Selfiee: Review

Is there a part of Akshay Kumar that regrets making a brief appearance in An Action Hero? His witty cameo is a highlight of the 2022 film, which mines similar territory to Selfiee while being smarter, quicker and funnier. Both films riff on the strange relationship between Indian movie stars and fans in the age of social media, where adulation can suddenly turn to righteous anger. But where An Action Hero starts off cynical and stays that way, Selfiee, a Hindi remake of the 2019 Malayalam film Driving License, just can’t stay mad at those good-natured, hard-working stars.

Om Prakash (Emraan Hashmi) is a dweeby RTO inspector whose life revolves around his worship of actor Vijay Kumar (Akshay Kumar). When he learns that not only is Vijay shooting in Bhopal but needs his help getting a driver’s license, he can’t believe his luck. Through a local councilor, Vijay promises Om a selfie in return for the favour. But the press gets wind of the meeting and Vijay—inundated by hangers-on and distracted by the impending birth of his child—suspects Om to be the leak. He tells Om off in front of his son and leaves in a rage.

Here's where things get weird. Om, stung by Vijay’s disrespect, takes advantage of the actor’s urgent need of a new driver’s license so he can drive in the film he's shooting. He whips the media into a frenzy (An Action Hero had bloodthirsty TV anchors as well), and when Vijay takes the bait and applies for a license, he makes the process as complicated as possible. There are a couple of problems with this. It’s barely credible that a big commercial production would be in danger shutting down because the star doesn’t have a license. It’s also difficult to believe an actor as popular as Vijay would ever get into a fight with someone on the level of Om. It’s a lose-lose proposition; more likely they’d get an assistant to throw money or influence at the irritant till it went away.

Here's the biggest problem: driver’s license tests aren’t cinematic. There are two big sequences in the film. The first has Vijay and Om sitting across from each other, surrounded by a breathless press corps, as the cop tries to stump the star with road safety questions. Each of Vijay’s surprisingly well-researched responses is accompanied by thudding music, as if something unbearably exciting is happening and not Hashmi and Kumar being drained of all vestiges of cool through the discussing of hand brakes. I hoped that the driving test would be more exciting, but director Raj Mehta and writer Rishabh Sharma have such faith in the inherent drama of a few sharp turns and reversing down a slope that they refuse to dress it up.

The film is initially honest about the entitlement and mania of movie fans. But it paints this as ‘love’—a sentimental gesture that robs the film of satirical bite. Vijay is the ideal of a Bollywood star, a family man, a hard worker, always willing to indulge his fans. It’s clear he and Om will end up seeing the good in each other—but by the time the film gets there it’s been a trying two-and-a-half hours. The honest version of Selfiee would end 30 minutes in. Vijay would send a driver to pick up the license. And Om would go back to his life, content in the knowledge that there's only one degree of separation between him and his idol.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

The Fabelmans: Review

One of my favourite observations about a filmmaker is made during an episode of Inside the Actors Studio. Host James Lipton is asking Steven Spielberg about Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “Your father was a computer scientist, your mother was a musician,” he says. “When the spaceship lands, how do they communicate?” Spielberg smiles. “Very good question.” He doesn't answer, so Lipton continues, “They make music on their computers and they are able to speak to each other.” 

Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano) is a computer scientist. Mitzi Schildkraut-Fabelman (Michelle Williams) is a musician. He’s extraordinarily good at what he does; engineering is his passion and most of his personality. Mitzi is also talented, but her full-time job is being a mother to four children, not piano-playing. Theirs is a difficult marriage: he “kills her with kindness”, she’s in love with his best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen). After a while, they aren’t able to speak to each other. 

In the Actors Studio episode, Spielberg tells Lipton he hadn’t realized till that moment that he had put his mother and father into his film. The Fabelmans gives him a chance to do it knowingly. It’s not like Spielberg’s parents' divorce hasn’t shown up in his films, which are marked by separated couples and a slew of absent fathers. Still, by making a film that’s explicitly about his own childhood, he’s finally addressing the ache that's the emotional counterpoint to the cozy warmth of so many of his famous films. 

