The Wind Journeys

Cirro Guerra's 2009 The Wind Follows is mostly landscapes.  The film is like one of those early sixties TV westerns in which a man on horseback is shown traversing a desert in one shot and, then, inexplicably riding the high sierra in the next image.  People go from place to place without transition:  one moment the young hero is high in the Andes; in the next shot, he's trudging through jungle.  This is an intentional effect in Guerra's film, but one that is so disorienting that it threatens to subvert the entire film. 

A traveling juglar (the Colombian word is derived from jongleur or troubadour) has lost his wife.  Bereft, the man sets forth on his donkey, riding side-saddle like Christ entering Jerusalem, to return his accordion to someone named Guerra.  The accordion is decorated with polished horns and there is a suggestion that Guerra is the Devil.  (Backstory annotations in Wikipedia but not really on-screen explain that the film is derived from a Colombian myth, the story of Francisco el Hombre.  Francisco was a traveling musician who spread news and revolutionary ideology throughout the remote villages in Colombia in the 1870's; he was reputed to have defeated the Devil -- or, maybe, been taught to play by the Devil -- and, therefore, doomed.)  The musician named Ignacio in the film, refuses to perform on his instrument and simply wants to be rid of it -- apparently, he believes that his musical prowess resulted in the dark forces seizing his wife.  A kid from the village trails Ignacio.  The teenager, Fermin, wants the older man to reveal his musical secrets to him.  (The initial scenes between Ignacio and Fermin look like the sequence in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai when the young peasant played by Toshiro Mifune trails an older swordsman, lingering near him with a mixture of hero-worship and self-conscious bravado.)  There is a musical duel between Ignacio and a musician using sorcery to defeat his enemies.  Ignacio wins the duel but the sorcerer's father, wielding a machete, wounds the horned accordion.  The instrument has to be repaired in the foothills to high mountains, on a picturesque peak overlooking precipitous green valleys.  The man who repairs the instrument turns out to be the juglar's brother -- he looks like a scrawny Allen Ginsberg.  Next, Ignacio and Fermin cross a lagoon as big as a sea and Ignacio is forced, at knife-point, to play a dirge while two men stab one another to death in a fight with machetes on a rickety bridge.  Within a strange grove of trees, Fermin undergoes an ordeal -- he plays the drums until his palms bleed and is baptized by an African holy man with lizard blood.  Ignacio wanders off, apparently angry that the young man has repeated his youthful error of allying himself with the dark powers.  Fermin attends another competition where three sinister judges, possibly blind and speaking an incomprehensible language, officiate -- the prize for the winner is Ignacio's accordion.  Fermin finds that Ignacio has collapsed in the high Andes and is paralyzed -- he is being tenderly nursed by a group of Ahuaco Indians wearing white robes and white conical hats in a picturesque quasi-Alpine village.  Fermin goes back to the bizarre accordion battle in the rainforest pole shed where other men are making cocks fight. He risks being beaten to death by a brutal Black boxer and, after showing he is willing to die for the instrument, the trio of scary judges gives him Ignacio's accordion.  He goes back into the mountains, a trip accomplished between two shots, retrieves Ignacio and, then, descends to a featureless desert -- this travel also occurring between one shot and the next.  In the desert, Ignacio collapses on a salt playa.  The sea is nearby and master with acolyte end up in a ghost town, apparently, an abandoned fishing village.  Guerra's mummified body festers in a casket awaiting burial.  A woman announces that the corpse is not to be buried until the accordion is returned.  The woman tells Ignacio that Guerra left him a message -- it's in the dead body's front shirt pocket.  Ignacio gingerly retrieves the note, reads it, and, then, a bunch of little kids appears out of nowhere -- they are Guerra's children. (Colombian juglar, like African-American bluesmen, are famous for their sexual virility and beget children with local women in every village that they visit.)  We never find out what the message says -- Ignacio plays for the little kids, who seem to be increasing in number with every shot, and Fermin is last seen wandering in the desert. 

The movie is a rough draft for Guerra's much more accomplished 2015 picture, The Embrace of the Serpent -- there is the same general theme of a shaman with mysterious powers leading a young disciple on a quest through a series of magical landscapes.  Both pictures end unsatisfactorily -- the end of the quest seems insufficient to the hardships endured and the wisdom on display gathered through the adventure is suspiciously vague, inflected with dimwitted and fraudulent New Age sentimentality.  The Embrace of the Serpent is much more effective because the film is shot in black-and-white, chastening Guerra's somewhat kitschy eye for the picturesque -- furthermore, the Amazonian setting grounds the latter film in reality.  The Wind Follows was made at 80 locations and the complete lack of continuity between landscapes makes the film seem, more or less, dream-like and disordered from its opening fifteen minutes.  There is no place that counts as normal; no real ground beneath our feet in The Wind Follows.  A quest has to set out from some place real and there isn't any grounding home from which to venture forth.  (I was surprised to learn that the movie is set in a very particular time:  a banner portrays one of the musical competitions as the first Valledupar vallenuto (the type of music that the accordionists play -- a combination of boastful rap and dance-inflected accordion accompaniment.) festival:  this means the movie occurs around Ash Thursday in 1968 -- but why this is significant is unclear to me.)  And, of course, I have no idea what the film is supposed to mean -- it's some kind of spiritual quest, but the object of the quest is unclear and, at the end, we don't get the sense that Fermin, the shaman's apprentice, has learned anything at all.  The movie is resolutely humorless and portentous but none of the ordeals seem particularly imposing or scary because the cutting from desert to savannah to swamp to high mountains occurs in such a disorderly way that we don't have any sense of real terrain traversed by the characters -- if you can get from jungle pole-barn to 18,000 feet above sea-level in the Andes in a single cut, it's pretty hard to see what's at stake in the journey.  We're in Jodorowsky's  El Topo territory, I'm afraid:  The Wind Follows is often beautiful and the landscapes are extraordinary -- but, in the end, landscape is all that the film has on offer. 

