Author: debarshicinemaniac

I'm not going to write a biodata here. I think about life, try to understand my deepest desires. I try to take help from Cinema. I try to find myself in films. I try to fulfill my unfinished fantasies through films. It sounds weird, doesn't it?

The Hunt (Jagten)

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The Hunt is a 2012 Danish drama film directed by Thomas Vinterberg and starring Mads Mikkelsen in lead role. The story is set in a small Danish village around Christmas , and follows a man who bcomes a target of mass hyseteria after being wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a child.
Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) , a divorced kindergarten teacher , is falsely accused of exposing himself by Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) , a five year old girl in his care. The Hunt becomes an interesting tense-drama thriller. The adults in the community believe Klara’s story , dismissing her self-contradictions as denial. Lucas is shunned by the community as a pedophile sexual predator. Shops refuse him service . A butcher provokes a fight with him and Lucas retaliates. The weight of the film rests on Mikkelsen’s shoulders and Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm have given him a lot of heavy lifting. Lucas is a character of a high moral standard and he is put to the absolute test. Mikkelsen handles the main character Lucas both with restraint, and a little explosiveness when warranted. Vinterberg was among the film-makers who started the no-frills Dogme 95 movement.  

Till now his best film was The Celebration which also revolved around accusations of sexual abuse. The Hunt exposes the brutality of blind prejudice faced with the spectre of child abuse.

AADMI KI AURAT AUR ANYA KAHANIYA ( [The Man’s Woman and Other Stories)

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This is a film made for the acting students (2006-2008) of the Film & Television Institute of India, and is a debut work of the whole cast and crew. Amit Dutta’s film is a series of three episodes which explore the difficult relationship between men , women and the physical and mental spaces they inhibit.
The first story (Pedh par Kamra by author Vinod Kumar Shukla) is about a man who lives in a rented room with tree branches by his window. He fears that birds and snakes may enter in his room through the window. But for some reasons , he finds himself compelled to go on recurring journeys to find a connection between the space he lives in and the woman living in his landlord’s quarter. In the second story (Aadmi Ki Aurat by author Vinod Kumar Shukla) , its the relationship of the man with his wife which gets transformed from possession to mutual love. In the third story (“Sau Candle Power Ka Bulb” by Sadat Hasan Manto ) , a woman is forcefully hired off to a young man waiting for his friend. While the young man wants to know her story , she only wishes to sleep.
There is very little dialogue in this film and all the text of the short stories is conveyed on the screen sharply via subtext and idiosyncratic absurdities of the characters .

Death of a cyclist

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Spanish cinema under Franco was a sterile industry , kept under strict government control. Bardem was one of the few brave film-makers to question the psychological and political oppression of the day. At the time of his Cannes award, Bardem was serving a prison sentence for his political beliefs,until international outcry led to his release from prison. Bardem was arrested a total number of seven times under Franco. Back then Bardem condemned Spanish cinema as “politically useless, socially dishonest, intellectually void, aesthetically hideous and industrially decrepit”. A couple travelling through the countryside strike a man on a bicycle.  When they get out of their car ,they find out that he is injured but not dead. Juan (Alberto Closas) and Maria Jose (Lucia Bosé) decide to flee instead of helping the man. Maria Jose is less bothered by the moral implications of killing a man. Her wealthy industrialist husband Miguel (Otello Toso) is unaware of his wife’s affair. Matters become even more complicated when the couple discover a member of their social circle,Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), may know something about their affair.
Juan Antonio Bardem’s charged melodrama Death of a Cyclist was a direct attack on 1950s Spanish society under Franco’s rule. He shows a Spanish society where people like Juan and Maria Jose operate above the law.

Black Sun

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A young jazz-obsessed Japanese drifter and a black American bcome friends in a strange manner. Our main protagonist loves jazz and blues , those done by blacks. It is a Japan still recovering from WWII, with bombed out buildings. Black Sun‘s bizarre character interactions take place within the context of the USA’s ongoing military presence in Japan some twenty years after Emperor Hirohito sent his emissaries to sign the documents of surrender that drew the Second World War to a close. The two outsiders become outlaws, and Koreyoshi Kurahara depicts their growing bond as an alternately absurd and tragic culture clash. It features music by American jazz drummer Max Roach.

Tender Mercies

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Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) is a burnt out country and western singer whose life has bcome a series of disappointments.One morning he wakes up on the floor of a desolate motel six miles outside of texas. The rundown place is managed by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) , a widow whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Mac wants to stay on as a handyman and work off his bill. Without much fanfare , Mac and Rosa lee fall in love and marry He reveals that he was married twice before once when he was too young and once to dixie (Betty Buckley), a very famous country singer. Director Bruce Beresford has stated: “This film is about changing relationships. The man is finding a new life, the woman a new husband, and the boy a new father. It is a story of growing together and of hope.” Duvall played a part where he is sure that he is unhappy and he accepted it as part of life but still he searches for some change.
Tender Mercies is a very poignant movie about the healing powers of love

Dead Man’s Shoes

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Dead Man’s Shoes is a 2004 British psychological thriller film directed by Shane Meadows. Richard (Paddy Considine) returns to his hometown after serving in the British army. Flashbacks reveal his younger brother Anthony’s abuse by a group of drug dealers in the town. Richard vows to take revenge. Richard has been in the army for several years and is trained as a mercenary, but he plays mind games as much as he resorts to violence. Considine delivers an absolutely convincing depiction of a man struggling to balance his desire for revenge and redemption.

