This is Not A Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi, 2010)

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, known for his cinematic contributions like The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), and Crimson Gold (2003), is under house arrest in Tehran. By making recalcitrant comments in his films about the suppressive Iranian regime and draconian laws imposed upon the society by the government, Panahi has long irked the government. Ultimately in 2010 the government handed him a sentence of six years in jail and banned from directing movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews to the media, and leaving the country for 20 years. He has appealed against this sentence ever since, and This is Not a Film, shot in his Tehran apartment, is an act of defiance by Panahi amid all this. The film can be categorized as a documentary in which Panahi self-documents a day of his captive life, assisted by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb in camera. The film in general shows a parade of some routine activities (having breakfast, talking to his lawyer, standing and smoking in the balcony, drinking tea, etc.) and some not-so-routine activities for an acclaimed director (taking care of his daughter's pet, an Iguana, getting the door for home-delivery food, and most ridiculously taking care of a neighbor's wayward dog, etc.) performed by Panahi. Some of these activities underscore, in a jocular fashion, what life has come to be for a world-renowned artist under house arrest. Panahi also regularly converses with Mirtahmasb about the sentence, and a few times jokes about his inability to control his innate habits like pronouncing "cut" after an imagined scene despite the government imposed restrictions on him. This is not the first attempt in history to stifle creative expressions of an artist. But artists are the most indefatigable types and creativity is unmindful of external limitations. What is clever about This is Not a Film is that Panahi abides by (almost) all the government bans imposed on him and at the same time successfully communicates his inner feelings by drawing upon images from his previous films. Specifically, Panahi dilutes the line between the cinema and the reality (which is the soul of This is Not a Film) and expresses his rebellious attitude toward the oppressors by playing a scene from The Mirror (1997) in which a child actor rebels against the director and removes a cast she's wearing on her arm; Panahi reveals his anguish by playing a scene from Crimson Gold (2003) in which a troubled war veteran working as a pizza delivery man who is driven into a suicidal crime by social tyranny. In another instance, Panahi uses a scene from The Circle (2000) to corroborate his assertion that sometimes in a film "location" (read house arrest) is more successful at establishing the inner states of mind of an oppressed character than the character merely "acting it out". In The Circle (2000), in one of the most memorable scenes one of the oppressed women released from jail into a Kafkaesque city races to avoid an arrest by the state police against a backdrop of steely vertical frames that befittingly seize the mood of the scene, that is, impending imprisonment of individual freedom. Panahi is also seen to be enveloped by a feeling of despair when Panahi discusses the film that he wanted to make but the censors rejected and thus Panahi never made that film. It is about the life of a teenage girl confined to her home in Isfahan by a dominating parent. She's a prisoner as Panahi is now, and he creates her apartment with pieces of tape on the living-room carpet. But after few unprofitable attempts, Panahi looks at the camera and tells that films are not meant to be "told", rather meant to be "made", essentially establishing a strict boundary between cinema and what is not cinema. In another brilliant use of his fertile imagination, Panahi continually uses the over-curios pet Iguana and its creepy and silent movements around the apartment to draw a striking analogy between the overtly encroaching nature of Iranian state laws into the private lives of Iranian people. The film ends with scenes where Panahi assumes the dual role of a cameraman and a character and engages in amusing conversations with a university student of art whose part-time job is to collect trash in the apartment building. The final scene ends with an apocalyptic vision of the outside world. At the end of the day This is Not a Film may not score high in terms of its pure cinematic contributions. Its success, however, lies in its remarkable ability to depict the life of an imprisoned artist by weaving together scenes from the reality and scenes from the cinema and thereby providing an all-inclusive view of the private moments of a captive but unflagging artist. In the long run This is Not a Film will rise as a testament to an artist's self-documentation of life under lock and key.

In The Mood for Love (Kar Wai Wong, 2000)

