Sunday, March 29, 2009

Two Movies Beyond Category—Pretty Poison and The Aura: Both Definitely Worth a Look (2009-5)

Pretty Poison (U.S.) 1968
The Aura (El Aura, Argentina) 2005)

Duke Ellington's highest term of praise was "beyond category."  A truly outstanding trumpeter, for example, was not merely a master bluesman or bebopper, but, rather, beyond category—could do it all at the loftiest artistic level.

One of the challenges of presenting remarkable works of art of any genre is that many achieve their excellence in a fashion that makes them almost impossible to force into a category without doing them an injustice—that is, for one, potentially misleading someone about their intrinsic value.  In the case of movies, we tend to think of labels such as comedy, drama, thriller, action or horror; but we know very well from experience that this nomenclature, this taxonomy, hardly captures with any precision what so many films are at heart.

For this post, two films, both beyond category, are worth a look.  Each is sui generis, and each quite different in tone from the other.  Both have crime-story elements, but neither's claim to recognition is based on its plot.  Instead, strong scripts, clear direction and excellent acting combine to create complicated characters  who defy our expectations without undermining the credibility of their characters.

Pretty Poison (U.S.) 1968
Directed by Noel Black (1937-)
89 minutes, color
Anthony Perkins as Dennis Pitt
Tuesday Weld as Sue Ann Stepanek
Beverly Garland as Sue Ann's widowed mother 
John Randolph as Morton Azenauer, Dennis' sympathetic probation officer
Dick O'Neill as Bud Munsch, Dennis' unsympathetic boss at the chemical company

At first we're not sure.  Is it a joke?  Is this for real?

Dennis Pitt has just been released from a state institution after serving time as a juvenile offender:  he burned down his aunt's house (with her in it, though he claims he didn't know she was there).  And now he's muttering something about his mission as a CIA agent.  Is he crazier than he seems on the surface?  Or is he just amusing himself, a newcomer alone in a small New England town with a menial job and an unpleasant boss at the chemical factory?

Then, walking past the high school football field, he spots Sue Ann, a radiant cheerleader vigorously practicing with the squad.  We watch him watch her from a distance, see him fit her into his espionage fantasy.  But we're confident, aren't we, that a guy like Dennis has no chance to connect with a girl like Sue Ann.

Pretty Poison was a dud on its release in 1968.  In early 1969, in fact, critic Rex Reed lamented the movie in the New York Times as one of the best of the previous year, calling it a victim of Hollywood's ineptitude in marketing a work of its caliber.  Sure, lots of people wondered how a movie starring Perkins and Weld could be worth a look.  And director Noel Black, only 31 when he made Pretty Poison, disappeared into a successful career primarily in television directing for the next several decades, so no later big-screen successes led to retrospective resuscitations of his 1968 achievement.

Over the years, nevertheless, the movie's reputation grew.  Like many others, I'm sure, I first saw Pretty Poison on late-night TV.  And the film was released on tape, then in 2006 on DVD. Watching it the following year, I realized why the movie had etched itself into my memory.

What makes Pretty Poison special?  Well, for one, there's not an ounce of fat on it; everything is lean as can be, taut and to the point.  Black promptly introduces us to his lead characters and, with his uniformly excellent supporting cast, propels them forward in clean lines of action, leaving us, by the movie's end, a little bit wiser, stung by the story's ironies.  Of course, we have met people like Sue Ann and Dennis on screen before, but not often so capably, even surgically, dissected.

The screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., navigates seamlessly among plot elements and character development, stopping us in our tracks now and again with the dark wit that courses through the veins of his dialogue.  And while Perkins capably sets the stage, Weld plays the lead with a bright cheerleader's smile, lips moist with venom.

RAH!  RAH!  RAH!

