Camera, Creatures, and Conflict

Every culture has its own mystical, mythical creatures. The English have their grindylow; the Irish their leprechaun; the Americans have bigfoot; the German their doppelgänger; the Greeks have their cyclops and gorgon; the Scandinavians their kraken; the Arabs have djinns; the Slavs have vampires; the Scots have the Loch Ness monster; the Jewish have their leviathan; the Japanese have oni; while we, the Hindus have our danavas, rakshasas, and icchadhaari nags.

In his second directorial venture, Trolljegeren a.k.a. TrollHunter (2010) the Norwegian director André Øvredal has brought to life a similar legendary creature from Nordic folklore—the troll, which is typically a hideous cave-dwelling being that is as old as the mountains and forests in which it dwells. 

Narrated in a found-footage format—a genre pioneered by Ruggero Deodato in his notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1980); that includes The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), REC (2007), Cloverfield (2008), and Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)—we are informed via a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that what we are about to see is an uncut version of almost five hours of footage found in two hard drives. Unlike most other examples of this particular genre, which jar the senses and leave behind a feeling of motion sickness due to the epileptic seizures that seem to grasp the camera in a stranglehold every now and then, the found-footage style actually works for Trolljegeren. This is simply because it treats the narrative style not as a gimmick, but as a visual representation of its basic premise—fairy tales.

After all, in our childhood, those stories were brought to life by someone else—our parents or even our grandparents—who read them to us. We saw in our mind’s eye what they described while narrating the awe-inducing worlds hidden within those pages. In Trolljegeren, we see what three college students: Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterus), Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) encountered while they accompanied Hans (Otto Jespersen), an unsung hero of Norway—a hunter whose identity and profession are both a national secret—in his perilous missions aboard his UV-floodlight equipped, armoured with iron spikes Land Rover.

It is a classic fairytale set up. Three characters, who depict our mind (Thomas, the reporter), eyes (Kalle, the cameraman), and our ears (Johanna, the sound recordist) befriend an intrepid hunter of mythical creatures and embark on the adventure of their lifetime. As the trio gradually eases their way into Hans’ life and livelihood, we, too, find ourselves warming up to this gruff, physically scarred man, and beginning to buy into his eccentricities.

We learn how Hans, an ex-Navy man, is the sole troll hunter in the whole of Norway—a job he has been silently carrying out for over three decades. We realise how officials from the country’s wildlife advisory board are involved in creating a smokescreen about trolls’ existence, by hoodwinking the general public in believing that it is bears or tornadoes that are uprooting trees and shifting boulders. Most importantly, we get an insight into these centuries-old creatures. While tracking trolls with remarkable names such as raglefant, tusseladd, and dovregubben, Thomas, Johanna and Kalle find out that some trolls have three heads, while others are giants; the best way to avoid being sniffed out by a troll is to rub one’s body with troll stink; they love to chew on old tyres, though their normal diet is rocks; they are nocturnal creatures, who can detect Christian blood from afar; and that ultraviolet rays are fatal to trolls—a burst of it and they are likely to turn to stone or simply explode. 

But such pedantic knowledge pale in comparison to the first-hand experience of coming face-to-face with a three-headed tusseladd. The initial fear of having a giant creature stomping towards the camera while uttering a blood-curdling roar soon makes way to the glee that follows the realisation that the bedtime stories one had listened in rapt attention to during our childhood were in fact true! We find this emotion writ large on Johanna’s face once Hans calcifies the monstrous creature using UV ray floodlights. Øvredal had, in fact, portended that the character who would be the first to embrace the fact that trolls could be around us had to be Johanna when he had focused on her playing with a stuffed tiger that looked like Hobbes. Surely, a girl who believes in a talking tiger would be more susceptible to a towering troll!

