Loss, Longing, and Loneliness

 El Hierro, the smallest and south-westernmost of the seven Canary Islands of Spain, is also known as Isla del Meridiano, or the Meridian Island, because since time immemorial, its location has been serving as the pointer to cartographers to mark the Prime Meridian. In Gabe Ibáñez’s debut feature film, Hierro (2009), the island drives a wedge into the life of single mother María (portrayed by Elena Anaya, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Julia Ormond, and will next be seen in the acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s much-anticipated The Skin I Live In) much the same way the Prime Meridian slices the globe into two halves.

María and her five-year-old son Diego (Kaiet Rodríguez) board a night ferry to El Hierro. While Diego is busy playing, María drifts off to sleep and wakes up to a living nightmare. To her utter dismay, she finds no trace of her child. A thorough search is organised both on the ferry and into the inlands, but to no avail. It appears as if the island, which is known to assist us in pinpointing our own location is, for once, at a complete loss when it comes to locating this particular five-year old.

Six months pass by. Like the island itself, María finds herself more and more cut off from those around her—be it her work or her sister Laura (Bea Segura), who has recently given birth to a baby boy. Ironically, she also realises that ever since the incident on the ferry, she has developed a phobia towards water, even though her job involves dealing with various aquatic species. With every passing day, she feels more and more like those fishes in her workplace, swimming inside huge water tanks made of glass. Her grief makes it difficult for her to reach out to others, and starts manifesting itself in frightening drug-induced hallucinations. No matter how much she tries, María just cannot come to terms with her loss and seems equally unable to forgive herself for not living up to a promise she had made to Diego. Many a time she had assured him that in a game of hide-and-seek if she fails to find her son at first, she will keep on looking for him.

Then, one day, comes a phone call telling her that a body of a young boy has been found in the waters surrounding El Hierro. The age and the approximate date of death match those of Diego. There, at the morgue, once she sees the body, María is as relieved as the coroner is surprised. It appears that the officials were, for some odd reason, convinced that it was indeed Diego’s body, but María proved them wrong. To be absolutely certain, they request a DNA testing to be done. Since that would require the presence of a judge, and the judge is currently off the island, María is requested to stay behind for three more days—a request she begrudgingly acquiesces to.

With nothing to do to pass the time, María and Laura, who had accompanied her, hire a car to tour the island. On an isolated beach, while taking the first step towards overcoming her phobia of swimming, María thinks she spots Diego playing near a travel trailer. Hoping against hope, she begins investigating on her own. Soon, she finds out that her is not the only child to have gone missing in El Hierro. But what are her chances of getting to the root of this mystery when the people on the island are a closely-knit community and it is quite apparent that there are times when she cannot trust her own eyes?

A child gone missing is a common trope in thrillers. The various facets of this particular sub-genre have more or less all been covered in some memorable outings like Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Wicker Man (1973), Without a Trace (1983), The Orphanage (2007), and Changeling (2008); as well as in some not-so-memorable ones like The Forgotten (2004), Flightplan (2005),  and Vinyan (2008). Hierro falls somewhere in between these two extremes.

While the premise itself is as worn out as the traditional usage of El Hierro’s location, the film is not an abject failure for more than a couple of reasons. An animator by profession before he made a foray into feature filmmaking, where Ibáñez has stumbled as a storyteller, he has more or less made up the lost ground when it comes to the visual elements. Aided admirably by his cinematographer Alejandro Martínez, Ibáñez’s vision comes alive in a sumptuous treat for the eyes. Ibáñez also uses his experience in working with miniatures to bring about a sense of stark contrast. This is apparent from the very first sequence of the film itself, when a toy car tumbles down beside an upturned vehicle. This big-small comparison is threaded throughout the film. We see a tiny Diego seated in front of water tanks containing huge fishes; tiny insects that lie trapped in the water of a swimming pool; a single individual on a sprawling beach…the instance are many. It is as if to depict that the magnitude of any incident is relative to the point of view—a fact that comes to light when María overhears her sister over the telephone and realises that the mishap that changed her life in an instant like a chameleon changing its colours is not that significant to her own sibling.

