Alienation and empathy themes shine at MAMI Film Festival screenings

A third of the way into Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, one stops wanting to know the film’s secret and begins swimming in its mystery instead. In the Canadian director’s sophomore full-length feature, Winnipeg is indistinguishable from Tehran, a Persian teacher scolds students in French, a Manitoban breaks into fluent Farsi, Tim Hortons sells chai sadeh, men play women, women play men. Cultures bend and identities coalesce with absurd ease to show what the present moment could look like if it emphasised unifying care over an isolating individuality.

 

A sense of alienation — within and around characters — bound Universal Language and several international films screened at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. In fact, the event itself had to suffer some disconnection this year, inflicted by the backing out of a title sponsor. While that meant the festival preserved its creative independence, it was forced to play at just two venues unlike the city-wide spread of previous editions.

 

Feelings of estrangement affect the festival-going experience too. Audiences lately are split in two factions: Those so prone to checking the phone they fail to give the big screen their undivided attention, and those who audibly admonish the phone crowd. Perhaps — if Matthew Rankin were allowed to direct these scenes — the groups could turn around and surprise each other with a droll but meaningful hug.

 

But being untroubled in our skin and finding empathy for fellow people is tricky work, as two films in the lineup demonstrated. The protagonists of A Different Man and The Substance find their own bodies uninhabitable, based on self- and socially-enforced expectations. Both choose external repairs over internal peacemaking, smoothing aesthetic bumps even if it deepens the lesions on their soul. Both films play out in the world of entertainment: The former in pretentious off-Broadway theatre, the latter on tinselly daytime television. But they easily mirror current visions of beauty, fuelled by algorithms and marked by obsessive self-care.

 

In A Different Man, directed by Aaron Schimberg, the main character Edward (Sebastian Stan) deals with neurofibromatosis, which causes bulging tumours on the face and affects his confidence in public and as a small-time actor. When a curious neighbour befriends him, it is only to mine his life for playwriting material. Later a miracle treatment melts off his scars, and he feigns a new life as Guy but can’t help feeling unredeemed.

 

A truly redeemed version instead appears in the form of a cheerful third character, Oswald (Adam Pearson), who bears the same genetic condition as Edward but displays none of the shame. This sends Guy down a delicious spiral into madness. Never meet your doppelganger. Schimberg masterfully probes the difficulty of rising above looks and the possibility of social rejection being overcome through self-assurance.

 

Not a genetic condition but the fact of ageing as a woman constitutes the shame in The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s use of gore and slime, exaggerated as it seems at first, is the right amount for critiquing the pressure, cost, and profit involved in looking young. After Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a dancercise show host, is let go by a TV producer claiming that for women over 50 “it stops”,  she uses a drug to literally hatch Sue — trim, taut, and 20 years old. The delicate balance required to host this new and improved version is threatened by her self-loathing and longing for agelessness. At the end of perfection is a new standard of perfection.

 

Fargeat’s film was the crowning glory of the festival’s “female gaze” selection. It had the company of April where Dea Kulumbegashvili has a female obstetrician delivering babies and covert abortions in long takes that bare the horrors women’s bodies routinely undergo. There was also Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, in which young women realise the task of protecting family honour puts them on the road to personal hell.

 

The answer to alienation then is in freeing oneself of expectations. Why be beautiful when you can be free? Life would still be a struggle but the right kind of struggle. The Substance’s Elisabeth chooses this by showing all her warts on TV. Some 800 festival-goers at Mumbai’s Regal Cinema united to cheer for that swansong.