Filmy Freak at the IFFK 2013

The moments I spend at the Eighteenth International Film Festival of Kerala were perhaps some of the best ones I will cherish for ever. During these days I understood why cinema is such a powerful medium, whether it is for sheer entertainment or for propagating political agendas. I have been to other editions of IFFK before. However, the Eighteenth  edition gave me something more which made it all the more special for me.

At least, I was lucky enough to watch ATouch of Sin, one of the year's most acclaimed films by the Chinese Jia Zhang-ke. Far from the rosy portrayal of contemporary China that we are used to hearing in the media, the film is built together out of four separate stories, none of which have separate titles or common characters but a common theme: helpless individuals caught in an increasingly corrupt, materialist and profit-driven world, driven to commit acts of violence, against others and oneself. The pace of the film is, for the large part, contemplative in tempo, with sudden outbursts of violence. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman captures the Chinese landscape in all its serenity, starkly contrasting it with the bleak lives of the characters in the four stories.

Later, I caught up with Claire Denis' 2001 film Trouble Every Day, a multilingual erotic horror film that is centred on two parallel stories, one of an American couple and the other of a French couple, both in Paris. While the American husband is impotent, the French wife's sexual appetite is so insatiable that she engages in sexual encounters with various men, and ends up drinking their very blood. That is all the plot there is to this film.

In what seems to me to be a surreal exploration of the discrepancies between male and female sexuality, Trouble Every Day has more than its fair share of gore, including an extended lovemaking scene that ends in cannibalism.

The Mozambican film Virgin Margarida by Licinio Azevedo charts the experiences of sex workers in guerrilla camps in post-colonial Mozambique in the 1970s, into which a teenager Margarida (Iva Mugalela), mistaken for one them, is forcibly deported. Under the leadership of a woman guerrilla who is single-minded in her devotion to 'cleanse' them of their colonial mindset and make 'new women' out of them, the women, along with Margarida, undergo harsh training sessions with harsh punishments for dissenters.
While director Azevedo definitely has got his heart in the right place in wanting to show how the revolution could bring about little change in the lives of ordinary citizens of the country and his script mixes irony and drama with relative ease, his performers, however, are unimpressive, chiefly because they fail to make the transition from the comic to the dramatic in their performance. But there is no denying that the film feels quite like one of our day and time, not of a distant period.

Perhaps the best film I got to see at this festival was The Crucified Lovers (1954), one of Kenji Mizoguchi's late masterpieces, in a 35mm print that had good contrast, despite the infrequent scratches. I had never seen Mizoguchi on the big screen, so I did not let go of the opportunity. As always, his indictment of Japanese patriarchy and hypocrisy is at his scathing best in this tale of a samurai's wife who is accused of adultery with one of her manservants, while her husband himself has a sexual interest in her maid.
Like his other masterpieces, The Crucified Lovers is testimony to Mizoguchi's genius as a visual stylist, especially in his trademark long takes, letting the action unfold in distanced views using a moving camera. Watching it on the big screen, I was once again convinced that he is, no doubt, one of the great masters of world cinema.

My last film at the festival, Act Zero by Gautam Ghose was the only Indian film I could see on this trip, one that tries to encapsulate in two hours and ten acts the various issues that haunt the country. While the basic premise is that of the CEO of a Multinational trying to invade the lands of tribals by deporting them and mining the area for bauxite, resulting in tensions between the tribal community and the CEO, the director crams in issues like Maoist insurgency, communalism, and throws in a fictional Binayak Sen. The result is an ineptly shot, preachy and didactic film, but one that is nevertheless watchable, thanks largely to the performances of Konkona Sen Sharma and Soumitra Chatterjee.

Thus ended my all-too-brief stay at the festival. There were several other films which I would want to have seen, especially the Jean Renoir retrospective, which screened such titles as Toni and La Bete Humaine, and a special section on German Expressionist cinema, which included such 20s classics as The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari and A Throw of Dice, which is set in India. But there's always another chance.

I think IFFK, like almost all film festivals, is elitist. Even the IFFK hand book, while paying tributes to veteran filmmaker Hariharan, who has given Malayalam cinema some of its finest movies, makes note of the fact that mainstream cinema has always been frowned at and belittled by film thinkers and organizers of film festivals alike, and hence generally deemed forbidden at festival circuits. A majority of the movies, especially those screened under world cinema category, at IFFK were art house movies or – as some derisively calls it – award movies that are a far cry from the kind of movies that ordinary movie buffs like to watch at the cinema. It is hardly surprising that the movies that struck a chord with the festival goers were simple and engaging movies like The Rocket and Television, while some of the other movies that bagged awards at various other film festivals received a rather lukewarm response, with some even getting scoffed at by the audience.

Last year’s IFFK had some terrible moments, we all agree. And the practice of handing out goodies to hanger-ones is certainly not an innovation of the present authorities. But remember, in former years too, many of us have been strongly critical of these tendencies. And unlike the hanger-ones of the present rulers who always protest only when they haven’t got the creamiest bit, we have persistently argued that the practice of treating cultural and literary institutions as spoils to be distributed among hanger-ones and minor warlords should be stopped. Please realize there are still people left here — and not too small a number, really — who work in the cultural sphere who do not wait for scraps from the tables of the powerful. We need to be heard, but we are not. But we will claim that voice, even if it means civil disobedience.