CineM Review: Un Coeur en Hiver (1992)

Cryptic Gazes

‘A Heart in Winter’. Directed by Claude Sautet, this is a story of repressed feelings and repressed individuals. The story itself may be a ‘love triangle’ if you will, or is it a ‘love quadrangle’? Or is it about love at all? This is a story essentially, of the characters of Maxime, Stephane and Camille – all 3 are connected with creating music. Maxime and Stephane are in the business of crafting violins and Camille herself is an up-and-rising violinist. Maxime is a polished social sort cultivating a dedicated clientele. Stephane is the master craftsman; he works away quietly eschewing unnecessary interactions - cutting, measuring, burnishing and beveling the sonorous wood. The violinist Camille stepping onto a cusp of musical greatness is involved in a romantic relationship with Maxime. All these details atleast the film is very much clear on.

The film also shows the extent to which Stephane is introverted; he shares a normal working relationship with only 3 people – his business partner Maxime, a book-seller Helene and a past mentor who is the closest to a father figure that Stephane can call upon. Stephane seems to understand himself but does not like what he reads in himself; that is his major orientation towards the external too – he understands but does not know what he ought to do. Stephane’s life gets shaken however when Maxime gets involved with Camille, and both move in together in a bid to cement their blossoming relationship. For a careful, precise person for whom his craft is his only life, this development creates the first uncharacteristic stirrings in Stephane’s bonded heart. Further developments follow when the normally unobtrusive Stephane steps into Camille’s life in small ways – attending Camille’s rehearsals and recordings, shooting long deep gazes – and Camille too finds herself getting attracted towards the quietness and seeming completeness of the violin-maker. Camille admits her new-found admiration in front of Maxime, and comes over to Stephane. All that has happened till now is conventional romance; what transpires after this point is a bit complicated.

Stephane rejects Camille’s love, explains that he does not love her and only wanted to get back at Maxime for some reason he does not fathom, leaving Camille devastated. In a canvas which seems to abjure passion and vivid displays of emotions, there is a cathartic outburst when Camille barges into one of Stephane and Helene’s usual coffee-table conversations in a café, and confronts Stephane for leading her on when he really had nothing to offer. A sad cycle of remonstrance, bitterness and ultimately, forgiveness involving all the 3 characters flows from all this mess. All these details the film lets us on gradually and sometimes, with stark clarity in tiny delicate moments.

This brings us to the parts where the movie apparently has nothing to communicate to the viewer. Camille who studied for a time under the same mentor as Stephane’s is described by the mentor as the “cold, polished girl who keeps others at a distance” and yet, she inexplicably falls for nothing more than the brooding, intense gazes of Stephane who is to remember, too closed to even venture an opinion in a conversation not involving violins. Somehow this strange attraction may be accepted for love is, if anything, quite inscrutable. However, the bafflement runs still deeper – there is a hint (and nothing else) of a past failed romance to partly explain Stephane’s regressive demeanour; the movie is curiously silent on why Stephane should harbor a resentment towards the suave, worldly Maxime (one can only laboriously infer that Stephane might be nursing a deep jealousy for the easy social grace with which the latter manages his business and his romance), and there is eventually, the added matter of the veneer of sterility in the relationships formed by the principal characters. Maxime (who is to a degree, self-seeking) is willing to leave his wife to live with Camille but is oddly undemonstrative of anything except an altruistic understanding of why Camille should opt for (again the not-obvious charms of) Stephane. The book-seller Helene who is obviously close to Stephane and confides about her love-life in him (in the hope of eliciting a romantic interest??), shares a platonic interest in Stephane’s ‘thing’ with Camille. So, there is Maxime who is obviously in love with Camille who in turn falls in love with Stephane who unfortunately, has no love for her. There is also Helene who may or may not be in love with Stephane. There is also a dense side-story involving the mentor and his lover, a merry but sometimes high-strung duo who may or may not be important in the scheme of things.

The high points of this movie notwithstanding the manner in which the characters sometimes interact, are the masterful performances of both Daniel Auteuil (as Stephane) and Emmanuelle Béart (as Camille). As the intensely private Stephane, Daniel lends great credulity to the hesitant, sometimes deep gazes with which his character views others and the world. One can always sense in any scene involving Stephane that the character is holding a part of himself back so that no one is able to completely perceive him or what he thinks. He is troubled yes, in an unseen way but he is also strangely assured in the way he goes about his trade or garnering the interest of Camille.

