Shadowy Past: Badlapur and Indian Noir

Revisiting Paul Schrader’s seminal 1972 essay "Notes On Film Noir" a couple of days ago, I came across a line I hadn’t paid attention to in earlier readings. In the section on the stylistics of noir, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver writes: “Compositional tension is preferred to physical action.” One imagines Sriram Raghavan, Bollywood’s most dedicated purveyor of noir, has these words tattooed on his arm. Raghavan’s set-pieces are marked as much by the suddenness of the violence as they are by his willingness to delay the pay-off and build the surroundings within which the action takes place. Film writer Phillip Lopate once remarked that any architecture student should be able to sketch the house in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata after watching the movie. On a less exalted level, I’d hazard that a careful viewer, after seeing the one-take gunfight in Raghavan’s Agent Vinod (2012) or the train sequence in his Johnny Gaddaar (2007), would be able to recreate them from memory, such is the film-maker’s control and attention to detail.

Schrader goes on to argue that noirs are marked by “measured pacing, restrained anger and oppressive compositions”. All these qualities are at the heart of Badlapur, Raghavan’s third neo-noir after Ek Hasina Thi (2004) and Johnny Gaddaar, which released in theatres on 20 February. Like Ek Hasina Thi, Badlapur is a revenge film, but one that subverts audience expectations until the lines between antagonist and protagonist, hunter and prey, are erased completely. That the film isn’t messing around is evident in the opening moments, when a child is tossed from a car and his mother shot. But the truly daring twist arrives imperceptibly, as we find our sympathies shifting ever so slowly from Raghu (Varun Dhawan), who embarks on a revenge that will take 20 years to come to fruition, to Liak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the killer of his wife and child.

Badlapur isn’t a straight-up noir: The screen isn’t shrouded in shadow, there’s no fatalistic voice-over, and Raymond Chandler’s rule about someone who “is not himself mean” going down mean streets is soon discarded. Instead, what we get is a sprinkling of noir themes and tropes: the pervasive fog of bad luck; the idea that once fate plays a hand, there’s not much you can do about it; a progressively dark and rainy second half; a femme fatale, played by Huma Qureshi, who wanders in and out of the narrative; the unravelling mental state of Raghu and the gradual fatalism of Liak. One might consider it a distant cousin of neo-noirs like Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) and David Cronenberg’s A History Of Violence (2005)—films that explore the effects of violence on aggressor and victim, perpetrator and bystander.

Raghavan, one of India’s most cine-literate directors, would be the first to point to a long, if slim, tradition of noir film-making in the country. The first Indian noirs appeared as the 1940s were ending. Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949), stunningly photographed by Josef Wirsching, was a romantic noir in the vein of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). Dev Anand, surprisingly stoic, appeared in several noir films, including Guru Dutt’s Baazi (1951) and Jaal (1952), Chetan Anand’s Taxi Driver (1954) and Raj Khosla’s C.I.D. (1956). Many of these were photographed by V.K. Murthy, whose unique feel for light and shade resulted in lush, dramatic compositions (when Dutt abandoned the crime noir, Murthy’s presence behind the camera meant that this signature shadowy look carried over into his other films). But once colour took over, Indian noirs dried up. Bollywood didn’t have the appetite for gloom and world-weariness that was so central to the genre; also, the advent of the Angry Young Man called for a more proactive approach to life’s woes.

