B
ased on a Daphne du Maurier short story and made in 1973 , it's one of the most haunting, enigmatic and , in the final moments bloodily shocking films ever made. After the tragic death of their daughter , Laura and John Baxter take a trip to Venice in an attempt to save their marriage. There, John uses his work -restoring an old church- as an outlet for his grief while Laura relies on pills . One day, they encounter a strange pair of elderly spinster sisters , Heather and Wendy . Heather, who is blind, claims to be able to communicate with the spirit world. She convinces Laura she has seen Christine. While John dismisses this as meaningless "mumbo-jumbo," Laura goes along with it - even participating in a séance. At first , John is delighted at the positive change in wife but he soon becomes concerned that she is falling under a harmful influence. To make matters worse, he is beginning to experience strange visions. Heather warns Christine that unless John leaves Venice, he will be in great danger. Christine's mother and father are played by Donald Sutherland and Julie
Christie, and their relationship is one of the most authentic portraits of a
marriage that i have seen in any film. Watching the film, it is easy to believe that the actors are in fact
married, and Roeg's portrait of Venice, with its intelligent,
non-tourist locations, is a real vision of a real, working city . The film is drenched with sex and displaced sexual longing, given a dark eroticism by the shadow of death. In Venice, Baxter will get glimpses of a little figure in red running
away from him or hiding from him, and may wonder if this is the ghost of
his daughter. We will see the red figure more often than he does,
glimpsing it on a distant bridge, or as a boat passes behind two arches. Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in “Don’t
Look Now.” It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling,
its canals alive with rats . This film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with
fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension. Few films
so successfully put us inside the mind of a man who is trying to reason
his way free from mounting terror.
The film follows the life of a donkey from birth to death , while all the time living it the dignity of being itself -a dumb beast , noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. It begins with a lovely medium close-up of a small donkey suckling his mother's teat. The baby is discovered by Marie and Jacques ,two children with strong adolescent feelings for each other, and is taken from his mother. As years pass, family strife intervenes and Jacques is forced out of Marie's life by her angry father. So begins Balthazar's journey through life, paralleled almost exactly by Marie's miserable trek. The donkey has several owners ,most of whom exploit him, often with more cruelty than kindness.
With his unerring patience, Bresson scrutinizes and underlines each trait displayed by the film's humans. The magic of Balthazar is that he is the ultimate Bressonian character . Bresson famously used untrained actors in his films -he called them "models" and purposely stripped away all vestiges of personality so that he photographed only a bare essence. The difference between Balthazar and us is that we are smart enough to understand our destiny without being able to control it. The film's restraint is its strength -beautiful monotone images, silences , gestures all laced with a simple piano sonata that underscores the mood of the film perfectly. Transcendental and sometimes joyful, the film (in
typical Bressonian style) eventually gives way to an unbearably sad vision
of 'life .
The Cloud door features pictorial beauty , slow-building sensuality and surprising humour that combine to rich effect. A king overhears a parrot telling erotic stories to his daughter , and is angered. He desires to kill the parrot but the princess intervenes and saves the parrot's life. The parrot escapes and is trapped far from the palace. One day when it's new owner is sleeping, the bird convinces a young man to open the cage door. In return, it shows the young man a secret way to get into the palace.
One of the inspirations for the story for the movie is based on the work
of noted Sanskrit scholar Bhasa and his six-act play 'Avimaraka' . The Cloud Door is a technically sound product . Too many people are busy on making several interpretations about this film but it's a refreshing mystical little tale with stunning visuals, beautiful locales and great music.
The film tells the story of a woman prisoner serving life imprisonment for murder, Kalyani ,the all suffering, selfless, sacrificing, and strong yet weak Indian woman. The film's protagonist Kalyani had the courage to not only make choices in her life but choices which at times might appear to be even wrong ones as she gives up everything for love. Her past is told in flashback. During the British Raj, Kalyani (Nutan) falls in love with freedom fighter Bikash. (Ashok Kumar) . He later leaves her in the village promising to come back but never does. The society treats Kalyani harshly. She leaves the village and moves to the city. Interestingly when Bikash tells Kalyani his story , Bimal Roy uses the flashbacks within flashback device in the film, surely one of the earliest use of such a technique in Indian Cinema. While the events of the story are highly melodramatic , Bimalda takes great care to handle them with sensitivity, simplicity and subtlety. Bandini is brilliantly photographed by Kamal Bose with its rich tonal quality and evocative framing. The film also sees the debut of Gulzar as a lyricist with Mora Gora Ang Laile , one of the most romantic songs in Indian Cinema as it expresses the heroine's first flush of love. Dharmendra is okish while Ashok Kumar is impressive as Bikash but Bandini clearly belongs to Nutan. She portrays her characters inner conflict and complex emotions with almost near perfections.
