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Hometheatre | Glad eye
All of Pedro Almodóvar is there. There is the breathless storytelling where every time you blink you may miss an important dab of colour on the canvas, there are bright colours and quirky interiors lined with modern bookcases and avant-garde posters, the fact-of-life attitude to sex and the matter-of-fact take on drugs.
Pedro's angel
Broken Embraces (A)
Eagle/Cinema Paradiso, Rs. 399
Rating: *****
All of Pedro Almodóvar is there. There is the breathless storytelling where every time you blink you may miss an important dab of colour on the canvas, there are bright colours and quirky interiors lined with modern bookcases and avant-garde posters, the fact-of-life attitude to sex and the matter-of-fact take on drugs. There's also the use of (the cutting of) tomatoes as a sexual innuendo. And there's Penélope Cruz, a riveting presence as Almodóvar's muse.
Writer Mateo Blanco has come to live the life of the pseudonym he invented, Harry Caine. The biggest twist is that Harry is blind. We find him surrounded by his agent Judith, her son Diego and ghosts of his colourful past. In another part of town, Magdalena ‘Lena' Rivero is struggling to raise money for her father's cancer treatment. To do so, she finally gives in to the advances of her rich and powerful boss Ernesto Martel and becomes his mistress. How do these unconnected worlds collide? Diego, a part-time DJ recouping from a drug overdose, corners Harry to tell his past and connect the dots. To give a clue, Ernesto loathes his gay son, whom he has appointed to make a documentary of the shooting of Lena's first film, which is being made by Mateo.
In Almodóvar's films, twists in the plot and connections between characters come about just like that – as a narrative tool that shouldn't come in the way of the story. Did we tell you that the story rocks forward and back in time, mostly between 1992 and 2002? That's very Almodóvar, too.
Cry Woolf
The Hours
Eagle/Lionsgate, Rs. 399
Rating: ***
It's the story of author Virginia Woolf as told through the life of her first classic, Mrs Dalloway. The fantastic narrative weaves between single days in three different years and situations – Woolf's London of the 1920s when she's beginning to write the novel even as she is being wracked by the pains that would devastate her; Laura Brown, a young wife in the Mad Men world of post World War 2 California who is reading the book and getting influenced by its feminist ideas; and Clarissa Vaughan, a spitting image of the fictional Mrs Dalloway in present-day New York and a lesbian who is preparing a party for her AIDS-struck former male lover.
Moving performances by Nicole Kidman as Virginia, Julianne Moore as Laura, and Meryl Streep as Clarissa make this poetic tale of care and dare scripted by David Hare into a sophisticated drama. Ed Harris as Clarissa's ex-lover Richard, who is forever mindful of the story of Mrs Dalloway, opens up the character with his harsh insights. If it didn't have to move between eras, it might have been a play.
The ‘Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf' is not a rearrangement of film shots. Instead, with inputs from Woolf's biographer Hermione Lee, art historian Francis Spalding and English professor Molly Hite, it tells us of Woolf's manic depression and upbringing. The ‘Lives of Mrs Dalloway' is the writer and scriptwriter's association with the classic. It's a film worth watching on DVD – this DVD.
Wheels of violence
Train to Pakistan (A)
NFDC/Shemaroo, Rs. 199
Rating: ***
We know the political events from the pages of school history. If we have been listening, we would also know some of the large numbers: as two nations were born, more than 3 million people got displaced, some 250,000 to half a million people died, and at least 75,000 women were raped. But the horrors of the biggest displacement of modern history, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, do not come alive in the numbers. They can only be told as personal tragedies. Khushwant Singh tells the story of common people living close to the India-Pakistan border.
Sikhs and Muslims in the village of Mano Majra have stayed together peacefully for centuries. They do not let the initial wave of violence hit their peaceful neighbourhood. But everyone is affected when trains full of slaughtered Sikhs and Hindus come in from Pakistan. As emotions get on the edge, events big and small stoke a cycle of mistrust. The personal tragedies and antics fall in the shadow of the earth-shaking calamities unfolding on the national stage.
This 1998 film by Pamela Rooks, based on the 1956 novel, features well-known theatre actors. Mohan Aghase is the conflicted magistrate Hukum Chand who visits a prostitute, Divya Dutta, of the same age as his deceased daughter. Nirmal Pandey, as the well-built and uneducated Juggut Singh, one of the suspects, is a perfect foil against Rajit Kapoor as the lean and articulate Iqbal Singh, the other suspect. Between them, they enclose a familiar tale.
