Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase’s Hikari (Radiance), the first of the three films by women filmmakers competing for the Palme d’Or this year, played at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on Tuesday morning.
The other two in the fray — Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here — were scheduled to be screened on Wednesday and Friday respectively. Jane Campion is the only woman filmmaker to have bagged the Palme D’Or for The Piano in 1993. Will 2017 be the year of the second?
However , Hikari doesn’t quite seem to shine as bright and it fails to rise up to the challenge. Mr. Kawase’s milieu is unusual: producing audio descriptions of movies for the visually impaired. There is the overarching theme of empathy, understanding and communication and also of the human connect and flight of imagination possible through the movies. Against it all is set the love story between a partially sighted photographer and a much younger girl, who works on the audio descriptions. The film moves languidly, pausing interminably on the innumerable close-ups and somehow manages to render a potentially profound take on the urgency for conversation and interaction into maudlin melodrama.
Theme of infidelity
Hong Sang-soo’s Geu Hu (The Day After) is a film on the theme of infidelity that overflows with food and liquor. Conversations move from the existential to the comical even as the camera stays static, looking on at people eating and talking. A publisher has a fling with an employee in his office, the lady moves on and he hires another in her place only to have the betrayed wife mistake the new employee for her husband’s mistress. That too on her very first day at work. Misunderstandings make things oddly comic till the mistress decides to return and demands her job back again. The film does bring on a few laughs but doesn’t make one engage with the situation and the characters.
Manish Mundra feted
Meanwhile, on the sidelines of the festival, at the India Pavilion in Marche du Cinema, producer Manish Mundra of Drishyam Films was felicitated by the leading film trade journal, Variety , as one of the ten producers to watch out for in 2017.
With winners such as Masaan , Waiting and Aankhon Dekhi behind him, Mr. Mundra is now set to release Newton , Rukh and Kadvi Hawa this year. Two films are soon to go on floors: Mohd Ghani’s Cycle , on the significance of the modest mode of transport in grass-roots India and Ganesh Shetty’s Anaam , on a woman dealing with abortion.
Also, eight to ten new projects are likely to be announced next year with a fund worth ₹80-100 crore allocated for them. Mr. Mundra will also be working with filmmakers like Pan Nalin and Shagufta Rafique on their next projects.
“We want to take Indian cinema to the next level, make films that travel to festivals, get nominated at the Oscars, create a buzz,” Mr. Mundra says.
Priyanka on Variety
Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra made it to the pages of Variety in absentia. Her production house Purple Pebble Pictures’ slate of regional films was unveiled by her mother Madhu Chopra, who has been diligently looking for foreign investment, collaborations and seats at the international festivals for their films. An Indo-German co-production is also on the cards, she told The Hindu .
There are a few children’s films, “visualised through kids’ point of view”, as Chopra puts it, which are coming soon. The first look of one of them, Sikkimese film Pahuna , was revealed at the India Pavilion.
Purple Pebble started off with the Bhojpuri film Bam Bam Bol Raha Hai Kashi. A Punjabi film, Sarvann , followed. The Marathi film, Ventilator , which fared well at the national awards this year, has brought them at the centre of regional film production.
“Our motto is to look at language cinema in India and give new filmmakers a chance,” said Dr. Chopra, who runs a cosmetology clinic in Mumbai and also manages the business back-end of the company while Priyanka looks at the creative side.
The aim is also to keep a tight leash on the budgets and get work completed in fewer days with a limited crew. A Marathi film, Kay Re Rascalaa , is coming up next. Future projects include Little Joe Kahaa Ho in Konkani, Brishtir Oppekhyayy and Bus Stop E Keu Nei in Bengali . Nalini on Rabindranath Tagore’s first love will be a Bengali-Marathi bilingual and Ventilator will soon be remade into Malayalam.
Meanwhile the Festival de Cannes expressed its “horror, anger and immense sadness” on the bomb attack in the city of Manchester on Monday night.
“This is yet another attack on culture, youth and joyfulness, on our freedom, generosity and tolerance, all things that the festival and those who make it possible — the artistes, professionals and spectators — hold dear,” the festival release said.
