of ten separate one hour features knitted together with the thread of human suffering. Kieślowski, along with Piesiewicz, visualized this feature as his personal homage to the Ten Commandments passed on to Moses by the creator whom we so lovingly call with the three letter name, god. But the series is not a biblical account of the ten commandments it is more of a study of the various emotions that bring about grief, a rambling with the commandments as backdrop, placed just as a guide while the director and his crew paint a picture of a desolate society where each of these commandments are transgressed with a brutal candor.
The commandments are pretty straightforward but in Kieślowski’s hand it becomes something utterly profound and deep. You shall not worship other gods (Part 1) translates to a story of a father who looses his son in a freak incident at the lake. His crime, he built a computer that could predict when the ice would melt but like any device controlled by man, it can err and it did, making the son drown in the icy waters of the lake. The movie is about the guilt of a man and grief of a father on his only child's loss. The final scene with the father tumbling over the candles in the church, and the wax spilled over the virgin Mary’s eyes was poignant and tastefully done. Similar in taste is the second part (Not take god’s name in vain) about an old, grumpy doctor who observes disdainfully at a woman in his apartment whose husband is his patient and is in comma for long. The woman wants an opinion to whether her husband shall survive so that she can decide whether to keep the baby whose father is her husband’s best friend. This choice is the cause for her anxiety, her grief. She loves her husband, no doubt about it, but she wants the baby as well. It is the doctor’s answer that would make her decide and that forms the crux of this plot, the doctor being asked to play god, taking god’s name in vain.
Grief takes multiple facets in these series where people lie, kill, feel jealous, and feel roused. They get angry, they have incestuous feelings, some kidnap their kid sister and some don’t trust their brothers, they in a it create a plethora of alternative plots showcasing human folly and the resultant pain.
The fifth part, which was developed later into a full-length movie “A short film about killing”, is a take on capital punishment, with the director drawing parallels to the crime that of the killing of a cab driver to that of the punishment, society hanging the twenty one year old murderer. The movie begins brilliantly with images of some poisoned cockroaches feasting on some rotten bread. The scene moves to a dead rat, may be killed by some random cat, and then cuts to a cat hanging from the noose and boys running away with a jolly abandon. The central idea of the movie, the opposition to capital punishment, is emphasized at that particular point, Kieślowski with his violent portrayal of the act of murder and an equally despicable depiction of the hanging inside the jail barracks, likens the two and questions the morality of the acts. The sixth part, which was also developed as “A short film about love”, questions the morality in the act of love and ponders about lust and the inter-relation between the two. The movie about a small kid who spies on her beautiful neighbor is humiliated sexually by her when she finds out and he attempts to take his own life. Loneliness stands out in this feature, as well as in the previous one, as a precursor to grief, with the bleak white background, an tottering old woman and some chilling music, adding to the silent grief of all the characters, making it so very profound. This movie also shows how a perfect movie even if copied scene by scene doesn’t produce the same effect sans it soul. For the un-initiated this was copied into the disastrous “Ek choti si love story” which reduced the plot to a sleazy soft porn.
The genius of the director is shown in the seventh feature, which showcases the commandment, “thou shall not steal”. In the hands of any ordinary artist, it may have been just a clichéd enactment of a thief repenting or the like but Kieślowski makes it a bewitching performance of a young daughter who kidnaps her ‘sister’ who in reality is her daughter. The daughter(the one who kidnaps), who looks and seems eccentric, is dominated by her strong willed mother who has made the world convince that her grand daughter is actually her daughter. At that point, the viewer is wonderfully unsure of who the commandment applies to, the mother or the daughter. The fourth feature, (Thou shall respect your parents) is more shocking and brilliantly disturbing. It begins with a young pretty girl drenching an older man, may be in his forties and then the older man taking his revenge in a playful way. The keen eye can no doubt mark a spark of love and maybe a speck of sexual tension, and then suddenly out of the blue, he is introduced as the father. As the story progresses, the young lady discovers a letter in her father’s desk from her long dead mother where she mentions that, her father is actually not his birth father and all the repressed emotions suddenly comes to the hilt, swinging destructively to break their relationship. Both these features talk about grief resulting from deep-rooted passions pent up in human souls.
