108. Iranian screenplay-writer and director Majid Majidi’s film “Baran” (Rain) (2001): A Sufi take on the mosaic of Iran

Many would assess and dismiss this delicate Iranian feature film as an interestingly made love story between a young Iranian man and an Afghan woman refugee in Iran,or even as interesting cinematic tale where the woman lead actor does not speak a word. However, the film communicates much more than a regular love saga. Baran won the the Grand Prix of the Americas at the 2001 Montreal Film Festival and the Freedom of Expression Award of the US National Board of Review.

The story of Baran, the film, is a based on a delectable screenplay conceived by the director himself. First, the name Baran is the name of the young Afghan lady in the film and Baran also means “rain.” So big deal, one would say. But rain is the ultimate scenario for the final sequence of this Majidi movie. Again rain might not mean much to a casual viewer of this film. Majidi, the screenplay writer, has deliberately chosen the word Baran to link the two elements of the movie, the human and the natural.

Many would assume the principal subject of the film to be the female protagonist Baran. Yet Majidi surprises the viewer by a clever inversion of the subject—the film turns out to be a tale about the man who falls in love with Baran rather than Baran herself. The film traces the gradual change in the male character before and after falling in love with the girl. Once in love, Lateef the young Azeri Iranian evolves from the cheeky young  fighter-cock constantly conscious of the importance of accumulating savings at each opportunity, to an individual who slowly transforms into an ascetic giving up all his wealth and the costly identity papers for his love’s family who needs those items of “pelf” more than him. Lateef in love is a transformed individual, he doesn’t chase away birds but feeds them. This is close to the Sufi ideals that one needs to adopt in life to be “united/aligned with the Beloved/Divine forces.” Somewhere near the middle of the film a troubled Lateef encounters an Afghan shoemaker with a "Rumi-like" visage who says the enigmatic words “From the hot fire of being apart, Comes the flame that burns the heart.” Probably these lines are from the Sufi poet Rumi, I do not know for sure. It is important for the viewer to note that that the shoemaker is never seen again by Lateef, and that the end of the film is also about a shoe that is returned to the owner and footprint of the shoe is shown being erased by rain.

In Iranian cinema, one hardly encounters physical touch by the opposite sexes, and true to this spirit the only acknowledgement of love is a smile or a furtive glance acknowledging the lover. With such constraints, memories become valuable than touch and more so in a movie like Baran, which transcends a love tale to enter a higher level of philosophy knocking at the doors of Sufism (and perhaps Tabula Rasa?).

The movie Baran is replete with minor details that indicate ethnic differences within the Iranian population that becomes apparent in the film but not to a casual visitor to Iran (I have visited Iran more than once on official work but never noticed the mosaic of ethnicity beyond the sprinkling of Armenians in Teheran and the bulk of the Persian Iranian population). Baran could be essentially classified as a tale of the Afghan refugee and the Afghan's eventual desire to return to his homeland, but Majidi’s Baran introduces colourful vignettes of Azeri Iranian (as associated with Azerbaijan), the Turkmen Iranian (as associated Turkmenistan), the Kurds and the Lurs. The official website of Baran explains the details. The construction site brings the different ethnicities together. Majidi’s screenplay knits the logical interplay between the communities: the Persian Iranians play the Inspectors, the Azeris bond together and take care of each other, the Kurds and the Lurs are easily provoked to fight the Azeris, while the poor Afghans, without identity papers, toil away for a fraction of what the others earn always fearing deportation if spotted by the Persian Iranian inspectors. And in Majidi's script and film, each ethnic group lives in separate rooms while they work together at the same construction site. Forget the love story, because these details, lovingly crafted, tell another realistic story that is perhaps more interesting than the obvious love tale.



There is a strange similarity that I note between Majidi’s Baran and Aki Kaurismaki’s Man Without a Past. In both movies, the past of the main persona is forgotten and a new person emerges harking back to Tabula Rasa--to start life anew. In both films “rain” is a mystical symbol—in Baran, you see the footprint of the beloved (or philosophically the one you seek) in the rain towards end of the film; in Man Without a Past there is rain on a clear day to grow potatoes, rain that grows six or seven potatoes on a small patch of land, and the last half-potato is given away to a stranger who wants to eat it to avoid scurvy! Futrther, in Baran there is a departure by a hired vehicle for Afghanistan, in Kaurismaki’s film there is a train that is moving forward, a visual metaphor used to punctuate past and future. Both Majidi and Kaurismaki seem to have similar minds and affinity in their personal philosophies.

