Juno by Jason Reitman (2007); Rating:5 in 5.

"As boyfriends go, Paulie Bleeker is totally boss.He is the cheese to my macaroni. And I know people are supposed to fall in love before they reproduce, but....I don't think normalcy is really our style."
               Juno Mcguff, the last monologue from the film "Juno".

"Juno" is simply the brightest film about a teenager I have ever, ever seen. Anyone with nominal conversational skills, don't watch this movie, because it can give you a frightful, sinking feeling in your stomach, which, in reality, will be a huge, massive attack of inferiority complex. And, anyone wishing a nice, little teen movie is up for a real surprise here. You know, I cannot even get serious about it yet, I am just so freaked-yanked-bombed out of it. It's one freaky big Martian hoopla put always sunnyside-up.

This movie transcends the limits and the very notion of teen movies in a dazzlingly positive way. This is the other side of films like "Elephant", "Paranoid Park", and "Election", which succeded to do the same, albeit "through the glass, darkly", so to speak. It is hard to imagine a teen movie being original; we are so accustomed to familiar scenes, facial expressions, boy groops, sorority sisters et al. Yet, "Juno" effortlessly moves out of that planet, and creates something exhilarating. And the first and foremost thing that works for this movie is it's dialogues.

The original screenplay for this film is written by Diablo Cody, a ravishing-looking ex-exotic-dancer-turned-scriptwriter. I have known her as one of the best bloggers out there before her script-writing days; her "Pussy Ranch" blog was something worth going back again and again. She brings her own, straight-for-the-punch humor to the dialogues. This film is really about dialogues. Take them out, change them an iota, and the movie will be gone. American films, well, a certain type of American films, have already taken the craft of "American" script-writting to a very high level. This film is the culmination of all those fabulous dialogues by Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, the Marx brothers, and many more. This is the first of her scripts to be filmed, and she has already won an Oscar. We will wait anxiously for her next efforts, but I have a sinking feeling that hers will be the case of Charles Dickens and "Pickwick Papers". Let us hope she will prove us wrong.

The medium of film is simply brutal towards people who overdo a thing on screen. If the director of this film (Jason Reitman) had tried to show some of his "craft" to prove his virtuoso talents, this film would have been a spectacular ruin. The credit of the film-maker as far as this film is concerned lies in the fact that he continuously underplays the role of a director. The camera remains neutral, unnoticed, and lets the dialogues do their work, take their own life and do their tap-dances. Also, this film has one of the finest title sequences I have seen in a long time.

Oh, and now, let's talk about the acting. Ellen Page is FRIGHTENINGLY BRILLIANT as "Juno". She is the next great thing in Hollywood for me, and I am ready to put my pants on fire to prove that. She, and Julia Stiles, are the next two women to watch for; a bit like Dianne Keaton and Mia Farrow. I am not going to describe even the smallest parts of this film, as it has become kind of a sacred entity for me, but I can tell you this. Ellen Page is as inevitable in this film as Marlon Brando was in "Last Tango in Paris". And that's the highest compliment I ever pay to any actor. J.K Simmons is perfect as Juno's father, Mac Mcguff. Jennifer Garner as Venessa delivers a surprisingly genuine performance. See this movie only to watch Eleen Page again and again. She looks like the "Actor's Studio for All Teen-age-Movie Acting Aspirants". She is encyclopediac in her role.

The music works brilliantly, working as a major 'misce-en-scene'. The film is so bright that it will hurt somewhere inside, if you still can feel a thing. Thankfully, this is not a 'Catharsis' movie, and it diligently avoids all the emotional pitfalls conceivable in such a film. "I'm Not There" was for me the best movie of 2007, but this is the most surprising movie of last year. I cannot help but give it a five. And, it should have won more Oscars. At least Ellen Page should have.
                                                 BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

The Counterfeiters by Stefan Ruzowitzky[2007]; Rating: 1 in 5

I said “slap me thrice and hand me over me momma” when, after watching this film, I recalled it is Austrian by birth. This is a stinkingly American film. It valorizes, eulogizes, extols, lauds, and sings “Ave Maria” to all possible clichés Americans, oh! so like about Nazi atrocities. How many films have you seen about concentration camps? From the early “Young Lions” to our veritable “Schindler’s List”, there is one and only predominant cliché about the Nazis: they were a mass of extreme psychopaths with an insatiable appetite for unexplainable cruelty. A complete society and race of Buffalo Bills and Tooth Fairies. And no one even remotely as interesting as Hannibal the “Cannibal”. Have you ever seen a movie from America that takes the pain to criticize Nazi ideology? The concept of genetico-racial superiority? Have you ever seen the broad picture? All you have seen are either psychopaths, or reluctant humans forced to go against their “conscience”, and of course, the win of the good one. Catharsis to the point of “Puking Pastille” [I thank J. K. Rowling for the phrase. It is one of her very few noble deeds]. You want to know, why is it so? I will tell you the reason: America has not yet come into terms with the reality of the Nazi era. In fact, a large and predominant part of the American society believes in some of the most fundamental Nazi ideologies: Genetico-racial superiority, belief in super-humans (if you don’t believe this, then you have not watched “Rambo”), belief in being the core of the world (have you watched their ‘World Series’?), and over all, a middle-class peasant political elitism that exhibits a violent, and self-righteous bigotry towards every other class. Hence, America cannot afford to criticize the politics of Nazis. And what else were the Nazis other than a political organization trying to make itself the society? As a result, all you see are faux-documentaries, and human tragedies that are blanker than blank. Still, I understand the American Dilemma, and kind of tolerate it. But when a director from a country physically and metaphysically abused by Nazi ideology reiterates the same void craps, it seems to be an act of abominable sacrilege. This movie tastes like a bowl of “two-minute” instant noodle. If you have seen your films seriously, you will be able to predict every forthcoming sequence without troubling your mind. It is a blatant copy of American concentration-camp films. Predictably, it won the Oscar. That has enabled me to re-discover my faith in Oscar.