In the latter half of the 1980s, there was a revival of home-grown noir. Aditya Bhattacharya’s Raakh (1989) and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989) gained tremendously from their shadowy look and seedy, amoral atmosphere. Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya picked up where Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988) left off, establishing a new template for the Mumbai crime noir. Anurag Kashyap made his noir pastiche No Smoking (2007); Vishal Bhardwaj borrowed from the genre for Maqbool (2003), Kaminey (2009) and 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), as did Reema Kagti for Talaash (2012). Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai (2012) was a throwback to the political noirs of Alan J. Pakula and Sidney Lumet. Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under (2007) was a clever take on Chinatown (1974), while Rajat Kapoor’s Mithya (2008) was that rare breed: a noir comedy. Last year, cinematographer Rajeev Ravi—who has shot most of Anurag Kashyap’s films—made Njan Steve Lopez, an existentialist black comedy slacker noir that was too spaced out to be much good but was, at the very least, an encouraging sign that Indian film-makers were still looking to take this genre to unexpected places. Will Kashyap and Ravi tip their forthcoming Bombay Velvet towards the dark side? Considering that the film is reportedly soaked in jazz, one can only hope that it’s wrapped in shadows as well.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Coffee Bloom: Review

If Coffee Bloom wasn’t a serious film about some very tangled emotions, it might have been a neat little comedy about what it is like to have a name like Dev Anand (if you aren’t the Dev Anand). Imagine the sheer difficulty of going through life being addressed as barkhurdar, watching people toss imaginary mufflers over their shoulders and doing little sideways dances. "Gata Rahe Mera Dil" would be completely ruined for you. The horror, the horror.

Manu Warrier’s Coffee Bloom has just the one Dev Anand imitation. This comes courtesy Srinivas (Mohan Kapoor), an excitable bear of a man who’s married to Anika (Sugandha Garg), whose tortured romantic history with Dev (Arjun Mathur) is the fulcrum around which the film revolves. Srinivas, who is unaware of their relationship and its nasty ending, hires Dev—who is about ready to renounce the world and become a sanyasi—to work on his coffee plantation in Coorg. Another thing Srinivas doesn’t know is that the plantation was Dev’s ancestral property till he sold it. So we have plenty of reason to suspect Dev’s motives for accepting his offer. Will he try to win back Anika? Destroy their marriage? Get back his plantation? A little bit of everything, really.

After a melodramatic start (Dev’s mother tells him that he isn’t worthy of scattering her ashes, before going and dying in the next scene), Coffee Bloom finds its rhythm when Dev moves to Coorg and starts talking to Anika again. The who-hurt-whom-and-how of their relationship is revealed in gradual flashbacks, but the details aren’t important: Dev’s inability to shake off his bitterness and Anika’s compliance with his mood swings and tantrums tell you everything you need to know.

Coffee Bloom isn’t the most exciting of films, but it has a slow-burn intensity that owes a lot to Mathur and Garg’s carefully calibrated performances and Kapoor’s exuberant, pressure-releasing one (his enthusiasm is simultaneously irritating and endearing). Yogesh Jaani’s cinematography is perfectly pretty, but I wish the director and the cinematographer had worked out a way to inject a little visual excitement into the scenes. This is Warrier’s first feature, which might account for a couple of blind spots: too much holy-earth-karma blather on the voice-over, a bland soundtrack, touristy photography. Yet there are also moments when Coffee Bloom’s characters access deep reserves of hurt and despair, which is when the film’s bruised, beating heart is laid bare.

This piece appeared in Mint.

Against the Sun: Review

If you’ve seen one film about crash survivors on a raft lost at sea, you’ve pretty much seen them all. There’s a bad-luck checklist that these films tend to tick off, starting with sunburn and the dangers of drinking saltwater, and moving on to bigger obstacles like hurricanes and shark attacks. Brian Falk’s Against The Sun, based on a true story about three US navy airmen who drifted over 1,000 miles on a raft after their plane went down over the Pacific in 1942, doesn’t have any new tricks up its sleeve. But it does execute the old ones well.

We first see Harold (Garret Dillahunt), Tony (Tom Felton) and Gene (Jake Abel) in their bomber jet, just as they’re starting to lose their bearings and run out of fuel. Harold, the pilot and highest-ranking member of the crew, manages a scrambled but successful water landing. The three men make it to the raft unscathed, but without food, water or medicines. They pin their hopes on the rescue mission—“They’ve got procedures for this,” Gene confidently tells Tony—but the plane that appears the following morning either doesn’t spot them or isn’t looking for them at all. Harold takes charge, organizing lookout schedules and fashioning a crude map and sea anchor in an attempt to steer them towards where there could be land. Resentments flare up, mostly between gruff Harold and short-tempered Gene, but the film never gets emotionally messy.

