Monday, January 28, 2008

accepted / inland empire / the sweet hereafter / junoon / the captive

a weekend of films was a good idea to get away from the obligatory patriotism being forced down my throat by everything on television. republic day began with ‘accepted’- an awful american teenage comedy where a kid rejected from all the ivy leagues starts a college of his own. same old silly tripe about losers who show the blonde hunks that ‘heart’ is really what matters.
but the films of the day were really david lynch’s ‘inland empire’ and atom egoyan’s ‘the sweet hereafter’. inland empire was a hallucinatory trip into a lynchian world even stranger than before. in some the earlier films i have seen there always was something to hold on to while the weirdness took over. here none of that exists. an actress gets a role of a lifetime to play the protagonist of a remake of a polish folk tale only to discover that the earlier time the story was attempted to be filmed both the lead actors were murdered. and so the tale begins as we follow laura dern into a sitcom set where rabbits play the main parts, women dance to the locomotion’, someone somewhere is being murdered- i have no idea who or what. as if the play on fiction and reality was not enough, characters turn into each other sometimes and everything just might be a dream. i enjoyed it more than i am willing to admit with all its glorious over the top madness it was enigmatic, frightening and odd. just don’t know what happened.
in ‘the sweet hereafter’ a schoolbus accident in a freezing north american town brings an ambulance chasing lawyer to its doorstep hoping to device for himself a case. as he shamelessly and ruthlessly exploits the pain of the parents who lost their children his own relationship with his druggie daughter haunts him. ghosts of ang lee’s ‘the ice storm’ were around as ruptures in the community fabric get created by the tragedy- some painful, others liberating.
in ‘junoon’ for a change we empathize with the british family which during the 1857 revolution loses its only man and is at the mercy of a caring nawabs family as the nawab lusts after the teenage girl. Its nice for a change to see another side in the otherwise jingoistic ‘mangal pandey’ type of brit bashing. shashi kapoor plays the nawab and nafisa ali the girl.
but for me the best film of the weekend was chantal akerman’s ‘the capitve’, her take on one of the stories from the proust novel ‘in search of lost time’. if you have ever been in a love so obsessive that it completely takes over your life, this film manages to capture the humiliations, jealousies and insecurities of that relationship. an impassive young woman is held captive in a perpetual vice of surveillance by her jealous boyfriend, especially after he learns about her attraction towards women. which one of them is the prisoner is difficult to sort out. the movie was constructed as a series of spare scenes where the drama is played out quietly and carefully.

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