The film centers on a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch (played by Karl Markovics), who is used in an operation to create lots of fake dollars and pounds by his old apprehender, Friedrich Herzog (played by Devid Striesow, and the spelling is not a mistake) at a Nazi concentration camp. The rest of the film can be guessed by anyone other than zombies: the guy Solomon becomes a copy of the character played by Sir Alec Guinness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”; he starts to compromise with everything and tries to survive. Bluh, bluh. There were potentially good sections in the film that remained under-developed: at the beginning and the end of the movie, we see Solomon, after the war, playing extravagantly at a casino. The character of Herzog had brilliant potential: he is an opportunist who happens to wear the Nazi swastika, and believes he will be “handling humans” after the war. I am amazed they never foresaw the potential of a film where a gambler and a crafty bureaucrat meet and we discover that the gambler was the prisoner of a concentration camp, where the bureaucrat used to be the jailer. Someone like Michael Mann would have done exactly that. But we are talking about lesser humans here. Frankly speaking, I am flabbergasted with these routine “Nazi” movies. And, like salt over wound, it uses one of the most disgusting cliches of contemporary cinema: jerky hand-held cameras, as if making a faux-documentary. It seems that the film fraternity has completely forgotten the characteristics of the genre called mock-documentary. it was the last thing, as a viewer I needed. Enough was enough.

I will instead give you a bigger picture. There is this lovely little 1969 comedy called “If it’s Tuesday, This must be Belgium” [Give me that lovely early morning bedroom romantic sequence with beautiful Suzanne Pleshette (the girl from “The Bird”, remember?) anytime, any day, in film or in life, I will lap it up gladly]. In it, there is this pair of couples in the film, one American and other German. Both the husbands use to brag about “the war” absurdly. The American part is at least true. The World War II is their moment of greatest glory, the point when they reached “humanity”; it is their counter-balance to their mass-inferiority complex about not having a racial tradition. It is the war when they became the messiahs of all the free men. They need such movies to boost their egos. I am not American; I don’t want to be one too. I do nod such craps. Not anymore.

This film is disgusting not because it is made by the worst director and the worst script-writer ever, but because it makes mockery of the medium of thought called film. Film is as much a medium thought as literature is. Anyone who insults that, anyone who treats like a piece of Weekly Easy-to-make Recipe for Tomato soup, deserves to be vilified to the limit. I demand a minimum level of intelligence from a creator, especially when he is pretending to be discoursing about “serious” matters. This film does not have that quality. It will get a 1 from me.

If you want to see a good film, and if you are downloading torrents (legal, or illegal, its up to you. It has nothing to with me), then try downloading Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park”. In him, we find a great director at the peak of his creative prowess. Twenty years from now, he will be counted as a creator critical to the development of contemporary cinema; his films will become standard canon at any film studies department. So miss at your own risk. And, if you are a devotee of Western Classical music, and also like romantic films, watch “The Competition” (with Richard Dreyfuss and Miranda-ish Amy Irving) on Sony Pix. The music and the characters will get to you.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Hitman (2007) by Xavier Gens. Rating:1/2 in 5

The year 2007 has been exceptionally productive, as far as films are concerned. That enabled me to have one of my longest-running orgies of sheer audio-visual pleasure, which was exhilarating and dolorously sinful, I swear. Well, friends, that uninterrupted run has come to an end, due to two of the most fiendishly abominable films ever. I am kind of very glad to tell you, one of them is an Oscar-winner. La-dee-dah! Oscar has not changed! But I will come to that Oscar-winner later. This one here is about a 2007 action thriller based on the popular computer game “Hitman”. The film, predictably, is also called “Hitman”. The film is stupid, unimaginative, routine, badly made, badly acted, and badly conceived. If the director, Xavier Gens, goes on this rate, he will be a good company for Ed Wood [unanimously tagged as “World’s worst director ever”] in hell.

This film is a publicity campaign for bald guys. It tells you how heroic, blood-thirsty and yet sexually innocent they can be; it reassures you that a girl need not fear that a bald man will “do it” to her even when she sits naked on his lap. How reassuring! If a bald man feels like suing Fox after that, I will donate to his court expenditure fund gladly! The film starts with a long sequence with a kind of mushy-mushy spiritual hymn going on at the background, where loads of very good-looking children get their heads shaved and a bar-code tattooed at the back of their head. It might remind you of ISCON, and, of course, pedophilia. A website says that this sequence is taken from the TV serial “Dark Angel”. May be, I don’t know. It is ostensibly an explanation for the shaved head of the hero [Timothy Olyphant]. What is amazing is that all those guys up there making these crap-shits can even dare to think that viewers will give a damn about their over-zealous and under-imaginative explanation for, you know what, A SHAVED HEAD WITH A BAR CODE! The hero, Agent 47, is the greatest killer on the planet. He is sexually frustrated. His educational credits are solely made of his readings of cheap magazines where they advice men on the art of seduction. I have a suspicion that you can possibly shoot him straight through his head, and he will not be killed; he cannot have got more than an ounce of brain. He makes people eat a pound of C4 and send them into offices in Africa as human bombs. Yet, he is so stupid that he forgets to cut their tongues off so that they cannot tell on him! And, the Human Bombs, very conveniently, forgets to take an enema or a stomach pump! He can walk barefoot, and when he steals from a showroom, people fail to see him. Blah, blah, yeah, yeah. And, this was very interesting, he is a member of a group of similar “Hitman”s [all with shaved heads] who do not fight between each other with automatics, but short samurai swords. That is supposedly quite honorable. There is a fight sequence in the film where 5 or 6 Hitmans fight with each other; it is the dumbest action sequence I have ever seen. The scriptwriters who came with this idea should be awarded the Darwin Award for endearing stupidity. Unfortunately for us, the prize is only posthumous. Then there is this arch-nemesis of our hero [Dougray Scott], an Interpol agent, who relentlessly shadows him. Unfortunately, instead of playing “Cops and Robbers”, they really play “Who’s the Dumbest?” between themselves. And, aha, there is a woman [Olga Kurylenko], because otherwise there would not have been a woman. She displays her gorgeous body almost all the time; seem to have an allergy towards clothing; and her only wish, dream, desire, ambition and whatever-else such woman may foster, is to get fucked by the hero sore. Fine. I love sex scenes. But can you imagine what happened next? Seconds before consummating his first “you-know-what”, the hero injects the girl unconscious. Still fine. I like homosexuals too. But no, this guy is not attracted to a hunk, a horse, a dog, or even a lamp-post! Throughout the film, I was shouting at the screen: GIVE ME ONE INTERESTING FRAME AND I WILL FORGIVE YOU! They did not give me the chance. This film is far worse than a video game.

