Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Circle of Coldness and Cruelty




The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had once said, ‘All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain’. In Tras el Cristal (1987) a.k.a In a Glass Cage, Spanish director Agustí Villaronga’s ‘art shocker’, Klaus (Günter Meisner) has an 0ld habit of keeping record of certain facts about himself that are so disturbing that he has managed to keep them a secret from his wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes) and his little daughter Rena (Gisèle Echevarría). Little does he know that soon these facts will come back to haunt him, in an excruciatingly horrifying manner, embodied in a beast, ironically named Angelo (David Sust).

Similar to Psycho (1960), Tras el Cristal tells the crux of the story that will eventually unfold in the pre-credit sequence itself. The film opens with close-up shots of an eye and a camera, followed by click of the shutter perfectly synched with the blink of the eye. At that very moment, we the viewer, become privy to the fact that the film is all about ‘looking’, ‘listening’, and ‘memories’.

As the scene unfolds, we see a man (whose name we shall learn later, is Klaus) clicking photographs of a young boy, who is naked and wounded, hanging from the ceiling with his hands tied up. It is around this time that another gaze enters the frame—a point-of-view of a third entity, hidden outside the building and peering through the window, looking at both Klaus and the obviously numb-in-pain youth.

If one goes back to Hitchcock’s most famous film, one will remember how there, too, in the opening sequence, an external gaze, in a swooping bird-like motion, enters a motel room where two individuals are involved in another type of activity, which, like Klaus, they, too, want to hide from the eyes of others. But in both instances, Hitchcock and Villaronga turn the audience into voyeurs by using point-of-view shots, and thereby make them accessory to the ensuing horrific events.

There is similarity between the two opening sequences in a sense of foreboding as well. While the bird-like swooping movement in Psycho alludes to Norman’s hobby of taxidermy as well as his predatory instinct, in Tras el Cristal, the ‘gaze’ pertains to knowledge. Unlike Klaus, we know that he is being watched, and unknown to Klaus, we see someone picking up a diary from the scene of the crime. And knowledge, as we shall see, will play a pivotal role in the remainder of this treatise on sadism, violence, and voyeurism.

A distraught and repentant Klaus, wishing to put an end to the evil inside him, tries to commit suicide. However, he fails, and instead of finding himself inside a coffin, lands up inside an ‘iron lung’—an artificial, metallic respiratory contraption, in which his paralysed body lies immobile, with only his head sticking out under a glass dome. While Klaus remains cocooned inside the breathing apparatus, Griselda and Rena, we learn, have remained imprisoned within the four walls of their mansion, ever since the family went into exile eight years ago. Into their lives walks in Angelo, a young man, who proclaims to having taken care of Klaus when he was in the hospital.

In sync with the first sequence of the film, where we could only hear his breathing and never come face-to-face, we ‘hear’ Angelo, long before we ‘see’ him. We find him threatening to reveal what Klaus did before he jumped off a roof, if he is not hired as his private nurse.

And when we do get the first glimpse of Angelo, we see him through the gap of a door not fully opened, telling us that there is a lot more to this young man than our eyes can discern at first glance.

For Klaus, the horror begins almost immediately. At night, when the two other members of the family are fast asleep, Angelo tiptoes into Klaus’ room and starts reading out from Klaus’ own diary, the despicable acts he had carried out on little boys when he was employed as a Nazi doctor. As if reliving those disgraceful days and heinous deeds were not enough, very soon Angelo reveals to Klaus” ‘I could be what you used to be’.

With paedophilia as an underlying theme, Tras el Cristal is not an easy film to watch to begin with. But by making innumerable references—both oblique and direct—to scopophilia (the act of deriving pleasure from looking), it makes the experience a first-hand one for the audience. Like Klaus, who is stuck in a contraption for the rest of his life, and has no other option but to look at his ‘mirror image’ in Angelo via an actual mirror that Angelo erects in front of his face; or similar to the young boys who Klaus used to strap down to a chair before abusing them, we the viewer find ourselves rooted to our seats, equally powerless and horrified by what is happening before us, but unable to look away.

In fact, to underline this very aspect, Villaronga, through the character of the maid of Klaus and Griselda’s household, tells us, though in a different context: ‘The machine makes me nervous. It’s like being in the cinema’. To add to the overall claustrophobic experience, Villaronga supplements his visuals, which are perpetually bathed in swathes of icy blue and depressing gray, with ingenious sound effects. The suggestive ‘beast within’ comes alive as much as in the screeching mechanical heaving of the ‘iron lung’, as it does via the sound effects depicting the rattler of a rattlesnake and the squeal of a wounded animal, during two pivotal scenes in the film, wherein the life of one individual lies at the mercy of another.

