F.i.g.h.t C.l.u.b

– Harsh Desai

FOR THE LOVE OF A MAN  by  Rinku Kalsy

First day at MAMI and who better to make up for the 2 days missed than Thalaiva himself! ‘For the love of a man’, a very engaging and well-crafted documentary that throws an exploratory eye on the worship Rajnikanth evokes in his fans. Broken in five parts, it takes us into the heart of Tamil Nadu and peaks into the lives of Rajni’s fans to try and understand why they do what they do. We all know the stories of the milk bathing of posters, impromptu dances, instant riots and god-like worship but it is another thing altogether to hear the fans speak for themselves. And when I saw their eyes well up with tears enunciating the importance of their icon in their lives, I realised this is something a non-Tamilian like me, could hardly ever fully understand. But I sat there gaping in wonder and amazement at the power of one man. And the power of cinema. Like I said, what a start!

WIND SEED by Babu Eshwar Prasad

Indian films and documentaries is more the mood this time. I chose this because I am interested in knowing what is being made in India these days, the passion projects, not the market-oriented ‘indie’ films. Wind seed meanders its way through its observations on small-town and big-town people through the metaphor of the road and films, self-referencing itself through the other. It explores several ideas at once, of civilisation, of one’s man’s progress and another’s exploitation, of loneliness and cinema and so on. It casts an observation on these, opening up an idea and leaving it at that, and that is a satisfying approach yet the somewhat loose performances and pace gives a sense of, intentionally or unintentionally, a drag. But despite that, for the roads it takes, it’s quite a road movie. (I am also more in the ‘thought behind the film’ mood this time.)

INTERROGATION (Visaranai ) by Vetrimaaran

Raw, hard and loud, ‘Interrogation’ is a straight-from-the-heart film that speaks about how institutional corruption spares none. Based on a real life story, (‘Lock up’), it adds other events of systemic corruption and weaves a heart-rending tale of cold and cutting crime within the system. It operates at extremely high decibels and one only wishes that if only all that passion was channelised into more intensity than drama, more darkness than realism, more implosion than explosion than maybe it would have been a craftier film. Nonetheless, it scores completely in getting its emotional quotient right, stirring up our souls a wee bit more than we’d be comfortable with.

MICROBE AND GASOLINE by Michel Gondry

Despite my vow to stay away from films that shall be easily available ‘elsewhere’, I gave into some Gondry indulgence. And the fourth film of the (hard-working) day did not disappoint one bit. Two boys, both misfits, both from dysfunctional families strike a friendship, a kinship rather, that Gondry weaves into a wonderfully entertaining as well as endearing tale all at once. Their weird escapades, innovative Gondry-style yet as ordinary as their adolescence issues, bloom into a bitter-sweet story told with equal parts head-in-heart and tongue-in-cheek. After the visually stunning yet mildly disappointing ‘Mood Indigo’, Gondry is back, looks like!

– Fatema Kagalwala

THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT  by Jaco Van Dormael

It’s one of those “God a. comes down to Earth or b. Bestows power on some idiot to teach him lessons about humanity” movies, except not really.

In Mr. Nobody director Jaco Van Dormeal’s film, God is an alcoholic, abusive husband and father who mistreats humanity. The film posits that God is the author of all our problems and maladies. When his pre-teen daughter, Ea, finds out about this, she decides to rebel against him and sets out to write the new New Testament.

What follows is a film that straddles between heartwarming, bizarre and whimsical and some times all three at once. A scene transitions from comedy to tragedy quite suddenly but without jarring effect, similar to the comics that France and Belgium put out. Like in Franco-belgian comic books, the people in the story have distinct characteristics, distinct faces that border on the cartoonish. God, for example, has a pudgy nose on a scrunched up miserly face that looks as if it were made for scowling.

Most of the film explores the lives of Ea’s six apostles, all of them starkly different, most of them impeccably beautiful. It’s interesting that while Christ’s apostles were all men, of Ea’s six apostles, two are women, three are men, and one transgender kid.  They all have great fucking stories, each of them could command a sizable short film on their own but, sadly, Catherine Deneuve’s bit is the most bizarre and least impressive (or maybe it struck me so because I’m not French). However, it makes sense if you just assume that her character in the film is the same one she played in Belle De Jour. I think the feminist commentary of the film falls victim to the French peoples’ tendency to patronise feminity to borderline stereotype levels. God’s wife, for example, is portrayed as a mellow, fearful person, perennially befuddled, with eyes threatening to pop out of their sockets when she isn’t knitting.

If not entirely successful, it’s a fun flick, and inventive to boot, with gags such as God creating ordinary (but hellish) annoyances on his computer with absolute glee, and a recurring motif where Ea deduces what song plays in the heart of an individual (they range from “La Mer” by Trenet to Handel). Interspersed throughout out the film are the misadventures of God as he chases down his daughter, each of the segments ending with God getting beat up a lot.
So, yeah, if you’ve ever been fucked by life, this movie is for you.

ANOMALISA  by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

I’m still thinking about the film and what it had to say. Charlie Kaufman is never subtle. He’s pretty blunt, his writing totally on-point. But his bluntness never feels lazy or pedestrian, because he shrouds it in clever concepts and complications. Anomalisa is no different.

Originally a sound drama, Anomalisa is about a guy who’s fucking bored with people. He’s at that stage where people feel the same. The style of the film takes that and runs with it, placing it in the film quite literally. There’s David Thewlis as Mike Stone, Jennifer Jason Leigh as the eponymous Anomalisa, and Tom Noonan as everyone else. Except for Stone and his lady love, the other characters have the same face and the same voice, kind of like that scene in Kaufman’s first film, Being John Malkovich, where Malkovich enters inside his own head and meets people with the same face.

The film is in stop motion, a beautiful job that doesn’t try to hide the technique or the medium – you see the separations between the two plates (every puppet is made of two face plates, one for the forehead and one for the mouth, each of them replaced multiple times for the animation) that other studios like Laika usually wipe out with CGI.

Some of the expressions they manage to get out of the characters are simply fucking impossible. Some expressions are so subtle they wouldn’t usually work in animation. The film goes to great lengths to humanize these puppets.  We see Stone’s puppet stumble out of the shower, its genitals in full graphic view. Unlike the puppets of Aardman and Laika, Stone has a slight flush of red on his cheeks, adding to the subtle reality of the design. These things would, in an ordinary film, add to the uncanny valley effect, that if an object merely approaches reality, it will be more unnerving than an object that does not lay claim to reality at all. Anomalisa, however, isn’t an ordinary film by any means.

The voice acting is magnificent, with David Thewlis doing his finest work since Mike Leigh’s NAKED, and Tom Noonan, as (literally, in the end credits) “everybody else”, managing to make each character feel like an individual but also, not, as it befits the theme of the film. The film works so well it does because of him, and what he pulls off here is nothing short of genius. The voicework really helps imbibe these obviously unreal puppets with a great amount of humanity.
Another interesting thing that Kaufman does is “break” a stunningly beautiful moment with a comic beat, sometimes bowing down to the basest slapstick, topping the moment with profundity. He finds beauty in the pathetic, in our errors and mistakes, big and small. All of Kaufman’s heroes have been pathetic individuals, and one of the joys of his films has been to see him bore into their souls and dig out the beauty that is inherent in them. This is why his films are so human, because we consider ourselves pathetic and he tells us, through his characters, amplified versions of ourselves, that we are also beautiful. And he does the same with Michael Stone in this film, but then he does something absolutely cruel, tapping into the fleeting pointlessness of happiness.

Anomalisa is a great fucking film. And, like Kaufman’s other work, great fucking therapy.

– @psemophile