My Mumbai Film Festival Diary [2018]
4 days, 13 films. My thoughts, in the order that I saw them.
DAY 1 [Regal, Colaba]
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs [Netflix]
Originally envisioned as a 6 part TV show but later made into a western anthology film by Coen Brothers, a series of non-connected, quirky, dark vignettes adorned by names like Liam Neeson, Zoe Kazan, Franco & Tom Waits. Fuck yeah I am going to watch it on the big screen even if I knew it was gonna be on Netflix.
I missed the first one & half stories, thanks to the slow local from Andheri to Churchgate, but out of the last 4 that I could catch, I loved Meal Ticket (Neeson & Harry Melling) and The Girl Who Got Rattled (Zoe Kazan) while All Gold Canyon was a beautiful slow burn featuring the outstanding Tom Waits who doesn’t really speak much in it but watching him dig the ground for gold and stealing Owl eggs for dinner was a treat of its own. I couldn’t really understand much of the last one, The Mortal Remains, due to the lack of subtitles but I am definitely gonna go back to it once its released because from whatever little I could understand, it was hilarious.
Meal Ticket starts with a limbless stump (a mellifluous-voiced Harry Melling, the Dudley Dursley of Potterverse) reciting lines from Shelley’s Ozymandis (which will always remind me of my favorite Breaking Bad episode, the Rian Johnson helmed S5E14), Declaration of Independence and biblical tales like Cain and Abel while his gruff master, Liam Neeson, makes sure they have food to eat and a place to sleep. It’s set in the cold, unforgiving winters, is repetitive (not boring) and ends on perhaps the cruelest note of all 5 that I saw.
Zoe Kazan brought me so much joy in the penultimate chapter, The Girl Who Got Rattled, which is the longest and the cutest. Like the rest of them, it also ends on a heartbreaking note, but before that it gives you ample reasons to smile and laugh, even at a dog execution scene, and features some of the best camera work of the entire film.
PS: I caught up with the first story on Netflix and HOLY SHIT HOW GREAT TIM BLAKE NELSON IS!
BlacKkKlansman [USA]
Based on the book Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth (played in the film by John David Washington s/o Denzel), who became the Colorado Springs Police Department’s first black officer in 1972, this Spike Lee joint is a fucking riot, start to finish. The most whistles, claps of the fest and a thunderous standing ovation at the end, this was a full on paisa vasool ride. It was also scary for the fact that the story of a White Supremacists gang infiltrated by a black man in the 70s doesn’t look very different from the present day America. It hit too close to home as well because they have Nazis while we have Bhakts. Same shit, different labels.
In the most memorable and uncomfortable scene of the film, Lee juxtaposes a KKK Initiation ceremony (during which they watch Birth of a Nation) with Harry Belafonte’s narration of the gut-wrenching details of Jesse Washington’s lynching to a group of young black activists interspersed with the images from the time (1916) to highlight the fact that its just the execution of racism that has changed, not the tools and malice behind it.
“America would never elect somebody like David Duke president,” Stallworth says.
His boss, Sergeant Trapp, responds: “For a black man, you’re pretty naive.”
John Oliver pointed out our complacency towards the rise of Authoritarianism all over the world in the latest installment of Last Week Tonight. Lee, being the woke black American filmmaker that he is, already knows that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear so he took it upon himself to shatter the naivete of the current generation with his not-so-subtle jabs at the modern day MAGA mania and it’s a glorious return to form for the man. He ends this cautionary tale with spine chilling footage from the Charlottesville white nationalist rally and dedicates the films to Heather Heyer, a counter protestor who got mowed down by a Nazi in the said rally last year.
Heather Heyer’s last Facebook post read: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
Vice has done exceptional work covering that incident. I can’t stress enough how important this short docu (22 mins) is. Please watch it.
A word for Adam Driver & the rest of the cast, including the Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen who plays the vilest KKK guy and Topher Grace who plays David Duke — Out-fucking-standing!
Trivia: BlacKkKlansman received a 6 minute standing ovation & won the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Film Festival.
The House That Jack Built [Denmark]
Matt Dillon makes an incredibly crackling career comeback as Jack - a failed architect, a narcissistic megalomaniac, an OCD suffering psychopath - who gleefully mutilates animals, men, women and children, throughout this unsettling yet deliriously funny gore-fest, divided into 5 chapters, while David Bowie’s Fame complements these beautifully deranged yet surprisingly hilarious sequences. We, the entire jam packed Regal theater, flinched, gasped, booed, screamed, giggled and marveled at the audacity of Lars Von Trier, who has created a straight-up epic in this horrifying, sadistic, 155-minute long dive into the demented mind of a serial killer who debates Art vs Morality with Verge (Bruno Ganz, Hitler from the famous Downfall clip-meme) through the lens of his top 5 kills that have played a pivotal role in shaping him into the monster that he is.
