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The International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2012 chugged along but none too smoothly, and despite being the ninth year in Goa, the glitches only keep changing, not decreasing. The overall quality of films was average, with the opening film itself Ang Lee’s Life of Pi being a major letdown, not in the festival class at all. The festival kits came in late, and, that too, without the bags, so it wasn’t easy selecting the films to watch. They say the Turkish package was unusually poor but then, one drew satisfaction from old classics like Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar, M. S. Satyu’s Garam Hawa and Shyam Benegal’s Ankur. Yes, it was the good (very few), the bad (plenty) and the humdrum (many) as one waded through the labyrinth of films only available at times like this. Paul Saltzman’s The Last White Knight (Canada) is a powerful documentary drama of the, then, dreaded Ku Klux Klan KKK in the deep South of America or Mississippi to be precise, which is the cotton centre of the world but the law is white. Black, even if they pick the cotton, are treated like trash, shot and lynched without compunction. The protagonists are Paul and Byron de la Beckwith Jr, the former a Civil Rights leader and the latter a hard-core KKK operative coming from a family of racists. The format may be repetitive but in 78 minutes one comes face to face with some of the most ghastly crimes committed, especially the lawyer, who deposes towards the end. It is man’s inhumanity against his fellow men. Pathetic. Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi rightly won the Lifetime Achievement Award but his film screened Illumination is not among his better films. It deals with his obsession with physics (‘even if it rejected me’) and has, for its protagonist, Francisco, a Woody Allen-like person, enigmatic as ever as he searches for the truth. The first woman he meets rejects him, the second marries him but it is an uneasy relationship with constant bickering and bursts of temper. After a weak middle, it manages to salvage itself but I personally would have preferred The Structure of Crystals, his maiden effort in 1969. This writer was lucky enough to meet the great author in the early 1980s when he came to conduct a master class at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. 7 Days in Havana is a searching docu-drama by seven different directors, including Benecio Del Toro, about the Cuban revolution after the great Castro revolution. Sparking off with zesty Spanish songs one, at once, enters the psyche of the locals, simple folks mostly deeply religious and how they deal with their rather difficult plight of few jobs. Cecilia’s Temptation, with precisely this aspect as the very talented singer has to decide between staying with a baseball playing boyfriend or crossing the shores with an American talent scout, who promises to set her up in the United States. In between, there’s Ritual, which deals with the rituals a young woman has to go through to be absolved of the crime of lesbianism. Then the last day, Sunday, is devoted to matriarch Martha, who, one night, dreams of a major celebration to Our Lady and by jingo, by evening, it happens by getting her neighbours to pool in their limited resources, a real miracle, Havana style. Polish film To Kill a Beaver is poor and uses the beaver of the title as a red-herring to enter the psyche of a disturbed, obstinate man named Eryk, who begins killing beavers and, for this, he is upbraided by a beautiful girl (Agnieszbe Powelkiewick). But this girl, a victim of child abuse falls in love with Eryk. That the protagonist has served in war zones makes matters more complicated but when all is said and done, it seems that director Jan Jokub Kolski is merely using the psychic angle to indulge in steamy sex. The Israeli film’s The Cut-off Man drew a very poor response with a steady stream of viewers leaving before the halfway mark and a digital glitch delayed the start of a Bengali film by an hour. So much for efficiency. Also among the better films screened was Abbas Kirostami’s Like Someone in Love and it only reiterated his class as he wove a story between an elderly professor (Rin Takomashi) and a young Japanese girl Akaki (Rya Kose), who is studying sociology but has more immediate social problems because of a jealous boyfriend, who claims to be her fianc`E9. It is just 24 hours in their lives but Kirostami covers so many aspects of life and enters the psyche of Akaki as probably representative of Japanese youth. How she is reluctant to meet her grandma, how she even tries to make a pass at the old man before coming to accept him as her mentor. Like peeling layers of an onion, we see something around every corner. It was 109 minutes of pulsating drama before that terrifying climax, a fully satiating experience. Holy Motors is centred on Monseiur Oscar, who has an amazing job as a master of disguise. Once as an old woman, once as a wife and his tasks are multiple. With the result, he suffers from an actor’s syndrome, but far more destructive, as he deals with death. His chauffeur is Celine, and then on the way, we come across what looks like his lady love. It is 115 minutes of searching, not as intense as Kirostami’s but the sincerity cannot be doubted, and it ends up as one of the films that passes muster. The Serbian film Clip was purely pornographic as it dealt with all modes of sexual poses, sodomy, and just an excuse to depict the permissiveness of Serbian youth, who condemns the United States, but is as bad, if not worse. Its director Majos was a woman. British Stephen Frear’s Lay the Favourite was, at best, fair and not in the same class as his Dangerous Liaisons over a decade ago. Beth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is a young strip dancer who becomes a Las Vegas casino waitress before becoming an assistant bettor to veteran Dink (Bruce Willis). But his jealous wife is a problem and her path is full of ups and downs but not doing justice to the star cast of the story. The concluding film at the festival was Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a political thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Mohsin Hamid. The film is about a Pakistani, who works on the Wall Street. The mood in the second half of the festival was subdued and press conferences were needlessly clubbed together and there were any amount of wannabees making a nuisance of themselves, entering towards the end and making calls on their cell phones. Guess, it’s a necessary evil.
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