224. Indian director Rahul Jain’s debut, long-documentary film “Machines” (2016): Hard-hitting and real perspective of modern India

India produces some of the world’s most attractive textiles that contribute to making lives in India and elsewhere colourful and comfortable-- whether it be the clothes one wears or the cloth-based furnishings in one’s dwellings. Few realize the oppressive conditions in which textile printing workers in India toil to make the lives of billions of diverse people across the world happy and content. Machines and human beings together contribute to those lovely printed textiles. The contribution of human beings in the process is rarely in the limelight. Toiling within dingy factories, these human beings gradually become dehumanized and mechanical in their actions in their sheer desperation to earn a regular income to keep themselves afloat above the abject line of hunger and poverty. They become machines not out of choice but more from a lack of choice.

Film director Rahul Jain’s honest perspective is not focussed on the machines that manufacture and print the textiles but more on the faceless tens of thousands of workers, exploited and dehumanized to work like machines for extended work hours, deprived of basic rights of hygiene, medical safety, statutory limitations of working hours and legal age and, of course, fair compensation for their time and toil. The film Machines underscores the no-win situation of migrant workers within India caught between poverty and survival, in the clutches of heartless contractors and factory owners, who spin profits for themselves sitting in contrasting distant cosy comfort.

Cinematography ( Rodrigo Villanueva) picked up two
important international awards

Machines has won several accolades worldwide.  Apart from winning the Golden Eye award at the Zurich Film Festival in 2017 for the Best International Documentary Film, it picked up the cinematography award at the Sundance film festival, the Silver Gateway award at the Mumbai film festival, the best cinematography award of the International Documentary Association and three awards/prizes at the Thessaloniki documentary festival.   What is it that makes Machines tick?

Diegetic sound recorded and mixed by the Indo-German crew
is laudable

Machines could have been made in diverse ways.  Mr Jain could have opted to make a film contrasting machines and human beings with music matching the visuals on the lines of the Dutch maestro Bert Haanstra’s 11-minute Oscar-winning wordless sublime film Glass (1958) on the Dutch glass factories. Jain’s film consciously does not use music—his attempt was not to capture the beauty, but the sweat and grime of the workers much in contrast with the workers in Europe. Machines could have been made without words to mirror the French director Louis Malle’s Humain, Trop Humain (Human, all too human) (1974), which is roughly the same length as Machines. That French film looked at the Citroen automobile factories in France and compared the human workers with the machines on the assembly line without words spoken except for brief pitches of the sales staff selling the cars.  There are commonalities between Jain’s and Malle’s film: same length, human workers who appear and work like machines, and no music. The big difference in Machines compared to the two European filmmakers is that the punch of the Indian film comes from the honest spoken lines of the workers captured by the camera replacing the silence of the European works. Malle probably thought that he conveyed a lot by choosing as the title of his film to be same as Nietzche’s last book which appeared to revise all his earlier written works. But little did Malle realize that all filmgoers need not be as well read as he was to make the bigger connection beyond what was obvious within the film’s visuals and sounds of the factory.

Spoken words matter in the film

Words when spoken in Machinessock you on the jaw. The workers have fled their villages because incomes from crops are undependable compared to grimy, sleep-deprived, and low-paid work that in sharp contrast can be depended on as steady income.   It is steady as long as you don’t upset the apple cart by protesting the raw deal meted out by the contractors and the factory owners.

 

The few spoken words are stronger than the visuals. The workers state they have never seen the factory’s owners—but the owners watch them on closed circuit TV in comfortable offices.  The workers can’t afford to buy cigarettes and instead ingest the cheaper semi-dry mix of raw tobacco and slaked lime locally called khaini while the factory owner ironically justifies the low wages as being more than double of what it was 10 years before, especially when workers were comparatively more committed to their work than today, casting a blind eye to the rising costs of living. (Khaini is proven to be injurious to health as much as it is to work with chemicals and dyes without adequate physical protection.) Equally disturbing is the logic of a teenage boy (it is illegal for children to work in factories in India) who claims that working at his age would develop him into a superior and sharper worker when he grows up compared to others who didn’t have his experience.  Or of another boy who reaches the gates of the factory each day and wishes soon after entering it that he could run out of the factory from another gate but chooses not to. More disturbing are the statements of a worker that any potential unionist seeking better compensation and hygienic conditions would be knocked off, while fearfully looking over his shoulder if someone heard him make that statement.