The Tribe

Myroslav Slaboshptskiy's The Tribe (2014) is a film perversely determined to punish the audience for any interest viewers might have in its subject matter.  The Ukrainian director uses long sequence shots as if to dare the viewer to look away.  In effect, the movie is silent because all of its characters communicate by sign language -- there is no music and, indeed, little in the way of Foley effects:  if you saw this thing in a theater, the loudest noise would have been fellow audience members gasping in dismay at some of the images.  The film is resolutely and utterly humorless and the performers, all of them deaf-mutes, are mostly ciphers.  There is a plot of sorts, but it is unrewarding and schematic.  In effect, The Tribe is a crime picture.  A naïve-looking young man arrives at a squalid and filthy-looking institution for the deaf.  At first, he is mercilessly hazed by a cadre of five or six thugs, older deaf students who wear black suits and thin ties to class  -- we see only two examples of education at the school; for most of the film, the picture follows the students as they gather in snowy vacant lots to plot their criminal enterprises or shows them abusing one another in the stark and grim co-ed dormitory in which they live.  It turns out that the shop teacher, himself a deaf-mute, is operating a prostitution business using two of the older girls; in this criminal undertaking, he enlists the assistance of the gang of young men who control the dormitory -- they solicit for the girls at a nearby truckstop.  The hero beats up some bigger boys and rises in the ranks of the gang.  When the lead thug gets run over and killed by a truck backing up -- he is smoking a cigarette and, of course, can't hear the vehicle -- the protagonist becomes the leader of the pack.  The boys mug people on trains, peddle trinkets, and help with pimping the two girls, leaping up to slap at semi-cab windows and displaying small hand-written notes as fee schedules to their customers.  In some ways, notwithstanding the film's peculiar and squalid premise, the movie follows the rules of a standard crime movie:  all is well until the hardened hero falls in love with one of the whores.   He, then, objects to her work and flies into a rage when she is solicited by another older and more aggressive pimp to travel to Italy, apparently to ply her trade there.  He seizes her passport, a document that she has laboriously acquired, and fleeing into a room inexplicably filled to the ceiling with paper trash, begins to eat its pages.  The rest of the gang restrains the hero, tortures him for a while and, after smashing a bottle over his head, leaves him for dead in the lavatory.  The lad is not dead, however, and he returns to the dormitory where he wreaks a gruesome revenge on his tormentors.  All of this is filmed at middle distance in two to three minute takes that spare the audience nothing.  There are several explicit sequence-shot sex scenes that follow various forms of intercourse from inception to climax and beyond -- bluntly stated, these scenes are embarrassing:  you feel ashamed for the young and vulnerable deaf actors engaging in the clinically depicted sex acts; there seems to be an element of exploitation.  The torture and beatings are filmed analytically as well, without any cuts, and there is a long single-take abortion scene that presumably had people fleeing for the exits -- an older deaf woman performs the work on the girl whose feet are tied in a string lasso up over her head having blithely heated a variety of nasty-looking tools over a gas-fired range.  Like the sex and violence, it's completely awful without being informative in any way -- in other words, it's just about what you would expect.  The film is certainly realistic enough, unrelentingly violent, and repugnant -- but to what end?  In the commentary, Slaboshptskiy, whose English is not good, seems to say that this community of deaf-mutes are without any concept of right or wrong -- they act outside of culture (or, rather, within their own vicious tribal sub-culture).  Accordingly, the director asserts that the film's nihilism derives from its subject community:  Ukrainian State-raised deaf-mutes are vicious, primitive beings without morality.  But can this be true?  And aren't we being asked to observe a kind of vicious freak show?  The film provides no commentary -- we don't know if the viciousness that we see is limited to a small group of the deaf students or endemic.  Certainly, it's not helpful that their industrial arts teacher moonlights as a pimp and that the attractive female history teacher seems to flirt with the older boys in the class.  Ultimately, the problem with the film is that we don't with whom to identify.  And the decision to not translate the loquacious sign-language exchanged by the characters seems wholly perverse (and, even, punitive) to me -- it's a language just as much as speaking and, so, why shouldn't we be allowed to know what the characters are saying?  Instead, the film opts to treat the deaf-mutes and their way of communicating as bizarre, freakish, as something entirely "other" to the audience.  Not translating the sign-languages signifies that the viewers are different from the protagonists, remote from them, and apart -- and, yet, the whole premise of the film is to embed us in their world.  But their world involves lots and lots of vehement communication so why aren't we allowed to know exactly what they are saying?   Put another way, why aren't the deaf-mutes allowed to speak for themselves?  (It's interesting to observe that when these deaf people quarrel, they turn their head away and won't look at their interlocutor to show their rejection of what is being communicated; this causes the interlocutor to continually nudge, or slap at the person with whom he or she is communicating, to force that person to look at the signs being made.)   

