Dark city: L.A. neo-noir

Though film noir will forever be associated with American movies of the ‘40s, the term actually originated in France. It was coined in 1946 by a French critic called Nino Frank (noir means ‘black’ in French), and in 1955, with A Panorama of American Film Noir, his countrymen Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton conducted the first in-depth study of the genre. It was an apt label: these films were undeniably black, both in their visual style (mostly dark interiors lit with a single light source) and their pessimistic outlook. Many of the golden age noirs – Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep – were set in Los Angeles; something in that city’s mixture of seediness and high glamour called out to directors working in this genre. Decades on, L.A. is still a favoured setting for filmmakers looking to push the boundaries of noir, as can be seen in these four titles.

Blade Runner (Reliance Home Video, Rs 499)

In 1982, Ridley Scott released a sci-fi film that was, strangely but unmistakably, also a noir. Blade Runner plays out in a Los Angeles of the future, with flying cars and android-like creatures called replicants. Yet it’s also possible to draw a line connecting Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard to the loner private eyes played by Humphrey Bogart and Ralph Meeker over half a century ago. The film has other noir characteristics as well – voice-over narration, wet, dark streets, a femme fatale and a general air of fatalism. Blade Runner is based on Phillip K Dick’s cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and in the years since its release, it’s become somewhat of a cult item itself. Twenty years after its dystopian visions first surfaced, the film remains one of the most persuasive arguments for taking noir out of its comfort zone and allowing it to spread its dark sheen over other genres.  

The Usual Suspects (Sony Pictures, Rs 599)

For certain film geeks who grew up in the ‘90s, Bryan Singer’s film was the height of cool. It looked like a noir, sounded like a gangster movie, and behaved like the smartest kid in the class. It had one of the juiciest set-ups in film history: a group of criminals meeting in a line-up at a police station. The characters all had names to die for – Kobayashi, Fenster, Verbal Kint, Keyser Soze. The action is spread over two great noir cities – New York and Los Angeles. Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay was pure pulp, a late entry in the hardboiled tradition of Raymond Chandler, though with one significant difference – Chandler’s universe is usually governed by some kind of moral code, while The Usual Suspects is exhilaratingly amoral. Its rug-pulling denouement is justly famous, but the real fun is in getting the surprises out of the way and coming back to admire the sleight of hand filmmaking that sets everyone up for a fall.

L.A. Confidential (Reliance Home Video, Rs 499)

L.A. Confidential would make a nice double bill with Chinatown, another noirish look at systemic corruption. Polanksi’s film was a key influence, and Confidential’s director Curtis Hanson acknowledged this by giving one of his characters a bandaged nose like the one Jack Nicholson sported in the 1974 film. Set in the 1950s, L.A. Confidential’s Los Angeles is a city going to seed. The editor of a sleazy gossip mag provides tip-offs to a detective. A prostitution racket supplies call girls who resemble movie stars. Policemen spend Christmas Eve administering a beating to a group of jailbirds. Amidst all this, two straight-shooting cops see their parallel investigations dovetail. While it didn’t quite break new ground for the genre, L.A. Confidential is nevertheless a stylish, highly entertaining period thriller. Watch it just for its cast – the pre-fame duo of Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell, and Kim Bassinger made up as Veronica Lake (two femme fatales for the price of one).

Drive (Reliance Home Video, Rs 599)

When Nicolas Winding Refn won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival last year for Drive, he earned comparisons with Michael Mann. While its slick action scenes and night-time explorations of L.A. place it in Mann territory, Drive is also reminiscent of the more romantic noir films by Hollywood émigrés like Robert Siodmak and Jacques Tourneur. (Like Tourneur’s lushly poetic Out of the Past, Drive too has a protagonist who lives on the edge of society and returns for one final job.) Ryan Gosling plays The Driver, a stuntman and getaway driver-for-hire who falls for his married neighbour, only to find himself inheriting her husband’s problems with the local mafia. Juxtaposing moments of great tenderness with shocking bouts of violence, the film ends up somewhere between a fairy tale and a very gory gangster film. Still, if you like your movies sleek, swift and sentimental, Drive is your vehicle.

This piece was published in the October issue of Man's World.

