Hope of Deliverence

Son of God (2014)

It is only human nature to be inquisitive. The human mind always tries to explore the unknown and try to go beyond the boundaries made by Man. Hence, when it was mentioned in our newspapers that the above film was banned by the local film council, the only natural reaction was try to watch it and that was a piece of cake.
After watching the whole 2h44m presentation, which is more of a docudrama, you come to realise that it was no big deal. It did not appear to be controversial or powerful enough for its viewers to be born again. In fact, it was like an Easter performance for a Sunday school students. Maybe some the depiction of cruelty of man to each other may be too much for young hearts to stomach.
It runs through Jesus' life story concentrating mainly from the time he enters Jerusalem during Passover.
Looking at it from the outside, the situation of people in that era is similar what people are going through all the time. Tyranny rules, people in power decide for their own interest, the poor are helpless in a hopeless situation looking for someone to lead to revolt the cruel regime, they have hope, they persevere hoping that their suffering would be rewarded and they go on life on Earth no matter how bleak things appear to be.
The story does not dwell into controversial subjects like Mary Magdelene.
It is always their own people who would get their own kind in trouble as the Jewish priests were all out to put an end to the life of a young charismatic leader to whom people especially the downtrodden  showed more allegiance to. They also pass the buck of meting punishment to the Romans as they were afraid of repercussions. Hence, the Roman way of punishment for many crimes.
Pontius Pilate actually appears not too keen to punish Jesus. He was willing to forgive him in the spirit of Passover. People of Jerusalem instead decided to vote for release of a murderer.
It is iconic that just when Jesus is praying before his apprehension in the Garden of Gethsemane, the others are also praying at the same juncture - the Jews with Passover and the pagans with their idols.
The religion of the poor continued to flourish under the disciples. The tradition of helping the needy and the poor must have continued with the nuns, nurses and schoolmasters from missionary schools after that.

Play the Game?

First, it was simple. Everybody did their predetermined duties in society. It started with the noblest of intentions, to relieve the suffering of mankind from the elements of nature. The exact pathogenesis remained elusive, putting a lot of mysticism, astute observation and trial-and-error into it. The bewilderment of the ability of the healing man earned him a place high up on a pedestal. It soon became the only humanly thing to do - not to deny the science and wizardry of the healers to the sick and downtrodden.
As not aliments were amenable to the advancement of medical sciences, many saw it as an outlet to serve mankind. The frustrated, the forlorn, the individuals who have given up conjugal wishes and the jilted saw it as avenue to be a servant of Almighty to do His work on Earth to serve the outcasts of society.
A doctrine was drafted for practitioners to hold dearly to their heart, an oath to serve humanity and first not to do harm. The pleasure of serving humanity was considered suffice to even mention any other forms of remuneration.
Society evolves, priorities change. A predominantly agricultural based society was slowly suckered in into an industrial based society with limited skills of being able to make what they needed. The Industrial Revolution had slowly transformed the society into a consuming self consuming self centred society who lives only for themselves. Gone with it are the values that glorified the advancement of society and mankind. Everyone was for himself.

The healing profession also evolved. Service beyond self, physicians heal thyself are phrases from a distant past. Now, just like their counterparts in the loan shark, tow truck and legal businesses, the healers have turned 'ambulance chasers'-like finding problems when there are no problems to start with. Working with probabilities and statistics, they excel at creating the paranoia of worrying of the unknown and uncertain. 

And the art of healing which was perfected by the sciences has been hijacked by the finances and the numbers. The lure of striking it rich compounded by the morbid fear of death has lured the vultures of businessmen, hyenas of insurance companies and wolves of associated services to join the foray.

Blurry mishmash of modern life?

