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Open your eyes: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I haven’t seen a film like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly before. For one, a huge part of the film unravels through the eyes of the protagonist, Jean-Dominique Bauby – and by ‘through the eyes’, I literally mean that the audience’s point of view is Bauby’s left eye – that is where the camera is. 

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the Chief Editor of Elle magazine - a man in the prime of his life, a lover of women and a family man at the same time. His career was supremely successful and glamorous – he was surrounded by models, photographers and bright lights all the time. At age 43, he suffered a disastrous stroke which left him completely paralyzed, except for his left eyelid. However, his brain was in perfect working order - a very rare condition called ‘locked-up syndrome’. The film’s title (and the book on which it is based), is thus a take on the human diving bell – a bell-shaped structure in which divers are supplied oxygen when they are underwater, and the intermittent swatches of memory that Bauby has of his previous life (the butterfly).

Right before his stroke, Bauby signed a contract with a publishing house to write a ‘feminine’ version of the Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo. The stroke makes him realize that that would perhaps be too ambitious a goal. With the help of the doctors and nurses at the Berck Hospital, where he lived for one year and two months, he uses his left eye to communicate to an assistant through blinks, and thus completes a book on his life. In the process, he learns lessons that he wished he knew when he was healthy - lessons about life and love, beauty and joy.

This film belongs to two people: one is Mathieu Amalric, who enacts Bauby. Whether it is the invalid patient of the film’s present or the sexy journalist of the past, the personality of Jean-Do, as he is called, shines through brilliantly. The other is, of course, director Julian Schnabel. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a work of art. It is a book, poetry and a film all in one. In the film’s official website, Schnabel says that he intended the film to be a ‘tool, like (Bauby’s) book, a self-help device that can help you handle your own death’. That may sound depressing, but the film isn’t, despite its story. 

Published in iProng Magazine, September 9, 2008

The darkness of power: There Will Be Blood

The most ominous element in There Will Be Blood is undoubtedly its soundtrack. It haunts you from scene to scene, choosing to keep eerily silent now and then before it suddenly shouts out at you again. Music seems to be a weapon in this film – a weapon that forces you to pay close attention to what is happening on screen. It has a personality and life of its own, in some strange sense, and director Paul Anderson has used it almost as such. It came as little surprise to me that the man behind the film’s powerful music is Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.

Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood traces the life of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in his journey from a small silver miner to a self-made oil baron. The film is set in the early 1900’s in the days around California’s petroleum boom, and the crisp cinematography captures the American landscape perfectly. As Plainview, the blood of an astute, almost ruthless businessman running in his veins from the minute we see him on screen, acts on a tip-off that there is a huge store of oil in a town out West, his young son H.W (newcomer Dillon Freasier in a strong performance) and he slowly go about building an empire. It isn’t as easy as it seems: their target oil well is situated right in the middle of a small, sleepy town where the entire congregation holds tightly on to the words that come out of the mouth of the church preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, whose complete departure from his role in last year’s Oscar-winner, Little Miss Sunshine, is remarkable).

There Will Be Blood is a not so much a drama as a sensory feast. The music and cinematography are truly brought out by the cast - a cast that interestingly, is devoid of any key female characters. I’d even go so far as to call it a masculine film. It is sharp, angry, dark and raw. As an essay on human psychology, for example, Plainview’s single-minded pursuit of power would make for a very interesting case study. And as a film, There Will Be Blood seems to say to the viewer that if it doesn’t cater to every palate, it couldn’t care less. It is unapologetically harsh. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Published in iProng Magazine, issue dated August 25th, 2008

Enid Blyton for Adults: National Treasure 2 - Book of Secrets

For the days when you just want to watch a film that doesn’t take too much effort on your part, Jerry Bruckheimer Films has brought to the big screen the sequel to 2004’s National Treasure. Say hello to the not-so-imaginatively titled National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, which, in case you had any doubt, is about the Exciting Adventure of Ben Gates and Friends in the Quest for the Book of Secrets (if that latter part sounded like an Enid Blyton novel, then consider yourself well-warned!).