The first film Sammy Fabelman is taken to see by his parents is Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. He’s traumatized and fascinated by a trainwreck in it, and takes to crashing his model trains at home. Mitzi tells him to film this, so he can watch it over and over (she sees the potential in destruction, unlike her husband, who can't look beyond building things). This, even more than the DeMille film, sparks something in young Sammy, who starts making home movies with his sisters. As he grows into a teen, these become more elaborate; in one of them, a Western, he figures out how to make gunshots flash. He’s on his way, even if Mitzi is the only one who realizes it. Burt, dependable, serious and impossibly square, cannot conceive of it being anything more than a hobby. When Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) declares he wants to make movies, he urges his son to put his mind to “something real, not imaginary. Something someone can actually use.” 

Inspiration arrives in an unlikely form: a short visit from Mitzi’s uncle Boris, who worked in the circus and the silents. The 10-odd minutes that Judd Hirsch is on screen is a blizzard of Jewish cliches. But it’s also the motive force of the film. As Sam is showing him the storyboards for a war movie he’s planning, Boris realizes the boy, like his mother, is an artist, but doesn’t have the self-belief to break away. “Family. Art. It’ll tear you in two,” he growls. He pinches Sam’s cheeks, hard enough to make him retreat to the other side of the room. “You will make your movies. You will do your art. And you will remember how it hurt.” 

Longtime Spielberg-watchers will note something unusual in the opening credits of The Fabelmans: he’s a co-writer, along with Tony Kushner. Spielberg hardly ever has a writing credit on his films, just Close Encounters, Poltergeist (which he produced but didn’t direct), AI: Artificial Intelligence and this. It’s an indication of how closely this film must hew to his life that he couldn’t entirely entrust it to someone else. There’s very little spot-the-future-Spielberg, though he can’t resist casting Sophia Kopera, who so resembles the young Drew Barrymore in E.T., as the youngest Fabelman sister.   

While editing his footage of a camping trip, Sam discovers his mother and Bennie are having an affair. That realization—and the dissolution, a while later, of his parents’ marriage—weighs heavy on Sam, as it evidently weighed on Spielberg all these years. The details of his life weren’t a secret—what we perhaps didn’t realize was how central they were in determining the kind of artist he would become. Mitzi is treated with sympathy and understanding—though it takes Sam’s middle sister (played wittily by Julia Butters) to change his perspective—but The Fabelmans might also be seen as an apologia to all those deadbeat dads in Spielberg films. Williams has the showier part but Dano is perfect as a kind, boring, steadfast man, skeptical of his son’s interests but nevertheless coming through for him. Labelle is just right too; his Sam, quick-witted, obsessed and resourceful, splits the difference between Spielberg and quintessential Spielberg protagonist.     

“It’ll rip you apart.” Boris’ advice is repeated at the end, this time by John Ford (David Lynch). We know, of course, that it won’t. He'll soon be directing for TV, then he'll make a movie about a truck, then another about a shark. All that success, all those accolades, just down the road. I teared up a little seeing the credits of Janusz Kamiński and John Williams at the end. It must be nice, when putting your life up on screen, to have your lifelong friends beside you. It’s crazy to think that the most nakedly emotional of storytellers had to build up so long to get to the point where he could say: “I forgive you. The eggs are burning.” Who knew Spielberg needed catharsis?  

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Fantastic Machine, The Tuba Thieves: Sundance 2023 reviews

“Our programming aims to make their brains accessible. To keep them entertained and disconnected. Our product is available brain time.” These lines—something John Berger might have written—are from a book by the CEO of France’s first commercial channel, in which he suggests his job, the job of TV, is to sell Coca-Cola. It’s quoted in Fantastic Machine, which played at the Sundance Film Festival last week. Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s documentary is a lively, thoughtful look at the essential slipperiness of the moving image.

