A Scene at the Sea [dir. Takeshi Kitano]

When I watched other Takeshi Kitano movies like Sonatine and Hana-bi, I would be enchanted by the serene Ozu-like moments and disturbed by the violence that interrupted them. I used to wonder how it would be if Mr. Kitano directed a wholly serene movie. A Scene at the Sea is the answer to that question.

Scene... is the story of Shigeru (Claude Maki), a deaf-mute garbage collector who one day sees a broken surfboard, and it awakens something within him. He does some DIY work to repair the board and goes to the beach to learn surfing. With him is his also-mute fiancee Takako (Hiroko Ôshima), an almost dog-like faithful support whose very existence revolves around Shigeru. She helps to carry his board, folds his clothes when he goes towards the water.

Shigeru is expectedly awkward to start with, more often than not falling off the makeshift board. But he keeps at it, devoting his spare hours (and in consequence, his fiancee's) till he gets better. But this isn't one of those underdog winner movies in which the plot trajectory is for the protagonist to beat some egotistic reigning champion and capture the attention of the world at large. It's about a person finding something he loves to do, which makes him feel alive, instead of a mindless automaton.

This lack of any major antagonist means that there's no external drama element (the people who laugh at his initial clumsiness slowly appreciate his effort and help him out, even his boss in the garbage business supports him when he needs it), and occasionally the film's dogged documenting of Shigeru's continuous following of his dream may seem a tad monotonous. But it has a quiet strength it builds upon with its matter of fact visual sense and composer Joe Hisashi's wonderful musical support. Without any flashy plot twists, Scene... makes us feel for Shigeru, his desire to be a autonomous living being. If you're interested in a relaxing serene film about a person exploring his/her own possibilities, this is a good one to sit with.

Dahshat [dirs. Tulsi Ramsay & Shyam Ramsay]

Let me say this right off the bat...Dahshat is one of the best vintage Indian horror films I have seen; and I don't mean this in the campy sense, this is one genuinely brilliant movie. The plot as such is a reworking of the famous R.L. Stevenson novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The hero Dr. Samir (Navin Nischol) comes to his hometown after a gap of many years, only to find it has become a gloomy sepulchral place with people afraid to move out after dark and rumors of corpses escaping their graves. Determined to investigate, he discovers a towering hooded grave-robber and a scuffle ensues. This quickly leads to a mob chase in which the dastardly fellow is apprehended. Although nothing can be got out of the fellow who is a mute, Samir's suspicions lead him to the door of the local physician Dr. Vishal.

Dr. Vishal (Om Shivpuri) is a straight port of a Victorian era medical man / scientist complete with frock coat and bow-tie. This Jekyll is dabbling in research to make man "complete" by imbuing him with the heightened sense attributes of various animals. While not inherently vicious, Vishal is an overzealous investigator, not averse to trying out his new researches on patients without their knowledge and consent. He is also an unsatisfied and unfaithful husband to a drunk crone (harangue queen Nadira) with whom he has frequent showdowns. It is during one of these showdowns that the vengeful wife injects him with his prepared serum, which has the effect of converting him into an animal. Thus ensues a saga of horror in which Vishal is forced at various instances to convert to a grotesque hybrid animal form with murderous consequences.

The main strength of Dahshat is the absolutely cracking lifetime performance by Om Shivpuri. This is a brilliant portrayal of the mad doctor archetype, which skillfully avoids the ham trap such roles fall into, and even it's most grotesque moments holds your sympathies for the character. Nadira as the alcoholic wife of the deranged scientist lends great support. The other and equally notable aspect is that apart from a couple of songs and some footage devoted to the idiotic antics of comedian Rajendranath, almost every scene in this movie is propelling the narrative onward at a frantic pace. It also helps that the story provides plausible motive for all the murders the monster commits and not just aimless boob-groping of assorted extras; this is first-rate stuff. The film also has a lot of atmosphere, although some of its location shifts can be confusing. The visual FX are a mixed bag but one admires that the make-up concepts are grounded in the story.

On the whole, Dahshat is a terrific achievement of Hammer-style horror by the Ramsays and one of the few films that lends substance to their reputation as this country's answer to Hammer.

C.I.A. - Comrade in America [dir. Amal Neerad]

CIA is one of those movies that at the outset wears its politics on its sleeve...but then you realize it's only on the sleeve; within its heart is a romantic adventure drama. While our leading man Aji Matthew (Dulquer Salman) may be an avowed communist his primary purpose is that of being the archetype HERO - the guy who stands up for the oppressed, looks bravely in the eye of the arrogant establishment and beats up a half dozen henchmen, barely breaking a sweat. Of course he is better provided than Rajini's "Auto kaaran", since the Congress party worker father (Siddique), with whom he has sarcastic dining table exchanges, loves his son enough to bail him out of trouble each time.