Additional Background
  • Pauline Kael was in her first year at the New Yorker when she reviewed Pretty Poison; some attribute the film's critical recognition—too late to help at the box office—to that review, which can be read in her collection Going Steady (1969).  You'll find a brief condensation at http://www.geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/p5.html
The Aura (El Aura, Argentina) 2005
Directed by Fabian Bielinsky (1959-2006)
134 minutes, color
Ricardo Darin as a Buenos Aires taxidermist
Alejandro Awada as his friend Sontag, also a taxidermist
Dolores Fonzi as Diana Dietrich
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Julio
Walter Reyno as Montero
Pablo Cedron as Sosa

The story is simple.  An unhappily married Buenos Aires taxidermist, who mounts animals for museum exhibits, is invited to join his fellow taxidermist friend Sontag for a hunting trip in Patagonia.  Against form, he assents.  When they reach the remote area in southern Argentina where they'll hunt, we are drawn with the two men into the rich, dark landscape.  But it only takes a rifle shot or two before the protagonist—intensely played by Ricardo Darin and whose character's name is not spoken in the film—encounters bigger game than expected, giving him a chance to realize his hitherto harmless fantasy of pulling off the perfect crime.

Director Bielinsky elevates The Aura by leveraging the medium's visual power, heightening through silence our intimacy with the character on screen.  We are riveted watching Darin negotiating the dense, unfamiliar forest, an urban professional completely out of his natural element.  

Or maybe not.  Because this taxidermist, frightened as he is, decides to engage the challenge to his survival by upping the ante—he'll play a dead man's role and participate in a high-stakes heist at a casino lost in the Patagonian woods (and reminding me of the two casinos at the eastern end of Connecticut, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, each isolated in acres of forest).

Both The Aura and Bielinsky's first movie in 2000, Nine Queens (Nueve Reinas), utilize some stylistic elements of what's loosely called film noir.  I'm always nervous about using that term, however, because it is so broadly applied that I'm never sure the label has definable meaning.  It is safe to say that The Aura echoes some earlier noir movies of note, including, for example, Jean-Pierre Melville's wonderful 1955 Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler, or High Roller) which also involves a casino robbery but is much lighter in tone than The Aura.  Like Bob le flambeur, too, The Aura also uses the style's conventions not as a crutch but to create a renewed cinematic vitality. Watching The Aura was an exciting experience for me, something alive and new.  See if you don't agree.

Additional Background

© 2009 Bob Fauteux
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

It’s Tough Being a Kid—Seven Compelling Movies about Children—Part 2 of 2 (2009-4)

Sarny and John in Charles Burnett's Nightjohn
Photo courtesy of Echo Bridge Home Entertainment

Nightjohn (U.S.) 1996
The Return (Vozvrashcheniye, Russia) 2003
Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, Japan) 2004
The Fallen Idol (U.K.) 1948
The Rocking-Horse Winner (U.K.) 1950
Forbidden Games (Jeux Interdits, France) 1952
Good Morning (Ohayo, Japan) 1959

In Part 1 of It's Tough Being a Kid, we looked at four movies focused on the relationship of children with their parents.  Despite the quality of each of these films, their creation at least 50 years ago may make them seem, aesthetically if not substantively, a bit less exciting to our latter-day cinematic palates than they might have been: surely movies have changed enormously in tone and technique over the past century.

So now we look at three more recent movies, each offering a view of children coping with their parents—present or absent—and the challenges of survival, let alone growing up.  And each movie well worth a look.

Nightjohn (U.S.) 1996
Directed by Charles Burnett (1944-)
92 minutes, color
Carl Lumbly as a slave named John
Allison Jones as Sarny, a young slave who befriends John
and calls him Nightjohn
Lorraine Toussaint as Dealy, the slave who raised Sarny from
infancy after Sarny's mother had been sold off to another plantation
Beau Bridges as Waller, the plantation owner

Nightjohn is a story of American slavery.  Sarny, the young protagonist, has lost not only her mother, sold off to another plantation, but, true to the nature of chattel slavery, has also been stripped bare with her fellow slaves of her entire heritage and human dignity.

Directed by Charles Burnett as a television movie for the Disney Channel and, thus, aimed at a young audience, Nightjohn has strong adult appeal as well.  In fact, it amazes me that the movie is apparently so little known.  Even Leonard Maltin's hefty Movie Guide (I've checked my 2007 edition) does not include a review among the 17,000+ the volume does carry, this despite Nightjohn's intrinsic interest and Burnett's well-deserved critical reputation.  In the Chicago Reader in 1996, for example, Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his extended review of Nightjohn as a masterpiece, writes, "I think a strong case can be made that Charles Burnett is the most gifted and important black filmmaker this country has ever had."  And, as Nightjohn demonstrates, Burnett is a gifted director beyond racial category.