Another refrain that runs through the film is the leit motif of water, as exemplified by fishes inside tanks and in the ocean; Diego being asked by his mother about ‘What lives in the sea’; water spilling out from an upturned glass and bursting out of a tap; water seeping from under a corpse; a painting of waves; María’s fear and eventual victory over fear of swimming; and so on. In a sense, water, too, acts as a contrasting element that brings out how desiccated and barren María’s life had become the moment she lost her only child.

Water just as well might have another implication here. In Spanish, ‘hierro’ means ‘iron’. As the film progresses, we find how armed with only an iron will, a dejected, depressed, and disconsolate mother embarks on a journey to uncover the truth in a terrain as desolate as her own existence. However, like the effect of water on iron, as time passes, she finds her willpower gradually losing the battle against forces that are way beyond her control.

A Horrible Homage to Hollywood

   
The pithily titled Korean thriller H (2002) begins with the decapitated body of a schoolgirl being discovered in an unnamed city’s landfill. What looks like a young life wasted and dumped takes a turn towards the gruesome when an unborn foetus is also accidentally found amidst the mounds of waste. Four days later, on February 14, it is bloody Valentine for an unmarried mother, when she is brutally slain inside a city bus before it arrives at the terminus. Here, too, when a still twitching arm of a foetus is found half ripped out of the womb, detectives Kim Mi Yun (Yeom Jeong-ah, who acted in the following year’s horror hit A Tale of Two Sisters) and her partner Kang Tae Hyun (debutant Ji Jin-hee) notice an eerie similarity in the modus operandi of the now-confirmed serial killer with that of another convicted mass murderer, Shin Hyun (Cho Seung-woo).

The only problem is that ten months ago Shin Hyun had voluntarily walked into a police station, carrying with him in a bag the body of his latest victim. On confessing to six horrific murders of women, he is now on death row, counting down the last few days of his life. Evidently, there is a copycat killer on the loose. To obtain information that might help solve the case and stop further murders from occurring, detectives Kim and Kang decide to pay Shin Hyun a visit.

While what puts the two detectives on Shin Hyun’s trail are the obvious similarities between the recent spate of murders to those committed by him, ironically, it is resemblance of a different kind that puts us—the viewers—off, the moment the scheming, calculating, Nietzsche-quoting killer-on-death-row enters the scene. The setting, the sequence, and the situation all hark back to Jonathan Demme’s multiple Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Granted, the ode is not as blatant as the Christian Alvart (Pandorum, Case 39) directed German film Antibodies (2005), where another serial killer named Gabriel Engel (played by André Hennicke) had proudly proclaimed ‘What did you expect? Hannibal Lecter?’, but the likeness to that classic thriller is all too obvious to be ignored.

As discerning film-watchers, we all know that it is impossible to steer clear of all clichés, no matter which genre a filmmaker is trying to explore. That is the reason we were willing to forego the hackneyed characterisation of an expressionless detective, who has still not come to terms with a personal tragedy; her greenhorn brash, over-enthusiastic, impatient partner, who is diametrically opposite to her in character traits; the portly policeman, whose sole existence in the film is centred around providing some ill-advised comic relief; and the incessant chimney-like smoking by the two protagonists that reveal that the screenplay writers were in a haze while penning the detective duo, rather than express any depth of character.

These missteps aside, if there is one image that summarises this stillborn effort at crafting an effective thriller, it is that of the unborn foetus. It is nothing but an allegory of how Korean filmmaking was being prevented from evolving beyond an embryonic stage by Hollywood, before directors like Chan-wook Park, Joon-ho Bong, and Jee-woon Kim resuscitated it to life. In this context, it might be pointed out that the first of Park’s riveting revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)—the second film of the trilogy being Oldboy (2003) that single-handedly put South Korea firmly back on the firmament of filmdom—was released almost exactly nine months before H.

