The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

The Bicycle Thief is a gem attributed to the Italian Neo-realist movement. The film shows the creative bankruptcy of today's filmmakers. The film is slender and poetic. It tells a story that has universal appeal and is sure to touch hearts of all who have suffered misfortune and misery in a treacherous world, even once in their lifetime. By the measure of that metric only, the film is applicable to all. The beauty of the film lies in the simplicity of its screenplay. It shows how simplicity can achieve greatness, save the obfuscations of most modern day crap. The screenplay is not charmingly witty, not philosophically deep, not characteristically complex, not contemplatively silent. It is intensely emotional (without overdoing it) and fiercely personal. The story is rather simple: in post-World War Two Rome, Italy, jobs are scarce, and Antonio Ricci finally gets a job offer, as a billboard sign man, posting billboards about town, after waiting for months in front of the downtown labor office. One catch, he needs a bicycle. He has one, but it’s at a pawnshop. His wife, Maria, sells their good bedsheets so Antonio can get back his bike. The job is apparently a good one, as other workers anxiously vie for the job. Antonio suddenly feels human and dignified again, wearing a uniform, and being able to make money. Yet, on his first day at work, while pasting posters, his bike is stolen by a young man. Antonio has the weekend to get the bicycle back, so he can report to work on Monday with it. He gets his acquaintance, Baiocco, a garbageman, to help him look for the bike the next morning, along with some of his pals in the garbage company. But it is to no avail, so they keep on searching, and Antonio and Bruno have a number of encounters, such as seeing the thief with an old man, whom they track down to a church, but the old con man gives Antonio the slip, by saying he wants some of the free soup the church is offering. They do get a tentative address of the thief, and eventually Antonio catches up with him, and forces him back to his apartment, where his mother and neighbors declare him a good boy, an innocent. The vile wolfpack mentality closes in, and the thief plays his false innocence to the hilt, like the true professional grifter he is- likely having sold the bike already to another pawnshop, as a policeman is powerless to do anything, after they search the thief’s apartment. Antonio and Bruno eventually end up outside a soccer match, where hundreds of bikes are parked. He sees one in an alleyway, and, in a scene that shows a human desperation and honesty that are too often overlooked in art, Antonio gives Bruno some money to take a trolley home, and decides to steal the bike in the alley. Of course, he almost falls as he tries to pedal away, and the bike’s owner raises alarums, and this man’s neighbors chase and quickly capture Antonio- who is now pilloried as a bicycle thief, and a low man. He is so ashamed and without that he cannot even say a word. He is totally humiliated- all his honesty, honor, and playing by the rules have forced him into doing something wrong, and Bruno, who stayed behind, witnesses his father’s capture, runs to him, and weeps. The old man, whose bike it was, decides not to press charges, possibly out of pity for Antonio’s humiliation in front of his son, and Antonio walks away with his son, both weeping, yet hand in hand, having been defeated inside and out. Reputedly, none of the film’s actors were professionals, at the time. Antonio comes across so realistically, and wholly believably. Bruno is magnificent. He is wisecracking, but not in the annoying way Hollywood smart aleck kids are. There are numerous scenes that pinpoint the director's keen eye for details and highlight his tendency to maintain a desired balance between personal loss and humor, which relieves the viewer. Many critics have concluded that in The Bicycle Thief De Sica has tried to show that good and evil are relative. But nothing can be farthest from the truth. For instance, we know, all along, that the young professional thief would likely be a con man regardless as all of his neighbors are cheats and liars, and even his mother lies for her clearly guilty son. De Sica wants us to remind that sometimes evil can be born not out of pure evil, greed, and compulsive characteristic flaws, but can be born of different circumstances like desperation and poverty, as with Antonio. The Bicycle Thief is great art. It is not a political manifesto as many critics have vehemently suggested.The Bicycle Thief tells a simple tale, but it documents the crushing of the human spirit at the hands of poverty, indifference and misery.

Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)

There are ten stories and two dozen characters that fill Short Cuts, and a plenum of human melodrama, drama, and darkness that fill the screen: joy, sadness, jealousy, fear, reconciliation, pain, infidelity, and death-accidental, murder, and suicide are among them.To reproduce the episodic and multi-narrative entanglement would be an unproductive exercise here. In a nutshell, it is a modern-day angst movie, with people misunderstanding, begrudging, beguiling, disappointing -- and even killing -- one another. In a work this pervasive, some plots will be inevitably weaker than others. But the overall feeling is that Altman, maker of Nashville and The Player, has pulled off another ensemble coup, with commendable assistance from Lily Tomlin, Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Waits, Bruce Davison, Fred Ward, Robert Downey Jr. and many others. Altman's movie is a harsh, almost fatalistic overview of modern-day sufferings in the less-exotic suburbs of California. After all the various plots have been introduced, developments (usually negative) cause many of them to intersect. The unfolding of events between Ward and wife Anne Archer who are invited to dinner for the first time with bickering spouses Julianne Moore and Modine is utterly mesmerizing. You watch enrapt, as these people experience the unrelenting tragicomedy of being alive. Although the omniscient design of Short Cuts is enthralling, it's indistinct. That indistinction leads us to believe we are watching something telling and profound. Short Cuts is a film almost wholly devoted to the written word, as all great films are, but its ‘little above average’ goodness, rather than greatness, stems from the fact that the words of Carver-as hit and miss in prose as Altman is on film, are never allowed their full power nor poesy.

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)

The story of Brokeback Mountain a familiar one. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are two cowboys who are hired by Joe Aguirre to shepherd sheep up on a Wyoming mountain named Brokeback. After a half hour of lushly scenery, Jack takes Ennis seduces Ennis and within seconds, Ennis is inexplicably battering Jack. Inexplicably because, a few scenes earlier, Jack was cooking and Ennis stripped naked to bathe, and neither man takes mind of what the other is doing. This gives an impression of instant gays, which is utterly absurd. In one of the reuniting scenes later, they practically bite off each other’s lips, indicating the extent of passion. Is this real? In the film, neither actor emits chemistry with nor eros for the other. Decades go by, and these two men marry, use, and abuse the women in their lives. Ennis is the worse of the two, for his wife Alma actually seems to love him, while Jack’s wife, Lureen, a former cowgirl, accepts the fact that he’s queer, and is romantically involved with Ennis in Wyoming. The wives are mere plot points in the film, not worth developing, especially since the leads are left in emotional utero even longer. The two male leads, however, look ridiculous in their poor makeup jobs. Aging, for them, consists of growing sideburns, it seems.  Eventually, Ennis divorces his wife and Jack goes ‘full on’ in his quest for sexual quest, which eventually gets him to death at the age of thirty-nine. The best scene in the film is when Ennis calls Jack’s wife, after a postcard comes back marked deceased. Gyllenhaal is ok as Jack, but Heath Ledger totally butchers ‘cowboy’ lingo, constantly letting his Aussie accent seep through his near constant mumbling. On a social level, I am tired of films like this that indulges more gay stereotyping by making gay characters dying, murderous, depressed, deranged, victimized, or victimizer. And, ethically, the film does a lot of dancing around the ethics of adultery and lying in a marriage. For example, if this film were about two men who cheated on their wives with other women, would the film have portrayed their encounters so favorably? But, adultery is okay if gay, and letting your ‘true’ self be revealed. So, it’s ok to be a liar if queer, but if you lie and use women in your straight adultery it’s not ok? Brokeback Mountain is not a love story for the ages, but a tale of simple sexual obsession. This film simply subordinates whatever good artistic impulses the director may have had in favor of the Lowest Common Denominator import of the ‘message’. Were this a film whose leads were straight, the critics would have torn at it for being every bit as kitschy as the abominable Love Story was. Bad writing, and dubious moralizing, makes Brokeback Mountain every bit as bad a film as any other bad film. 

