On Taxi and other films I watched at the Jio MAMI 17th Mumbai Film Festival:
There was a report in The Guardian during PM Narendra Modi’s visit to
the UK, the same week the 17th Mumbai Film
Festival concluded, in which the reporter begins telling that in 2005, the
local police of Gujarat state murdered a criminal Sheikh Sohrabuddin, and how
this cold-blooded murder was cheered by the crowd during a 2007 election rally
of Modi, then chief minister of the state, who, when asked the crowd what
should be done if a man is found possessing illegal arms, got a resounding
response of “Kill him”.
In the opening scene of Iran’s banned
filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, we meet one
gentleman who is of the view that thieves who steals car-tyres, which is
apparently a rampant crime in Tehran, should be lynched to death. “Death
penalty for a crime as petty as stealing tyres?” argues a humanist
school-teacher repulsively who is his co-passenger in the taxi. We don’t know what
that gentleman does for a living; he doesn’t tell despite being asked several
times by the lady school-teacher. But his refrains do suggest that he is not on
the right side of the law. And with his views on humanism, it is not tough to
imagine him as a part of one such mob that could fill air with aggressive,
extreme opinions.
Taxi is one of the best films I saw at this year’s Mumbai Film
Festival. My fourth consecutive year at the fest, I managed to watch maximum
movies this time. Twenty three. That is in seven days. Law of diminishing
marginal utility seems to almost fail. But it does get heavy in head at a
point, sort of viewer’s block. And, you wonder, what is the point of watching
films in a chaos? Like in a chaotic mob, judgements (of few films) do get a
little discombobulated here too.
Characters in Panahi’s film come and
go. They are the passengers of the taxi driven by Panahi himself which makes
for a running commentary on the politically oppressed state of Iran. Panahi is
under house-arrest; his crime was he made films. And one of the early
characters we meet is a video rental guy who pirates Western films and TV shows
for his customers, who are mostly film-students. Panahi was his customer too,
he reminds. Piracy is again a crime, and at one point, as a cover-up for one of
his customers, he even makes Panahi his partner. This is cheekily funny, almost
satirical. Though a criminal, he is one of the sources of international
pop-culture import in this consumerist country. You can see Apple products,
Angry Birds school-bags, and modern coffee-shops. The place doesn’t feel
strange, in ways more than one.
The star of the film is Panahi’s
affable niece who is a young school girl and owns a camera. They teach films at
schools there, which is unimaginably awesome. But her lessons in filmmaking are
all about how to make a “distributable” film which is by avoiding “sordid
realism”. I would like to know if the school-teacher passenger whom we met
earlier would subscribe to such lessons or would teach the same thing to her
students. Panahi, on his taxi ride, takes a slight detour to meet a friend who
has been wrongly framed in another criminal charge and Panahi is asked to offer
quick judgement after watching the CCTV evidence. Moments later, he bumps into
a lady lawyer friend of his who puts brilliant perspective about the country
where law and religion strictly informs each other and people have to tread
this thin line between a criminal and a sinner even in their daily job of
bread-earning.
In one of the most rewarding scenes
I’ve ever watched in cinema, the lady lawyer picks out a rose from the bouquet
she is holding, puts in front of the camera installed in the taxi as an
offering to the audience watching her. “A rose for the ‘people of cinema’,
because they can be relied on,” she says. Shot on a small digital camera which could
have made this film watchable even on a laptop screen, this quoted line from
her made the entire theatre burst in applause, and what could have been a
personal-watching transcended into being a powerful and heart-warming
community-watching experience. Also, it’s affirming to see a crowd of people
cheering plain humanistic love. Fittingly, this film won the Audience Choice
award at the fest.
***
Sometimes, extreme love or
desperation for someone or something could push humans off the boundary where
they stop being humans. In a milder instance, there were reports that few
‘people of cinema’ heckled a screening for which they were denied entry even
after queuing up for hours. The screening had to be cancelled. The idea of film
festival as celebration of films by film-lovers coming up together as one took
a back seat for a while. We see a grimmer instance in M Manikandan’s novel-like Kutrame Thandanai (Crime is
Punishment), but telling that would be a spoiler. The protagonist is a
credit-card payment collector (though the lead actor looks too well-off for
this job) who suffers from tunnel-vision problem, literally and figuratively.