In fact, the  non-cloying emotional bond between this father and son, and the kinship between Aji and his commie party buddies (Shoubin Shahir, Dileesh Pothan) provide the most endearing elements of CIA. Which is a good thing, because its political messaging is misleadingly simple-minded (Aji defines communism as sharing your lunch box with the kid who didn't get any), existing solely to showcase its hero's attributes, and yes, the admittedly funny fantasies where he discusses his personal life with Marx, Lenin and Che.

Aji's "content to stay where I am and impact a few people around me" life mantra is rocked when Sara (Karthika Muralidharan), the girl he loves, is taken back by her parents to the US and scheduled to be married in two weeks. Since it is unlikely that an unemployed leftist, even the son of a local politico, will get a US Visa in that time-frame, Aji opts to take the roundabout route of landing in Nicaragua (the nearest country to the US which provides a visa on arrival), then make his way by road to Mexico and enter the US illegally by jumping the border.

This is where the film gets slightly queasy, in its conversion of a harrowing reality to a romantic adventure. Baradwaj Rangan's insightful review details it much better than I could, so I definitely advise you to check it out. In Nicaragua, Aji befriends a Tamil speaking Lankan driver who agrees to help him get across, then a motley group of other archetypes - cute Mexican family, Chinese guy with a mobile phone and surprise, surprise, attractive Malayali girl (Chandini Sreedharan) who has landed there with the equally bone-headed intention of visiting the places her father was at, after HE landed as an illegal migrant.

A remark about women having to buying condoms to offer attackers who rape them is made into a wisecrack. When they are accosted by gun-wielding bandits, it's another Hero moment for Dulquer (no one even thinks to consider how he could have aggravated the situation, if he had failed to subdue them). While it's wrong to expect this movie to be a hard-hitting expose of burning issues (and thankfully it doesn't try to give a happy ending to all its characters), the extent to which they have been "fluffed" to provide a backdrop for what is essentially a well-made masala movie is certainly a matter of debate.

Shiva ka Insaaf aka The Justice of Shiva [dir. Raj N. Sippy]

Released in cinemas in 1985, Shiva ka Insaaf was touted as the first Hindi 3D movie (since the previous year's Chota Chetan - which remains for most Indians in that era the defining 3D experience - was only dubbed into Hindi from the original Malayalam My Dear Kuttichathan). While I never actually saw it in 3D at the cinemas, I did see it on VHS in that period.

Shiva ka Insaaf is a comic book type movie, with leading man Jackie Shroff playing a masked vigilante hero called Shiva and his Clark Kent inspired mild-mannered alter ego Bhola; of course, in 80's Bollywood, mild-mannered translates to near-retarded (Bhola shows the intellect of a 10-year old schoolboy, yet is immediately hired as a personal assistant to a newspaper editor). The obvious inspirations for Shiva are Batman (After the hero's parents get murdered by a criminal, he trains for a life dedicated to crime-fighting) and Superman (mild-mannered employee at a newspaper).

The script is all about broad strokes - locations are defined as "gaon" (village) and "shahar" (city). Shiva is brought up by a Hindu-Muslim-Christian triumvirate (while he is shown to visit all the religious shrines, the Hindu component appears dominant, given the avatar he dons and the batarang style mini-tridents he hurls at his enemies). Heroine Poonam Dhillon plays an editor that goes by herself to cover stories, which usually involves sneaking into a shady location, then getting caught and having to be rescued by Shiva. The evil mastermind villain (Shakti Kapoor) runs a poorly defined crime empire, and gets his jollies setting off bombs using a TV remote.

For the action scenes, 3D means there's a good bit of pointing guns, swords and sticks towards the screen, and in the climax Shakti Kapoor and his son (Gulshan Grover) inexplicably start firing flaming arrows at the hero. There is some hilarious use of toy cars, dolls/puppets and very obvious miniatures. Apart from one decent romance number, RD Burman's score is wholly forgettable. But for nostalgics of 80's action masala, Shiva ka Insaaf is not a bad way of spending 2 hours.

