There is a film festival - Pune International Film
Festival - going on at Pune. It is co-sponsored by the Maharashtra Government
and so the ambience is respectable and the selection committee appears to be
quite fastidious. As with all international festivals, this one too has films from
Europe, Hollywood, West Asia and the East. There are great masters and modern
innovators and new local - which means Marathi - films and so on. As always,
the principal attribute is not unanimously acknowledged quality but is the
variety. The canvas, by being so wide, makes for a great perspective to judge
any film one sees.
So, how do the individual films seem? Here is a
sampling:
Maunrag (Marathi)
This was an audio-visual experience
which definitely was not a feature film. It is impossible to narrate sequentially
what it presented. It began with a man - an actor - apparently narrating his
recurrent dream to a boy. The narration was broken when he failed to remember
the crucial words he was expected to deliver. The defining feature of this
monologue was anguish. Then a woman in white said her part to the camera. Then
a man and then another woman came and said their parts. They said the same
words with different inflexions. Twice. Mostly thrice. Then again thrice at
another point. The monologues were from different literary works of the
renowned Marathi writer Mahesh Elkunchwar and their sequence made no sense. It
may safely be said that the 'film' as a whole is not supposed to 'mean' anything.
Just as instrumental music or an abstract painting is not expected to mean
something which can be put into intelligible words, this piece of art too is an
audio-visual presentation and it would be an injustice to impose 'meaning' onto
it.
Once this is made clear, one may
proceed. It had extraordinary sound; so much so, that a case can be made to say
that Sound was THE Presentation and the camera and the words were
accompaniments. There were extraordinary sound effects (of a storm, a howling
wind, lightening and so on) in the background, the pieces of paper (and they
were plentiful) crackled, the floor creaked, the chalk squeaked on the
blackboard, the feet grated like a saw or a pair of new leather boots. However,
the shadows too were quite eye-catching. The property scattered all over was
exotic - it loudly accented a bygone era. There was no dialogue and the two men
and the two women delivered monologues and the young boy was always there as a
mute witness. His mostly expressionless countenance made quite a contrast with
the highly accentuated emotions of the four speakers.
Don't ask what was it all about.
Overheard a comment: "Serves Elkunchwar right." Must have come out of
a deep grudge.
Sunset Boulevard (English-
Hollywood)
Iconic 1950 Hollywood movie by
Billy Wilder. A struggling storywriter finds himself completely without an
assignment and reluctantly accepts the offer of a has-been star from the silent
era, to 'touch up' the movie script penned by her. Fully aware that what she
has written is beyond redemption, he keeps going because of the 'add-ons' and
is gradually sucked into her web through costly gifts and cosy, comfortable
living. Aiding her in her designs is the mysterious chauffeur who appears to
act also as her guardian. But another pretty young writer acts as the counter
attraction and in the inevitable conflict, the hero loses all including his
life.
The plot appears hackneyed today in
2014, but must have been quite a sensation 64 years ago. The script is
carefully crafted to satisfy demands of credibility but the feature that stands
out is the contrasting, yet complementary acting styles of the principal
characters. The hero is cynical, the young girl is full of energy, the faded
star is over-the-top melodramatic and her guardian the chauffeur (who turns out
to be her discoverer as well as the first husband) is underplayed with constraint.
And no viewer is ever going to envisage that the narrator is a dead man; a ruse
that considerably adds to the hold the film commands.
A pleasant experience. As one would
expect from an old Hollywood fare.
To be continued ...
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