To the frequent film-watcher, the parallels to Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, a film that was released more than a decade after Tras el Cristal, are obvious. However, unlike its distant, watered-down cousin from Hollywood, this Spanish film has built up a certain reputation for itself—and quite rightly so. Rather than merely slapping an in-your-face message of ‘immorality never pays’, it actually manages to be disturbing because it turns the audience into an accomplice.

Just like Angelo used meshed wire to turn the hallway of Klaus’ house into a replica of those numerous concentration camps, Tras el Cristal creates the eponymous glass cage for the audience, as well. We are infantilised, immobile, and passive in our response, but very much active in our participation. Klaus is made to look through the crystal dome via a mirror. We just cannot tear our gaze away from the screen. 


Sunday, March 20, 2011

Reinventing the ‘Re’ in Revenge





In the fourth season of the TV series Lost, the antagonist Benjamin Linus tells the former Iraqi National Guard Sayid Jarrah: ‘When you let your grief turn into anger, it will never leave you’. In South Korean director Jee-woon Kim’s latest offering Akmareul boatda (I Saw the Devil), Kim Soo-hyeon (played by Byung-hun Lee; who some of us might remember as Storm Shadow in the awful GI Joe: Rise of Cobra), who works for the National Intelligence Service, has every reason to be aggrieved. His fiancée, Joo-yeon, with whom he got engaged just a month ago, has been found hacked to pieces by an unknown assailant, while she was waiting by the roadside for a tow truck.

Soo-hyeon, like his innumerable precedents on celluloid who had been wronged, promises to avenge Joo-yeon’s murder by ‘inflicting 10,000 times more pain’ on the assailant—a claim or its variant that, too, has been made time and again on the silver screen. Till then, ‘I Saw the Devil’ follows a tried-and-tested formula that lies at the core of any revenge flick. And if it had been just another entry in this sub-genre of films, it would have ended at around the 55-minute mark. Because that is when, Soo-hyeon lays his hands upon the dastardly serial killer Kyung-Chul (another bravura performance by one of the most well-known actors ever to emerge from South Korea, Min-sik Choi), after staking out three more suspects.

The evidence that Kyung-Chul is, in fact, Joo-yeon’s—and several other equally unfortunate women’s—murderer is irrefutable; the dastardliness of Kyung-Chul, irredeemable; the fury of Soo-hyeon, as he lifts a large boulder to snuff out Kyung-Chul’s life, inconsolable. So, when the passed out Kyung-Chul regains consciousness to find that all he has lost is a pint-odd of blood and the functionality of his left wrist, and has, in fact, gained a wad of currency notes left behind in an envelope, he is as surprised as us, the viewer.

That is also the precise point, when Akmareul boatda (2010) begins to deviate from other run-of-the-mill revenge flicks.

Mildly flabbergasted but largely condescending of what he deems to be his unknown attacker’s foolhardiness, it does not take the psychopathic Kyung-Chul long to pick up, from where he had left off, when it comes to hunting down women. But to his utter astonishment, whenever he finds himself a new prey, Soo-hyeon arrives out of the blue, again and again, almost on cue, and inflicts pain on Kyung-Chul that keeps getting worse.

But Kyung-Chul is no ordinary psychopath. His proclamations that others are nothing but ‘retards’ are not boastful claims, but a statement of fact. It is only a matter of time before he figures out exactly how Soo-hyeon is managing to appear at precisely the same place where Kyung-Chul is planning to devour another hapless human.

And when he does figure out, Soo-hyeon finds that in this particular psychopath, the answer to ‘Who do you think won? You or me?’ is not as simple and straightforward as it sounds.

‘Violent thriller’ is a sub-genre that has found itself resuscitated by new Korean cinema. Chan-wook Park, Jee-woon Kim, and Hong-jin Na are just three of the new breed of film directors, who have firmly put Korea onto the map of world cinema, resulting in that classic knee-jerk reaction from Hollywood—churning out remakes.