In the first National Treasure movie, we are introduced to Ben Gates (Nicholas Cage), Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) as they search for a mythical treasure, hotly pursued by the enemy. Book of Secrets doesn’t risk changing this tried-and-tested formula much, so here we have the trio attempting to find and unravel the mystery behind the hidden Book of Secrets that is only ever seen by the men who hold the office of President of the United States, again in hot pursuit by their enemies, who have also heard of the Book (but of course). Some domestic disputes (Gates and his father - Jon Voight as Patrick Gates, also reprising his role in the first part - are continuously squabbling with their respective partners, Kruger and a gorgeous Helen Mirren as Emily Appleton, Patrick Gates’ ex-wife), a Presidential kidnapping and many action-sequences in the US and London later, the mystery is solved and all is well with the world.

However, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets isn’t the boring movie that it could have been. For starters, there is a reasonably engaging plot. Gates has a solid reason for searching for the Book of Secrets: his great-grandfather is mentioned in a recently-discovered page from John Wilkes Booth’s diary, thereby potentially implicating him in Abraham Lincoln’s murder (yes, I did tell you it bears a resemblance to kiddie adventure books, albeit in an adult way), and Gates has to clear his name, which he has to unravel the mystery of the Book of Secrets for. But apart from that, the film is extremely fast-paced, laced with witty humor throughout and has some very able entertainers in the lead roles. Sample this, a dialogue between Ben Gates and his trusted sidekick Riley Poole in one of the action sequences:

“Ben: Riley, what do you see?

Riley: Death and despair! Mostly death. Uh, I mean a little despair, the last few seconds. But then a hard, sudden death.”

You can’t help laughing at moments like these, and there are many, even though it is supposed to be an adventure-thriller kind of film. Full marks to Jon Turteltaub, the director, for making a remarkably entertaining movie – action, drama, humour and a dab of romance in just enough doses to make them all eminently watchable in the same narrative.

National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets is one of those films you really wouldn’t mind watching sitting on the sofa at home with some popcorn. I originally watched it during the first weekend of its release in a theater in New York, and it was packed. It happened to the biggest grosser that weekend.

Published in iProng Magazine Issue 17, dated June 17th 2008

Troubled charmer: Juno

The deal with Juno is that it is very difficult to dislike. Part of the charm is that it can’t be slotted in any one category: it’s not a pure romantic comedy, a drama or a teen comedy, but in a very artistic way it is a combination of all three. I can’t remember the last film that pulled something like that off successfully. I guess there’s a reason why the acclaimed film critic from the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, rates it as number one on his list of the best movies of 2007.

One of the introductory scenes in the film shows Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) downing American orange juice brand SunnyD by the carton, to ensure there is no problem getting results with a pregnancy test. Luck is not with her, and she soon finds herself telling her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) that she has indeed, ‘honest to blog’, been knocked up. Leah’s response is ‘shockingly cavalier’, as Juno puts it, till she realizes she is not being had, upon which she does a double-take and fittingly replies, ‘Oh Shit! Phuket! Thailand!’

Ellen Page is so real, it is easy to believe anything she spouts - and she does. Pearls of Juno-wisdom are delivered calmly or sarcastically as the case might be, at a dizzyingly rapid pace throughout the film. Of course Jason Reitman did a brilliant job of directing her, but honest to blog, as Leah might say in the film, the real star of this film is Diablo Cody’s script. Almost every single line in the film is such a remarkably funny pun that it makes it difficult to stop either smiling or laughing constantly.

Juno, a teenager wise beyond her years, decides to put the baby up for adoption. She finds an ad by Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a young affluent couple looking to adopt, in the local PennySaver newspaper. You’d think that things would go smoothly from here on, but no, they don’t. Come on, how predictable would THAT have been? And if you know anything about Juno by this stage, you know she is anything but. The look on the Lorings’ face, for example, when Juno goes to visit them with her father for the first time, and when offered Pellegrino, Vitamin Water or orange juice asks for ‘a Maker’s Mark. Up’, is priceless! Juno is as different from them as chalk from cheese, but realizes that they would provide the baby something she wouldn’t be able to – a stable and loving home. Once the closed adoption is agreed upon, she springs a visit upon the two every now and then to get to know them better, except all isn’t well in paradise, as she soon discovers.

