THE BAND'S VISIT aka BIKUR HA -TIZMORET (HEBREW/ARABIC/ENGLISH) (2007)

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, an Egyptian police orchestra consisting of eight artists, land in Israel to perform at a local Arab Cultural Centre. However, when they land at the Israeli airport in their immaculate blue uniforms, they are befuddled to find that there is no welcoming party/vehicle to receive them in this alien land. The leader of the band is a sullen and taciturn Tewfiq (an excellent Sasson Gabai). Thanks to a mispronunciation, the band lands in a wrong place and is trapped in an isolated small town in the middle of a desert without any further conveyance or communication. As there are no hotels to spend the night, the band is forced to accept the shelter provided by Dina (a radiant Ronit Elkabetz), the owner of a local restaurant and couple of her customers in their respective homes. Tewfiq and the Haled (Saleh Bakri) end up at the home of Dina while the others are provided shelter by her customers. What follows is an interesting study of characters of these unlikely hosts and their reticent guests as they interact ever so reluctantly over the course of the night.

The core of the movie revolves around its three principal protagonists viz. - Sasson Gabai,  Ronit Elkabetz and Saleh Bakri as Tewfiq, Dina and Haled respectively and how they handle their unusual situations over the night. Sasson Gabai owns the character of Tewfiq in its all clammed up exterior, circumspect communication and his constant attempts to manoeuvre through the ambiguity of his awkward situation. Ronit Elkabetz shines through as the assertive and confident Dina who uncovers Tewfiq's rocky exterior with her simmering warmth to find a warm, yet lonely individual weighed down by his pensive past. Saleh Bakri is fluid in his portrayal of Haled as somewhat brash and rebellious member of the band. 

Eran Kolirin, the debutante director, deftly navigates through the narrative of this long night when these hitherto unacquainted persons from alien lands have to interact and traverse. But, are they just strangers from two nations which share a mutual hostility ? In the course of their interactions, both verbal and otherwise, over the night, the movie conveys the elemental human craving for communication and reaching out to other souls, which recognise no man-made barriers. 

Eran Kolirin seems to have a gift of framing his visuals which could communicate and presents the loneliness that permeates the town or the predicament of the characters to the viewer without even a single dialogue. Check out the scene at a local skating rink where Haled helps his young host in connecting to his date or the scene at Dina's home after she returns from a dinner with Tewfiq at a restaurant or the sequence concerning an artist and his unfinished piece of music or even the sequence at the local pay phone where a young man awaits the call from his lover even as a member of the band is trying to make a call.

The Band's Visit is an unusual and rather, intriguing slice-of-life drama that strikes a chord. In the garb of a gentle bittersweet comedy, it presents a subtle, yet profound exploration of the very human emotions of loneliness, melancholy, friendship, love, loss and hope which are commonplace and connect people irrespective of the fact that they may consider one another as alien or even enemies.

The movie won the award under the category of Un Certain Regard (Jury Coup de Coeur) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and has adorned several other film festivals where it was highly appreciated. However, it was rejected as the official nominee from Israel at the Academy Awards under the category of Best Foreign Language movie as more than half of of the dialogues are in English.

A VERY GOOD WATCH !!

P.S. -  You can watch this movie on UTV WORLD MOVIES channel which airs it quite regularly.

GRAVITY (2013)

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is a spectacular enterprise that AWES us from the very first frame with its sheer brilliance and could well be counted among the defining movie experiences of our lives. If movies are an endeavour in collective dreaming, this is one hell of a dream which would remain with us, the viewers, for a very long time. For the cost of a mere movie ticket, the director transforms the audience into astronauts and transports them to space such that the entire movie hall seems suspended in space for about two hours.

The movie's plot, as such, deals with a catastrophe set in space and its aftermath. First time astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and her experienced mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are on a space walk mission with their team to repair the Hubble telescope. Disaster strikes when a debris cloud from an exploded Russian satellite  comes hurtling at them. The debris destroys their shuttle, the telescope and also kills the rest of their crew and space-walk team, leaving them adrift and spinning in a very vast and lonely space without any means of communication to their command center on earth at Houston. The rest of the movie is a race against time thriller wherein they need to find each other and escape to the safety of terra firma. Yet, at the very heart of the movie is an engaging and inspiring tale of hope, resilience, courage and grit that defies overwhelming odds (of astronomical magnitude, one may add). 