In the Mood for Love is the second part of Hong-Kong-based director Wong Kar-wai’s trilogy, along with Days of Being Wild and 2046. The three films is a reflection on time, memory and relationships.The film takes us to Hong Kong in the early 1960’s, when two neighbors move into a very busy building. Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow start a friendly relationship, which becomes increasingly intimate when they discover that their respective spouses are cheating on them, actually with each other. The shared pain of unfaithfulness brings the two forlorn hearts closer and a unique bond of love blossoms between them. The film while dealing with an extramarital relationship never leaves you with the impression that the duo indulges in the same wrongdoing that their respective spouses are charged with. Taking a sensitive topic such as marital infidelity and making a poetic love story out of that is not an easy feat for any director. The film is filled with close-up shots, voyeuristic camera movements, minimal usage of lighting, and use of shadows and reflections that accentuate the tiny details of daily life of the two protagonists and thus intensify the romantic moments. The film features one of the most routine scenes about lovers: two lovers in a slow motion, but these scenes are infused with so much artistry with a nuanced sense of music that they end up creating long-lasting impressions in the viewers' mind. The shots of narrow corridors, streets, and staircases highlight a sense of secrecy and confidentiality of the characters, and at the same time underscore the agony of alienation of the characters. The plot is developed aesthetically and is aurally supported by the repetition of the sublime theme song. This music and the visual rhythms of the film force us to feel the unspoken desires of a couple yearning to be together. Mrs. Chan is shot like a great painter. The audience sees her the way she is viewed by her neighbor. She manages to combine the feeling of a betrayed, lonely, and subtly sensual woman. Dialogue is relegated to a trivial role and is replaced by suggestive body languages, eye contacts, and delicate breathing. This is the language that reveals the couple’s inner thoughts. The respective spouses are always distanced from the viewer to stress the distance between the protagonists and their spouses. The film ultimately leaves us with questions like would the cheated couple engage in an affair with each other and become a double of their spouses? This is for us to wonder. Wong Kar-wai merges a simple and potentially scandalous story with an artist's mind, and thus creates a masterpiece of cinema in the process. In the Mood For Love elevates a simple love story to an exceptional aesthetic altitude that goes far beyond a familiar plot of relational complexity. This stylized romantic film addresses relationships from a measured distance, but a distance that can only be created by a true artist.

Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)

The story follows the episodic journey of two dear friends in former Yugoslavia during World War II that ultimately culminates into more than a mere thrilling climax to the relationship between the friends. The film is Kusturica's satirical take on how a visibly tight-knit friendship takes unexpectedly specious and traitorous turns in the background of a soon-to-be-concluded war. Even though the WWII is over, Marko, a black marketeer, tricks Blacky, an anti-Nazi ideologue, into believing that the war is still on to win the heart of Natalija, a charming theatre actress. War, an unmixed evil most of the times in the human history, becomes a ploy in the hands of Marko to keep an unsuspecting Blacky in the underground shelter only to convince that the war is still going on. Marko exploits a familiar mix of propagandistic elements - people, visuals (read cinema), and audiotapes - to make Blacky and others believe in the continuing gruesome crimes perpetrated by the Germans. What starts like a circus-like cinematic fare gradually unravels grave realities of war. On a different layer, the film adopts a metaphorical approach to demonstrate the reality of a war: an average citizen with shrewd intelligence, that is, Marko whose apt exploitation of war capitalizes on the gullibility of Blacky to take control of the treasures of the land captured by the alluring beauty of Natalija. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of an evil phenomenon like war and that point is most strongly communicated to us in a carnivalesque manner. In the background of an epic tale of friendship how innocence of humanity suffers at the hands of warmongering, Undergroud depicts that with an eclectic combination of mostly grim humor and a pinch of weighty sentiments, and in the process the film has  become a rare documental evidence on war atrocities.   

The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film festival.

Life in A Day (2011)

This is the first crowd-sourced film that I have watched. The film posed most possibly the simplest and yet most profound and intriguing question to the people around the planet: What was life like on planet Earth on July 24, 2010? And asked people to submit their personal accounts of the day in a moving image form, that is cinema. Developed from 4,500 hours of user-submitted YouTube videos from 192 countries, the film documents personally significant moments. What we get as the end product is a competently constructed mosaic of contrasting views on life. The film advances chronologically and thematically. On both sides there exists an amazing level of homogeneity. The mundane activities that occupy our lives on a daily basis are all too familiar to each of us. The sublunary activities are the same, the processes are different. The ultimate human desires are nearly identical but the recipes to achieve them are vastly dissimilar. In showcasing proceedings of daily life, the film exhibits the whole gamut of human emotions and touches upon topics as diverse as life and death, fear and fearlessness, love and heart-break, intimacy and aloneness, solitude and togetherness, cruelty and compassion, poverty and abundance, achievements and failures, freedom and captivity, simplicity and complexity, material and spiritual, and many more. What emerges from all these is the grand truth about life, and that is, human life is a perfect embodiment of monotony. Despite our best efforts to make extraordinary images out of an ordinary life, we slowly give in to the traditional demands of life and on an eerie night suddenly discover the futility of life just like the last human did in Life in a Day.And despite all its monotony, it still remains a Rubik's Cube.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