Like a seasoned storyteller, the two-film-old Øvredal, and his co-writer Håvard S Johansen are both aware that the spine of any story, fairy tale or otherwise, is conflict. While the clash between man and beast is evident in the title of the film itself—with a reference to the adverse effect of global warming on flora, fauna, and wildlife thrown in for good measure—there are other, more subtle, allusions, as well. Hans reveals he hates his job, not so much because the pay is meagre and he has to work nights, but because he regrets having to massacre pregnant, and even young trolls, who can barely walk. At a more broad level, the perpetual discord between fantasy and reality—and our preponderance to find a ‘natural solution’ to everything—is brought to the fore when Øvredal offers a faux-scientific explanation to why trolls cannot stand sunlight and any other source of ultraviolet radiation. It is as if sunlight is a metaphor for the light of knowledge and rationality that turns these walking mythical creatures into immobile rubbles of stone. And therein lies a similarity with us. While for humans it is ashes to ashes and dust to dust, these concrete-eating creatures return to stone.

In keeping with the fairy tale flavour, Øvredal has also peppered his film with humour. It is impossible to keep a straight face when a ghillie suit attired Hans burst out of the jungle screaming ‘Trolls!’ or when a Polish guy expresses in broken English his desire not to ask questions because it might lead to problems he would love to avoid by uttering, ‘Why problem make when you know problem have you don’t want to make?’ Perhaps, the best example of humour occurs at the fag end of the film. In sync with the essence of Trolljegeren, which mixes fantasy with reality, Øvredal takes an actual footage of a press conference by the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, where he had mentioned the word ‘troll’. Though the context was different—the politician was actually referring to an oilfield beyond the Norwegian coast, which has the same name as the mythical creature—the innovative editing does elicit smiles. 

As a filmmaking fraternity, the Nordic industry has been experiencing a second coming of late. In 2009, Norway burst into the limelight with the Nazi zombie flick Død Snø, or Dead Snow. A year later, the Finns turned the concept of Santa Claus on its head with the superlative Rare Exports. Now, with Trolljegeren, Øvredal has succeeded in something that has for a long time been the realm of directors like Spielberg—reliving our childhood, revisiting our infantile fantasies, and reaffirming our belief in them. 

The Penalty, the Profession, and the Pain

In her book Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean, one of the foremost American proponents for the abolition of the death penalty, wrote: ‘Government ... can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.’ But in the 1960s, under the feared dictator Francisco Franco’s regime, capital punishment was very much in vogue in Spain, as we learn from the opening sequence of the acclaimed Spanish director and screenwriter Luis García Berlanga’s criminally underrated and unfairly under-viewed tragicomedy masterpiece El Verdugo (1963) a.k.a. The Executioner a.k.a. Not on Your Life.

As the film begins, a prison guard has his breakfast interrupted with the arrival of a mortician and his assistant, the latter carrying a coffin on his shoulders. Through a second door emerge a handful of government officials, including the counsel of defence, and an aged, affable man, carrying with him a case. He is, the mortician tells his assistant, the eponymous executioner. The duo and the coffin now enter through the same door, only to re-emerge a moment later. Only this time, they are holding the casket up at both ends, indicating there is a body inside. Thus, subtly, the spectre of death enters the frame, and will hover around the main characters throughout the film. However, like the morbid act of the execution itself, it will never really come out in the open.

The elderly, genteel executioner is Amadeo (played brilliantly by the renowned Spanish actor José Isbert). As the mortician’s assistant, José Luis (portrayed by the Italian actor Nino Manfredi) tells his boss, ‘…he looks like a normal person’, the first of the many wrong impressions that we harbour about an executioner gets snuffed out.  A veteran of forty years in the gruesome profession of garroting, Amadeo has a long time ago come to terms with the reality that ‘executioners are misunderstood people’. That is why, he does not take it as an affront when the prison guard looks distastefully at his case containing the tools of his trade that he had mistakenly placed on the same desk where the guard was having his breakfast. Nor is he shaken by the obvious irritation his innocuous query about when the first streetcar arrives is met with.

A chance visit to Amadeo’s residence reveals to José Luis that he is not really popular among his neighbours, either, who consider themselves ‘respectable people’. But when the young undertaker meets Amadeo’s spinster daughter Carmen (Emma Penella), something starts brewing between the two hearts, and it is not just the coffee that Carmen dutifully offers him.