Though the film tracks back to 1828 and the first still photograph, and on to Muybridge, Edison and the Lumière brothers, its thematic tale begins with another pioneer. George Méliès, the narrator says, is “one of the first examples of man manipulating the moving image”. In 1902, Méliès staged the coronation of British king Edward VII in his studio with French actors, after failing to get permission to shoot the real thing. The king enjoyed the re-enactment; his admiring description of a movie camera gives this film its title. “Honourable Englishmen, you’re being fooled,” a reporter at the time warned. Over a century later, the machines are still fantastic and their images still deceptive, despite our familiarity with them.

Danielson and Van Aertryck run pell-mell down the decades, stopping at the various points you would expect (Leni Reifenstahl, Ted Turner) and some you might not. They don’t focus on cinema much; instead, they examine TV, news, advertising, viral video, livestreams for signs of manipulation and unruliness. They show the award-winning photograph of a dead girl taken during the 2010 Haiti earthquake, then follow it up with another, taken from a different angle, of a battery of photographers looking for a shot. This feeling that deception may be lurking just a few feet away is not a new concern. Peter Tanner, talking about capturing the first filmed evidence of concentration camps, says, “We tried to make shots as long as possible, use panning shots so there was no possibility of trickery.” 

In the way it connects cultural flotsam and jetsam, Fantastic Machine resembles the work of English documentarian Adam Curtis, though without his laser focus. We go from the viral video of the man who ended up imitating a music biz/business expert on the BBC to a little boy doing note-perfect imitations of Bruce Lee, to spectators at a children’s theatre in Riga in 1970. Ruben Östlund (The Square, Triangle Of Sadness) is one of the executive producers; the film has his sense of mischief. An earnest TED talk clip about YouTube in which the speaker tells his audience, “You are the teachers,” is followed by a man showing how to escape a fall into an ice pond. This is followed by a tutorial by ISIS on how to make a home-made bomb. 

Fantastic Machine asks viewers to look closer. The Tuba Thieves asks them to listen more carefully. I started watching after skimming the description on the Sundance Film Festival site. I was expecting a wry mockumentary of sorts. Instead, Alison O’Daniel’s film turned out to be a ceaselessly inventive and thoughtful consideration of sound in cinema, one of my favourite titles at the festival.

It’s a wordless film for long stretches, yet the polar opposite of a silent film. This is a film that asks the viewer to pay special attention to on-screen sounds and how they are described. O’Daniel, a deaf filmmaker, pushes us to think about captioning, about how the richness of sound is rarely captured even in close captioning. Her own captions have imagination, beauty: “thin wind”, “hum of the forest”. Freed from the supremacy of image, this film becomes a unique viewing experience. After a while, I was hearing the images.

The title is a sly misdirection. A mysterious spate of tuba thefts across universities would seem to be central to the film: It records at regular intervals the location and content of the robberies, and even has a journalist talk about the crime spree on the radio. But as the film progresses, you realise O’Daniel is just using the robberies themselves as a jumping-off point—and perhaps a little dig at how films, fiction and non-fiction, must have a “story” in order to be saleable. There are fictional (semi-fictional?) performances by Nyke, a deaf woman, and Geovanny, a saxophone player. But the impression left behind by the film is a series of unhurried images in place of what we might think of as “narrative”.

O’Daniel finds inventive and often witty ways to attune our ears and eyes to what is happening on screen. As a tuba plays a long note on the soundtrack, we first see:

[A TUBE STRETCHED]

But when the note is elongated further, the caption becomes:

[A TUBA S T R E T C H E D]

(In another playful moment, plants start to hum, captioned as multiple Mmmmmmms) 

There’s a passage that seems to encompass the different kinds of on-screen silence. A panoramic shot of nature is first soundtracked by absolutely nothing. Then we start hearing the whistling of wind, bird calls. This cuts to a scene of a small audience waiting for a pianist to play. He takes out a stop clock, which we hear ticking, but the scene changes before we hear any music from him. From the imposed silence of no sound to a more natural silence to a silence of denial.