The film is little melodramatic, mainly due to its background-score (by
Illayaraja), and its production value makes it look soap opera-ish. One misstep
after another, he finds himself in a quarantine-like loop.
In Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria, the female protagonist goes through
relatively same dilemma. She meets a bunch of "fun-loving" dudes
while leaving a pub, where she was getting drunk all alone, of whom she finds
one guy a little more attractive than the others. Post Linklater-ish first half
of stoner romance, she finds the air around her getting dangerous. While she
had the chance of safeguarding herself, it is interesting to see how and what
makes her keep crossing the line that drags her deep in this quicksand. The
main setup comes a little late and feels a bit contrived, shifting the tonality
of the film, but the fluid filmmaking (134-minute single take) assures that the
mood of the film is not disturbed (perfect colour treatment is also responsible
for that), keeping you engrossed and rooting for the titular character while
the tense atmosphere grows on you.
What animalistic things people would
do or behave like when in little or extreme love or desperation, they make you
do when you’ve found none. They make you an animal. Literally. When you fail to
find anyone of the opposite sex to be in relationship with. I am talking about
Yorgos Lanthimos’s cracker of a film The Lobster. This hilarious
satire on modern human life is set in a fantastical world in near future –
where after breaking-up with your current relationship, you enter a hotel
where, like… err… Tinder, you have to find a match for yourself from the
singletons arrived there. The Lobster is great fun in its idea, and its top-class execution of the
dystopian world divided between loners and lovers is reflective about the human
nature towards love and loneliness.
 |
| A still from Anomalisa |
Loneliness is again something Charlie
Kaufman tries to look at and wants us to feel about in his latest stop-motion
animated film Anomalisa, co-directed by
Duke Johnson, through his middle-aged character Michael Stone who is a
motivational speaker and writer. Marred with loneliness and awkwardness in
dealing with people, Stone feels everyone is same, boring and mechanical. This
existential tragedy of his takes the narrative form on screen where everyone is
puppets having the same voice. One of the billed reviews on the film’s poster
reads “The most human film of the year”. I so agree with it that I believe the
characters on screen are humans and it is just “the magic of cinema” that transforms them
to look like mechanical puppets. (I went to see this film wearing a T-shirt
that read “Being Human”. That would have made Gods of Cinema weep in heavens
though.) When almost all the animated films are made for kids telling them the
hopeful nature of life, this one is for grown-ups, showing them the pathetic
nature of it.
Human form of life and its existence
is most objectively and contemplatively put to discuss and debate in Michael
Madsen’s docu-fiction of gob-smacking brilliance, The Visit. Assuming that
planet earth has been invaded by the aliens in a spaceship, officials from UN
agencies and NASA are called in to put their perspectives about the changes
that our extra-terrestrial guests would bring in, if allowed to leave their
spaceship and enter our world, at levels ranging from bio-chemical to
political. Filmed in the style of Terrence Mallick, constituting mainly high
shots and slow-motion images, The Visit distances us from the human civilization and yet looks at its
vulnerabilities very closely in a deeply introspecting way. Give this film a
chance; it could alter your perspective.
Come back to earth in a remote region
of Andhra Pradesh, India, where humans migrated from place to another are
looked at as “invaders”, where law is still dodged to bring out the animal side
of humans. This is Vetrimaaran’s disturbing Visaranai (Interrogation). Visaranai demands great empathy for its principal characters – who in
search of jobs have come to the city of Guntur and have been wrongly framed in
a case by the police themselves. But when one character gets jokey about his
teeth in a situation of which he is clueless about why is he there at first
place, my empathy gets little reserved and all the brutal beatings then tend to
appear as emotional porn. The director conveniently forgets them for a good
screen time when he has to shoehorn a larger political nexus related crime
story to shock us more, but superficially. Yet, surprisingly, his filmmaking
remains smooth.
These films tell us how we are, as
humans, inherently—lonely and insecure, and what we become at desperate times
and measures. Amidst this chaotic movie watching experience, as I try to make
sense out of it, if and when I ask myself why do I go to movies, I get my
answer. To be human.
Here's another post from the 17th Mumbai Film Festival, a full length review of Ruchika Oberoi's Island City: http://moifightclub.com/2015/11/07/ruchika-oberois-island-city-of-men-and-machines/
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