Westfront 1918

G. W. Pabst's scathing Westfront 1918 (1930) is companion to All Quiet on the Western Front, but more radically theoretical than the American film.  Indeed, the German movie is so uncompromising that it has never been popular.  Nonetheless, Westfrong 1918 is a powerful anti-war picture and, ultimately, more disturbing than Milestone's film because less sentimental.  It is not surprising that Westfront 1918 displeased just about everyone when it was released; Pabst's later film, the allegorical Kameradschaft (Comaraderie), a 1931 film based on an actual incident in which German miners dug a shaft across the international border to save French workers trapped in a collapsed mine, although equally accomplished, has always been more popular because it has a message that viewers can readily endorse.  Westfront 1918 is so savagely nihilistic that it doesn't seem to have any message at all. 

Westfront 1918 is simple enough:  four German infantrymen serve in the trenches on the West Front.  One of them goes home on leave to find his wife, who has been starving, sleeping with the butcher from another flat in the apartment.  The soldier is exhausted.  He lies down in bed with his wife but won't let her touch him.  As he departs for the front, his wife cries out:  "Can't you say something nice to me?"  The weary soldier pauses, but does not respond.  Returning the Front, the soldier learns that his friend, the "Student", has been killed and that his corpse is rotting in a nearby shell-hole.  The soldier and his surviving two buddies volunteer for a forward mission and find themselves in the vanguard of an attack.  All three men are badly wounded and the film ends in a chaotic field hospital where the dying soldiers are abandoned to perish.  As he dies, the soldier with erring wife imagines her anguished face: again, she cries:  "What can't you say something nice to me?" and, then, something like:  "You must forgive me -- it's not my fault."  Before the final fade-to-black, the fatally wounded soldier whispers:  "No one is at fault."  Of course, this conclusion -- that no one was at fault for the war and the suffering that it produced did not endear Pabst to his colleagues on the Left in the German film industry.  Pabst was later to make a powerfully cynical version of Brecht's Three-penny Opera and, of course, like most German directors in the Weimar period was aligned with the Communists.  The soldier's dying declaration that "no one is at fault" didn't please those like Rosa Luxemburg who declared that the War was caused by Capitalism and, in fact, was diagnostic of the economic malaise that Communism was supposed to correct.  Similarly, Pabst's refusal to ascribe fault didn't sit well with the German right-wing who blamed the defeat of their army and the later collapse of the economy on a sinister cabal of Jewish and Leftist conspirators.  Attacked from both sides, Westfront 1918 was subsequently, more or less, ignored.

But Pabst was a great film maker and Westfront 1918 deserves more attention.  The picture was Pabst's first sound film and it contains several bizarre, documentary-like sequences intended to showcase the new technology.  One extended scene involves a series of vaudeville-like performances for an audience of front-line soldiers -- there is a can-can dancer, several clowns playing comically tiny instruments, and, then, an orchestral interlude.   Although this sequence is clearly a demonstration of the new Ton film's technical capabilities, the sheer weirdness of the performances and their odd non sequitur irrelevance to the savagery of the combat disorients the audience -- what is this all about?  The battle scenes are designed to dramatize a very particular and important point:  the combat soldiers are completely helpless and have no agency -- they are victims, in the purest sense, of deadly forces over which they have no control.  In the opening, the four protagonist are almost killed when their position is shelled by friendly fire.  A friendly looking dog, a version of Rin-tin-tin, is sent with a message that the artillery needs to correct their aim -- but the dog ends up mangled in a shell-hole.  One of the protagonist carries the message, but when he reaches HQ, it seems, that the shelling has petered-out anyway and his message that he delivers is meaningless. (The film's title forcefully reminds us that all the suffering that we see is entirely futile -- the war is lost.)  The last third of the film is an extended battle scene staged to emphasize chaos and confusion.  Someone is picking nits and singing a tune to his buddy when a bunch of men wearing slightly different helmets appears out of the corner of the frame -- people start falling over and the trench fills with smoke.  Apparently, French troops have somehow invaded the trench although we are just as surprised as the Germans by their inexplicable appearance.  Pabst edits all the combat scenes to avoid imputing any active agency to any of the hundreds of troops that he shows.  In most war films, we see someone firing their gun and, then, the film cuts to an enemy soldier falling down.  In All Quiet on the Western Front, the camera is placed behind a machine-gun so we see the bullets knocking down swathes of attacking soldiers.  If someone throws a grenade, the film is edited to show the effect of the grenade.  Pabst refuses to edit his film in any cause and effect pattern.  We see men wildly pitching grenades in all directions but don't ever see the bombs explode -- the only exception is when someone tells a hapless soldier who has been throwing grenades that are not charged to "pull the pin;" the man does this, gets shot, and the grenade blows up in his own trench knocking down a half-dozen nearby soldiers.  We see troops firing but have no sense that their bullets are hitting anyone.  Pabst doesn't use flashy montage-cutting to amp-up the excitement -- in fact, several shots are completely, and daringly, static:  the camera simply surveys waves of men running forward and dying as they are knocked over by explosions and machine-gun fire.  The battle-scenes are not designed to have a front or back -- there is no sense of directionality in the attack sequences.  Groups of soldiers enter the frame from unanticipated directions -- the explosions and gunfire that cut them down seem to come from all sides at once.  In one scene, a group of soldiers lunges into a pit where enemies are hunkered down -- but before we see any hand-to-hand combat, Pabst just cuts away.  Panoramas of the battlefield that we would like to observe as a spectacle are invisible due to whirling clouds of smoke -- attacks vanish as the figures simply wander off-camera or are hidden by mists of poison gas.  Pabst shows soldiers with enormous glaring eyes gazing out at us in utter terror.  The gung-ho commanding officer goes mad and has to be dragged off the battlefield.  The field hospital is crowded to overflowing with screaming men, shell-shocked soldiers gibbering in corners, blinded men begging to be killed, and doctors who seem on the verge of nervous breakdown.  The home-front isn't much better -- people stand in long queues for food that is invariably sold out before everyone can be fed.  A fat man like a figure out of a George Grosz cartoon berates a soldier on the street.  The hero's mother sees her boy returned from the front but is unable to leave the food line to greet him -- she silently lets him pass by on his way to discover his unfaithful wife.  The butcher caught in flagrante delicto with the soldier's wife is a mealy-looking little man who has been exchanging meat for sex is palpably terrified by the fact that he has been conscripted and will have to report to the army the next morning.  At the front, the soldiers' keep a mistress, a French girl who they all seem to periodically rape -- the girl doesn't seem to mind since the Germans feed her.  She falls in love with the student but, of course, he is killed and left to rot in a water-logged shell crater.  The hovel where she is lives with the Germans billeted with her is shelled and we last see her as a refugee, departing the ruined village with a single piece of luggage.  Dying soldiers glare at the camera like figures in a painting by Otto Dix.  In a moment that foreshadows Kameradschaft, a mortally wounded Frenchman who is begging for water, and ignored, reaches out to take the hand of a dead German.  The film concludes with a stark handwritten title:  Ende?!  