The character of Camille attracts a ready lampoon on the guileless but love-lorn woman who is taken for a ride and then unceremoniously discarded. This is where Emmanuelle as Camille, exhibits a singular portrayal of a woman who is scorned but save for that one moment in the café scene, never lacks in grace. Emmanuelle Béart is one of those true Pre-Raphaelite beauties with her long, slender swan-like neck, raven hair, expressive eyes that make one swim with headiness and perfect lips. She lends beauty to everything that she enacts in the movie; of particular mention is the absolutely rapturous manner in which she plays the violin. As she holds up the violin and screws her head slightly upwards, eyes half-closed in deep passion, she embodies the true fiery ornament of transcendental music. She embodies the emotion of love too, in that bridled but lush manner which is the hallmark of a true romance; there is a scene where Emmanuelle wonderfully masks the first flushes of emotion in a violin recital where Stephane directs steady, unflinching looks at her. She starts playing the violin, then becomes conscious of Stephane; there is a tiny imperceptible change in her posture, her music stutters, and she asks for a glass of water.

The perfectly assured manner in which Daniel and Emmanuelle act out their characters, obviously stems from the complete way in which they understood what their characters are and how they should behave. This makes me believe that there is a scope of re-interpretation into the story and the story’s characters, and a more complete understanding. For the moment though, this is a movie which sees some bits, misses a lot and explains little.

CineM’s Verdict:

Grandparents & Grandkids

Once there was an old man. You could say that he had a natural predisposition towards crankiness. He did not get along with most grown-ups but he had a granddaughter who stayed along with her parents in the house of her grandparents. And this granddaughter was the apple of her grandpa’s eyes.

Both grandfather and granddaughter would spend every available moment together playing, singing or going out for walks. At that time, the granddaughter could not have been more than 3 years old and she had just started playschool. Every morning before going off to school, she would rush over to her grandparents’ room, coax her grandfather out of bed and get him a glass of water. After she returned, both the old man and the young granddaughter would play their own peculiar games. One of the games was pretend-fishing, the duo would spread out pages of old newspapers on the living room floor; and then both grandfather and granddaughter would take out cane sticks with threads attached and pretend that the scattered paper was indeed fish, and proceed fishing. They would pretend to put their fish in a bag so that they could carry their catch home. Another game was bashing stuff; the old man would take out old cups of china, clay pots and other odds and ends of breakable stuff, and lay it out before the young kid like a veritable spread. The granddaughter would then pick up any object that caught her fancy and go thunk-thunk, disintegrating and scattering little bits of broken stuff all over the living room. All this noise and mess would anger the grandmother who would loudly admonish the frolicking duo. The grandfather would then reply, “She’s just a kid; she’s supposed to break things, It’s OK.”

One day while having his customary morning glass of water offered by the granddaughter, the old man was pointing out a lizard on the wall. He was talking to his granddaughter about the lizard and its life (what it ate, how he could grow back its tail even if it fell off, etc.) and walking towards the lizard, looking up and still holding his glass of water. He struck the arm of a chair and fell down on the floor. He took a nasty fall and the family took him to a hospital. The old man never returned home.

Sometime later the garlanded portrait of the old man was put up on a bureau in the grandparents’ old room. Every morning brought an inexplicable puddle of water on the bureau-top just beneath the portrait till the family found out what was causing it. You see, every morning before leaving off for school, the young granddaughter would still fill out a glass of water, stand up on a chair and hold it to her grandfather’s portrait. She would put the glass to her grandfather’s lips in the portrait and try to make him drink.

CineM Review: Get Shorty (1995)

Get your Sparkling Dialogue, Wacky Characters Here

In a curiously enticing world where molls have "eyes like strange sins", and a hood possesses a battered face that looks "as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline", 'Get Shorty' (the book as well as the film) exists in a comfortably cheeky space. I have a theory; everyone likes a good gangster movie – the wise guy on the screen takes the risks, peppers his speech with smug humour (or cold threats) and knows how to throw a good punch when it is required. I have got another pet theory too; every wise guy wishes he was John Travolta.

