Film Impressions

ESSAY: Actors of the Year

EVERYDAY HEROES

As it was for this year’s women where we had a clear front-runner in the performing sweepstakes, Ranbir Kapoor in Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar steals a march on this year’s field, holding together a film that otherwise seems to be coming apart at its seams. In the opening montage, he is the recalcitrant rock star, a rebel who fights through a barricade to take the stage in a giant amphitheater filled with thousands of his fans, and as the camera swoops unto his almost upholstered frame, we segue into flashback mode, with Kapoor now in college tweeds and a marked air of deference, busking with his guitar at a road crossing. Over the course of its running time, the film takes us through his character’s progression, and although the styling of his ‘look’ is an important part of the transformation of a gauche kid with cropped hair to a straggly haired rock icon, Kapoor inhabits each change like a second skin.

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ESSAY: Actresses of the Year

THE YEAR OF THE BAD GIRL

Earlier this year, our mid-year picks brought out the indie soul of Bollywood, before a litany of blockbusters took over the box-office in quick succession. Female actors often have precious little to do in many of these ‘100-crore’ bonanzas. However, this year has certainly reaped a rich harvest of great turns by women, several of which have been in films that have done reasonably well commercially. A common theme that has emerged is how the ‘bad girl’ seems to have been catapulted centrestage, indicating that audiences are perhaps increasingly able to view women outside the mould of tailor-made propriety.

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PHOTO ESSAY: The Evergreen Star

PHOTO ESSAY: The Women of Bhumika

Shyam Benegal's Bhumika—The Role (1977) featured Smita Patil in arguably her greatest role, for which she won her first National Award. One of Benegal's masterpieces, Bhumika was based on the autobiography of Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar. Amol Palekar, Anant Nag and Sulabha Deshpande play significant supporting parts, as well as a roster of fine women performers who are the subject of this slideshow.

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These images are screengrabs from the official release DVD. No copyright infringement intended.

PHOTO ESSAY: The Women of Junoon

Sanjana Kapoor has recently announced her departure from Prithvi Theatre, and the setting up of Junoon, an organisation will take plays from around the country to smaller towns. Here is a look at a film in which she made her first appearance—Shyam Benegal's cult classic, the similarly named Junoon, in which a host of women had strong performing parts. This continues our restrospective on The Women of Benegal. Junoon, based on Ruskin Bond's novella, A Flight of Pigeons, and is amongst the few films that dealt with the 1857 mutiny, a list which includes Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khiladi and Ketan's Mehta's Mangal Pandey—The Rising.

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These images are screengrabs from the official release DVD. No copyright infringement intended.

ESSAY: The Lost Oeuvre of Kareena Kapoor

A version of this article was featured on Firstpost

Given yet another 100-crore bonanza at the turnstiles, Kareena Kapoor seems set to extend her grip on the transitory mantle of the No.1 actress. In her free time, she's probably sitting with her legs up, between sipfuls of orange juice and carefully calibrated portions of jungli mutton so favored by the Kapoors, balancing rag dolls of the five Khans (as precious to her as an array of Oscar statuettes) on her knees, picking the one who is to be anointed her ‘absolute favorite’ come the time such-and-such film needs to be promoted in the kind of  marketing overdrive that makes engorgingly successful cinema from even such pap as Bodyguard and Ra One. But she’s probably never allowed to forget that for a really long time she was just Lil’ Miss Jinx (in the grand tradition of box-office poison like Meenakshi Sheshadri and Raveena Tandon).

Catch glimpses of the lost films of Kareena Kapoor in this special Film Impressions slideshow above. Use the arrows to navigate.

SPOTLIGHT: What to look out for at the MAMI Fest

As another edition of Mumbai’s premiere film festival gets underway on Oct 13th, here’s our selection of some of the films that may tickle your senses over the coming week, in all the right ways.

MELANCHOLIA (Denmark / 2011 / Col. / 130’) 

It’s a shame that the cinematic achievement that is Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia has been all but obscured by his pro-Nazi comments uttered in jest at a Cannes press conference. The director was declared persona non grata by the festival directors, while actress Kirsten Dunst’s appalled countenance as she reacts to Von Trier’s public unraveling, became one of the defining images from the festival. Dunst’s searing performance as one of two sisters (the other is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) caught up in a far-fetched but unnervingly immediate pre-apocalyptic scenario (a planet on a collision course with Earth) is a beguiling tour-de-force, light years removed from the franchise movies she usually traipses around in, and won her the Best Actress award at the festival.

A devastating turn from Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

PHOTO ESSAY: The Women of Trikal

A GENERATIONAL SAGA

Trikal, an ambitious (but ultimately unsuccessful) period drama helmed by Shyam Benegal in 1985, serves up a delectable slice of Goa in the 60s, when it was still under Portuguese rule. The late Leela Naidu starred as the doyenne of a crumbling Goan Christian clan. It remains one of the few films in which women took centre-stage with its ensemble cast including many fine talents. Here we remember the film's wonderful cast of women.

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These images are screengrabs from the official release DVD and have been processed using the Andrea Dorea preset.

SPOTLIGHT: India at the Toronto Film Fest

At any film festival, it is always interesting to find out what the films that deal with Indian themes, whether diasporic or local, have to say about us as a culture. Usually the mainstream cinema we are accustomed to, supplants our cultural identity with a manufactured one that is woefully one-dimensional (all that spice-loving singing and dancing). Luckily, that kind of cinema is under-represented at most prestigious international festivals. That's when a different kind of picture emerges—something more rich and diverse—that for a second the miscellany almost fleetingly represents a kind of 'national' cinema that a country of such immense contradictions surely deserves. Here are ten films that form the 'unofficial Indian selection' at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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LIST: What 'They' Say About Indian Cinema

A round-up of what eight celebrated international directors have to say about Indian cinema. Some of these opinions have been stated during interactions with Indian journalists, who are ever eager to get the low-down on anything and everything desi, including our cinema. That's the stock question that provides good copy (or at least a headline of some import) to the local press, but which visiting filmmakers must secretly dread, given the general quality of our celluloid output. Of course, there is no reason to believe that the directors featured here are being less than candid.

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