O’Daniel allows viewers the space to form their own ideas. There are dots to connect, though rarely obvious. At one point, a voice on the radio is heard describing California wildfires as the sound of “hundreds of animals growling”. Later, the film shows us an actual wildfire. It’s soundtracked, hilariously, by unmistakable animal growls.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat: Review

Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat is the worst Imtiaz Ali film in a while. It has actors playing characters in different timelines. It has a half-English, half-Hindi title. It has a scene with a young woman crying her eyes out. It has a lovelorn weirdo spouting Rumi-esque nonsense. Confusingly, it’s written and directed by Anurag Kashyap.

2018 seemed to be the start of a new phase for Kashyap. Mukkabaaz and Manmarziyan released that year, both tending surprisingly towards sweetness and hope, while retaining (in Mukkabaaz especially) the spikiness that had characterised his career up till then. And it was a new phase, just not in the way I would've hoped. His next film was Choked, a strangely neutered demonetization comedy. Last year there was Dobaaraa, which showed no evidence whatsoever of being a Kashyap film. And now there’s Almost Pyaar, a film that’s seemingly emerged from that awkward impulse: a middle-aged director deciding to make ‘one for the kids’. So we get a whole lot of popping and locking and Tik-Toking, all of it seeming like a put-on.  

Almost lovers (India) are Amrita (Alaya F), a sheltered rich schoolgirl in Dalhousie, and Yakub (Karan Mehta), a poor boy from her neighbourhood. Almost lovers (UK) are Aisha (Alaya), also a rich girl, this time the daughter of a shady Pakistani businessman, and Harmeet (Mehta), a dal-chawal-eating DJ in London. Yakub and Amrita steal off in the early morning to attend a secret concert by DJ Mohabbat (Vicky Kaushal); her family, already edgy about her talking to a broke Muslim, treat it like a kidnapping. Aisha, 15, keeps throwing herself at the older Harmeet, who’s only interested in his music. 

For a while, Kashyap keeps jumping between the two narratives without letting on if they’re connected (his last film, Dobaaraa, had juggled timelines as well). Kaushal’s love guru DJ is in both love stories—he’s equally annoying in both—which makes it seem like it’s all moving towards an explanation. Something of the sort is offered late in the film: not quite fantasy, not quite logical, an almost explanation. 

This is the second Hindi film in a fortnight where one character asks another, “Are you Muslim?” I wouldn’t have bet on Pathaan answering that question better. As Amrita and Yakub go on the lam, Almost Pyaar becomes a laboured commentary on interfaith relationships, and the othering of Muslims, in India today. “We’re letting you stay here—be grateful,” Yakub’s father is threatened by Amrita’s thuggish brothers. Another character warns Amrita that Yakub will take other wives. It’s not that these aren’t common jabs, more that this is the stuff of lesser directors (also, recreating Saloni Gaur’s aapi shtick isn’t the brightest idea in a film that’s arguing against caricatures). 

I really don't want to damn Alaya and Mehta's performances—I think the film puts them in the line of fire with no cover. The emotional openness that was so appealing in Alaya’s Jawaani Jaaneman turn isn’t absent here, but it’s dimmed by the writing. She’s asked to speak in three accents: a Hindi of the sort that a girl from a conservative family in a small town might speak, the exaggerated Urdu Amrita uses in her videos, and Aisha’s NRI drawl. Mehta has a braying laugh in India and a perpetual scowl in London, neither of which is flattering. He’s thrown into a prison drama suddenly—an implied rape scene comes out of nowhere, and he seems to participate in another later (there’s also a strange pattern of predatory homosexual behaviour in the film).

Almost Pyaar is billed as an Amit Trivedi ‘musical’: eight songs, a lot for a Hindi film nowadays. Trivedi is reunited with his partner on Manmarziyan, the lyricist Shellee. But while Manmarziyan was an exceptional soundtrack—catchy and sexy in equal measure—Almost Pyaar takes its youth assignment rather too literally. There’s so much English threaded into the lyrics that they start sounding parodic, more ‘Telephone Dhun’ than ‘Grey Wala Shade’. Only ‘Banjaare’, with its lilting Nikhita Gandhi vocal, approaches top-drawer Trivedi. Fittingly, one song has three successive lines ending with ‘connection', ‘condition’ and ‘emotion’—almost rhymes. 