In Nightjohn, Sarny is a house slave, a bit pampered compared to the field slaves who do the harder agricultural work, growing cotton on this plantation; the house slave's better conditions are, of course, the slave owner's wager to insure that these aliens behave in trustworthy fashion within the sanctuary of the white household.

As the story develops, Sarny befriends Nightjohn, a field slave who, we learn, had once escaped slavery to freedom in the north; but he has chosen to return to the south and to slavery to pass on to others his hard-earned, and forbidden, legacy of literacy.  Today, we take literacy for granted without appreciating its power and responsibilities.  In Nightjohn, we understand anew the revolutionary and liberating implications of the ability to read and write.

Burnett and his cast dramatize this story of triumph amidst slavery's dehumanizing deprivations—physical, intellectual, cultural and spiritual.  He renders the slaveholder himself, ably acted by Beau Bridges, in nuanced tones as a man caught between his self-serving racial hatred and the pressing demands of his bank, ever ready to foreclose on a defaulting loan.  

As America enters a new era, perhaps, with the election of President Obama, who himself often reminds us of the continuing relevance of history, Nightjohn is surely a movie worth a look.

Additional Background
The Return (Vozvrashcheniye, Russia) 2003
Directed by Andrei Zvagintsev (1964-)
106 minutes, color
Vladimir Garin as Andrei, the older brother
Ivan Dobronravov as Ivan, Andrei's younger brother
Konstantin Lavronenko as their father
Natalya Vdovina as their mother

Ultimately, as we painfully reconfirm throughout life, it's so difficult to know other people—really know them—not even our most intimate others, our parents, our siblings, our spouses.  

When this movie begins, a mother and her two sons—Andrei is in his teens, and Ivan is a bit younger—live alone together,long deserted by the boys' father.  Abruptly, without warning, without explanation, he returns.  He invites the boys to join him on a trip.  But neither son really knows his father, and the younger has almost no recollection—at least no comforting memory—of the man.

When Ivan demurs, his father no longer invites, he demands that both sons accompany him. Afraid of the father's barely restrained rage, and not clear at all about where he's headed, the boys assent.

The Return is its director's feature debut, and his dark, powerful movie had for me the feel of encountering some primal mystical ritual, promising—or threatening—a transformative experience. And Zvyagintsev delivers on his promise.

Dad takes the boys on a journey along back roads and over cold green waters, under vast, glowering grey skies, to a wooded island where he recovers...well, we're not exactly sure what it is.  But that's not the point.  During the trip, his anger forges an even stronger bond between the two sons.  While they cannot be sure of their father's motives or intentions, they—and we—must be always on our guard.

With a sure hand and superb acting, Zvyagintsev tests the boys' mettle in a grueling contemporary tale of fathers and sons.

Additional Background
Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, Japan) 2004
Directed by Kore-Eda Hirokazu (1962-)
141 minutes, color
Yagira Yuya as Akira, the 12-year-old son
Kitaura Ayu as his sister Kyoko, about 10
Kimura Hiei as Shigeru, their brother, about 6
Shimizu Momoko as Yuki, their sister, about 5
You (née Ehara Yukiko) as the children's mother, Fukushima Keiko
Kan Hanae as Sako, a girl about Akira's age or a bit older, who
befriends Akira and his siblings

The New York Times ran a story today (12 March 2009) about a former National Football League running back who says he's broke now, having sired nine children by nine different women over the years since the first was born, when the athlete was still in high school—he's 30 now.  He says he wants to support them but doesn't have enough money.

Nobody Knows is about five children who live in what appears to be, at the beginning of the movie, a middle-class apartment in a Tokyo high-rise.  Their working single mother doesn't let her children attend school—something about possible bureaucratic intrusions.  Instead, she has her oldest, Akira, her little man, oversee his siblings while she's away at work during the day. We see the kids occupy themselves, sometimes grow impatient, at they await Mom's return in the evening.

Then Mom goes away, on business trips she says.  She'll be back shortly; and the first couple of times, she is, after a week or two.  Meanwhile, Akira manages everything with the help of his sister Kyoko.  He bathes the younger kids, keeps the peace when spirits flag, takes the money Mom leaves to do some meager grocery shopping, and cooks so that dinner will be ready for her nightly arrival when Mom's in town.

But one time Mom leaves, and she doesn't come back.  She sends messages, suggesting she'll be home for Christmas, but then her messages stop.  The kids wait; they miss her, they're running low on money for food, they're running low on hope.  What's going on?

