The joy of unearthing little gems

PTI | BySaibal Chatterjee, New Delhi
Jul 19, 2005 04:33 PM IST

There are many such films waiting to be discovered. Saibal Chatterjee offers a preview to some select ones.

The 7th Osian's-Cinefan Film Festival is into its fourth day and warming up. It is not surprising at all that the big guns of quality Asian cinema have managed a headstart over the others. Wong Kar Wai's long-awaited 2046, the package of films by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud and What Time is it There? have expectedly emerged as the biggest draws of the 10-day event.

HT Image
HT Image

A small film festival of this kind, however, draws its appeal primarily from the little discoveries that it allows cinema lovers to make amid all the hype that is understandably generated by the big names. The 7th OCFF has already thrown up two cinematic gems crafted by first-time filmmakers - Iranian actress-turned-director Niki Karimi's One Night and Vietnamese debutant Nguyen Vo Minh's Buffalo Boy, which marked the start of the Fonds Sud Cinema section on Monday evening.

The most striking aspect of these two films is that neither of them succumbs to the temptation to be unduly showy. The focus is firmly on the subtle human drama that each of these films deal with against a clearly defined backdrop. Neither Karimi nor Nguyen try anything that isn't absolutely essential in terms of craft and storytelling. That, coming from filmmakers just starting out in life, is a truly pleasing trait.      

A still from One Night

One Night is an urban road movie set in Teheran, but the city hardly ever impinges on the frames of the film in visual terms, except at the very end, where a steady camera watches dawn break over the landscape. The city of Teheran lives in the hearts and minds of the characters that people the minimalist plot. It's about human relationships, deceptions and infidelities but above all,

One Night

is about an exploration of a woman's place in Iranian society.

Negar is a young woman who works as an office clerk. One night, her mother, preparing to receive a male guest, asks the girl to sleep at a friend's place. A rather reluctant Negar hits the streets of Teheran and in the course of the night encounters three men who have three disparate stories to tell her. As each man drives her through the city and narrates his experiences to Negar, she begins to sees life around her in a new light.

The three men reveal their relationships with the women in their lives. The first, a man from the town of Isfahan, lives in Teheran away from his wife and son. He makes an advance at Negar, asserting that it is all right for a man to be a philanderer. 

The second, a soft-spoken doctor, lives with his mother. The woman he once loved has left for good for the US and so have all his brothers and sisters.

The third story pushes Negar to the dawn a new realization. This man, seemingly genteel and harmless, has murdered his unfaithful wife and is driving around with the body in the boot.

The female protagonist of One Night does not recoil in horror. She waits for darkness to be swept away by the first rays of the sun over Teheran, which become as much a symbol of the continuity of life as a hope-filled reminder that, no matter how many cruel twists and turns human fate may take, there is always a tomorrow.

Fatalism also plays a big role in the narrative of Buffalo Boy, set in the far south of Vietnam, a region that is flooded every year during the long rainy season. Based on stories by Vietnamese writer Son Nam, the film journeys into the heart of darkness only to come up with a saga of courage and fortitude.

A teenaged Kim is sent by his old father to look for high-ground pastures for the family's two buffaloes. This is a terrain where gangs of buffalo herders fight bitter battles for supremacy and the 15-year-old boy is caught in the middle. Reminiscent of the Hollywood western, Buffalo Boy is, in essence, a wonderfully original tale about people for whom grappling with the elements is a daily chore.

The visuals are stunning, the drama is controlled, the frames are superbly crafted and the quality of the tragedy is classic. The flow of the film approximates the choppy rhythms of the water that surrounds the lives of the people - joys and sorrows, loves and peeves, and births and deaths come and go with the inexorability of day and night. Buffalo Boy, like One Night, is a film that makes a deep impact without letting the effort really show.  

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