Yavanika aka Curtain [dir. KG George]

On a trusted friend's recommendation, I recently checked out Yavanika, a celebrated mystery drama by KG George.

Yavanika is centered around a musical drama troupe, whose main tabla player Ayyappan (Bharat Gopi) suddenly goes missing. As he is a habitual drunkard, it takes a while for the other members to regard his disappearance in a serious light. When they finally do, an investigation is launched. Jacob (Mammootty), the inspector leading the enquiry, conducts a series of interrogations with the rest of the  troupe, and other characters. He gauges their relationship and attitude towards Ayyappan, probing to see if any of them is responsible for his disappearance and possible death.

Terms like 'Rashomon Effect' have been used to describe Yavanika's story, but it's more like one of Agatha Christie's mysteries. You have a gallery of possible suspects, each giving their stories; the detective has to find out if one or more of them is lying. Struturally, much of Yavanika is narrated in flashbacks as Jacob reconstructs the character of Ayyappan and his equation with the other drama company members. Jacob's approach is to be confrontational: he accuses the subject of being behind Ayyappan's disappearance with the aim of breaking down their composure and getting them to blurt out information. This also serves as an examination of the other characters in the narrative. A similar approach was later adopted with Saswata Mukherjee in the Detective Shabor films.

Unfortunately, there is little subtlety in the flashbacks: From the very outset Ayyappan is a blackguard - a drunk lecherous chauvinist that corners and uses women for sex and to extract money from. His abrasive behavior frequently gets him into quarrels with the other men in the troupe, so they are suspect too. I have to confess that the lack of nuance in Ayyappan's personality makes the repeated flashbacks across the 2.5 hour running time a bit of a slog. There are moments of pleasure when the other characters reveal facets of themselves. The film has a large cast of recognizable names in the supporting cast and, within the script's limitations, they acquit themselves well. One striking bit is when Jagathi's jokester character reveals that he keeps making wisecracks because that's the only way he can cope with his life's miseries. While the central mystery isn't a particularly devious one, I liked the device of the play-within-the-film, in which certain events are foreshadowed in an oblique way.

Another interesting aspect was the contrast between Ayyappan's dominant stance towards his women and Jacob's equation with his wife - Jacob and his wife address each other as friends, he canvasses her opinion on the case and she is not diffident about rebuking his lapses of judgement. This depiction of equal camaraderie in a marriage certainly wasn't a norm in 80's Indian movies and is therefore refreshing to see.

On the whole, Yavanika is not as gripping or layered as I should have liked, but definitely interesting at least as a one-time watch. The full film in rather decent image quality is available to stream on Youtube with hard-coded English subtitles:

Kaathal - The Core [dir. Jeo Baby]

In my take on Rajkumar Hirani's PK (read HERE), I described it as "...a slipshod, almost insufferable movie that by the theme it tackles and the willingness therein of the people behind it to attach their clout becomes ironically a courageous, even important film." Kaathal - The Core, its clumsy caption notwithstanding, does not require that level of allowance. It is a quiet, measured narrative packed with noble characters and dignified performances. But with all its sincere intentions, it's really more a sermon on Christian kindness and openness to alternate sexual orientations than a credible narrative.

Of course, Kaathal is hardly alone in that aspect. Thirty years ago in Hollywood, Jonathan Demme made Philadelphia, in which a gay lawyer files suit against his employer for having fired him after he had contracted AIDS. Tom Hanks played the lead, one of the first major-league stars to portray an openly homosexual character. The film is an awkward mix of maudlin drama and AIDS info-dump, but is important for bringing a more balanced discussion about AIDS and homosexuality into the mainstream. We can make a similar case for Kaathal.

In the story, star Mammootty's protagonist Matthew Devassy is presented as a pillar of conventional virtue. A sincere and well-liked political worker with the prestigious lineage of a principled father, Matthew is the party favorite to contest the local elections. Prior to the film's main conflict the brief glimpse of his home life - apart from the father there is his long-married wife Omana (Jyothika) and teenage daughter Femy (Anagha Akku) - suggests a harmonious existence. The only ripple on this calm surface is that Matthew and his father barely speak to each other. In a later scene, Matthew himself puts forth that he is in any case a man of few words and when you have lived long enough with someone, you eventually reach a point where nothing much remains to be said.