This is a long movie, perhaps a bit too long.  But Kore-Eda isn't concerned with cinematic economy—surely, these children know what a bit too long means, and the director uses the time to disclose through the course of their waiting that each child had a different father, none willing to support his child or the mother.  And Mom has been something less than diligent, less than effective in rousing these men to redress their irresponsibility...or to change her own errant ways.

In this quiet, devastating account of human strength despite familial disintegration, the actors playing the children create their own insular world—and we look on, hoping for...what exactly?

For his performance as Akira, Yuya Yagira won the Best Actor award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

I am grateful to our older daughter for introducing this movie to me; since seeing it, I've also watched two other Kore-Eda films, both well worth a look:  Maborosi (1995) and After Life (1999).  I'm now looking forward to seeing his latest available on DVD with English subtitles, something entirely different apparently, Hana:  The Tale of a Reluctant Samurai (2006)
.
Additional Background
© 2009 Bob Fauteux




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Sunday, March 1, 2009

It’s Tough Being a Kid—Seven Compelling Movies about Children—Part 1 of 2 (2009-3)


Paulette and Michel in René Clément's Forbidden Games 
Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection

The Fallen Idol (U.K.) 1948
The Rocking-Horse Winner (U.K.) 1950
Forbidden Games (Jeux Interdits, France) 1952
Good Morning (Ohayo, Japan) 1959
Nightjohn (U.S.) 1996
The Return (Vozrashcheniye, Russia) 2003
Nobody Knows (Dare mo-shiranai, Japan) 2004

Childhood—if not growing up—is a universal experience for those of us living into adulthood. So, as I've watched movies over the years, I've continued to remember a number of films whose portrayal of the drama of children's relationship with their parents especially moved me.

It's not surprising, perhaps, that these more memorable films, more often than not, tend to depict difficult situations. The cliché has it that happiness, whatever its virtues, doesn't lend itself so productively to artistic exploitation as conflict, and this selection confirms that observation.  (But I recognize that my selection is just that —my choice of seven movies out of thousands of possible picks. I invite your suggestions of movies worth a look that contradict the cliché.)

This time, we'll take a look at the first four of seven movies you may not have caught, all worth a look.  All are contemporary, set over the last 70 years, except for one historical drama in Part 2; and, as you see above, they come from around the world.

The Fallen Idol (U.K.) 1948
Directed by Carol Reed (1906-1976)
95 minutes, black and white
Bobby Henrey as Phillipe
Ralph Richardson as Baines, the butler
Sonia Dresdel as Mrs. Baines
Michèle Morgan as Baines' lover, Julie
Denis O'Dea as police inspector Crowe

Director Carol Reed is probably better known for three other films:  The Third Man (1949), his classic tale of corruption in postwar Vienna, instantly recognizable for the movie's evocative zither-driven score and starring Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, and Aida Valli; his 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando as a foppish Christian Fletcher; and his 1968 musical Oliver! for which he was awarded both Best Picture and Best Director. This last movie, of course, underscored Reed's remarkable ability to work with young actors, and The Fallen Idol is a case in point.

Based on a short story by Graham Greene, who also wrote the screenplay, the movie sees the world largely through the eyes of young Phillipe.  He's a little boy who lives in a large foreign embassy in London; his diplomat father is too busy to have much time for his son, and Phillipe's mother is also absent, recovering in a hospital from an unspecified—perhaps mental—illness.  Instead, the impressionable boy befriends the butler Baines, a parental surrogate whose empathetic conversations with the lad win Phillipe's unspoken loyalty and rapt admiration. Baines has a problem of his own, however—to wit, his wife, Mrs Baines, the termagant.

When Phillipe witnesses a murder, the stage is set not only for a terse tale of suspense but, more importantly, a revealing exploration of how children come to understand that the fundamentals they learn from adults—everything is clear black and white—are sometimes misleading simplifications. 

As the plot unfolds and the tension builds, we wonder how Phillipe will grapple with the harsh challenges to his boyish perceptions that ever-changing reality poses.  The movie's final shot epitomizes this painful human learning process with a close-up of Phillipe's face; it is a shot that may remind you, too, of the unforgettable concluding frame of François Truffaut's great film of youth, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups), 11 years later.