  
This is my first experience with Terrence Malick's art of filmmaking. Many would argue that the film is an attempt to understand the philosophical tenets of life. Others would contend that the film is an exercise in theology. Still, a few others would insist that the film is a phenomenological study of life. While viewers' opinions may vary in their interpretation, all would agree on one thing, and that is, the film is going to be a clear disappointment to the loyal followers of classical cinematic narratives. This is just because the film (almost) defies the age-old language of cinema and instead makes heavy use of stunning images, intense meditative techniques, and minimal use of dialogues to push its own itinerary of thoughts. The film starts with the descriptive images that chronicle the pre-Big Bang age, the Big Bang, cosmic eruptions, the advent of unicellular organism, rise of the relationship between the prey and the predator (the scene of a large dinosaur establishing its territorial supremacy over a small dinosaur while in the same scene the director infuses a forgiving mood, which is hard to come by in a typical dinosaur movie), which ultimately culminates in the modern age. This series of events basically captures the macroscopic theme of the film. This is all nature and human beings are absent by design.
The microscopic view of the film starts with the portrayal of a family in a little American town back in time. Brad Pitt is the father. A strict disciplinarian whose bad temper can get the better of him at times. In contrast, Jessica Chastain is the mother who is an embodiment of unconditional love and tenderness. The character of the father is starkly juxtaposed with that of the mother to represent the two alternative views about life: the way of nature represented by the father and the way of grace and love represented by the mother. Then there are three pre-teen sons the eldest of whom is Jack played by Sean Penn. The director crafts the images from the viewpoint of young Jack, played by Hunter McCracken, who visibly oscillates between these two ways of life. He undergoes a sexual awakening, encounters cruel and caring aspects of life, and as an adult, finds himself in a place that is clearly alien to his senses. Most importantly, Jack shares an uneasy childhood relationship with the middle brother who dies at a young age. We are never told the exact reason behind his immature death. This tragic event, however, engulfs Jack with its utmost force. His overtly conscious self wants to escape the reality of life and continually ponders over the "right" way to deal with life and death. His breakout from this stifling atmosphere comes in the surreal guise of the film’s grey and sombre climax, when he is met by his parents, brothers and everyone he has met so far in his journey in life. The conclusion of the film is manifest by Jack's experience, who realizes that a myeterious mix of the way of nature and the way of grace holds the key to understanding the human existence. There is a shred of doubt and disagreement about Malick's interpretation of the "way of nature" in the film. There are evidently two sides of the nature. A side that is brutal, willful, and clearly Darwinian. Malick's rendition of the nature coincides with this authoritative, vigorous, and assertive side. The other side of the nature is forgiving, magnanimous, and equitable. This side is starkly absent in Malick's film. The problem is that nature can also represent the "way of grace and love" (remember Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives?). As a result, the film seems to suffer from a biased depiction of the nature's way, which is self-serving to a large extent.


The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film festival.

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)

Bela Tarr from Hungary is renowned for his minimalist approach to cinema. The Turin Horse is his last contribution to the art of cinema. This affirmation comes directly from the filmmaker himself. While many around the globe would want that to be a revocable decision, for the time being we have to take the auteur by his own words. The film opens up with a direct reference to a prominent incident in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's life. The much debated incident had unfolded somewhat in this fashion: Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse in the streets of Turin, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground. The film starts with a voice-over of Nietzsche's incident while the screen remains black. Does this signify the impending darkness? The film then documents six days in a stony house on a Hungarian plain occupied by the horse’s owner (Janos Derzsi) and his stoic-faced daughter (Erika Bok). The film presumably attempts to establish a connection between the horse in the Nietzsche's incident and the horse owned by the family.  What unfolds next is the mundane existence of the father-daughter couple amid fast-approaching apocalypse. Tarr punctuates the in-between time with a chain of repetitious acts performed by the couple: eating the boiled potato that is their daily meal, the daughter helping dress and undress the father, the daughter fetching water from a nearby well, both of them peeling away skin of hot potatoes. Tarr does not draw conclusions, but sketches a marginal and tedious existence of humans on the screen. The family in the mean time makes a futile attempt to escape the impending doomsday scenario. The only worthwhile but helpless act remains for these characters is to wait out the imminent end of the world. While this turn of events makes the two characters look like helpless creatures waiting to be crushed upon by the willful massacre of nature, the horse also undergoes the same psychological pain and displays symptoms of an imminent physical breakdown. Despite the nurturing efforts by the couple, the horse is slowly nearing death and the wagon lies down in the darkness. All these images create a sense of hollowness in the mind of the viewer. Tarr's style of filmmaking may not be for everybody. His penchant for long takes (this movie was filmed with a total of 30 shots!), stony black and white images, minimal use of dialogues, and using a handful of characters are what defines his senses of cinema. Tarr manufactures some beautiful images out of situations that are extreme in their ultimate consequence. The profoundness of the grim plot has been aptly captured in the scenes where the father/daughter sits by the chair in front of the only window of the house and silently stares out at the museum of natural destruction. These images of solitude will haunt you forever. Some of the tracking shots will stay with you much after the theater has lighted up. The background score is perfectly matched with the undercurrent of monotony and calamity. Tarr also makes subtle references to how different genders react differently to mundanity of life: while the daughter seems unfazed and stoic (when stripping away skin of hot potatoes), the father is visibly angry and unsettled. The Turin Horse is a magnificent watch by any measure; be it its cinematic images, aural experience, study of human characters in the face of most mundane existence and fundamentally the most disastrous event. 


