LIBERAL ARTS (2012)

“Why do I like this guy so much?”

“ Because he's likable.”

These lines from Josh Radnor’s sophomore effort as a writer-director, sums up his appeal wonderfully well. He has a very likable screen persona. He’s a dork, he’s geeky, slightly snobbish (but in an endearing way) and when he’s talking with someone, it’s like he almost forgets the rest of the world exists. This is what made his character Ted Moseby, from the hit sitcom HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, so popular, because he’s an adorable everyman we can all relate to. All of these characteristics come to the fore in LIBERAL ARTS, to make the movie a delightful treat to watch.

Ted, I mean Josh, plays a jaded, slightly aimless thirty-five year-old New York City college admissions officer Jesse Fisher who is called back to his alma mater Kenyon College, to attend the farewell dinner of one of his favorite teachers, Prof. Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins). While there, he meets Elizabeth (Elizabeth Olsen), or as everyone calls her, Zibby, a 19 year-old drama student at the college, and there’s some sort of connect. She gives him a mixtape of classical music, and they bond over their shared love of Vivaldi and Beethoven. His relationship with her almost makes him believe he never left college at all, as if he’s still there on the incredibly beautiful campus, reading books all day long, having interesting conversations with like-minded people and basically revelling in the sense of infinite impending opportunities that seems inherent in the very air of a good college. Life after college never quite met Jesse’s expectations.

 Prof Hoberg too, seems loath to leave the college at which he has taught for thirty-seven years. He likens his condition to a long-time jailbird who can’t handle life on the outside and so commits a petty crime to get thrown back into jail. When Jesse asks him if he thinks the college is a prison, Hoberg replies, “Any place you don’t leave is a prison.” Jesse also meets other students like the troubled genius Dean (John Magaro), who seems intent on being a genius who died young, and the campus weirdo-aphorist Nat (Zac Efron) who utters pearls of wisdom like “Be love, man”, as well as Jesse’s favorite teacher Judith Fairfield (Allison Janney), who seems a little too morose and cynical to have been a successful teacher of British Romantic poetry. Existentialists might have been more appropriate.

The film is a fantastic evocation of college life and the pains of growing up. Jesse’s character is based on a character stereotype often seen in Sundance indies, the articulate man-child. Through certain events portrayed in the film, Jesse realizes he’s not 19 anymore, although like Prof Hoberg says, “Nobody feels like an adult. It’s the world’s dirty secret.” I suppose the key to growing up is acceptance, realizing at some point that this is your life, and the sooner you stop thinking about hypothetical scenarios, the sooner you can start off on the road to happiness. In that sense, the film can be called a chronicle of Jesse’s journey to the realization that he’s thirty-five and he does not have access to a time machine. The screenplay is wonderfully astute, funny and zips along at a nifty speed, ending at a wonderfully appropriate 97 mins. The acting is uniformly fantastic especially from Richard Jenkins and Elizabeth Olsen. You can’t go too wrong with Western classical music, and for a long duration of the film, Jesse and Zibby correspond about their shared love for opera, while their favorite pieces play in the background. Massenet and Mozart doing their thing, always adds something to a film.

Like MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, WONDER BOYS and THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, this film is also a tribute to bibliofilia, and the film is chock-full of references to everything from William Blake to vampire chick-lit (the book is never mentioned by name, but it’s not difficult to put in an educated guess). Almost everyone in the film carries a book under their arm when walking, and I can see why. It’s comforting to know you have a book in case you don’t have anyone to talk to.

A beautiful little gem of a film, embodying (as Richard Corliss said) the five W’s of good modern indies, warm, winning, wise, wacky and wonderful. 7.5/10.

EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994)

Wuxia drama. Gay cowboy drama. Superhero film. English classic adaptation. Modern historical. Civil War historical. Magic-realist fable. And now I discover Ang Lee can rock the genre of the cultural comedy-drama too. Is there anything this man cannot, or should not, do? EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, Ang Lee’s third film, is a treat for the eyes, taste buds and heart, a wonderful generational family drama that depicts the changing values and social systems of modern-day China.