The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)

Some films embrace style but lack substance and life. Others fumble by believing they can make an audience care for a character just by having a traumatic situation beleaguer him early on. The Sweet Hereafter by Canadian director Atom Egoyan suffers from all of the above syndromes. The Sweet Hereafter is not a bad film, but it certainly is not a great film. The film also suffers from some other minor flaws, as well; primarily an anomic screenplay by Egoyan, who adapted the novel of the same name by Russell Banks. The film follows the aftermath of a 1995 schoolbus crash that killed many of the children in a remote Canadian mountain town. A big city lawyer named Mitchell Stevens jumps on the case to extract compensations for the victims. His reason, other than greed, is that his daughter, Zoe is a drug addict who has been using him emotionally. Stevens is a small devious man and he gets a number of the local families who lost children to take up arms against the government. The film is non-linear, and herein lies a major problem. Not that linearity is the main problem of The Sweet Hereafter, for many films excel at non-linear structure. The film does not stay with Stevens, but jumps about to a host of characters who, after first viewing, we are left wondering who they are and what relation do they bear to the other characters. The Sweet Hereafter is plagued by script and character development problems. Then there is the unnecessary complication of a PC theme-incest, in which one of the older girls, Nichole Burnell hurt in the crash to the point of possibly being paralyzed for life, is being incested by her long haired dad, Sam. This leads to the culmination of the film, wherein the girl ultimately destroys Stevens’ case by lying about the crash being an accident, and blames the schoolbus driver, Dolores Driscoll, for speeding on an icy mountain road. The film leads us to believe via the theme music and lighting, that this lie is somehow a good thing, for it helps prevent her dad from getting a large settlement from the class action lawsuit Stevens is deposing her for. But, all it does is make her as bad as the rest of the greedy townsfolk, for she blames an innocent woman for the accident.Yet, just as the force-fed tale of Stevens and his daughter induces any empathy, neither does the incident of incest really move the viewer. Partly this is because the girl clearly engages in the fantasy element of the ‘romance,’ but the daughter’s receptivity to it (which seems forced, even though there are abused females who feel no ill will toward their abusers). These tales resolve themselves, but not in a realistic fashion. The girl is also hamhandedly used as a symbol when she recites the poem The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, by Robert Browning. The idea of lost children is so manifestly obvious in the film that the reason Egoyan adds this is puzzling, except that he bizarrely felt the loss aspect is not evident enough. It is. The opening scene of the film, where Stevens is in a car wash, heading out of the darkness and toward the light, is equally embarrassing in its condescension. The use of the non-linear structure also fails for a primary reason, it ruins the whole dramatic structure of the tale. Since we know what happens early in the film (save for a few minor details), because of Stevens’ reactions and body language, there is little drama in the girl’s testimonial lie. The whole flashback within the flashforward does not work for the lighting and dreaminess is so gauzey, saccharine, and so, ‘This is the big moment of the film,’ that the viewer almost feels embarrassed at Egoyan’s cluelessness at the inappropriateness of it all. The Sweet Hereafter simply is not that deep of a film, and had it gone a more standard route, it actually would have worked better. Simply put, a tragic subject matter does not automatically make for a deep film. The Sweet Hereafter does not rise to the heights of a film by a master like Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, nor Yasujiro Ozu.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