Coming back to H, the intentions of the filmmaker, akin to those of Shin Hyun, were noble, at least to themselves. One need not be a semiotician to read the anti-abortion subtext running throughout the film. But both first-time writer-director Jong-hyuk Lee and the character of Shin Hyun committed a similar error. Both got embroiled in the word ‘copycat’.

The initial interest aroused to try and figure out how a behind-the-bars serial killer is pulling the strings gets diluted by the red herrings thrown at us. The number of suspects is just too many, which, in most cases keeps us involved, but in this particular instance causes confusion. Moreover, it seems, the director, in his fervent enthusiasm to depict the tussle between the heart—(as portrayed by Detective Kang, who seems to take every atrocity around him—from a torn umbilical cord to a traffic jam—to heart)—and the mind (the ice-cold exterior of Detective Kim, who smiles exactly three times during the entire film) has thrown the entire volume of Psychology 101 at us. So, we have a doctor specialising in neuro-psychiatry, who has this curious habit of flashing a mysterious smile whenever she is in the company of cops; a patient, who suffers from a recurring horrible nightmare, which, supposedly, lies at the root of his psychotic behaviour; an abstract painter, who appears like the proverbial dues ex machine, and is proclaimed to be suffering from a multiple personality disorder; and last but not least, the prevalent belief among Koreans that a foetus becomes aware even when inside the womb, and the information gathered therein remains latent throughout one’s life as suppressed, unconscious memories.

After 106 minutes of mishmash that involves prostitutes and psychology; honour and horror; nicotine and Nietzsche, one is almost tempted to project Shin Hyun’s paraphrasing the German philosopher’s popular quote: ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’ on to the film and brand it as ‘abysmal’.

And as far as the elaboration of ‘H’ provided at the conclusion of the film is concerned, no matter what the director has depicted, it will take a lot to dissuade us from believing that it did not stand for ‘Homage’—an homage to Hollywood, and not a highly-recommended one at that!

A Master class in Minimalism

Taphephobia (from Greek taphos, meaning grave; and phobos, meaning fear) is the medical term for the fear of being buried alive. Those of us who have read the master of macabre Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado or the self-explanatory The Premature Burial would have had a second-hand experience of this terrifying situation. But in Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ single-character, single-setting, tour de force, Buried (2010), for Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), the prospect of being buried alive is not a crooked literary concept, but almost a cruel certainty.

One day in October 2006, Paul wakes up in complete darkness. All he could remember was that he, alongside his other truck-driver friends—all of who work for Crestin, Roland, and Thomas (CRT), an American company—were ambushed while delivering kitchen supplies. While Paul was fortunate enough to escape the gunfire—to which most of his companions succumbed to—after he regains consciousness, he finds his current situation anything but lucky.

Paul finds himself gagged and bound inside a wooden coffin, just large enough to accommodate enough oxygen to keep him alive, with absolutely no clue of who put him there, and why—a predicament reminiscent of Oh Dae-su in Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece Oldboy.  While Dae-su had been imprisoned by unknown assailants in a room for 15-long years with only a television as his link to the outside world, Conroy finds that his kidnappers had left him behind a Blackberry, a Zippo, a pen, a flask, his medicines, a torch, his wallet (emptied), and a satchel.

After he realises that his cries for help are falling into deaf ears, Paul, with the help of his Blackberry, tries to figure out a way to wriggle out of his nightmarish situation. As any American would do in a similar situation, his first call is to 911. But since he is in a different country, he finds little help from that source. So, he calls the FBI next. And thus begins his earnest quest to get outside help, any help.

In the meantime, someone calls him and tells him in broken English that he has till 9pm to arrange for $5 million as ransom. With the phone’s battery, and the oxygen inside the coffin running out as fast as his own life, the stakes just got higher for Paul. After all, he is only a truck driver. Even though he had, somehow, conveyed his ‘situation’ to the US Department of State, and to his own company, what were the chances they would find him, when he, himself, has not even the foggiest idea of where exactly in Iraq he has been buried underground?