Elmore Leonard who wrote this story, is the natural successor of such accomplished writers of pulp fiction as Ray Chandler and Dash Hammett. And like any good crime thriller, ‘Get Shorty’ is filled with colourful, sceptical and assured characters whose main motivation is to pull off the next big thing, and look good too while they are doing it. Adapted almost to the letter from the book, the film has John Travolta as a cinema-savvy, smooth-talking and smartly-attired loan shark who follows the trail of a debt gone bad from Miami to Las Vegas. He takes a detour to LA to put the squeeze on B-grade film producer Gene Hackman and the story veers away from the normal ‘pay-up-or-I-will-bash-you’ routine. Travolta who must surely be the most films-knowledgeable toughie to ever grace the silver screen, enters into an unlikely movie producing deal. This story about gangsters and movie people is inhabited by characters with "Runyonesque" names – Travolta is ‘Chilli Palmer’ and works for a mobster named ‘Momo’, and has a running feud with another toughie from Miami named ‘Ray Bones’ (Dennis Farina). His introduction into the movie business puts Chilli in touch with another set of quirky characters who might have come straight out of legendary Ed Wood’s world – a B-movie ‘screamer’ (played by Rene Russo), a well-regarded but pompous actor full of himself (De Vito), a bumbling stuntman turned hood named Bear (James Gandolfini), and a local hood Bo (Delroy Lindo) who believes “what’s the point of living in LA unless you’re in the movie business?”

And when the hustlers try to hustle their way into producing movies (Chilli because he’s genuinely interested in movies and Bo because he ….well, believes that anyone can do it), and pugnacious Ray Bones simply driven by his greed to recover his money, meet with another set of smug, greedy, selfish and dubiously talented characters in the movie business, the plot rises onto delicious humour laced with just the right amount of thrill. The plot here (just like Guy Ritchie’s ‘Snatch’) is not the main attraction, you see ‘Get Shorty’ and like it for what it offers in such abundance – sparkling tete a tetes and stellar all-round good acting. In a canvas etched with numerous archetypes (struggling B-movie folk, shifty gangsters, acclaimed actor given to grand delusions), it is easy to overdo the obvious but that is not the case here.

Travolta as Palmer perfectly pulls off a slight hint of a menace beneath a tone which is always silken smooth; he is brilliant at portraying a ‘cool guy’ with his mannerisms and yes, the cigarette. He gets some of the most memorable lines in the movie – there’s a running gag with the line ‘Look at me’ and he corrects people’s grammar when he’s not reeling off the names of movies (both classics and B-grade alike) and actors. The movie folk have their own oddballs – Gene Hackman as the slightly insincere and scatterbrained producer, Rene as the ‘screamer’ who has a working knowledge of both films and the crime world, and a pretentious major movie actor in De Vito who gives cheesy imitations when he’s not mouthing inanities like ‘visual fabric’. The icing on the cake is Farina’s turn as Ray Bones; breaking into expletives at every moment and with an angry-looking broken nose now turning purple, he is the ultimate oddball. In a performance streaked with brilliance and affected insouciance (something which he would reprise as the gangster ‘Avi’ in ‘Snatch’ 5 years later), his actions are wholly unpredictable. The comic mix of broad slang and grandiloquence in Ray Bones colourful language is a delight to take in.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld and the cast must have had a real ball with this movie. I have a feeling that the movie regards itself with a sly, impish gaze in the way it references Orson Welles’ film noir classic ‘Touch Of Evil’ and has Rene Russo arrive breathlessly out on the balcony above Travolta a la Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in another classic film noir ‘Double Indemnity’. The final tip of the hat is a grim-faced and just as purple-nosed Harvey Keitel in the role of Ray Bones in the movie within a movie.

CineM’s Verdict:

CineM Review: The Station Agent (2003)

Quiet, Real

Back in 2003, I was trudging through a dreary final year of my graduation; that same year however, Hollywood twirled, weaved and waltzed to give us two brilliant films on unlikely friendship and quietly-born intimacy. Both Sofia Coppola's ‘Lost in Translation’ and Thomas McCarthy’s ‘The Station Agent’ are understated and yet sparkling gems, unobtrusively exploring characters disparate in all respects but possessing a common intangible sense of loss or unfulfillment, and the uncommon friendship which evolves out of nothing more than a shared existence; in LIT’s case, of staying in the same hotel and in TSA’s case, of living in the same town.

