on saturday with photographs and videos that ranged from the rooftop shanties in hong kong to a housing colony below a bridge in manila discussion at the ‘informal cities’ revolved around the role and responsibility of the artists as ‘voice for the oppressed’. often, as it was destined to be, aesthetic questions kept jostling for space against the sloganeering.
at mami on sunday we started off with ‘gandha’ a marathi film with three episodes about the sense of smell. while the first was charmingly over the top when a typist in a college falls in love with the smell of agarbattis from a student, milind soman and sonali kulkarni in the second episode where he is hiv positive and smells of medicines was too soap opera for me. in the third episode neena kulkarni sits aside in ‘that time of the month’ and listens and smells the birth of a child in a house in rural maharashtra.
speaking of the sanctity of good intentions standing in for any aesthetic ambition; ‘soundtrack for a revolution’ intercut history channel footage about the civil rights movement with the ‘we shall overcome’ style chants of the protestors. in between these talking heads gave us struggle stories that we have heard too many times before and contemporary r&b singers like wyclef jean, the roots and joss stone sang updated versions of the songs. not nice in spite of the incredible voices.
in michael winterbottom’s ‘genoa’ way finding in the labyrinth of the medieval italian city becomes an allegory for the process of healing after the death of a family member. two lovely girls and their father played by colin firth spend a summer in the city of narrow lanes between tall buildings where every street looks the same.
the gritty realism of many new european films i am seeing nowadays focuses on the lives of the those living on the edge of the mainstream. in ‘la pivellana’s case it is a group of circus performers living in mobile homes surrounded by animals. shot in that grainy hand-held way that all these films are, the plot concerns a little girl abandoned by her mother who is found by a family and raised for a few months. everyone in the film is invariably and tryingly sweet and caring despite the relentlessly bleak surroundings.
yesterday we saw two films, starting off with steven soderberg’s terrific ‘ the girlfriend experience’. unclassifiable in any genre- somewhere between reality television and fiction (as if there is such a difference) the film follows a high end escort in new york as she navigates her life between her live in boyfriend, her many clients and her image as projected on the internet.
after a few drinks are ‘firangi paani’ the estonian film ‘blank robbery’ looked really tacky. grainy as hell, the story did not make watching the film any easier. some conman comes out of jail and fails at trying to come clean when his nephew forces him to rob a bank with him.
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