A factory worker reminiscent of a
Thomas Hardy novel

The critical decision that goes in the favour of Machines is that the spoken words are not preceded by questions.  Questions don’t matter.  Those have to be imagined.  When the workers do ask inconvenient questions of the filmmakers, the answers too are not heard.  The film as the finished product is the answer.  The brief silence before the end credits is loud and punchy.

After hard labour, a brief nap in the factory

The crucial bit beyond making of the film was revealed by the young talented director—the film having won all the global awards is yet to be widely seen within India because it is awaiting a Censor Certificate from the Government.  Few can deal with truth, fewer with injustice. Economic growth for those who matter is the mantra of the day. If the film is indeed seen widely, the question asked by the workers at the end of the film would be answered. Nietzsche could be smiling in his grave.

P.S. Director Rahul Jain, who grew up near a family owned small textile mill in India  and studied in the US will soon be teaching at a prominent US University and hopefully continue to make hard hitting films. Terrence Malick used to teach at MIT. Both wear similar hats.

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216. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s film “Teströl és lélekröl” (On Body and Soul) (2017) (Hungary) based on her original screenplay: A stunning script involving dreams and matching dreamlike cinematography bring Hungarian cinema back to the heights it had climbed several decades ago.

 “Teströl és lélekröl  (On Body and Soul) is an idiosyncratic love story full of lyricism and humour, free of all social conventions. It impresses us with the subtlety and eloquence of its style and involves us in its joy of living and loving.” 

--- The citation for the FIPRESCI prize bestowed at the Berlin Film Festival

Hungarian cinema touched its zenith in the Seventies and Eighties when a group of remarkable Hungarian directors delivered their best works: Zoltan Fabri, Istvan Szabo, Miklos Jansco, Istvan Gaal, Karoly Makk, and Marta Meszaros—in that order.  Then there was a lull for several decades while the director Bela Tarr briefly captured the imagination of a new generation of filmgoers of the Nineties and at the turn of this century. Now in 2017, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi brings back to the floundering Hungarian cinema the power of yore.

Just as Zoltan Fabri’s brilliant The Fifth Seal offered food for thought as few films do, director Ildikó Enyedi presents in On Body and Soul a range of philosophical thoughts captured through near silent sequences that discusses issues pertaining to the human body and soul---often presenting contrasting ethereal natural behaviour of animals in the forest with the bloody horror of an abattoir for another set of animals.  

The stag and the doe--arresting award-winning cinematography of Mate Herbai

On Body and Soul is not about animals—it is about us, human beings.  The main plot is an unusual love story of a physically unattractive old cripple falling in love with an emotionally crippled beautiful woman half his age. Director and scriptwriter Enyedi evidently loves to study body and soul in many facets of everyday life, not just limited to the world of a Hungarian abattoir.  If one looks at the subjects the film present, they could present obvious metaphors for larger geographies.  

Enyedi chose Hungarian cinematographer Máté Herbai (who has primarily worked with the little- known but not insignificant Hungarian director Atilla Gigor) to bring magic to her feature film made after a significant 18 year hiatus from making regular feature films, just as Terrence Malick took a 20 year break  between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Enyedi’s last feature film was Simon the Magician (1999) that won awards worldwide following her 1989 Cannes winner My Twentieth Century. Now, Herbai (under directions of Enyedi) ,captures intimate  images of a stag with antlers in the company of a doe in a snowy forest.  There is no copulation on screen but the animals are evidently attracted to each other.  The film sequences seem to talk to the viewer.  That’s the first chapter of the “soul” in the film.

The lead characters go home after work separately
until their separate dreams bring them together

Enyedi and Herbai follow up with a contrapuntal sequence also bereft of music. This is of cattle waiting quietly before they are slaughtered. Herbai captures the eyes of the bull which seems to anticipate its fate as it looks through its cage at the slaughterhouse workers as they casually chat before they begin their day’s work. Both the lady janitor and the bull looks up at the sun tying up humans and animals in a cosmic silent gesture.  Enyedi and Herbai do not show the actual slaughter—only the preparation and the aftermath. Yet, the sequence is chilling and yet aesthetically rendered.