The Gangs of Wasseypur

A minor assassin in Anurg Kashyap's The Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), describes the coal-mining city named in the film's title in these terms:  "In Wasseypur, even the pigeon flies with one wing -- that's 'cause he needs the other to cover his ass."  There must be more than a hundred murders depicted in Kashyap's 5 1/2 hour gangster epic, crimes generally committed by feral kids on motorscooters or gunmen walking up to people in crowded public places and shooting them down at point-blank range.  At times, assassins blow one another up with hand-grenades, called "terrorist apples" by the thugs who seem to be equally divided between Muslim and Hindu criminals.  At the beginning of the film, a half-dozen men with automatic weapons attacks the decrepit palace of Fazil Khan, the leader of one of the two crime-families contending for dominion over the wretched slums and decomposing walled townhouses where Wasseypur's corrupt elites live.  To one not familiar with Bollywood conventions, parts of the spectacular gun-battle are scored, MTV-style to jaunty Hindi pop songs with astonishingly profane lyrics -- at first, this aspect of the film was simply baffling to me.  Indeed, it should be noted at the outset that The Gangs of Wasseypur is not only a huge and gory gangster saga but, also, some sort of musical.

The Gangs of Wasseypur is Anurg Kashyap's fifth or sixth movie and, on the evidence of the picture, the director is a master film maker.  He is also, it seems, wholly remorseless -- in the course of the huge film, Kashyap kills off all of his principal characters, including most of the women, without expending so much as a backward look in their direction.  This is the kind of movie in which an important figure, the mother of four of the protagonists and the wife of a leading Don, is shot to death while shopping, a murder that results, of course, in a cascade of reprisal killings but that is not worth a single frame showing anything like sentiment or grief.  (Although the picture imitates certain aspects of The Godfather, Kashyap's movie has nothing like the spectacular show of grief displayed by Brando's Godfather when his eldest son is murdered -- Italian mafia pictures: for instance the patriarch of the genre, Rosi's Salvatore Giuliani feature extravagant displays of mourning and have an operatic and romantic quality. By contrast, Kashyap's Gangs is peculiarly cold, even nihilistic -- the generations of criminals slaughtered in the film generally die without any one shedding so much as a tear over them.)  The emotional tenor of the film oscillates between a low, mirthless kind of farce and lust inspired by some of the very beautiful leading ladies -- the general tone of the film is raw and objective, Brechtian in its indifference, a turbulent narrative that moves forward so swiftly that the story can't really pause to express any significant emotion.  Bubbling over with weird alienating pop song interludes -- there were 25 tunes commissioned for the film -- the entire enterprise seems fantastically analytical, remote, and completely superficial.  But if superficial, what a surface! -- the movie vibrates with intense, saturated and unnatural colors; the night scenes involve armed men traversing zones of various colored light -- it's like the expressionistic color scheme from Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind gone berserk.  One gang operates out of a slaughterhouse and everyone is literally drenched in blood from head to foot.  In another scene, two burly coalminers fight a duel by alternately bashing one another in the head with hammer-like lumps of coal -- the men are totally black with coal dust and the fight is staged in a torrential downpour as well.  Kashyap films wacky-looking betrothal ceremonies in which the grooms buy their brides while wearing headdresses that look like day-glow octopuses -- there are garish weddings and dances.  Whenever someone important dies, a New Orleans style band with trumpets, trombones and bass drums marches through the crowded streets led by a bare-chested guy in sunglasses crooning his heart out.  Gunmen hiding in heaps of garbage are spotted by street dogs and assassins purchase home-made pistols that backfire every time they are used.  Mothers in garish saris threaten to chop up their miscreant sons with huge butcher knifes:  "I raised you to be a killer," one mother proclaims to her cowering boy.  Currying favor with the poor, gangsters drive around the slums in trucks entirely draped in ribbons and tinsel with dancing Elvis-imitators mounted on them.  Everything is a spectacle and one that is peculiarly and intrinsically chaotic.  At one point, Danish, the son of a crime boss, named Sardar Khan, gets shot by a killer from an enemy gang.  Danish protests that it is just a flesh wound, but he is obviously severely injured.  Sardar Khan, enraged that his son refused to follow his order to go to the hospital, begins to savage beat the wounded man.  Danish agrees to be taken to the hospital but the keys to the truck have been lost -- Sardar brandishes a gun and says he'll kill someone if the keys aren't found.  (It turns out that one of the mobsters has them in their pocket).  The gangsters rush the wounded man to a hospital where the power promptly fails and the doctor protests that he can't perform surgery in the dark, an objection to which Sardar responds that if they have to use a flashlight to illumine the surgery they should do so -- after which, Sardar promises to ram the flashlight up the surgeon's ass.  In the film, nothing works right and there are comical "low-speed" chases, gunmen hunting one another trapped in traffic jams or whose mopeds inexplicably run out of gasoline at the crucial moment.  The only rational response to all of this chaos is modeled by the Fazal Khan -- he spends the last half of the movie stoned-out of his mind with a hash-pipe perpetually protruding from his mouth:  Khan stops smoking hash only long enough to behead his best friend, a nocturnal scene depicted with enormous back-lit jets of arterial blood, geysers so large and fulsome that they would appall even Japanese samurai film enthusiasts.  The dignified patriarch of the Singh crime family pronounces a kind of verdict on all of this disorderly violence:  "you have to be a real fucker to fuck up a fucker" -- a tautological statement that says it all.