There’s one intriguing bit in the film, when a kindly elderly couple is revealed to be bigoted on multiple levels. It’s something a younger Kashyap would have doubled down on, made menacing and significant. Here, it passes by unexamined. It’s been a while since Kashyap’s seemed like himself. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Pathaan: Review

After a lot of killing and double-crossing and some dancing, Rubayi (Deepika Padukone) asks Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan) the one hundred crore rupee question: “Are you Muslim?” Time stops. A hundred op-eds await their first line. A thousand memes are readied for launch. A million Twitter users think of something clever to say. Everyone knows the answer will be a deflection—but what kind? Pathaan first tells a story: a boy abandoned, raised on the kindness of strangers, filled with a desire to repay that kindness. And then the line, a Salim-Javed line, a triple-distilled Bollywood line: “Mere desh ne meri parvarish ki”—I was brought up by my country.   

Like War, the last YRF spy film, Pathaan is consumed by the idea of patriotic duty. These are not deep films, but it’s notable how much wiggle room they find in this regard. When superspy Pathaan says a variation on “Ask not what your country can do for you” to Jim (John Abraham), a RAW-agent-turned-freelance-terrorist, I was reminded of how, in War, Vaani Kapoor’s army daughter argues that not everyone need pledge to save the country. ISI agent Rubayi must make a choice, to follow orders or serve her nation. And Jim has excellent reasons for going rogue—he feels no fealty to a country that abandoned him in his hour of need. When he first turns up, the soundtrack has a whistled ‘Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon’—a hilarious choice. 

Siddharth Anand’s film begins with Pathaan—presumed dead by friends and enemies—announcing his return by singlehandedly slaughtering a few dozen of Jim’s men. An extended flashback shows the two agents discovering they're as philosophically opposed as they’re physically matched. There's an introductory fight on top of a speeding truck in Dubai, followed by a shorter meeting in Spain, where Rubayi and ‘raktbeej’ are introduced. She’s part of Jim’s group of super-rouges, luring Pathaan to him in a swimming pool. As a smirking Abraham, clad in the smallest of white shorts (the real besharam rang), walks towards Khan in a black shirt with pink roses, I felt myself grin for the first time. 

After that bit of silliness, the film relaxes. So does its star. In the company of Padukone, he starts making Shah Rukh Khan noises, those little stammers and exclamations that belong to him alone. Even as they go off in search of raktbeej—a smallpox virus that Jim plans to sell on the black market—the film finds time for some nostalgia. There’s a reference to k-k-k-Kiran. There’s a variation on that scene from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge: fake couple in Europe, willing girl, Khan gently refusing sex. 

Soon, though, Khan must return to his primary task: carrying an out-and-out action film. Anand is one of the few capable action-oriented directors in Hindi cinema. But in a film bursting with set pieces, there are passages that fall flat. Some of the CGI is dodgy. There’s too much creative cutting for my taste. There’s a lot of flying—and it never looks convincing. But a single-take brawl in a train compartment is brutally effective. And there’s a wild beauty to the sequence on a frozen pond, Pathaan and Jim on motorbikes, Rubayi on skates. Pathaan may take a lot of its cues from the Mission: Impossible films, but it doesn’t bother pretending Khan is doing all his stunts. Different megastar, different contract with the audience. 

Shridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala, writers here and on War, again assemble an action film from the pieces of other action films, with a lot of military and spy talk enlivened by eccentric details (Pathaan and his handler, Dimple Kapadia's Nandini, discuss kintsugi) and melodramatic flourishes. When Jim asks an ISI agent “Sab khairiyat?”, the gloriously villainous reply is, “Khair nahi, kahar chahiye.” Pakistan is the bogeyman as always, though, as with previous YRF films, there are good actors and evil ones. Article 370 is mentioned at the start—better get used to seeing that as a pretext in Indian action films. 

By the time this review is published, word would have gotten out about a certain appearance in the second half. Skip lightly over the next paragraph if you’d rather...

…not hear about Tiger (Salman Khan), YRF’s most bankable spy, turning up to help Pathaan out of a tough spot. It’s the most playful action sequence in the film, a chance for the two Khans to wisecrack and leap through the air together. It’s meant to be iconic—and it brought down the house in my first-day screening— but I also found it moving when Tiger says he’ll be going on a mission soon and will need Pathaan’s help. All that history, all those moments of rivalry and rapprochement, and in the end it’s two old men sitting on top of a train, talking about the past, promising to catch up soon. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Pianoforte: Review

Alex is getting his body worked over by his coach. And he’s getting a pep talk, the usual stuff—let go of the stress, the people will love you. Alex could be a boxer before a big fight. He’s about to go play piano on stage. “Chopin will be alive,” the coach says. “You’ll be playing for him.” 

At several points during Pianoforte, Jakub Piątek’s mesmerizing account of the 2021 edition of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, I felt I could be watching a sports documentary. A slim young man limbers up with his entire body. Poland’s Marcin jumps up and down, then takes the stage at a light run. Later, we see him use an app to meaure if a vigorous piano exercise to warm his muscles has taken him to 110 bpm. As China’s Hao plays in his room, his coach massages his shoulders. When Russian pianist Eva receives seven specific and different instructions in seven seconds from her coach, it reminded me of the demanding practice scenes with the gymnast—also named Eva—in Věra Chytilová's 1963 film Something Different. 

The Chopin Competition has been held 18 times since 1927. It takes place over 21 days, with no break. It’s a prestigious tournament for young players, and competition is intense. One pianist, dissatisfied with his own performance, rants entertainingly about his opponents’ flawless recitals. “They’re like CIA or marines, you know? They wake up early morning and do push-ups. Then they do etudes.” Leonora, the sunniest character in the documentary, describes it as the ‘Olympics of piano’, adding: “If you win the 40,000 (Euro), you might be using it to go to therapy.” 

Leonora says this jokingly, but it’s probably not far from the truth. At the level these pianists are playing, where a flub or two could mean elimination, mental fortitude becomes crucial. At one point we see Hao—who’s still in high school—do ‘mental practice’, sitting in front of the piano without touching the keys. As the film progresses, you get a sense of who might handle the pressure and who might crack. It’s especially evident in 17-year-old Eva, who keeps advancing in the competition but never seems to find the calm she’s looking for. “Flat. Everything is flat,” her coach says. “The piano or…?” someone asks. Eva just looks on, her eyes searching for an answer that isn’t forthcoming. 

Pianoforte is composed and handsome, far from the Pennebaker tradition of musical verité. Unlike another great Polish documentary, All These Sleepless Nights (2016), it doesn’t redraw the boundaries of the fly-on-the-wall film. Its success is almost entirely derived from how sympathetic and interesting it makes its protagonists. There’s Marcin, who resembles a young Jean-Pierre Léaud, playing for his cat, who’s more interested in pizza. There’s the straight-shooting Michelle, who packs off the filmmakers with a firm “Now it's time”. We see Hao practice in a tiny apartment in Guangzhou, his father looking on, his mother cooking. The ease of the film belies the work that must have gone into building relationships with so many young musicians, earning their trust till they’re comfortable with being recorded at their most vulnerable. 

The editing by Ula Klimek-Piątek is a masterclass of precision and canny choices. Five minutes into the film, we haven't heard anyone play. There's a quick series of shots showing the participants poised to play the first note. We focus on Leonora. Her fingers descend. We expect Chopin. Instead, as the film’s title appears onscreen, it's the rumbling beat of Elephant by Tame Impala, a choice so witty and so perfectly executed, it made me laugh. Later, there’s another musical montage, set to Arcade Fire’s Rococo, as the pianists unwind, stroll, play football. Here, too, is smart little decision: as the song explodes, the camerawork does too, turning frenetic for once as it follows Alex bearing down on goal. 

