I was lucky to see what I could at the Mumbai International Film Festival; many films are otherwise unlikely to be shown in India, now that the gruff censorship of something as innocuous as smoking is making filmmakers reconsider their decision to screen their films here.
Of the films I saw, Le Passe by Asghar Farhadi (of A Separation) was hands-down the best. Starring Berenice Bejo (The Artist's Peppy Miller) as a woman divided between her love for two men, it showcases everything one has come to expect from Farhadi: intense drama, moral conflicts, characters walking the fine line between desire and conscience.
In brief, a woman is in a coma after attempting suicide. Her husband (the scintillatingly good-looking Tahar Rahim) and another woman (Bejo) are having an affair. Bejo's husband, who lives separately, is in the city to finalise their divorce. The film revolves around the cause of the suicide, with other characters, such as Bejo's daughter and Rahim's colleague, contributing to a drama that is emotionally powerful as well as thrilling.
In the Oscar-winning A Separation, Farhadi stitched together a similar tale of domestic tension around a single, inscrutable incident. Nader, an Iranian man, is unwilling to leave the country, a wish his wife has staked their marriage on, because he has an old, Alzheimer's-afflicted father to care for. The woman hired to assist the father is found missing from the apartment one morning, with the father lying unconscious in the bathroom. When she returns, Nader has an altercation with her, which leads him to push her. She falls down the staircase and suffers a miscarriage.
The rest of the film tries to pin down responsibility, both overt and covert, for this incident. Did Nader push her too hard? Is the woman speaking the truth? Farhadi builds up suspense around the incident with tropes more suited to a detective story. We are taken through the courtroom battle that ensues. Money matters raise their ugly, corrupting head. But at heart, A Separation keeps a pointed focus on the human drama - people who are trying to make the best of frankly grave circumstances.
So with Le Passe. The woman commits suicide in a way that raises questions about how much she knew of the affair between Rahim and Bejo. Here too, the director uses multiple strands and shifting perspectives to escalate the dramatic tension incrementally. By the end, we know scarcely more than we did in the beginning, but in staying with the characters as they mature over the course of the narrative, we empathise with, and perhaps even become, them.
Another film that I liked was Matterhorn from the Netherlands. Fred, a strict Calvinist, is passing his dotage in splendid isolation, his wife dead and his homosexual son thrown out. Enter Theo, an adult with the mind of a five-year-old who fixes himself up with Fred. Debutant director Diederik Ebbinge sets his story in the lush environs of rural Denmark. When the small community casts aspersions on the nature of Fred and Theo's relationship, Fred has to come to terms with his ordered life and what ultimately it has snatched from him.
In Italy's La Grande Bellezza, an ageing writer goes through the motions of his charmed life - social gatherings, art exhibits, gossipy soirees - while being in the clutches of the damning realisation that he has essentially failed at his craft. The author of only one book, a successful "novellete" called The Human Apparatus, Jep Gambardella continues his search for "the great beauty" of the title. In a memorable scene, director Paolo Sorrentino punctures the vapidness of the intellectual crowd - at a party, among friends, one woman bloviates about being "both a successful mother and woman" and challenges Gambardella to prove her wrong. He does, crushingly.
The documentary on Pussy Riot, the girl band that was sentenced to two years by Vladimir Putin's regime (not entirely incorrect to say this) for showing disrespect to the Church, begins with Bertolt Brecht's quote: "Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it." For once, the words don't sound precious. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is a series of interviews Nadia, Masha and Katia give from prison. Interspersed with snippets of their performance at the Cathedral that sparked the chain of events, the film is a frank appraisal of both the band as emblematic of youth sentiment in today's Russia and the power of the state to curb dissent.
Spread over a week and three theatres, the Mumbai festival offered an impossibly packed screening schedule. If this small sample is anything to go by, it should be on top of film lovers' itinerary every year.
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