In-flight delight

In-flight entertainment is no longer an afterthought for all international flights. There used to be a time when the same movies would run for six months at a stretch. My recent 14-hour flight from Doha to Boston was a revelation because I found movies that cater to a broad range of audience and have a sense of immediacy. There was everything from the latest Malayalam cinema to obscure French movies of 2018.

Obviously, all airlines are catching up with streaming services and providing an equally rich experience to a captive audience for 14 straight hours. Kingfisher Airlines used to provide in-flight entertainment in India a long time ago before it went belly-up and none of the other airlines found it a cost-effective measure.

I managed to watch two black comedies back-to-back: the Fahadh Faasil- and Suraj Venjaramoodu-starring Malayalam movie Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum and Game Night, which has Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams. Both are breezy, one-note dramas that were well worth my time while my flight was circling around Iraq and Iran.

However, the most pleasant of all available surprises was Western, a moody German drama directed by Valeska Grisebach with a terrific high-minded take on the title, which John Ford has basically a patent on. But replace Texas with rural Bulgaria and intrepid outsiders with a gaggle of German construction workers who land up to build a hydroelectric power plant. What’s more, the protagonist rides a horse. Grisebach’s way of telling the story about how cocky men decide to change the landscape of a place whose traditions they are unaware of is universal.

It reminded me a lot of how the USA thought it was important to pitchfork its giant military tent in Afghanistan or how China is spreading its geopolitical tentacles in Pakistan and most of Africa. A German flag is hoisted the moment the workers settle in and it provides the immediate impetus to the friction between them and the locals.

“We’re back,” the group’s chief proudly announces. “It only took 70 years.”

The only sane person in this boisterously irritating group is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) who liaises between the villagers and his overtly macho colleagues. His serene yet dour disposition allows Grisebach to tell the story from a remove. He’s the only one the villagers seem to trust as the lines on his face have a melancholic tone to them.

It's only poetic justice that Maren Ade is among the producers of this broodingly intelligent movie. It being Grisebach’s first movie in over a decade, she needed someone like Ade to support her considering the latter’s Toni Erdmann was her first movie in seven years.

“With sweeping cinematography and tightly modulated pacing, Western tells a universal story of masculinity and xenophobia on the contemporary frontier of Eastern Europe,” stated the accurate press release for the movie at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section.

The best part about the movie is how the characters speak their own language conveyed to each other mostly through gestures. Grisebach set out to make a movie which would be highbrow even by ’70s standards. The conflicts remain unsolved, the lighting is constantly natural, the actors are all amateurs and the dialogue is as stilted as it can get. Grisebach’s slice-of-life drama can be as uncomfortable as seeing a family feud breaking out in front of your eyes.

The way the Germans treat local women becomes a flashpoint and Grisebach tells us that the most macho of them all has a constant fear of his wife cheating on him. Watching Western reminded me a lot of American movie critic Manny Farber’s seminal essay on art, written in 1961. He delineates art into two categories: white elephant art and termite art. The former is flashy and easy to consume while the latter has a laser-like focus on being intelligent and long-lasting.

“Termite art, termite-like, feels its way through walls of particularisation with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement,” wrote Farber. Grisebach is a prime example of such an artist in 2018.

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