CINEMATHEQUE

Woman on the Road Movie: Vagabond Dir: Agnès Varda    Brimming with humanity, Vagabond tells the bum-like life of a vagrant girl called Mona. With unflinching resilience and courage to lead on with her life of independence and cool-headedness, she accompanies people she meets along the way, only to split with them after a while.    The movie begins with someone  finding Mona in a gutter, lying all frozen and stained with the purple of wine dreg. What ensues is a peep into her life before the incident, starting with her arrival into that place from a beach. We get to know Mona through flashbacks emanating from the confessions of the people whom she met along the road. All of them remembers her clearly, as she is that girl which either someone's mother doesn’t want her daughter to become or was a pain in the ass for another person who offered her help.     Agnès Varda , who made the brilliant Cleo from 5 to 7 that showed the life of a lady who roams th...

Alone in A House Movie: Sivapuranam (Tamil) Dir: Arun Karthik     Sivapuranam reinstates the fact that a film can be more than its plot and meaning. Debutant director Arun  Karthick weaves a surreal experience of journeying into the loneliness of it's protagonist's psyche. Sparsely dialogued and centered around a single character-- who rarely leaves his house-- the movie makes a statement about adaptability—that despite all odds, one would try to make up for what he’s missing.    The film is strange (the English title of the film being The Strange Case of Siva ), for the protagonist's act of abstaining from his job of being a designer and shutting himself down to a life of alienation, for the sole purpose of editing and tinting the photograph of a woman whom he sees each night, is actually pretty weird. He’s in fact not attracted towards the girl, he’s just obsessed with the shaky picture of her that he took while she slid past him like a wind. There’s visibly...

Is Motherhood Sacred? Movie: The Olmo and the Seagull Dir: Petra Costa, Lea Glob    “I feel like there’s an alien in my belly” says Olivia, a pregnant stage artist who is straddled between choosing a life of following her passion and her untimely pregnancy which alienates the woman from her own choices. The Olmo and the Seagull discusses the false imposition of undue importance to motherhood, which in fact takes its toll only on the women involved.    The film meanders on a thin line between non-fiction and fiction and is played by real characters (Olivia Corsini and Serge Nikolai), with intermittent additions from the director’s angle to manipulate the setting of the cinema. What distinguishes cinema from a documentary is it’s power to manipulate the performers in action. The Olmo and the Seagull doesn’t intend to hide the timely interventions from the creator's side on the drama happening between the husband and the wife, it in fact showcases the directors' promts...

A Wrong Movie for the Wrong Times Movie: Ichi the Killer Dir: Takashi Miike     Ichi the Killer is devoid of any of the morals that we are conditioned to watch in movies and is regressively violent all through its length. Takashi Miike is in for a two hour long self-indulgent exploratory trip on the nuances of human violence, and the fact that he doesn’t care at all, brings forth a sense of awful disgust in the mind of an ordinary film goer(that includes me) all through the film.     The film begins with Ichi, an insecure young man playing the peeping tom on the balcony of a couple. Ichi is gaining pleasure out of the man's act of thrashing up his girlfriend’s face, which consequently makes him to jerk off vigorously and end up ejaculating himself on a potted plant. The title of the film strangely emerges from the puddle of semen that dripped fresh off the plant. What ensues is an aesthetically catchy and merciless gore-fest to which every single character of ...

Unforgettably Mundane Movie: Vith (Seed) Concept and Realization: Don Palathara    Killing the father figure(at least mentally) is a recurrent motif in almost all Coming-of-Age tales. Vith discovers the emotional disconnect of a very Christian father and an indifferent son living amidst the High Ranges of Kattappana. But it’s not the tale but the depiction that makes the film unique.     Don palathara, who's earlier venture Shavam that captured the capriciousness of human nature with an hour long slice-of-life depiction of a Christian funeral, was also a representation of the mundane. Vith is his second feature and it attempts to discusses the edgy relationship which a father has towards his son by which he wants to pin the boy down to a life of his liking-- a life of going to the church on every Sunday and getting a steady job. The film dwells on this aspect of how the father/son duo are leagues away from each other in every aspect. The dream-like combat sce...

Adolescent Adventures Movie: Rebels of the Neon God Dir: Tsai Ming-liang    There is an instance in Tsai Ming- liang’s Rebels of the Neon God where the mother of an adolescent boy confides to her husband that her kid is the incarnation of the Neon god, who is known for rebelling against his own father Lee-chin. This story doesn’t have any hold on the narrative of the movie, it’s just that it provides a hint into the rebellious nature of the young people in action.    This coming-of-age drama is as much the story of the young Ah ping--who is not content either with his school life or his shadow-like and lacklustre existence of staying with his parents—as it is the story of Ah Tze, an energetic lad who revvs away on his motorcycle. A minor hormonal error committed by Ah Tze triggers an already disturbed Ah Ping to break free from the commitments he had towards his family. Ah Ping, who had the air of a not-so-confident boy throughout the movie having his revenge on th...

What to Speak and What Not to...Anyway All's Just A Matter of Chance Movie: Right Now, Wrong Then Dir: Hong Sangsoo    While Hong Sangsoo's recent feature On the Beach at Night Alone deals with the results of a strained relationship which its leading lady has with a film director and the consequent impact of such an endeavour on her overall demeanour and psyche, his earlier film Right Now, Wrong Then is talking about how a relationship or one's life for that matter, could change entirely based on the minutest details involved in a conversation.      The things that we converse and our actions at a particular moment might not always be a display of our 'Right' selves, and being our 'Wrong' selves (which could be governed by our mood or anything that surrounds us) could serve in seeking a wrong-turn which is often against the desire of the people involved. Or is it just blind chance that’s at work here? Anyway, Hang Sangsoo's film is in two parts: the f...