The film won a FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Berlin International Fim Festival.   

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives is the latest gem from the Thailand's New Wave director Weerasethakul. Uncle Boonmee, the central character of the film, is a successful tamarind farmer who has made a place of abode in a pristine forest in Northeast Thailand. He is at the doorstep of death and therefore has decided to spend the last few days of his life surrounded by nature. Having realized that he is about to transfer from the "material world" to the "uncharted territory of death", he starts reminiscing about his past life, death, and beyond. Boonmee's reflective persona is facilitated by time spent in the forest which speaks the language of silence, punctuated by rhythmic utterances by nature: swaying sounds of trees, humming crickets, and melodic birds. In stark contrast to establishing Boonmee's character as a nature lover, the film also provides certain glimpses into cruel and  materialistic aspects of Boonmee's character like killing of the "commies" for which Boonmee appears to be remorseful and guilty. Thus Uncle Boonmee presents a familiar combination of good and bad life choices that define typical human nature. In his last journey, Boonmee is accompanied by people who are linked to him by known and unknown tokens of identity: sister-in-law whose parasitic existence on nature is starkly juxtaposed with Boonmee’s cosmic love and respect for nature. On the other hand the character of the illegal immigrant, who is in search of a fresh identity, is a skilful ploy by Weerasethakul to accentuate the discriminatory treatment of people by people on the basis of geography, history, and politics. But these aren’t the only characters who visit Boonmee. He is soon unexpectedly visited by his long-dead wife and long-vanished and dead son, who is transmogrified into a monkey-ghost. In sum, by exploiting these surreal elements (natural atmosphere, fantasy-like characters, aural anatomy of a forest, and brilliant choice of images) Weerasethakul creates a unique setting that is conducive to undisturbed contemplation about life, death, and beyond. From thereon the film touches upon some profoundly deep concepts of philosophical nature. Boonmee is in two minds about his impending death. On one hand, death will allow him to bond with his deceased wife. On the other hand, death will transfer him to a world that is filled with fear, anxiety, strangeness as alluded  to him by his dead son. At this time the film infuses fantasy into reality to delve deep into Boonmee's psyche. Boonmee's past "lives" (re-embodiments) rise before him as outcomes of his meditative state . His re-embodiments include a tethered buffalo that unshackles itself and escapes to the mystical forest in the pursuit of freedom and nature, and a cat fish who performs sex acts on a princess who is trying to regain youth and beauty. We are never told as to why "these" re-embodiments are particularly chosen for Boonmee and what conclusions ensue from their study. Weerasethakul apparently uses these fantastical characters to portray Boonmee's views toward nature and man and earthly desires. The art of marrying fantasy-like characters to mundane details of human life is an important element of Weerasethakul's films (Blissfully Yours, Syndrome and A Century, and Tropical Malady). By doing so, Weerasethakul creates a film language that manifests itself best by exploiting monotony of life (as we know it) and infusing fantasy into that dull life that are ably aided by magnificent aural and visual compositions. There are some scenes or themes in the film that deserve a special mention. The parasitic existence of humans on nature is exemplified by the superb cutting techniques where in one scene the sister-in-law lays claims to nature’s bounty when in the next she deprives the smallest of the small insects of their life. Ideas of oneness of man and nature and reincarnation are represented by various animal figures like the buffalo, the catfish, and the ghost that are presumably the various re-embodiments of Boonmee. Weerasethakul’s mastery of the cinematic art manifests itself at the dinner table where two alive human beings, a monkey-ghost, and a dead person share an uncanny evening and yet we never feel the awkwardness of the scene for a moment. The director mixes fantasy with reality with such a gentle touch of humor. The most profound and unearthly moments of the film take place when a catfish performs cunnilingus on a princess in the jungle, when the catfish finds beauty in the same princess who is judged as ugly by a man in the moment before. The illusory nature of human beauty  and the non-discriminatory character of nature are placed in direct contrast to each other. One of the last few scenes where a monk "unshackles" himself from the spiritual jersey, gets inside a modern piece of clothing, and indulges in loud pop music immediately establish a pretentious understanding of spiritual freedom. The scene gives us an inkling of the thin line that exists between ritual-centric religious practices in everyday life and true enlightenment of the soul. The beauty of the film lies in its magical ability to blend heavy concepts like memory, identity, life, and death in a playful manner. The imagery is suitably slow paced and phenomenologically enriching. The frames sometimes project images that can be found in a typical documentary film (the last part mostly), or images that can be found in a mise-en-scene cinematic style (the parts with the princess) to capture the underlying thematic sensibilities of the film. Thus by intermingling rich interpretations of man and nature, by mixing poetry with cryptic images the film transcends the limitations of cinematic language.

The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film festival.