Guilt is an exciting vice which when comes to the surface produces a fascinating plethora of emotions. The Eight feature is about a professor of ethics who comes face to face with her past in the shape of an visiting professor who as a child was betrayed to the Nazis by the same professor. This unlikely interaction lays all their past ghosts to rest and give both a chance to survive with their trust in humanity rekindled.
The Ninth feature is about jealousy, it is about one man who, after having multiple partners, turns impotent one fine day and he requests his wife to find a lover. His wife responds that sex is just an act that she always found cumbersome but then she does take a lover. The husband, in spite of his previous statements, becomes jealous and starts spying on his wife who breaks up with him when she founds that out and he leaps over a bridge to end it all. Confused, but that is Kieślowski for you, betrayal here is two ways, the wife betrayed the trust by taking a lover, the husband betrayed her trust by questioning her love and his own faith. This feature draws a thin line and underlines the difference between love and the act of love. Dakalog three is about a cab driver who leaves his family during Christmas to help an ex lover search for his current partner. The entire feature has a sublime desire glowing in the background with the underlined tension between the ex lovers. Both the features showcase the difficulty in letting go, the grief and pain that is associated with every cease in an relationship.
Feature ten is about obsession, it is about two brothers who obsess over completing their dad’s stamp collection and in the process loose much more, one even his kidney. Bordering on comedy, this feature showcases filial differences and grief resulting from lack of trust.
The movie is a must watch with all its nuances, each beat necessary and every moment priceless. Developed primarily for ten different directors to direct, Kieślowski just couldn’t let go, like his characters he suffered from the grief of parting from his stories and he made each of them with different cinematographers trying to change the look and how he succeeded is for all to see.
There is one character that appears in each of his feature, just looking with a peering glance, not judging just observing, not a participant in the stories developing around him. There Kieślowski got us into the film, we are that man watching a movie not judging the characters but judging ourselves, hoping to become better, sometimes successful, sometimes without success. But the important thing is to at the least “try”.
Part 3: Grief from Bereavement
Let me set matters straight, Decalogue is not a movie in a conventional sense. It’s a series of ten separate one hour features knitted together with the thread of human suffering. Kieślowski, along with Piesiewicz, visualized this feature as his personal homage to the Ten Commandments passed on to Moses by the creator whom we so lovingly call with the three letter name, god. But the series is not a biblical account of the ten commandments it is more of a study of the various emotions that bring about grief, a rambling with the commandments as backdrop, placed just as a guide while the director and his crew paint a picture of a desolate society where each of these commandments are transgressed with a brutal candor.
The commandments are pretty straightforward but in Kieślowski’s hand it becomes something utterly profound and deep. You shall not worship other gods (Part 1) translates to a story of a father who looses his son in a freak incident at the lake. His crime, he built a computer that could predict when the ice would melt but like any device controlled by man, it can err and it did, making the son drown in the icy waters of the lake. The movie is about the guilt of a man and grief of a father on his only child's loss. The final scene with the father tumbling over the candles in the church, and the wax spilled over the virgin Mary’s eyes was poignant and tastefully done. Similar in taste is the second part (Not take god’s name in vain) about an old, grumpy doctor who observes disdainfully at a woman in his apartment whose husband is his patient and is in comma for long. The woman wants an opinion to whether her husband shall survive so that she can decide whether to keep the baby whose father is her husband’s best friend. This choice is the cause for her anxiety, her grief. She loves her husband, no doubt about it, but she wants the baby as well. It is the doctor’s answer that would make her decide and that forms the crux of this plot, the doctor being asked to play god, taking god’s name in vain.
Grief takes multiple facets in these series where people lie, kill, feel jealous, and feel roused. They get angry, they have incestuous feelings, some kidnap their kid sister and some don’t trust their brothers, they in a it create a plethora of alternative plots showcasing human folly and the resultant pain.