Salvador Dali once said “the guy who first said “your cheeks are like a rose” was surely a poet. The guy who repeated it was the sorriest ass ever seen talking.” Our world of film is unfortunately filled with such sorry asses, like all the people involved with this film (which includes Luc Besson). They have the habits of last-minute students who memorize essays from last-minute suggestion books. This film is like that half-burnt chocolate cake made by a fourteen-year old, who happened to have discovered the cookbook for the first time. It is even worse, it even lacks the enthusiasm. If one collects the cans of its rolls and dumps them at the Mariana trench, he/she will be doing an act of proper charity.

Some may say that it is a futile wish to find a mainstream action movie to be good cinematically. I absolutely disagree with that. Structurally, this genre has given us brilliant attempts [Bourne films, Blade Runner]. Some of them have been applauded by everyone [La Femme Nikita, Leon], some of them had a quirky intelligence and humor to them [The Last Action Hero]. All it needs are understanding, intelligence, and sincerity. But Hollywood never believed much in those. Some say that Fox has interfered with the shooting of this film, and toned down the violence. I don’t think violence can help this movie. Even with a lot of violence, this movie would have been the zilch it already is. This will prove to be a disappointment for the gamers as well, as it completely lacks the edge and movement of the game.

This is an abominable film. I give it a ½ out of pity that verges on self-disgust for watching this.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

I'm Not There by Todd Haynes. Rating:4 & 1/2 in 5

If you want me to tell you what this film, “I’m Not There” is all about, I can’t. Because the film itself ain’t straight. It is about what Bob Dylan had been, could have been, should have been, shouldn’t have been, and may have been. Towards the end of the film, Jude Quinn (played by Cate Blanchett), an incarnation of 60’s Dylan at the top of fame and controversy, says: “yes….chaos, clocks, watermelon…it’s everything”. That’s the closest one can get to describe this film in a sentence.

There are six incarnations of Bob Dylan in this film; two of them (depends on how you count), Jack Rollins/Pastor John (played by Christian Bale) and Jude Quinn, are biographically and behaviorally partially similar to Dylan; others are, at best, reflections and, at worst, refractions of his character [I am not using the words “best” and “worst” as value judgments here]. Among them is a black child who fraudulently calls himself Woody Guthrie (played by Marcus Carl Franklin) ---an act of homage by the director---; carries a guitar that says “This Machine Kills Fascists” [a tag the real Guthrie used to keep on his guitar], hitchhikes the length and breadth of American railroad, ends up meeting the real Guthrie in a hospital, and is a state fugitive (for unknown reasons) in reality. There is this perpetually bored-looking guy who faces an interrogation team (it seems) and calls himself Arthur Rimbaud (played by Ben Whishaw), who talks about anything and everything, and does it with dazzling smartness [“I accept chaos…..I am not sure it accepts me”]. Then there is Robbie Clark (played by Heath Ledger), a “James Dean, Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac, all rolled into one”, who acts in the role of Jack Rollins in a Hollywood film “Grain of Sands” and becomes an instant hit, who is as erratic and as difficult in his marriage with his wife, a French painter, Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) as Bob Dylan the divorcee; the film goes through their love affair [“and the cat across the roof, mad in love, scream into drainpipes”] that stays as long as the Vietnam war, and at the end, Robbie, most probably, dies. The strangest of all incarnations of Dylan is played by Richard Gere, who really is Billy the Kid [ the only semblance of a reason given that explains why Billy the Kid can be Dylan’s incarnation is this dialog “we hadn’t spoken in a long while...I think he was involved with someone...actually...he said something to me on the phone about angels hanging out of buildings, which was frightening....I thought he was hallucinating...that's the last I heard....it was like what people say about Billy the kid...that he really just dodged the bullet and went on dying....and Jack, he always loved Billy the kid..], only older, who lives near a town called Riddle, where Giraffes and Unicorns roam across the American grassland; Billy faces his old arch-enemy, Pat Garrett (played by Bruce Greenwood), and defeats him, seemingly. Then there is Alice Fabian, played with deceptive effortlessness by Julianne Moore, who very clearly is Joan Baez, there is Allen Ginsberg, all the four Beatles, a model named Coco, harlequins, jokers, mimics, masked men, carnivalesque crowds, miners, passengers from tubes, paranoid reporters, hobos, Americans looking like period pieces, Lyndon Johnson proclaiming “ Its not yellow, its chicken”, etc etc. Do you get the picture? Of course you don’t. Like any good film, it cannot be expressed through words; it eludes literature. Major portions of the film is made like a mock-documentary; the part with Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) is a honest and strong reference to Fellini’s 8 & ½ (in black & white); and there are freeze frames and captions accompanied by rapid gunshots, which is again a clear allusion of Jean Luc Godard’s “Masculin Feminin”. The storylines are shot in different film stocks and styles. The scenes featuring Woody Guthrie, Robbie Clark and Billy the Kid are in color. The scenes involving Jack Rollins/Pastor John are shot on 16mm color stock, and are framed as a documentary with interviews from people who knew him describing his transformation. Arthur Rimbaud's scenes are shot on very grainy black and white stock. Finally, there is an abundant array of wonderful Dylan songs (many of them sung by Dylan himself) that work like a harmonic twin to the visuals. Altogether, it is an unusual film. In fact, although this is a film from USA, this movie is the grandson of that past cinematic moment where Nouvelle Vague and Frederico Fellini met. This is a European film, mate, and of the highest quality. Do you ask anyone, “What is it all about, Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou”? Do you ask, “Give me a synopsis of Fellini’s “Amarcord”? You will not dare, because you know that’s stupid and irreverent to the craft of film-making too. If you understand that part, you must not ask what this film is about. At the final judgment, this film is about films. You have to see it to know what it is all about. I am done with telling the story. Now I will tell you what I felt about the movie.

