Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Mumbai Film Festival Weekend Round-up: Day 2

Concluding my previous blog with all the films I watched on my 2nd (and likely final) day of the Mumbai Film Festival. This was Sunday, the 28th of October, and I opted to go to the Andheri side where  the cornucopia of adjoining multiplex screens (PVR Cinemas) offered a greater choice than the single screen cinemas. These were the films I saw:


Manta Ray (Phuttiphong Aroonpheng) - This Thai directorial debut was a slow but engaging and eventually hypnotic blend of reality and fantasy, highly reminiscent of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee, Cemetery of Splendour). A Thai fisherman searching for gemstones in the forest (for an intriguing purpose) comes across a battered half-dead person (hinted to be a Rohingya refugee). He brings the man home, tends to his wounds and slowly nurses him back to health. In all this time the stranger does not utter a word, but there is an emotional connect between them. One day the fisherman abruptly disappears and the stranger from  that moment carries on life in the manner the fisherman taught him. Even the fisherman's wife who had abandoned him for another man returns and moves in with the mute stranger, as though she has accepted him as a substitute for her husband. Already we are going into spoiler territory so I will not discuss the plot any further but the beauty of the film is in its rhythm and its evocative mix of real and imagined elements, coming across as a fable of sorts. And towards the end there are some sequences that are rapturous pure audio-visual experiences. This is a brilliant assured debut from a maker whose future work I will be looking forward to (There was a QA with the director after the screening, a shy unassuming gentleman who said that it took him almost 8 years to get the resources for making his film. I hope we won't have to wait that long for the next one).


Udalaazham aka Skin Deep (Unnikrishnan Aavala) - After that positive experience I was hoping for another interesting debut feature, this one from Unnikrishnan Aavala, a school teacher turned writer-director. The protagonist of Aavala's film is a transgender tribal Gulikan who faces regular sexual abuse and is chided for not being a man. He is married to a tribal girl to whom, although they share a mutual affection, he can give neither children nor sexual pleasure. The vandalization of Gulikan is compared with the vandalization of the forest and the tribal way of life by modernity and encroachment. Gulikan's wife Mathi is carrying on a tryst with the local fish-seller, but one day they are espied by the forest officer who tries to proposition Mathi into sleeping with him. Her refusal sparks off a series of events which lead to the uprooting of Gulikan's homestead and a general dissent within the tribals. Unnikrishnan's film reminded me a lot of Shyam Benegal's Aarohan (which looked at the exploitation of farmers in Bengal) in that it carries the same heavy-handed treatment of social issues. In an attempt by Aavala to showcase all the research he has done towards the film we get in-your-face info-dumps about how pesticide use, building of dams and conversion of the original forests to teak plantations have led to erosion of the environment and the traditional tribal way of life. The build-up of miseries and personal tragedies is so relentless and lacking in originality it ceases to have any effect, other than inducing tedium. Characters with humanities / fine arts backgrounds (the danseuse and the PhD student) are portrayed with a halo around them, possibly as a reflection of how the director would like to be seen. The film may have noble aims, but as far as I am concerned they didn't make it consistently interesting or worth the while.


The Sound Man - Mangesh Desai (Subhash Sahoo) - Chatting with another film buff in the food court, I so lost track of time that even though I had pre-booked for the show, I had to stand in the lower priority walk-in line. I did manage to get in, although the seat was only available for the first row. But even with that discomfort I was glad to have got the chance to see this documentary.
Mangesh Desai is a name you will see in the credits of almost every major Hindi film from the 60's onwards (and he was working even before). Desai was primarily a sound mixer / re-recording expert and he was supposed to have such demand for his craft that the biggest producers would stand in line outside the studio to get a slot from Mangesh-da, and often hear abuses from him when they did not provide him with the sound material he needed. The film features talking head interviews with several major league film personalities including Shyam Benegal, Ramesh Sippy, Yash Chopra, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Sandip Ray (son of Satyajit Ray), Subhash Ghai, Manoj Kumar, adman Prahlad Kakkar, composer Vanraj Bhatia, Kiran Shantaram (son of V. Shantaram and owner of Rajkamal Studios where Desai worked for the largest part of his career). Veteran and current audio professionals like Hitendra Ghosh and Resul Pookkutty shower paeans to Mangesh Desai's genius. Anecdotes told by major directors indicate the complete vision Mangesh-da had for the final product, even demanding (!) that they bring him specific shots to which he would add effects and build an intricate tapestry of sound that provided impact for the whole scene. The docu also presents a facet of Mangesh's life not commonly known: he had been actively involved in the freedom struggle and even worked to smuggle pistols and make crude bombs as part of the revolutionary movement. A personal touch is added by the reminiscences of his daughter Sucheta Lad. Alongside the interviews a careful selection of film clips underlines the impact of Mangesh Desai's work in the movies (ironically, many suffering from poor video quality and audio hiss that comes from negligent preservation and incompetent transfer to digital media).
On the whole an absorbing documentary, and now I feel enticed to watching some of the Shantaram films (like Jhanak Jhanak Paayal Baaje) to appreciate their creativity.


In Fabric (Peter Strickland) - I went for this one with some anticipation having enjoyed Strickland's previous features Berberian Sound Studio and Duke of Burgundy. In those films Strickland showed a great craft in building atmosphere and rhythm. His knowledge of the horror / weird film genre allowed him to pay tribute to influences but not being just emptily referential. In Fabric, however, I did not immediately enjoy. It begins well enough as a haunted object tale (in this case a mysterious red dress), but the scene jumps are jarring, the film's tone is all over the place and its sense of humor never seems as comfortably seated alongside the horror element as in BSS. At one point it seems like a Halloween special episode for the naughty 80's British departmental store sitcom series Are You Being Served? before going into total gonzo territory. Perhaps the disorientation was an intended effect and I feel I could give this another try sometime in the future, but on the whole my first viewing left me dissatisfied.

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