World Cinema

Film festivals, I would like to argue, are not the places where the most radical films will get a fair viewing today.

The first film was Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s Altiplano. Mining in the mountains of Peru contaminates the area with mercury causing deaths in the neighboring village. The local doctors end up bearing the brunt of the villagers’ ire. One of them is killed and his widow arrives on the scene.

Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her (2002) is hardly little known enough for this column but it is a film that has not been entirely understood and a fresh analysis (rather than a ‘˜review') may be appreciated. The reason I have chosen this film is that last week I chose Patrice Leconte's The Hairdresser's Husband, also about sexuality/ sensuality and a look at Almodovar's film may be interesting.

What happens to ordinary people who search frantically for their loved ones after a bomb attack? How do they even come to know that missing family members may be victims? Where do they begin looking and who do they turn to for help? The subject may not be new but Rachid Bouchareb, the French-born director of Algerian descent, elicits a new ethos into the story he narrates.

Many argue that boxing, among all sports, is the ultimate test of character of a sportsperson. Fulvio Bernasconi also seems to believe so. That is why Out of Bounds (Fuore Dalle Corde) directed by him uses boxing as a metaphor for the fight for survival in today's unforgiving, cruel world. Bernasconi, in this Switzerland-Italy co-production theatrically released in India by NDTV Lumiere, has his protagonist in a boxer for whom the world of fairplay is made to move far, far away. Caught in a bind, he has to fight for his survival, literally....

Cinema would not be as popular if sex had not preoccupied it as much as it does but sexual obsession is not a subject that film art has negotiated successfully. Sexual obsession is most popularly dwelt upon for its negative connotations and the quintessential examples would be from film noir. In films like The Postman always Rings Twice (1946), it leads to murder, with the obsessed/ murderous lovers subsequently becoming suspicious of each other. More often sexual obsession becomes the occasion for titillation in cinema.

Believe it or not, that's the quotation that opens the spaghetti western with Rod Steiger and James Coburn!

The uncut 154-minute version brings into focus three revolutions on three continents-the Chinese revolution, the Irish revolution of the IRA, and the Mexican revolution of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata-and yet none is discussed at length. The Chinese revolution is merely alluded to in the opening Mao quote and some aspects of the quote can be associated with the opening stagecoach sequence....

Atsushi Funahashi's third film, DEEP IN THE VALLEY, moves between fluidly between documentary and fiction, between a narrative of the here and the now and a throwback to a novel entitled Five Storey Pagoda by Rohan Koda written in 1888 which he fictionalises. A fiction, thus, within a fiction. The result is a film of grace and gentle optimism centring on a pagoda that once welded a community together.

The Desert of the Tartars (1976) is based on a classic Italian novel by Dino Buzzati written in the 1930s when war seemed imminent in Europe. In the film Lieutenant Drogo passes out of the military academy to be posted in a fort named Bastiano situated at the border. Fort Bastiano was constructed at the edge of a desert eons ago to keep the Tartars from invading Europe. No one on the fort has actually seen a Tartar and only one of them - Colonel Nathanson - has even seen action but the soldiers are drilled every morning and secret passwords are in place....

The Berlinale opened this year with the much awaited THE INTERNATIONAL, a mainstream thriller and a scintillating if sordid story of how two people - an Interpol agent (Owen) and a New York Public Prosecutor (Watts) give chase - through dramatic, complicated and thoroughly deadly twists and turns of plot - to people who finance terror...