This movie has nailed Bob Dylan, precisely because it refuses to nail him down. The inanity of conventional Hollywood biopics like “Ali”, “Aviator”, lies in their futile attempt to create a private “human” out of celebrities; as a result, we see them crying, fucking, shitting in their pants, and ending up being the greatest hero of the humanity. No one dares to explain what we saw, what we heard, what we felt. This film does not try to portray humanity, it does not even pretend to believe that the phenomenon of Bob Dylan can be explained or even shown consistently through just one persona. That is the first hypothesis on which this film stands: “there he lies. God rest his soul.... and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness...and his phone numbers. There he lay--poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity; nailed by peeping tom...who would soon discover (Cate Blanchett--the problem is like a naked person) even the ghost is more than one person...”. Even the ghost of Dylan is more than one person. The film-maker took a risky decision in opting for six different Dylans; it proved to be a brilliant one from a true experimental formalist. At the end, there is not a single mention of Bob Dylan in the film, but he is everywhere; you might try to pin him down scene by scene, but then, he is just not there. The film is about the real Dylan because it refuses to essentialize a singular Dylan, and forget about all his anomalies, contradictions, betrayals. The film gets him where he is not. Dylan is there where he is not. Find it paradoxical? That is the first clue to psycho-analysis. We can consider this film to be a psycho-analysis of Bob Dylan. A brilliant psycho-analysis at that.

With this film, director Todd Haynes has established himself as a true “Auteur”. This is the first film I have seen of him, and I am terribly impressed. He shows his inheritance of Fellini and Godard with a frank show of strength that astounds. Any director of lesser skill, imagination or confidence would have made a complete frothing mess out of it. Now, here I must caution you people. There are and will be negative reviews about this film that will say “It is incoherent, tangled”, “art-house stuff”, “lacks a coherent storyline”, “it is cerebral and obscure”, “it does not illuminate Bob Dylan” [Illuminate! What a JOKE!!], etc. They are all true. I prefer this film this way. I do not want to see a “coherent” Bob Dylan who notoriously was never so. If you want straight lines and coherence, don’t watch this movie. Do not watch those great films of 60’s from France and Italy. Do not read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Do not watch Picasso, do not watch Jackson Pollack. They are all incoherent, lack unified meaning, they are often deliberately obscure, they are all art-house. Then the greatness of art-forms is not for you.

I will give you a solution that make you understand the film better: whenever you find yourself plagued by the “incoherence” of the film, whenever you ask yourself “what does it mean?”, ask instead that famous counter-question asked by Dylan himself: How does it feel? How do you feel?

“I’m Not There” is not only a biopic of many Dylans, or Dylan as an idea, it is a film about his world, his influences, and his thoughts. It is a film about Dylan’s, and consequently Woody Guthrie’s, America. It is a film about the history of film-making. This film can be seen as an attempt to answer that unanswerable question Jean-Pierre Laud’s character asks in Godard’s “Masculin Feminin”: “Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Bob Dylan?”. It can be taken as an attempt to relocate Fellini’s 8 & ½, or to reinvent it. It can be seen as a critique of those linear documentaries about Bob Dylan. It is something more as well, something I still haven’t discovered yet. May be I will when I watch it for the fourth time. I am afraid the students of Cinema Studies are going to be very busy writing dissertations on this one.

A film of such extraordinary intellectual complexity would have been dull without humor. Fortunately, the film retains the bitter, oblique humor of Dylan all the way through. Did you observe how many times I have a quoted a dialogue from the film? That is because I am in love with this film’s dialogs. They are sharp, moody, Dylan-ish, often very funny, and brilliant.

Yet, after all that, this film would not be standing on its feet today without such brilliant actors. I am particularly bowled out by Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire. She is as perfect in the role of Claire as Vivian Leigh was as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; she is a particularly strong-willed butterfly perpetually wounded. Christian Bale is spot on in his imitations of Dylan; there is a very thin line between imitating and monkey-ing someone, both Bale and Kate Blanchett manages to go deep into their characters even when imitating Dylan accent-by-accent, flinch-by-flinch. Late Heath Ledger, as always, went uncannily deep into his character. So deep in fact, it scares a little. And, of course, there is Cate Blanchett’s performance.

What Cate has done in this film is stuff of legend. Her acting in this movie has taken the craft of acting to a new level altogether. She is a neurotic, caustic, amphetamine-saturated character, a dazzling bundle of flinching nerves with an unpredictably ambivalent attitude towards everything. She takes a roll down the hill with the Beatles, cavorts with a model named Coco, and desperately tries to avoid a paranoid reporter from BBC. Cate follows Dylan so closely that some viewer might just sit back and mutter in discomfort, “Isn’t she crossing the line? Is she allowed to go that close? Is anyone allowed to go that close?” She unveils a pleading, feminine, insecure quality in Dylan’s rage that, I never suspected, was there, inherent in him. Cate Blanchett’s acting in this film should be equated with Orson Wells’ in “Citizen Kane”, Marlon Brando’s in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, or, in “Last Tango in Paris”.

The cinematography of Edward Lachman is cerebral, spot-on, and often dazzling. So is the editing.

Director Todd Haynes has won the Special Jury award at Venice for this film. He should have got the Golden Lion as well, which went to Ang Lee for his “Lust; Caution”.

I am not going to give this film a 5. That does not mean this is not a great film. I am deducting this ½ point as a gesture of optimism. I expect even better things to come from Todd Haynes. I am saving up my perfect 5 for that. Also, great films like this need a little time to gain their true stature. Just like good wine. So let’s say I am waiting for this film to decant a bit. I am not sure this is a perfect film; there is almost nothing to compare it with. May be five years from now, I will accept defeat and give it a 5. For now, I will remember it as an extraordinary film that proved to be a resounding slap over the cheeks of those ruddy little biopics Hollywood puke out in the market every year. I will remember it as 2007's best film.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

GREAT FILMS: ELEPHANT(2003) BY GUS VAN SANT (WINNER OF PALME D'OR,CANNES)

When the tone poem “Don Juan” by Richard Strauss, the great German composer and not a relative of Johann Strauss, was premiered in the year 1889, half the hall cheered and the other half booed. This told Richard that he has found his own musical voice, and he wrote:

“I now comfort myself with the knowledge that I am on the road I want to take, fully conscious that there never has been an artist not considered crazy by thousands of his fellow men.”

After the controversy about his 2003 film “Elephant”, director Gus van Sant could have proudly reiterated that. This is a great film, this is an extremely unlikely film to be made in Hollywood, and it is a miracle that the film was ever completed. It unanimously won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; Todd McCarthy of Variety magazine said that the film is “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst”. Are you wondering why there was such bipolar disorder among critics? I will tell you. But before that, let me tell you one thing. If you want to know whether a film is really good or not, go to the Europeans (not the British), and stop believing the Americans (especially the critics). They are genetically impotent of anything higher than good mediocracy.