Additional Background


The Rocking-Horse Winner (U.K.) 1949
Directed by Anthony Pélissier (1912-1988)
91 minutes, black and white
John Howard Davies as young Paul Grahame
John Mills as Bassett, the family gardener and Paul's friend
Valerie Hobson as Paul's mother
Hugh Sinclair as Paul's father
Ronald Squire as Paul's Uncle Oscar
Philip Larkin's poem "This Be the Verse" (1971) famously (and corrosively) etched forever how parents pass on to their children, as surely as genes, the psychic damage that their own parents had earlier inflicted on them:  "They may not mean to but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra just for you."  A concise film version of D. H. Lawrence's 1926 short story of the same title, The Rocking-Horse Winner is as well a cinematic rendition of Larkin's tragic maxim.

Young Paul's parents are frazzled:  their spending exceeds their income, and they won't stop spending, or fighting. But Paul develops an uncanny ability:  when riding his rocking horse in his room, he drives himself into a frenzy—and can see in his mind the winner of horse races on which his friend Bassett the gardener and his Uncle Oscar plan to wager.  

As the adults grow increasingly confident of the boy's lucrative clairvoyance, the drama heightens.  We watch—and we see the building pressure from his parents' fraught marriage weigh ever more heavily on Paul's young shoulders. Oh, his visions do not fail, but...

As Pauline Kael wrote years ago, "This little-known English production of the D. H. Lawrence story is a demonstration of how good a movie intelligent people can make when they have better-than-intelligent material to work on."  What she says remains true.

Additional Background
  • I first learned of this movie—and many others—from Pauline Kael's brief review—the one quoted from above, and one of 280 included—in her 1968 collection Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  It was her paragraph-long reviews there that, like enticing items on a menu, helped whet my lifelong appetite for good movies, long before the advent of video made them so accessible.
Forbidden Games (Jeux Interdits, France) 1952
Directed by René Clément (1913-1996)
86 minutes, black and white 
Brigitte Fossey as Paulette
Georges Poujouly as Michel Dollé
Lucien Hubert as Michel's father, Monsieur Dollé
Suzanne Courtal as Michel's mother, Madame Dollé
Louis Sainteve as the parish priest

What a strange movie, at once heartbreaking, tender and, a few times, quite charmingly funny.  Over the many years I had not gotten around to seeing the movie, its title in English stuck in my mind as suggestive of something entirely different—a steamy story of extramarital lust, perhaps.  But no, this is the small tale of a young girl orphaned by war. And in a brief early scene, we are pulled helplessly with her as Paulette crosses the stone bridge, transforming her life from the security and innocence of an only child with loving parents to...life completely on her own.  The image is succinct and powerful.  

I have read that director Clément was moved to make a movie on this subject after having seen a newspaper photo of a young Chinese girl, desolately alone in a war-ravaged field.  He then happened to read the novel by François Boyer that became the basis for this movie's screenplay and on which Boyer collaborated with Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. I mention the film's provenance because it shows the primacy of image for Clément, and he fills his movie with images that consistently show, not tell, us of Paulette's lonely journey.

Brigitte Fossey, by the way, was all of 5 years old when she played Paulette so indelibly in her first role; she went on to long success as an actress.

Although Forbidden Games is by no means a suspense story, too much information may create preconceptions that leave one less open to the film's exquisite images.  I suggest it may be better, then, to postpone reading detailed commentary, such as that listed below, until after you've seen the movie.  

Additional Background
  • Forbidden Games is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection, with excellent supplementary materials, including some important alternate footage Clément considered using. At Criterion's website you'll find background information, including two essays, at http://www.criterion.com/films/350
  • Roger Ebert's insightful Great Movie review, which helped me significantly to better understand the film, can be found via his review search at http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
  • Pauline Kael's commentary on Forbidden Games is collected in her first book, I Lost It at the Movies (1965). And British-born David Thomson's review—one of 1000 single-page reviews—appears in his 2008 volume "Have You Seen...?"  A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.  Like Kael over her career, Thomson covers a lot of ground; in this single mammoth book, he reviews movies from the silents through 2007 and is especially generous with his coverage of movies from each decade from the 1920s to the 1970s.


