Mulholland Drive by David Lynch

Dreams are more potent than reality. We might live numbly through our days and nights, but in our dreams, the feelings, regrets, aches, fears and hopes pulsate with a strange intensity. We can cry in our dreams, we can be mortally afraid, we can feel an intense longing in our dreams which has no outlet in our waking lives.

Some random notes:

Why does the assassin mess up? Diane wishes him to be a mediocre, error-prone murderer. In her heart, she does not want Camilla to die.

Who is the young man who has nightmares? It is Diane, transferred into his body. She is the one who has nightmares (she has had recurring dreams about the diner). The psychoanalyst is a symbol for the organized part of our selves, which is well-dressed, has a clean, shaved face, regular features, and who knowingly looks at us, knowing all our secrets but in denial.

Adam Kesher is also another face of Diane. The world is corrupt. And what is our wish in the face of this corruption? "I am going home." "I am going home." (Adam Kesher after his meeting with the mafia). And if home too is a den of rejection and betrayal? There is nowhere to go.

When Rita mumbles in her dream "No Hay Banda" and is woken up, she tells Betty, "Go with me somewhere." Where are they at present? They come out and see something pasted on a pole: "Is Hell".

"There is no band"! This is but a dream. In face of extreme suffering within a dream, we do get messages within the dream that it is a dream, so that we can wake up. Diane does wake up soon after this message, in a daze.

Who is the streetwalker? She takes something from the assassin's shirt pocket. Remember the assassin had the blue key in the very same shirt pocket.

...

This is movie which made me sadder than a thousand other movies about heartbreak. David Lynch has crafted a true masterpiece of world cinema by presenting the immeasurably haunting vision of what tears mean, deep down.

The acting by Naomi Watts is exemplary, a shining light of artistic excellence.

Recommendation: Masterpiece.

United 93 by Paul Greengrass

Three recent films, United 93, Flight 93 and World Trade Center, deal with the September 11 tragedy as seen from the eyes of people involved in the disasters.

V Sanil from IIT Delhi forwarded me an interesting article by Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher-critic on the so-called non-political stance of these movies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,,1869546,00.html

I think Flight 93 and United 93 both succeeded in portraying the agony of humans facing a certain death when the victims have no understanding of the reasons for the drama unfolding before their eyes and when they are just caught up in the immediacy of self-preservation.

World Trade Center, on the other hand, is a mediocre attempt at portraying Americans as the professionals of the world. What is this US fetish with "professionals"? I think it is a very deep issue related to the lack of political power that a common citizen enjoys in the US. Because he is unable to anything to change the system, the most heroic thing he can do and command respect thereof, is to be great at what he does. Be a great pilot, a great fireman, a great cop, a beautiful woman....

And obviously, being great, being specialized to the exclusion of other things make others instantly appreciate your skills, but it also makes you a caricature.

Digressing a little bit...

Americans dream of a family as the goal of their pursuit of life liberty and happiness. And professionalism is the allged means. Strangely, it is the professionals who cannot hold their family together. The dimwits (Forrest Gump) do a great job at it (not related at all to Forrest's luck in the world). You can't worship both money, ambition AND have warm relationships.

Recommendation: Good.

Parzania by Rahul Dholakia

Is the Indian psyche so infantile that nothing can be left unsaid in a movie?

As we are deeply uncomfortable with our true identities, our movies and our lives happen at the outermost surface of our minds. There is no depth in our motion pictures.

In that sense, Parzania is a conventional movie. It breaks no new ground in depicting the reality of India, where churlish idealism stands beside an appallingly callous and violent society.

The dialogue is extremely amateur, the diagetic music at times good and at times out of place, acting sub-par mostly. Most importantly, the extremely bad decision to have the characters speak in English destroys the film's credibility. Many Americanisms have been copied (Husband kissing the wife while going to office, an old Muslim man saying "That's very sweet" at the gift of a bed sheet (ridiculous)).

However, to be fair, in places Naseeruddin Shah and Saarika do display what they were capable of doing had the director been more accomplished.

Recommendation: Poor.

...

There have been many movies about communal riots in India.

Amu: Not a very well known movie, stars Konkana Sen Sharma and Brinda Karat. This is a insightful look at the 1984 riots in Delhi. Understated and focused, with a very realistic look at present day Delhi. Slow at times.