Nosferatu: DVD Review

The first thing to keep in mind is that Nosferatu released in 1922. This means the German public had just been given a mighty scare off-screen, and would receive a series of shocks for the next two decades. Onscreen scares had not been invented yet, but FW Murnau would change all that. Though some might cite The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or The Golem, both released in 1920, or even 1913's The Student of Prague, it is actually Noseferatu which should qualify as the first horror film ever made. (It beat the Swedish faux-documentary Haxan, a scarier affair, by a few months.) It was also the first vampire movie, which makes Murnau the earliest – and unlikeliest – cinematic ancestor of the Twi-hards.

Murnau was one of cinema’s great early poets. He would go on to direct The Last Laugh, Faust, and the most lyrical of all silent films, Sunrise. Nosferatu was his first classic; an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Apart from a few minor changes – the count was called Orlok, Harker was changed to Hutter – the film was to a large extent faithful to its source. Hutter is a real estate agent who visits Orlok’s castle in the Carpathian mountains. After some broad hints, it dawns on him (here begins the horror film tradition of the slow-witted pretty boy protagonist) that his host is a nosferatu, or a vampire. The rest of the movie is a mish-mash of fangs, ghost ships, rat plagues and women in ecstasy (the vampire as seducer: another genre staple born).

Is Nosferatu still scary? Ninety years of films that bump in the dark later, the answer is no. There are a few creepy moments – you just know Tim Burton loves that shot of Orlok’s shadow menacingly advancing towards a wall face – but the greater shock today is the openness with which Murnau pushes the psychosexual aspects of the story (unlike the 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, Nosferatu does not shy away from showing Orlok suck the blood from Hutter’s thumb). This was the only element that Hollywood did not – or could not – borrow wholesale from the Germans for their own horror films of the 1930s. In every other way, German expressionism formed the basis for what we now regard as the golden era of horror.

A minor gripe about this particular edition of Nosferatu. Viewers might be surprised to find that the film isn’t in black and white at all; instead, scenes have strong yellow, pink and blue tints, an early cinema trick to alert audiences to changes in time and mood. Noseferatu was released in this form, but then the original print went missing. In 1984, the “colour” print was discovered and restored, followed by two other versions in 1995 and 2005 (the latter is on view here). Film buffs might have welcomed nuggets like this, but the bare-bones DVD pack, like the film, is silent on these matters.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The Auteurs Anderson

Wrote this for Man's World. Couldn't find a link online, but here's the piece as it was carried. 

They both made directorial debuts in 1996. Since then, both have been called ‘America’s best filmmaker’ at one time or another. And as fate would have it, they’re both named Anderson. The first, Paul Thomas Anderson, struggled with studio interference on his first film Hard Eight, but bounced back with an incredible sequence: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood. Wes Anderson, by contrast, emerged fully formed with Bottle Rocket, and was anointed ‘the next Scorsese’ by Scorsese himself. He’s followed that with one intricate, idiosyncratic gem after another.

Scorsese is actually one of the few things these two have in common. His stylistic influence can be seen in PT’s bravura long-takes (the opening of Boogie Nights recalls the Copacabana Steadicam shot in Goodfellas), as well as Wes’s scored montages. Apart from this, and their shared habit of casting a certain set of actors in several of their movies, the two inhabit different cinematic worlds. PT is like Robert Altman, Wes is more Hal Ashby. PT’s characters are usually in the process of discovering themselves, while Wes’s are preoccupied with mending, escaping or replacing their dysfunctional families. Wes’s movies are set in an off-kilter universe all of his own; PT’s are located within the cracks of a recognisable world.

Both directors have a film out this year. Wes’s Moonrise Kingdom premiered at Cannes, while PT’s The Master will release abroad in October. While both films should make their way to our shores eventually, you can use the time before that to catch up with – or revisit – their earlier work on DVD. Here’s my pick of the Andersons.

Wes Anderson: The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr Fox

Though some argue that the 1998 film Rushmore is Anderson’s best till date, a strong case can also be made for The Royal Tenenbaums (Disney, Rs 399). Released in 2001, it tells the story of the Tenenbaum clan – distracted patriarch Royal, his ex-wife and their three children, child prodigies once but now adrift in life. While Salinger’s Glass family is a probable inspiration, the film is bursting with little details that are pure Anderson: Dalmatian mice, a falcon called Mordecai, matching red tracksuits worn by Ben Stiller and his two sons. Gene Hackman heads a superb cast that includes Luke and Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston and Gwyneth Paltrow, and the soundtrack is both eclectic and apt.