Good Morning (Ohayo, Japan) 1959
Directed by Ozu Yasujiro (1903-1963)
93 minutes, color
Shidara Koji as 13-year-old Minoru
Shimazu Masahiko as 7-year-old Isamu, Minoru's younger brother
Ryu Chishu as the father of the boys, Mr. Keitaro
Miyake Kuniko as their mother, Mrs. Keitaro
Kugo Yoshiko as their aunt, Mrs. Keitaro's attractive (and still single) sister
Sada Keiji as the tutor of the boys, Mr. Fukui
And now, in the words of Monty Python's Flying Circus, something completely different—an amusing movie about children in a happy, but believably human, and loving family.

If you're familiar with director Ozu's movies, you're aware that most are, like Good Morning, centered on family life. Usually, however, they focus on the sad undercurrents, especially the strains that often develop between parents and their adult children.

In contrast, Good Morning shows us a family whose two boys are dead set on convincing their thrifty father to buy a television set so they can watch sumo matches at home, instead of at their neighbor's.  We witness this entertaining test of wills, of course, and also catch glimpses of the domestic politics universal to families and neighborhood living. We also get a few peaks at the larger picture—a postwar Japan undergoing major cultural changes, thanks in part to American influence.

I must confess that I found this movie particularly interesting because I lived, as a young high-school student with my family, in Tokyo in 1959, not far presumably from where the film is set.  It was a gift to pay a visit, through the artistry of a master, back to that time and place for a few minutes.

Here's hoping you'll find Good Morning almost as enjoyable as I did.

Additional Background
  • See the 2001 review of Good Morning by Gary Morris at Bright Lights Film Journal at http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/31/goodmorning.html
  • Nicholas Rucka's 2003 review can be read at the Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Cinema blog at http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/gmorning.shtml
  • You'll find over 6000 articulate reviews at Dennis Schwartz's blog, including his 2006 posting on Good Morning at http://www.sover.net/~ozus/goodmorning.htm
  • Acquarello reviews a number of Ozu films at the strictly film school blog, including Good Morning at http://filmref.com/directors/dirpages/ozu.html#ohayo
  • Nick Wrigley, a co-founder of the Senses of Cinema site, posts his 2003 profile of the work of Ozu at http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/ozu.html
  • When it comes to learning about Japanese film, the best American interpreter is Donald Richie.  He went to Japan in 1947, returning home in 1949 for college at Columbia University till 1953, and has since spent much of his life in Japan dedicated to, and writing about, Japanese movies.  He's produced a prodigious stream of articles and books.  I've usefully referred to his updated 2005 A Hundred Years of Japanese Film:  A Concise History with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos.  He has also written extensively on Ozu; his 1977 Ozu: His Life and Films remains available as a paperback.

© 2009 Bob Fauteux
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

If You Saw Slumdog Millionaire, Four Indian Movies Worth a Look (2009—2)

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) 1955
Pyaasa (Thirst) 1957
Ankur (The Seedling) 1974
No Smoking 2007

If you're one of the millions who've seen Slumdog Millionaire, you may be interested in several movies that offer a more distinctly Indian take on their country and people.  While director Danny Boyle and his colleague Loveleen Tandan, credited as co-director—India, drew upon Bollywood's well-known musical accents, as well as basing the script on an Indian novel, the movie seems overall fairly conventional—Western conventional, that is—in form.  Boyle nevertheless infuses his film with tremendous energy and has obviously held most viewers' rapt attention.

But Indian cinema has a long and accomplished history of its own, and many of us have not had an adequate chance to sample its highlights.  Here are four movies, available on DVD, you might well enjoy.  Two are classics, another one not so well known but by a highly regarded director, and the last by a relative newcomer who has emerged over the last five years as an exciting director.

If you haven't seen these movies, please take a chance—they're all worth a look.  (And, of course, I've seen them
all with English subtitles.)

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) 1955
Directed by Satyajit Ray (1921-1992)
115 minutes, black and white, in Bengali
Subir Bannerjee as Apu
Karuna Bannerjee as Apu's mother
Kanu Bannerjee as Apu's father, Harihar, a Hindu priest
Runki Bannerjee as Apu's sister Durga (as a little girl)
Uma Das Gupta as Durga a bit older 
Chunibala Dev as Auntie Indir


Pather Panchali is the first film of director Ray's acclaimed Apu trilogy.  Based on a late 1920s novel by Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhay, the movie tells the story of young village boy Apu and his family.  The great sitar player Ravi Shankar provides the ravishing score.

