Rituparno Ghosh, tried to put up a slice of life topped with contradictions and anomalies – he succeeds fairly and Chitrangada will remain an important film in Indian cinema for raising the doubts, contradictions and confusions about identity – sexual and/or gender.
What sets Soumitra apart? On one side, he had been thriving and bursting with creative restlessness that makes him a more complete creative persona – he being a poet, an elocution artist, editor for two decades of one of Bengal’s most versatile literary magazines and an actor. Notwithstanding 14 of Ray’s films, he had acted with all major directors of Bengal barring Ritwik Ghatak.
Rang Milanti is a moderately enjoyable film. It could have been cut short quite a bit to bring in some speed to it. Considering Koushik’s previous, enigmatic Arekti premer golpo (Just another love story, 2010) this can be passed on easily as a drab.
Charlie Chaplin’s most films promote the unvanquished – the triumph of will to overturn any trouble or hardship in life. It is irony, a film made on a character who takes up Charlie to impersonate is laden with so much casual sentiments. This is such a defeating philosophy that the film is not saved.
Urochi Thi is a good film. It’s crisp and yet it makes you laden with an inexplicable heaviness of soul. This is the director’s first film and hence it is apparent that he tries to punch in too many things and characters in one go. Few could have been dispensed with to make the film look petite. But none-the-less in the era of self indulging prophetic film makers, this film is for the urban mass that can surely recognize few of the characters.
How can a man be so handsome, I asked myself everytime I looked at him? In those pre-teen years of stupidity and innocence, in falling in love and falling apart, Shammi Kapoor with his wild, beastly submission was just what I could never become.
The deaths hence of Iti Mrinalini are laden with self-indulgence, big philosophies and prophecies. Somehow in between, life slipped through. This is the reason why the film and the deaths within it almost always fail to connect. The tragedy of absence – in individual and in collective society is narrated in thin air and dissolves.
The film opens up with a kid Rana getting up from sleep and his mother Mamata (Sohini Sengupta) readying him for school. In the short journey in a rickshaw to school, Rana is hammered with ‘knowledge’ from the mother. And this continues, from home to school, on the way back and almost all the time the child is awake.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film The Dreamers is a tribute to cinema. It’s mainly a tribute to the European school of cinema which had been critically acclaimed and inspirationally followed across the globe. Hence it doesn’t need any time to hook onto it. For film buffs of India and the other Third world countries, this surely works – nostalgia and associations flood in making the viewing experience quite worthwhile in most of the case.
door Gopalakrishnan is an exceptional film-maker. Not only does his oeuvre hold the colours of the rainbow, but more importantly when the social world tries to teach us to run and ruin – ourselves and the life round us, he is a graceful exception to this ‘accepted’ norm. Hence, a book on Adoor – his [...]
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