The filmmakers state in the end-credits that no animal was killed specifically for the film but they merely recorded an actual event in the abattoir.  That’s the second “chapter” of the film that gradually moves from the “soul” to the “body,” from the shots of the live animal to its dead body as prime beef portions. This sequence is not for the queasy animal lovers in the audience but yet it is aesthetically presented as few filmmakers can.

The CFO (Morcsanyi) watches his new Quality Inspector (Borbely) at work

As the film progresses, the viewer realizes Enyedi has merely introduced us to the human soul and body in the main plot of the film bringing to the fore the human stag and the human doe, connected through dreams.  While scientifically much of Enyedi’s imaginative tale can be pooh-poohed, the tale is extraordinary.  It is the unusualness of the situation that grabs the viewer. We are presented a man who is a cripple, who once had an active sex life, and now has a grown up daughter, suddenly taking an interest in a reclusive new worker in the abattoir, where he is the influential Chief Financial Officer (CFO).  Enyedi ‘s and Herbai’s initial visual introduction of the lady is superb: she is standing outside the building alone, while others are chatting in groups.  She retreats into the shadows when she realizes her legs are being burnt by the sun’s rays.  Enyedi develops her character as one who is very smart—one who can figure out likely conversations between people without hearing them, a person who can recall dates of incidents in her life perfectly unlike most of us, a person who takes her job seriously and professionally. Even her plate of food is carefully placed to geometric alignment. (Oh, Enyedi, how I admire the lovely details of your script!) And she is naive about sex (and music) even though men are attracted towards her but is evidently interested in experiencing it.

Enyedi does the same with the human “stag.” He once had a fair share of women in his life. The CFO still has a glad eye for sexy women that comes in his view but has grown up sufficiently to apologize profusely when he caught staring. Unlike the human doe who believes in rules, the CFO knows how to keep the local police chief happy by presenting him choice portions of beef. Unlike the human doe, the human stag has no problems meeting up with strangers. They are contrasting characters

What brings the opposites together?   Dreams. Sigmund Freud would have laughed at the amazing proposition of Enyedi’s film but even the stodgiest detractor will have to agree the improbable scenario presented in the film could happen. After all, it is a reworking of the Beauty and the Beast tale, cleverly packaged.

Separate bedrooms in a split screen. Both characters look forward to their dreams
as they prepare to sleep

The film is not just Enyedi and Herbai. The lead male role of Endre, the CFO, is played by a nonprofessional actor, Geza Morcsanyi, who in real life is a successful publisher of Hungarian books, has never acted in a film before and may not in the future.  However, he does edit film scripts and has written one screenplay. The female lead, Maria, is played by Alexandra Borbely, who has acted in a couple of feature films. The lead actors are very convincing.

Geza Morcsanyi plays the CFO

The film introduced this film critic to the wonderful voice, songs and lyrics of British folk singer Laura Marling whose song “What he wrote” wraps up the film. The lyrics of the song do not tie up with the story of the film. My guess is that scriptwriter/director Enyedi merely introduced Marling to the viewers as an extension of the sequence where music store owner suggests a CD  as good music to the character Maria who cannot make up her own mind on what music CD to buy and ends up buying the suggested disc.

Enyedi’s film is one of the best films of 2017. What is amusing is how a lady scriptwriter is able to create the minor characters—the sex obsessed male workers, the amusing psychologist, and the side plot of a worker stealing sex stimulants for human consumption that was meant for animals about to be butchered.  The film is Hungary’s submission for the Best Foreign Film category at the 2017 Oscars.  A formidable one indeed! Hungarian cinema is back at the top.

P.S. The film On Body and Soul won four awards and honours at the Berlin Film Festival: The Golden Bear award for the best film of the year; the FIPRESCI Prize; the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury; and the Prize of the Reader Jury of the daily Berliner Morgenpost . It also won the prestigious 2017 Cameraimage Award for its cinematography by Mate Herbai and the top award at the Sydney film festival. It also won the audience award at the Mumbai film festival. Hungarian director Zoltan Fabri’s The Fifth Seal (1976) and Terrence Malick's  Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the names of the films in this post script to access those reviews.)