Among these three, Park maybe the most famous—after all, his Oldboy (2003) re-introduced modern Korean cinema to the world—but it is Kim, who has the most diverse filmography. His previous three films were an action-adventure (The Good, the Bad, the Weird), a crime drama (A Bittersweet Life) and a top-notch horror (A Tale of Two Sisters; remade in Hollywood in 2009 as The Uninvited). And with Akmareul boatda, Kim has broken new ground. Not only has he carried on the creative acumen that he has ostentatiously displayed in his earlier works, but has also managed to push the envelope, so much so that Akmareul boatda, because of its violent content, became the first instance in entire Korean film history to be restricted twice by the authorities. Considering the amount of violence that has perpetuated the current crop of Korean films—that tells a lot.

However, there is a lot that separates Akmareul boatda from the violent trash, tripe, and travesty that Hollywood keeps churning out on a regular basis. To begin with, Kim has made it abundantly clear that there is not much of a difference between the avenging Soo-hyeon and the atrocious Kyung-Chul. From the latter using a hammer to mercilessly dispose of Joo-hyeon, to Soo-hyeon using the same weapon on a sex-offender; from Kyung-Chul using a vehicle to pick up his unfortunate victims, to Soo-hyeon using his car to incapacitate one of his targets; from the remorseless manner in which Kyung-Chul chops off one of his preys, to the inability of Soo-hyeon to break down when he learns about his fiancée’s fate; from the instantaneous movement of Kyung-Chul’s chopper on a woman’s body, to the split-second stomping of Kyung-Chul’s wrist by Soo-hyeon; from Kyung-Chul using a dumbbell to bludgeon a guy, to Soo-hyeon bashing Kyung-Chul  with a fire extinguisher; Soo-hyeon—initially unknowingly, and then consciously—emulating a coda followed by the serial killer regarding the manner in which body parts are cut off; and last, but not least, the sweeping panning of the camera that directly connects a distraught Soo-hyeon to Kyung-Chul prowling the streets in search of his next victim—the instances are many.

While the gore is almost unbearable, the violence unapologetic, and the fierceness of both the protagonist and the antagonist unflinching, the film has its own share of dark humour, evident in the two instances when the battered Kyung-Chul tries to hitch a ride or when a psychopath calls his victims ‘crazy’.

Refreshingly, the supporting characters in Akmareul boatda do not condone Soo-hyeon’s actions. On several occasions, we hear them imploring that the path he is following will not bring back the dead, nor is it necessary to become a monster to fight one—a feature inconspicuous by its absence in the plethora of revenge films that we encounter every year.

The other interesting aspect of the film is how it has subverted a number of cinematic tropes. How often do we find a psychopath in a situation where he has to fight for his life fending off two more of his kin; the handle of a screwdriver coming off when someone tries to dislodge it from his palm; or the audience finding their sympathy being inadvertently swaying towards an immoral individual?

It is this ingenuity that is present even in the title of the film itself. The Korean phrase Akmareul boatda simply means ‘Saw the Devil’, without any subject, which can imply the devil being either Kyung-Chul or the evil that lay hidden inside Soo-hyeon, only to emerge as the film progressed.

All in all, while breathing new life into this catatonic sub-genre, the Koreans have shown that unlike the Chinese, who like to eat the dish of revenge cold, they prefer to have a second helping, and a third, and a fourth….  


Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Charm and Challenges of Childhood




 As the Turkish director Atalay Taşdiken’s award-winning film Mommo (2009) opens, we see the elderly Kazim (Mustafa Uzunyilmaz) putting household items on a mule-drawn cart. As soon as his second wife boards the vehicle, he drives away, not even sparing a cursory glance at his cherubic little daughter Aysa (Elif Bülbül) or at his nine-year old son, Ahmet (Mehmet Bülbül), who emerges from the background. There is a yawning gap between the two kids—symbolic of the vacant space their father is leaving behind in their lives.

The two kids now stay at their grandfather’s (Mete Dönmezer) place. Grandpa is old and infirm. Fate has snatched away the working of two of his limbs, but has failed to do the same to the pride of this stoic, old man. Deep down, Grandpa knows that he is living on borrowed time, and the little savings he has accrued from his pension, which barely allow him to make both ends meet, are fast running out with the addition of these two members to his household.

A disgruntled Ahmet, angry at his father, finds himself filling up multiple shoes for little Aysa. He becomes her brother, confidante, and surrogate parent. During the beginning credit sequence, we see Ahmet carving a small boat out of a plank of wood. In reality, he finds himself inadvertently landing with the burden of carving a life for both himself and his sibling.