“The old cathedrals often have sublime artworks hidden away in the darkest corners for only God to see. The same goes for murder.”
In between the killings, LVT takes multiples detours to discuss architecture, classical music, the creative process, concentrations camps and ironically, violence in movies, and references few of his own films (Nymphomaniac. Melancholia) while doing so.
Sitting through this film is akin to going through a psychological examination to test your own sanity. I was aware that people had walked out of the earlier festival screenings and I usually don’t mind graphic violence but this was the first time in my life, for a brief period of time during Chapter 3, I felt so nauseous and restless that I wanted to scream and run away . I somehow managed to control the churning in my gut and hung tight, and I am so glad that I did because the rest of the film, especially the last 20 minutes were pure cinematic orgy. Bonkers good!
If you want a taste of what this film is like, here’s one short snippet from the most misogynistic chapter which also happens to be my favorite for the sheer self-awareness of what it is doing to the audience. Also because Riley Keough who plays a dumb bitch named Simple (Ha!) in it is ❤.
“What can I say? I understand Hitler. He did some wrong things, absolutely, but I can see him sitting there in his bunker at the end … I sympathize with him, yes, a little bit.”
Lars Von Trier said the above before Melancholia premier in 2011 and got banned from Cannes. Now he casts Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler, as God (?). Well played, sir.
DAY 2 [PVR Icon/ECX, Andheri]
The Miseducation Of Cameron Post [USA]
Set in 1993, this film starts with a Homecoming dance set to this ironically apt ballad, Anyone who knows what love it (will understand) that ends with Chloe Grace Moretz’s boyfriend catching her in the backseat of a car hotboxing & making-out with a girl. She is promptly sent to a ‘Gay Rehab camp’ called God’s Promise run by a brother sister duo — Dr Lydia Marsh (a sinister Jennifer Ehle, also known as the resident Disney Villain) and her brother Reverend Rick (the ever so adorable John Gallagher Jr) who is now not gay (‘in recovery’ as he puts it) thanks to his sister and is paraded around as an example. They try to brainwash the kids into believing that God wants them to lead a life without the sin of same-sex attraction, or masturbation. Basically, hate yourself if you like sex and hate yourself even more if you like same-sex. Cam struggles initially but eventually finds comfort (weed, hikes, hugs, karaoking 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?”) with two similarly kindred spirits, Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane) and Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck) both of whom have great chemistry.
Adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s YA novel, the Iranian-American film-maker Desiree Akhavan takes us into the seemingly safe but actually toxic confines of a conversion therapy camp, free of any kind of physical abuse but full of invisible psychological trauma that pushes the vulnerable, lost kids to make horrible choices. Owen Campbell, one such kid in the camp, in a gut punch of a scene, recites Paul’s Thorn in the Flash (For when I am weak, then I am strong.) and maniacally starts doing push-ups until Dr Marsh steps on his back. That scene jolted me to the core.
After a horrible incident, when an auditor interviews Cam about the care given to the children in the facility, she asks him -
“How is programming people to hate themselves not emotional abuse?”
and this line perfectly captured the soul of this beautiful coming of age tale for me.
It won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, 2018 beating films like Sorry To Bother You*, Wildlife and Eighth Grade.
Wildlife [USA]
This film belongs to Carey Mulligan. She completely owns it and though I am rooting for Toni Collette for Best Actress, I wouldn’t mind her taking the trophy home because she absolutely destroyed me with her performance in this directorial debut of another favorite actor of mine, Paul Dano.
Dano, along with his partner Zoe Kazan, elegantly adapts Richard Ford’s novel of the same name, and very confidently, albeit in an old school dramatic way, chronicles the disintegration of a marriage in 1960s Montana which we experience through the eyes of a 14 year old Joe (an extremely gifted Australian kid Ed Oxenbould who was equally great in The Visit where he rap-informed us that shit doesn’t taste like chicken.) In a mid-life crisis prompted by sudden unemployment, his dad Jerry (the ever dependable Jake Gyllenhaal who still hasn’t won an Oscar) leaves to fight fire. His mother, Jeanie, not knowing how to cope with the absence of her stubborn, childish husband gradually comes undone and starts doing embarrassing things in search of stability and companionship. She takes solace in the arms of a wealthy widower (Bill Camp) and Joe gets to witness a side of his mother that no child should ever get to see. The dinner scene at Camp’s house where Carey, wearing the silk green ‘desperation dress’, shines the brightest is a masterclass in acting.