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194. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Farsi/Persian language film “Taxi” (2015), based on his own original screenplay: Very interesting subject but intriguing cinematic docu-fiction.

The difficult Kafkaesque conditions for the intellectuals and the financially insecure in Iran discussed in Taxi are indeed very real.

I have visited Iran several times and therefore I have seen it all first-hand. You do not encounter beggars but it is only natural that economically weak families exist in Iran.  In the film Taxi, too, you don’t see beggars but there is a conversation about Iranians being publicly hanged for petty crimes and of a husband-wife duo wearing masks taking to mugging of their richer neighbours because of their pecuniary compulsions. The film ends with thieves/plain-clothed policemen on a motorbike ransacking the “taxi’s” cameras.

Anyone who criticizes the Iranian government is perceived to be a foreign spy and brutally interrogated, while blindfolded, in notorious prisons.  In his film Taxi, the director Jafar Panahi claims that he himself underwent a similar situation and that he is still hoping to one day identify his interrogator by his voice. In the movie Taxi, the Iranian prisons are referred to tongue-in-cheek as “Paradise” by a famous Iranian human rights lawyer, Ms Nasrin Satoudeh (the flower woman), who travels in the Panahi driven “taxi.” She explains that once you are released from prison, your neighbours and friends treat you so differently that you wish you were back in prison. She would know because she was there herself. Ms Satoudeh has represented prisoners and political activists. Her impressive list of clients includes the Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. 

Director Panahi drives his taxi in Teharan's streets with a camera on the dashboard,
while a pirated CD hawker engages him in a conversation on films

Everything discussed in the movie is real. My heart goes out to the people of Iran where the best works of Iranian cinema are banned and good foreign cinema rarely shown. My favourite Iranian film Bitter Dreams, a 2004 debut feature film by Mohsen Amiryousefi, was banned within months of it being shown at the Cannes film festival and awarded the Camera d’Or (the award for best cinematography) and subsequently most cineastes are not even aware of that path-breaking film’s existence or the unique capability of the young director.

Now Panahi is different. He makes very interesting films. He claims he is hounded by the Iranian authorities but yet continues to make films, one after the other, openly on the streets of Teheran. It cannot be that he has accomplished it without people noticing his filming activities in public areas. Iran is a nation, which has lots of cops in civilian clothes and a slice of its population is ever ready to report on activities that would please the government machinery.

Now Taxi is a laudable work--including a discussion of males wearing ties in public (I have not spotted a single Iranian male wearing a necktie in Teheran, but two people in Taxi wear ties, Panahi's friend who has been mugged and a just-married bridegroom), the human rights lawyer  Ms Satoudeh (the flower woman) referring to prison tales after she herself was an inmate of the notorious Evin prison,  pirated film CDs of American, Japanese  and Turkish films being hawked surreptitiously  on the streets of Teheran--all laudable, realistic cinema.

Or is it? In Taxi, the taxi driver Panahi is concerned that his two women passengers with a fishbowl will wet his backseat. When the fishbowl does break by accident, Panahi is not concerned about the water or the broken glass. The camera angles of the sequence with him helping the ladies saving the lives of the fish could not have been taken from the dashboard camera. Evidently there were more cameras (and camera persons) used than we are expected to believe.

Two women with a glass fish-bowl enter the taxi.
Where is the camera? If it is positioned outside the vehicle,
were there regular cinematographers at work?

We are supposed to believe Panahi’s friend who was mugged has captured electronically some evidence of that event on his electronic notebook that he shares with Panahi, the contents of which we don’t get to see. We just see Panahi’s expressions while viewing it.  Are we expected to conjecture the mugging was caught on camera? Further, are we expected to believe Ms Satoudeh and Mr Panahi could drive around Teheran without raising suspicions of a film being made, when Panahi was banned from making films in Iran?

I have actually shaken hands with the director in my city when he was chairing a film jury. He appeared sullen and unfriendly. In the movie Taxi, you see a charming, ever-smiling and friendly Panahi. Which is the real Panahi? In my opinion, the Berlin film festival ought to have bestowed the Best Actor award for this film not just the Best Film!