Tamas: The 6 hour TV series opus by Govind Nihalani based on the novel by Bhishm Sahni. Not available on DVD. The best movie about communal tensions in India. The depiction of Sikhs in the Gurudwara and the communists' efforts to stop the riots are head and shoulders above any other such movie in India.

Bombay: Directed by Mani Ratnam, with music by A R Rahman. The less said the better, but still, two words: Lollypop tragedy.

Train to Pakistan: Based on Khushwant Singh's novel about the partition riots. Good in parts but meanders in between.

Dev: A recent Govind Nihalani movie about the Bombay riots starring Om Puri and Amitabh Bachhan. Accomplished in many ways (except for the jarring picture perfection of Kareena Kapoor). Hackneyed in places.

Flandres by Bruno Dumont

The latest film by Bruno Dumont, the Grand Prix winner at Cannes, is a minimalistic vision of an almost intangibly small evolutionary step of one man.

The film gives a new meaning to the term "Animal Farm".

This is, like Michael Haneke's cinema, a challenge to the existing codes of media and filmmaking. Mainstream cinema portrays love and war in an idealized form, with an implicit goal to entertain. Both Haneke and Dumont shock the viewer into seeing things that are normally not seen on film. When people complain that violence and sex in films desensitize or "corrupt" the spectators, they fail to realize that most films present, what Haneke calls very eloquently, 24 lies per second.

When violence is of a form which makes us clap and cheer, is it really violence? Or is it some form of perverse entertainment.

Real violence leaves one reeling and scared and shocked. It never entertains or titilates.

This film begins in the inane life of the farms of the Flanders town with an exposition of lives bereft of any feeling or thought.

It then proceeds to a clinical examination of what these farm animals are capable of in the midst of a desert war, and what happens to a lonely heart in which there is no hope of love or joy.

It ends with the protagonist realizing just a little bit of his humanity, but which is tragic in its belatedness. It is all the more tragic when one sees that it needs war to bring a man to at least some sense of his beastliness.

Recommendation: Very Good.

Freedom of Expression

Did Ram exist, or did he not? Was the Ram Sethu constructed by Ram, by his monkey army, or is it a natural formation?

Is Mr Karunanidhi speaking for political benefit? Is he right or wrong in what he says?

Did Justice Sabharwal commit acts of corruption or not?

These are not the important issues.

The important issue is this: In a free society, it must be safe to be unpopular. It must be possible to blaspheme, one must be free to say things which hurt others' sentiments, one must be allowed to express unpopular or heretical ideas, one must be free to criticize the judiciary or the constitution, to burn the flag or to burn the effigy of not just Ravan and his brothers, but also of our Gods and Goddesses.

However, as India is far from that reality, where it would be safe to be unpopular, a common man cannot think of making radical statements and expect to be provided safety by the state. Hence, work towards that freedom, get together and discuss civil liberties, act for their enactments in India (or elsewhere) but temper your words carefully in the present environment.

Do not be suicidal.

Martyrdom is not the catalyst to public outrage as it used to be.

...

I quote from Noam Chomsky's article about freedom of expression here:

(for the context, do refer to The Faurisson Affair).

BEGIN QUOTE

...

I do not want to discuss individuals. Suppose, then, that some person does indeed find the petition "scandaleuse," not on the basis of misreading, but because of what it actually says. Let us suppose that this person finds Faurisson's ideas offensive, even horrendous, and finds his scholarship to be a scandal. Let us suppose further that he is correct in these conclusions -- whether he is or not is plainly irrelevant in this context. Then we must conclude that the person in question believes that the petition was "scandaleuse" because Faurisson should indeed be denied the normal rights of self-expression, should be barred from the university, should be subjected to harassment and even violence, etc. Such attitudes are not uncommon. They are typical, for example of American Communists and no doubt their counterparts elsewhere. Among people who have learned something from the 18th century (say, Voltaire) it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended. Advocacy of the right to express ideas that are generally approved is, quite obviously, a matter of no significance. All of this is well-understood in the United States, which is why there has been nothing like the Faurisson affair here. In France, where a civil libertarian tradition is evidently not well-established and where there have been deep totalitarian strains among the intelligentsia for many years (collaborationism, the great influence of Leninism and its offshoots, the near-lunatic character of the new intellectual right, etc.), matters are apparently quite different.

...

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson's alleged "anti-Semitism." Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi -- such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here -- this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.

...

Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 11, 1980

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