Against The Sun has the immense bad luck of releasing a couple of months after Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, which had an extended sequence—also based on a true story—in which three American airmen drift on a raft for weeks in the ocean. It’s likely that most of those who saw Unbroken will give Falk’s film a miss. Yet those who don’t might be surprised at how affecting the unforced camaraderie of the three characters is after a while. Dillahunt, so effective in the HBO series Deadwood that after his Jack McCall was killed off, he was brought back as an entirely different character, gives his square-jawed leader unexpected moments of vulnerability. Abel manages the difficult feat of slouching and looking cool in a raft, while Felton (Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films) is very moving as the faint-hearted Tony. Unexpectedly, given that he’s British, Felton also looks and sounds like Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad. Good as he is, I would’ve paid a fortune to see Jesse Pinkman on that raft, shouting “Yeah science, bitch” at passing sharks.

This piece appeared in Mint.

Houston, we have a winner

In 1985, Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society. It started as a modest venture, a chance for the 25-year-old Linklater and his cinephile friends to screen films by Ozu and Demme. At the time, Linklater had yet to direct a full-length film; Slacker, a touchstone for the American indie movement, would only release in 1990. It was at the Film Society's theatre that a young man from Linklater's hometown of Houston met him, and asked what he could do to help. The student was Wes Anderson. According to Time's Richard Corliss, Linklater's reply was "Grab a broom."

Three decades later, Anderson and Linklater are together again — linked in the most public manner possible. Their films are frontrunners for Best Picture at this month's Oscars, and both have scored Best Director nominations for the first time. Though the clash was building all awards season, the Golden Globes brought it all to a head: Linklater's Boyhood won Best Picture (Drama), while Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel won Best Picture (Musical or Comedy). Anderson's film leads the Oscar nominations race, with nine nods to Boyhood's six, though Boyhood is the odds-on favourite to snap up the top prizes.

The films in question could hardly be more different. Boyhood is a deceptively simple look at one person's journey from child to young man, rendered unique by Linklater's decision to shoot the film with the same actors over the course of 12 years. It's an intimate, spiky film, filled with the boredom and disappointment of childhood more than its occasional epiphanies.The Grand Budapest Hotel, on the other hand, is a Fabergé egg of a film, set in a world informed by, but much removed from, reality. The tale of hotel concierge M. Gustave and his beloved lobby boy might not be Anderson's most resonant till date, but what it lacks in soul-searching characters it makes up in its evocation of an old world, pre-Nazi Europe that audiences first saw in the films of émigré Hollywood directors like Max Ophuls and Ernest Lubitsch.

That Linklater and Anderson are about to go head-to-head on 22 February is both gratifying and slightly surreal. The Academy spotlight rarely falls on directors who avoid big issue filmmaking and are content churning out modest masterpieces. The fact that these two films are in Best Picture race along with Sundance fave Whiplash and the genuinely weird Birdman could be seen as a hopeful sign that Academy voters might be opening their minds to options other than prestige cinema, mainstream weepies and obvious Oscar bait (in another year, these films might have been replaced by Unbroken or Interstellar). If this is so, it's fitting that these two are front and centre, for these are filmmakers who, even while working within the studio system, have hewed stubbornly to their own path for two decades, leaving behind not a string of hits but that rarer achievement: a body of work.

What Richard Linklater, normally used to flying way under the radar, is feeling right now is anyone's guess. Boyhood was the critical smash of 2014, topping a staggering number of critical shortlists (online aggregator Metacritic places it at number one on 72 separate lists). This was an outpouring of love much deserved but slightly bemusing in its intensity. It's like the critical establishment had just discovered Linklater, even though he'd been doing un-showy, inventive work for over two decades.