As the two start coming closer, they find that they share something in common. Carmen confides to José Luis that all her fiancés have run away the moment they had learnt that she was an executioner’s daughter. José Luis tells her in return that every girl has left him when they had realised that he earns his bread by working as an undertaker. While death parts other couples, in this particular case, it brought two hearts together.

Coaxed by his boss, who is also Amadeo’ friend, and browbeaten by being unfortunately caught in bed with Carmen when Amadeo had barged into the house unannounced, the unassuming undertaker has no other option but to abandon his dream of going to Germany and become a mechanic, and get married to Carmen, instead. But surely, there is no place in his own house for his new bride, which is already bursting at its seams as a result of the presence of José Luis’s younger brother Antonio (curiously played by an actor named José Luis López Vázquez)—a tailor by profession—his shrewish wife, and their two children. Moreover, on the day of the wedding, disgusted that his brother had taken an executioner’s daughter as a bride, Antonio had proclaimed that he would be parting ways with his elder brother.

But good news arrives in the form of a missive that declares that in recognition of his four-decade-long service, Amadeo has been granted a three-bedroom flat. However, as fate would have it, the soon-to-be-retired executioner is told that he will lose the flat the moment he is out of work. Hence, the future of the family, which is on the verge of welcoming a new addition, seems to hang on whether an individual, who is an expert at interring, can now become equally proficient at garroting.

The very idea of earning his livelihood by taking someone’s life is unimaginable to José Luis. But his feeble protests stand no chance while facing the incessant haranguing of his father-in-law, who keeps insisting that he take the job and make the flat theirs simply because ‘…they sentence people, but, in the last moment, they're going to pardon them!’ Begrudgingly, the undertaker, who has always believed that ‘People should die in their own beds’ accedes to Amadeo’s request, while dreading the day when he will be called to ‘work’. To his utter dismay, his fear soon becomes reality, when he is summoned to Mallorca to execute a condemned convict.

A close scrutiny of all timeless comedies will reveal a common thread. If one scratches their funny, frothy façade, one will invariably find pain and pathos running deep. Berlanga’s El Verdugo is no exception.

The film is full of both wry, satiric humour as well as laugh-out-loud moments. Take for example, the scene when José Luis visits Amadeo’s house for the first time. On the wall, he spies a framed photograph. Noticing his gaze, a nonchalant Amadeo tells the young undertaker that it is one of his ‘clients’, and then goes on to show him the wristwatch that the man had gifted the executioner. A horrified José Luis now turns his attention to another wall, this time adorned with more than one portraits. Pre-empting the unasked query, the aged man replies, in an equally casual manner: ‘No, those are just my relatives!’ Or the scene when Carmen wants to buy a new shirt for José Luis., and Amadeo takes one look at his son-in-law’s neck to announce: ‘It’s a size forty-one!’

While peppering his film with such smile-inducing moments (the wedding scene is uproariously funny), maestro Berlanga and his frequent collaborator, co-writer Rafael Azcona, have not, for a moment, allowed the subliminal anti-capital punishment message of their film to get diluted. By condemning the duplicity of governments that proclaim they want to protect the lives of citizens, and at the same time sentence them to their deaths, Berlanga and Azcona state their message aloud through Amadeo, when he suddenly grasps the hand of his would-be son-in-law and brings it near a lamp socket to say: ‘ That is only 250 volts! They make me laugh when they say public garroting is inhuman. Is the guillotine better then? Do you think it’s fair to bury a man in pieces?....The Americans they use the electric chair, which leaves them carbonised, scorched’.

The director-screenwriter duo also delivers the same message subtly, in the unforgettable penultimate sequence of the film, by raising the all-important question: Who really dies and who gets killed at the garrote, gallows or guillotine?

