Mon Oncle Antoine(1971)

English title: My uncle Antoine.

Country: Canada

Language: French

Its a chilly and snow filled december in Quebec. A father leaves his children and wife behind to find work. An undertaker raises a child as his own. An employee has secret liaisons with the wife of his employer. A mother sees her son die. A whole town basks in the joys of christmas and fights the hardships of daily life. And a little boy watches with his big, blue, innocent eyes. We watch through him. We watch with him. And we watch him as he struggles to become a man, in every possible way. Jutra's film about the coming of age of Benoit is so simplistic, so real and so heart wrenching, it reminds us of Apu in "Aparajito". Benoit learns to take on the world, he gets a taste of death, love, betrayal and sex. And at the end, he gazes innocently at the life out there, the real life where there's no uncle Antoine to protect him, no Carmen to love him. This film is a wondeful journey through two fateful days in Christmas time. But a journey that changes lives forever. And one that will change the way you look at life too.

Dev D(2009)

Director: Anurag Kashyap

Language: Hindi

Kashyap arrived on the scene a few years back with "Black friday" based on the Mumbai blasts. It had its shortcomings but made us wait for his "Paanch", which never came out. Then came "No smoking" and Anurag took Hindi cinema on a ride, a bumpy roller-coaster ride. With "Dev D" the ride comes a full circle. Kashyap has finally given Bollywood what it deserves, a true masala entertainer for the serious cine-lovers. Shed all your inhibitions, this is not your regular Hindi movie. It is a tale of lust, love, lust, obsession, lust, psychedelia and lust. Bollywood finally grows up, with the help of a man who has disgraced the silver screen more than once before. Devdas Mukherjee had always been an epitome of self pity, drunkenness and failed love in Indian cinema. Dev Dhillon is instead an absolute bastard who fondles other women and cracks up at rumors of Paro kissing someone else. Dev Dhillon is essentially just another avatar of Devdas Mukherjee, yet so very different. He drowns himself in vodka, does coke, calls up Paro's house at 4 in the morning, yet he sees Chanda's face when he closes his eyes. Dev D doesn't believe in "moving on", yet he truly does by the end of the film.
What Kashyap does to the much cliched tale is quite unexpected. It has always been about the man, Devdas himself. Kashyap, on the other hand, examines each and every character with utmost sincerity. He gives us the two of the strongest female leads in Indian cinema. Paro sends her nude pictures to Dev, carries a mattress on a bicycle to a field to have sex with Dev and ultimately, on being refused, manages to have her revenge too. Lenny on the other hand is not afraid being filmed while she gives a blowjob to her boyfriend, or accusing her father of getting aroused by her mms, or becoming Chanda by night. Kashyap gives these characters various shades of gray and turns them from mere props to symbols of women empowerment. Not that he accomplishes this all alone. He is helped by the wonderful Mahi Gill and Kalki Koechlin. Kalki's almost deadpan expressions, indifferent moaning and impish smiles alongwith Mahi's big eyed passionate looks mark their arrival on the big scene. Abhay Deol is fantastic as Dev. The use of light throughout is brilliant. Kashyap uses different shades of blue, pink to set the dark, often brooding mood of the film. I already talked about the music before. How it was all different and stuff. But what I was amazed to find was all the 18 songs were used in the film. And still the film didn't stall for a single moment! Kashyap makes use of the music wonderfully well, sometimes to tell a part of the story and take it forward, sometimes to compliment the mood and sometimes just as a background score. His use of music is actually reminiscent of Godard. I don't know if its only me or Lenny reading Moravia's "Contempt" with Brigitte Bardot on the cover alongwith the use of music is really a tribute to the French master. I hope it is because it would be a most befitting one. Kudos to Mr.Kashyap for finally giving us a nouvelle vague Devdas.

P.S : Did anyone else notice three random guys in the film? Once when Dev first goes with Chunni to Chanda's den, next when Dev drunk drives and almost crashes his car? Even if you did, did anyone else think they were the three horsemen of apocalypse? Gah! I see too much into everything!

La Gran Final(2006)

English Title: The great match

Director: Gerardo Olivares

Language: Kazajo dialect(Mongolia), Tamashek(Niger) and Tupi(Brazil).

Scene 1: A group of Mongolian nomads and a few soldiers play football on the snow-capped peaks of the Altai mountains as a few others try to plug in a television to an electricity pole.

Scene 2: Three African men, clad in yellow and green jerseys dance around foolishly on a desert in Niger as a handful of others watch a television with glum expressions.