When Linklater's Slacker released in 1990, few would have predicted that this strange, ramshackle film — shot with a cast of non-professionals on a truly shoestring budget of $23,000 — would be the harbinger of a major movement. Yet, most people trace the start of the American indie film boom of the '90s to this and Steven Soderbergh's Palme d'Or-winner Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Linklater followed this with the much-loved high school film Dazed and Confused (1993) — which introduced Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey — and the equally delightful walking-and-talking-in-Vienna film Before Sunrise (1995). He ranged far and wide in the next few years, trying his hand at animation (Waking Life), period comedy (The Newton Boys) and intense indie drama (Tape).

In 2003, he had the only hit of his career, the Jack Black-starrer The School of Rock. Yet, rather than worm his way into big-budget projects, he continued to jump from genre to genre. All the while he continued to gather Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Ellar Coltrane to shoot yearly installments of Boyhood. His reputation — which for years had suffered at the hands of auteurist critics used to seeing patterns in less varied output — grew steadily as his early cult films celebrated their 10th, 15th, 20th anniversaries.

Someone who's never had any shortage of attention from critics is Wes Anderson. Like Linklater, he was born in Houston, Texas — a fact that many would be disinclined to believe, given that Anderson's films give the impression of having been made by a European aesthete and not someone from the state associated with Dubya. At the University of Texas at Austin, he met Owen Wilson, with whom he collaborated on a screenplay for his first film, Bottle Rocket. This heist comedy was to become a cult hit, and Martin Scorsese named it one of his favourite films of the '90s.

With Rushmore (1998), Anderson created the first of his memorable eccentrics — Max Fischer, a precocious child who develops a crush on his high school teacher. This was also the film where the various Anderson trademarks began to fall into place: the British invasion soundtrack, the whip pans, the rueful melancholia, the low-key whimsy and the obsessive symmetry. Underlying it all was the constant search for acceptance and companionship. Family, or the absence of it, was at the heart of The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom. (It isn't as central in The Grand Budapest Hotel — a possible reason why the film was less affecting than some of Anderson's other efforts.)

Working with the cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Anderson developed a filmic style so unique that it became the unofficial template for the American indie. Soon, dozens of films with hyper-articulate, maladjusted characters were being made — it goes without saying that without Wes, there'd be no Little Miss Sunshine or (500) Days of Summer. Anderson, to his credit, has neither called out his many imitators nor abandoned his signature style. His style is so specific that it passed over perfectly into animation with Fantastic Mr Fox, a stop motion adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl novella, which looked and sounded exactly like one of his live action films.

They might be products of the same Austin arts scene, but Anderson and Linklater are poles apart as filmmakers. Linklater guides his productions with a very light hand, while Anderson crafts his movies with the precision and attention to detail of a fine watchmaker. You can tell you're watching an Anderson film from the first frame (the yellow Futura typeface credits are a dead giveaway), something even die-hard Linklater fans would hesitate to claim about his films. The flipside is that there's a world of difference between, say, Before Midnight and Bad News Bears, while Anderson's films can, after a while, acquire a whimsical sameness.

The one thing these directors do share is a commitment — or determination, or stubbornness — to keep making the kinds of films they want to make. This is why, even though they work within — or in Linklater's case, on the outer edges of – the studio system, they continue to be seen as indie in spirit. This sets them apart from the other remarkable filmmakers who emerged in the 1990s — Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, P.T. Anderson, Christopher Nolan — directors who continue to choose their projects, but who have moved far beyond the indie-sphere in terms of budget and approach.