The film is about a semi-retired master chef Chu and his three daughters Jia-Jen, Jia-Chien and Jia-Ning, and their loves and lives. It is a brilliant triumph of screenwriting, composing several story arcs which intersect and twist and wind through each other, to a gloriously satisfying conclusion. Chu has been depressed since the death of his wife twelve years before the start of the film, and is slowly losing his keen sense of taste. Jia-Jen is still heartbroken over her high-school boyfriend and leads a sedate life as a devout Christian and chemistry teacher. Jia-Chien is a strong, independent professional who has little fascination for relationships but a healthy appetite for sex. And Jia-Ning is the youngest of the family, still a student and going through all the romantic turmoil that twenty year-olds do. These characters are etched so brilliantly that we are bound to empathize with all of them, helped of course by the excellent acting from all the leads, as well as the supporting characters like Chu’s best friend Chef Wen, and their neighbours the Liangs.

The film is also a lip-smacking ode to the incredibly complex art of fine Chinese cuisine. The Sunday dinner at Chu’s house is the scene for many of the film’s major plot points. The film is fascinated by food and the process behind its creation, leading to some enchanting sequences where we see Chu and later Jia-Chien showing off their culinary skills. Any person, whose mouth doesn’t water, hasn’t had a great meal in his life.

The buried emotional and sexual tensions between the characters are subtly articulated in the film. There is no room for melodrama here. These are real people, living their real lives, and the surprises that life offers them are as unexpected to us as to them. There is not a single character cliché on display here. Not every person who is unmarried at the beginning of the film must end up with the right person by the end of it, nor does anyone with a messy life end up later with an ordered one. The screenplay allows the characters to mature organically throughout the film. This is the sort of foreign-language film, where you wish you knew the language, because it is obvious much more than just the dialogues are being said. You want to catch the priceless little nuances, be able to read between the lines. This is a film rich in emotion and character, and there is not a single dull moment.

Ang Lee’s visual panache has never been showy, and here too, his presence is muted. He is a true master of economy. Don’t waste five seconds, when three will suffice. A notable achievement of Lee in this film is how he artfully choreographs his actors in small constrained spaces, like in the scene where Mrs Liang faints at the dining table after some momentous news, eliciting a lot of hullabaloo. Lee captures this scene with an active hand-held driving us head-first into the thick of things. We feel the commotion all around us.

A wonderful social comedy-drama with a damn-near flawless screenplay and some excellent acting and directing. 7.5/10 for me.

BLACK SWAN (2010)

How far will you take an obsession? How perfect is perfect? Can you handle the darker side of your personality? Darren Aronofsky’s BLACK SWAN is a stunner of a film, a magnificent, visceral, painful and grand evocation of obsession and the brutal path to perfection. This is cinema at its most thrilling, an enchanting, swooning, terrifying sojourn into the depths of the human mind.

The film depicts a young ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) who is starting to attract attention from the director of her ballet company. The previous star, Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder), the director’s former lover, is getting too old, and has lost much of her star power. The company is on the brink of bankruptcy. It needs a new face. Nina is chosen to star as the Swan Queen in a new performance of SWAN LAKE by Tchaikovsky, an incredibly difficult role as it involves embodying two different personalities-the pure and sweet White Queen and her darker and more dangerous twin the Black Queen. Nina is perfect for the first. She does not quite fit the part of the second.

The film then takes us on a twisted ride as Nina sheds her inhibitions, trying to break free of the iron-clad ministrations of her obsessed, emotionally manipulative mother (Barbara Hershey, in stunning form), as she tries to bring out the Black Queen in herself, with the help of a new dancer at their company, Lily (Mila Kunis), an aggressive, seductive girl who is everything Nina is not, and seems an equally suitable candidate for the role, according to the director Tomas (Vincent Cassel).

The premise lends itself easily to operatic grandeur, and Aronofsky (who is no stranger to big emotions) utilizes every chance he gets with the ease of a maestro. The film is visually astonishing, a fever-dream of blinding spotlights on black backdrops. The ballet scenes are wonderfully shot, the camera so agile it seems to be gliding on wings, capturing the dynamism of every single graceful movement. Aronofsky is not shy to subject his viewers to the almost-unwatchable self-mutilating horrors of Nina’s transformation, or the macabre visions of her schizophrenic episodes. When Nina strips the skin from her finger, it is so gruesomely fascinating that it is impossible to look away.