An individual trapped in an apparent hopeless situation is an age-old trope in cinema. However, what elevates Buried from others belonging to the same genre is the treatment. For the entire 95-minutes’ running time, the camera does not emerge, even for a second, on to the surface, thereby making us, the viewer, very much a part of Paul’s claustrophobic existence. Reminiscent of Kubrick’s experimentation with only natural light in Barry Lyndon (1975), the only source of light in the film are the ones that Paul uses—a blue mobile screen, the yellow flame of the Zippo and the torch, and the eerie green of glow torches.

Just like the letterings of the opening credits that break apart and bubble up, and the geometric lines that obstinately move down to form the first letters of the various crew members, Paul’s efforts at emerging out of the wooden casket seem to be bogged down by forces way beyond his control.

Like any other human being in his place, Paul undergoes an entire gamut of expressions—fear, anger, panic, frustration, hope, and despair. As an individual who has a history of anxiety attacks, Paul knows that his biggest ally and his biggest enemy are one and the same—himself. He gathers his wits, just when things appear to be hopeless, and tries to make the best of the meagre resources at his disposal.

Let’s face it, we have seen drivers emerging out of similar no-way-out scenarios unscathed (here’s looking at you, Jason Statham), but Paul is no superhero (ironically, though in his next film Ryan Reynolds will play a superhero, the Green Lantern). So, as he waits for the head of the Hostage Working Group (HWG) in Iraq to locate him by tracking his cell connection, he takes resort to his survival instinct to stay alive till the rescuers arrive. But, things are about to get worse for Paul.

Cortés’, who alongside directing, has also edited this edge-of-the-seat thriller, while staying true to a Hollywood-set template has steered clear of clichés. For instance, there are no villains of the piece. The film does not take sides. We learn from the head of the HWG that in a country torn apart by war, kidnapping is the ‘only functioning business’. (There is a wonderful tête-à-tête between the captive and the captor, when the latter exclaims: ‘You terrified? So, I am a terrorist?’)

What makes Paul’s experience equally harrowing for us, the viewer, is the fact that just like him, we only get to hear the people he speaks with over the phone. Just like him, we have to take their words at face value. Just like him, we do not get to see what the FBI or the HWG are doing to get Paul out.

A solo character, single-setting film is a unique challenge. No wonder then, such films have been few and far between—the few examples include Daniel Bourla’s astonishing The Noah (1975), Robert Altman’s seminal Secret Honor (1984), the recent Sam Rockwell starrer Moon (2009), and this year’s Oscar-nominated 127 hours by Danny Boyle.

What makes Buried by the 37-year old Cortés out-of-the-box is that he decided to film it in-the-box—in its entirety.

A Mother, Murder, and Memories

In a pivotal moment in Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong’s recent film, the superb Madeo (2009), a police officer, while referring to the forensic team collecting evidence at a murder scene, tells his colleague “Cops these days…CSI and all that TV!”

While serials like the aforementioned CSI and its various spin-offs focus on the science behind solving terrible crimes, it is films like Madeo (Mother) that, in contrast, have at their heart the dynamics of the individuals involved therein—the victim, the accused, and their friends and family.

The eponymous Mother (she is not mentioned by her name throughout the film’s 128-minute duration), played impeccably by Hye-ja Kim, lives a forlorn life in a town in the outskirts of Seoul with her intellectually challenged son Yoon Do-joon. She tries to make both ends meet by selling herbs and medicines and by providing acupuncture sessions to the neighbours, though she does not have a valid licence to ply that particular trade.

Mother treats Do-joon as a child, helping him eat, asking him to tuck in his shirt, and advising him not to mix with his friend Jin-tae, who she considers as ‘bad seed’. Knowing that they have ‘only got each other’, she shares an exceptionally strong bond with her son, who besides lacking in intellectual capacity also has problems remembering things. A harmless and gullible guy, who is as innocent of the nitty-gritty of life as he is of the man-woman equation, the only time Do-joon reacts violently is when anyone calls him a ‘retard’.