On the film website The Dissolve, Jen Chaney, while lamenting the absence of Selma's Ava DuVernay among the Best Director nominees, suggests that Linklater and Anderson's nominations should give hope to those who believe that "non-conformity and unwavering commitment to one's artistic integrity are actually worth a damn in Hollywood". This may sound like an especially serious way to describe directors as unassuming as Linklater and Anderson, but it's hardly an exaggeration. Fifty years from now, long after the memories of The King's Speech and Zero Dark Thirty have faded, we'll still be worrying about Margot Tenenbaum and Olivia Evans, and delighting in M. Gustave and David Wooderson.

This piece was published in The Sunday Guardian.

Excuse me, while I read between the lines

Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 at 27. His stint as the lead vocalist, guitarist and composer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience lasted roughly four years. Four years, three studio albums — that's the bedrock of the Hendrix legend. Everything else — the live albums, the footage of him playing Woodstock and Monterey, the numerous outtakes and b-sides — is window dressing. Every year some new Hendrix curio comes to light, and is solemnly packaged and distributed to the faithful. One of the strangest of these is Starting at Zero, a quasi-autobiography assembled from Hendrix's own writings.

Starting at Zero's journey began when British filmmaker Peter Neal, director of Experience (1967), the first ever film on Hendrix, began to gather material for a documentary on the musician. To create as authentic a portrait as possible, Neal, along with writer Michael Fairchild, set about collecting everything Hendrix had ever said: quotes culled from press meets, books, magazines, recordings and concert raps. They had an unexpected windfall in 1990, when a large collection of Hendrix's handwritten notes were auctioned in New York (Fairchild somewhat overestimates this as "the most amazing archaeological find since the unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls"). Neal incorporated some of these notes, and completed a first draft in 1991. However, a copyright battle with the Jimi Hendrix estate stalled publication for almost two decades. It was finally published in the U.K. in 2013.

The entries in the book, though not precisely dated, cover the entirety of Hendrix's life. We know this because the first page has Hendrix recalling his birth ("It was fireworks — so it must have been the Fourth of July"), and the last words in the book are "When I die, just keep playing the records". In between, Hendrix discusses the first time he heard Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, his stint in the air force, his largely unhappy career as a sideman in the States, and the chance meeting with Chas Chandler that bought him a ticket to Britain — and instant fame. It's certainly Hendrix's voice — you can almost hear him speak some of the lines in his woozy, dulcet tones.

Those who know the general trajectory of Hendrix's life should welcome this opportunity to read between the lines. When we read Jimi's 1965 letter to his father ("Nowadays people don't want you to sing good"), we can sense his quiet confidence and connect it to the fact that he was finding his own sound around this time. For someone who comes across as an unusually modest rock star, there's a rare moment of hubris when he writes in another letter home in 1966: "Tell Ben and Ernie I play the blues like they NEVER heard." He was right, of course, and in a few months, the whole world would know it.

Purists will complain that Starting at Zero is cheating — and they won't be wrong. These aren't notes for a book; they're simply musings, scattered thoughts and random utterances that have been collected and given the shape of a biography. This "shaping" is key; on the same page, presented as part of the same thought process, may be sentences Jimi said or wrote years apart, in very different contexts and moods. There are four interviews that read like regular fanzine Q&As: it's only when you go to the book's website that you realise that the questions are all from different interviews. The other problem the book suffers from is the man's famed spaceyness — his tendency to obscure meaning in clouds of science-fiction, mumbo-jumbo and marijuana fumes. This becomes more pronounced as the book goes on, and after a while, less patient readers might begin to scan pages for references to specific events, songs and performances, rather than Hendrixian raps about the planets, love and cosmic consciousness. ("Where all the earthquakes stem from is bad vibrations," he writes at one point.)

