Pather Panchali

A little while ago I watched this film by Satyajit Ray for the first time, though I’d known about it for years. I read about it in this memoir I had to read while at school. I was also reminded of this film when I reviewed a book on a Bollywood film star a while back, as the book mentioned Ray when summarizing Indian film history. This film was very good, with some excellent characterization and acting. It has aged quite well, and The Harvard Crimson was certainly wrong when they said: "...Pather Panchali, remarkable as it may be, is something of a chore to sit through." This is not a film with extra fat, but is concise and engaging throughout.

Here’s part of Dan’s review where he analyzes a scene from the end of the film. The final sentence also captures how this film is unique considering the time in which it was made.

“While packing up the family’s belongings, Apu comes across a bowl with a large spider spinning a web, and is repulsed. Then, in the next bowl he finds the necklace that the other girl claimed Durga stole. He takes it, runs to a pond of algaed water, and plops the necklace through the scum which recoalesces around the spot left by the necklace- a great touch, visually, but also it shows the brother’s love and loyalty to his flawed sister, to save her reputation in death, as well as his emergence from under the influence of the three women who have dominated his life until then. Whether he realized it or not, Ray adds an incidental poesy to the scene by having a definitively masculine act (throwing) end up with the past (the necklace) being consumed by the feminine (the water), to which Apu, the man in waiting, turns his back forever on. Yet, this all occurs in the famously masculine dominated society of the subcontinent, showing Ray well ahead of his time by having the film so effectively and wonderfully focus on the three main female characters.”

Here is a little taste of the film. Though Dan describes the camera work as ‘pedestrian’, there are some nice visuals, such as in scenes like this one:

Persona

A couple of weeks ago I watched the Ingmar Bergman film Persona, which I hadn’t seen in something like 7 years, when it was screened in one of my classes as a student. At the time when I first watched it, I remember the central ‘thing’ that people focused on was whether the two characters were the same person. Now, it is not really the ‘question’ of whether the two characters are the same person, or even the ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ that stick out when watching this film…but the writing, acting, and cinematography, all of which are so well done that they strengthen a film that is maybe not as ‘profound’ as some have claimed. As it has been said with something like poetry, it is the ‘how’ it is done that is more important than the ‘what’ that is said. Dan touches upon this in his review:

“Persona is self-conscious, narcissistic, and not too psychologically deep, for there is no real reason offered for Alma’s identification with Elisabet, nor her breakdown, but it is the ultimate style over substance film, and as such attains its true greatness, despite the visual sleight of hand that leads many to be sucked into its hollow posturing as some source of great depth. But, more so, it’s a grandly entertaining film, more than it is a deep one, giving the psychologically naïve much to talk about as Bergman deceives the viewer into deep thought over the shallow.”

Revolutionary Road

A couple of nights ago I saw the film Revolutionary Road with a friend of mine. As cliché as it sounds, I found the book to be better than the film. The basic story is still intact, but many of the positive effects of Richard Yates’ prose were lost in the transposition from literature to the big screen. While I don’t think the film is terrible, it doesn’t really distinguish itself from the ‘unhappy white people in suburbia’ genre, in the way that the book did.

Some scenes come across as more melodramatic than I remember them being in the book. Sometimes this is because Yates would write about a couple fighting in a way that went beyond typical scenes of WASPs yelling at one another. For instance, when I think to the opening of the book, where April and Frank Wheeler are fighting by the side of the road, I don’t so much remember the kind of conventional exchange that was in the film, but how Yates described the encounter, such as how their faces twisted into “shapes of hatred.”

Another example comes at the end of the film. While I won’t ‘spoil’ the ending for those who haven’t read the book/seen the film, I thought Yates handled the scenes with April Wheeler much better than the film did, because I don’t think he had to be as obvious in order to have an emotional effect.

I also think the film was missing some of Yates’ humour and his critiques of the various characters. The friends of the Wheelers, Shep and Milly, were not as developed in the film, and got off a lot easier than they did in the book, where they were shown to be drones despite thinking that they were above the ‘suburban mindset.’ The film didn’t show this with Frank Wheeler at the end of the film, either. The film depicted him smiling blandly while watching his children, while the book was unambiguous in showing him to be as much of a cipher as those he and his wife and friends used to mock.

Had the film had a better director, and had the screenplay worked harder to communicate certain things in more visual and less soap opera-ish ways, I think it could have been a lot better. Some parts of the film were nice looking, but the overall appearance of the film was very ordinary—it is not a film that is memorable for stunning visuals. I Googled the director and saw that he was the director of American Beauty—another over-rated film about how ‘things aren’t ok in suburbia’.

As for the acting…I thought Kate Winslet was better than Leonardo DiCaprio. My friend was impressed by one of DiCaprio’s ‘emotional’ scenes in the film, but I think they could have found someone else who could have done the character much better. Some of the actors who played smaller roles were better than him.

So regardless of whether you see this film or not, I recommend you read the book. Unlike the film, it goes beyond just being about an 'unhappy 1950s couple.' See Jessica's review of the book here, if you haven't already.

George Washington

Last week I saw David Gordon Green’s film George Washington. Like All The Real Girls, this film is one that could have taken a more predictable turn, but instead focused on characters instead of obvious plotting. By this, I mean that it isn’t hard to see how the accidental death of a young man could have turned into a predictable Hollywood film.

I think that overall All The Real Girls is probably the better of the two, but this one shares many of the later one’s positives, including a unique approach with dialogue, good characterization that avoids stereotypes, and a poetic approach to the presentation of images, where the eye can linger on a shot as it would on a poetic line.

Here is a snippet of Dan’s review of the film, where he discusses the narrative approach of the film, as well as how the film achieves its poetic effect in its contrast of dialogue and images.

“That said, this film is not really a narrative, more of a simple series of linked vignettes that trace a several week period over a summer, which opens with a dreamy panoramic and poetic monologue spoken by a young girl named Nasia (Candace Evanofski), that weaves poetry out of the banal snippets that drift in and out of even the most prosaic minds, such as, ‘I like to go to beautiful places where there’s waterfalls and empty fields.’ This is not immanently poetic, but juxtaposed with the camera work it takes on a heightened, almost ecstatic, state. Some criticize the film by stating real children do not speak that way, but, a) I’ve known them, and a read of Anne Of Green Gables shows they’ve always been around, and b) the poesy is not of the character, but what the character says in relation to her station on life.”

Here is a taste of the film courtesy of Youtube: