Bhumika

Bhumika was made in 1976 by Shyam Benegal, the leading exponent of 'new' Indian cinema. This refers to films that sought to break away from the tradition of making song and dance entertainment films, now referred to as bollywood.

The film is based on the autobiography of the actress Hansa Wadkar, who worked in the 1930s and 1940s in Indian cinema. Her autobiography is a seminal feminist text in India. In the film she is called Usha, and is played by the beautiful and intelligent Smita Patil, who died in childbirth at the age of thirty. Bhumika was the third film she had made for Benegal and she was not sure she wanted to be an actress. Throughout the making of the film Benegal had constantly to urge her to remain committed to the film. Bhumika won several wards in 1978, and only then did Patil become a committed actress. She died aged 30 in 1986.

The film has a complex structure. There is a narrative in the present, with flashbacks to the past. The present is in colour and the flashbacks are in monochrome. The flashbacks show Usha's childhood with scenes from films she was in, and from films which influenced her. These scenes are, inevitably, from traditional (song and dance) Indian cinema. When Bhumika was made there was a shortage of film stock in India, and Benegal used in the flashbacks stock that would have been used at the time, because these older, inferior stocks were more easily available. this gives these scenes extra authenticity.

Usha as a child learnt from her grandmother to love music, and all she wanted to do was sing. A family friend, Keshav, had contacts in the film industry and found her a job there, and she became a film star.

There were five men in her life. Her father, who she loved, was an alcoholic and died when she was young. She married the family friend Keshav and he was cruel and venal, doing his best to exploit her earning power. She loved her co-star, Rajan, and he loved her, but he was commitment-phobic. Sunil was a charming, nihilistic and intellectual film director who led her into an unsuccessful suicide pact. Vinayak was a prosperous businessman who wanted her as a domestic captive to care for his son and paralyzed wife.

At the end of the film, unhappy and alone, she decides to make a life alone. At one point, as she is contemplating escape from Vinayak's household, his paralyzed wife says to her "Why do you bother? The beds change, the kitchens change. Men’s masks change, but men don’t change.” As Benegal put it, talking about the film, she had learnt that freedom has a cost.

In the flashbacks we see many scenes of song and dance, and we have the translation of the song lyrics. Each song encapsulates a woman's dilemma.  These songs, and Usha's story, make a very powerful feminist text. The flashbacks are objectified as such by the intrusion of cameras and technicians. The credit sequence is such a scene leading us to expect a bollywood-style film. Then, towards the end of the credits, a camera on a boom enters the frame from the right, a dancer falls over, and technicians rush to her aid, destroying the bollywood illusion.

It is astonishing that this powerful and memorable film, pregnant with meanings that are relevant for us today, should be so little known, and not celebrated as the masterpiece it so clearly is.

Free Men (Les hommes libres)

This film is interesting because it is about the Muslim community in Paris during the second world war. It concerns a small-time dealer, Younes, in the black market who becomes politicised. Younes is played by Tahar Rahim who impressed us in Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and here he is excellently cast, having the right blend of youthful innocence and disengagedness. ````

Michael Lonsdale plays the head honcho of the mosque where much of the film is set, doing his best to keep the Nazis on-side, playing a part very similar to his part in Of Gods And Men, and looking similar.

In addition, there is a Muslim singer who sings in a style that is very similar to flamenco.

The film tells a story having elements we have seen many times before - unsympathetic Nazi Germans in trilby hats and long, leather overcoats, black Citroen Traction-avants bulging with bulging-overcoated men. Although the film is set in wartime Paris I thought that more could have been done with the cinematography to render the setting more vividly. Also, the telling of the story was quite prosaic. If I used stars I would give it three.

The Turin Horse

I don't know whether Bela Tarr will keep to his word and not make another film but, if he does, he will have finished his film-making career with his best film. The Turin Horse is about very little and yet it is about everything. It is a symphony with wind, a horse and two humans.

In it we see the daily routine of an elderly man, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, who live a minimal existence in a rudimentary cottage in a God-forsaken place in central Europe, presumably Hungary. We see six days of their lives, each day introduced by a title. The highlight of their routine is their meal of a single boiled potato each, eaten with their fingers from wooden plates in about five minutes. When they rise in the morning Ohlsdorfer drinks two glasses of the local firewater, palinka, while his daughter goes to the well to fetch two buckets of water.

They have a horse which, at the beginning of the film, is linked to Friedrich Nietzche, and this little back-story succeeds in keeping the horse in our attention. In fact the horse, remarkably, in it's enigmatic speechlessness, becomes the emotional centre of the film. The Hungarian rain and mud that we became familiar with in earlier Tarr films is here replaced by a hellish wind, audible on the soundtrack throughout the fim. Even going outside is difficult, and the atmosphere is always laden with leaves and dust. There is a visit by a neighbour to fetch some palinka and, after he has unburdened himself of a political rant, he is sent on his way with a disparaging put-down by Ohlsdorfer. There was humour of this type in earlier Tarr films. Otherwise few words are spoken other than by Ohlsdorfer, who is elderly and slightly handicapped, to give instructions to his daughter.  Early in the film the daughter expresses a query that I'm sure is on many viewers' minds when she asks her father, after a brief conversation about woodworm, 'What's it all about, Papa?' He replies that he does not know. So little happens and yet I was gripped because the slightest change or incident in the routine makes one wonder where it will lead. One by one things on which their simple life depend start to fail, until the continuation of their life seems impossible, and the film fades to black. I was reminded of Beckett by the timeless fundamental nature of the world it depicts but with, instead of Beckett's abundance or words, Tarr's abundance of cinema.

The music is striking. It is a simple repeating dirge-like motive that could easily have come from Philip Glass. The wonderful monochrome cinematography, much of it in the near-dark interior of the cottage, is by Fred Keleman, the film-maker who made Abendland and the unseeable Frost, a film whose ownership is still the the subject of contention. Both Tarr and Keleman work in the European tradition of 'slow' cinema, traceable to Tarkovsky.

Compared to The Turin Horse, the other films I have seen recently have the weight of TV commercials. This film left emotions and images that will stay with me for a long time.

Moonrise Kingdom

This is a return to form for Anderson, after the wilderness of Steve Zissou and and The Darjeeling Limited. When I saw it the audience clearly enjoyed it, and there was even a half-hearted attempt by the audience to applaud the film at the end, even though most of them preferred to skip the amusing credits. It would be difficult to watch many frames of this film without immediately identifying them as the work of Wes Anderson. We have busy compartmentalised sets, diagrams and boats, all permeate by tongue-in-cheek visual humour.

There is a gold-star cast including Anderson regular Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and Harvey Keitel. But despite the humour and the cast I was left unsatisfied because the humour doesn't sustain the film. It is a ninety-four minute joke that flags in places. There are some very good jokes, but I didn't really care about what was going on and the cast, with the exception of Bruce Willis who is very good, were required to parody rather than act, so I thought they were wasted. As an Edward Naughton fan I was very disappointed; and Tilda didn't do much for her fee.

I can see that this is a return to form for Anderson who, after Zissou and Darjeeling I had given up on, thinking that he had lost his way. Now he is back on track but I recognize that his track is not for me. All is not lost because I did enjoy Rushmore, Tenenbaums and Mr Fox, but I shan't be hurrying to see Anderson's next film.