A closing thought. Did Majidi, when he wrote the script, intend to make a love story relating to one dazzling individual that struck a chord in a boy’s heart and mind or did Majidi want to make a philosophical film on the life of a young man maturing into one that cares for others less fortunate than himself? I feel both stories co-exist in this film and it is the viewer who has to choose which tale is the more powerful strand of the two.

P.S. Aki Kaurismaki's film Man Without a Past has been reviewed earlier on this blog

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99. Japanese director Yojiro Takita’s “Okuribito” (Departures) (2008): Amazing grace of handling dead bodies

Many viewers would be touched by the tale of an aspiring cellist, who accidentally becomes a mortician (an undertaker or a funeral director, to some) when he loses his dream job with a symphony orchestra. Many would even be stupefied by the ingenuity of the filmmakers to pick up a seemingly unique subject such as “encoffinment” as a subject for a feature film. Many others would be in awe of the Asian traditions that respect the dead, the elderly, and the institution of marriage until (and beyond!) “death do us part”. Many others would be equally intrigued by the Asian traditions that consider associating any profession relating to the dead as being somewhat demeaning and not worthy of public stature.

Director Yojiro Takita’s film is loosely based on Aoki Shinmon’s autobiographical book The Coffin Man, which was subsequently adapted for the screen by the scriptwriter Kundo Koyama. While Takita and Koyama need to be complimented on deciding to bring to the big screen a heartwarming tale of a disappearing tradition of subcontracted morticians in Japan, there is the strange overpowering element of music that is pivotal to the somewhat mysterious organic development of the movie’s plot and in all probability this is obviously disconnected to Shinmon’s original tale. As I was intrigued as how the duo of Takita and Koyama added the powerful element of music to the tale, I stumbled on a detail available on the Internet that the lead actor in Departures, Masahiro Motoki, was a member of a band before he took to acting and that the film Departures was a direct outcome of the actor reading Shinmon’s book. Evidently, Motoki had much to do with development of the final Takita-Koyama collaborative effort.

The film is overtly an essay on the art of taking care of the dead under the gaze of family members and friends. It is also a film that details the dressing of the dead body while covered by sheets and the application of make-up on the corpse to make it resemble the best living memory of the dead person, all the while ensuring that there is no disrespect to the dead and living present in the room. Yet the movie offers much more entertainment and reasons to introspect than these facets of the script that could be attributed to Shinmon’s book. A sub-text of the film deals with reverse urban migration, of going back to the villages as urban employment becomes unpredictable and unstable under recession. Much later in the film there is mention of salmon returning upstream from the oceans to die. The metaphor becomes one of the many Shintoist references where life’s patterns can be understood by studying nature. Here is a movie that attempts to improve life and marital compatibility by having a closer look, not at death, but at the dead.

There is somber black humor—a lovely dead girl is discovered by the morticians to be a transsexual during the embalming; typos in advertisements hilariously bring the world of morticians close to that of travel agents; and the viewers are shown a coveted meal of an octopus, disappearing into the waters of a canal because those who were to devour it realize it the sea creature is still alive and then decide to release it into natural freedom. Dead or live octopus, the film is replete with comparisons of the dead with the living and vice-versa. It is not without a connection when later in the film an elderly mortician, a widower, speaks like a sage—“The living eat the dead, unless they are plants”—as he cooks a puffer roe, the size of a poultry egg, surrounded by live indoor plants and an image of his dead wife who he fondly remembers.

Takita’s Departures won the coveted Best Foreign Film Oscar and the Grand Prize at Montreal Film Festival apart from some 30 other awards. This would not be surprising for anyone whose hearts rule their minds. If one looks closely at the honors the film has garnered, these are basically for the director, the actors, and the sound technicians—all well deserved. Yet the mainstay of the film, for me, was the music composed by a talented Japanese called Joe Hisaishi, violinist and composer, who transformed parts of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Brahms’ Wiegenlied, and Bach’s Ave Maria as the basis of his own musical compositions for the film Departures. Joe Hisaishi is a stage name that the composer chose to indicate his fascination for the US composer Quincy Jones as Hisaishi is close to Quincy in written Japanese. Now Hisaishi is a name to watch for in film music as his music already has played a role to the success of at least three recent films—Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and restored sound version of 1920’s silent Buster Keaton’s The General. And surprisingly not one of the thirty plus awards has gone to the talented composer.