The Royal Tenenbaums is a story of five psychologically unstable and immensely melancholic individuals. The Tenenbaums own a gigantic house in New York. The patriarch is the Royal Tenenbaum who has left his family behind and leaves in a rented hotel room with his loyal attendant Pagan (who once tried to kill Royal in India), essentially on credit. His wife Etheline, who has an African-American accountant-cum-suitor, looks after the three gifted children, but all of them have turned into neurotic adults. Chas was a financial virtuoso as a kid who has lost her wife in a plane crash and since then has become hysterical about his two children's safety. Margot was adopted who had won a big literary prize as a kid and is caught in a loveless marriage with a psychiatrist with no offspring. Richie was once a tennis champion in the international circuit who threw away his career and secretly harbors a deep love for Margot. All of them live in the mansion except Royal Tenenbaum. Their most prominent neighbor is Eli who writes best-selling Westerns that receive terrible reviews and who is also in love with Margot. Even though they share the mansion, each of them is an island in itself. Eccentric behavior of each Tenenbaum covers a grave sense of loneliness. Amid all these, Royal Tennebaum fakes cancer during a dinner-table conversation seemingly in a bid to get close to his three children and win back his estranged wife. Some of the Tenenbaums respond with pity and arrange for Royal to stay with them. However, Etheline's suitor reveals in a spell of jealousy that Royal has been untruthful about his illness, which causes an immediate eviction of Royal from the family home. After a string of bizarre events, everything falls into the right place: Etheline and her suitor take the vow, Richie and Margot reveal their love for each other, for the first time in the family history Chass displays emotion and love for his father and lets go of his OCD regarding safety concerns, Eli accepts his mediocrity and renounces his love for Margot, Margot's husband writes a famous book on one of his patient's delusions, and Royal Tenenbaum passes away, peacefully. Nobody knows of Pagan, though. Wes Anderson's film is an uncommon combination of comedy and sadness. There are situations that produce big laughter and there are moments of quietness. But just when a contemplative and gloomy scene evokes sentimentality on the screen, Anderson suffuses the scene with edgy comedy or sarcasm. This queer juxtaposition of sorrow and humor has always been a defining feature of all of Anderson's works. Characters in Anderson's films almost always verge on the eccentric side of the persona and all of them suffer from a collective delusion out of which an orderliness emerges. The Royal Tetenbaums is no exception. The movie is effortlessly funny, flagrantly peculiar, and emotionally uncertain. At a fundamental level, the film documents a broken family's preposterous effort to carve out strategies to find emotional connectivity and strange characters' outlandish mannerisms to hide their emotional loneliness.

The Scent of Green Papaya (Anh Dung Tran, 1993)

The Scent of Green Papaya spans the life of Mui, an illiterate maid in late 1940s and early 1960s in Vietnam. Concerns for daily bread force young Mui to work as a domestic help in an upper-class family located in a distant city, away from her family. She is innocent at heart, uncomplaining, has keen eyes for observing minute details of her surroundings, and is constantly fascinated by the beauty of the nature. Mui's patience and forgiving nature are manifested when she takes in stride the childish antics of her master's two young sons who seem to have a propensity for urinating outside a toilet, or dragging her washing onto the ground. When she is not working, she spends what little time she has free to explore nature. Mui discovers beauty in smallest of details: a drop of water trembling on a leaf, a parade of busy ants, her pet frog in muddy water, the sunlight through the green leaves, and The Scent of Green Papaya. About two-thirds of the way through the film, Mui's life jumps abruptly 10 years into the future. Mui has transformed into a beautiful young woman, and has developed a strong curiosity that comes naturally with blossoming intelligence. She is now the servant of a young musician who is engaged to a rather flippant young woman. Mui is visibly attracted to the musician. Predictably, Mui turns out to be a home-wrecker and the musician sketches her face and teaches her to read. Sensing an underlying chemistry between Mui and the musician, his fiancé trashes his music room and returns the ring. However, the musician remains aloof from Mui's beauty and we wait for the epiphanic moment when the man will suddenly see Mui through fresh eyes and realize that the perfect woman he has been searching all this while is actually under his roof which he shares with Mui. This is exactly what happens in the film.The film is beautifully filmed. Virtually all of the scenes are indoor - there are no wide open spaces or cityscapes here. The film doesn't use any grand symphony orchestras, but only natural sounds, however, the music is off-putting. Anh Dung Tran has a strong penchant for visual beauty as each frame of the film gives great aesthetic pleasure. His aim for visual perfection in fact defies and to some extent understates the ugly realities that the family undergoes in the film. The film is tranquil and meditative, doesn't weave a dramatic plot and fiercely follows the growth of a woman. The acting is rather weak except that of Mui's. As much as the director masters the craft of visuals, he fails to produce enough steam so the climax of the film is mostly a foregone conclusion for the viewer. In essence, The Scent of Green Papaya constitutes an example of a visually alluring film that lacks adequate narrative punch, drama, and strong performance. 

The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1994.

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.