Fantastic Mr Fox (Excel Movies, Rs 399), made eight years later, achieves something even rarer – the transfer of directorial handprint from live action to animation. For though the story is based on Roald Dahl’s children’s book, Fantastic Mr Fox looks, feels and sounds like a Wes Anderson film. It’s all there: the atypical family dynamic, a son looking for his father’s approval, the little cinematic nods (Citizen Kane, Day for Night). Even the choice of animation technique – the fastidious, elegant process of stop motion – seems appropriate.

PT Anderson: Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood

Boogie Nights (Eagle Home Entertainment, Rs 99) released in 1997 and immediately marked Anderson out as an ambitious, fluid filmmaker. The film was set in the Los Angeles porn industry of the ‘70s. Burt Reynolds’ director chances upon the prodigiously endowed Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) and offers him the lead role in his film, as well as a glimpse of the high life. At first, the film bounces along like a cork on the water, buoyant and sunny. Then, as the decade draws to a close, it changes face and becomes darker (the actual porn industry also suffered a downturn in the ‘80s, with the advent of video and the threat of AIDS). Boogie Nights is dotted with sensational set-pieces: the long opening shot introducing the principal players; the swimming pool sequence that echoes Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba; the stand-off at the mansion, with a dead-eyed Wahlberg as scary as the raving Alfred Molina.

If 2007's No Country for Old Men and Michael Clayton were portraits of modern-day America’s spiritual crisis, There Will Be Blood (Disney, Rs 299), released the same year, was a key to the miasma. It’s the story of an early 20th century oil prospector, played with menacing authority by Daniel-Day Lewis, and his battle with a young priest for the soul of a small town. The movie is gritty and stark; you can almost taste the dust and the oil through Robert Elswitt’s visuals, and hear the madness in Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s score. Anderson said that he watched The Treasure of Sierra Madre repeatedly while making There Will Be Blood, and it’s clear how much John Huston’s movie about frontier lives ruined by greed has influenced this one. One also gets the sense of a naturally flashy filmmaker cutting away the fat and getting down to the basics. No Country may have nabbed the Oscar with its more abstract apocalyptic visions, but There Will Be Blood was the real deal. 

English Vinglish: Review

Sridevi always seemed like a great candidate for a second innings. India’s biggest female star in the ’80s and early ’90s, she was also – script- and director-willing – a terrific actor, with standout performances in films like Sadma and Lamhe. On hiatus for the past 15 years, she’s back as the lead in Gauri Shinde’s directorial debut English Vinglish. Happily, she still has that unforced charm that made her one of the least narcissistic Bollywood stars of her generation. Pity, then, that this diverting but uneven comeback film spends its latter half struggling to keep it real.

Sridevi plays Shashi Godbole, a Pune homemaker with a tenuous grasp on the English language. Her bratty daughter and supercilious husband (Adil Hussain) keep pointing out her mistakes – something she’s embarrassed about, but has come to accept and live with. But when she has to travel by herself to New York for her niece’s wedding, the problem is compounded. Enter an impossibly diverse English tutorial class (pro-gay, even) and English Vinglish becomes an American version of the British TV series Mind Your Language. Shashi and her classmates (including the fine French actor Mehdi Nebbou) stumble towards fluency, even as Shinde throws in a bunch of touristy montages that tell us little about the city they’re flattering. Still, the classroom scenes are funny, with everyone gamely playing up their racial stereotypes. (Rajeev Ravindranathan’s broad Tamilian accent must have tickled Sridevi, who belongs to that state.)

As Shashi began to find herself, we started to find ourselves dreading a melodramatic backlash. It arrived on cue. Her family joins her early, and turns out to be as insufferable on holiday as they were back home. Her final examination is scheduled for the same day as the wedding (of course it is). Most disappointingly, instead of taking her emancipation to its logical end, Shashi goes ahead and does what Hindi film mothers have been doing for the past century – sacrifice her dreams for her family. “I don’t need love, I just need a little respect,” Shashi tells her niece at one point. For that to happen, she’ll probably have to start respecting herself a little.

