Norte, The End of History

Norte, The End of History (Lav Diaz, 2013)

A disclaimer to start off:

I have personally become disillusioned with the American critical stance of films having to have a certain time-frame of “watchability”. I don’t get that. To me, a film’s “length” being indicative of its watchability only really depends on the seriousness of the filmmaker. If there is, in the filmmakers judgement and intellect, truly a necessity for the runtime he has allotted for his film, then I leave that to his discretion. The nonsensical argument that a movie lasting more than 2 or 2 ½ hours is one which is poorly edited is a myth, and it’s a myth which has ruined films like Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, forced Tarantino to chop Kill Bill into two parts, and made the 4 ½ hour version of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King be restricted to DVD instead of where it really belonged: in the theater. Yet, evidence exists everywhere of films with lengthy run-times that have gripped me far more and relentlessly than even 90-minute features.

One of them, Lav Diaz’s 4 ½ hour Norte, The End of History is in a word, incredible. Incredible to behold in not only its cinematic scope of location, camerawork, and time, but equally in the density of its core, packed with so many discussions of socio-politics, religion, and the fight between immorality, innocence, revenge, and love so jam packed one after another with so many ideas and insights into the film, that its 4 ½ hour runtime doesn’t feel even a millisecond “too long”. There wasn’t a moment of this movie which made me check what the time was, on my watch or my phone. I was glued. From the opening scene discussing a provocative conversation of nihilism, dictatorship, we are automatically drawn to the upstart law student Fabian, who’s radical ideologies, Marxist level of disdain for the economic and social state of his nation, The Philippines. This may not seem riveting to the average film-goer, but I am a sucker for philosophical discussion, especially one in which fervor and anger take central stage, because it displays the passion for socio-politics that I think everyone in every country could benefit from in a knowledge standpoint and one of inspiration.

Diaz is clearly speaking to the effects of the nation on its populace and in turn, the reaction of its citizens throughout the film. While Fabian’s disillusionment leads him down a dark and horrifying path of self-hatred, poor construction worker Joaquin and his family (wife and 2 kids) lead a life of quiet desperation, going about their daily chores, living hand to mouth, not saying much because they don’t have the power nor the energy to do so. The two threads that made up the quilt of Norte are weaved in the winding lives of Fabian and Joaquin. The distinction between their two lives is important, the former a brilliant prodigy of the law student praised by his teachers as an “outside thinker” and the other a low wage worker at the bottom of the totem pole, a mule of the economic system. As Fabian commits a gruesome murder, one sparked by both a sense of righteousness and blind hatred, Joaquin is the one who bares the brunt of the blame, a perennial scapegoat of the corrupt, a “disposable entity”.

The irony at face value of course is that in his Raskolnikovian guilt and shame, Fabian lives in his own prison outside of the bars, while Joaquin in jail is shown to grow as a person and his kindness succeeds in winning over even the coldest of hearts. But Diaz’s commentary goes a bit deeper than this, as a 4+ hour film should. We realize that Fabian’s existence as a disillusioned youth was his prison, and his murder was already a murder committed behind bars. For him, the Philippines itself was the prison, a nation which, from the beginning of the film itself, was at the precipice of complete hopelessness according to Fabian, one where every transgression deserved a murder, every political lie deserved torture. His anger at the socio-political turmoil which surrounded him infiltrated his mind and ignited the fire of a young would-be dictator. One teetering between the heart of a good kid wanting so much better for the people of country (he gives up all his saved money to Joaquin’s wife for her to keep and raise her kids with), and a madman who’s helplessness in the grand scheme of things leads him to violent insanity.

To me, Diaz’s ultimate message in this film was that the oppression and neglect of a ruling government can be directly related to rise of violent and immoral individuals. The lack of power, the lack of solutions, and the continued boiling anger of a population can produce a Fabian, and it can also hamper a Joaquin. There is unforgiving heartbreak, death, rape, and torture which is peppered throughout the film, but none of it is disingenuous, or manipulative, or politically preachy. It is showcased as a happenstance of life in a country where Diaz clearly believes so much to be morally wrong. A country where the populace is devoted to God, where Jesus and Catholicism and priesthood are such a prevalent part of the culture, yet, Godless acts seem to occur, without much mourning.

Readers know from a few of my previous articles, that I am very averse to labelling a film a masterpiece because I always feel like I’m short-changing the power of that word. We use it so loosely (just like everything else today) and freely that I feel the need to be even more strict with my usage of it to counter the complete liberal abandon with which it is being flung around nowadays. But I thought about it, I pondered it, and I spent the better part of the last month letting Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History sink in. I am at a loss for another word to describe my experience with this movie. Masterpiece, it is.

(Suffice to say, I will be watching more Lav Diaz in the coming months, starting with From What is Before…. Stay tuned!)

 

 

Airlift

Airlift (Raja Krishna Menon, 2016)

I’m going to place a disclaimer here for myself from the get go of this review because I grew up in the United States and was raised mainly on American cinema despite being born in India and being of 100% Indian heritage. Perhaps it is this qualifier that will help the reader gain some perspective as to where I am coming from when I say that Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift is a film with many opportunities to evoke emotion through its inspirational story, but systematically rejects said opportunities and aims only for the low hanging fruits of cheap melodrama.