The occasional visit to the neighbourhood police station—where the guards and the higher officials are all known to Mother from their childhood—when her son gets involved in minor scuffles, takes a turn for the worst when Do-joon is taken into custody by officer Je-mun as the prime suspect in the murder of a young girl Moon Ah-jung. Knowing fully well that her son cannot ‘even harm a water-bug’, Mother starts running from pillar to post—trying to bribe Je-mun with camphor ginseng (‘which helped you when you were a child’) and getting hold of the most well-known public defender of the area, the karaoke-loving Gong Suk-ho, to prove her son’s innocence. But when she finds herself shunned by the police, who have an incriminating piece of evidence at their disposal that links Do-joon directly to the crime; and betrayed by the lawyer, who suggests sending Do-joon away to a mental asylum for four years, Mother takes it upon herself to acquit her son. She starts collecting evidence, distributing pamphlets proclaiming her son’s innocence, and starts talking to kids who knew Moon Ah-jung, who, she finds during her investigations was quite opposite to her own son—being a girl who grew up far beyond her chronological age. In her quest, she finds two allies—a neigbour who runs a photo studio and Jin-tae, Do-joon’s friend.

Her efforts at trying to make Do-joon remember the incidents of the fateful night face a curious resistance. In trying to remember, Do-joon inadvertently unlocks various suppressed memories that rather than helping mother find a ray of hope, makes her come face to face with incidents in her and Do-joon’s lives that she never thought he would recollect.

In the same manner, as Mother proceeds in her search for truth, dark secrets of the small town—a town that had not seen a murder in years—start rising to the surface, till we reach a dénouement that throws both Mother and we, the viewer, off-balance.

Joon-ho Bong, alongside Chan-wook Park (of Oldboy and Thirst fame), belongs to an exciting generation of Korean directors, who have ushered in a new era of filmmaking. Bong made quite a splash in Hollywood with his 2006 creature feature Gwoemul (The Host). However, the film with which one can draw parallels with his most-recent work is his film of 2003, Salinui chueok (Memories of murder). In that film, two police officers, one from a small town and the other from the city try to solve a series of grisly killings in the South Korean province of Gyunggi. In both the films, the peace and quite of a small town are ruptured by violent crime. In both cases, a mentally-challenged individual is accused of the misdeed. In both instances, though the cases were apparently solved, one character was found to be carrying the burden of truth for the rest of their lives.

In the course of Madeo, Mother asserts twice that she, and only she, knows of an acupuncture technique that when applied to ‘the meridian point’ can ‘loosen the knots in the heart and clear all horrible memories from the mind’. In the climax of the film, which harks back to the conclusion of Oldboy, Mother found out that the same acupuncture needles that she claims can have such a therapeutic effect, can also be the harbinger of unimaginable pain. 

A Vanishing Act

One fine day I noticed that I have around 20-odd films lying with me that I haven't yet watched. So, I rummaged through them and randomly started selecting. Hence, over the past three days, I have watched Turistas (USA), followed by Wolf Creek (Australia), and Spoorloos (Netherlands/France).

Films watched in such a random order almost always entails serendipity. For example, I remember watching Vertigo and Basic Instinct back to back, and I can vouch for it that the change of color of dresses worn by Kim Novak’s character in the former has an eerie similarity to that of Sharon Stone’s character in the latter! Now, can that be true?

This time, the common thread between the aforementioned films was ‘disappearance’. While Turistas deals with disappearance of tourists in Brazil; Wolf Creek is concerned with the same in the Australian outback. As I was watching those two, I was thinking how the depiction of the boogeyman has changed over the years in cinema. We have had the Graf Orloks, Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein, Mr Hyde...who were resurrected in the succeeding decades as Freddy Kreuger, Jason Voorhes, Leatherface, and Michael Myers, to name just a few.

With the new millennium, a variant has emerged, which in common parlance is known as ‘torture porn’, made famous by films such as Hostel. While I was watching Turistas and Wolf Creek, I could not but wonder how we are no longer satisfied with the boogeyman being an ‘individual’. It is now an entire nation—sometimes Brazil, sometimes Bratislava, sometimes Australia…Talk about art imitating life!

Anyway, I went a little off-track there. I started writing about this Dutch/French collaboration called Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing), so, let’s get back to it.