It is not an easy piece of literature to adapt and I can totally see why Dano got drawn to the source material and he is totally in command of his craft here but other than the stunning performances by the principal cast and the gorgeous cinematography by Diego Garcia (he shot the shit out of Montana as Marc Maron would say in his WTF podcast chat with Kazan), it left me a bit cold. But the more I think about it, the more Joe’s calm face haunts me. I will definitely revisit it soon.
For now, look at how great these three are, would you?
In the Aisles / In den Gängen [Germany]
Shy and reclusive Christian (a terrific Franz Rogowski) joins the supermarket as a night shift forklift operator. One day he meets a flirtatious Marion (equal part zingy and sad, Sandra Hüller) from ‘Sweets’ and instantly falls for her, hard. Much of the first half is centered around Christian and Bruno, his boss, who used to enjoy his life on the road much more than a shelf stacker in this megastore. He shows him the ropes, takes illegal smoke breaks with him in prohibited areas, plays chess, eats expired food from the waste-bin, and cautions him to not get his heart broken because Maria is married. Christian, of course, doesn’t pay heed.
Thomas Stuber, along with his cinematographer Peter Matjasko, makes excellent use of the symmetrical geometry of the storage area to tell a deeply melancholic love story between these two emotionally damaged souls. Most of this film takes place inside the vast, soulless, dimly lit corridors of a retail supermarket yet it is tremendously lyrical and humane in the way it observes the mundane activities of these night shift employees and their interpersonal dynamics. Very few films have captured the blue-collar drudgery as magically as this one does. I was completely transfixed with a huge grin on my face when Christian learns to operate the forklift for the first time and Easy by Son Lux (i.e. Sun Light) plays in the background. What a great song choice for such an otherwise drab sequence. Smooth AF!
The film meanders a bit in the second half and trades humor for a morbid seriousness owing to Christian’s curiosity about Marion outside work, which felt a little out of place tonally given the expectations this film sets with its sharp, witty first hour. But it still doesn’t change the fact that this is one of the most visually arresting and poignant films I saw at the fest and I quite liked it.
PS: A Joaquin Phoenix looking tattooed guy falls in love with a Michelle Williams looking woman is how I first responded to these two. They both, of course, are great German actors in their own right but my uneducated ass didn’t know that. If only I had seen Victoria and Toni Erdmann before.
It won the German Film Guild Award & Ecumenical Jury Award, Berlin 2018 and Best Leading Actor, German Film Award, 2018.
The Day I Lost My Shadow / Yom Adaatou Zouli [Syria]
I desperately wanted to get into Jaaon Kahaan Bataa Ae Dil, but it was houseful by the time I reached. Shoplifters was out of question because there was a 3 km long line outside the screen with people waiting there for more than 6 hours already!
I did not want to end my day yet, so I took a chance with this one and it turned out to be pretty decent though a bit more context would definitely have helped me absorb it better. All I knew that it was the directorial debut of French-born Syrian director Soudade Kaadan and the first ever Syrian film to premier at Venice Film Festival where it also won the ‘Lion of the future award’ for best debut.
It’s a pretty simple story of a single mother, Sana (the beautiful and talented Sawsan Arsheed) who goes out in search of a gas cylinder to prepare a meal for her son in war torn Damascus (circa 2012 when the war just broke out), and gets lost behind enemy lines with two strangers. The film documents their struggle to get back home during which we find out that the trauma of war has made people literally lose their shadows, a metaphor that doesn’t quite land as powerfully as it should have. Still, not a bad film to spend 94 minutes with.
DAY 3 [Regal, Colaba]
Burning / Beoning [South Korea]
What would you do when you are an aspiring writer (read poor) and are pitted against a rich yuppie - a modern day Jay Gatsby (people who are rich but no one knows how. South Korea is full of them.) — and he steals your GF from right under your nose, quite literally. You would go crazy, won’t you? That’s exactly what happens to Jong-su when his idiosyncratic GF Hae-mi (cute as a button Jeon Jong-seo, making a remarkable debut) comes back from Nairobi with Ben (Steven Yeun, charming/subtle/menacing as fuck, all at once) and starts hanging out with him casually and one fine day disappears without a trace.