It would be easy to reduce this movie’s story to one of the unlikely coming together of first a dwarf, second an energiser bunny who may be considered a festival of unaffected gregariousness, and third a single woman grappling with twin losses – that of a dead child and an approaching divorce. The slightly more challenging task is to see beyond the stereotypes which such characters usually attract, and take a peek into what makes them behave the way they do. Real-life ‘short person’ Peter Dinklage as the dwarf Finbar McBride, Bobby Cannavale as the hugely enthusiastic Joe Oramas operating a coffee-shop-on-wheels and always-perfect Patricia Clarkson as the hesitant Olivia Harris, are the people around whom the story revolves. Michelle Williams as the unsure but well-meaning local librarian (Emily) and cute Raven Goodwin as the sedate school-girl Cleo complete the delectable ensemble.

Intensely reclusive Fin moves from the city to a quiet town called Newfoundland in New Jersey (his lawyer helpfully informs him that “there’s nothing out there…nothing”), to take over a recent inheritance which is actually an abandoned train depot; what follows immediately his arrival is a portrait of quiet but rich mirth. Fin who must have inwardly rejoiced at the lawyer’s dismissive view of placid Newfoundland is met with an acutely polar reality. Picture Fin’s first day in Newfoundland – he goes over to Joe's mobile coffee-shop just outside his depot where he is treated to a morning cuppa accompanied by a relentless flow of friendly questions, and while on his way to the local convenience store, he is nearly run over by a distracted Olivia who apologises profusely and drives off, but nevertheless manages to narrowly avoid crushing Fin a second time while he’s on his way back. Fin’s lengthening stay in the depot is punctuated with all-too-familiar interactions with the indefatigable Joe who persists in plugging away at his reserve and the much quieter interactions with a naturally good-natured Olivia. Fin lets in the other two slowly into his quiet world of the train depot and trainspotting, and we are treated to an unhurried but very revealing slice of how the characters behave, and their motivations.

Writer-director Thomas McCarthy who is deeply interested it seems, in developing stories of unlikely friendships (in ‘The Visitor’, ‘Win Win’, ‘UP’) draws out such minute details of the characters (Fin walks mostly with his hands deep in his pockets and his head perennially held down) with a delicate touch. He builds the characters with a sure-footed intensity, and complements the tumult in the lives of his main characters with the flustered and needy inflections of the librarian Emily and directness of the only character in the cast un-afflicted with any inner struggles – that of Cleo, the young girl with frank questions and an open mind. I felt a clear identification with the characters; their completely real lives and the blossoming of a friendship which is honest and filled with actual warmth.

In a movie which is actually well-acted with just the right amount of expression and reserve, Bobby Canavale’s turn as the unflappable, ‘doesnt-take-no-for-an-answer’ blaze of energy is the real showstopper.  He actually bludgeons both Fin and Olivia with absolute open, warm human connect and wriggles his way into the lives of two very introverted people. Peter Dinklage brings out a real character tethered to his own sense of self and the perceptions so easily expressed, by others; in a life of either ridicule or absolute isolation, the way he has trained himself to be defensively reserved and the manner in which he is drawn out of his solitude by the gutsy friendliness and obvious interest of Joe and the similarly troubled and calling-for-help aura of Olivia, is slowly but clearly tapped into. The surprise in the package for me is Michelle Williams who even in that limited space gave ample proof of the quiet strength which she inherently brings to the characters she plays (like ‘Wendy and Lucy’, ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ among others).

This is one of those movies so sparsely-populated with characters and so thin on a plot, but very riveted on showcasing not ‘what is to happen’ but ‘what exists’. The 3 main characters so perfectly act out a lifetime of feelings in their performances, and convey so many little truths about grief, solitude, compassion and simple pleasures. By the time Fin, Joe and Olivia take their quiet leisurely stroll down the rail tracks in picturesque New Jersey, I very much wanted to be there on that walk with them too.

