(Spoilers ahead…)
The only rule in planning a film festival is...there are no rules. You know there are going to be delays and schedule mix-ups, even though you have come up with a proper plan. So, when I queued up at Anna Theatre on a Sunday morning to catch Sole (2019), which opened to rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was left disappointed when a CIFF (Chennai International Film Festival) volunteer announced that there was a change in the schedule and they were replacing Sole with Holy Beasts for the 9.30am slot. The only positive outcome was that...I wasn’t alone; I had company (read: festival audience).
If there’s genuine love and appreciation for cinema, it’s among the festival audience. How different are they from a regular audience, you ask. There’s one percent difference; these are people who attend the festival with a singular notion of celebrating cinema, as an artform. They may not know the language. They may not know the culture. They may not know the actors. But they know the language of cinema. To put things in perspective, let me narrate an interesting incident that happened during the screening of Holy Beasts . Minutes into the movie, a gentleman noticed that the movie was playing with a wrong aspect ratio and asked the volunteer to change it. When he was told that they couldn’t convert it into the right format, he barged into the cinema hall and yelled, “They won’t change the aspect ratio it seems. This is the price we pay. I don’t know about you guys, but I am walking out.” Fortunately for him, the screening was stopped inadvertently, when there was some issue with the dongle. That incident set the tone for the fourth day of CIFF, where I happened to watch three-and-a-half movies including Holy Beasts .
The system at fault
The opening sequence of the Iranian social drama Just 6.5 has the pulp and zest you’d expect in a Hollywood thriller. Police officers are in the process of arresting a possible suspect who’s involved in a drug racket. The elaborate chase sequence ends on surprisingly amusing note, only to be ruined by the audio system in Casino Theatre. Had it been a Vijay or Ajith introduction scene, the crowd might have gone bonkers. “Operate, will you increase the volume?” screamed an audience member, launching a set of salvos aimed at the projectionist. Just 6.5 shows shades of an investigative thriller at first. But it gradually transforms into a social drama, offering a glimpse into Iran’s code of law and its (fractured?) system. When drug kingpin Nasser’s (Navid Mohammadzadeh) ex-girlfriend Elham (Parinaz Izadyar) rats him out to the investigating officer Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation fame), he’s put behind the bars. The court proceedings are nothing new, yes. But it is the human interest story that keeps the tension alive.
‘Just 6.5’
Saeed Roustayi wonderfully captures the last moments of a prisoner who’s about to be executed. Picture this: a bunch of prisoners are brought to the execution chamber. There are unbroken cries and prayers of men. How does a man react when he comes to know of his last few seconds in this world? You see Nasser shivering. And that sends shivers down our spine. When the judge passes Nasser’s sentence to death, Saeed cuts to a close-up of both men looking into each other’s eyes. You find there’s sympathy in the judge’s eyes that reads, “I’m sorry, but it is what it is.” I haven’t seen any of Saeed Roustayi’s movies, but he comes across as a humane filmmaker.
Can you overcome faith with tests?
How come some of the visually-stunning movies are from filmmakers who are also visual artistes? Is this some unwritten rule? Or is the other way round? There is Gaspar Noe in France and Gabriel Mascaro in Brazil. Divine Love is a tough watch and it takes a light year to process the dystopian universe that Gabriel Mascaro (of Neon Bull fame) has created. It opens with a voice-over of an unborn child, whose voice is almost chilling. The child ushers us into its world, where Brazil embraces Evangelist society and puts ‘faith’ above all, waiting for the Messiah to arrive. It is the world where detectors identify whether or not you’re pregnant, thereby questioning the very purpose of your existence.
‘Divine Love’
“Love endures all,” the child says. Joana (Dira Paes) is a product of bureaucracy. Her job involves registering and granting divorces to couples who file them. But Joana is a practising Christian who’s against the concept of divorce. “She believed bureaucracy is equality,” the child says. Gabriel Mascaro employs the child’s voice to make a mockumentary on the fundamental societal norms. Joana uses her power to convince people of the futility of divorce, by introducing them to a secret community group, Divine Love, which can safely be called a sex cult, where couples indulge in adultery. “True love never betrays. True love only shares,” the child says. She ‘saves’ marriages from failing, but she cannot save her own marriage with her husband Danilo (Julio Machado). Danilo is a florist, but he cannot flower a child. There’s a strong sense of flower being used as a symbol here and apparently, the smell of flowers strengthens one’s belief in God — I Googled. The trouble starts brewing when Joana finally ‘registers’ her fetus, but doesn’t know the DNA of the father. She begins to realise the divine intervention and ‘what if’ this was an act of God. Some of the parts left me wondering if Gabriel Mascaro was telling the story of the birth of Jesus, set in a modern world.
What’s marvelous about Divine Love , apart from its themes and subtexts, is the last shot when the child says, “I am her Divine Love. I don’t have a name or birth certificate. When you don’t have a name, you grow up without fear.” This movie is what you get when a Perumal Murugan novel ( One Part Woman , also about an infertile couple) meets Gaspar Noe’s treatment.
Good father, bad father and male pride
There’s a pensive shot of Meriem Ben Yosseuf (Najila Ben Abdallah) resting on her husband Fares Ben Yosseuf’s (Sami Bouajila, who resembles Milind Soman in certain angles) shoulders inside a dingy hospital, as they battle their son Aziz’s life, who is hit badly in a terrorist shootout in the Tunisia border. This heart-rending image — of this couple wallowing in self-pity in the midst of a maid, mopping the floor — is perhaps the only quiet moment they get to live in A Son , which takes a global conflict like the Tunisian revolution as its central premise and breaks them into characters. The bullet has punctured Aziz’s liver and doctors are contemplating a parent-to-child organ transplantation. But the news that hits like a bullet is this: Fares isn’t Aziz’s biological father, which, in turn, sets off a bomb of events, inviting a domino effect. Meriem, just like us, is equally distraught when she discovers the news. She hasn’t changed the blood-soaked clothes since the time of attack. But now, she’s left with a permanent strain. The clock is ticking and the doctor asks Meriem to discuss with her husband and find the biological father, who’s a suitable donor. If this were a Gautham Menon movie, the protagonist would have said, “Inni neeyum Aziz-um enn sontham.” But it isn’t.
‘A Son’
For every one step, she takes two steps backward when facing her husband. Take this scene for instance. Fares helps change her clothes, but she feels naked amidst his presence. In an extramarital affair, it’s invariably the woman who bears the onus, right? In that sense, A Son and Divine Love share the same emotional spirit. It’s about male pride and the privilege of being a ‘man’. However, there’s a great amount of tenderness in A Son , which eschews the usual you-screwed-up-so-you-clean-the-mess approach of painting the characters with shades of black and white. Director Mehdi Barsaoui etches his characters with a fair bit of sensitivity, and shows admirable quality in dealing with complex human emotions. Like when Aziz wakes up and says that his Airbus 380 toy is upside down, Fares chips in and says, “Dad is here... dad will fix everything.” Or the painfully-beautiful scene where Fares looks at his wife and her ex-lover from a distance, possibly thinking that he should have been there, instead of the other man. Or the melancholic closing shot where the husband and wife are exchanging looks, perhaps putting their differences aside and accepting the reality.
