At the IFFK 2013

My stint at this year's edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala happened to be shorter than last year's, lasting hardly two days. So, I could watch no more than five films, and none of them were in the competition section. Nevertheless I am going to chart down what I thought of the films I saw below, since I don't want to keep my readers waiting for my next entry (what pomposity!).

At least, I was lucky enough to watch ATouch of Sin, one of the year's most acclaimed films by the Chinese Jia Zhang-ke. Far from the rosy portrayal of contemporary China that we are used to hearing in the media, the film is built together out of four separate stories, none of which have separate titles or common characters but a common theme: helpless individuals caught in an increasingly corrupt, materialist and profit-driven world, driven to commit acts of violence, against others and oneself. The pace of the film is, for the large part, contemplative in tempo, with sudden outbursts of violence. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman captures the Chinese landscape in all its serenity, starkly contrasting it with the bleak lives of the characters in the four stories.

Later, I caught up with Claire Denis' 2001 film Trouble Every Day, a multilingual erotic horror film that is centred on two parallel stories, one of an American couple and the other of a French couple, both in Paris. While the American husband is impotent, the French wife's sexual appetite is so insatiable that she engages in sexual encounters with various men, and ends up drinking their very blood. That is all the plot there is to this film.

In what seems to me to be a surreal exploration of the discrepancies between male and female sexuality, Trouble Every Day has more than its fair share of gore, including an extended lovemaking scene that ends in cannibalism.

The Mozambican film Virgin Margarida by Licinio Azevedo charts the experiences of sex workers in guerrilla camps in post-colonial Mozambique in the 1970s, into which a teenager Margarida (Iva Mugalela), mistaken for one them, is forcibly deported. Under the leadership of a woman guerrilla who is single-minded in her devotion to 'cleanse' them of their colonial mindset and make 'new women' out of them, the women, along with Margarida, undergo harsh training sessions with harsh punishments for dissenters. 

While director Azevedo definitely has got his heart in the right place in wanting to show how the revolution could bring about little change in the lives of ordinary citizens of the country and his script mixes irony and drama with relative ease, his performers, however, are unimpressive, chiefly because they fail to make the transition from the comic to the dramatic in their performance. But there is no denying that the film feels quite like one of our day and time, not of a distant period.

Perhaps the best film I got to see at this festival was The Crucified Lovers (1954), one of Kenji Mizoguchi's late masterpieces, in a 35mm print that had good contrast, despite the infrequent scratches. I had never seen Mizoguchi on the big screen, so I did not let go of the opportunity. As always, his indictment of Japanese patriarchy and hypocrisy is at his scathing best in this tale of a samurai's wife who is accused of adultery with one of her manservants, while her husband himself has a sexual interest in her maid.

Like his other masterpieces, The Crucified Lovers is testimony to Mizoguchi's genius as a visual stylist, especially in his trademark long takes, letting the action unfold in distanced views using a moving camera. Watching it on the big screen, I was once again convinced that he is, no doubt, one of the great masters of world cinema.

My last film at the festival, Act Zero by Gautam Ghose was the only Indian film I could see on this trip, one that tries to encapsulate in two hours and ten acts the various issues that haunt the country. While the basic premise is that of the CEO of a Multinational trying to invade the lands of tribals by deporting them and mining the area for bauxite, resulting in tensions between the tribal community and the CEO, the director crams in issues like Maoist insurgency, communalism, and throws in a fictional Binayak Sen. The result is an ineptly shot, preachy and didactic film, but one that is nevertheless watchable, thanks largely to the performances of Konkona Sen Sharma and Soumitra Chatterjee.

Thus ended my all-too-brief stay at the festival. There were several other films which I would want to have seen, especially the Jean Renoir retrospective, which screened such titles as Toni and La Bete Humaine, and a special section on German Expressionist cinema, which included such 20s classics as The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari and A Throw of Dice, which is set in India. But there's always another chance.

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi - 1953)

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Produced by Masaichi Nagata
Written by Yoshikata Yoda
Cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa
Music by Fumio Hayasaka
Edited by Mitsuzo Miyata
Country/Language- Japan/Japanese
Cast- Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyo, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sakae Ozawa, Mitsuko Mito and Kikue Mori


Ugetsu or Ugetsu Monogotari, the original Japanese title, is perhaps the most widely seen of all of director Kenji Mizoguchi's films (Sansho the Bailiff is another one). It was an important film for Mizoguchi because it was the first film that brought him international renown.

Ugetsu made its appearance in international film circles closely on the heels of Rashomon, which was an international sensation and gave its director Akira Kurosawa the sort of reputation no Japanese director had enjoyed before. Mizoguchi, who started his career in the 1920s as a director of silent films, was a relative unknown outside his native country. The fact that a Japanese film could appeal to international audiences was proved by Kurosawa's film, which may have prompted Mizoguchi to try the same. 

Incidentally, both the films do share a few similarities. Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo, who played the murdered samurai and his wife in Rashomon, also essayed important roles in Ugetsu, the cinematographer and the music composer for both the films were the same, and the plots for both the films were created by combining two short stories. And yes, both films won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

But the similarities end there. When it comes to plot, style, tone and performance, the paths of both the films tread entirely different paths. Ugetsu stays clear of any moralising we may hear in Rashomon, despite the theme being about human vanity. Where the tempo in Rashomon is raised to a feverish pitch, and the acting broad (What else could you expect from someone like Toshiro Mifune?), the tempo and acting in the latter film are restrained. 

Mizoguchi tells his story in a more serene way, in the manner of a Buddhist fable. Set in 16th century Japan, ravaged by civil war, the film is centred on two families, that of Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, who hopes to make the most of the war for his business, and his brother Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), who is driven by his desire to become a samurai. Their wives, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), and Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), are sceptical of their ambitions, since they are motivated by greed. Unmindful of their wives' advice and the eventual tragedy that befalls them, the two carry on. While Tobei becomes a samurai through fraud, Genjuro is enchanted by Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo), who vamps him.

What gives the film its uniqueness is its almost uncanny blend of the real and the ethereal, factors that are often indistinguishable in the film. One could argue that it holds true even in real life, where the illusory is often taken for being real. It is not the characters alone who are unable to differentiate the real from the unreal; we, the viewers, are also deceived in our perception of this seemingly two sides of the coin, and credit has to go to the impeccable artistry of Mizoguchi.

By now, it would have become obvious to you that the heart of the film has its roots in Buddhist thought, which abounds with themes of how man is led to suffering as a result of his own desires and vanity. But there is hardly any moralising in the film- Mizoguchi is content with simply presenting us with the story and does not want any character to stand in as a mouthpiece for his views.

The mood that the film evokes is one of mysticism, and this mood is evoked through Mizoguchi's mise-en-scene, his use of graceful long takes and complex camera movements. Kazuo Miyagawa delivers some of the most beautiful images through his magnificent use of the crane shot. The actors are, for the most part, framed in medium to long shot- even in scenes of dramatic intensity, Mizoguchi prefers to keep the camera distant. The only close-up I can recall is that of Miyagi towards the end of the film. The distanced view that pervades through the film embodies a spirit of detachment, which again has its roots in Buddhist thought.

The score by Fumio Hayasaka also deserves to be mentioned, since it is a vital contributor to the film's mood. While his score for Rashomon used a lot of Western themes (like Ravel's Bolero), the music here is largely Oriental (at least to my knowledge).

Though Ugetsu bought Mizoguchi the worldwide attention he so deserved, he was already nearing the end of his career. He would die of leukemia three years later, at the age of 58.