If you ask me to give a summary of the film, it really won’t read much—not enough to get you interested in what I consider one of the best mystery-thrillers ever made. Still, let me give it a try.

Rex Hofman and Saskia Wagter are a couple visiting France during the Tour De France. On their way, Saskia enters a store to get some Coke and beer. Then, she disappears into thin air. The most apt word here would be ‘Poof’. Notice how during an ingenious tête-à-tête between two characters, the word makes a magical appearance.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not a mystery, per se, because we, the audience, are already privy to the fact who the kidnapper is. He is a family man, with a wife and two daughters. His name is Raymond Lemorne, and he teaches Chemistry. He meets Saskia for the first time inside the store and kidnaps her.

There is no connection between Raymond and Rex, except their initials. And you will notice how this fact is played into the film. When we first meet Rex and Saskia, they are playing a word game—names of animals that begin with the same letter. It is also a keychain with the initial ‘R’ that draws Saskia to follow Raymond to his car and get abducted.

Three years pass by. Rex, however, does not give up the search and his dogged determination to get to the root of it all is what ultimately lures Raymond to come and meet Rex with an offer that the latter laps up—letting Rex know what happened to Saskia.

What elevates Spoorloos to the level of a classic is the fact that underneath the exterior of a mystery-thriller, it is actually a film about knowledge and how far an individual will go to ‘know’. It is, at the same time, about the power of knowledge and the futility of it. In a one-of-its-kind ending, Rex gets to know the fate that befell Saskia, but he is helpless to do anything with what he has learnt.

There is a preponderance of yellow in the first half of the film—Saskia’s top, a frisbee, on a watch, a canopy, mention of yellow shirts… and the list goes on. To me, yellow symbolizes the act of waiting and wait is what the three main characters do in this film: Saskia for Rex, in a brilliantly conceived sequence inside a tunnel (the darkness inside the tunnel being a harbinger of what is to come) when their car breaks down; Rex for Saskia, when she vanishes into thin air and then to learn the truth about her disappearance; and last, but not least, Raymond waits for three long years before allowing Rex to know about Saskia’s fate.

What makes this film chilling is the ‘everyday’ feel to it. Raymond is no knife-wielding whacko. His ‘everyman’ bit is emphasized by how he meshes into a crowd when he baits Rex to come and meet him at a wayside place. How obviously commonplace he is that even when he is seated two chairs away from the man on whose life he wreaked havoc with one single act, the man fails to notice him.

Add to this the fact that such disappearance is also something we keep on encountering in all those ‘Missing persons’ columns. It is this ‘it could happen to any body’ aspect, the utter lack of motive behind the crime, and the fact that Raymond looks like any other guy we meet on the streets that add to the chill factor. All of these are summarized in the very first shot of the film where you see a stick insect, which can so easily be mistaken for a twig; or the grasshopper in the last scene, which effortlessly blends into the greenery, unnoticed.

Spoorloos is based on a novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé, which reminded me of that fable I had read as a child, about the man who got a goose which lay a golden egg and how, he, in a fit of greed killed the goose to get all the golden eggs at one go.

That man is Rex Hofman. His ignorance was bliss, and when knowledge dawned on him, it was too late.

The Stage is Set

My grouse with plays has always been that they are in 'long shot'. I crave for the quality of omnipresence that a film camera bestows on the audience by shifting from long to mid to close to extreme close, and so on. It, somehow, lends a feeling of intimacy with the characters for me, the viewer. Not to mention that size of the frame also acts as a punctuation. 

But at the same time, I have found myself fascinated with films that resemble plays—in the sense of their setting. The single set of 'Rope' to 'Sleuth' and 'Deathtrap', resembling the 'stage' in more ways than one has kept me rooted to my seat every time. The other commonality among these three aforementioned films is that they all deal with crime—murder, to be precise.

Like any other fans of murder mysteries, I, too, have been an avid reader of Christie, Doyle and the masters. A common trope in these murder mysteries—from Christie, to our own Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories is the climax, where there is this room full of individuals connected to the 'case', and one of them, is about to be revealed as the culprit.

