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Yes, it’s one more film festival for me. Efficient as usual, S. Narayan, director of the Mumbai Film Festival, sees that the best films available are here for the cine buffs. If only the ground realities were as competent. But the slips between the cup and the lip persist as though caught up in some warp of the law of perversity? They do improve, though, as time goes by, Casablanca style. During the shows, there is near pin-drop silence. A mobile ring is instantly "shooed down" by a handful of viewers near the offender. "No talking" is permitted by an unwritten law, rigidly enforced by volunteers. A distinct film culture has evolved in its 15th year. Now, to get to the films, just a sprinkling of them, as one has to change options on an "as is, when is" basis. Golden Palm winner Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour is clearly overrated as it deals with the adolescence of Adele and her sexual experiences. A shy kid, she slides into a relationship with a blue-haired stranger named Emma, who imbues her with confidence as they develop into a lesbian affair. It’s okay for starters but after years of togetherness, Emma is looking for something more permanent, which doesn’t go well with Adele. How the two react is what the film is all about but it plods on laboriously. It takes too long, all of 179 minutes to do so, and could easily have been clipped of a third of its length. The tantrums thrown by Emma are graphic as is the reaction by Adele, played to perfection by Lea Seydoux, whose copious tears and running nose is ample testimony to her troubled state of mind. Set in Paris, Asghar Faradi’s The Past is the icing on the cake. Figuring in the "Rendezvous with French Cinema" section of the festival, filmmaker Faradi is Iranian and his treatment of a failing marriage is just impeccable. Ahmad (Tahir Rahim) arrives in Paris from Tehran to finalise the divorce from his wife Marie (Berenice Bejo). But complications set in one by one. Marie’s daughter Lucie throws tantrums. Ahmad’s rival has his own problems, a sick wife and growing kids. One by one, they crop up, thanks to an excellent screenplay co-written by Faradi that zig-zags around a host of characters in 130 minutes of taut drama. Quite unbeatable as it deals with the many problems linked with the separation, especially the children of whom the stubborn Faoud stands out. This is cinema at its best. Ethan and Joel Cohen’s Inside Llewyn Davis is all about the 1960s music centred on the Gaslight Café and its bylanes where musicians earned their livelihoods scrimping, with no roof over their heads. Davis is one such with a refrain like "You can hang me, oh hang me, before I’m dead and gone" that, at once, sets the mood in this on-the-road flashback to those great music. Francois Ozon’s Young & Beautiful deals with the exploits of sexually inquisitive 17-year-old Isabelle, who has her first sexual experience on a summer holiday but later learns to cash in on it to please older men. This goes on happily for her till one of her clients has a heart attack and dies in bed. All this was unknown to her conservative parents, and she is then sent for psychological counselling. Oson’s treatment is sensitive and it is a taut 95-minute drama where the lovely Marienne Vaeth also has the talent to match. It is an absorbing drama with former sex bomb Charlotte Rampling making a brief appearance as the dead client’s widow. Shades of Jean-Louis Trintignant’s gap from A Man and A Woman to L’Amour, the damaging effect of time. Carlos Saura’s The Hunt is about the reunion of three war veterans Jose, Paco and Luis as they go on a rabbit hunt. With them is 20-year-old Enrique and it is through his eyes that director Saura brings out the inherent cruelty and violence in Spanish life that is supposed to work against them nationally. It doesn’t take time for fallout between them and though rabbit hunting is apparently their excuse, it gets personal and explosive. Saura’s build-up from a picnic to bizarre tragedy is devastatingly put across and also lays threadbare the role of the conquistador. Volver a Emperor, a rambling trip down memory lane for a Nobel Prize-winning author who returns to his native town of Gijon after he is diagnosed with cancer. The film won the Best Foreign Film Oscar but is a tad too sentimental. Appropriately starting with that immortal song Begin the Begin, it drifts into another time wrap and shows a simple man who does not fall prey to the adulation of kings and TV camera but digs out old pals, including the woman he once loved. It was a great week sufficiently applauded by all those who ventured to take time off the nitty-gritty of life.
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