Considine’s Richard is an utterly frightening anti-hero who performs his acts of vengeance without a pause and gives a large satisfied smile with every act. There’s a ruthless logic to our anti-hero’s vengeance that makes it all the more chilling. The villains in this story will feel familiar. They are bullies, no more, no less. They pick on Anthony, coerce him into taking drugs, sexually molest him, mess with his mind in cruel ways. This is a revenge tale, yes , but a complex one.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

                                                                                            The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) doesn’t want to serve a life sentence in prison, so he becomes an informant for both the police and the treasury department. The characters and dialogue are what drive this low key crime story. Eddie Coyle has no friends.
 The life of a criminal is hard. Eddie Coyle is tough but wearing out. He doesn’t want to leave his wife and kids and see them go on welfare. It’s impossible to not feel for Eddie (because of Mitchum’s understated performance), who comes across as a mostly harmless man who got caught up in the wrong game and could never figure out how to unravel himself. The film’s other characters like Dilon, a hard-eyed bartender who acts as a liaison for those who are truly in power and thus don’t need to dirty their hands directly and Jackie Brown, a young gun dealer. Brown is cocky and in no way naive, but he also represents a generation that Coyle doesn’t understand. There is not a lot of physical violence in the film, with only a few gunshots being fired. Directed with a sharp eye for its gritty locales and an open heart for its less-than-heroic characters, this is one of the suspenseful crime drama of 1970s Hollywood.

Double Suicide

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Masahiro Shinoda directs this brilliant modernist reworking of a famous 1720 bunraku (puppet theatre ) play written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Set in Osaka , the film centers on the doomed romance between Jihei , a down and out married paper merchant passionately in love with courtesan Koharu whome he cannot afford to buy out of servitude. Their love is further hampered by Tahei , a rich ,obnoxious merchant who flaunts his ability to buy Koharu. Suicide is the only way for the two to be together. Shinoda begins the film in a modern day theater with puppeteers preparing for the show. When the story itself begins , Shinoda replaces the puppets with real actors but puppeteers’ presence remains. Figures dressed entirely in black move among the characters, helping to position them and manipulating the story. When the actual story begins, Shinoda constantly reminds the audience that they are watching a theatrical story with a predetermined outcome. Shinoda’s interiors are abstract and theatrical to the point of absurdity. Shinoda also cast his real-life wife Shima Iwashita as both the courtesan and the paper merchant’s wife. No matter where he turned ,he was stuck with the same woman. Double Suicide effectively combines the best of both worlds – the technical prowess of a master cinematician with a touching and tragic love story.

Le Beau Serge

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It is often considered the first product of the  “Nouvelle Vague” movement. It is about a young man Francois (Brialy) who returns to his native village and finds that his childhood friend (Blain) has become a hopeless drunk. It is Brialy’s efforts to rekindle the youthful promise once shown by his pal that form the bulk of the stark goings-on.  While much of the first half focuses on Francois’s attempts to solve the mystery of Le Beau Serge, the second half of the film increasingly comes to focus upon why it is that Francois is so obsessed with saving first Serge and then the entire village. Though Chabrol offers us no easy answers, the depth of Francois’s guilt is such that his attempt to protect Serge and his family eventually comes to seem insane. The remarkable and stark Le Beau Serge announced the arrival of a great who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five decades.

Nazarin

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Nazarin is very straightforward film for Bunuel . We don’t see a lot of his surrealist tricks here.  Nazarin (the priest) lives among whores , thieves and beggars in a Mexican town during the early 1900s. Though his neighbors steal from him , Nazarin refuses to lock his door. He is an Apostolic and Roman Catholic so he believes that ” everything belongs to the one who needs it most “.  “Nazarín is motivated by his beliefs, his ideology. What moves me is what happens when his ideology fails, because whenever Nazarín gets involved, even in the best of faith, he only begets conflicts and disasters,” says Buñuel of his protagonist.

Bunuel seems to ask a very obvious question here : is there a place for pure Christianity in a modern world? Nazarin would say that his ideology is more important than ever yet his continued rejection suggests that the world is  as unready for him now as they were for Jesus in his time. Interestingly Nazarin neither preaches his gospel nor does he wish to convert anyone in particular. Bunuel tells the story in a manner of a Christian parable masterfully and uniquely combining admiration and irony for the main character and strong criticism of formal religion and hypocrisy. The film is simple and profound as well as beautiful and ironic.