The fifth part, which was developed later into a full-length movie “A short film about killing”, is a take on capital punishment, with the director drawing parallels to the crime that of the killing of a cab driver to that of the punishment, society hanging the twenty one year old murderer. The movie begins brilliantly with images of some poisoned cockroaches feasting on some rotten bread. The scene moves to a dead rat, may be killed by some random cat, and then cuts to a cat hanging from the noose and boys running away with a jolly abandon. The central idea of the movie, the opposition to capital punishment, is emphasized at that particular point, Kieślowski with his violent portrayal of the act of murder and an equally despicable depiction of the hanging inside the jail barracks, likens the two and questions the morality of the acts. The sixth part, which was also developed as “A short film about love”, questions the morality in the act of love and ponders about lust and the inter-relation between the two. The movie about a small kid who spies on her beautiful neighbor is humiliated sexually by her when she finds out and he attempts to take his own life. Loneliness stands out in this feature, as well as in the previous one, as a precursor to grief, with the bleak white background, an tottering old woman and some chilling music, adding to the silent grief of all the characters, making it so very profound. This movie also shows how a perfect movie even if copied scene by scene doesn’t produce the same effect sans it soul. For the un-initiated this was copied into the disastrous “Ek choti si love story” which reduced the plot to a sleazy soft porn.
The genius of the director is shown in the seventh feature, which showcases the commandment, “thou shall not steal”. In the hands of any ordinary artist, it may have been just a clichéd enactment of a thief repenting or the like but Kieślowski makes it a bewitching performance of a young daughter who kidnaps her ‘sister’ who in reality is her daughter. The daughter(the one who kidnaps), who looks and seems eccentric, is dominated by her strong willed mother who has made the world convince that her grand daughter is actually her daughter. At that point, the viewer is wonderfully unsure of who the commandment applies to, the mother or the daughter. The fourth feature, (Thou shall respect your parents) is more shocking and brilliantly disturbing. It begins with a young pretty girl drenching an older man, may be in his forties and then the older man taking his revenge in a playful way. The keen eye can no doubt mark a spark of love and maybe a speck of sexual tension, and then suddenly out of the blue, he is introduced as the father. As the story progresses, the young lady discovers a letter in her father’s desk from her long dead mother where she mentions that, her father is actually not his birth father and all the repressed emotions suddenly comes to the hilt, swinging destructively to break their relationship. Both these features talk about grief resulting from deep-rooted passions pent up in human souls.
Guilt is an exciting vice which when comes to the surface produces a fascinating plethora of emotions. The Eight feature is about a professor of ethics who comes face to face with her past in the shape of an visiting professor who as a child was betrayed to the Nazis by the same professor. This unlikely interaction lays all their past ghosts to rest and give both a chance to survive with their trust in humanity rekindled.
The Ninth feature is about jealousy, it is about one man who, after having multiple partners, turns impotent one fine day and he requests his wife to find a lover. His wife responds that sex is just an act that she always found cumbersome but then she does take a lover. The husband, in spite of his previous statements, becomes jealous and starts spying on his wife who breaks up with him when she founds that out and he leaps over a bridge to end it all. Confused, but that is Kieślowski for you, betrayal here is two ways, the wife betrayed the trust by taking a lover, the husband betrayed her trust by questioning her love and his own faith. This feature draws a thin line and underlines the difference between love and the act of love. Dakalog three is about a cab driver who leaves his family during Christmas to help an ex lover search for his current partner. The entire feature has a sublime desire glowing in the background with the underlined tension between the ex lovers. Both the features showcase the difficulty in letting go, the grief and pain that is associated with every cease in an relationship.
Feature ten is about obsession, it is about two brothers who obsess over completing their dad’s stamp collection and in the process loose much more, one even his kidney. Bordering on comedy, this feature showcases filial differences and grief resulting from lack of trust.
The movie is a must watch with all its nuances, each beat necessary and every moment priceless. Developed primarily for ten different directors to direct, Kieślowski just couldn’t let go, like his characters he suffered from the grief of parting from his stories and he made each of them with different cinematographers trying to change the look and how he succeeded is for all to see.