CineM’s Verdict:

CineM Review: Life of Pi (2012)

An Allegory Grand

‘Life of Pi’ takes you along on a heady plunge into the limitless world of a young boy named Pi, a boy so precocious, so innocent and at times, so brave that you are left pleasantly confounded. Inspired by a book which may be thought of as ‘unfilmable’, this is less of a story about a stranded boy and a tiger; it is more of a fantastic journey into the workings of the mind of Pi. Yann Martel who wrote the original book, bases his story on fantasy, intrigue and ultimately, belief – Pi’s quirky childhood, the chequered environs around which he grew up, the calming, rational influence of his father and mother (so unusual for most parents), the ultimate tragedy of the stricken ship and the subsequent odyssey of a boy and a tiger on a lifeboat essentially provide us with a glimpse. In Pi’s case, that glimpse transcended onto a stark gaze into the microcosm of his entire universe. This idea is beautifully shown in a scene where the legend of Yashoda (Krishna’s mother) seeing the entire brahmaand (universe) inside the open mouth of the boy Krishna is played out along parallel lines when Pi mimicking the tiger’s action, looks down over the boat’s side into the infinite depths of the sea.

The heart of the story is the feat of Pi surviving 227 days at sea on a boat with a powerful and mystical tiger. The interesting prologue showing Pi’s family, Pi’s upbringing and the fateful voyage are all temporal signposts leading to that epic heart where a boy and a beast find themselves bereft, unsure but unshakable inheritors of the primordial urge to survive. A deep distrust between the two gradually turns into a grudging recognition of each other, which ultimately forms into an unspoken mutual love and respect. This inventive ballet between brain and sinew, the eternal dance between will and elements is played out with the immense sea as the narrative frame, with Ang Lee expertly evoking the loneliness and unpredictability of the unbroken blue.

The hallmark of this film is great aesthetic beauty; the richness of its visual appeal reminds me of Terrence Malick’s ‘Days of Heaven’ where man and nature have been photographed in such deep impact and intensity which I have not seen anywhere. Just like the sprawling and wind-swept prairie in ‘Days of Heaven’ which serves as that one constant point of view, the often-treacherous sea remaining always counter to Pi’s ingenuous narration, does justice to that same role here.

Ang Lee is well-known for making 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ (2000) and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (2005) – both films explore the same strain of loss, the ageless search for security and joy. While the former set in feudal China uses imaginative martial arts technique against a backdrop of desert, mountain forests and bamboo groves, the latter offers us a very private view framed by mist-filled mountains and grassy glades into the unlikely lives of two cowboys. Lee brings those same poetic sensibilities here to illustrate and accentuate the sensory appeal of the story. However where his previous two masterpieces had a raw and intimate feel to the events and the characters, his latest offering has a plastic (for want of a better word) tone. The director’s desire to create that picture-perfect and at times, sterile imagery (eschewing animal actions involving blood and gore, not filming portions of the book which might have been deemed ‘mature’) seems to be a concerted attempt to find an universal audience.

Post his extraordinary odyssey, Pi presents us with a riddle as old as the world itself – should we only take in and believe the facile facts of man and his actions, or can we get inspired by something which goes beyond what we simply are or what we ended up doing?

I find it inspiring to mention here the story of a young aviator who died when he was only 19 years old. John Magee was an American fighter pilot who died in a mid-air collision during World War 2. He was also a poet and 4 months before his tragic death in December 1941, he had composed a sonnet titled ‘High Flight’. The inspiration of this poem lies behind the sorties on his Spitfire fighter-plane when he would climb up and soar into the clouds. The sonnet has been reproduced here.

"High Flight"

 Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

 And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

 Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

 of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

 You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

 High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

 I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

 My eager craft through footless halls of air....

 Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

 I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

 Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

 And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod

 The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

 - Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

I have also reproduced a portion from the film ‘The Snow Walker’ where one of the characters brings to mind the grace-filled words of the poem in a memorial service. I am sure that Pi too, flung in the midst of that immense blue sea and in his puny boat must have felt that same feeling of oneness with God and with life itself. The film is a celebration of that same feeling.

CineM’s Verdict:

CineM Review: Ikiru (1952)

To Create Is Beautiful

When Akira Kurosawa began filming ‘Ikiru’, the commercial and critical success of ‘Rashomon’ (it won the highest award ‘The Golden Lion’ in the Venice Film Festival 1951 and collected an unheard-of amount for a Japanese film in the US) was fresh behind him. He must have felt very confident about his story-telling abilities. And that shows amply in ‘Ikiru’ – a film examining the struggles in the life of a bureaucrat who is fated to die of cancer shortly; the story itself an inspiration from Tolstoy’s short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".