A keen viewer of the film will recall the scene in the film where the cellist finds a jagged stone next to his cello with the musical notes of a piece called The Wayfarer. I can only guess the piece of music relates to Mahler’s The Wayfarer, a song of grief sung by the singer waiting for the beloved. The film has a subplot of the cellist turned mortician coming to terms with disappearance of his father when he is quite young, but already showing flair to play the cello. When the cellist finally gets to meet his father after harboring hate towards his missing parent for most of his life, he finds out his father is dead with just a cardboard box of possessions to leave behind. He has to embalm his dead father, with his dead fingers clutching a symbolic smooth stone. The viewer is never told why the father left his wife, while we can guess that the father whose gifts to his only son ranged from written musical scores and stones, both rough and smooth, was in remote touch with his son, while the son takes time to put the pieces together. Finally, why did the filmmakers choose the cello over a violin or a viola for the lead character's favorite musical instrument? Avid filmgoers might get a likely answer to that question by viewing Fellini's under-rated classic Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d'orchestra) made in 1978.

This Japanese film can be lauded for its many virtues—a fascinating subject that is ecumenical (as it shies away from being typically Shinto or Buddhist, while one of the dead has a Christian/Jewish name, Naomi), endearing performances from the lead actor Masahiro Motoki and Akira Kurosawa’s stock actor in later films Tsutomu Yamazaki (Kagemusha and High and Low), beautiful adaptation of western classical music, and finally an uplifting theme of how any job can elicit respect of others if done well. It is no wonder the Oscar voters loved it, as this Japanese film meets many of the values that Hollywood traditionally celebrates.

Yet after the watching the movie, I wondered if any of those who thought the Japanese film was unique had ever seen a brilliant Iranian mockumentary film called Bitter Dreams (Khab-e Talkh) (2004) which deals with a parallel story of “encoffinment” of dead Muslim bodies in Iran. While encomiums are well deserved for the director and scriptwriter of the Japanese film Departures, the gaping holes in the story makes you wonder how this film could beat its co-nominated French film Laurent Cantet’s The Class in the eventual Oscar race in 2009. The film never explains the sudden exit of the cellist father from his life though both his parents never remarried, and his mother retained his father’s music record collection. The film never explains the need for the implicit father-son communication through rocks, smooth and jagged, even though rocks occupy an importance in Shintoism. The film never clarifies why the jagged rock came wrapped in the notes of The Wayfarer. The film never explains why the octopus that was to be eaten is freed, when the same individuals eat and enjoy dead chicken. There is mention of death being a “gateway” in the film but there is no discussion of afterlife in the film. For me Departures could have more fulfilling if the trio of Takati, Motoki, and Koyama had developed the film a wee bit further developing the suggested Shinto imagery in the film of birds realigning their positions in formation flight, of stones, and of salmons. It would then have not just won the hearts of the viewers but also their minds. Then the deaths would truly be “food for thought” of the living.


P.S. The Iranian film Bitter Dreams and the French film The Class have earlier been reviewed on this blog. A trivia for those interested: Takati, Motoki, Hisaishi and Yamazaki are all December born!! Do they also think alike?

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97. Indian maestro Mrinal Sen’s “Khandhar" or "Khandahar” (The Ruins) (1984): Touching sensibilities, tugging at our conscience

My friends are amazed that I should rate a Mrinal Sen film among the very best in world cinema. In fact, there are two films of Mrinal-da that I rate very high—Oka oorie katha (a film in Telugu language based on the Munshi Premchand tale Kafan) made in 1977 and Khandhar (made in Hindi language). These are two films, for me, which raise the bar of quality of Indian cinema, decades after they were made.

Mrinal Sen is an acknowledged Leftist. Yet a viewer of Khandhar will not come across Communist propaganda or even a red flag. There are no political speeches. The Mrinal-da of the overtly political Chorus-that won awards at Moscow and Berlin festivals apart from top Indian national honors--and Calcutta ’71 cannot be recognized as such in Khandhar.

Why then do I rate Khandhar so high? Is it because it won the Golden Hugo at Chicago or the Special Jury Prize at Montreal film festivals? Is it because it won the Golden Lotus the highest national award in India and the best actress award that year? Is it because it had a talented ensemble cast of Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Annu Kapoor, Pankaj Kapur and Mrinal Sen’s wife Gita Sen? For me, Khandhar was fascinating because it was a point of departure for Sen the director of Chorus, who had matured as a filmmaker and had come to accept that true greatness lay within the ambits of understatements rather than overt statements, political, psychological or social.

