A few months ago I attended the Austin Asian American Film Festival. Yeah, I know, I’m a jerk for not writing about it sooner. It was an intriguingly curated little festival (I used to put in several film festivals a year, but this one will do me for a while). Basically there were two standout films, Still Life by Jia Zhang Ke, and No Smoking by Anurag Kashyap.
Still Life was highly reminiscent of the films of Robert Bresson, filled with slow, beautiful images and a highly controlled and contrived soundscape of silences and clamorous machinery. It takes place in the monumental landscape of the three gorges dam and the human turmoil that follows the slowly rising waters. The little guy who thinks he sounds like Chow Yun Fat is a must for any film buff.
No Smoking was the biggest eye-opener, because it was another compelling piece of evidence for the existence of the Bollywood auteur. As an ex-film-student I’m always on the lookout for those tantalizing tidbits of personal expression within a standardized film industry.
This movie is a stunning exercise in surrealism and quirk. Our hero is John Abraham, giving the best performance of his career as a hyper-cocky chain-smoking scruff-faced executive. When he decides to quit smoking to save his marriage, he’s led into an underground world of gurus, magic, and midgets.
Anurag Kashyap also wrote the screenplay for Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (which I have reviewed previously).
When my mother was in town this month I rented it again so I could show her what a truly jaw-dropping Bollywood production really was. Watching it again I could see the similarities it shared with No Smoking, the touches of surrealism with the waxworks and Princess Diana.
To get the full Kashyap experience, I also netflixed his film Black Friday. Because this film is about the 1993 Mumbai bombings (which Sanjay Dutt was implicated in), the subject matter is particularly relevant considering this week’s tragic Mumbai hotel seige.
It’s hard to imagine a film farther from Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and No Smoking. To summarize this docudrama, a bunch of angry and not terribly bright men kill a lot of innocent people in revenge for an anti-muslim riot. Then the Indian police hunt them down, primarily by putting their mothers and sisters and daughters in jail and doing brutal, unspeakable things to the screaming women. Usually in front of a bunch of people.
Kinda similar to American anti-terrorist policy, but less subtle.
From what I’ve gathered, this is in the new "realistic" trend of Bollywood movies. You can tell the word "realistic" is an in-joke, because in the recent Priyanka vehicle Fashion, the characters use that word ironically several times.
Fashion manages to take the Hollywood rags-to-riches formula and de-distill it out to three hours of fashion-model strutting and secondary character narrative. It’s realistic because there aren’t any obvious dance-sequences. Instead there’s super-dynamic runway walking/turning/posing to throbbing fashion-model techno-beats.
Although a beautiful and engaging movie, what makes Fashion remarkable is the straightforward tackling of homosexuality (apparently fashion designers are sometimes gay), as well as particularly prolific use of the English language, approaching 60% of the actual dialogue.
The main complaint I have with Fashion is the suggestion that modelling is somehow hard. At one point Priyanka is on the catwalk and her coach shouts at her through the bullhorn "You forgot to turn! Put your mind back into it!"
Also it suggested that fashion shows were somehow very important. There’s no attempt to actually explain the purpose behind looking like you have attitude in front of a buncha strangers with cameras. But then beauty is its own reward.