First, I must tell you how I discovered this film. It was 2:30 AM of stark, cold night; I was deep into a movie binge. Then I decided to go to bed. Before that, I switched the TV on. It was HBO. The next movie, they showed, was something named “Elephant”. I liked the cinematography from the trailer, so decided to go through the first few minutes, and then go to bed. I did not sleep that night. I was feeling like a new-born.

I am not kidding. That’s what a good film, especially when it comes as a surprise, can do to you. From then on, this film became a personal obsession for me. For the record, in last two years, HBO showed this film only once. Unfortunately for HBO, they sponsored this independent film. Well, enough of oblique talk, lets come straight to the point. Who is this Gus van Sant? All of you have seen at least one of his films: “Good Will Hunting” (1997). Do you think that is a great film? It is not, it is just a very good Hollywood film. You might have seen another of his movies at Z MGM of past: “To Die For”, with Nicole Kidman starring as a murderously ambitious weather-girl manipulating her husband and an unstable boy (Joaquin Phoenix) obsessed with her. Gus van Sant is primarily an independent moviemaker who made it big in Hollywood with “Good Will Hunting”. He made only two mainstream movies after that; he understood the limitation of Hollywood factories to be debilitating for a truly original director, and he left. Here is what he said, “I came to realize since I had no need to make a lot of money, I should make films I find interesting, regardless of their outcome and audience.” Gus van Sant came into his own with his later works, especially in his “Death Trilogy”. Elephant is the second film of the trilogy. What is “Elephant” all about? It is about a massive shootout inside a school, an event strongly resembling the Columbine School Massacre. The reason people got angry about this film is because it is only about the shootout; in other words, it does not provide any reason, background, or cure, it just states what it wants to state. It does not let you close the case shut, and move on after the movie. It keeps the problem open. The difference between “Elephant” and other inane “issue-based” “movies with messages” is the difference between polemic and sincere thought. The difference between political parties and Karl Marx. Between “kitsch” and “sublime”. The greatest thing about this film is that it refuses to essentialize anything and problematizes everything. It is unbearable for the American media to see someone thwart the “great” reasons and cures they have formulated and transmitted everywhere for years, unbearable to see someone denuding the mystic glamour of its favorite events, events that they cover inch-by-inch, second-by-second, deaths they have shown in all their glory; it is unbearable for them to see themselves naked and waxed like a freak. In its after-effect, “Elephant” is a destroyer of myths and myth-builders. If you conform to stupid ideas such as “Films Propagate Violence among Kids”, “Consumerism Kills You Spiritually”, “Charity will One Day Make Every Poor Rich” etc, then you will not like this film. But in that case, you should not like me. Because, if you follow a logical sequence starting from those quoted presumptions, you will end up at the statement “We Are Worse than Baboons”. In case you accept those oft-repeated statements I have put under quotation marks, please accept this as a truth. It might end up being self-reflexive.

Now, for the remnant, are you quizzing yourself why this film is named “Elephant”? There is no reference to any sort of an elephant in the film (other than a pencil drawing in one of the protagonist’s room). There have been many interpretations of the name of the film; some say it is a tribute to a BBC documentary made by Alan Clarke of the same name; I prefer a different explanation. The title is an allusion to the Indian fable “Blinds Watching an Elephant”. Most of you know the tale; blinds cannot gasp the reality of an elephant wholly. What Gus van Sant means here is that we cannot understand the enormity of a homicide only through analytical reason; whenever we try to interpret, we distort the image by essentializing it. “Elephant”, on the other hand, deconstructs the event [in the strictest Derridian sense. You have to see the film to realize how closely it reads the events]. In that respect, this film is truly post-modern (not in an “ism” sense, but as a time&space-frame), and a close relative to films like “No Country for Old Men”.

“Elephant” is one of the most poetic films I have ever seen. It is made of extremely long tracking shots filmed through SteadyCams. Harris Savides’ cinematography astounds even after watching it thrice. The film follows several students throughout the huge school on an ordinary day that ends up being the date of the shootout. There is violence in the film, but they are not violent. Gus van Sant strips the killings of their glamour, effect, convention and polemic by making them anemic; he shows what they really are: repetitions of video games, simulation of a simulation. The deaths in this film are “cool”, or even “cold” in a Marshall-McLuhan-Jean-Baudrillard sense. The film does not try to analyze its characters; instead it respects their privacy (when a student enters the classroom, the camera remains outside). One of the shooters, Alex (played by Alex Frost) is an accomplished pianist. He played Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” in a long sequence, and that music becomes the theme (the score is actually played by the actor Alex Frost). It is one of the most serene and memorable use of Classical music in a film I have ever heard. The cinematography in reminiscent of the great Hungarian director Belá Tarr, and in its empty uneventful nature, it reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni at his best. Also, one can say that such film-making signals a return of Cinema verité.

The film was shot in an improvisational way. There were no dialogs in the script; they were made up by the actors ad lib. It was an inspired choice, as it helps the film to avoid “meaningful”, cliché films. Everyone looks so real that it might scare you. In fact, all the actors in the film are amateurs; many of them were from the school where the film was shot.

Some people complained about some essentialisation in the film: the shooters watch a Nazi propaganda film; they play a video game where they shoot people. That disturbed me for some time: are they not trying to propagate a “message”? But then I realized where my, and other critics’, problem lies. We forget the fact that Americans are the largest consumer of Nazi propaganda products. We forget the fact that it is natural for a teenager to play a shooting game on his laptop (I do the same on my desktop). Film directors are not responsible for our thoughts, responsible for the conventions we unconsciously follow. It is a major lesion we often tend to forget.

Roger Ebert once wrote a very significant thing about Hollywood: “when it comes to tragedies, Hollywood is in the catharsis business”. It is not even a truth, it is troth. They are into other monkey businesses too. Hollywood is the pinnacle of professional, segmented film-making; but to be a true Auteur, you have to stop formalizing films. And great films only come from true auteurs and that too once in a while [that does not mean there are no auteurs in Hollywood]. This is one of those films. If you ever felt love towards the medium called film, you should watch this movie. It is a film that dwells at a different level of film-making altogether, a level rarely reached by filmmakers, rarely enjoyed by cineastes. See whether you like it or not.