The problem with long-form films of this kind is readily shown by the 12 or 13 hour extravaganzas broadcast by HBO and the other cable shows --  typically, a gangster picture of this length is simply too repetitive to be interesting and, after a couple of hours, interest in the entire proceedings flags.  Who cares who is killing whom?  This was a problem, in my view, with the FX series Fargo, a show that was similarly brilliant in its imagery, unremittingly violent, and, ultimately, much too long to sustain the audience's interest.  Kashyap, however, solves this problem by using two devices, one narrative and the other formal.  The narrative device that keeps the film engaging is that The Gangs of Wasseypur is fundamentally a four-generation family saga -- the movie covers a span of 70 years, beginning with primitive crimes involving wetting down coal to falsify tonnage and ending with elaborate internet scams.  Kashyap shows the progression from one generation to another -- the founder of the Khan crime family is a sort of brigand robbing British trains in 1941; this brigand has adopted the identity of a Hindu guerilla and terrorist, thus establishing the multi-generational feud that comprises the subject of the film:  between 1941 and 2009, the Muslim Khan family battles against the Singh mob (apparently upper caste Hindus) for control of the mines and nasty-looking industries of Wasseypur and its twin city, Dhanbad.  Whenever energy starts to flag, Kashyap and his writers simply kill off one generation and replace them with up-and-coming criminals of the next generation -- thus, we see our characters win their wives, the birth of their children, their inevitable assassination triggering their children's quest for revenge.  Kashyap also has a narrative advantage over Western film makers -- his characters can have several wives and, thus, father different lines of mobsters.  Notably Sardar Khan has both a Muslim as well as a neglected Hindu wife, Durga, a woman who is an epileptic.  Khan favors his Muslim family and has four sons by that wife; but he also has a viciously murderous son by Durga.  Accordingly, Kashyap can deploy complex family narratives involving different strands of the crime dynasty and the various subplots involving the women and their children keep the film moving forward at a breakneck speed.  It seems that there is something intrinsically fascinating about a film that encompasses a long period of history (shown in this picture by skillfully intercutting newsreel footage into the movie) -- the tedium afflicting something like Fargo or Vinyl never sets in because as soon as we start to weary of one cast of characters, they are wiped-out and a new group takes their place.  The second technique that Kashyap uses to keep things interesting is that the overwhelmingly oppressive mood of squalid violence is lightened by the musical interludes -- the sheer, bizarre contrast between the bloodbath on the screen and bubble-gum pop of the Hindi songs keeps the everything weightless.  The songs have lyrics that have to be heard (or translated by subtitles) to be believed -- they are relentlessly obscene with double entendre and use the word "fuck" about every five syllables.  Sometimes, the music is integrated into the action:  when one character smuggles pistols into Wasseypur, a band of hippies on the train sing an a capella ditty about penis size, referring the virile member as a gun.  There are numerous weddings and wakes in the film that all feature preening singers in Las Vegas garb wearing big sunglasses.  This continuous flood of music revives the film whenever it seems to lose energy and keeps things percolating.  Through the music, Kashyap can constantly manipulate and change the tone of the film -- no two scenes seem to come from the same movie.  In one sequence, Fazal Kahn flees from a fire-fight in his mildewed mansion -- for five minutes or so, he navigates a series of shadowy recesses and empty alleyways:  the film seems to stop entirely while Kashyap explores eerie, paralyzed imagery derived from David Lynch's more experimental films.  Some brutal scenes are played for laughs; one assassination involves an extended series of misunderstandings involving cell-phones.  There are extended rants that Tarantino-style obstruct the action -- the leader of the Singh family claims that the manhood of his mobsters has been ruined by the fact that the thugs have attended way too many Bollywood crime films; in making this complaint the venerable Ramadir Singh seems to disclose, however, a suspicious familiarity with the very movies that he condemns.  Young lovers quarrel over which film to attend and there are long disquisitions on subjects only tangential to the plot.  The fourth generation of criminals are so feral and nihilistically violent that they can't really function within the parameters of the plot -- as little kids, this generation is too busy kidnapping candy merchants and making them prepare their confections at gunpoint.  The last generation of thugs don't even have proper Indian names:  the two half-brothers are named "Definite", a word that no one understands (no one speaks English) and "Perpendicular".  These kids are so bad that they end up rubbed-out almost immediately or imprisoned.  "Definite" who is Durga's son is released from jail only to bring the whole epic to an end by murdering his half-brother, Fazal Khan, who has just slaughtered the Singh family in an assault on a hospital, a scene that is similar in many respects to the mayhem at the end of John Woo's Hard Boiled. 