Full movie with English subtitles below:

Memories of Underdevelopment [Dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea]

I'm not generally interested in political films for their politics alone. I appreciate when they are part of another genre (like with the thriller overtones in  John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate or contain a more personal viewpoint like with Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Mukhamukham aka Face to Face). I was primarily interested in Memories of Underdevelopment (MoD) because the stated premise "A Cuban man cycles through his repressed opinions and memories as the threat of foreign invasion intensifies and the rest of his family retreats to Miami" suggested an individual perspective, one that possibly gives an insight into what was happening with the common man in Cuba in the volatile period between the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

My expectation wasn't directly addressed because the protagonist of MoD, Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is far from the average  Cuban. He is an intellectual and a man of comfortable means. When the film begins, Sergio sees off his parents and wife at the airport where they are fleeing towards the United States. Our man has decided to stay back in Havana, because he feels that while he knows his future in the US, it is a time of unknown fate in Cuba and therefore more interesting to him.

The rest of the film sees Sergio carry on his existence (he gets a comfortable living off the rent from his family properties and does not have to earn a living, which puts him at a massive distance from the average citizen). We are privy to his monologues in which he often makes radical criticisms of the post-revolution scenario (He refers to Havana a cardboard cutout city). Middle-aged Sergio is also a hedonist who lives by his fancies. He fantasizes about sleeping with his Catholic housemaid, and has multiple trysts with much younger women.

Sergio's behavior with women appears caddish, even cruel. He pokes fun at his neurotic wife before she leaves him for America. He prefers to break off an entanglement with another woman he claims to truly love, because it would involve moving to the US, and he prefers to stay back with the family business. His most prominent affair in the film is with Elena (Daisy Granados), a 17-year old ingenue he shamelessly pursues, and after she gives herself up, tires of her lack of sophistication and dumps her (The film might be hinting at seeing this as a reflection of the treatment of the Cuban people post-revolution).

All of Sergio's decisions appear to stem from a self-centered comfort zone, his interest in people's movements in politics or literature only the hobby of a dilettante. I personally felt his decision to remain in Cuba comes from a feeling of knowing his position there, unlike the US where he will be a nobody that has to take employment and work his way up the system. While not a villain, Sergio is hard to sympathize with, even when we see the screws being slowly tightened around his like.

Apparently Corriera, who was committed to the cause of the Cuban revolution, hated the character of Sergio. That said, he portrays him brilliantly, carrying the casual charm and self-deprecation of a Marcello Mastroanni. Strong credit is also due Granados, who very convincingly passes for the not-yet adult Elena when she was actually 25 at the time, only 3 years younger than Corriera.

MoD's strongest point is in its brilliant execution, which is never less than worthy of admiration. Inspired by the French New Wave, director Tomás Gutiérrez aka Titón and editor Nelson Rodríguez deftly present a mixture of narrative and archival / documentary footage, often building up a scene as a collage of contrasting images. There are even some clever fourth wall addressing in-jokes with appearances by the director and the writer (Edmundo Desnoes) in wholly appropriate contexts. While I did feel removed from its protagonist, MoD is still recommended for an imaginatively conceived and skillfully executed construction that stands with the best of its ilk.

Virus [dir. Abu Aashiq]

2019's Virus is a movie about the epidemic outbreak of Nipah virus in 2018 that was successfully tackled by the health and administration authorities in Kerala. While it is not identical to the Covid-19 we are facing now, it shares some notable characteristics and is important from the POV of depicting what an administration is made to do in such a crisis situation.

The ominous electronic music at the start of the film signals an impending disaster, which is not long in coming. The Kozhikode Govt Medical College Hospital sees a couple of patients who are suffering from fever and vomiting, and within a short period have massive blood pressure spikes and convulsions, and die. When the possibility of a contagious disease is hinted, the patient samples are sent to the Manipal Institute of Virology where the infection is confirmed to be of Nipah virus, a deadly pathogen with a high mortality (~90% of all infected), previously known to have created havoc in countries like Malaysia and Bangladesh.

The administration meets with health authorities and acts quickly, ordering a wide quarantine. But as more cases come in from different places, it becomes crucial to track the source of the virus and its mode of transmission between these seemingly unrelated people - unless a natural mode of transmission to each of the patients is conclusively established, they will also have to consider the possibility of a biological warfare plot. Thus along with the medical angle, Virus is also a serial killer mystery, only the killer is a germ.

To tackle this tangle of threads, Virus adopts a back-and-forth narrative. Many a time during the course of the emergency, the story winds back to the circumstances under which each of the infected (or the people around them) could have been exposed to the pathogen, thus revealing the links of the chain that connects them. This makes following the story occasionally tricky (if you can't recall all the faces you've seen), but it is essential to encompass the sprawling multi-directional cascade of events.