And at the center of it all, the force of nature that is Natalie Portman. She was born to play Nina Sayers. This role would have exhausted her to the limits of her endurance, and not just to achieve perfection in her dance. It is incredibly tiring to hold an emotion for long, and when you have to carry a complex demented character like Nina Sayers inside you for weeks of shooting, it can damn near kill you. Her transformation from sheltered momma’s girl to femme fatale is glorious, a supreme wonder to watch. No one deserved that Oscar more than she did.

The music by Clint Mansell is gorgeous and thrilling, imbuing each scene with weight and heft, a perfect accompaniment to the visual and emotional rollercoaster that the film is. The DOP Matthew Libatique and the production designer Therese DePrez also cannot be praised enough. Nor can the stunningly beautiful choreography by Benjamin Millepied, which constitutes a large part of the film.

A mesmerizing film in all respects with a tortured heroine at its centre, this is an absolute must-watch for all film buffs. A grand 9/10 for me.

TALAASH (2012)

(Due to the delicate nature of the film's plot, I may beat around the bush a little. Patience is requested of the readers. I do have a point to make. I think.)

What is the responsibility of a film towards us, the viewers? To give us a stunningly realistic, slice-of-life portrayal of events, whether fictitious or real, or is it to provide an absorbing experience, no matter how illogical or absurd the premise? Films require a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of its audience. It asks you to accept the logic of its universe and to try and develop an emotional connect with the characters adrift in this universe. It does not ask you to extract those characters from their fictitious universe and judge their actions according to the rules of our more prosaic world. TALAASH is not L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, and it is futile to expect the same things from it. And yet this film too is a neo-noir, and a well-shot, well-crafted neo-noir at that. But oh horror of horrors, it is NOT a well-written one.

A famous film-star drives his car into the sea with no apparent provocation. He was not drunk, and he did not seem to have been suicidal. Inspector Shekhawat (Aamir Khan) is brought in to investigate, which he proceeds to do with such a vacant unfocused intensity that we are left to wonder just how far his investigations would have gone without the extensive help he ultimately receives from an unexpected source. This inspector has demons of his own, haunted as he is by a recent shattering death in his family. This film is the journey of his catharsis. I don’t give a shit if I just gave away a spoiler. I am irritated because the film was so predictable. You can anticipate the basic details of the plot after twenty minutes.

The film has redeeming qualities though. It is splendidly shot and apart from the last, say, fifteen minutes, it is exquisitely directed as well. It is the task of the director to know when to back off, to know when “less is more”, which the producer of the film, Farhan Akhtar, said in a recent interview that Indian film-stars just have no idea about. He may have been talking about the director Reema Kagti. After managing the reins of the film so well through such shoddily written material, Kagti goes overboard trying to provide closure to all the characters. Antonioni used to say that the last moments of the film should not concern themselves with the plot, but should be used for the film to “breathe out”. Here, it seems that the film held its breath too long. It doesn’t breathe out, it gushes.

Apart from the hammy, extraordinarily saccharine ending (with a cutesy kiddie voice-over to boot, aaaarrrrgggghhhh!), I have little to fault the film’s visual and aural craft about. The red-light districts of Mumbai have rarely looked as spooky or as menacing. The opening credits are so good they make you expect great things from the film. The use of music is excellent, imbuing many of the moments of the film at times with elegance or a sort of breathless charm. Aamir Khan puts in a solid performance, one of the film’s biggest strengths. Rani Mukerji too manages to do what is required of her. Kareena, in a pivotal role, tries to be as ethereal as possible in a one-note performance. Nawazuddin is good as he makes us care about his character in the little screen time he gets. His relationship with the aging prostitute is one of the highlights of the film.

This film cannot really be discussed without revealing the film’s biggest secret. And yet, the secret is pathetically predictable, and if you pay attention, should be obvious to you before the first hour is over. TALAASH is better discussed in a sort of retrospective five years down the line, where we can talk about the film’s plot points without fear of spoilers. But the film is not good enough to deserve that retrospective. Watch this film, because if you don’t, it will bug you. If you’re feeling lazy, you might as well pop in that DVD of CHINATOWN.

5.5/10.