Michael Cera plays Paulie Bleeker, Juno’s boyfriend in the film. Technically, as Juno might say, he isn’t her boyfriend for most of the film but after he learns that he was the one who got her pregnant, he faithfully decides to stand by her till the delivery. Cera’s baby face is very well-suited to a role like this – that of a sixteen-year-old high school kid who is reticent (unlike Juno) and charming (quite like her) at the same time. The dynamics between Juno and Paulie would soften any heart. Again, full marks to Diablo Cody for coming up with lines that are so believeable, and to Page and Cera who are remarkable actors : when Juno tells Paulie that she thinks she is in love with him, he says ‘as friends?’, she replies, ‘No, I mean, like, for real. 'Cause you're, like, the coolest person I've ever met, and you don't even have to try, you know...’ and Paulie admits honestly that he, in fact, tries really hard to ‘be cool’, which is evident as we follow his interactions with his school friends through the film.

If a charming, sensitive, funny and extremely well-made film is your kind of thing, then watch Juno as soon as you can. It’s the best thing you’ll do all day.

Published in iProng Magazine, May 7th, 2008

The Psychology of the Strong: The Counterfeiters

No matter how many times you see a film that has to do with the horrors of World War II, you will not cease to be shocked. The Counterfeiters is another of those stories based in the concentration camps of Germany during the war. I say ‘another’, but not condescendingly. I say it with respect. The full respect that this true story is due.

Salomon Sorowitsch, or Sally, is a master counterfeiter. His Jewish heritage leads him to being incarcerated by the Nazis along with a group of other ‘professionals’, but away from the rest of the unfortunate captives who are led to their death day after day. Their expertise earns them minor comforts - a soft bed, the odd cigarette - in return for the manufacture of fake currency, with which the Germans aim to flood the British and American economies and bring about their downfall.

Through the various characters in the film, The Counterfeiters examines the psychology of both kinds of humans that survived the Nazi camps. One was the kind that was glad to just stay alive by virtue of the skills they possess (I recall Sophie’s Choice, for example, where Sophie was also put to work, and thus saved, by her skills as a stenographer while a prisoner in Auschwitz), and the other were people who were consumed by guilt at being alive when so many of their fellow prisoners, including their families, were gassed or shot in multitudes. It is difficult to pronounce a value judgment in times of war, and I have come to realise that one should not even try. However, one thing that cannot be argued with is that staying alive during the war was in itself an incredible achievement, and as we follow Sorowitsch and his fellow inmates in this film, we realise how valuable their achievement was.

The Counterfeiters joins my list of Sophie’s Choice, The Lives Of Others, Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List as films about World War II that will stay in my memory.

A cinematic passage to India

The sense of mystery about India that has traditionally surrounded it is long gone. The India of today is hardly represented by wicker baskets with snake charmers coaxing hooded serpents patiently out. Even milkmen in rural areas have cell phones now, while‘being Bangalored’ is a commonly used phrase globally, and Indian entrepreneurship is on the rise. It is only natural then that the Indian film industry has moved with the times and undergone a huge change as well.

India has an illustrious cinematic past, of course. Decades ago, Satyajit Ray created masterpieces like his Apu trilogy, which are still hailed by film critics the world over. His brand of filmmaking continued with directors like Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and Shyam Benegal. Other regions of India also produced cinema that can stand the test of time, such as Mani Ratnam’s Nayagan in 1987, the story of a real-life underworld don in Bombay.