Still, this is hardly a less worthy project than the dozens of Hendrix compilations and reissues that have surfaced since his death. Hendrix anticipates these in the book, writing about recordings he made with Curtis Knight and the Squires when he was a session man that surfaced as bootlegs when he became famous: "It was just a jam session, and here they just try to connive and cheat and use... They never told me they were going to release that crap." Yet, last year, it was announced that the Hendrix/Knight recordings would be released in their entirety. Posthumous compilations such as these (and probably Starting at Zero too) are more likely to appeal to completists — people happy to glean a lot of chaff for a kernel of gold — than to regular music fans. And there's enough gold sprinkled here to keep fans interested: Hendrix's evolving thoughts on Eric Clapton, The Beatles and Bob Dylan; his surprisingly frequent mentions of composers like Bach and Wagner; his initial aversion to political issues, followed by his growing involvement.

Of the three J's who died at 27 (Jimi, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin), Hendrix was by far the biggest loss to music. He was fertile till the end, and would have probably embraced funk, rap, perhaps even punk if he'd continued to record into the '80s. The last few entries in the book have him enthusiastically discussing his plans for setting mythology stories to music ("It wouldn't be like classical music, but I'd use strings and harps, with extreme and opposite musical textures...") At one point, he writes that he'd like to achieve a sound that combines the strengths of "Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco". No wonder he admits soon after that "I can't play guitar well enough to get all this music together." But he came closer than anyone else, and Starting at Zero is a reminder of this, and of what might have been.

This piece appeared in The Sunday Guardian.

Big Eyes: Review

Big Eyes begins with a burst of freedom, as Margaret (Amy Adams) drives off with her young daughter in the night, leaving her first husband behind. We then see her in San Francisco, applying for jobs that will allow her to utilise her talent for painting (she gets one in a furniture company). Sketching portraits of passersby in the park, she meets what appears to be a fellow-painter. Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) realises that Margaret's paintings of waif-like children with unrealistically large eyes are special. He courts her, and soon, they're married, trying to make ends meet by selling their artwork. But the public only has eyes for Margaret's paintings.

What follows is both incredible and absolutely true. Walter Keane — who, Margaret later discovered, was never an artist — took credit for his wife's paintings, first without her knowledge, and later, with her complicity. In the film, Walter is a gushing huckster with affectations of high culture (he's in love with France, never a good sign in a Hollywood film), and Margaret a timid '60s wife. As his star rises, she sits at home, producing paintings that Walter then sells under his own name.

That Big Eyes is directed by Tim Burton is hardly a surprise. The children in Keane's paintings could easily pass off as one of the large-eyed characters in Burton's films — The Penguin in Batman Returns, the animated leads of Corpse Bride, the wild, dark-lined peepers of Johnny Depp in half a dozen movies. Burton had been a fan of Keane's for decades, getting her to paint portraits of two of his partners, Lisa Marie and Helena Bonham-Carter. Big Eyes is one of his more restrained films — but the fact that he's reigned himself in just means that the ersatz Burton touches that keep surfacing sit awkwardly with the more straightforward biopic approach he adopts for the most part.

Burton emerged in the late '80s seemingly fully formed: a former animator whose visual style had the rude energy and wackiness of a cartoon. Lately, however, his work has taken on the quality of a meal comprising solely of dessert: beautiful to look at, fun in small doses, but hardly sustaining. Working with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Burton creates an eye-popping vision of Frisco in the '60s, but there's surprising little weight behind the emotions. Instead of delving deeper into why Margaret — timid but capable of standing up for herself — lives a lie for 10 years, Burton teases us with the possibility that Margaret is going insane when she starts seeing people with big eyes in the department store. She isn't crazy, and the film doesn't really believe she is either — it's just that Burton can't help himself.

Big Eyes is further harmed by the casting of Waltz, who gives one of the hammiest performances by a two-time Oscar-winner ever. The script, by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, doesn't liberate Waltz's German-accented English the way Quentin Tarantino's lines do, but that's only part of the problem. Waltz preens, puffs, lunges, gurgles and almost salivates in his effort to convey the mendaciousness of Walter Keane. The courtroom scene at the end should be all about the protagonist, but is instead taken over by Walter's buffoonery. Would that Burton have thought of Danny Huston, seen in the small role of a muckraking journalist, as Walter: he has right mixture of menace and charm for this character.