A Subterranean Saga of Salvation

There comes a point in each of our lives, when we just cannot stand the sight of the profession we are employed in. But for Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi), the issue is slightly more complicated. As a ticket inspector of the Budapest Metro, his job is to kontroll, or to ensure that passengers have bought a ticket or at least have a valid pass. This apparently monotonous and innocuous job turns out to be a daily struggle, primarily because, with almost no exception, the passengers hate kontrollers and their job. In fact, they do so with such ferocity that the ticket inspectors face verbal—and even physical—abuse almost on a daily basis.

In this thankless livelihood, Bulcsú and his crew, comprising the elderly Professor (Zoltán Mucsi), the narcoleptic Muki (Csaba Pindroch), and Lecsó (Sándor Badár), who is afraid of dogs, has just been joined by the bumbling recruit Tibor (Zsolt Nagy). It is through Tibor, or Tibi, who acts as the surrogate for the viewer, that we learn that as if the incessant animosity of the Metro passengers was not enough, a prankster nicknamed Gyalogkakukk (Hungarian for the cartoon character Roadrunner), also known as Bootsie (Bence Mátyássy), who, apparently has eyes at the back of his head like the devil and can run like him, is making life hell for the kontrollers. On top of all this, there have been seven suicides, or jumpers who throw themselves in front of an onrushing subway train, this month alone. Later on, we realise that in most cases, it is a mysterious hooded figure that is pushing people on to the tracks.

Like the gigantic exhaust fan that we see Bulcsú perched upon in one shot of the film, each day in the life of our poker-faced protagonist is an endless cycle. Through a conversation with a passenger named Feri (János Kulka)—from whom Bulcsú hides the reality that he is now employed as a ticket inspector of the very Metro Feri is travelling in—we get to learn that Bulcsú had left a project that he was working on unfinished before he ‘went underground’. Bulcsú explains that he simply got weary of waking up everyday knowing that he had to wage a daily war to prove that he was the best in his work.

But deep down both Bulcsú and we, the viewer, know that the life he has consciously opted for is no better. While he has shut the world above by never venturing out into the sunlight, spending his days boarding one train after another and the nights by sleeping on the platform, he feels equally confined by his daily routine that never veers from waking up, working, and wandering off to sleep, and waking up again to engage in exactly the same sequence of events.

It seems the only time Bulcsú can feel any rush is when he competes in the perilous game of ‘railing’ with one of his rival kontrollers, Gonzó (Balázs Lázár). ‘Railing’ is like Russian roulette. Only difference being it is a footrace and does not involve a revolver, though the stakes are equally high. When the last passenger train leaves, those who are participating in ‘railing’ run after it, following the serpentine tracks. But the objective is not to catch the train ahead of them, but to avoid getting crushed by the ‘midnight express’, the last train that comes after the final passenger train, which never stops at any station, and is always breathing down their necks, and is hot on their heels.

The ‘midnight express’ is nothing but a personification of the past that Bulcsú is running from. That is why, even though he has made a name for himself as a ‘railing’ champion, even after winning another race, his face is not flush with the exhilaration of victory, but cringed with an aura of defeat.

One day, into this dreary life of Bulcsú, appears Szofi (Eszter Balla), a girl in a teddy bear suit. She is the daughter of Béla (Lajos Kovács), who, after being banished from the world above when he could not stop in time because of ‘insufficient braking distance’ now drives one of the subway trains of Budapest Metro. Like the Little Bear constellation, Szofi takes on the role of a guiding star, lighting up Bulcsú’s humdrum existence. For the first time in a long while, Bulcsú starts thinking beyond the frequent fights with the commuters, the boring conversations with his crew members, the menace posed by Bootsie, and the perilous hooded figure.

It is difficult to categorise Kontroll (2003), the first feature length film by the Hungarian filmmaker Nimród Antal. Like its characters who hop, skip, and jump over railway tracks while ‘railing’, the film deftly hopscotches across several genres—drama, mystery, thriller, comedy, and even romance. Filmed in its entirety in a subterranean setting, the brooding atmosphere is lightened both by individual character traits (like Muki collapsing into a narcoleptic fit every time his temper rises) and by the interactions of the kontrollers with passengers without tickets, which vary from the benign (a stuttering man trying in vain to explain his situation) to the bizarre (being handed a lottery ticket in place of a subway ticket; being threatened by a gypsy that she will put a curse on the inspector who had the gall to ask for a ticket; to a guy pulling out a syringe full of blood and wielding it as a weapon).

