There’s an over-familiar quality to this movie about an elderly man coming to terms with his mortality that is both exacerbated and dismissed by its Indian setting. The story’s particulars—a man’s reckoning with the inevitable, his son’s reactionary intransigence, the comic second act that attempts to soften the blow of death before giving in to its terrifying inevitability—don’t differ substantially from other films of this sort, but by placing it all in the context of the holy city of Varnasi on the sacred Ganges River, it becomes more edifying, even, presumably, to Hindus.
The old man, Daya (Lalit Behl), is a grumpy former school teacher who realizes one day, despite what seems exceptionally fine health, that his time has come. He lives with his son, Rajiv (Adil Hussain), and Rajiv’s wife and college-age daughter, in an arrangement that is civil but hardly comfortable. Rajiv is the kind of nervous businessman who can’t stop thinking of work even when more pressing family problems come forward, like his father’s insistence on traveling to Varnasi so that he will be there when he dies. As it happens, there’s a hotel there that caters to such needs, though there’s a time limit to how long a guest can stay. If the guest does not die within this time period he has to leave, or re-register under a different name.
Rajiv, under the impression that it would not look good if he let his father go on his last journey alone, grudgingly accompanies Daya to Varnasi, where he will attend to his business by remote devices that don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. Complicating the matter is the fact that his daughter, Sunita (Palomi Ghosh), has been promised to another in an arranged marriage but is resisting mightily. Rajiv’s wife, Lata (Geetanjali Kulfarni), accuses Rajiv of “taking a vacation” and leaving her to deal with this domestic crisis by herself. Needless to say, while in Varnasi, Rajiv has much to distract him, which is fine with Daya, who didn’t want him to come in the first place.
Director Shubhashish Bhutiani has obviously seen enough Western movies to understand how these kind of uncomfortable situations can be spun into comedy, but by presenting them in what is basically a documentary about the traditional Hindu way of dying he raises not only the film’s profile as a work with something to teach, but also its dramatic potential. As days turn into weeks and Rajiv is forced to improvise in order to be with his father on his deathbed but also keep his family and livelihood afloat, we meet others in similar situations whose contrasting experiences give the story a fully realized, multidimensional character. And like a good orchestra conductor, Bhutiani brings it all to a harmonious coda that is satisfying without being predictable. It’s a subtle film that truly earns its sentiments.
In Hindi. Now playing in Tokyo at Iwanami Hall, Jimbocho (03-3262-5252).
Hotel Salvation home page in Japanese.
photo (c) Red Carpet Moving Pictures
Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a freelance political fixer, and in popular fiction terms such a description conjures up visions of slick men in three-piece suits juggling cell phones and commanding transactions of millions of dollars in fees and payoffs. Norman is anything but. We first see him badgering his nephew, a lawyer named Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen), for the contact information of one of his clients. Though Norman talks as if he’s experienced in the world of political connections, Cohen’s reaction is caution veering toward alarm. There’s something between the two men that’s unexplained but points to general mistrust on Cohen’s part of not only Norman’s motives, but his effectiveness. Norman is a hustler, but unlike the stereotype, he’s not a particularly good one.
What’s immediately compelling about Aneesh Chaganty’s thriller is its cleverly curated mise en scene, which takes place on a computer desktop. The story unfolds in a series of screenshots depicting photo files, browser searches, chat messages, Tumblr posts, Facebook timelines, and, most provocatively, Skype conversations. By obviating the need for placing the viewer’s POV directly into the action, Chaganty has more control over the mystery elements of the story, which is just as well because that story is pretty trite.
Jackson Heights, located in the western part of Queens and serviced by numerous subway and bus lines, has been called the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the world. Add to this legend the fact that it was the first place in New York City to launch an annual Gay Pride parade in the wake of the murder of a gay Latino man, and you’ve pretty much got the reason for why Frederick Wiseman spent the better part of 2014 patrolling the streets, hanging out at community meetings, and visiting the myriad small businesses that service the area. In Jackson Heights runs more than three hours, and yet you get the feeling that Wiseman only scratched the surface. His main concerns are commerce and ethnic dignity. He loves just pointing his camera at store fronts and dropping into nail salons, tattoo parlors, and gay bars just to see what’s going on. He also spends a lot of time with a group of Spanish-speaking business owners trying to come up with a strategy in their battle against developers who are finally targeting the neighborhood because it seems to be the last low-rent but vital commercial stronghold in not only New York City, but the whole New York metropolitan area. These confabs are fascinating in the way they not only explain what these people are up against, but also their philosophy about making business something that gives as much to the community as it takes.
Though the sardonic comic style that drives the best parts of this feature has become the default mode for Hollywood animation of late, the physical gags are more in line with the classic Looney Toons shorts of yesteryear, so it’s no surprise that Warners produced and distributes Smallfoot. Set in the Himalayas, the movie is given plenty of opportunity for characters to drop long distances into the snow, screaming all the way.
Barbara, the preteen protagonist of this earnest work of empathy, played by newcomer Madison Wolfe, is one of those troubled free spirits who channels her anxieties into flights of fancy that threaten to spin out of control. She wanders forests and beaches with a pair of rabbit ears on her head and clutching an old, worn purse, gathering mushrooms and laying bait for giants, which she believes exist. As the title of this movie, adapted from a graphic novel, suggests, Barbara thinks it is her mission to slay these creatures, and even though the director, Anders Walter, depicts them on screen, the viewer is constantly reminded by other elements in the story that they represent something darker in Barbara’s unconscious.
Though based on a best-selling kids’ story written in 1973, The House with a Clock in Its Walls feels overly determined as a film, as if it were conceived and developed from scratch by a bunch of Hollywood executives. Some find it curious that torture porn maven Eli Roth directs what is basically a Harry Potter concoction with a few more jump scares and less literary ambition, but by now Roth is firmly in the establishment, and the movie has already proven to be his biggest box office hit to date.
The jump scare has become a tired cliche of horror films, a method that was never that necessary in the first place. Suspense and terror are often more potent when the viewer is allowed to perceive threats in an organic way. In a sense, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place takes off from this premise, but that’s not its primary appeal. He and his scriptwriters don’t provide a lot of back story, and it takes a little time for the viewer to fully understand the danger at hand. It’s not clear where the monsters who kill and eat humans came from, though indications imply that they’ve been around for three months as the movie starts. These creatures have no sense of sight, and can only locate prey through sound, so the movie is by necessity quiet. Even the music, when it’s used, is subtler than what you normally hear in horror films—most of the time, anyway.
Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy and militarism, Israel’s filmmaking contingent more often than not addresses the country’s sticky matters with imagination and verve; which isn’t to say they necessarily confront their problems head-on, but they don’t ignore them. Samuel Moaz’s Foxtrot is built around a unique narrative that bookends an absurd tragedy with a play-like dramatic comment on that tragedy. Michael and Daphna Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler) live in a nice Tel Aviv apartment whose privileged air of complacency is shattered when they receive news that their son, carrying out his obligatory military service, has been killed. Immediately, the couple becomes disoriented and incapable of providing each other with the consolation they so desperately require. It’s obvious the relationship has been strained for some time, but instead of bringing the parents together, the news drives them further apart, partly owing to the nature of the tragedy. Michael, it turns out, was deeply traumatized by his own military service, and news of his son’s death only works to make the past come back with unexpected fury.
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