Melodrama as a means of rendering emotion within audiences is a trope of Indian cinema which has existed since time immemorial, sometimes to its brilliant benefit (Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, Raj Kapoor, early Mahesh Bhatt) and many times its colossal detriment (too many to name). But through different cultures, the ways of portraying emotions from pain, to joy, to anger are shaped not only by the culture of the people within that nation, but of the reception and communicative value from screen to audience that speaks the best. Perhaps it is the condition on which I was brought up as a filmgoer and film admirer, that makes it hard for me to take a film like Airlift seriously, when every sequence meant to depict the helpless tragedy and senseless death of those Indians and Kuwaiti’s trapped in Saddam’s hellfire, is a slow-motion shot of people crying or Akshay Kumar looking longingly in a very awkward stance with chest almost jutting out of his sleek dress shirt, or diatribes by characters one-upping each other with moral statements as if they were carefully written political speeches meant to stir a nation to their feet. These moments are nice as nationalistic set-pieces, and clearly by box office and critical raving, the Indian populace has been won over by them, but they hardly evoke more than an eye-roll and a sigh from me.

Perhaps it is growing up with American cinema that turned me away from such direct melodrama. American cinema has had its share of it sure, but at least since the era of my childhood, it has either been considered completely passé or, in the case of Douglas Sirk, looked upon through cinematic nostalgia as a classical relic of one auteur’s signature style (implemented in films like Far From Heaven not as actual tool for evoking feeling, but as a tool for remembrance of cinema that once was). In Indian cinema, it seems to be the easiest and thus, most utilized way to evoke emotion and its done in most instances where I expect more tact, effort and subtlety.

I always find myself questioning why filmmakers like Raja Krishna Menon feel compelled to spell everything out so obviously through melodrama, and use their camera to make sure absolutely nothing loses our sight and every proverbial socio-political stone is turned so that we don’t have any gray areas to discuss after the film is over. Airlift is the kind of film that, upon returning to a second time, there will be nothing that we discover anew that wasn’t seen upon first-time watching. To compare this film to an Argo and even more egregious and insulting, a Schindler’s List, is to say that this movie riveted or disturbed us in a way those films did, using similar effect to those films to depict the selflessness and sacrifice of individuals to save those less fortunate. But that’s not what I got. I’ve seen Argo, Schindler’s List, even Hotel Rwanda and the basic structural premise, stretched a bit, is all I could say with a straight face was in common between those three films and Airlift. If your thoughts right now are, “well it’s so unfair to compare Airlift to Schindler’s List” you’d be 100% correct. It’s horribly unfair, yet, a good amount of Indian critics have already done it.

Airlift is based on a story that screams for a film adaptation, and in our politically volatile world, a renewed Indian patriotism movement, and turmoil in the Middle East, it seems the right time to create a movie like this. To Menon’s credit, there are some sequences, especially the phone communications between Katiyal and the foreign ministry back in Delhi that ring not only true, but powerful in their criticism of bureaucracy. We see as the desperate calls keep ringing in the Ministry, employees start leaving for lunch. As one worker reaches for the phone, his friend, carrying a tiffin, juts him away signaling to him not to bother because they are officially on break. It’s these types of visual moments, unfettered by any overpowering cinematic music, or dialogue, or overexpression from actors, which make the best moments of Airlift… but they are few and far in between. The rest of the movie is rife with the same ingredients picked from numerous disaster films, aided by a hokey film score to pair with pained closeups of actors faces and the helpless lost look of children in their mother’s arms. Had no context been provided for these scenes, I’d have thought they were part of some NGO or Red Cross outreach infomercial asking for dollar-a-day donations.

Visaranai – Praise and Perspective

Visaranai (Vetrimaaran, 2015)

As far as police corruption stories go, Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai (English: Interrogation) brings the good cop bad cop dichotomy to a full circle of suspicion, where the first half of the film is such an exhaustive and tragic hour of torture and manipulation in the Telugu lock-up, that we subconsciously see the second half of the film completely through the eyes and emotions of the three helpless Tamilian victims at the story’s center. Vetrimaaran has us self-guessing the intentions of even the well-meaning cop Muthu and his assistants and as we enter a new set of interrogations within the second police station, this one in a safer Tamil Nadu, we hardly have a chance to breath as everywhere our three protagonists wander, cleaning bathrooms and sweeping offices in the station, they are confronted by police. If there is anything to say about the success of this film, it’s that it really grips at our own fears of authority through its viciousness and in some senses, also confirms our distrust in the way that it shifts between brutality and kindness of its police officers.