N.B:--This film was produced by Diane Keaton. I am a big fan of her work, and I think producing this film should be counted among one of the greatest things she has ever done. Without a free leash, and without the producers not “peeing” [a word used by Gus van Sant himself] on the film, such movies cannot be made.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, by Tim Burton, Rating: 3 in 5

As a film, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” has all the good and bad qualities of a typical Tim Burton film. Some will enjoy the good ones; some will overemphasize the bad ones. On my part, I am rather disappointed by this film.

From the very beginning, Burton’s films have shown how the atmosphere can become the most important factor of a film. Most of his films --- “Beetlejuice”, “Edward Scissorhands”, the “Batman” films, “Sleepy Hollow” etc ---- are “atmospheric” films; their virtues lie solely in their atmosphere. On the flip side, many of these films lacked coherence in the development of their story-line, which is essential for the kind of films they are. Same things hold true for “Sweeney Todd”; although the story does not suffer from completely unnecessary intrusions of characters like Michael Keaton’s in “Beetlejuice”, the story never becomes surprising or engrossing enough to make Sweeney Todd’s anguish, or his pained humanity seem true. May be the “spectacular” nature of musicals was always a disincentive for the film’s subject. At the end of the day, this film will be remembered as the bloodiest musical ever made on film that had a stunning backdrop of 19^th century London.

The film starts with CGI blood-drops that look suspiciously like diluted tomato ketchup running down blue-tinted gables of shanty houses. The symbol holds true for the entire film: it is mostly about blood ketchup and blue-tinted 19^th century London. This film is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s stage musical of the same name [the logo at the beginning of this article is the original poster of the musical]. Benjamin Barker (played by Johnny Depp), a barber, is falsely arrested, charged and sentenced to life of hard labor in Australia by a licentious Judge Turpin (played by Alan Rickman), who coveted Barker's "beautiful and virtuous" wife, Lucy (played by Laura Michelle Kelly). Returning 15 years later, Barker adopts the name of Sweeney Todd and says goodbye to his friend, sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who rescued him from the sea. He then returns to his old flat above Nellie Lovett's (played by Helena Bonham Carter) pie shop on Fleet Street. She tells him that after his arrest, Turpin tried to rape his wife, and she poisoned herself out of humiliation. After receiving this news, Todd vows revenge and reopens his barber shop in the upstairs flat. His method is simple: he cuts the throats of his customers and sends the bodies down to the basement through a chute. Nellie cuts the bodies up and uses the meat to make the best meat pie in whole London.

It is highly unsettling (I presume this. I have been a gore fan for long time, so it all looked lip-smacking to me) to see serial killers with operatic music. To heighten that effect, it is filmed differently than formal musicals: you do not see groups of dancers singing choruses, or anything of that sort. There is absolutely no dialog in the film, which is again very rare. Burton, surprisingly, makes the film more quasi-realistic than a musical fantasy. The London of yesteryears looks like Hell’s Kitchen in the film; it reminded me of the ghastly details I read once in a huge book called “London: A Biography”. Following recent [and deplorable to me. I have lived in one of the most notorious cities in the world for its poverty, Kolkata, throughout my life, and never saw a slum look blue in moonlight] tradition of showcasing any bleak part of a city through clod blue filters, the production design of Dante Ferretti and cinematography of Dariusz Wolski help create a dark, frightening and eccentrically skewed vision of London. Most of the characters have a larger-than-life and over-the-top feel of a Dickensian caricature. They all have deathly blanched faces, almost blue from lack of blood. One of the good things about this film is that all the songs are sung by the actors. It makes the words of the lyrics sound more clear and important, helping the story to grow naturally. It is something Woody Allen did in his musical comedy “Everyone says I Love You”. It also avoids the over-emphatic singing style of professional singers.

I wrote “Most of the characters have a larger-than-life and over-the-top feel of a Dickensian caricature”. The problem of the film is that even the principal characters are caricatures. It would have worked if the film showcased itself as a musical fantasy, but the quasi-realistic nature of the movie leaves us with a lot of unfulfilled expectations. Also to be blamed is Johnny Depp. Criticizing someone like Johnny Depp sounds sacrilegious nowadays, but I have no qualms in saying that his acting in this film has a sad after-effect of Jack Sparrow. I detected a slight backward tilt every time he delivered a major dialog. That backward tilt, strongly reminiscent of “you-know-who”, ruined my day. And at the end of the day, the character of Sweeney Todd remains a phantasmagorical caricature; his human emotions seem shallow, his ultimate redemption seems phony. Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow deserved at least an Oscar; if there was ever a performance that can be tagged “original”, that was it. From such a great actor, I expected far better performance. I expected him to frame the character of Sweeney Todd in a different manner. His acting in this film seemed to hesitate between sincerely enjoying the act of killing and feeling deep resentment for what happened to him in past. Too shallow by my standards. On the other hand, Helena Bonham Carter is perfect in her role. She is quite an actor; it is a shame that she still remains under-estimated in Hollywood. But the best performance comes from Allan Rickman as judge Turpin. You have to watch him to realize what a truly nuanced actor from English school of acting can do to such roles. His acting will stay with me for a long time.

There is a segment in the film that shows the true capabilities of Tim Burton as a director, though. Nellie, while butchering human carcasses every day, still dreams an insane dream of marrying Sweeny and making a good thing out of it. Her dreams are painted with heart-rending softness that stirs our compassion; it makes the character of Nellie surprisingly believable and familiar. Sadly, Sweeney does not seem to have such hidden chambers; it would have been a good thing for his character. He is either a chocolaty simpleton of a husband (in flashback), or a one-dimensional monster. I have a suspicion that Tim Burton wanted to create his own “Kill Bill”, but lacked the quirky appreciation of the genre that Tarantino showed.

The songs used in the film are highly complex; it is a miracle that the actors managed to do justice to them. It bears the signature of mid-twentieth century, urban style of music. A veritable Sondheim masterpiece.

The film has received tremendous positive reviews from critics. Why, I don’t know. Despite all the hullabaloos about this film, I found it to be a noble failure, and nothing more than that. I give this film a three. It does not deserve any more.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

Eastern Promises [2007], by David Cronenberg. Rating: 3 & 1/2

Before I give my opinion about David Cronenberg’s latest Oscar-nominated film “Eastern Promises”, let me quote the remarks of two critics:

“I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation…. (the film is) directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power.”