I would’ve been happy with any of the protagonists winning, so appealing does Piątek make them. However, the stakes are clearly the highest for Eva. The film knows this, focusing on her as the final results are announced. That scene is wrenching, but then Pianoforte is full of dreams deferred and denied. Vivian, Hao’s coach, was a talented young player herself, but, as she says ruefully, she never had the ambition for competition. Michelle predicts she won’t advance in the tournament beyond that night’s performance, saying “I don’t believe in unicorns.” But even in defeat, there's grace. A musician from China, eliminated in an early round, is at the airport. He sees a piano. You’d think he’d be sick of pianos by then, but his face lights up. He sits down and plays, beautifully. A small crowd gathers; one woman seems overcome. Michelle would roll her eyes at the sentiment, but to be able to move people this way must be its own reward.    

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Kim's Video: Review

“Why am I staking out a building full of neglected films in the middle of the night in Sicily? My compulsion had transfixed into obsession.” 

So asks David Redmon, co-director of this weird and wonderful documentary. The unlikely white whale being pursued is the donated collection of a beloved video store in New York City, which counted amongst its customers Richard Hell and the Coen brothers. When Kim’s Video closed in 2008, its collection of 55,000 titles—everything from obscure art films to pornos—was given away to the town of Salemi in Sicily by the owner, the fascinating Yongman Kim, on the promise that it would find a happy home there. 

Kim’s Video, by Redmon and Ashley Sabin, is film-crazy. It’s also just crazy. When Redmon hears about Salemi, he travels there to see if he can track down the videos. He breaks into the building where they’re stored and find the cassettes on shelves and in piles, disorganized and unwanted. His attempts at gathering information are stymied by a combination of language barrier and blithe stonewalling by the locals. No one there seems to care about the collection—really, it’s amazing that Kim had thought they would. 

Things only get weirder from here. Redmon tries to reach out to the mayor at the time of the transfer. When that yields nothing, he travels to Seoul to meet Kim. He somehow convinces Kim to travel back with them to Sicily. This is a region under the shadow of the mafia, even if the film doesn’t draw a straight line to organized crime. Still, you can feel a heaviness descend on this light-hearted film. “This is where people go to get murdered,” Redmon says nervously as the car he’s been told to follow stops under a bridge. But this doesn’t deter Sabin and him from taking a final glorious swing at the problem, helped by Varda, Herzog, Hitchcock… and Affleck. 

If the Italians in the film conform to types—shady politicos, cagey old-timers in little groups—the filmmakers also send themselves up. Redmon never stops pushing, never stops asking questions; he’s the Michael Moore of lost video stores. Throughout the film, we see the locals string along the Americans, trying to see how their niche obsession could be exploited (since we have the benefit of subtitles, we know what they’re are saying even though the filmmakers don’t at the time). Their presence in Salemi is a stereotype in itself: Americans who go abroad but even then are only interested in America. Perhaps inadvertently, the filmmakers also hint at the ridiculousness of their mission through lofty comparisons; Redmon declares he’s out to right ‘injustice’, like the boy in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is The Friend’s House?

Video might be a bridge too far, but Salemi isn’t immune to the pull of cinema. After his first break-in, Redmon is given a lift by Enrico, under whose care (though evidently not much care) the collection is kept. In a possible bid to drown out Redmon’s questions, Enrico plays something sinister and catchy in the car. In broken English he tells Redmon it's a tune he composed for a horror film. 

This is a crazy enough story that, had it been told absolutely straight, it would still have worked. But much of the fun is to see Redmon and Sabin knowingly juggle genres. Kim’s Video is an investigative indie doc. It's also an essay film, with clips from La Dolce Vita, Blow Out, Citizen Kane, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger to illustrate the action (like a true nerd, Redmon always says the title of the film aloud; I’m surprised he doesn’t mention the year in brackets). It’s a heist film. It’s a gonzo comedy. It’s guerilla filmmaking at its craziest and most committed. Above all, it’s a wry, affectionate look at people who love movies—and physical media—more than anything else in the world. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.