The movie may have fallen victim for me at least, to the knee-jerk, hyperbolic culture of film journalism in India, where “independent” films or social films, ones which don’t fit into the mold to the typical mainstream entry, are in their own way now being poorly analyzed through overreacting praise. One quick scroll through twitter’s Indian film critic sphere will be filled with words and phrases like “fantastic”, “masterpiece”, “mind-blowing”, “encore”, “take a bow”, “superb” etc and surrounded by other characters totalling 140 which treat every non-mainstream film as a once-in-a-century golden nugget. There are even anniversary celebrations being had for films which haven’t even scratched a year into film lore. I am already very selective in the Indian films that I choose to watch, and when there is such a sugary jubilee celebration for even average “indie” films like Piku or Sairat, how is something like Visaranai ever going to properly evaluated and placed amongst the lot? If every one of these films is a “masterpiece”, then how can we build any semblance of perspective between qualities of a Visaranai or Njan Steve Lopez or a Court? So let me not get carried away by calling Visaranai a blinding masterpiece, or a ‘monumental’ film, or tell Vetrimaaran can “take a bow”. Vetrimaaran can do better, and the almost-greatness of Visaranai, which if our film critic culture ever had the balls to cut down a few notches for its shortcomings (questionable camerawork in many sequences, unfocused narrative arcs, a few bits that should’ve been left on the cutting room floor), is an opportunity through some real perspective and fair analysis, to dare Vetrimaaran to making his next film a film truly worthy of the word masterpiece, if we haven’t raped that word of its exclusivity already.

Aligarh

Aligarh (Hansal Mehta, 2016)

Director Hansal Mehta seems to have found a new calling of Hollywood-esque social message cinema after starting out directing a broad pallete of commercial attempts from the by-the-book romantic music comedy Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar! to a by-the-book thriller Woodstock Villa. It’s a career filled with safety-net cinema similar to what Tigmanshu Dhulia was doing before he broke out with Paan Singh Tomar. Hansal Mehta’s newfound invigoration with social issues in India was no doubt ignited through his short hiatus from filmmaking, in which he declared he would travel, explore his other passion in life of being a foodie, and start working on things which truly mattered to him.

This culminated in his befriending of Rajkumar Rao, a relatively newer actor who gained some acting praise for his sidekick role in Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che. Mehta and Rao’s collaboration for Shahid struck a sort of mini-Gowarikar-Aamir Khan spark, where a film’s critical and international success lead its director and actor a path of cinema much higher than what they were previously doing.

So now, we arrive at the third film in what I’d call Mehta’s career rebirth, Aligarh. Many people consider Shahid to be the film in which Mehta really came into his own, but I think Aligarh speaks much more to his handling of social issues and his confidence in his direction. Shahid, while accessible, played out in a familiar fashion to most routine biographical films, a series of tick marks on a timeline that make for an easy scene-by-scene structuring of a film. It undermines the narrative creativity which can put a biopic over the top and instead reduces it to a History Channel Sunday Night Special. While Mehta was tackling more important issues in Shahid than in his previous films, his manifestation as a by-the-books safety net director still hung with him. He found something more meaningful but was stuck in the routine trappings of his early-career unimaginative commercialism.

Aligarh on the other hand, is his real breakthrough. The casting of Manoj Bhajpai (solidly reliable performance) in the lead role was an inspired first step to success, and the film’s aim to place S.R. Siras’s own beliefs, interests, and his moral character at the center of the film is commendable. Many directors would be too eager to use a media entity like Rajkumar Rao’s character Deepu as the noble cipher of the film, investigating and exposing further details of the case. Instead, Mehta is equally critical here of the overzealous liberal media as he is of the overzealous conservative religious. Siras is stuck in the middle only left to continuously recall the awful moments of the night where is homosexual relations were ripped from their innocent privacy into a world of contempt and unrelenting shaming. The actual issue surrounding Aligarh may end up being less about gay rights, and more about how clashes of media and social politics hardly ever end with the outcome of a winning side. It’s a testament to the volatile global culture of “us vs. them” which is a sensation created by people who feel strongly without much perspective. The use of the word “gay” is consistently put down by Siras himself:

“How can you reduce how I feel to just three letters”? The media sensationalism and talking points are also equally frustrating to him:

“I hate that word, lover. Do you even understand love? Love is such a beautiful thing. You people make it sound like a dirty thing.”

A seminal moment in the film, when Siras’s lawyer makes a compelling argument which ultimately wins the case, he turns back and Siras has his head leaned against the wall, snoring away. For him, his rights and his life are so deeply felt, so personally experienced, he cannot fathom such political diatribes, media talking points, liberal and conservative scuffles and monotonous proceedings of the Supreme Court being needed to justify himself as an equal person with equal beliefs.

The film isn’t quite as harsh or unforgiving as Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor Ki Maut, and Mehta certainly falls a few times into the over-explanation trap, where visuals of the violent invasion of privacy cannot be left to our own sick minds and must be shown exactly how they happened, something I felt completely chopped down the brilliance of the opening sequence, like a demented Rear Window sequence, with us in Jimmy Stewart’s shoes. But it is a testament to Mehta’s confidence as a filmmaker. He may never fully let go of his commercial roots, his safety net which even the best filmmakers sometimes cling to in momentary lapses, but he is certainly forging ahead on his journey he carved for himself, and Aligarh is a milestone which he may look back to as the moment he made a film which really mattered to him.