--------J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“What it's really about, more than sensitivity for displaced people or social analyses, is violence — hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence…. For Cronenberg, such cheap sensationalism is business as usual, and this far into his career, that business has slipped into artistic bankruptcy……(the film) isn't about Russian gangs so much as Cronenberg's own dark passions not just for violence but excruciating carnage, which he brandishes mercilessly…… (it is a) a stifling descent into grim shock and disturbing awe.”

---- Bruce Westbrook of Houston Chronicle

You need not take the second critic seriously; he belongs to a recent foolish trend of film critics (read politically correct priests) who stop seeing a film as it is, but as they expect it to be. If anyone goes to watch a film about Russian mafias and expect complete non-violence, then that man must be the sorriest buffoon ever seen inside a cinema hall! But in case you do not like blood and graphic violence, this film might not be your cup of tea. This film IS violent, but never over-enthusiastic about it. It also does not adhere to the genre regulations of Italian mafia movies.

The first critic is more to the point, but something is missing there too: this film is certainly not one of Cronenberg’s best, and, most disappointingly, it had every potential to be his Magnum Opus. It had the potential to be as influential a film as The Godfather is. It had everything in it to be remembered forever, but it just missed its mark. Despite all that, this is a better movie than most of the ones we are going to see coming out of the factories in the next few months. It is an original, engrossing, deeply disturbing film about identity, violence and the constant human degradation it causes.

The film is based in London, where Anna (Ivanova) Khitrova (played by Naomi Watts), a midwife at a London hospital, witnesses a 14 year old child, Tatiana, die in childbirth, while the child, a girl, survives. She finds a diary (written in Russian, which Anna cannot read) in the dead girl’s person, and checks it to find the home address of the dead girl. She finds a card for the Trans-Siberian restaurant owned by Semyon (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is in reality a powerful boss of a Russian mafia family, or Vory V Zakone. Anna meets Semyon and talks about the dead girl. Once Semyon learns about the diary, he immediately understands that the diary can be used against him. Here starts a very subtle, polite, but deadly cat-&-mouse game in which Anna gets more and more involved. Deeply involved in this snare is Nicolai LuZhin (played by Vigo Mortensen), Semyon’s driver and a soldier under Semyon’s son, Kiril (played by Vincent Cassel). Another big player is Kiril, a sad homosexual who must suppress his taste to survive, and expresses his masculinity by manhandling young girls and by remaining drunk most of the time. As Anna gets more and more involved, even the lives of her mother (played by Sinéad Cusack) and her melodramatic, but simple uncle Stepan (played by Jerzy Skolimowski) are in danger. There is a huge twist at the end of the film that will send you off your seat. The film is not really about how the mafia works, but about a “why”: why are they doing what they are doing? And you will not get the answer until nearly the end of the movie. The script keeps its secret very effectively, in that respect.

The film has a very authentic look and feel. No one in the film uses a gun. They use razors and curved knives which prove even more effective, and certainly gorier. Director David Cronenberg explained, “We have no guns in this movie. There were no guns in the script. The choice of those curved knives we use in the steam bath was mine. They’re not some kind of exotic Turkish knives, they’re linoleum knives. I felt that these guys could walk around in the streets with these knives, and if they were ever caught, they could say 'we’re linoleum cutters’.” Precise and logical. There is something in this film that is very rare: while watching it, you feel that there are other unseen events in these characters’ lives, you kind of anticipate how they celebrated last year’s Christmas, that girl’s marriage and this boy’s first communion. In this respect, it reminded me strongly of The Godfather. But, unfortunately, the film fails to become an epic.

The film revolves around the acting of Vigo Mortensen as Nicolai. Vigo is a tremendous actor. He seemingly has a sense of humor too; he told the press that he styled his character after Vladimir Putin!! Those who remember him as Aragorn from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy may not recognize him at all. He is so deep into the character that some of you might become disgruntled: WHAT THE HELL, MAN (!), that man is not ACTING! He internalizes the role, underplays it, making his Nicolai fascinating and scarily enigmatic. Years from now, this will be considered as one of the most memorable mafia characters ever, right there with Michael Corleone and Tony Montana. Armin Mueller-Stahl is brilliant as Semyon; he is scintillating as the apparently agreeable, grandfatherly Godfather. Vincent Cassel goes dangerously deep into his character, Kiril; if you find him a bit too abrupt in the end and a little inconsistent, or banal, it is not his fault but the script-writer’s. Naomi Watts, as always, gives a precise, economical performance. Howard Shore’s score for the film is very restrained and economical. But personally I have a feeling that a more rustic Russian, Shostakovitch sort of background music would have been more memorable. There is a knife-fight scene in this movie that is truly something never shown on the big screen. Roger Ebert commented, “Nikolai engages in a fight in this film that sets the same kind of standard that "The French Connection" set for chases. Years from now, it will be referred to as a benchmark.” I absolutely agree with him.

But let me come to the most important part: the shortcomings of this film. There are two distinct flows in this film, the main narrative and a voice-over of the dead girl reading from her diary. This second stream seems somewhat artificial, shallow and undercooked. Instead of becoming touchingly humane, most of the time it becomes a placard for cheap humanism. In a pivotal scene right at the end of the movie, Kiril refuses to throw the child into the Thames, crying “It’s just a child, papa!”. The whole scene looked abrupt and forced to me. I am not saying that such human angles are unnecessary. What I am saying is that the film does not allow its characters enough time to gradually build that side. It seems as if the director himself did not believe in the way he was presenting the solution. I said this before, and let me repeat it: this film had the potential to be as great an epic as The Godfather. Instead, it becomes a very well-built thriller with an abrupt and pretentious ending. The solution comes too easily at the end; the tragedy dies a pre-natal death. It should have followed the character of Nicolai a bit more; it should have traced the tragic destiny of such men.