In recent years, Adams has played fiery, take-charge women in films like The Fighter, The Master and American Hustle. Here, she's withdrawn but still compelling. When she says early on she draws the eyes large because they're a window to the soul, Adams' own searching look lend credibility to the cliché. Whenever Walter's rants became unbearable — which was often — I found myself scanning the room for Margaret, hoping to see a spark of rebellion in her eyes. It arrives, too late to save the film — but thankfully, not too late for the real-life Margaret, who escaped to Hawaii, remarried, and got the long-overdue credit she'd been denied.

Unbroken: Review

Unbroken opens high up in the sky. At first, all we see are clouds and the distant horizon. Then, we begin to make out a bomber plane flying slowly towards us. Almost immediately, a dozen or so more planes materialise. Though there are no opening credits, it's no surprise to learn that the architect of this lovely shot is the great Roger Deakins. What is more surprising is that two of the four writers on this film are his most frequent collaborators, the Coen brothers. It's difficult to imagine the misanthropic, sardonic brothers penning this ode to the triumph of the spirit.

One of the planes in the opening fleet has a bombardier named Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell). En route to a tricky landing after their plane is attacked – a sequence which second-time director Jolie handles admirably – we're whisked into an extended flashback. We see Louis as a scrawny American school kid who's picked on because of his Italian ancestry. His life changes when his brother recognises his talent for track and field. After some pro-forma training sequences, we switch back to the older Louis, off to represent America in the 5000 metres at the Olympics. "A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory," his brother says as he's leaving. What follows seems like a brief moment of glory and a lifetime of pain.

Sent on another mission over Japanese waters, Louis and his fellow airmen crash land in the sea after one of the plane's engines fails. Three of them – Louis, Mac (Finn Wittrock) and Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) survive – and float around on lifeboats for 47 days, fighting off sharks, hunger, thirst and delirium. It's a harrowing passage, lasting for what seems like half an hour, and it's almost a relief when Louis and Phil (Mac succumbs on day 33) finally float into the hands of the Japanese. Unfortunately, our hero's troubles are nowhere near ending.

We know, from half a century of Hollywood films, if nothing else, that Japanese POW camps were hell. Yet, I see no reason to believe why camps anywhere else in the world would be much nicer. The cultural hegemony of Hollywood has drilled the image of the sadistic "Jap" into our heads. Jolie perpetuates this stereotype by introducing a guard named Mutsuhiro "The Bird" Watanabe, an antagonist so brutal that after a while, the viewer is numb to the pain and hoping the same for Louis. Watanabe, played by the baby-faced Japanese pop star Miyavi, subjects Louis to unbearable levels of physical punishment. In one scene, he forces the emaciated prisoner to lift a huge boulder above his head. The way the scene is framed, Jolie is clearly trying to conjure an image of Christ on the cross. But if Louis is Jesus, whose sins is he suffering for?

During the flashback, there's a brief recreation of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the one held under Nazi rule. Jolie must have enjoyed paying tribute to Leni Riefenstahl, arguably the first great female director, whose Olympia documented these very games. I'd argue that Jolie's own approach in the second half of this film borders on a kind of fascism. By presenting the Japanese as unrelentingly evil and sadistic – less than human – and the Allied prisoners as loyal, polite and brave, she's essentially saying, this is why we had to drop the bomb on them. (There's a brief disclaimer at the end, saying Louis preferred forgiveness to revenge, but it's too late by then.)

Unbroken marks the start of Oscar release season here in India – and it's certainly an Academy-friendly film. One wishes it were a little bit black and white in in characterisation, and a little more willing to play around with its source material, Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. None of the film's faults, however, can diminish the considerable screen presence of the young British actor Jack O'Connell, who gives Zamperini a doggedness and enthusiasm that audiences will have no difficult in rooting for. Let's hope they don't put him in a superhero movie next.