Ikiru means “to live” and strangely (but perhaps not so strange after all), the protagonist starts leading a life true to himself only when he is compelled to stare straight ahead at the grim prospect of death. Kurosawa teamed up with Shinobu Hashimoto (who had earlier written the sparkling script of ‘Rashomon’) and Hideo Oguni to write the screenplay, and the nuances that they bring into a seeming-conventional story are very insightful. The story outline is simple enough – a long-serving, tired and thoroughly insipid bureaucrat is diagnosed with stomach cancer but given a misleading medical prognosis; he gathers though that he does not have long to live and surrounded by a stifling work-place environment and an equally unloving atmosphere at home with his son and daughter-in-law, our protagonist examines his past life, and comes to an epiphany about what he should do in his remaining days. This is a theme which has been widely explored both in literature and films – the onset of a fast-approaching death coupled with memories of a life made up of words left unsaid and work left undone, the ritual breakdown of mind and body, all culminating in a deeply-felt realisation about life (or death). This much-travelled niche is where Ikiru breaks the mould - through performances so sincere, a screenplay so sensitive, and a camera so faithful and alert to what it seeks to capture and what it desires to leave out.

Ikiru’s opening shot with a voice-over narration introduces the protagonist’s death even before we have had a glimpse of the protagonist, in a form of a X-ray film showing the cancerous growth in the stomach. The story then progresses along as the versatile Japanese actor Takashi Shimura in the role of the bureaucrat as Kanji Watanabe, sits through a cold, unsettling (and as proved, ultimately devious) medical diagnosis, stumbles back home to his dark bedroom which is sparsely adorned with certificates of appreciation for a long (but hollow) career in service, ultimately rebelling against his own deep-set frugal nature to seek out a night of pleasures and thrills. This is the definitive point where the film veers away from convention to present us with a truly masterful narrative.

That single night of debauchery has been shot in a marvelous sequence where Watanabe accompanied by a kindred spirit, a writer of cheap novels but possessor of an altruistic sensibility, taste the pleasures of a night that Tokyo has to offer. Stumbling in and out of dubious alleys, in and out of bars, both men end up in a lounge. This lounge is the setting for the scene which strikes me the most; Watanabe requests a song (‘The Gondola Song’) which the lounge pianist starts playing, the young and beautiful people of the night congregate to dance, but stop in mid-step when Watanabe starts singing the lonesome strains. The camera which initially lingers behind a swaying bead screen as the young couples start to dance, glides onto Watanabe as he sings, panning upwards to his face with the glass ceiling in the background reflecting the frozen figures of the other revelers. The sad lyrics of the song which call upon the young to come fall in love before their youth fades away, are sung in a low, so soft voice with the lips scarcely moving and tears silently welling up in Watanabe’s eyes, have stayed with me. This sequence is further embellished with interesting use of reflections of the people on glass surfaces presenting us with allegorical shots of how life holds different views for different people. In a sense, we see the characters both as they really are as well as how they appear to be.

That night is followed by a curious and unlikely relationship that develops between Watanabe and a much- younger female colleague. This bond which Watanabe feels is not easily understandable until the cathartic last dinner in the restaurant when Watanabe reveals haltingly and with characteristic reserve, and later more urgently what he seeks from the girl – the silent and somewhat raw cry of him who is going to his grave for an attempt at redeeming the life which is now past him. Kurosawa directs this part of the story with a stark camera’s eye which lays bare the utter helplessness in Watanabe’s soul – there is a wonderful shot where the side profile of Watanabe’s face frames the picture while the younger, happier, more open face of the girl lingers in the background – a contrast between the two.

Moments in Ikiru are not poetic; scenes are sometimes jagged, insistent, urgent, often giving us close shots of Watanabe’s face as he’s trying to work out his thoughts, perhaps attempting to capture the conflicts in the mind. The most dominant feature on the screen is Watanabe’s drooping figure; the camera follows him ruthlessly around, in one shot capturing his sorry bent figure on knees, frozen in a dark staircase – in a futile attempt to reach out to his son.