There is one character that appears in each of his feature, just looking with a peering glance, not judging just observing, not a participant in the stories developing around him. There Kieślowski got us into the film, we are that man watching a movie not judging the characters but judging ourselves, hoping to become better, sometimes successful, sometimes without success. But the important thing is to at the least “try”.
Part 3: Grief from Bereavement
Friday, May 02, 2008
Despair and the Refrigerator
(This blog has been published before as a winning review in the "dearcinema" site, link :http://dearcinema.com/requiem-for-a-dream-despair-and-the-refrigerator/)
Author's Note: I don’t write many reviews but sometimes when you shaken to the core, you need to write. This post is about the magnificent "Requiem for a dream".
It was inevitable, the refrigerator will always remind me of the terrors of drug abuse but then I am not complaining. Narcotics remain one of the most abusive scare that is galling human society today and it was an honorable effort from Aronofsky, with the Russian name and the Brooklyn background, to portray the desperation and simple ambitions gone wrong of the characters first created by the incomparable Herbert Selby of the ‘Last exit to Brooklyn’ fame. Selby is known to paint a bleak picture of desperation with the characters wanting the simple pleasures of life, sometimes to look thinner, sometimes to be appreciated. A little dream of a little house filled with pleasures and a picture of happiness around. Nothing that is unattainable right but then in Selby’s world the small dreams turn into a nightmare before even they ripen and a requiem is written before even they have their five minutes of happiness. But me, branding it depressing and demoralizing and absolutely disturbing, doesn’t stop me from absolutely idolizing it and this movie generally marches into my list of the top ten movies with its sad requiem played all over.
I cannot speak enough about the movie and the plot. The plot is simplistic with four main protagonists each having their small sweet desires sugarcoated with niggling ambitions but then as in life nothing turns up as expected. An old mother, Sara, played brilliantly by the amazing Ellen Burstyn, residing in downtown Brooklyn spends all the time in front of the television or sunning in front of the old dilapidated building with the other old ladies. Her only ambition is to be able to fit into the old red dress that she wore for her son’s graduation and appear in a television program that she obsesses over. The son, Harry played by Jared Letto, wants to open a boutique with his designer girlfriend Marion (the beautiful Jennifer Connelly). To get the money and partly satisfy his and his friends’ heroin addiction, he enters into a drug dealership with Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). Sara starts taking prescription drugs from a seedy doctor to get thinner and fit into the red dress. As summer transcends into fall, their condition starts becoming precarious and they descend further into gloom and despair. The movie spans across winter and our main protagonists have become hopeless in their desperate attempts to redeem themselves. Without spoiling your watch by going into further details, I will leave you guys here with the story and digress to the cast and the crew.
The actors are simply brilliant, no two thoughts about that. Ellen Burstyn, who has won the academy awards, acting in Scorsese’s ‘Alice doesn’t live here any more’ is brilliant as Sara the neurotic but loving mother who dreams of her son getting a good job and settling down with some beautiful girl. Jared Letto and Marlon Wayans are great with their restrain and controlled performances, sometimes high on drugs, some other times down with life. But I have to speak for Jennifer Connelly, she is brilliant as the sweet girl dreaming of a happy family but with her life culminating as a prostitute pimping her body and aspirations for dirty old men for a little heroin and some dollars.
Darren Aronofsky is brilliant, one of the greatest young directors working in Hollywood. His brilliance is stamped all over the film. The narration is crisp and keeps one engaged, the camera is voyeuristic and follows the protagonists around with short shots, the mood is somber and he keeps up the despair and by the end it becomes so strong that you can literally touch it with your heart. The editing is simply mind-blowing, I have never seen a better-edited movie and I fail to understand why it was overlooked for a nomination. The sequence towards the end, in which all the four protagonists’ life run interweaved with the devilish soul stirring music piece, is the best intense moment that I have ever seen and its etched in my mind for a long, long time I think. This brings me to the music and I cannot but adulate Clint Mansell for the immortal music that he has provided.