The cast is a Who's Who of modern sensible Malayalam cinema - Revathi, Tovino Thomas, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Kunchako Boban, Srinath Bhasi, Indrajith Sukumaran, Reema Kallingal, Shoubin Shahir, Dileesh Pothan and many others - some of them have big roles while others are in only a few scenes, but each commits to their part. Of course in a non-melodramatic thriller like this, it can mainly be a matter of looking grim and speaking in undertones, but they do what is required without drawing attention to their individual selves, which is laudatory for an ensemble production.

While the editing is in itself tight, some monotony is generated in all the back-and-forth. But this is reflective of the actual situation of the management of an epidemic outbreak; as someone rightly said, it is how well we can manage the gap between "being afraid and "growing tired of being afraid". As an engaging film in itself and as a reminder to all of us, the enormity of the challenge faced daily by the people forming our first line of defense against an insidious, tenacious enemy, Virus is a must-watch.

Ayyappanum Koshiyum [dir. Sachy]

If you've grown up watching mainstream Indian cinema, it's hard to escape the Revenge Drama (RD), a saga in which two or more participants are at constant loggerheads with each other. There are two main categories of RD's:

1. One of the characters is the protagonist, and the other is the villain. Here the conflict is an inevitable consequence of their innate natures and ends in violent comeuppance for the bad guy (after serious losses on the  hero's side).

2. Both are protagonists and their animosity is based on misunderstandings often engineered by a third party villain. Typically these are resolved just before the climax where they team up to lay the beatdown on the baddie.

Writer-director Sachy's Ayyappanum-Koshiyum (AK) is a bit of both. What it also is, through minute attention to detail and a beautifully constructed screenplay that organically builds upon moments instead of just appearing as an episodic series of encounters, is a canny reworking of all the cliches that accompany the archetype RD, giving us characters we feel invested in, sparring in a bout whose each round generates curiosity for the next one.

Round One begins when a vehicle driving through a forest road is stopped by a joint operation task force consisting of police, forest and excise officials. In a declared alcohol-free zone, the vehicle carrying a supply of liquor bottles and a heavily drunk passenger is a travesty, and when said passenger becomes violent, tempers flare on all sides. The situation quickly escalates to an arrest during which the passenger is slapped by the local police Station House Officer (both literally on the spot, and legally at the station). Thus we are introduced to our two opponents, the drunk Koshy (Prithviraj Sukumaran) and the SHO Ayyappan (Biju Menon).

In Round Two, the tables start to turn. One of the station officers, while going through Koshy's phone, realizes that he has big-shot connections. Ayappan is instructed by his superior to make his prisoner comfortable and considerately explain the seriousness of his offense. In one of the few openly contrived bits, Ayappan opens a bottle of the seized liquor to pour a drink for Koshy, surreptitiously captured by the latter on his phone. After serving out his short jail term, a vengeful Koshy supplies the video to the media as an example of the officer's misappropriation, setting fire to an otherwise unblemished career record and igniting an all-out conflagration of enemity between the two.

The rest of the film is a series of encounters between these men (and, in consequence, the people around them). What is interesting about AK is the focus it gives to the supporting cast and the milieu around its leading men. Ayyappan is popular in the town for his sympathy towards the oppressed caste locals and tribals, and they openly make their displeasure known to the mustache-as-status-twirling Koshy. Ayappan's tribal wife is no trembling violet constantly fearing for her family, but a firebrand activist that pushes him to go after his oppressor even at personal risk. On the other side, while Koshy is egoistic and short-tempered, he has his moments of clarity in which he realizes the stakes, and would rather be home with his family. But any attempt to backtrack is stymied by his domineering father, a retired gangster-politician who sees the avenging of his son's insult by Ayappan's destruction as a litmus test of Koshy's manhood. Toxic masculinity, anyone?

Every revenge movie thrives on the suspense generated by the moves and counter-moves of the antagonists. Sachy's script for AK excels in how it takes each such sequence to its limit, teasing out new facets that carry the tension to just short of breaking point. Once the battle begins there are no diversions and nothing is perfunctory. Salim-Javed in their prime would have been proud of turning out such work. Wisely, he keeps the direction low-key, the stylistic flourishes restricted primarily to a ritual costumed dance drama at the beginning and the all-out duel at the end. Propped up by an excellent support cast, Biju Menon and Prithviraj Sukumaran throw themselves into their parts with such gusto as to easily surmount any niggling inconsistencies in the characterization; whenever they face each other the screen is set ablaze. AK is a triumphant example of how even a standard genre can with intelligence and genuine love be transformed into a ferocious new experience.