Barfi! - Review

One of the happy triumphs of Barfi! is the way it manages to avoid becoming a “message film”, even though one of its protagonists is deaf-mute and another autistic. Our films – even sensitively handled ones like Black and Taare Zameen Par – tend to use disabled characters as a sort of censorious mirror reflecting society’s biases and indifference. Barfi!, on the other hand, sticks close to its characters, treating them like real people, not issues to be resolved.

Barfi (Ranbir Kapoor) is a young man-about-Darjeeling. He cannot hear or speak, but is otherwise well-adjusted: cycling around, flirting and troubling the local cops. He falls for Shruti (Ileana D’Cruz), and despite her protestations (she’s engaged), woos her like a regular Charles Chaplin. At the same time, Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra), the autistic daughter of a local businessman, re-enters his life. As the story unfolds in an intricate series of flashbacks, we watch these three characters chase each other from Darjeeling to Calcutta and back, with Saurabh Shukla’s harried police officer a constant step behind. There’s kidnapping and attempted robbery and even a murder, yet the film never loses its whimsical tone.

Maybe it was the mountain air, or the fact that he’s a Bengali director finally getting to shoot in Bengal, but Barfi! seems to have released something joyful and buoyant in Anurag Basu. Unlike the pessimistic narratives of his previous two films, Life in a... Metro and Kites, this one glides along like classic silent comedy. Kapoor adds to this impression, with a performance so light on its feet it makes everyone else seem like they’re trying too hard.

One might fault the director for introducing a plot coincidence too many. One could criticise the theft of certain silent movie standards, like the handsy marionette, or the piece of paper that won’t get unstuck. After a while though, it might be easier to just sit back, relax and surrender to Barfi!’s varied charms. There’s Pritam’s music, appropriately sunny and eccentric. There are the committed performances, not just by Kapoor, but also Chopra, Shukla and Akash Khurana as Barfi’s dad. There’s the cinematography by Ravi Varman, who performs small miracles, shooting through trees and off reflected surfaces. And there’s Darjeeling in the ’70s, a picture postcard simulation of an age when people actually sent postcards.

This review is on the Time Out website.

Postscript: Was disappointed to hear that one of Barfi!'s scenes is a straight lift from The Notebook, and another one from the Japanese film Departures. It's easier to explain away the silent film borrowings, not so much these. 

Catch a fire

I've been a fan of Fire in Babylon since I saw it a year or so ago. It's a tremendously entertaining documentary, and those of you who haven't seen it have a chance next week, thanks to a limited theatrical release courtesy PVR. I spoke to the director Stevan Riley for this piece for Time Out. 

The English, as we all know, introduced its colonies – notably India and the West Indies – to cricket. Not surprising then, that defeating their former rulers at their own game would prove a huge boost to the self-esteem of these two cricketing nations. After India recorded their first series win in England in 1971, Wisden reported that people in Bombay were dancing in the streets and garlanding wireless sets. And the 3-0 drubbing the West Indies gave England in 1976 marked the beginning of nothing less than a new era in world cricket.

Fire in Babylon, an affectionate look back at the West Indian team of the late ’70s, uses this series win as a dramatic turning point in its story. In 1975, the Windies were humiliated by the Australian fast bowlers, a defeat that galvanised their captain Clive Lloyd into finding his own pace battery. A year later, he had Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Vanburn Holder (Colin Croft and Joel Garner would soon join that line-up). The real spark, however, was English skipper Tony Greig’s promise to make the West Indian visiting team “grovel”. As Gordon Greenidge points out in the film, this was not a very clever thing to say. The West Indian pacemen, bowling fast and short of a length (in a pre-helmet age), subjected the English to a torrid time. The visitors won 3-0. Jamaican band Ezeike had a hit with “Who’s Grovelling Now?”.