I can go on and on about the little scenes strewn all over that affected me, and anyone who has seen this movie. Remember the scene with Sara and the refrigerator where she hallucinates that the refrigerator is moving forward to eat her and then the walls of her house tumble down with the actors of the television including herself, who she imagines being on TV take over and jeer her for being fat. I was touched by that scene when she mumbles, “Am an old woman” and at the fact that she was jeering herself for being miserable. Then there was the terrifying scream of Marion inside the bathtub with bubbles floating around. I even found the opening sequence funny, Tyron and Harry dragging the television to the used store and selling it for some easy money. But the last twenty minutes take the cake, they disturb the mind to the core and the intensity of the visuals are enough to leave you in a state of suspended animation and wide disbelief for days to come.
One of my friends, who was a regular user of marijuana stopped smoking on seeing the movie and another called me at four AM in the morning complaining of sleepless nights. That’s what a good movie can do to you; make you think about it forever. For anyone who wasn’t watched the movie please do watch it, There can be nothing better than being shaken to the core, once, every time.
Rating: 10/10
Advices if watching on DVD:
· Watch it preferably in the night just before you sleep in a closed room and ALONE.
· Please Watch it one sitting and without telephone or anything else bothering you.
Author's Note: I don’t write many reviews but sometimes when you shaken to the core, you need to write. This post is about the magnificent "Requiem for a dream".
It was inevitable, the refrigerator will always remind me of the terrors of drug abuse but then I am not complaining. Narcotics remain one of the most abusive scare that is galling human society today and it was an honorable effort from Aronofsky, with the Russian name and the Brooklyn background, to portray the desperation and simple ambitions gone wrong of the characters first created by the incomparable Herbert Selby of the ‘Last exit to Brooklyn’ fame. Selby is known to paint a bleak picture of desperation with the characters wanting the simple pleasures of life, sometimes to look thinner, sometimes to be appreciated. A little dream of a little house filled with pleasures and a picture of happiness around. Nothing that is unattainable right but then in Selby’s world the small dreams turn into a nightmare before even they ripen and a requiem is written before even they have their five minutes of happiness. But me, branding it depressing and demoralizing and absolutely disturbing, doesn’t stop me from absolutely idolizing it and this movie generally marches into my list of the top ten movies with its sad requiem played all over.
I cannot speak enough about the movie and the plot. The plot is simplistic with four main protagonists each having their small sweet desires sugarcoated with niggling ambitions but then as in life nothing turns up as expected. An old mother, Sara, played brilliantly by the amazing Ellen Burstyn, residing in downtown Brooklyn spends all the time in front of the television or sunning in front of the old dilapidated building with the other old ladies. Her only ambition is to be able to fit into the old red dress that she wore for her son’s graduation and appear in a television program that she obsesses over. The son, Harry played by Jared Letto, wants to open a boutique with his designer girlfriend Marion (the beautiful Jennifer Connelly). To get the money and partly satisfy his and his friends’ heroin addiction, he enters into a drug dealership with Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). Sara starts taking prescription drugs from a seedy doctor to get thinner and fit into the red dress. As summer transcends into fall, their condition starts becoming precarious and they descend further into gloom and despair. The movie spans across winter and our main protagonists have become hopeless in their desperate attempts to redeem themselves. Without spoiling your watch by going into further details, I will leave you guys here with the story and digress to the cast and the crew.
The actors are simply brilliant, no two thoughts about that. Ellen Burstyn, who has won the academy awards, acting in Scorsese’s ‘Alice doesn’t live here any more’ is brilliant as Sara the neurotic but loving mother who dreams of her son getting a good job and settling down with some beautiful girl. Jared Letto and Marlon Wayans are great with their restrain and controlled performances, sometimes high on drugs, some other times down with life. But I have to speak for Jennifer Connelly, she is brilliant as the sweet girl dreaming of a happy family but with her life culminating as a prostitute pimping her body and aspirations for dirty old men for a little heroin and some dollars.