One day Ben who lives in the cleanest, poshest area of Korea, Gangnam (oppa!), visits Jong-su at his father’s ramshackle farm in Paju, where North Korean Propaganda can be heard from afar. After the three smoke up, Ben confesses, unprovoked, that he loves to burn down abandoned Greenhouses, which could as well be the metaphor for him being a serial killer of young drifter Korean women like Hae-mi. Do we ever find out if that is the case? No. Does the movie shows us enough to figure it out? Maybe. That’s the beauty of it. It never spells things out and takes its sweet little time unfolding the mystery so much so that it could have been called Slow Burning. :)
I had no fucking clue that it was based on a Murakami short story called Barn Burning until I noticed it in the opening credits and seeing the film felt exactly like reading a Murakami story does — surreal, enigmatic, ambiguous, frustrating sometimes, intriguing most of the times, lacking any concrete resolution but immensely satisfying. I am so very grateful that I went in blind because the experience of watching this unpredictable story develop from one scene to the next was an incredibly thrilling experience.
PS: How thoughtful of the director Lee Chang-dong to include a cat in the film, which does not exist in the original story and may or may not exist in the film. A perfect Murakami ode.
It scored the highest marks ever on a much-consulted Cannes international critics’ poll and snagged the Fipresci International Critics’ Prize for best film.
Roma [Mexico]
Alfonso Cuarón goes back to his roots since his first Spanish outing Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) in this deeply personal love letter to his childhood years. He writes, shoots and directs a gorgeous, immersive Black n White nostalgic dream that shattered me with its beauty, sensitivity and performances.
Cuarón’s camerawork, full of panning wide shots peppered with astonishingly rich details, sucked me in so hard that I felt like I did not watch it but actually spent 2 hours and 15 minutes with a upper middle-class family of 4 kids, 2 domestic helps, 1 pretty housewife and a cheating husband in 1970s Mexico. It is hard to believe that Yalitza Aparicio makes her debut in this film as the domestic help Cleo because she is otherworldly good in it. Most of the film tackles her accidental pregnancy and the impact of the bread winner’s departure on the family.
There are two scenes in it which left me with a huge lump in my throat.
Cleo’s relationship with the kids is more than that of just a nanny. She is practically their mother and the kids love her unconditionally. This love reaches its peak with a group hug when Cleo, who doesn’t know how to swim, saves two of the kids from drowning. The cinematography, choreography, and the unadulterated affection that washes over them in that moment is as moving and emotionally overwhelming as the descent of Sandra Bullock in Gravity’s climax was.
Without getting political or compromising on the scale of it, Cuarón also skillfully weaves the 1968 Student massacre into the narrative and builds up a spectacularly tense sequence that reaches its zenith in a maternity ward and all through it I was clasping the armrest so hard it made my fingers hurt.
This man knows how to create magic on screen. Do not watch it on Netflix because this is everything that cinema is meant to be. I beseech you to check it out in all its theatrical glory, wherever/whenever you can.
Pretty cool of the marketing department to set this trailer to The Great Gig in the Sky by Pink Floyd, a song that could very well have been the name of his last film, Gravity. :)
It has won shit ton of awards everywhere and it will continue to do so because it deserves all of them.
Mandy [USA/Belgium]
After the balmy, breezy caressing of Burning and Roma, my day ended with this deliriously fucked-up bitchslap. Nicolas Cage is peak Nicolas Cage in this unbridled acid trip and I have utmost respect for Elijah Wood who made it happen because apparently Cage and the director Panos Cosmatos weren’t on the same page about who Cage should play after the first sitting.
He ended up playing Red whose wife is immolated in front of his eyes by a bunch of Jesus freaks led by Jeremiah Sand (the role Panos originally wanted Cage to play) and he sets out to exact sweet revenge. That’s the basic plot. God complex, incidental porn, brutal violence, psychedelic animation, cryptic books, elements of a cult, heavy metal, grunge, chainsaw fights, disfigured demons, Cheddar Goblin; this film has all of these and more and there is no point in me trying to expand on any of it because words can’t possibly do justice to what this trippy rage-fest did to me. It’s like Mad Max Fury Road and Grind-house made a baby on LSD.
After the death of his wife, Cage enacts a spirit-downing freak out in the bathroom where he lets out guttural screams, and slowly and embarrassingly falls apart. It is a painful moment of unrestrained grieving and it isn’t easy to watch, and to me, it was the most beautiful thing I saw during this festival. He gave it his all and it was glorious.