More often associated with mega-budget sets, larger-than-life stars and gaudily-dressed extras in never-ending songs, Indian films have slowly graduated to a no-nonsense, realistic art form, an art form that somehow got lost along the way with 80’s and 90’s commercial ‘Bollywood’ films, with few exceptions. Today, a host of original scripts are making their way to the screen and attracting an audience of their own, thanks to the burgeoning construction of multiplexes in India, which afford viewers a completely different viewing experience compared to the old format single-screen theatres. One of India’s biggest commercial film production houses, Yash Raj Films, ventured into producing a film targeted for an international audience for the first time in 2007. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures Entertainment finally acknowledged the huge business opportunity presented by Indian films and entered hitherto untested waters by producing Saawariya, a typically ‘Bollywood’ fairytale drama, said to be based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights.

With the corporatization of cinema in India came professionalism and the freedom to create stories that are about the new India. In the last four years alone, we have small-budget films like Manasarovar by first-time director Anup Kurian, which traces the story of two brothers and their independent interactions with the same woman a few years apart. Shot in English and set in Kerala, it has a small film feel but a worldly story that is intrinsically Indian. Meanwhile, director Navdeep Singh’s debut feature Manorama Six Feet Under depicts the story of an amateur detective in a small Indian desert town. Another first-time directorial venture, Khosla Ka Ghosla, by director Dibakar Banerjee narrates the travails of a middle-class Indian family and their run-ins with land sharks in Delhi. Such dynamic film projects are making the Indian film industry one that is no longer just about big budget films with even bigger film stars like Shah Rukh Khan or Aishwarya Rai (both of whom are so popular now that they have wax likenesses in Madame Tussaud’s in London). Today we can find Shah Rukh Khan, arguably India’s biggest film star, lending his name to an off-the-beaten-track subject in 2007’s Chak De India, that was a commercial success as well. Said to be based on a true story, the film depicts the story of a defeated hockey player who returns to coach the country’s women’s team.

Yet, for a country that produces the largest number of films in the world, India’s history with the Oscars has been checkered. In 1956, Mother India made it to the Best Foreign Language Film nominee list for the first time, followed by Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! in 1988 and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan in 2001. Over the last few years though, purely commercial, weakly scripted films were sent as the country’s official nominations, when quality and dynamic films like those mentioned earlier existed alongside. In 2002 we had the costume drama Devdas being nominated, and another costume drama, Paheli, in 2005. Last year’s nomination to the Oscars was probably the most criticized, a film called Eklavya-The Royal Guard, which had big stars but not much of a story. It is possibly part of a trend started by Lagaan in 2001, which had big names and so more financially strong people to push the film’s visibility at an international level.

Critical film viewers cannot be blamed for having numerous questions about the recent direction of the Film Federation of India, and blogs are rife with questions and speculations. Bhavna Talwar, the director of Dharm, a film that was pipped to the post by Eklavya in the final selection, even went so far as to take legal recourse on the grounds that the selection committee was biased. Eklavya of course never made it to the final Oscar nominee list for Best Foreign Language Film anyway, but the issue begs the larger question of how transparent the nomination process is. The process followed by the Academy itself is quite transparent, but what is the process followed by individual countries, specifically India? As it stands today, the general public is certainly in the dark.

It may sound simplistic to say that good films should get the attention they deserve, but more often than not, because they are made without enough financial backing (at least in India), they don’t. Sarthak DasGupta, director of the forthcoming independent feature The Great Indian Butterfly, a film based on an urban couple’s relationship in a changing India, makes an interesting point. He says that cinema which carries the contemporary Indian voice, whether in subject or treatment, is likely to resonate better in international juries' minds. Statistically, he thinks, independent films in India tend to represent this voice more than commercial films.

One solution, maybe, is for big studios to support good-quality, independent Indian films and not just the more commercial fare. These decisions could wind up being commercially astute as well. Miramax, for example, co-produced the multiple award-winning The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which clearly sits in the usual independent film category. Another is for the Film Federation of India to consciously ensure through a transparent system that good quality films truly representing a country’s mood are sent for awards like the Oscars, because this will give a much-needed boost to these films and will ultimately cause a domino effect on the Indian film industry as a whole.

Published in Seven Magazine, 13 April 2008