As the character of Watanabe approaches and meets its inevitable end, we are presented with a penetrating study into life and human nature, as his family and colleagues attempt to deconstruct his later days and ultimate death, while sipping sake in his wake. Unlike ‘Rashomon’ which captures truth as it undergoes a beguiling and self-mutating cycle of discovery, Ikiru is more concerned with examining the truth as it appears from one incrementally-developing perspective. We, the audience possess the privilege of knowing the unalloyed truth of both Watanabe’s life and death; however as the story’s characters (unsure and some of them, over-zealous) try to understand the motivations for Watanabe’s change from a bored bureaucrat to a tenacious civil servant, we are treated to the scattered and small ways in which the truth and eventually the meaning of life itself, make themselves apparent.

The masterstrokes in this film are too numerous to list them all; however I will make special mention of the scene where Watanabe’s rushes off after that fateful last dinner with the girl, while a bunch of happy party-people gather around the stair-head. They enthusiastically sing ‘Happy Birthday’ for someone who is as yet unseen but coming up the stairs, as Watanabe hurries down below them, his hands clutching his new symbol of hope, with a new flame in his eyes as he understands the way to live. We revel in his re-birth.

CineM’s Verdict:

A Business that Flies…

I recently made a couple of trips to a place called Sonapur in the outskirts of Guwahati; the town lies on the highway barely 30 kms away. Earlier Sonapur was famous for its scenic beauty, the quaint picnic spots it had to offer and its sweet, juicy oranges. Sonapur is now more known for the multitude of dhabas that have come up along the highway, some of whom have grandly advertised themselves as ‘resorts’. The town itself is bound on one side by the highway, on another side by a tea estate and ringed by agricultural land all around. Besides this, Sonapur is also home to a defence establishment (whether army or air force, I don’t know for certain). Beyond the mushrooming of the said dhabas along the fringes and the recent opening of 2 vehicle showrooms along the highway (a Mahindra one for commercial vehicles and another belonging to Maruti cars), there is little commercial and industrial activity to be seen in the place.

Anyway, when I went into the town I asked an old resident as to the predominant occupations of the local folk. He replied that most people were cultivators, some of them ran myriad trading businesses (grocery, convenience, clothes stores, etc). Besides the regular clientele of defence personnel and their families, there is a fair sprinkling of hill tribal communities who also came down to sell their produce in the town, forming another customer group for the town’s traders. When I further enquired about any other business besides the stores and the ubiquitous dhabas, the geriatric man replied, “Oh yes, a great many do engage in ‘flying business’.” Flying Business?! This was the second time in as many months that I had come across the term. The first was when an old acquaintance had claimed that flying business was in fact, one of his major sources of income. I asked him what he meant and he explained.

To the uninitiated, let me make it clear that the term has nothing to do with propellers, aeronautics, flight ticketing or any other paraphernalia that we normally associate with ‘flying’. It is in fact a business that possesses no concrete definition; it operates mostly on the twin bases of local know-how and sociability. For instance, when one party decides to sell off a plot of land and you get hold of an interested buyer and arrange for the deal to materialise, you charge a certain fee as the facilitator – this is one model of flying business. Oh, flying business has numerous models of operations – again for instance, if you are new to a place and someone comes along who manages the gas connection and the police verification for your new rented home, that becomes yet another illustration of how a flying business may be conducted. Chances are that the same guy will also come forward to get you the registration certificate for your newly-purchased car, finagle a trading licence from the oily local officials, get you a maid or even arrange for the neighbourhood electrician to install the fancy chandelier in your living room. I guess you may call this guy a broker or even a middleman. In its essence, a person who engages in flying business is a sort of all-rounder offering his services; he does ‘this’ and ‘that’ and 'everything else' – his only consideration being the fee. The flying businessman may therefore, be considered a necessary and very useful part of the local community, providing his services through the extensive native network that he has cultivated.

The downside is that flying businessmen are often less than sincere about the services that they supposedly offer. They might charge fees upfront for 'incidental expenses' for things which never materialise; frequently leave you hanging with vague statements of ‘you know how it is, these things take time’ after taking responsibility or even rip you off with legal documents or certificates of decidedly dodgy provenance. There is quite simply no accountability mechanism through which one can ensure that services are rendered on time, as promised and in the correct manner. These are all reasons why the term ‘flying business’ has acquired a certain shady connotation today. Perhaps when you are a flying businessman, it is a constant temptation to just take off…..with your client’s bucks!!