God bless you Nicolas Cage, you insanely gifted oddball.
A 5 minute standing ovation at Cannes and one at MAMI that I was a part of.
DAY 4 [PVR Icon/ECX, Andheri]
Sorry To Bother You [USA]
This wildly imaginative, relentlessly funny, insanely original film was on the top of my must-watch list and it surpassed all my expectations. Definitely a contender for the most revolutionary debut of all time, this dystopian sci-fi absurdity is as bizarre as Mandy, something I didn't think was possible.
Cassius ‘Cash’ Green (a perfectly cast Lakeith Stainfeld) likes to bore his artist GF Detroit (Tessa Thompson, crushing it so hard with her crazy earrings and crazier performance art) with his lofty existential monologues. He lives in his uncle’s garage, walks with a slouch, and is in dire need of a job. He interviews at a telemarketing company, lies on the resume but still gets the job because they would hire anyone who could read and STSS (stick to the script). His next cubicle neighbor, Danny Glover, tells him to use his ‘White Voice’ to make the pitch and he does and and his life turns upside down. After a crazy celebratory montage of post sales chest thumps, he becomes the ‘Power Caller’ and reaches the top floor of the building, using a golden elevator that wishes it was a human so that it could caress his muscular body.
Shit gets even freakier after this. Cass gets to meet the owner of Worry Free, a company that provides the employees housing (bunk beds) and 3 bland meals in exchange of lifelong indentured servitude. Basically a corporate prison, which isn’t a fantastical idea that rapper Boots E Riley, the writer-director of the film, pulled outta his ass while horsing around with the script. This shit is pretty regular in China. Have a look at this Taiwanese electronics giant, Foxconn dormitories.
Armie Hammer plays the coke-snorting, bitches-banging, scarf-wearing, gleefully flamboyant CEO of Worry Free and he is clearly having the fucking time of his life here. I can not talk about this film anymore without spoiling it. It’s the most scathing and outrageously inventive critique of racism, corporate greed & modern day slavery I have ever seen and it’s bonkers good and I loved every goddamn second of it.
I probably shouldn't be sharing this clip here because it’s pirated but man, this scene had me cry-laughing. This movie rules so hard!
*If it were up to me, this film would have won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2018.
Birds of Passage [Colombia]
Colombia’s submission to the Foreign Language Film Award, it was basically Narcos meet Godfather at .5x pace. The only film that I waited in line to get into and the only one I walked out of mid way. Forever thankful that I did because this happened.
Ash Is Purest White / Jiang Hu Er Nv [China]
Zhao Tao, Director Zia Jhangke’s wife and consistent muse (she appears in all 9 of his features), plays Qiao, a smart, fearless, resourceful woman from a depressing small coal-mining town who is madly in love with a gangster, Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She is a badass who knows how to deal with low life drunkards, is least bit intimidated by the overflowing testosterone around her and has devoted her life to her man. Takes a back seat when her man needs to be in the spotlight and takes a fall for him when he gets beaten within an inch of his life. She is a perfection personified. I’d give my left arm to have someone like her by my side. But Gao is a piece of shit who forgets her the moment she goes to prison.
I found the first act of the film that establishes Qiao and Guo’s relationship (beginning in the patriarchal, rural interiors of the China of 2001) a little tedious but once Qiao gets out of the car in the middle of a crowded market and fires a gun to scare the goons off who are beating the shit out of the man she worships, the film picks up and it never was not engaging till it ended on the NY eve of 2018.
To see Qiao survive with nothing but just her wits (she scamming the likely philanderers in a Banquet Hall or getting her ID and cash back from the pickpocket were hilarious), not crying or begging her man to take her back, not indulging in any kind of drama when she realizes that the man she sacrificed 5 years of her life for wasn’t worth it, was an absolute thrill. She loved him unconditionally and with unflinching loyalty and seeing her holding her end of the unsaid deal till the final frame was enthralling.
The french DP Eric Gautier’s (Into the Wild, The Motorcycle Diaries) camera sharply observes the sprawling landscape of a dynamically evolving China (rivers, dams, volcanos, empty stadiums) as well as the minute twitches on Qiao’s face during her arduous return to a regular life outside prison. She is subliminal and is the real hero of this devastating saga spanning two decades.
An extremely gratifying closure to my frenzied 4 days at the fest.
So long, MAMI!