I didn't understand about a fourth of the film.  I assume that this is based on cultural differences -- the women, in particular, were completely opaque to me, strange combinations of lust and astounding Medea-like ferocity.  And there's too much of the film: you have to devote two nights of your life to this stuff and it's not intrinsically edifying.  But there's, no doubt, that Anurgh Kashyap is one of the world's great filmmakers. 

The Jungle Book (2016)

The Jungle Book directed by Jon Favreau is a great, warm-hearted, and generous spectacle.  Ostensibly a remake of a Disney cartoon produced forty years ago, the film is, in fact, an intense adventure movie, more similar to the pictures in The Lord of the Rings cycle than to the easy-going animated 1967 feature.  Although everything (with the exception of Mowgli) in the movie is computer-generated, the movie looks photographically realistic -- the animals have the actual texture and appearance of beasts that we might see in a National Geographic special and the jungle, although full of vertiginous heights and cascading waterfalls, looks like a real place.  Indeed, the jungle has some of the hazy, primordial character of the jungles in paintings of the mid-Victorian sublime school -- for instance, Church's majestic view of the volcano Cotopaxi with its foreground dropping into an abyss occupied by a huge waterfall.  (Probably, the inspiration for many of the landscape images are similar forests and mountains and muddy ravines in Peter Jackson's Middle Earth films.)  The animals are not anthropomorphized -- the wolves have long spindly legs and alert canine eyes and some of them look more than a little mangy.  It's more than a little incongruous to hear them speaking, since the animals are shown naturalistically, but, after a while, the audience is educated into this convention and we really don't notice that the beasts are constantly bickering or muttering among themselves.

The film's plot is an extended chase sequence.  She Khan, a huge Bengal tiger, is the apex predator in the rain forest.  The tiger has been disfigured by the "red flower" (fire as it is called by the animals) and, indeed, sustained his injuries at the hands of Mowgli's father before mauling the man to death.  Mowgli escaped, was raised by a pack of wolves, and seems to be about 11 years old when the film begins.  At a "water truce" called during dry season, (all animals can drink from a puddle around the normally submerged Peace Rock without fear of attack), the tiger threatens the wolves and demands that they surrender the "man-cub" to them.  The wolves are willing to fight and die for the boy, but he leaves them, traveling with a black panther, and, later, a bear to an overlook above an Indian village.  The notion is that Mowgli must return to his own kind.  But Sher Khan intervenes and, ultimately, the animals league together to battle the tiger while a forest fire, inadvertently set by Mowgli, rages around them.  The film is filled with bravura action sequences -- a huge cobra embraces Mowgli, hypnotizes him and, then, tries to swallow him alive; there are landslides and an orangutan, the size of King Kong, also threatens the little boy, demanding that he bring him the promethean fire that terrifies the other animals in the jungle.  (Critics have noticed that the scenes with King Louie, who speaks with the voice of Christopher Walken, incorporate many of the mannerisms of Coppola's work with Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.)  Many of these action sequences contain images of great, almost visionary power:  in one scene, a herd of water buffalos charges down the flashflooding funnel of a muddy ravine.  The tiger has spooked the herd of buffalo in which he knows that Mowgli is hiding.  After a spectacular stampede, we see the great herd dispersing across a vast savannah, having emerged from the muddy chaos of the ravine, the animals slowing down, trotting this way and that in random groups, rain clouds scouring the distant horizon -- it's an image of breathtaking beauty.  Similarly, at the height of the forest fire, a herd of elephants emerges from the darkness, the huge animals silhouetted on the cliff tops against the glare of the flames.  The elephants use their tusks to divert the river and put out the fire, again a sequence of majestic splendor that is both brilliantly imagined and stunningly staged.  The film is full of small incidental details -- clouds of butterflies in distant beams of light, tiny forest creatures scampering underfoot and a strange gymnastic landscape of twisted and gnarled trees.  There are some defects with the film -- the battle between King Louie, the orangutang, and Mowgli with his protectors (the black panther and the bear) takes place in a crumbling Hindu temple sacred to Hanuman the monkey god, a sort of cross between a cathedral and Angkor Wat.  Much of the battle scene involves the huge red orangutan trying to squeeze through narrow vertical passages to seize Mowgli.  At the end of the film, the boy's final encounter with Sher Khan takes place within a sort of vast mangrove tree, a labyrinth of narrow passages and constricted spaces in which the tiger repeatedly gets caught -- it's the same general idea as the fight in the temple with the King Kong figure and this duplication of scenic effects lessens the power of the film's climax.  Nonetheless. Favreau throws one astounding image after another at the audience:  after King Louie has been immured in the collapsing Hindu temple, a thousand monkeys pour onto the ruins to desperately claw at the rocks to free the ruler from the fallen man-made mountain:  it's a spectacular, moving, and unexpected bonus, a memorable image provided out of sheer generosity since the scene of the monkeys trying to rescue the orangutang is completely superfluous in terms of the film's plot.  And this film is crammed with similar gifts.

