The International Film Festival of India (Iffi), which had a slow, sarkari start, is now into day five and picking up momentum. With bigger and better movies being scheduled every day, the queues at Goa’s Inox multiplex and Kala Academy are getting longer and the buzz louder.
The most popular films till now have been Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s stylish comedy Soul Kitchen; director Andy de Emmony’s West is West, a sequel to the 1999 Om Puri-starrer East is East; Nila Madhab Panda’s adorable I Am Kalam; Rituparno Ghosh’s Nauka Doobi, which is based on a short story by Rabindranath Tagore; Italo Spinelli’s Gangor, based on Mahasweta Devi’s story Choli ke Peeche; and Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage, about the battle for power in Japan’s underworld. One of the most awaited film, Kaushik Ganguly’s Just Another Love Story, is scheduled today. In this Rituparno Ghosh plays Chapal Bhaduri. Once famous for his female lead roles, Chapal is a woman trapped in an aged man’s body.
Apart from the delightful back-to-back films, Iffi offers another incentive. It is a remarkable laboratory for sociological research — which films people choose to view, and why.
Some films obviously draw large crowds because of their star cast, a few because of the director’s reputation, others for entirely parochial reasons, and certain films because of the promise its title holds. But what’s most interesting is what happens when these films don’t deliver on their promise.
Two films — Pornographia, a 2003 Polish feature film by Jan Jakub Kolski, and My Life With Carlos, a 2000 documentary from Chile by German Berger-Hertz — opened to packed houses. But less than half-way through, all the virile, happy men who had queued up in anticipation, started disappearing.
My Life With Carlos is about an assassin alright, but his name is Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, the Chilean military dictator, and Carlos is one of the men killed by his Caravan of Death squad.
Director German, who made this film when he was 30, was one-year-old when his 30-year-old father Carlos was killed by the squad which would fly around Chile in a Puma helicopter, making pit stops to eliminate resistance heroes.
This deeply sad documentary, narrated as a letter by a son to his father, is the director’s poignant journey to come to terms with his father’s life and death. German retraces his father’s life by talking to his mother and uncles, listening to stories behind family photographs, visiting the prison where his father’s eyes were gorged out, and sifting sand in an acrid expanse of land where his father and others were buried.
Pornographia, too, similar discontent. This film by celebrated Polish director Kolski is based on a satirical novel by Witold Gombrowicz of the same name. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland, Pornographia is a complicated but intriguing film about a different kind of pornography in 1943 — “selfish antihero behaviour during war, and the prurient obsession of the old with the sex lives of the young”. There is some nudity, but it is more disturbing than titillating. Not a film one can get off on. Therefore, the long, loud sighs and mass exodus.
Then there are proud, boisterous crowds for regional films, especially for the ones from south and West Bengal. Though sometimes the enthusiasm is misplaced, in the all-world cinema contest that is IFFI, loyalty trumps merit. Director V.K. Prakash’s Kannada film Aidu Ondola Aidu (Five Ones are Five), for example. This is a feature film about a man who is jerked to life one morning by a dream. He recalls how much he loved Charlie Chaplin, chucks his job and decides to direct a film about four stories. He encounters hurdles, and it is clear why. He is in imbecile, as are most other characters in the film. Aidu Ondola Aidu is madly in love with itself and is annoyingly smug about its contrived comedy. Though one man snored next to me, and I couldn’t bear it beyond 30 minutes, everyone else sat glued.
Fortunately, there are several very good films to justify and satisfy regional fidelity.
S. Aravind’s Dhruva Nakshatram (The Pole Star) is an adorable 11-minute film about an old, lonely father who has been waiting for eight years for his NRI son. The son has been planning, promising, but he never turns up. One day the old man’s grandson comes to stay with him. Grandfather ignores the little boy, but the two eventually form a bond that is both beautiful and touching.
Piracy is bad-bad and Torrent is a no-no, but try and catch this little star somewhere.
The Malayalam psychological-thriller Elektra, whose cast includes Manisha Koirala, Nayantara and Prakash Raj and is directed by Shyamaprasad, is based on the Greek by Sophocles and Euripides, and Oedipus Rex by Aeschylus, and explores both familial complexes.
Mother Diana and daughter Elektra live in a large ancestral estate in Kerala, tied to each other by suspicion and hatred. Father Abraham returns home from Jaffna, but his wife Diana is cold to his touch while his grown up daughter Elektra craves his attention. Abraham dies mysteriously that night itself, and Elektra, who knows about Diana’s affair, calls it a murder and blames Diana.
Diana and Abraham’s son Edwin, who is obsessed with his mother, arrives and Elektra tells him about their mother’s affair. What follows is a complicated, and more than a tad pretentious, drama of intrigue, murders and incest.
After Elektra kills most of its characters, it drags its feet around, engaging in vague encounters and talk, keeping the audience waiting for a twist that never comes. Yet, it is an interesting film with some good performances.
How we pick films and why we sit through them, or leave, is just a mildly entertaining aside. Iffi is not about that. It is about cinema.
To your “to do list” add a new item today: to spend a week, a fortnight, experiencing and enjoying the magic of films. And there is no better place to do it than at festivals that celebrate the celluloid.