Film Impressions

DVD REVIEW: The Kids Are All Right (2010)

FAMILY VALUES

Good comedy isn't about loud gags, but about watching everyday life keenly and catching the moments that tickle, almost always, imperceptibly. Like Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right. It's perhaps the most intelligent comedy to come out of Hollywood in ages. It's also sensitive, poignant, crazy and intuitive in its understanding of people, love and relationships. But for me, it's most refreshing quality is it's unabashedly candid take on sex and sexuality. Not just because it has a lesbian couple at the centre, but because of its unusual sensibility towards the act of love-making -- neither squeamish, nor titillating -- a matter-of-fact depiction of two people doing things to and with each other's bodies totally unmindful of the camera and the audience that's watching them.

DVD REVIEW: The Killer Inside Me (2010)

HELL RIDE

It's hard to find a justification for rabid misogyny and graphic objectification of women, even in the cause of telling a good story. Notwithstanding his artistic genius (never in question for even a moment), one has always wondered why Hitchcock humiliated and/or murdered beautiful blondes in film after film -- beyond the possibility of the filmmaker being intimidated by them -- whatever his rational justification may have been. Perhaps it was retribution of sorts, for their sinful divinity, their unattainability. Lars Von Trier does the same, with even greater viciousness. He batters women in his cinema into submission and makes them grovel at the feet of male characters with shocking consistency. His last, Antichrist, featured a close-up shot of female genital mutilation, and assorted other horrific sequences depicting sexual violence. 

DVD REVIEW: Helen (2009)

ANATOMY OF DEPRESSION

If you've ever battled the twin demons of depression and anxiety, Sandra Nettelbeck's Helen will hold a painful, yet cathartic mirror to your face. You'll see your abject helplessness and despair in Ashley Judd's brittle, crumbling frame, in what's another case of an astonishing performance going unnoticed at big award ceremonies. If you haven't, it'll expose you to the horrors of psychological disorders and their devastating effect both on the patient, as well as those around her. Mental illness isn't quite the same thing as physical ailments and somehow, the understanding and acceptance of people in such situations (their numbers are stealthily growing) comes only through a process of rigorous sensitisation. It's not easy for the best of us to cope with it, and even more, to live with it on a daily basis.

DVD REVIEW: El Secreto De Sus Ojos (2)

WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN

"A man can change anything. His face, his home, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God. But there's one thing he can't change. He can't change his passion." This is the underlying refrain of Juan Jose Campanella's highly stylised, superbly crafted Argentinean film El Secreto De Sus Ojos or The Secret In Their Eyes, which pipped two equally formidable films, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete, to win this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar. All three films are dramatically different. Yet, they are bound together by a sophisticated, tightly controlled approach to story-telling. One is a German period piece about austere cruelty. The other is a contemporary French prison thriller about survival. This one is a whodunit-cum-love story intertwined so beautifully that both aspects of the narrative are equally important to the schematic and irrevocably tied together.

DVD REVIEW: The City of Your Final Destination (2009)

LOST WORLD

It took James Ivory two years to release his first film following the demise of his long-time collaborator Ismail Merchant in 2005. The City of Your Final Destination, based on a book by Peter Cameron and adapted for the screen by Ivory regular Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, only got a limited release in 2009, although it was ready in 2007. Perhaps because this kind of cinema -- set in splendidly isolated, decadent environs peopled by literate, upper class folk trapped in another era -- has long lost its audience. Who on earth lives on lush estates in the middle of nowhere, completely cut off from the rest of humanity, and spends time doing nothing but reminiscing the past? And yet, this world has a romanticism that seems regrettably lost on modern life.

DVD REVIEW: Un Prophete (2009)

THE ANTI-HERO

By Joyojeet Pal

The curious thing about a critically-acclaimed French film is that it can end at pretty much any scene after roughly the 80-minute mark, and thus would be the permanent pause of that artistic expression. Un Prophete director, Jacques Audiard, frequently finds himself on the wrong side of the critic community, since his films are considered a bit too entertaining. Disappointingly, perhaps, all the ends are tied.

DVD REVIEW: El Secreto de sus Ojos (2009)

LOVE, GRIEF AND VENGEANCE

By Joyojeet Pal

Few cinematic accounts of a nasty historical event or period finger the raw flesh like a love story gone tragically bad. The film opens with the brutalized corpse of Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo), and that is pretty much all we see of her. But between her inconsolable husband Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago) grieving blankly, and investigating attorney Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín) relentlessly pursuing the case while wrestling with a stillborn romance of his own, the film is fundamentally about love and loss. Presiding over the despondency is the Peronist ‘Dirty War’ of Argentina in the mid 1970s. 

DVD REVIEW: Chloe (2009)

A FATAL ATTRACTION

In the hands of a lesser director, Chloe would have disintegrated into a senseless erotic thriller quite rapidly. But given Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's ability to weave a dense plot with layers of meaning hidden beneath the obvious, it maintains its momentum all the way to the limp denouement. Adapted from a 2003 French film called Nathalie, much of the film's success owes to two dazzling performances from the ever-dependable Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried, who plays the title role with shocking honesty.   

DVD REVIEW: Vinnaithandi Varuvaya (2010)

LOVE STORY 2010

By Joyojeet Pal

“Yenna daa maccha? Love-failureaa?” (trans: ‘What’s up buddy? Love failure?) This is one of the most repeated lines in recent Tamil cinema, perhaps at par with pregnancy proclamations of yore. So what makes a great love story? For most Indian cinema, failure is a good starting point. Indians love unrequited love, especially when it’s peppered with a dash of misogyny. What other culture can boast such a vast archive of ‘sad songs’ in practically every vernacular of film songs, with a distinct numerical skew towards the brooding male baritone. Theories abound through overturned quarters of Old Monk: perhaps the love story is situated perfectly at the point of bare contact between tradition and modernity in urban India. Indeed, the college or neighbourhood sweetheart (that one possibly never even got introduced) was a brilliant distraction, a blinding hope that obscured the reality of a parent-induced partnership that lay in ambush somewhere down the line. 

DVD REVIEW: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)

WOMAN ON THE VERGE

Sometimes the value of a film is greater than the sum of its parts and often, the credit goes to the actors who keep it all together. Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is one such film, boasting of a fantastic ensemble cast headed by the ever-dependable Robin Wright Penn. She's Pippa, a 50-ish wife who appears to be sleepwalking (literally and metaphorically) through her life with her publisher husband Herb (Alan Arkin), 30 years her senior, in a quiet Connecticut neighbourhood. Pippa appears stable, plays the perfect hostess, takes good care of her husband (he's survived three heart attacks) and tries to manage her relationship with two odd-ball kids (the son is a geeky law student, the daughter a photographer who relishes conflict situations and hates her mother). And yet, because of the way Wright Penn plays her from the opening moments, you know her nerves are on edge.