The opening credits of the film roll as a smalltime still photographer develops his prints in his developing room in Calcutta. The last picture he develops is of the well-balanced image of a Bengali lass among the ruins of an old mansion, with moss and weeds threatening to overshadow brick and mortar. But you soon realize the tale relating to that photograph (captured on still and moving film by the late cinematographer K. K. Mahajan) is yet to follow. The photographer is a middle-class young bachelor. Adorning his studio wall is the awesome still photograph of thespian Vasudeva Rao in Mrinal Sen’s earlier film Oka Oorie Katha (the other favorite of mine from the Sen-Mahajan combine!).

The tale is simple. Three young men, including the photographer Subhash, decide to go to a distant village for a short vacation. One of the young men has an ancestral house tucked away in the interiors of West Bengal. Evidently the house once provided shelter to a rather rich owner. The former symbol of pelf and power has fallen to crass neglect by its few inhabitants to the extent that neither public transport nor electricity is within easy reach. Only god seems to be in touch—as there is a temple and a priest in the environs.

The denizens of the ruins include a caretaker and his visiting daughter (Sreela Majumdar), a bedridden blind widow (Gita Sen) and her quietly demure and faithful daughter (Shabana Azmi) who has been betrothed to a young man who has never returned to claim her for a wife for several years. And there is a white goat that this darling daughter tends, not unlike actress Irene Papas' character in Michael Caccoyannis’ (Mihalis Kakogiannis’) 1956 film Zorba the Greek.

The film could easily be viewed as an unrequited love story between an urban photographer and an intelligent beautiful village woman caught in a time warp. The interaction is brief between Subhash and Jamini but indelible not unlike Alexis and the Greek village girl with a goat in Caccoyannis’ cinematic gem. The words spoken are few between the two protagonists in Sen’s film but the emotions captured are endless. Even the ruins seem to speak..

But the questions the viewers would ask are many. Will the lovers meet again and marry? Probably, not. Is that what the film is all about? The film asks the viewer several questions indirectly. How many of us act according to the dictates of our conscience and our hearts? Most of us prefer not to act, not to rock the boat, not to swim against the current. And there are the hundreds of Jaminis, less beautiful and less intelligent, caught within the chains of honor, family ties, religion, birth, and financial constraints, who cannot truly bloom and show their true capacities and capabilities to the world. One can mistake them as shadows unless they are captured on film as Subhash/Mahajan/Sen did.

The true power of the film lies in its understatements. The chemistry between the two strangers comes alive when a well meaning Subhash tries to cheer a blind widow by pretending to be her future son-in-law. It’s a white lie. When a white lie is spoken, many characters in the film indicate their discomfort, yet no one acts. This is a situation that one encounters so often in life. We tend to question the liar, as in the film, but do not act ourselves.The film is a tale of meaning well but never actually getting down to changing the social, psychological and political status quo. It is somewhat like the clever editing in the film of a man tottering off a steep staircase, which Sen crisply follows up with another scene recording the sound of a bucket falling into a well to withdraw water. No one has fallen--we, the viewers, assumed it. That’s cinema that suggests more than the reality. Khandhar is a subtle film that packs a tough punch. Many might forget to note that this is arguably and deceptively the strongest political film that Sen ever made. The open ending actually helps the film further. A viewer might be forced to accept the ligitamacy of the main protagonist uttering a white lie to comfort an old blind woman. But how many will travel the whole nine yards to rescue the Jaminis of this world?

That Ms. Azmi won a national award for this role would not surprise anyone. But then a perceptive viewer will note that most of the actors in this film were trained in acting schools and could etch out their roles with a depth rarely associated with Indian cinema. The performers were not providing eye candy for the viewers or mere theatrics. Here was an example of restrained, yet detailed evocation of inner turmoil. (The only sore thumb was when Sen used the celebrated actor Om Puri's voice for a minor character in the film.) Both Sen and Azmi were at their finest fettle in this film. It is a story co-written by Premendra Mitra whose story Kapurush was used by another giant of Indian cinema Satyajit Ray. It is important for cineastes to note that Mrinal Sen is one the only Indian filmmaker to win awards at almost all the major festivals of the world--Berlin, Cannes, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Chicago and Montreal--and an honorable mention at Venice.

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