Howling fantods

For the last three months I have been reading (née savouring) David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a digressive, hefty, brainy, gorgeous slab of a book. This post post-modern book, published in 1996, is ostensibly about Quebec terrorists in search of a film by a dead film-maker that will help them mount an attack on USA. 

The book has such dense passages on tennis, drug abuse, paedophilia, depression, mathematics, philosophy coupled with Wallace’s savage wit that I am suffering from withdrawal syndrome. One neophrase that struck with me throughout the book is “giving me howling fantods”, which means an intense feeling of revulsion or fear evoked by something.

Three movies in the recent past gave me the howling fantods. 

Karthick Naren’s debut feature Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru is one such whodunnit that’s gripping from the word go. The movie’s about a retired police officer (Rahman as Deepak) who talks with a rank stranger about a murder case that rendered him limbless and scarred for life. The nerve shredding psychodrama holds up for most of its 104-minute duration because of the way Rahman and his constable (Prakash Vijayaraghavan) nearly piece together the jigsaw of a missing girl and her supposed beloved in Coimbatore. There are lot of false alarms that keep the characters and audience on their feet waiting to finding out the psycho thriller.

Tonally, the movie reminded me of Karthik Subbaraj’s pant-foulingly scary Pizza and both the movies turn out to be a cop out in their final act. It’s a minor tragedy that most Tamil thrillers always cave in when unfolding. 

Thankfully, Asghar Farhadi’s Salesman doesn’t. The movie, about a part-time theatre actor and full-time high school literature teacher (Shahab Hosseini as Emad) and his wife (Taraneh Alidoosti as Rana) in Tehran, gets gratuitously nasty in the most Iranian way. When the couple moves into a new home unaware of the previous tenant’s shady vocation, the woman gets badly beaten one evening. 

The rest of the movie is the protagonist, a flinty Hosseini who won best actor gong at Cannes 2016 for the role, tracing down the perpetrator. The slow burning movie harks back to Farhadi’s About Elly days when things unravel at alternately leisurely and unflagging pace.

After his previous dud (The Past), Farhadi seems in his elements with razor-sharp observations on gentrification in Tehran and conservative social mores that are as prevalent in Rouhani era as in the time of Ahmadinejad. There’s a lovely bit in the movie where the protagonist’s students slag off USA as “the enemy”. Farhadi takes us through the bylanes of modern Tehran like Panahi-lite. The movie, which I watched at the Habitat International Film Festival in Delhi, feels like a neo-realist paean to the Italian masters of the 1960s, what with the movie interspersed with snatches of theatrical performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

To be honest, I was disappointed that Toni Erdmann lost to Salesman at the Oscars for the best foreign film award. In a pique of post-Trump paranoia, the Academy seems to have gone for Salesman, while the German film deserved the accolade in every which way. That said, Salesman is a perfectly good movie in its own right and I’m super chuffed that it’s finding a theatrical release in India starting March 31.

A lot of Salesman reminded me of the Belgian-French mystery-cum-drama The Unknown Girl, directed by the French auteurs Dardenne brothers. Starring Adèle Haenel as Jenny Davin, the movie is about a Parisian doctor who feels the guilt heavy on her heart that a patient she refused inside was found dead a few hours later. The guilt-stricken doctor sets out to find the murderer through her patients and their friends. The movie feels like a natural progression to their previous movie Two Days, One Night that unfolds over a course of 48 days.

Both the movies have zero music and the strings have been replaced in The Unknown Girl with traffic noise and wheezing of the protagonist’s patients. I was reminded of Wallace’s phrase when she gets to know a geriatric man paid the dead girl for sex. The dour-faced Haenel would still treat that man who is crumbling under the weight of truth. That’s some serious abiding of the Hippocratic Oath.
 

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in