Kontroll was selected to be a part of the Un Certain Regard category of the Cannes Film Festival in 2004—two decades after the last Hungarian film made it to the prestigious event. Not a small feat by a director making his full-length feature film debut, by any means. Thus, one would have been perfectly justified to hope that the four sets of escalators all moving upward in the final shot of Kontroll would also signify the rise of this talented born-of-Hungarian-parents but raised-in-Los-Angeles filmmaker. Unfortunately, his career graph, since then, has resembled not the final, but the opening shot of Kontroll, wherein all the escalators are seen moving down. The clue possibly lies in the fact that he never went back to his homeland again but decided to heed the call of Hollywood instead for his next three films: the vacuous horror flick Vacancy (2003), the atrocious heist movie Armored (2009), and the pathetic sci-fi offering Predators (2010).

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 83^rd 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.

A Truly Sweet Revenge

With the 83^rd Oscars—the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences’ annual tentpole event—barely weeks from now, it will now be a decade since the edition remembered the most by majority of Indians. That was when Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan failed to bowl out the rest of the competition in the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category. Equally disheartened across the globe that year, and since then, has been an ever-increasing number of cine-lovers, who just cannot fathom how Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s utterly charming Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (aka Amelie) did not win enough hearts at the Academy to win the trophy in the same category.

A self-taught filmmaker, Jeunet belongs to a dying breed of directors—the ‘auteur’ (or author). A much-influential film theory that evolved in the 1950s in the seminal French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, the auteur theory argues that just like authors use the pen to express themselves in literature; each film, too, should reflect its director’s own vision. One can view this as the filmic equivalent of expressionism in painting—with both putting emphasis on the creator’s (painter/filmmaker) subjective perspective.

The hallmark of an auteur is that it takes the viewer only a couple of moments to guess the director correctly, every time he/she views any instance from his/her body of work. In other words, an auteur leaves his/her signature behind in his/her films.

Jeunet’s signature is the way he digitally manipulates colour in every frame. Like a true auteur, he has stuck to his trademark visual aesthetic in his latest offering—Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009), which roughly translated into English, means ‘Non-stop shenanigans’.

Bazil (Dany Boon) is a thirty-something video store clerk, who can recite dialogue from films from memory. As a kid, he lost his father—a soldier—in Morocco to a landmine. While that particular weapon of war broke his heart, another product of arms manufacturers—the revolver—leaves behind a much more apparent scar. A stray bullet from a shootout that occurs right in front of his video store hits him right in the head and lands in his brain. Gauging that operating on Bazil might have fatal consequences; a surgeon decides to leave the bullet where it is.

Stripped off his job and ousted from his home, Bazil spends two months roaming the streets begging, till he meets Slammer, an ex-convict. Slammer, aware of the fact that the bullet could pop Bazil’s brain any second, tells him that he knows of a family who will still be willing to adopt him. Slammer introduces Bazil to a motley crew of individuals, who live in a junk yard. There’s Mama Chow—the cook, who is also in charge of recruiting; Calculator, a young girl capable of conducting complex mental calculations in an instant; Tiny Pete, who can create wondrous automatons using scrap metal; Remington, a former ethnographer from Congo, who speaks in old-world clichés; Elastic Girl, a contortionist; and Buster (played by Jeunet’s perennial favourite Dominique Pinon), a human cannonball. They spend their time salvaging defective stuff. No wonder then, they welcome Bazil.