Darren Aronofsky is brilliant, one of the greatest young directors working in Hollywood. His brilliance is stamped all over the film. The narration is crisp and keeps one engaged, the camera is voyeuristic and follows the protagonists around with short shots, the mood is somber and he keeps up the despair and by the end it becomes so strong that you can literally touch it with your heart. The editing is simply mind-blowing, I have never seen a better-edited movie and I fail to understand why it was overlooked for a nomination. The sequence towards the end, in which all the four protagonists’ life run interweaved with the devilish soul stirring music piece, is the best intense moment that I have ever seen and its etched in my mind for a long, long time I think. This brings me to the music and I cannot but adulate Clint Mansell for the immortal music that he has provided.
I can go on and on about the little scenes strewn all over that affected me, and anyone who has seen this movie. Remember the scene with Sara and the refrigerator where she hallucinates that the refrigerator is moving forward to eat her and then the walls of her house tumble down with the actors of the television including herself, who she imagines being on TV take over and jeer her for being fat. I was touched by that scene when she mumbles, “Am an old woman” and at the fact that she was jeering herself for being miserable. Then there was the terrifying scream of Marion inside the bathtub with bubbles floating around. I even found the opening sequence funny, Tyron and Harry dragging the television to the used store and selling it for some easy money. But the last twenty minutes take the cake, they disturb the mind to the core and the intensity of the visuals are enough to leave you in a state of suspended animation and wide disbelief for days to come.
One of my friends, who was a regular user of marijuana stopped smoking on seeing the movie and another called me at four AM in the morning complaining of sleepless nights. That’s what a good movie can do to you; make you think about it forever. For anyone who wasn’t watched the movie please do watch it, There can be nothing better than being shaken to the core, once, every time.
Rating: 10/10
Advices if watching on DVD:
· Watch it preferably in the night just before you sleep in a closed room and ALONE.
· Please Watch it one sitting and without telephone or anything else bothering you.
Friday, April 25, 2008
The Ballad from Nischindpur:
Have you ever looked at a painting and become suddenly happy, Have you ever felt the mad rushes of some tiny molecules gush away from various parts of the body that you had learnt to identify in your long forgotten biology classes and flood your heart with a kind of happiness and pleasure that can only be experienced and never dared described? Remember those lines from American Beauty, where Rickey describes the white carry-bag floating in air and ends his monologue by saying “ Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.” That’s what I echoed on seeing the wonderful Pather Panchali by the master craftsman, Satyajit Ray. I had read BibhutiBhushan Bandopadhya’s book of the same name not too long before I had seen the movie and had been pleasantly amazed and touched by the innocence of the characters and deeply moved by the heart rendering rustic surroundings that was the keystone around which the story revolved. Having said this, Let me also say that all the beauty in that book hadn’t prepared me enough for the beauty that the movie hurled at me and I was left gaping at the screen with a happy goofy smile smacked across my face and with my hands holding my heart in sheer happiness. Seems ludicrous isn’t it, but then Pather Panchali is a movie which you just have to see to be a fan of.
Pather Panchali is a director’s movie, where the visuals of the countryside with the meandering roads and the lush fields, the calm waters of the village pond and the disturbing loud chug of the distant train creates an atmosphere which reassures the viewer of the greatness of the director with each of its frame. The movie, like the other Italian neo-realist movies of that time uses non-actors as the main protagonists and portrays the common placed miseries and the little aspirations and desires of people whom we may have come across but never turned and looked when they passed by. Satyajit Ray with his sensitivities which no doubt would have made Tagore proud, captures just that, villagers toiling hard to make the ends meet without loosing hope, stricken with poverty but remaining honest, hungry yet remaining proud. The visuals are enchanting and the music like the flowing river and blowing wind make you sway with them in a pace that’s leisurely racy.