In a perhaps unnecessarily oblique way, we are told that Omana has served Matthew a divorce notice, citing mental cruelty. Matthew seems more disturbed by the timing of the action rather than its intention - it is not him, but the lawyer who questions her allegation of cruelty. This is because Matthew harbors the guilty secret of being a closet homosexual. In the decades of their marriage, he has denied his wife her right to companionship and sexual happiness, searching for his own occasional comfort in the arms of the mild-mannered local driving instructor (Sudhi Kozhikode). But once the case has been opened, there can be no secrets.

Jeo Baby previously made The Great Indian Kitchen, which aimed to expose the insidious slavery and oppression of women in domestic settings. But it shot itself in the foot by eventually painting its male characters so one-dimensionally vile as to be detached from the more widespread 'cruelty by indifference' that homemakers everywhere face. Kaathal tries to create the impression of a more nuanced narrative. Even after the divorce notice has been served, Omana lives on in the same house and continues her family duties. There are no angry outbursts or hateful standoffs between the spouses, only sad silences. It is suggested that she only initiated the divorce proceedings after Section 377 was struck down in the courts, as her accusation would have previously led to criminal proceedings against him. While he has at least had occasional respite with his secret lover, her life has been an emotional desert. It is a level of nobility and self-sacrifice that makes her less a believable character, more a mouthpiece.  If they had at least shown a degree of friendship and cordial interaction between them as a couple, it would have gone some way to swallow the longevity of the union. In the film's commitment to being 'sensitive' and avoid sensationalizing, there is also a noticeable degree of soft-footing - neither Omana's lawyer or his political opponents in that allegedly conservative society demonize Matthew's sexuality and marital infidelity, which seems too good to ring true.

But for all its flaws, Kaathal is a palatable non-offensive drama with dignified performances from its lead cast, and its star-power gives it the reach to raise more open-minded sympathetic discussions about closet homosexuality in our society, which can only be a good thing.

Croupier [dir. Mike Hodges]

In Mike Hodges' Croupier, a young Clive Owen plays Jack Manfred, a struggling author with some history as a croupier (that's a casino dealer). While initially reluctant, he is persuaded by his fast-talking shady entrepreneur father into taking up a croupier post at a local casino. As an employee Jack has to follow the house rules - no relationships with customers or fellow croupiers, and if you spot anyone cheating, report it. Working at the casino seems to evoke something deep in Jack. He enjoys the feeling of dealing out the fortunes of the gamblers, of seeing the losers ruin themselves. He starts writing a novel about a croupier called Jake, an obvious alter-ego. In traditional hard-boiled noir fashion we get a good bit of inner monologue voice-over from Jack/Jake.

Jack's live-in girlfriend Marion (Gina Mckee), a former policewoman turned store security agent, is not pleased at the change in him after the new job. Meanwhile Jack doesn't always play by the workplace rules. He hangs out with one colleague who he has observed cheating without reporting him, has a one-night stand with another when she comes to his aid after an assault by a disgruntled patron. The crux is when an attractive female gambler Jack seems to be developing feelings for (Alex Kingston) brings him a proposal to help with carrying out a heist at the casino.

In another movie this heist would be the film's centerpiece, and it would end with Jack emerging as the hero after battling both his manipulators and his own conscience. But in the screenplay from Paul Mayersberg (who wrote two David Bowie vehicles - The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence), Croupier isn't as straight-faced a caper as that. It's more about the effect the casino world has on Jack as a person, how it makes him do things he thought he wouldn't. At several points in the film Jack repeats "I never gamble", but the increasingly dangerous manner in which he violates the house rules and even considers accepting a part in the heist suggest a deep gambler complex within.

After sitting through Shoot 'Em Up, whose appeal was lost on me, for a long time I hated Clive Owen's surly face. But I have to admit, he can be really good in the right part. Along with the off-beat SF thriller Children of Men (reviewed HERE), this is another solid vehicle for the actor. Owen's poker-faced opacity makes him perfect for the lead part; you cannot predict the direction of his moral compass  At one point, when he tells Marion, "You are my conscience." she retorts with "Don't you have one of your own then?". The answer might well be no. But his Jack is no villain either - when he discovers that Marion has betrayed him with regards to the heist, it does not embitter him or reduce his affection for her. At the end, when he learns how he was set up for the heist, his response is not anger, but a cynical chuckle about how he was part of a larger gamble. Such murkiness does mute the adventure aspect of the film, but it gives us a more nuanced noir drama where the 'happy ending' is an amorphous entity.