Ray had never made a movie before, nor his cinematographer Subrata Mitra taken a single foot of film.  But when you see Pather Panchali, you'll find that hard to believe.  It's breathtakingly beautiful:  the black and white is so rich that, when the wind blows a field into waves of tall grass, we relish its lush green and smell the tropic humidity in the air, then thrill at the approaching train.  And Ray's creation of the life of his characters on screen is equally luminous:  Apu's family becomes our own, his village our home.

Socially and historically, Ray's depiction of Apu and village life is an introduction to India on the cusp of modernity and urbanization.   In fact, in the two superb following films of the Apu
trilogy—Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) and The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959)    —Apu himself goes to the city for his college education and stays to work.

But Pather Panchali and its companion films are not treatises.  They are human documents of the first order.  If you have not seen them, let them introduce you to the many excellent movies that Ray made over his career.

Additional Background
Pyaasa (Thirst) 1957
Directed by Guru Dutt (1925-1964)
146 minutes, black and white, in Hindi
Guru Dutt as Vijay, a poet
Waheeda Rehman as Gulabo, a prostitute
Mala Sinha as Meena, Vijay's college sweetheart
Rehman as Mr. Ghosh, a wealthy publisher and Meena's husband
Johnny Walker as Sattar, a street masseur and Vijay's friend 


Guru Dutt is regarded as a key figure in the rise of Indian cinema, and Pyaasa perhaps his crowning achievement as a director.

The story is conventional, a variation on the timeless boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-finds-girl theme; but within this framework, Dutt develops his theme, the plight of the outsider, in this case the artist unwilling to compromise with a money-hungry materialistic society.

Music also plays a key role in Pyaasa.  Thanks to the lovely score by S. D. Burman, the movie is a pleasure to hear as well as watch.  But whereas today's Bollywood extravaganzas are flashy visually and throbbing musically, Pyaasa's songs are of another era, often delicate, melodically luxuriant.  (It's inexcusable, by the way, that the available DVD that I watched provided no English subtitles translating the extensive lyrics, except for the movie's final song.)

The story involves a narrative line, interrupted (and generally enriched) by a series of comic and musical interludes. Director Dutt also plays the lead role as the sensitive poet Vijay, who is despised as shiftless by his brothers who have even sold—for next to nothing—his beloved poetry manuscript...as waste paper!  To make matters worse, Vijay can't forget his college beloved, the beautiful Meena, who, despite an attraction him, is just too ambitious to be satisfied for long with the penniless poet.

As the story unfolds—slowly by today's standards—the director and his cinematographer, V. K. Murthy, move us to empathize with Vijay as, at long last, he learns to accept reality and, ultimately, finds love with Gulabo, the prostitute who recognizes his true value.  What turns these cliches into magic is Dutt's imaginative use of lighting, music and his actors' fine performances.  In its 2005 selection of the world's 100 greatest all-time movies, Time magazine selected Dutt's Pyaasa as well as Ray's Apu trilogy.

Additional Background 
  • For a brief review of Pyaasa by Richard Corliss from the Time all-time greatest movies listing, go to http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete—list.html
  • Philip Lutgendorf, Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, offers an informative website—called philip'sfil-ums notes on Indian popular cinema; there you'll find a knowledgeable review of Pyaasa by Prof. Lutgendorf's colleague, Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor in both the Dept. of English and Dept. of Cinema and Comparative Literature. There are also reviews of other Indian movies, including of five additional Dutt films.  The site is http://uiowa.edu/~incinema/
  • Dinesh Raheja has an extensive and informative review , with lots of interesting production detail, at http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/jun/23dinesh.htm
  • Vinay Lal, Associate Professor History at UCLA, co-edited with Ashis Nandy, Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema.  His website—Manas:  India and Its Neighbors—includes a brief overview of Guru Dutt's career at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Culture/Cinema/GuruD.html



Ankur (The Seedling) 1974
Directed by Shyam Benegal
131 minutes, color, in Hindi
Anant Nag as Surya, the landlord's son
Shabana Azmi as Lakshmi, Surya's cook and housekeeper
Sadhu Meher as Lakshmi's husband




I first saw Ankur at a university film society in the late 1970s or early '80s and was deeply impressed.  Over the years, the movie remained in my mind as one of the most powerful I have ever seen.  Recently, then, when I first had the chance to see it again, on DVD, I was a bit nervous:  would it hold up?  would I still be enough the same person to appreciate what it has to offer?  Well, I'm happy to report that Ankur has stood the test of time for me, and I think you'll find it worth a look too.