The story is minimalist about a poor Brahmin family in a far off village lost somewhere in the desolate lands of the poverty stricken countryside of Bengal. The head of the family, a middle-aged man named Harihar Ray played by a theater actor named Kanu Banerjee is astounding as a poor man but always hopeful for good things to happen in life. He dreams of being a writer, writing play and dance dramas (palas, a concept which sadly is now obsolete). Karuna Banerjee, who was the director’s friend and had never acted before, plays Harihar’s wife Sarbojaya. She is the perfect housewife with little dreams for her husband, for her daughter and her little son. Like she says in the kitchen, “we will have food twice a day, Durga will get married, Apu will grow up and have a job, what else is required” and to this Harihar answers, “Hobe, Hobe” (It will happen with God’s grace). This scene, with the innocence of the characters and the plight of the people, totally moved me; the important thing being, these people were not portrayed as heroes but as pawns in the hands of fate battling poverty, fighting an war which may have been already lost but still not loosing hope and their head.
Apu (Subir Banerjee) and Durga (Uma Dasgupta) are their children and they are the ones who steal the show with their innocent acting portraying sometimes desire, sometimes an understanding that maybe is the result of their poverty. Durga as a character is amazing, she steals fruits from the near by orchard, which once had belonged to their family, and gives it to her grand aunt, an wizened old woman, who though is ninety and an widow loves the good things in life, a little more chilly, some more salt. She loves her kid brother Apu and acts as a sister, mother and friend and all rolled into one. Apu the central character of the story is a young boy of eight who is a wide-eyed sensitive kid and a favorite of his mother and sister alike. He waits near the door waiting for the sweet-vendor to pass by, and looks longingly at it when he does. This now brings me to Indrin Thakur, an old lady of around eighty years old, played by Chunibala who marvels with her performance. It is surprising to note that, she was found by Satyajit Ray near a brothel, where she was living as a destitute after having been a theater artist long time back. She with her ease and effortless acting is the best thing in the movie and brings her character to life. Her reciting “Hari, take me to the other world” and narrating the ghost stories to the children remain the high points and the sequences I will always carry with me.
Any review of this movie without mentioning the fabulous cinematography and the amazing art direction is seer blasphemy. The cinematography by the first timer Subrata Mitra is mind blowing, the camera had never been more inconspicuous yet so much in notice. The sequences where the kids follow the sweet-vendor followed by a dirty street mongrel, and their reflection visible on the water, is simply stupefying. The sequence in which Apu and Durga see the train for the first time is brilliant, tall grasses with the color of the sky merging with the tip of the grasses, and then the black smoke in the background with the loud chugs of the approaching trains. The art direction by Bansi Chandragupta is accurate, I have been to villages and have visited households with the similar economic background and haven’t yet found any fallacy in the household goods they portrayed. The obscenely huge trunks of feeble materials, the small brass containers, Chunibala’s torn blanket with funny squarish patterns and Sarbojaya’s sari with the thick black borders decorated with beetle leaf shaped embroidery, all of these lend a feeling of completeness and creates together a picture that is astoundingly profound and stimulating for the soul.
The music by Pandit Ravi Shankar, in simple words is just great. He deserves all accolades and with this only score is deserving of all the fame and venerations he is attributed with. The sequence towards the end when Sarbojaya gives a heart shattering news to Harihar, the dialogues are muted and music takes over rapidly adding to the pathos that the visuals and the story had already generated. The background music of Pather Panchali truly does what music is supposed to do, complement the story.
After my lengthy tributes I think it is redundant to say that I thought Pather Panchali to be one of the best movies ever made in the history of cinema. This movie along with Aparajito and Apur Sansar remains the best that Indian cinema has given the world. Calling Pather Panchali “A Movie” may be an insult to the brilliance of Satyajit Ray; this is a painting on celluloid, a song of the road, the ballad from the every place Nischindpur.
Pather Panchali is a director’s movie, where the visuals of the countryside with the meandering roads and the lush fields, the calm waters of the village pond and the disturbing loud chug of the distant train creates an atmosphere which reassures the viewer of the greatness of the director with each of its frame. The movie, like the other Italian neo-realist movies of that time uses non-actors as the main protagonists and portrays the common placed miseries and the little aspirations and desires of people whom we may have come across but never turned and looked when they passed by. Satyajit Ray with his sensitivities which no doubt would have made Tagore proud, captures just that, villagers toiling hard to make the ends meet without loosing hope, stricken with poverty but remaining honest, hungry yet remaining proud. The visuals are enchanting and the music like the flowing river and blowing wind make you sway with them in a pace that’s leisurely racy.