One fine day, while collecting junk, Bazil realises, to his utter amazement, that the company that manufactured the landmine that blew his father into smithereens and the organisation that was behind the bullet that is now a ticking bomb in his brain, have their headquarters on opposite sides of the same street. Like Amelie, who decided to take matters in her own hands to teach the local vegetable vendor—who repeatedly ill-treated his dim-witted employee—a lesson; Bazil, does not get mad at the CEOs of the two companies. He, too, decides to get even, while being ably assisted by his family of six.

With the sombre topic of international arms dealing as the backdrop, and the morbid situation of the protagonist, who has lead in his head, Micmacs could easily have turned into a dark, brooding thriller. But similar to Jeunet’s characters, who never get bogged down by their circumstances, and his frames, which show the world in a different hue than usual, the film does a volte-face and takes on an amusing avatar. Akin to The Big Sleep (1946)—a film the adult Bazil was watching when we first see him on screen—which deals more with the process of a criminal investigation and ponders less on the results; Micmacs, too, is more about how the magnificent seven go about extracting revenge, than the final outcome.

It is obvious that like the protagonist of his latest film, Jeunet, too, is a movie aficionado. There are numerous references to other films strewn throughout Micmacs. Look out for Bazil begging inside a subway station, lip syncing to a female singer on the other side of a pillar, who is oblivious of his presence, in a direct homage to the Jean Hagen lip syncing to Debbie Reynolds sequence in Singin’ in the Rain (1952); the ode to Chaplin when an obviously hungry Bazil is restrained by his pride from approaching a woman, who is distributing food packets, and he feigns that he is waiting for a cab; the Buster Keaton-ish moment while cleaning windows and being caught snooping; the characters speaking about Scarface (1983) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971); the shot of Buster zooming through the air a la The Rocketeer (1991); the harking back to the famous Russian roulette sequence in The Deer Hunter (1978); split screens similar to De Palma’s Mission Impossible (1996); and at least two references to Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): a buzzing fly, and the way in which one CEO ends up on the shoulders of another in the same manner as Harmonica’s brother in Leon’s masterpiece. Not only that, in a particularly ingenious sequence, by using sound effects, Jeunet succeeds in fooling the two antagonists and the audience alike.

Other than the surreal tints, what brings Jeunet’s films alive is the quirkiness of his secondary characters. Micmacs, too, follows this tradition. So, we have a surgeon who flips a coin to decide whether to operate or not; a CEO who quotes poetry during his speeches; his rival, whose collection includes Marilyn Monroe’s molar and Churchill’s nail clippings; a security personnel, who has worn the same sweater for three decades…and the list goes on.

The only other filmmaker of this generation who is successfully delving in fantasy is the Spanish auteur Guillermo Del Toro (of Pan’s Labyrinth fame). However,

while Del Toro focuses on bringing out the macabre side, Jeunet highlights the  magical in the mundane.

Possibly, the most apt way to apprise Jeunet’s body of work is indicated by Elastic Girl during a conversation with Bazil. While Bazil dismisses her as ‘twisted’, she begs to differ. She exclaims, in return that she is just a ‘sensitive soul in a flexible body’. 

Reincarnating Manmohan Desai!

There’s a particular shot in Om Shanti Om, where the director, on a film set, tells the producer that he has three cameras for the next shot—'Ek Satyajit Ray angle, ek Bimal Roy angle, aur ek Guru Dutt angle.' The producer coolly tells him to try out the Manmohan Desai angle because that’s the one that sells.

That sums up the entire film for me.

I have not seen Main Hoon Na, and to be very frank, Farah Khan, to me, has never come across as someone who can make serious cinema. And that’s exactly where I had gone wrong.

In the happiness of my pursuit of cinema, I had all but forsaken the pursuit of happiness that is watching films. I still remember one of the interviews of the late Manmohan Desai, where he had emphasized that there is already a lot of strife, pain, loss, sorrow, and grief in the world. When an individual enters the cinema theater anywhere in India, he wants to leave those behind at the entry gate. For three hours he wants to visit another world where 'Everything is fine in the end. If it is not fine, it is not the end.'