For his first feature film, director Benegal sets his story in a rural village.  There, Surya, the imperious son of a wealthy local landlord, is enthusiastically looking forward to going off to college for what he foresees most of all as an extended vacation from life in the boondocks.  But his father orders him to forgo school and to stay home to manage one of the family's farms.  Ankur depicts Surya's tenure, explicating through vivid characterizations the evils of caste and the hereditary economic privilege of traditional India.

Of course, Surya is not pleased to have to go to work, and he plays hardball with everyone.  The primary object of his attention, as things develop, is the lovely lower-caste woman Lakshmi, whom he hires as housekeeper and cook. Lakshmi's husband, who is deaf and mute, is an out-of-work potter, marginalized by the advent of inexpensive mass-produced aluminum ware. In her first role, Shabana Azmi plays Lakshmi brilliantly, with quiet dignity and credibly       restrained sensuality.  Since making Ankur, of course, she has gone on to become one of India's acclaimed dramatic actresses.

What makes Ankur special is Benegal's reliance on his characters and his vision to let events play out naturally:  we get no sense that someone behind the scenes is pulling puppets' strings to manipulate our reactions to what we see.  

The mindset of the oppressed castes is, of course, largely foreign to the American perspective.  But understanding the drama of Ankur requires us to recognize that centuries of enforced subservience immobilized the Indian poor. What animates Ankur is its setting at a turning point, a period of nascent change in the early 1950s. perhaps, when this cultural straitjacket was just beginning to loosen.  A new sense of possibility is planted as the movie unfolds; I'll never forget the final shot of the young boy hurling his rock.  Thus, in the simplest, most elegant way, Benegal and his movie tell us nothing, but show us everything.

(In 1976, Benegal released another particularly potent movie, Manthan (The Churning), about labor unrest at a dairy collective.  I know, it doesn't sound entertaining; but it's riveting moviemaking, which, unfortunately, is not available on DVD, so far as I know, in the U.S. with English subtitles.  Please alert me if you know otherwise.)

Additional Background
No Smoking 2007
Directed by Anurag Kashyap
128 minutes, color, in Hindi
John Abraham as K
Ayesha Takia in two roles, as K's wife Anjali and as his secretary Annie
Ranvir Shori as K's friend Abbas Tyrewala
Paresh Rawal as Guruji, who runs The Laboratory




Like Slumdog Millionaire, Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking incorporates Bollywood music and dance.  But its congeries of cinematic fireworks sets off a series of explosions that, in the end, don't quite hold together, don't quite add up.  In fact, some of its excesses threw me off course midstream.  But I'm glad I persevered—even though the movie is overlong, it displays Kashyap's considerable talent and innovative potential, taking him beyond his capable (and also overlong) Black Friday (2004), about the 1993 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, then Bombay.  (Given the November 2008 ordeal, Black Friday is perhaps even more timely now than when it first appeared.)

The premise is simple.  Handsome, wealthy K is married to the beautiful Anjali.  But he has a problem he can't shake—smoking.  In fact, Anjali is so upset with his habit that she's threatening to divorce him.  So a friend tells him about The Laboratory where they have a surefire smoking cessation program, success absolutely guaranteed.

Kashyap has cited Bob Fosse of All That Jazz fame as an influence, and I believe it.  I also thought of the Matrix movies as I watched No Smoking.  But this is the only film I've seen that uses cartoon baloons (on occasion) to display its human characters' thoughts!

Surreal, high-tech, vivid, visual, sometimes more like an extended music video in concept and execution.  (And a bit of Grand Guignol, with several shots of graphic violence.)  In the end, too long, too self-indulgent on Kashyap's part.

And what is the director getting at? Clearly, smoking is a MacGuffin.  So is it a metaphor for all human follies?  Or is the film about the risk of resigning our personal responsibility in favor of totalitarians making too-good-to-be-true promises?  

I suspect that Kashyap doesn't care.  He wanted to make a movie expanding the range of his technique.  And, imperfect (too mild a word, I know) as it is, No Smoking exhibits, I think, not only Kashyap's talent but also suggests  India's cinematic vitality and its capacity for growth,  Definitely worth a look.

Additional Background

© 2009 Bob Fauteux


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