In David Greene's made for TV film of 1982, 'Rehearsal for Murder', we are plunged headlong into this scenario very, very early into the film. A playwright (Robert Preston) named Alex Dennison, who lost his fiancee, Monica Wells (Lynn Redgrave, sister of the legendary Vanessa Redgrave) a year ago, has assembled a group of individuals for a reading of this new play that he is working on. 

Behind this apparently innocuous invitation lies an ulterior motive—that of unmasking the truth behind his fiancee's death. Alex firmly believes that Monica was murdered, as opposed to what the police believe that she committed suicide after her first leading role generated a 'mixed response'. Not only that, Alex is also sure that one out of those who he has invited for the reading is the murderer!

A murder mystery is very much like an act of prestidigitation. In both cases, the audience/reader allows the author/illusionist to indulge in an act of misdirection and happily follows, knowing in the end they will realize that they were betrayed, in the sense that the truth (identity of the culprit/how the magic is done) was always being kept hidden.

But there is a sense of enjoyment in this betrayal (though there are some novelists and films where the identity of the criminal is unraveled right at the beginning. Those are the 'whydunits' and 'howdunits', and not the 'whodunits'). That is because we are all aware that we are being led down the garden path, so to speak. What makes the journey worthwhile is the expected surprise at the end.

What makes films like the three aforementioned ones and even the less somber examples like 'Clue' and 'Murder by Death' a treat is that we are all kept guessing till the very end, and the fact that, invariably, the writer throws us red herrings along the way. 

A similar premise of eliciting a confession about a crime is not an original idea. 'Chase a Crooked Shadow' had a similar plot. But while that film depended on logically questionable and at times quite incredulous artifices, 'Rehearsal for Murder' has taken a totally different path.

In the first scene of the film, one of the minor characters says '...that's where it all starts—words'. In 'Rehearsal for Murder', words is to Alex what 'the little gray cells' is to Poirot. After all, when a playwright plays sleuth, his magnifying glass will inevitably be words. 

On stage is the microcosm of the theater world. Besides the playwright, there is a heroine (Karen, played by Madolyn Smith), a director (Lloyd, portrayed by Lawrence Pressman), a producer (Walter, enacted by William Daniels), a leading man (David, played by Patrick Macnee) and a struggling actor (Leo, a lanky Jeff Goldblum). What is missing is the critic. 

But as Alex says in the film, 'Never confuse the audience with the critics'. The play within the film is not being staged for the critics, of course. Here the actors are the audience.

In every murder mystery the detective is always the same. It is the author, because from the very beginning s/he knows   who has committed the crime. 'Rehearsal for Murder' brings this truism to the fore. 

And that very last shot, where Alex raises a toast is actually the audience clinking the glass, appreciating an aspect that seems to have been overshadowed by the over-dependence on CGI today—the role of the writer. 

It is also a reminder for those of us who missed what Greene told us at least twice during the film—once in Monica's bedroom, and then in the 'third act' of the film—via a poster of 'La Revue Blanche', the late 19th century periodical that is synonymous with the modern 'literary' movement.

'Duel' in the Sun

It is said that 'Psycho' (1960) gave birth to this new genre called 'slasher' flicks. And with slashers was born the concept of the relentless, merciless killing machine, a la Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Jason Voorhes (Friday the 13th), Michael Myers (Halloween), Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street), to name just a few. Even the T1000 from Terminator 2, the eponymous Predator and Alien fall under the same category, though they did not feature in films which can be termed slashers, in the purest sense of the term.


What interests me most about these characters is the weapons they use: Leatherface uses a chainsaw; Jason, a machete; Freddy has needles for fingers; Predator has an arsenal at his disposal, while the alien’s biggest weapon is its intelligence. 


The other similarity I have noticed among these movie monsters is the fact that you do not often get to see their faces. Most of them wear some kind of a mask—ice hockey variant, or even made of human skin; while some have their visages burnt beyond recognition. 