Scene 3: A native Indian in the forests of Amazon, "9" painted on his back, climbs the highest tree with an antenna on his back as his tribesmen wait eagerly for reception on a television.

This unique film is all about scenes exactly like these. Its about three very different groups of people with one similarity. They can go to any lengths to watch the final match of the 2002 football World Cup. The nomads risk losing all their savings in paying fines to the Government, the Africans forget all their errands and take a detour, the Indians risk getting shot. All for one reason. To watch Brazil take on Germany in the final. It is the love for the greatest game on earth that is contained in each shot of this film. Every frame speaks of the passion for football. Only that may be more than reason enough to watch this film. Add to it the wonderful cinematography, brilliant use of wide angle shots on the desert and the mountains, absolutely hilarious situations(like an African guy selling pages of Playboy in the midst of a desert) and also the very subtle socio-political undertones. And voila! You can't afford to miss this film.

Angela(2002)

Director: Roberta Torre

Country: Italy

Angela runs a shoe store with her husband Saro Parlagreco, when actually they deal in drug trafficking. Angela helps put up the shoe store show while Saro with the help of his cousin, controls his well disguised drug business. Problems start when Saro brings a new guy, Masino to help him. Angela and Massino fall for each other and their torrid affair gives the suspecting police a chance to round them all up. This little film is supposedly based on a true incident that took place in Palermo, Italy. The director's use of handheld camera and extreme closeup shots of all the characters make this look like a docudrama more than a film. And her use of closed, dark spaces give this film a very claustrophobic feel. The only saving grace is the very beautiful Donatella Finocchiaro as Angela, on whom the camera hovers for alomost the entire length of the film. She almost carries the film single-handedly and there's really not much else to look out for. What could have been a gripping tale of passion, guilt and organized crime remains only a mellowed Italian drama.

Adoration(1987)

Director: Olivier Smolders

Country: Belgium

A Japanese man invites the beautiful woman he loves to his place. After they have dinner, she recites some poems and he records them. Then he shoots her with a gun, cuts her body parts and eats them one by one.

This 16 minute long film is based on a real life incident. Its shot entirely in monochrome and has no dialogues except for the part where the girl recites some poems. The special effects are awesome, the director uses very innovative camera movements and angles to make this film technically almost perfect. The film works in its totality too. In the very short time frame, the director succeeds to present a very strong picture of passionate power play. The man looks at the woman with awe, kisses her, listens to her recite. After killing her, he even undresses her with utmost care, strokes her body with his hands and finally consumes her completely. What better way to culminate the ultimate passion that a man feels for the woman of his dreams! Its sick, its perverted. And its still the most basic, most natural form of obsession. Very interesting piece of cinema, this. But definitely not suitable for all.

The Unborn(2009)

Director: Who cares.

A pathetic excuse for a film.

Une femme est une femme(1961)

English title: A woman is a woman

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Country: France

Angela is a stripper who lives with her boyfriend Emile. She wants to have a baby with him but Emile refuses. She turns to Emile's close friend Alfred instead. That is about all that there is to the story of this cute little film by JLG. Its his style of film making and Anna Karina, the most beautiful woman on earth, that makes this film work. Godard, notably an American cinema fan, took the b-grade gangster film genre, dissected it and remade it into "A bout de Souffle" in his own sly way. Here, he does the same with the Hollywood musical genre. There are constant references to musicals(Angela wants to star in a musical with Gene Kelly). And the use of background music is the most interesting it can ever get in any film. Godard not only uses discontinuity in music(as in "A bout de Souffle") but he does so much more with it. Sometimes the music is a supplement to the dialogues spoken, sometimes they stop to let the characters speak and at other times they are just too loud to let us hear what the characters are saying. He lets a score stop at the middle and starts another from nowhere and suddenly goes back to the former. To follow it thorughout the film, is absolute fun. The film has its unique moments when the characters interact directly to the audience, they bow to us, wink at us or even asks Jeanne Moreau how her film "Jules et Jim" is doing. Technically this film is outrageous, much as JLG's other works. But on the intellectual level this remains one of his most accessible works. Apart from being playful and comic at different levels, the narration doesn't really test the viewer's intellect.
The film belongs to Anna Karina. She's there in almost every shot. Her mischievous smile, beautiful body and the divine face is utillised to every possible bit. The film kind of reflects how much JLG was in love with this woman. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy do justice to their roles. There's an absolute hilarious scene where Brialy and Karina doesn't talk to each other and communicate only through the names of books they choose from their bookshelves. Overall, this is a really nice comedy that should appeal to the common viewer as well as the hardcore JLG fan such as me.