The story is minimalist about a poor Brahmin family in a far off village lost somewhere in the desolate lands of the poverty stricken countryside of Bengal. The head of the family, a middle-aged man named Harihar Ray played by a theater actor named Kanu Banerjee is astounding as a poor man but always hopeful for good things to happen in life. He dreams of being a writer, writing play and dance dramas (palas, a concept which sadly is now obsolete). Karuna Banerjee, who was the director’s friend and had never acted before, plays Harihar’s wife Sarbojaya. She is the perfect housewife with little dreams for her husband, for her daughter and her little son. Like she says in the kitchen, “we will have food twice a day, Durga will get married, Apu will grow up and have a job, what else is required” and to this Harihar answers, “Hobe, Hobe” (It will happen with God’s grace). This scene, with the innocence of the characters and the plight of the people, totally moved me; the important thing being, these people were not portrayed as heroes but as pawns in the hands of fate battling poverty, fighting an war which may have been already lost but still not loosing hope and their head.
Apu (Subir Banerjee) and Durga (Uma Dasgupta) are their children and they are the ones who steal the show with their innocent acting portraying sometimes desire, sometimes an understanding that maybe is the result of their poverty. Durga as a character is amazing, she steals fruits from the near by orchard, which once had belonged to their family, and gives it to her grand aunt, an wizened old woman, who though is ninety and an widow loves the good things in life, a little more chilly, some more salt. She loves her kid brother Apu and acts as a sister, mother and friend and all rolled into one. Apu the central character of the story is a young boy of eight who is a wide-eyed sensitive kid and a favorite of his mother and sister alike. He waits near the door waiting for the sweet-vendor to pass by, and looks longingly at it when he does. This now brings me to Indrin Thakur, an old lady of around eighty years old, played by Chunibala who marvels with her performance. It is surprising to note that, she was found by Satyajit Ray near a brothel, where she was living as a destitute after having been a theater artist long time back. She with her ease and effortless acting is the best thing in the movie and brings her character to life. Her reciting “Hari, take me to the other world” and narrating the ghost stories to the children remain the high points and the sequences I will always carry with me.
Any review of this movie without mentioning the fabulous cinematography and the amazing art direction is seer blasphemy. The cinematography by the first timer Subrata Mitra is mind blowing, the camera had never been more inconspicuous yet so much in notice. The sequences where the kids follow the sweet-vendor followed by a dirty street mongrel, and their reflection visible on the water, is simply stupefying. The sequence in which Apu and Durga see the train for the first time is brilliant, tall grasses with the color of the sky merging with the tip of the grasses, and then the black smoke in the background with the loud chugs of the approaching trains. The art direction by Bansi Chandragupta is accurate, I have been to villages and have visited households with the similar economic background and haven’t yet found any fallacy in the household goods they portrayed. The obscenely huge trunks of feeble materials, the small brass containers, Chunibala’s torn blanket with funny squarish patterns and Sarbojaya’s sari with the thick black borders decorated with beetle leaf shaped embroidery, all of these lend a feeling of completeness and creates together a picture that is astoundingly profound and stimulating for the soul.
The music by Pandit Ravi Shankar, in simple words is just great. He deserves all accolades and with this only score is deserving of all the fame and venerations he is attributed with. The sequence towards the end when Sarbojaya gives a heart shattering news to Harihar, the dialogues are muted and music takes over rapidly adding to the pathos that the visuals and the story had already generated. The background music of Pather Panchali truly does what music is supposed to do, complement the story.
After my lengthy tributes I think it is redundant to say that I thought Pather Panchali to be one of the best movies ever made in the history of cinema. This movie along with Aparajito and Apur Sansar remains the best that Indian cinema has given the world. Calling Pather Panchali “A Movie” may be an insult to the brilliance of Satyajit Ray; this is a painting on celluloid, a song of the road, the ballad from the every place Nischindpur.
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