The brilliance of Cuarón  as a director, is in his intelligent and seamless enmeshing of the scientific spectacle, visual wizardry and a very human tale of hope. He creates a very vivid image of the loneliness and utter helplessness that confronts a human being in what could be one of the most hostile environments to endure and survive. Cuarón creates an immersive experience for the viewer by effortlessly switching the viewer from a third person watching the action from a safe distance to a first person when we look at the happenings through the visor of Bullock. As a result, the helpless free-floating spin of Bullock and her breathlessness when her oxygen levels plunge are very real and palpable experiences for the viewers themselves. Cuarón masterfully combines the skills of his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and the visual effects team to present striking visuals with a silken flow as they effortlessly pan out to showcase the breathtaking beauty as well as the unending vastness of the space and zoom in to capture the tense expressions of the leads. There is also a remarkable eye for the detail, be it the careful and measured movements of the astronauts at work or their frenetic efforts to grapple at a hold to stem their free-fall or the floating specks of flame or even the globular drops of tears or other pieces of flotsam, which presents a well detailed and realistic setting. 

For a movie that spans about two hours, Gravity depends almost entirely on, its aptly cast, two Academy Award winner leads - viz. an excellent Sandra Bullock and the suave, smooth talking George Clooney. Sandra Bullock puts in a riveting performance as Dr. Ryan Stone, bringing in just the right amount of vulnerability, melancholy and grit to the part. The significance of her performance is accentuated by the fact that, for the better part of this movie, she is the only human element who anchors the emotional content of this movie and in the process, lifts it from being merely a spectacular sci-fi eye-candy. The silent vastness of space filled with enormous, yet, empty distances between far flung celestial bodies and presenting beauty that is both captivating and foreboding alternatively, is the other major dimension of the movie 

Gravity belongs to a small and rare category of movies that succeed in questioning and extending the hitherto known and accepted horizons of film-making. It is also one of the few movies which capitalises on the scope and depth offered by the IMAX experience to the hilt and is sure to be the front-runner for a clutch of technical categories including cinematography and visual effects at all major award events for the year. 

This is a movie experience that inspires the viewers at several levels and is sure to spark many a young hearts to nurture the dream of donning a space suit. One also hopes that it would also inspire many more film-makers to conceive and conjure many such pioneering movie projects which could navigate the collective dream experiences of the audience to hitherto unexplored newer directions.

A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE ! A MUST WATCH (preferably in IMAX 3D) !!

LORE (GERMAN) (2012)

The lasting scars of war are seldom physical. It is the psyche of human beings - both perpetrators and victims - which are irreparably singed by the sins of war and remain as scars for the rest of their lives. Lore is a movie that dwells on the changes in the psyche of its protagonists, wrought by a wasting war. It is based on The Dark Room, Booker shortlisted novel by Rachel Seiffert.

Lore is set in the final days of the Second World War and presents the aftermath of the war on Germany as seen through the eyes of it's protagonist, a German teenager Lore Dressler (an ethereal Saskia Rosendahl). Lore is the daughter of a senior SS officer and has four siblings - a sister and three brothers, the last being an infant. Both her father and mother are staunch Nazis and Lore herself is brought up with their indoctrination from her parents as well as from the organisation of Hitler Youth, of which she has remained an member.

The film begins in the palatial home of Lore when an apparently normal day is abruptly turned upside down as her father and mother race to flee the impending arrival of the allied forces, torching all evidence of involvement with the evil acts of the Nazi rule. Soon, we see both the parents fleeing the rest of the family, fearing possible arrest and incarceration for their misdeeds under the Nazi regime. Lore is forcibly entrusted with entrusted with the onerous responsibility of shepherding her siblings to the relative safety of their grandmother's home near Hamburg. However, that would involve a gruelling trek through the wilds of the black forest and confronting a variety of challenges including hunger, capture, etc. which test them and threaten them. They are also joined by Thomas, an apparent escapee from a concentration camp who shadows the family continuously. Lore is deeply suspicious of his intentions and is unsure if he is a predator or a protector of the family. She feels utter disgust and contempt for him and attempts repeatedly to keep him away from her siblings. Nevertheless, we do find that Thomas coming to the family's rescue more than once and accompanies them in this ordeal. Lore, however, thanks to her years of indoctrination, is unable to resign herself to the thought that she & her family are forced to find shelter under the wings of Thomas, a Jew, albeit being thankful for the same. 

Besides her quandary about her feelings towards Thomas, she is further perplexed by the all-pervasive hunger, ruin, death and destruction of what she hitherto believed to be a just war. Her carefully constructed belief system of the invincibility and the righteousness of the Fuhrer and his war is blown to smithereens when she is confronted with the facts of large scale genocide that he had presided over.

While the mainstay of the movie is about the journey of Lore with her siblings and Thomas and the several events they confront en route, this movie is essentially a coming-of-age tale of its protagonist, Lore. The journey and the destination merely serve as metaphors for the awakening & maturing of Lore and her siblings on several planes. 