Fire in Babylon’s director, British documentary filmmaker Steven Riley, is a long-time fan of the West Indian team, especially their fast bowlers. “I remember watching matches as a teenager, waiting for someone to get hurt,” he said, over the phone from London. “That was part of the excitement.” He said that in those days, he “partly supported the West Indies, even when they were playing against England”. (Many Indians who grew up in the’70s and ’80s have made similar admissions about this particular team.) In 2009, when two cricket-crazy producers, Ben Elliott and Ben Goldsmith, floated the idea of making a film on the subject, he jumped at the chance to direct it.

Riley may have been a fan, but he wasn’t an expert. To remedy this, he dove into research, reading everything from CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary to player biographies. His immersion in the period helped him convince several greats from the team to appear in his film. “The real turning point was when we got Viv on board,” Riley said. Vivian Richards, regarded by many as the greatest batsman of his era, lends his deep-voiced authority to the film, as do Croft, Greenidge, Lloyd, Holding and Roberts. Holding even does the narration in his distinctive patois. There’s also a diverse sample of talking heads: dreadlocked author Frank I, professor Hilary Beckles and the legendary Bunny Wailer.

Wailer isn’t the only musician to feature in the film. Fire in Babylon is the closest thing imaginable to a cricket-themed calypso-and-reggae musical. Though the narrative focuses on the years between 1975 and ’85, the soundtrack goes further back, featuring singers like Lord Short Shirt, and a performance of Lord Beginner’s 1950 number “Cricket Lovely Cricket”, with its immortal couplet “With those little pals of mine/ Ramadhin and Valentine”. Riley said it was difficult to imagine making the film any other way. “Music is so much part of the culture in the West Indies,” he said. “You can’t walk 20 yards in Jamaica without someone coming at you with a ghetto blaster.” He pointed out how singing eulogies to the cricket team was a local tradition. “The overlaps between music and cricket and politics there are fascinating.”

Audiences here should find it easy to identify with one of Fire in Babylon’s recurring themes: that cricket, at its best, is more than just a game. “These islands only come together under the banner of the West Indian cricket team. It’s the only thing we do together,” says Holding at one point. The film examines how this team became a unifying force for the islands, and how its success went some way in erasing the lingering colonial hangover. The team was also, in its own way, a political force, standing up for blacks in South Africa during apartheid, and for their own rights as athletes and entertainers (frustrated with their low salaries, they briefly ditched the national team for Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket).

The biggest stumbling block with discussing the Windies’ glorious past is that the discussion invariably turns to its unhappy present. After remaining unbeaten between 1980 and 1995 – an unrivalled run in modern sport – the supply of lightning quicks dried up and the slump began. Riley hoped that his film might serve as “an education” for young West Indians unaware of their cricketing past. It’s already done the trick once. On 12th June this year, in the third Test against England, Tino Best scored 95, a world record for a number 11 batsman. Later, he credited Fire in Babylon as the inspiration for his knock.

Blue Valentine

Derek Cianfrance began writing Blue Valentine in 1998, when he was 24 years and one film old. He ended up completing it 12 years later. In the meantime, he got married, had a kid, made documentaries for a living. Though spending that much time on one hard-sell project might have led someone else to quit the business altogether, Blue Valentine is arguably stronger for it. For Cianfrance’s film examines, unflinchingly, the effect of the passage of time on a relationship.

When we're first introduced to Dean and Cindy (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling), the husband-wife pair are so irritable with each other, one wonders whether there was any love to begin with. A little later, that question is answered. A parallel strand of the story shows the couple younger by a decade or so, happy, hopeful. As he begins to court her, the film starts to bite into the viewer’s skin. We know how this ends. It’s like watching a ballet turn into a train wreck. It doesn’t help that Gosling and Williams reach within themselves and pull out performances worthy of a Cassevettes film.

It seems pretty unlikely that anyone would allow children to watch a DVD whose cover has “The most provocative film of the year” emblazoned across it. Nevertheless, a couple of sex scenes pertinent to the story have been snipped off. But Blue Valentine remains damaging and dangerous, in ways that simple-minded censors will never get around to understanding. The film gives it to us straight. Love will fade. Familiarity will breed contempt. Ryan Gosling will lose his hair and start looking like a creepy spud. It even punctures that great movie lie, that the memory of love may be enough to save things. This DVD has no special features, though interested viewers should seek out Cianfrance’s interview with critic Elvis Mitchell on the KCRW website.