Now, imagine a director by the name of Steven Spielberg creating a killer of the same nature, and I am not talking about Bruce in ‘Jaws’. In 1971, Spielberg made a film for TV called 'Duel', which had one of the most innovative weapons of death ever used—a 40 tonne trailer truck!


The stage is set with a brilliant point of view shot of a car being driven out of a garage. That moment on, we, the viewer, become one with the ironically named Valiant, a red Plymouth.


Like all great horror films, this one, too, has a very simplistic, everyday premise – a businessman while traveling for an appointment makes the biggest mistake of his life – overtaking a trailer truck. What ensues is one of the most skilfully composed elongated duel between man and machine.

What elevates this film to the level of a classic is the deft touches to it. The protagonist is 'David Mann'(Dennis Weaver). His surname is an obvious reference to every ‘man’. His car has a license plate number PCE 149. Those three initials can be interpreted as short for 'peace', but during his journey to meet a client along a long stretch of road through the desert, he encounters anything, but.


Throughout the entire running time of the film, we never get to see the truck driver’s face, neither do we get to know why he was trying to run down David at every opportunity. Spielberg simply does not provide us with a back story. This makes the experience, both for the viewer and David, all the more harrowing. Then again, when we see that the truck has numerous number plates from various states stuck on it, like trophies on a mantle piece, Spielberg does tell us a lot.


What makes ‘Duel’’s trailer truck stand out is how Spielberg has rendered ‘life’ to that mammoth made of metal. The words ‘Inflammable’ painted at the back—has there ever been a more apt one-word description of a character in the entire history of film making? The whistle of its horn is akin to any blood-curdling scream; the engine, an angry growl; while the headlights take on the shape of unblinking eyes. And in the end, it’s the wheel that stops turning first, before we see droplets of blood.


Selecting a trailer truck was a stroke of genius. No, in this case size does not matter that much. The element of surprise when one notices how fast it travels for its girth; the slithering, serpentine way in which it moves, all hark back to some of the most feared predators of the animal kingdom. In one particular sequence, Spielberg makes this bit amply clear, when rattlesnakes and spiders take a backseat in the minds of both Mann and us, while we are face-to-face with a charging truck.

And the innovation doesn’t stop at that. Spielberg knew at the tender age of 25 that what all of us are really afraid of is the ‘unseen and unknown’. But the master in the making that he was, he weaved  a twist in that bit. While most horror films rely on darkness, ‘Duel’, in its entirety, is shot in broad daylight.


As far as the identity of the driver is concerned, here, too, Spielberg literally toys with the viewer. There is an extended sequence inside a cafe, when both David and us, the viewer, know that one of the individuals in there is the driver of the trailer. But, which one, we both wonder!


Even after 39 years, this film has not aged a bit. And there are reasons for it. If movie watching is a ‘ride’, then this is the film that buckles the seat belt and keeps us rooted, first frame onwards. Technically sound, amazingly shot and superbly edited, the ‘classic’ nature of ‘Duel’ actually lies in its ageless topic. Who hasn’t encountered road rage?


Is the truck a manifestation of the pent up anger inside Mann, whose married life isn’t exactly hunky dory? Is it simply a hallucination of a man traveling a really long distance in desert conditions (except on two occasions, no one seems to notice the truck or the driver, besides Mann himself)? Is the mind game between the truck and Mann actually a game inside the mind of Mann to make him feel like the ‘Man of the house’? This apparently simplistic film, actually has a lot beneath its bonnet.


The ‘man vs machine’ premise of ‘Duel’ has been seen in many a later film, from ‘Christine’, ‘The Terminator’, to 'The Matrix', ‘I, Robot’, ‘Stealth’ and ‘Death Proof’, to name just a few. However, what separates ‘Duel’ from these is how it makes the ‘common, uncommon’. From the shrill whistle of a truck that has an ominous feel; the red traffic lights that seem to warn of impending danger; the level crossing gate that suddenly becomes a cage; the pipes underneath the truck, which resemble the innards of a hideous monster—‘Duel’ does to driving what ‘Jaws’ did to going swimming in the ocean.


Pity, ‘Duel’ remains for Spielberg the road traveled only once.