A few words on the UK Limited Edition (LE) blu-ray package from Arrow Video (There is also a 4K UHD version for those so equipped):

Arrow's transfer is sourced from a recent 4K restoration which looks smashing. At least  to my untrained eye, there don't appear to be any revisionist color grading anomalies, and both detail and film-like appearance are pleasing. The lone audio track is lossless PCM 2.0 (The back cover mentions a 5.1 surround track but it's definitely not present in the setup menu) - this is a decent track although not particularly aggressive, and it does require raising your volume setting a few notches above usual. Extras on the disc include two commentaries and multiple lengthy interviews with selected cast and crew. The LE has a bonus disc with a career-spanning documentary on Mike Hodges, whose other films include the gritty working class crime drama Get Carter and the ultra-flamboyant Flash Gordon movie.

Interestingly, the movie disc is labeled as disc 1, so I wonder if they are planning a separate pressing for the standard edition release or will the Hodges documentary not remain the LE exclusive it currently is.

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash [dir. Edwin]

Vengeance is Mine... is in many ways an unexpected movie. Based on a novel by Eka Kurniawan, which I haven't read, the title makes it sound like one of countless spaghetti westerns pumped out in the 60's and 70's. But it's actually an Indonesian drama set in the 1980's, in the late phase of the autocratic Suharto regime. It starts off like a martial arts action movie with a cocky badass hero and features several brutal hand-to-hand combat sequences, but at its core is a deep romance. It subverts many of the usual tropes of revenge in movies and, after a point, even goes into magic realism mode. How's that for straddling genres?

The conventionality of the beginning is also relative. When was the last time you saw an action movie where the lead guy (Mathino Lio) is sexually impotent? Here it is upfront, presented as the driving engine behind his character's violent streak, because his masculinity has no other outlet. The leading lady (Ladya Cheryl, my favorite actor in this movie) is also a hyper-violent no-holds-barred brawler that on their first encounter kicks his face up his butt in combat, before they proceed to fall in love. She accepts his impotence as a fact, but it has consequences later that tear their life apart. Their condition is a reflection of disturbing incidents that occurred during their respective childhoods - She was molested by a teacher and he witnessed a woman's brutal rape-murder. This has been interpreted by multiple critics as a metaphor for the oppressive political regime and moral corruption that prevailed in Indonesia in that period, and its debilitating impact on the people's psyche (it's not something the film tries to punch you in the face with). The magic realism aspect, involving the unearthing of a certain character referred to in the past, is disorienting when it happens, and it's not explained out in the explicit manner a less confident maker would succumb to. Film-maker Edwin trusts the audience to fill in the gaps for themselves.

In consequence, Vengeance is Mine... may sometimes seem meandering, and it definitely does not stick to genre limitations; it's as serious about being a humanistic drama or an absurdist fable as it is about being an action flick. But in all of its phases it always remains interesting and off-kilter. For me it was mainly the very palpable chemistry between the leads that kept me constantly interested in their fate. I also love the manner in which the camera (DoP Akiko Ashizawa) captures their intimate physical and emotional moments; obviously a great deal of thought was given to this.

I would like to talk more about the film, go into some of the ways it deflects conventional arcs into something new, but I don't right now know how I can do that without spoiling the film for people that haven't previously seen it. I'm thinking I'll come back for a stab at that at a later stage. But this much is clear, for those looking for entertainment off the beaten track and with a little more emotional substance, it is certainly a film worth watching.

The film is currently screening on Netflix, but I caught it on the UK blu-ray release from Arrow Video, about which a few words:

This is a recent film, but it was shot in 16mm - It looks a little soft, but textures are good and the colors are vibrant. There primary audio track is 5.1 DTS-HDMA (with an option of lossless stereo), but I did not experience a lot of activity in the surrounds. There are a good number of meaty extras, including interviews with the cast and crew, and behind-the-scenes footage from its making. My copy came with a slipcover (the reverse art features the Indonesian title and different artwork) and booklet with a pretty good essay from cult movie enthusiast Josh Hurtado.