Beresina oder Der Letzten Tage der Schweiz (Beresina or the Last Days of Switzerland)

At the outset of "Premature Burial," Edgar Allan Poe announces that some topics are simply too terrible for fiction, adducing among his list of horrors, "the passage of Beresina."  Poe refers to an episode during Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, mass slaughter that occurred when thousands of panic-stricken French soldiers tried to cross a bridge that was too small to accommodate the crush of retreating troops.   It is curious that a spry, even merry, Swiss satire has been named after this calamity.  Apparently, the Swiss troops allied with Napoleon demonstrated rare fortitude at the horrific bridge crossing and, even, sang an inspiring tune to keep up their spirits:  Mutig, mutig, lieber Brueder  -- Courage! courage! dear brothers... In Daniel Schmid's 1999 comedy, the song of the Swiss guards at the Beresina bridge is a code that triggers a geriatric monarchist rebellion, a coup d'état that leaves Switzerland under the rule of a kindly and ambitious Russian prostitute. 

I don't know much about Daniel Schmid -- he appears as one of the directors impersonating mobsters in Wim Wenders great neo-noir, The American Friend.  He has made one famous documentary, Tosca's Kiss, a picture about an Italian nursing home for opera singers, a noble and moving work that I saw when I was in college and, of course, was unable to understand at that time in my life.  On the evidence of Beresina, Schmid is certainly a capable satirist, although he works in a broad style that is tantamount to caricature -- there are faint influences of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove in the film, as well as a tiny bit of Brecht, but, by and large, the movie is a cheerful bagatelle; although there are multiple assassinations at the climax of the picture, the film generally feels light and confectionary and it is certainly very, very pretty.  Elena Panova plays Irina a Russian prostitute from some place called Elektrostal.  She has an extended family that she hopes to import into Switzerland, a place that she regards as a kind of paradise on earth.  In her letters to family members, always visualized as a dour crowd occupying one large, cluttered room, Irina portrays herself as circulating in Switzerland's high society where she has many benefactors.  In fact, she is a call-girl specializing in mostly sado-masochistic fantasies to which the Swiss elite seem to be addicted.  (Her madam is played by Geraldine Chaplin.)  The girl has broad Slavic features, creamy white skin and a lush figure generally set off by leather dominatrix garb -- the actress is incredibly beautiful and, of course, part of the pleasure in the film is simply watching her.  Irina is spying for security forces in Switzerland, led by an inept spymaster who keeps losing parts of his reddish moustache to the bondage masks in which Irina locks him.  A mafia chieftain named Tedeschi is laundering money through the Swiss banks -- a crime in which literally everyone, including the crusading investigative journalist, is complicit.  Poignantly, Irina wants to become "a Swiss girl" and worships the country, immersing herself in its history and spectacular landscapes -- there are stirring oaths taken at the foot of towering glaciers; in one scene, a bad guy places a phone call from a phone booth improbably located on an escarpment overlooking a vast river of ice.  (She tours the National Museum to learn more about her adopted country where she acquires a friend, confidante, and drinking buddy in Benedetta, a female janitor who works the subterranean torture chamber exhibits in place.)  One of Irina's customers is an old man who is a member of Cobra, a monarchist conspiracy plotting to kill the top members of the government and replace them with a King -- the entire country is imagined as resting on a maze of subterranean tunnels linking one place with another.  Irina serves the government efficiently and Tedeschi is captured.  Unfortunately, Tedeschi knows too much about corruption in Switzerland and he has to be murdered.  Irina's utility to the Swiss secret police diminishes and the government, now regarding her as an embarrassment since she knows the fetishes of most of the cabinet ministers, decides to deport her.  (Previously, she has been promised citizenship for her efforts.)  After a botched attempt at suicide, Irina accidently triggers an uprising in the Cobra cell.  All of the principal politicians in the State are assassinated and Cobra seizes the airwaves announcing that Switzerland's monarchy will be restored.  At a spectacular coronation ceremony, Irina is made queen of Switzerland.  The film ends with a lavish display of fireworks.  The final reel of the film, particularly the scenes involving the coronation of the Madonna-like whore, have a brilliant, enameled even cloisonné appearance -- it's like the scenes of the Mad King Ludwig swooning in his Wagnerian castles in Syberberg's Requiem for a Virgin King -- there seems to be some genuine nostalgia for the monarchy and, when the prostitute embarks  from the cathedral on a kind of gondola across one of Switzerland's vast lakes, the sky lit by fireworks, the film's ending seems bigger and more grandiose and more moving, in fact, than the relatively tawdry subject matter.  Last but not least -- the movie is a kind of musical:  there are several amusing songs and the picture ends with a fantastic turbo-charged polka tune by Florian Ast.   