This is a very good film, but a rather disappointing one. I cannot give it any more than three and a half points.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

No Country for Old Men, by Coen Brothers [Rating:5 in 5]

When Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” was published in the year 2005, Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review, “No Country for Old Men would easily translate to the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left on the cutting room floor — a move that would also have made this a considerably more persuasive novel”. As it is often the case with literary critics, he was absolutely wrong. It is the monologues of sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) that holds the core of the movie “No Country for Old men”, this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. It is, at the end of the day, a post-modern (not in the hip sense) character study that believes in leaving more loose ends than answering each and every rational and inconsequential question about details. It hints at a dislocation that would have been unperceivable in any other era than ours. AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, IT IS A MIRACLE OF A GOOD FILM!

Let us look back at the words I quoted at the very beginning of this review. Kakutani thinks the novel was not adequately persuasive because he was regarding it as a Genre novel, which it, and the film, is not. No Country, as a film, is a subversion of a genre that is all too familiar in the American cultural scene: Psychopath vs. The Force of Good; it is also not a spoof or a critique; it works through the structure of thriller and chase movies, breaks through every single loophole, and at the end, becomes something completely different. It is a movie about something a little inconceivable, something that looses its meaning once spelled clearly, something that lurks just behind the our all-too-certain understating of contemporary society. May be that’s the only way of showing what is there to show.

In the film, Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brollin), a poor man hunting antelopes at the valley of Rio Grande, discovers the remnants of a drug deal gone-all-wrong. Bullet-ridden cars stand desolate; in this scene, not only the men, but even the dogs are shown shot dead. Moss finds a huge stack of drugs, and with his habitually cunning mind of a hunter, understands what is missing: the money. He stalks the trail of a wounded man and finds a satchel full of money. He was discovered later, and a corporation hires Anton Chigurh (with Javier Bordem in his Oscar-winning role), a psychopath with a “principle”, who goes around Texas with a tank of compressed air in hand and killing people with a cattle stungun, to kill Moss. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again; it can bust locks as well. Chigurh starts stalking Moss, which forces Moss to leave his childlike wife Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) behind. The sheriff of the town, played by Tommy Lee Jones, realizes the danger Moss and his family is in, and tries to help them. There are other characters, such as a bounty hunter who knows Chigurh well (Woody Harrelson) who is hired by a businessman (Stephen Root) to track down the money, and other nameless characters in motels, swimming pools, on the roadside. Yet, it is a curiously lonely movie, where none of the three major characters are shone together in a frame. And that brooding loneliness hints at a strange dislocation, something I was feeling continuously while watching the movie.

Take the scene early in the movie where Chigurh walks into a run-down gas station and talks to the visibly shaken elderly owner. Throughout the sequence, both the characters jostle with each other verbally with a stiff awkwardness, as if something was just not fitting in, something was just not right. It was like watching an English missionary looking at the orphan child from Blue Lagoon with a nasty feeling that he knows the language but cannot understand a word. Or something even more subtle. Subtle enough to elude the gasp of written words. Chigurh makes the man call head or tail in a toss to decide whether he should kill the man or not. The dialogs in this sequence are undoubtedly the best-written ones I have heard in a film for a long, long time. If you watch the film look very closely at this section, savor the strange tension such crafty screenplay can create [Coen brothers absolutely DESERVE their Oscar for Adopted Screenplay], and, if you can, try to feel that dislocation there. Can you feel it? There is a chance that you may not. That’s precisely the charm of such great films. Personally, I felt that the dislocation is the unspoken core of the whole narrative.

Before I went to see the film, I was apprehensive about one thing: Would the film be about nostalgia? The name of the film at least indicates that. The character of Tommy Lee Jones constantly feels outstaged by the capacity for violence of the next generation. One of his monologues sounds nostalgic too. But, to my great relief, the film turned out not to be so. We have had a bit too much of nostalgia lately, especially a sort of snobbish nostalgia about the innocent, “non-violent” days of the past. That sort of stuff makes a film stink of shit. Being a fundamental study about violence (among other things, such as, chance, self-will, unspeakable evil. Other critics have pointed those out before), No Country avoids all the cliché answers and solutions to violence (effect of consumerism, television, homosexuality and whatever-you-may-have-a-grudge-against); it only paints a cinematically sparse and austere landscape that hides hints that are only hints and not answers.

The cinematography of the film is remarkable: it refuses to be stylish (as an unfortunate after-effect of the film “Traffic”, every movie in Hollywood nowadays routinely depicts deserts through extremely grainy deep-yellow filter, dark sides of a city through blue, using the most bizarre angles a camera can possibly find. Apparently, they call it “stylish”), it gets to the core of the ambience the film uses, so much so that the landscape becomes one of the principle characters in the film. It again shows that Coen brothers are one of the greatest exponents of the dramatic capacity of a landscape; they did it before in “Fargo” (using a landscape of blindingly white snow), they have done it again. The editing of the film follows the same path: it is effective, precise, and self-effacing. Surprisingly for a Hollywood film, it uses only 16 minutes of music, which is minimalist in nature as well. It was an inspired decision. Such decisions have made this film such a great one. The actors down to the nameless woman by the swimming pool do a truly swell job; I have seldom seen such perfect casting.

In my last piece about the Oscars, I wrote “Javier Bordem as the Best Actor in a Supporting Role (for “No Country for Old Man”) was again a routine choice, Hollywood loves its psychopaths.” I do not intend to change it. Javier is a great actor and has done mesmerizing work in this film. But, like all great art, this film will be easily misunderstood by most people, I fear. Like they called “Brokeback Mountain” a “gay cowboy movie”. I suspect that after this Oscar, many will watch the film the way they watch “Silence of the Lambs”, counting “nicely” shown “cool” killings; they will come out of the hall trying to imitate Anton Chigurh’s grin. It will become the benchmark for a new-era psychopath. The film will be lost in a labyrinth of deliberate mass-censorship. We are not very good at handling our own violence, are we?

So if you watch the film, try to look in closely. Check what is scarier: the chilling acts of Chigurh, or how the scattered symbols repeat themselves in the path of both Chigurh and Moss, obscuring the line between the hunted and the hunter? Why, after all the obvious evil, can’t we make an ethical distinction between Moss and Chigurh? Why do we perceive only a forlorn sense of futility at the end of the film? Keep those questions afloat in your mind, but don’t try to seek an answer. You might see a truly great film.

Making such an astounding film is a feat that belongs to the order of a minor miracle; add to that the fact that Coen brothers have done it before with “Fargo”. If we still stop short of counting them among the first three directors in Hollywood, it will be an act of blasphemy. This film deserves a five by any standards.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI