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Current Issue: July 2009

OF LIFE & COLOUR

All About Life

European films are about life and not just some escapist tamasha like Hollywood. It is like an essay which goes along at its own halting pace but eventually making a statement, says well-known film critic ERVELL E MENEZES

The foreign film scenario in India has changed from time to time and though Hollywood dominated it for decades, it has now changed considerably with independent importers playing a considerable role.

This combined with cinema buffs wanting to see films from Europe, Africa and other countries, the market has changed alarmingly.

Actually, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) should have played this role but like most government-led bodies it was incompetence that was their biggest handicap. What they should have concentrated on was setting up a chain of cinema houses for their discerning product. Instead, after running from pillar to post they were eventually competing with the open market for Xrated films.

European films are about life and not just escapist fare like Hollywood. It is like an essay which goes along at its own halting pace but eventually making a statement.

Later on Australian and Iranian films impressed and directors like Peter Weir and Makhmulboff soon became household names. Combined with this the Hollywood product too declined and today they are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

One has to see films like "Pink Panther 2" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic" to realize how trite they are. Today not even one in five films touch a certain high standard. Dteve Martin is not even a pale shadow of Peter Sellers.

Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," shot in India and making a meal of the Oscars, of course, was one of those better films but enough has been written about it. It may not have deserved all the Oscars it got but then Hollywood works that way. Still, it is a very good film and all the hu-ha raised by Amitabh Bachchan and company about glorifying poverty is a lot of poppycock. Why don't they do something to curb the poverty ?

Recently, Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road" is quite outstanding as it probes the lives of a seven-years married couple who wants to get out of that suburbia mould.

Leonardo de Caprio and Kate Winslet do the honours and it is really an absorbing drama, European in treatment and compelling to watch. Here again it is a film about life and its many facets. How "give and take" is okay in speech but not in reality.

And what about the pressures from outside, the two-timing neighbours and false friends. That's life at its candid best.. Qudos to Sam Mendes. But easily one of the best films this writer has seen is the Turkish "Turtles Can Fly" made by Kurdish-Turkish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. It is a heart-wrenching account of orphaned children in a refugee camp on the Iraqi-Turkish border before the US invasion of Iraq, a chilling anti-war tract of unmitigated pain and suffering hauntingly narrated by Ghjobadi.

Soran aka Satellite, because he is adept at setting up TV antennae, is the head of this group, comprising the lame Henkov, Agrin and her child. Henkov is amiable despite losing arms in a mine blast and Agrin has been raped by Saddam's soldiers and left with her child. Soran has tender feelings for Agrin but she is no mood to reciprocate. It is a motley group with the handicapped Henkov as swift as a normal boy. It is a docu-drama and breathes life and grime and in the midst of war they pass their time seemingly happy.

If this is possible, well then turtles can fly. It is released by NDTVLumiere which has probably the best product of world cinema. But they should expand their coverage.. Multivision and PVR films are the other independent companies with a fair product.

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