Mumbai film festival has seen better days

Actor Salman Khan (above) with filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Jammu and Kashmir CM Mufti Muhammad Sayeed during Jio MAMI 17th Mumbai Film Festival. (Photo: PTI)

The 2015 Jio MAMI Festival felt a good deal smaller this year. In my general experience, most movie-goers were frustrated with the planning and organisation, whether it was the pre-booking of tickets, the difficulty involved in acquiring information about relevant screenings, the confusing manner in which the catalogues were printed. The movie schedule itself appeared far later at the festival website than in previous years, making it difficult for movie-goers to properly plan to see the films they needed to see.

Earlier festivals had a greater sense of festival atmosphere and excitement.

The presentation overall was competent, movies started on time on every screening I attended and the feeling was general across other audiences who noted the greater punctuality. One specific failure however was regretful. This was the screening of Ritwik Ghatak’s E-Flat whose restored version was originally meant to play at the festival, and intended to screen on Ghatak’s birth anniversary. But finally they could not secure the restored print and instead projected a DVD transfer, complete with the awful watermark that stands for Indian Home Video. While Ghatak’s genius can still be appreciated, this sudden late minute shift and the woeful inadequacy of the print for a big screen projection made it hard to appreciate. Especially given Anup Singh (Qissa)’s spirited introduction and defence of the film.

The local winners of the festival were Haraamkhor, Chauthi Koot and Thithi.

The international competition jury, headed by Ava DuVernay (director of Selma) awarded the Best Film award to the Guatemalan film Ixcanul Volcano, directed by Jayro Busatamante, which is an official entry in consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Another winner was the Kyrgistan film Heavenly Nomadic.

Other films that played at the festival included new films from established international film-makers like Aleksandr Sokurov (Francofonia), Marco Bellocchio (Blood of my Blood), Hou-Hsiao Hsien (The Assassin), Jia Zhangke (Mountains May Depart), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun. There were also documentaries on movies. Stig Björkman, the famous film-critic, made a highly interesting documentary called Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words about the famous Hollywood icon. In addition, there was Christian Baad Thomsen who made a documentary on Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Jia Zhangke was also the subject of a documentary (The Guy from Fenyang) directed by Walter Salles, of The Motorcycle Diaries fame. There were also documentaries on general themes, such as monsoon, a documentary about India’s rainy season by Canadian filmmaker Sturla Gunnarson (who earlier adapted Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey). The film has a good musical score by Andrew McKay who presented the film but is otherwise quite a conventional film.

The films that had the most hype during the festival, among observers of international films, were Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, as well as Marco Bellocchio’s Blood of My Blood. Both films are reflective of certain currents in world cinema, the attempt of art house film-makers to engage with genre stories but at the same time do so in a manner that reflects their famous style and approach. Hou’s The Assassin stars Shu Qi in the title role, an assassin in the Tang Era in 8th century China. The film features action sequences in quick bursts amid lengthy, slow sequences showing life in the mansion of a Chinese nobleman and gorgeous shots in the countryside. The plot is about an assassin asked to murder a man who was formerly her fiancé.

Yet this bare outline doesn’t fully convey what the film is about. The Assassin is truly a big screen experience, less a story to follow than a world to get lost in, especially for its costumes and set design by Wen Ying-Huen who was at the festival this year. She worked on the film’s costumes and set design for nearly 10 years and the film is the incredible fruit of her labour.

Bellocchio’s Blood of my Blood is more playful than The Assassin. It’s a two-part gothic melodrama, not very different from Gulliermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, though far more understated and less affected.

The more successful first half is set in the familiar world of Catholic horror, with images suggestive of Ken Russell’s The Devils as well as wild flourishes like anachronistic music (a spooky choral version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters).

The second half is set in the same locale in the 21st century. The conceit is interesting but the cohesiveness of both parts together doesn’t come across fully.

The most entertaining and crowd-pleasing of the films is Francofonia. Aleksandr Sokurov caught international attention for Russian Ark, a film that uses digital to compose a 90-minute film entirely in a single extended take without any cuts. That movie was set in Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and Francofonia is set in the Louvre, but the two films cannot be more different. Francofonia has none of Russian Ark’s redemptive vision of museums as preservers of culture; rather it’s a parody of the Louvre and its vaunted prestige in the art world. Anyone who thinks art house films are polite affairs of self-congratulation will be shocked by this film.

Other curiosities at the festival are retrospective feature of Israeli maestro Amos Gitai, Promised Land and Disengagement. Both movies offer glimpses of one of the world’s most original political filmmakers. The latter film, especially in light of recent changes in Israel, is deeply poignant, with some of cinema’s most powerful extended single-shot camera set-ups. French filmmaker Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women was a poignantly funny and realistic story about marriage and infidelity, shot in beautiful black-and-white. Terence Davies’ Sunset Song, which adapted a classic Scottish novel, was an impressive if oddly restrained story about a Scottish peasant family at the start of the 20th century, featuring a commanding lead performance from Agyness Dean.

So all in all, even if the festival wasn’t entirely successful this year as it was previous years in terms of presentation and crowd participation, it still allowed one to find several films that one would otherwise not see on Indian screens.