The director, Cate Shortland, has helmed this movie with an assured grace and subtlety of a master auteur. The movie also benefits immensely from an effective background score and brilliant cinematography that has provided an aesthetic, almost lyrical, yet very real visual setting. Saskia Rosendahl, playing the lead role of Lore, has given an excellently restrained performance that connects with the viewers and kindles memories of Jennifer Lawrence. Lore, an Australian-German co-production was the official entry from Australia at the 85th Annual Academy Awards in the category of  Best Foreign Language Film, but did not make it to the shortlist of final nominees. 

Overall, Lore is an excellent movie that offers a unique perspective on war and raises several questions on a multitude of issues such as collective belief systems, state propaganda, etc. which are very relevant for our present days too.

A VERY GOOD WATCH !!

STOKER (2013)

Stoker is the striking English language debut of Korean master auteur Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, Vengeance Trilogy, Joint Security Area). He conjures up a brilliant mystery (not exactly a whodunit) which could as well be his personal ode to the master of suspense, Hitchcock. 

Stoker is the story set in a wealthy Connecticut family living in a huge mansion surrounded by sprawling woods. India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is distraught when her beloved father Richard Stoker (Dermot Mulroney), with whom she shared a (perhaps her only) close relationship, dies in a car accident, on her eighteenth birthday. A shocked India and her grieving mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), with whom she has a frosty relationship, are joined at the funeral by her Uncle Charlie (Mathew Goode) whose existence she was hitherto unaware of. When the enigmatic Charlie quickly wins over Evelyn with his wit and charms his way into the family's fold, India feels a rising sense of uneasiness and fails to warm upto him. Nevertheless, she also a senses a strange connect with him even as he goes overboard to be caring and protective of them. India also senses a similar sense of discomfort is shared by her caretaker and her visiting aunt Gwendolyn (Jackie Weaver) towards Uncle Charlie. Curiously, both of the caretaker and the aunt  go missing without a trace. Without revealing any further, let me just add that the title of movie refers to more than just the name of the family at the center of all action here. And no, it does not refer to Bram Stoker or Dracula and none of the characters jump to take a bite at other's throats.

Is Uncle Charlie plainly eccentric or is there something even more sinister to him ? Is he actually the globetrotter he claims to be ? Why hasn't he ever made any contact with any of them in all these years till the untimely death of India's father ? Is Evelyn just an emotionally fickle person who merely leans on the shoulder of Charlie for emotional support ? And, what does one make of India herself, with her reticence and compulsive aloofness ? What should one make of her inherently paradoxical connect to her eerie Uncle, her lurking aggression and her acute sensory gifts ? 

The rest of the movie unravels answers to all these questions and more through meticulously mounted frames, rich with details, where Park works on the deepening mystery surrounding the Stoker family. The viewer is made continuously aware that there is more to these characters than what meets the eye and their curiosity is piqued to decipher their actions and motives. 

The three main leads, aptly cast, have played their parts beautifully portraying the necessary level of ambiguity about the characters and are successful in keeping the viewer engrossed and guessing. Mia Wasikowska is first rate as India Stoker packing several layers of nuances under her apparent plain looks. She puts in a riveting performance as the lonesome, serious and introverted teenager who is curious about the mysterious happenings around her as well as within her. Nicole Kidman is convincing as an emotional messed up woman with a chilly relationship with her daughter. Mathew Goode is exceptional as he brings to life a twisted character who oozes charm and eerie menace in equal measure.

While there is no doubt that this a well concocted mystery, it is indeed the atmospherics that Park builds up the tension with each passing frame that make this movie outstanding. He seems an artist working intricately at each of his visuals to create the eerie aura of rising suspense and tension. He is assisted in his task by brilliant cinematography and a potent score - check out the scene at the piano when India is interrupted and later, joined by Charlie. While Park is well known for his stylish, bloody and twisted stories of vengeance, the violence in Stoker, save for a few parts, is confined almost exclusively in the psychological sphere, which makes it all the more effective. It is the mastery of Park that he successfully maintains the aura of unease and nervous expectation of an impending explosive event throughout the course of the movie. 

Stoker works on a subtle level and straddles more than one genre in a manner that is so unique to it's master director. It delves into the dark recesses of the human mind and presents its punches in an unhurried manner even as it keeps the viewers on the edge with each unfolding disturbing twist of event. 

Overall, this is a SUPERB, twisted, gothic and accomplished thriller from a master in his prime that is sure to spook the viewers even as it keeps them glued and guessing. 

 A MUST WATCH !!