Life is tough for the brother-sister duo in this tiny Turkish village. The kids in the playground, led by Abidin, their stepmother’s son, taunt Ahmed telling him to go ‘play house’ with his sister than participate in a soccer match. Aysa is branded an ‘infidel’—a term, whose meaning is unknown to the wide-eyed and confused child—by the daughters of the affluent families, when she takes part in a game of hopscotch. Then there are rumours floating around that the partly-paralysed Grandpa might get married again and that Ahmet and Aysa will be sent to a children’s home.

Amidst all these adversities, Ahmet tries his best to keep Aysa happy. He builds a swing for her with a rope and a pillow for a seat; offers her his worn-out T-shirt when she gets wet while playing in a brook; tells her stories; combs her hair; and stands guard when she cleans her hair in the public bath.

There is a particularly poignant scene where the two siblings play with the wooden boat that Ahmet had crafted in the water of a makeshift dam made of stone. That dam is symbolic of the world the duo have created around them—away from the painful reality of their circumstances, a small, joyful corner of their own. But their fun is short-lived, when a villager, irate with the makeshift dam, shovels the rocks out. A helpless Ahmet and Aysa can only stare at the wooden toy sailing past them, never to come back.

At night, they sleep on the roof of Grandpa’s house, under the stars, to avoid keeping the old man awake while Ahmet answers all of Aysa’s innumerable questions in a practical, matter-of-fact manner. And more than often, he has to allay Aysa’s fear of the bogeyman, who she believes hides in the storeroom and can be seen through the hole that serves as the window.

Ahmet finds himself and his sister akin to the hollyhocks—the ‘orphan flowers’, as his mother used to call them. His only friend in the entire village is the local grocer ‘Istanbullu’ Bakkal (Mehmet Usta), who frequently gives away chocolate wafers and chewing gum to the two kids. While Ahmet puts on a brave face as he goes about his daily chores of cooking, running errands for his grandpa, and giving his sister company, the fact is he is just a nine-year old boy. So, he too, breaks down, but does so discreetly, away from the gaze of Aysa or grandpa.

Meanwhile, a ray of hope arrives for the brother and sister in the form of a letter from their aunt Fatma, who stays in Germany. She writes that she and her husband are trying hard to bring Ahmet and Aysa to join their family, but the laws of the land and the necessary paperwork are hampering them. Grandpa is trying in his own way to keep the kids happy. But, pragmatic that he is, he knows that on his old-age pension the once-in-a-month feast of kofte will soon turn out to be a luxury he will not be able to afford anymore. Pride does not allow him to keep the doors open when he makes bread, lest the neighbours get to learn that he does not have money to make a purchase from the bakery; nor does it allow him to agree to Gulseren, a lady from the village, who comes with the proposal to send Aysa to work as a servant for a rich family.

But how does a frail old man, fight with the forces of fate that are slowly, but gradually, putting him into a corner?

Born in the Konya province of Anatolia himself, Taşdiken, who also wrote the screenplay for Mommo, offers not only an insider’s view into Anatolian village life, but also draws an equally astute picture of what it is like for children to grow up in such surroundings. While there lie an innate happiness in riding a bicycle along a dusty road with one’s sister riding pillion, sleeping underneath a blanket of stars, writing a letter on behalf of one’s grandfather; there are also the tears that follow after being tonsured, the confusion that arises when one thinks the boy at the soccer field knows a secret that can jeopardise one’s and one’s sibling’s lives, and the fear when a child of nine looks into a hole in the wall staring at him, even though he has made himself believe that the bogeyman is a figment of his father’s imagination.

It will take a cynical mind not to be swayed by the sheer simplicity of the story that is Mommo; a stone heart not to want to reach out through the screen and give the angelic Aysa a tight hug; and a superhuman self-restraint not to allow a sigh escape and a lump rise in our throat when the film comes full-circle at its heart-wrenching conclusion.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Magic, Materialism, and Melancholy



Paris. 1959. The vaudeville theatres of France find themselves in the middle of a losing battle against the proliferation of television, showy rock stars, and other new forms of entertainment. In such a fast-changing scenario, an elderly illusionist, Jacques Tatischeff, finds himself and his quaint art form as difficult to fit in, as he finds it hard to manage his mischievous little pet rabbit while pulling it out of the hat in front of an ever-diminishing audience. 

Undeterred, he decides to shift base and comes to London, where he takes up assignments at garden parties to make ends meet. But here, too, the only appreciation he gets while conjuring wine glasses out of thin air is from a Scottish guest, who is as full of liquor as the glasses in Tatischeff’s hand. On this inebriated individual’s invitation, Tatischeff arrives at a remote Gaelic-speaking island that has only recently been electrified. No wonder then, the villagers find switching a light bulb on and off and crowding around the jukebox as enthralling as any magic trick.

In the same inn where Tatischeff is lodged works Alice, a young girl entrusted with doing laundry and keeping the premises clean. To her impressionable mind, the illusionist’s performances in the pub are not sleight of hand, but true magic and Tatischeff, a mystical magician in the flesh. And when the elderly illusionist buys her a pair of new red shoes, to replace her old, tattered ones, Alice, like Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz decides to go on what she believes will be an equally magical journey. Only this time, rather than taking the yellow brick road, she follows Tatischeff and convinces him to pay Edinburgh, a land famous for its street performers and magicians, a visit.

Once in Edinburgh, the two of them put up at Little Joe’s Hotel—a rundown establishment, whose residents include a triplet of trapeze artists (an oblique reference to the same director’s equally adorable 2003 film The Triplets of Belleville), a down-on-his-luck anorexic mime, and an out-of-job ventriloquist—all of whom represent the microcosm of the slowly-dying traditional forms of entertainment.

As the young Alice slowly gives in to the lures of a big-city life, Tatischeff, egged on by the opportunity to redeem a missing piece in his own life, and unwilling to let go of the only audience he has who still seems to believe in magic, decides not to break the spell. He starts showering her with increasingly expensive gifts, while hiding from her his own struggles that force him to take up obscure jobs like working in a garage, painting billboards, and even working as a live demonstrator at a shop selling women’s perfume and undergarments. While Tatischeff regales the passersby from the store’s window, one day Alice finds love across the street, while peeking out of the window of her hotel room. The last vestige of magic seems to come to an abrupt halt in Tatischeff’s life, as he confronts the reality that life so stone-heartedly shoves in our faces.

Based on an unproduced script by the acclaimed French director and actor Jacques Tati (whose full-name was, in fact, Jacques Tatischeff) L’illusioniste (2010) is a double ode. Tati’s script, which he wrote in 1956, but never got around to depict on celluloid, was a thinly-veiled dedication to his daughter, who he had abandoned early in her life. In his L’illusioniste, director Sylvain Chomet has, in turn, paid his homage to the French master. In this sublime hand-drawn full-length animation film, which, incidentally was nominated at the recently-concluded 83rd Annual Academy Awards in the Best Animated Feature Film of the Year category, Chomet, while staying true in depicting Tatischeff in the physical likeness of Tati, has also carried forward Tati’s signature approach to film making that is known for being sparse in dialogue but rife in emotion.

Think of the dialogue-less but heart-wrenching initial sequence of Pixar’s Up (2009) extended to an eighty-minute run time that is buoyed by beatifically drawn characters who speak volumes through body language and a lilting musical score composed by Chomet himself, and one can have a preliminary idea of L’illusioniste. At the same time, it offers a sharp criticism of the consumerist society we live in and our preponderance to discard the old without so much as batting an eyelid. A tale of relationship that has shades of Chaplin’s brilliant Limelight (1952), it shows how all of us are in constant pursuit of one illusion or the other, while ironically, those who pursue conjuring illusions as a trade lie long-forgotten.

When all of us hanker after a little magic in our lives, it is indeed tragic that circumstances can compel a professional illusionist to forsake his art in the face of cold reality. That the curtain has fallen, in particular, on the kind of magic that Tatischeff and his compatriots once plied, and in general, on vaudeville music halls is immaculately depicted by Chomet in the penultimate sequence of L’illusioniste. One by one all the lights outside of a ‘variety theatre’ are turned off, with ‘Music Hall’ being the last two words to fade.

However, true to his master Tati, whose characters always exhibited an immense joie-de-vivre in times of external adversity, one little firefly fleets across the screen, while the lights breathe their last. That tiny insect is a harbinger of hope—hope for hand-drawn animators, who find themselves relegated to the background when computer-generated animation is the preferred option; optimism that human emotions will succeed in eking out a place in a world succumbing to materialism; and faith, that no matter how much we progress, there will always be space for magic in our lives.