The film documents the feudal -life in Kerala at its twilight. The protagonist is trapped within himself and is unable to comprehend the changes taking place around him. Unni, the last male-heir of a decaying and feudal joint family gets trapped within himself. His older sister Rajamma waits on him hand and foot ; Sridevi ,the younger , is studying at school and is drawn only reluctantly into his service. The treatment is great ; using rats as his governing metaphor. Unni (played brilliantly by Karamana Janardhan Nair ) is stubborn ,narcissistic , feudalistic and an escapist to the core.
According
to Adoor , the film is a "a detailed study of a character at many
levels -- psychological, physical, social, even genetic, based on his
roots. I gave primary colors to the characters' clothes and a
predominant gray to the background. " The sister Rajamma is destroyed by the silence of her brother, who does not support her when she wants to get married -he turns down an offer because he felt it was beneath his family. The decline is vividly told , with colour and music used as a striking and significant constituent of the film's thematic development .
Sol
aris is a 1972 science-fiction film adaptation of the novel Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is a meditative psychological drama occurring mostly aboard a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris. This film weaves a story about a man named Kris Kelvin, played by a haunted Donatas Banionis, who is assigned to replace a
scientist onboard a space station that is orbiting and monitoring the
oceans of a strange and mysterious planet.
After decades of study, the scientific mission at the space station has barely progressed. To make matters worse, most of the crew has succumbed to a series of emotional crisis. The crew does not wish to discuss what's going on ,and only hints that Kelvin will find out himself. Kelvin soon wakes up to find his dead wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) sitting with him in his room. Some mysterious force coming from the planet below has tapped into his mind and made portions of his memories or dreams physical. Solaris , contrary to its setting, is interested in inner as opposed to outer space - namely, the realm of our consciousness.
Tarkovsky manipulates the basic framework of the Sci-fi genre to express his own thematic concerns, refusing to bow to generic conventions. At it's core, Solaris is a philosophical treatise on the human condition , and it intelligently questions the certainty of reality. The age-old argument of science versus nature comes to a head, as these well-educated , knowledgeable men fail to provide answers. Questions arise over these fantastical events being manifested from the deep recesses of each man's unconscious will. When we love someone, who do we love? That person, or our idea of that person? When we touch them , it is not the touch we experience but our consciousness of the touch .
Wa
kamatsu's Go, Go Second Time Virgin tells the tale of two Japanese teens brought together by sexual violence., revenge and rebellion. Poppo, a teenage girl is raped by four boys on the roof of a seven-story apartment building. She asks them to kill her , but they mock her and leave. Tsukio, a teenage boy has been watching the rape passively. The story revolves around both characters befriendment and subsequent attempts to deal with their traumatic past and present.
Poppo had an incredibly dysfunctional past which includes the gang-rape of her mother leading to Poppo's conception, incest , the suicide of her father with his mistress, the subsequent suicide of her mother out of loneliness and two rapes. She is nihilistic and consistently reiterates her desire to die. In a colour flashback, Tsukio tells of his own recent sexual abuse at the hands his parents and another couple, all of whome he has stabbed to death. Poppo repeatedly asks Tsukio to kill her, but he refuses. Tsukio initially looks on with some adolescent excitement, his hatred for the abusers grow throughout the film until his rage explodes in final scenes. On the surface, the audience will be in for a great deal of sex ,violence and drug-induced bizarreness. Stylistically, the entire film is shot in black and white and takes place within the confines of the apartment building, either on the roof, in the basement, or in the bloodied apartment of Tsukio's attackers.
It is a rather dismal tale of primitive morality in the face of degradation, humiliation and abuse. It would seem that this film's message is one of the consequence of a
moral decline within society and the irreparable damage it causes among
innocent youth. This decline explicitly involves the pursuit of
unfettered and often violent sexuality as well as drug and alcohol abuse .