The Past (Le passé, French; 2013)
Director and Story: Asghar Farhadi

 Life in the modern world is complicated. And this film aptly illustrates the matter to the fact. Probably that is why our forefathers cast in stone some of the dos and don'ts in life. It may not solve all the problems but it may help it to make it less complicated, perhaps at the expense of personal gratification. More people, however, would be happier.
Unfortunately, modern life is not such. The intricacies of individualism and unabated self expression have turned our already complicated life into a difficult Rubik cube puzzle. It is not that the individual is innately evil or vindictive, situations happen.
Asghar Farhadi is a famous Iranian filmmaker with a string of hits behind his name. This offering is quite an intense one set in Paris with a melting pot of cultures. In this movie, you have a Persian, an Arab and Caucasians who are quite comfortable with the French culture. The superior nature of this film is the surreal storytelling and true to life characters that each of us have seen or correlate to in our lives. They are complex characters without overtly appearing good or bad. Actions and inaction appear different to different people.
It starts with Ahmed returning from Persia to Paris after 4 years of leaving his wife, Marie-Ann, to sign the divorce papers. Ahmed thinks that his return is just for the solemnization of the divorce. He later comes to know that Marie is planning to remarry. This is going to be Marie's third marriage.
Her first marriage resulted in a divorce. She was caring for the 2 girls of that marriage. Her ex-husband is now residing in Brussels. Ahmed was the second husband with no offspring from that union. As the story progresses we realise that Ahmed was hit with a bout of depression previously which made him forsake the marriage and return to Persia.
Marie's third marriage is going to be with Samir who has a son and a comatose wife in hospital after an apparent attempt at suicide. Marie's elder daughter, Lucie, a teenager, is quite fed up with her mother's repeated failed marriages and is hostile to her marriage. Ahmad is supposed to knock some sense to her as the two are close.
Ahmed soon discovers that there is more than meets the eye. His job is not just over after signing at the dotted lines. He is entangled in the messy web of family melodrama. Samir also has issues with his wife in the hospital almost brain dead and on top of that Marie is 3 months pregnant.
An intense presentation with each body language giving added meaning. The unfinished sentences can actually say so much. No character has just no role to play. Even the 2 young children play important roles in the status quo.
Overall rating 5/5.

The mind sees what it wants

Memento (2000)
Director: Christopher Nolan

If you are fed up with watching movies with the usual introduction, crises, climax and resolution, then you should give a look at this film. It does not have your conventional storytelling. The story is told in both forward and backward almost simultaneously. The forward story is in black and white whilst the backward story is in colour and it moves concurrently. Of course it is all too confusing but it falls into place in the end. This movie is where Kollywood and later Bollywood got their idea for their violent superhit 'Ghajini'.

Memento tells a story of a man who has anterograde amnesia and goes on to avenge his wife's killer. In his life, there is a man who could be a cop, a drug dealer or a conman. Then, there is a lady who is supposedly in his same predicament. He is so confused. With the help of tattoos on his body and polaroid pictures, he is trying to the piece the jigsaw puzzle together.
Along the way, he remembers the story of a man with his same condition who and overdosed his wife with insulin.

Reality and fantasy are blurred. What is conditioning, memory and truth becomes all an illusion by itself.
In the end, we become to realise that the mind sees what it wants to see. Reality and truth are not in the equation at all. 

The trouble is...

If there were a God, I think it very unlikely

that he would have such an uneasy vanity 

as to be offended by those who doubt 

his existence. And He would not like to be

apple polished all the time! Imagine your

children singing praises of you every time

they think of you. Annoying, right?

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

-Bertrand Russell

That is the trouble, is it not? People are so cocksure that certain things must done in a certain way and insists that others follow suit or malady may befall upon them. And the naysayers do not have the courage to support themselves steady on their vertebrae to oppose such views as they themselves are not cocksure about their convictions or is it because they are wiser but do not want to offend? At the end of the day, the louder, the mightier and the vocally gifted would rule the world. The real truth would lay dormant, pacifying the feeble into submission, living on hope the elusive truth would one day came afloat to reveal the final revelation. Till that day, the cheats, bigots, idiots and evil would reign...

An old Tamil proverb consoles the oppressed in this manner, "The king's justice is immediate but the justice of the Divine is worth the wait!" Now, the problem is that the king wants to mete the Divine's justice on Earth!

Happy Teachers' Day!