Whether the 1970s was the 'golden age' of Hindi cinema or not, why Manmohan Desai is not studied the way he should be, might or might not have been some of the questions the researcher and/or even the filmmaker had in mind while conceptualizing Om Shanti Om. But it is quite apparent that they have, indeed, expressed their love for that era and the man.

What has really impressed me about the film is the fact that it has the guts to laugh at itself. Being a film about the industry (in fact, considering there’s a literal roll-call of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s film personalities in a much-talked-about song sequence—I refuse to use the term ‘star’, because it does not apply to at least 4–5 of them—it can, in fact, be called a film of the industry, for the industry, and by the industry), the little nudges in the ribs that it gives to itself are quite commendable. It has taken almost every stereotype that you can think of from the '70s (there are actual footages from '70s films with OSO's stars inserted in the frame, a la Forrest Gump) and thrown them back at us. In fact, it has delved on certain aspects that I have always wanted to ask while gorging on those stupendously entertaining films by the Desais, Mehras, et al. For example, how does a mole on the cheek so drastically alter one’s appearance?

There are many such references, whether a nod to actual incidents that occurred during shooting (watch out for a take on Mother India with Deepika Padukone doing a Nargis and Shahrukh Khan doing a Sunil Dutt) or characters that were obligatory in those blockbusters—the suffering mother, the selfless friend, and the scheming villain. In fact, it mixes today with yesterday seamlessly and am not talking about the 30 year time-frame that the film covers. 

For example, I know for a fact that everyday thousands of youngsters still arrive in Bombay (I still prefer to call the city that, Mumbai just doesn’t have the correct twang to it) with one dream, like the one Shahrukh Khan’s character has in the film—to make it big: ‘a round bed, velvet slippers, silk coat, loads of servants and to top it all, a FilmFare award!’

The film is not an ode to the 1970s. In fact, it is not an ode to any era at all. It is a paean to the joy of both watching a film and making it. It unabashedly lauds those people who, when they enter the darkened theater, wants to be transported to a world where the hero can do no wrong, where the heroine is 'dreamy', and where the villain will get his due, even if he seeks refuge in Hollywood!

The spoilsports among us might point out the fact that not all oblique insinuations have been in good taste. Especially those who refused to be a part of the 'roll-call number' (for want of a better term) have had quite a few digs made at them, be it a photo on a driving license or anything but parental affinity to girls young enough to be daughters. But, these again, are minor issues as compared to how well the film has tackled the 1970s in the first half, in particular, and filmdom, in general.

Shahrukh, the self-proclaimed 'rockstar' possibly found an even bigger fan following after OSO, because this is the film where those gazillions who come to Bombay everyday will find themselves reflected in the superstar’s persona—at last in a character he plays on screen, they will find themselves. There are, I think only three films of Shahrukh that I like. But this is the film, which has made me realize why he is such a huge star on the film firmament. In between a Chak De, a Swades and a Kabhie Haan Kabhie Naa, this man has, as an actor, carried on the legacy of Manmohan Desai, the legacy of unadulterated entertainment. We all know by now who the real 'Mohabbat man' is, don’t we?

About three-quarters into the second half, many of us, especially the Bimal Roy fans, will know how the climax of the film will turn out. But that, to me, was not a deterrent. It is just Farah’s way of taking her hat off to one of the best films ever made on the same premise that her film is based on. It, to me, was not plagiarism, not even an 'inspiration', but just a film fan’s way of saluting a master and his masterpiece.

There’s one prop in the film that encapsulates the spirit of Om Shanti Om. Shreyas Talpade handing Deepika Padukone a wine glass filled with tea. Yes, Hindi cinema has traveled, the form has changed, but the essence of going to a film is still the same old entertainment, like the staple morning cup of tea.

And to those of us who smirked at the issue of reincarnation (in fact a character in the film also asks the same question. It really is amazing how most characters in the film ask questions that we audiences have had in mind) in a film releasing in 2007: you just mistook the '70s to be dead, it is still with us, in ‘spirit’; we simply didn’t recognize it till now.

MKD would have said 'Om Shanti Om—I likes lot!'