Days before the Jio MAMI 18th Mumbai Film Festival was to kick off, Karan Johar came out with a 117-second video appealing to a fringe nationalist party to allow a smooth release of his upcoming Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. This earnest, albeit soul-destroying, video sent more chills down my spine that any movie at the marquee event this year.
What role can a film festival play during such testing times, when the national discourse is steeped in neighbour bashing? For one, hope springs eternal that the choicest of cinema on display would further push the limits of the mindset of the attending public.
Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women is an achingly beautiful adaptation of short stories from Maile Meloy's collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. She does her reputation of being an indelible poet of rural America no harm while telling the stories of four working-class women fighting it out in and around the state of Montana. The movie is leavened with gorgeous meditations on how women deal with sexist work culture. Laura Dern's lawyer character is befuddled when one of her clients wouldn't grasp what she has to say but would understand when her male peer says the same thing.
Equally alluring is Paul Verhoeven's Elle, which is about a Parisian lady falling for her stalker. As the eponymous character, Isabelle Huppert delivers a barnstorming performance and equally good is the Dutch auteur's emotionless rendition of the novel Oh... by Philippe Djian. Sure, it's seemingly padded up with random househould and sexual affairs, but that's Verhoeven being blase about rape. His choice of Huppert, who has been hailed by Little White Lies earlier this year as the "world's greatest actress" at the moment, is perfect. In Elle, she's a brilliant blend of a tortured victim and playful seductress.
In the "After Dark" section, dedicated to connoisseurs of horror cinema, South Korea's Wailing (Goksung) made the most impact on me. Director Na Hong-jin is partly responsible, along with Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon and Bong Joon-ho, for spawning a wave of Korean cinema steeped in gore and scintillating thrills. Wailing is about a bunch of violent deaths happening in a nondescript South Korean village. It starts off with a couple of detectives trying to get to the root of the matter before one of them (Kwak Do-won) finds his daughter's life at risk due to these supernatural hapenings.
Tonally, the movie is reminiscent of Memories of Murder and even the climax is unresolved. But the first half reminded me of True Detective Season 1 until it started going into darker territories like The Witch, which released last year. Among the disppointments is Bruno Dumont's Slack Bay, about two bumbling Laurel and Hardy-ish detectives solving disappearance of several tourists from a nearby beach in a coastal town in northern France in 1910. The movie feels like a follow up to Dumont's L'il Quinquin, which I loved to bits, but starts losing steam and becomes a bland showcase to French idiosycrasies.
Nicolas Winding Refn's Neon Demon lived up to its billing of being a bewitching curio that's a hit or miss for people at the film festival. I am incapable of disliking anything that Refn creates. This drama is about three girls in Los Angles's modelling industry who feel threatened by the remarkable features of Elle Fanning. There's no denying the purity in Refn's images despite the pretensions they come loaded with.
Among the Indian movies, the most promising was Konkona Sen Sharma's directorial debut, A Death in the Gunj, set in the colonial town of McCluskieganj in the winter of 1979. It starts off like Satjyajit Ray's Aranyer Din Ratri, where a bunch of people go on a picnic but it turns into a compelling whodunit after an eight-year-old girl goes missing.
The event could have been a larger success but, due to a vexatious litigant, people could not watch the newly restored 1959 Pakistani black-and-white classic, Jago Hua Savera. The Rs 5 crore demanded for army fund is the total amount spent by the organisers of the film festival.
jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in