Nootrukku Nooru (நூற்றுக்கு நூறு, 100/100, Tamil; 1971)
Story and Direction: K. Balachander

For a duration about a little more than 5 years, Jaishankar was the newest best thing in Tamil. He was always placed a notch lower than the doyens like MGR and Sivaji, nevertheless this suave humble law school dropout had his own string of hits and diehard fans. He gained fame from his roles as an undercover cop ala-James Bond, CID Shankar. In this movie, he assumes the role of a dedicated college professor protecting his lovestruck female students who conveniently put all their internal problems on him. This, however, jeopardises his career, reputation and casts doubt on his soon to be wife.
A young Mathematics Professor Prakash is a reputable tutor who climbed the ladder of promotion promptly is loved by his students. One day, his whole squeaky clean image is marred by an accusation of sexual molest by one of his students, Manjula (Sri Vidya). As her parents complained to the principal (Gemini Ganesan), he investigates. The parents, not satisfied with his report, rope in the police. Police investigations (with Srikanth as one) opened a pandora box of unpleasant accusations against his unblemished image.
His top student, Kausalya, accused him of passing her a love letter. Then the daughter of his landlord, Stella (Vijayalalitha) dropped a bombshell. She was pregnant with his child! Then another suspicious letter from another student, Vimala. All these proved too much for his soon to be in-laws. They stop the wedding. The only persons who still held a thread of trust in the teacher are Lakshmi (his fiancé, played by Lakshmi the actress), her brother (acted by Nagesh as the professor's student) and the rest of the class.
It is interesting to see the storyteller slowly unfolds the real story behind the lies to wipe out the dark spot in Prof Prakash's life.
I remember all the scenes like I watched it only yesterday even though I only watched it in RRF. I was particularly intrigued by how same scenes were reshot to paint the teacher in positive and negative roles!

Another blast from the past, again?

Parineeta (2005)
May be the Indians are very sentimental people. They like to reenact events of the past and reminisce it again and again. This, is quite evident in this film. More of these later.
This love story was penned by a contemporary of Ravindranath Tagore, Bengal's another favourite son, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1914. It made its entry into the Indian silver screen in 1953 through its namesake acted out by Ashok Kumar and Meena Kumari. It boasts of being a classic with memorable dialogues.
Like in most romantic dramas, especially an Indian one, it revolves around what appears like a love triangle but within the confines of Indians' one man one woman tradition! A woman or a man who have accepted the other as life partner stays like that till death do them apart, may be in not so dramatic way.
It is a story of a the main characters Sekhar (Saif Ali Khan) and Lalita (Vidya Balan, debutant) growing together as neighbours and close friends. Lalita's name here is made to sound Anglicised, Lolita, to keep it fresh and mysterious to keep with times, perhaps to lure the sex crazed Indian public to the theatres as the name Lolita gained notoriety through Stanley Kubrik's 1962 film! Lolita also sounds Bengali, as Calcutta is the location of the movie.
Sekhar is the son to a ruthless industrialist. Lalita is an orphan who grew up with her uncle in the house next door. The uncle, in dire straits, mortgaged the house cheap to Sekhar's house. Sekhar's father tries all his tricks to take over the neighbour's property to build a hotel there. That is the root of the crisis in the movie. Sekhar and Lalita's love life came to an abrupt halt when a deep pocketed relative from UK, Giresh, (Sanjay Dutt) bails them out.
In frustration, Sekhar's father bad mouths Lalita and cajoles Sekhar to marry a fellow industrialist friend's daughter. Sekhar thinks Giresh is doing all that to woo Lalita.
In the end, all turns out well.
The thing about living in the past, reminiscing the glorious past...
Even though the present generation have left the pre-Independence and have embraced head long into the future, I cannot help but imagine that this film is romanticising the past. The music score is reminiscent of 1942 Love Story. There are a few scenes that remind me of Satyjit Ray's 'Charulatha'. If I am not wrong, a song from that movie is also in the song list. Rekha makes a cameo appearance as a cabaret singer in a sing that sounds strangely familiar!
Of course, no movie shot in Calcutta is complete without Howrah Bridge and the submerging of the diety during Durga Pooja!