Everybody wants some!!

In Richard Linklater's 2016, Everybody wants some!! nothing much seems to be going on.  You watch the film, an account of a freshman college student's first three days with his roommates at a school somewhere in Southeast Texas, with mild amusement but the whole enterprise seems a wee bit pointless.  Only later, on reflection, does the film's structure and content appear innovative, even radical.  On consideration, the film has a strange quality that is more than a little unnerving.

In setting, costume, and incidental detail, Everybody wants some!! is ostensibly realistic.  Every effort is made to duplicate the appearance of a Texas college town in 1980 -- haircuts, vehicles, tastes in music, clothing styles are all reliably reproduced.  The plot is bland and inconsequential to the point of vanishing -- the film's bland subject matter is exemplified in the generic title, possibly the worst name for a film made by a major director, in recent memory.  (No matter how hard you try, you can't keep the name of the movie in mind.)  The picture features a large cast of impeccably attractive and affable young actors -- since the protagonist has been recruited to play baseball, all of the boys in the movie are athletic and beautiful.  The movie is shot from the perspective of the freshman, using completely unobtrusive film grammar -- there are no memorable shots in the movie, very little intrusive editing (a montage showing the boy's first baseball practice is an exception), no visual arias or self-consciously pretty images; everything is direct, clear, even, self-evident.  The characters are without mystery or depth -- exactly what you would expect in a film about young college athletes.  There are no middle-aged adults, children, or elderly people in the film.  Everyone is between 18 and 24 -- one guy who turns out to be 30 looks like he is 19.  At the end of the film, we see a college professor but, only, briefly -- after their three days of strenuous drinking and partying, the two freshmen students fall asleep in their first class.  A baseball coach lectures the boys living together in the team's house on decorum, drinking, and relationships with girls -- everyone agrees with the coach's comments and, then, ignores his directives for the rest of the film.  The film resembles Animal House but without the conflict with authority figures and without the jokes.  The hero listens to "My Sharona" as he drives up to the sprawling old house where the baseball team lives.  He encounters some mild hazing when he meets the other boys who will be his roommates.  The kids go out to drink, meet girls at a disco called "Soundmachine" and, then, go line-dancing at country-music bar.  The next night, they have a party at their house.   They go to a bar to hear a punk band.  The hero pursues a girl who turns out to be sophomore studying Theater Arts.  The baseball players go to a party at the theatrically decorated house where the Theater Arts majors live and the hero stays up all night talking to the girl.  At dawn, they go swimming in the river and, perhaps, sleep together.  Then, the hero attends his first class -- the teacher writes these words on the blackboard:  Frontiers are what you make of them, possibly a comment on the fact the film's events are liminal, occurring n the frontier between the summer and the first day of college.  The hero and his buddy fall asleep and the movie ends.  The picture is casually vulgar and features endless drinking and pot-smoking with lots of sex between the compliant girls and the handsome young athletes.  There is literally no conflict.  No one gets sick or vomits after drinking; all of the girls are beautiful; the boys are all handsome and competent.  Although there is a Black kid on the team, there is no racism and no sense of racial difference.  The pretty girls all seem to want pretty much what the boys want -- that is, to hook-up for casual sex.  In its form, the film refers back to Linklater's famous Dazed and Confused -- but Everybody wants some!! lacks the melancholy sense in the earlier film that time is passing and that those who remain mired in High School are doomed, most probably, to lives of futility.  Clearly, the movie is not realistic -- the absence of ugly or, even, ordinary-looking people in the large cast signifies that we are well within someone's fantasy vision of an idyllic past.  (I assume the movie is autobiographical-- I think Linklater may have matriculated as a college baseball player).  A movie assumes a certain meaning based on the identity of its director:  if Dumb and Dumber were directed by Ingmar Bergman we would have a different reaction to the film than we might have otherwise -- we would be searching for evidence of Bergman's trademark ideas and obsessions in the picture.  So, similarly, we necessarily interpret a film based on our expectations as to the director's previous work and thematic concerns.  Everybody wants some!! is resolutely cheerful, optimistic, and free from conflict.  The film is a rarity -- a work of art that is completely lacking in drama or anything akin to drama.  Furthermore, the film presents an idyllic floating-world, a series of encounters that are seemingly weightless and without any consequence whatsoever.  In its way, the film's thematic material is as austere as that exploited by Bresson although in a different tenor -- there is nothing in the film to suggest any kind emotional conflict:  it is disconcertingly easy, stress-free, lacking even the slight but pronounced "dying fall' of melancholy that we perceive in Dazed and Confused.  So what are we to make of this peculiar film?  If it were directed by an unknown auteur, we would be tempted to consider the movie as a cynical attempt to cash in on the youth market, a genre film but without enough crassness or sex or cruelty to be particularly interesting.  But this movie is made by an important American director, the man who created the densely experimental and deeply problematic Boyhood as well as a host of other challenging films.  Ultimately, the viewer has the sense that the movie is all preliminary, some kind of scene-setting, for a conflict that may occupy a sequel film -- or, perhaps, a conflict that may never arise at all.