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Spider spins a web
Spider whets the appetite of those hunting for good recipes, says Saibal Chatterjee.
Half way through the 35th International Film Festival of India, the worst fears of film lovers who have congregated here for a celebration of cinema have been confirmed. The festival’s showcase section, Cinema of the World, is exasperatingly bare. It is crammed with far too many films that are uninspiring, if not outright awful. These are films that have got into the festival not because they do deserve to do so, but because they were available. And that, as is eminently evident on the ground here, can only be a recipe for disaster.
Mercifully, however, there seems to be enough in the other sections of IFFI 2004 for people hunting for cinematic gems to stay interested in the event that runs till December 9. The Canadian Showcase, for one, is a sidebar packed with riches. One of them is David Cronenberg’s uncompromisingly arthouse film Spider, a remarkably sparse yet emotionally draining adaptation of Patrick McGrath novel of the same name. Cronenberg’s unrelentingly grim but consistently fascinating psychodrama blends touches of classic British theatre with elements of a Freudian inquest to deliver a stark depiction of human dementia.
Arriving at a halfway house in London's East End after a long stint in a mental asylum, Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes in a remarkably restrained performance) - nicknamed 'Spider' as a boy for his dexterousness with his fingers – revisits the area he grew up in. As the sights and smells of a dank, depressing landscape percolate down into his battered soul, Spider struggles in vain to exorcise his traumatic past as the only child of an abusive plumber (Gabriel Byrne) and his wife (Miranda Richardson).
In Spider, remembrances of things past are strictly personal. In several other engaging films on show at IFFI 2004, they are extended to the sweep of bitter collective memories of unhappy historical events. Especially interesting are the two Israeli films that are vying for the Golden Peacock in the Asian Competition section, Avi Nesher’s Turn Left at the End of the World and Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water, both of which deal with a set of characters grappling with scars of the past
Walk on Water is about an Israeli Secret Service hitman, Eyal, who is given the mission of eliminating an octogenarian ex-Nazi who is believed to be alive. Posing as a personal tour guide, he gets close to the old man’s granddaughter Pia, who now lives in Israel having renounced her family in Germany, and her brother, Axel, who is visiting Tel Aviv in a bid to take the woman back for their father’s birthday celebrations. As the two men, Eyal and Axel, from two sides of the divide, discover each other during their peregrinations across Israel, they begin to learn more about their own true feelings.
Walk on Water uses the Yogic metaphor of self-purification as the first step to the attainment of such lightness that one can actually step on water and walk. The film is shot through with a sense of deep humanism - decades of prejudice melt away as the two male protagonists dig deep into their own hearts and minds for inspiration.
Turn Left at the End of the World probes the immigrant experience in a manner that has rarely been done before. In a remote Israeli island, two families, one from India and the other from Morocco, become neighbours. The Indian family tries to put a rag-tag cricket team together, the Moroccan family does all it can to disrupt the effort. Each family has a teenaged daughter and they are refreshingly free from all baggage. It is left to them to restore harmony in a corner of the world where prejudices seem completely out of place.