Candid videoography by Panahi's niece taken within the taxi (She was present in Berlin
 to pick up the Golden Bear on behalf of her uncle)

As in Panahi's The Circle (2000), the subject of Panahi’s film is totally laudable once again in Taxi. But is there an implicit collusion between Panahi and the Iranian authorities? How much of Taxi is spontaneous? Probably nothing.  Panahi, who was not allowed to make a film by the Iranian government, makes a film (or several films critical of the state of affairs in the country) and gets away with them.  Panahi’s niece captures on camera a rag picker picking up some cash dropped by a newly-wed groom.  Are we to believe that photographic evidence will go unpunished in Iran, however trivial it is?  Now that is intriguing.

P.S. The film won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin film festival and the audience award at the Mumbai international film festival.  Amiryousefi’s Bitter Dreams (2004) and Panahi’s The Circle (2000) are discussed on this blog. Other reviews of several important  Iranian films (and those co-financed by Iran) on this blog can be found by clicking here. However, the film Taxi is built on the ideas first introduced by Abbas Kiarostami in his earlier film Ten (2002).

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182. Indian director Anand Gandhi's debut film “Ship of Theseus” (2012): A remarkable thought-provoking, non-commercial film from India

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had 30 oars, and was preserved by the Athenians, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

-- Plutarch (Greek historian, 45-120 A.D.)

Ship of Theseus is an unusual and a philosophical film from India. It deals with an interesting philosophical subject that Plato and Socrates debated, philosopher John Locke postulated replacing the ship with a torn sock, and Jules Verne used in his story Dr Ox’s Experiment.

It is unusual for several reasons.

First, much of the film Ship of Theseus is in English and, that too, in good spoken English, and represents visuals of mostly emerging urban India.  

Second, it is not a big budget film (made with less than the equivalent of US$ 0.19 million as per IMDB, a fraction of what it takes to make a commercial Indian film in Bollywood) and yet has good technical quality--quality that earned it international awards. The sound design  is credited to a talented Hungarian duo who did sound design of British director Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009) and two of the Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s films The Turin Horse (2011) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). 

Third, one segment of the movie has as an actress Aida El-Kashef, an Egyptian filmmaker, who filmed the famous Tahrir Square protests in her country. Her performance in Ship of Theseus won her the Best Actress award at the Dubai International Film Festival, and the Best Supporting Actress Award at the 61^st Indian National Film Awards.  

Fourth, the film, which does not have any commercial trappings, was released briefly in major theatres in India and subsequently won the country’s top national award, the Golden Lotus, in 2014 for the best feature film of the year. The film also picked up awards for the Best Film at the Transylvania film festival. A dream achievement indeed for a debut filmmaker from India! 

And finally, Ship of Theseus is a rare work of cinema that highlights ancient Jainism as a religion that sprouted in India and continues to be a way of life of millions, even to this day.

Plutarch’s conundrum is placed before the viewer by director Anand Gandhi, and his two co-scriptwriters Khusboo Ranka and Pankaj Kumar, by presenting three disconnected modern tales on human organ replacement to extend the concept of aging parts of the fabled ship of Theseus being replaced with new parts until all its original parts are replaced . Each of the three segments of the film Ship of Theseusapproaches the effects of the physical replacement with different perspectives. 

The blind photographer (Aida El-Kashef) capturing urban India
on camera aided by sounds 

In the first  segment, an almost blind photographer (Aida El-Kashef) clicks away with her camera, using intuition, touch and sounds to come up interesting photographs that are eventuially exhibited as art. On regaining her sight, the photographer reviews her blind work. The concept of “good creative“ art, once applauded, is reassessed by its creator, post her critical organ transplant.

Barefoot Jain monks meditating on the sea front captured against the backdrop
of a recently constructed  bridge in Mumbai 

In the second  segment of the film, a well-educated, well-read Jain monk Maitreya (played by theatre actor Neeraj Kabi) spearheads a legal war against the torture of animals for the benefits of medical research of the pharmaceutical industry. The very same medical world points out that Maitreya’s liver has cirrhosis and needs to be treated with drugs or even replaced. As with most Jain monks, for whom the concept of “Santhara” or fasting to death is an option, Maitreya has to choose between what his religion, which he has practised over decades promotes, and an option of modern medication combined with organ transplants. (The concept of “Santhara” has been in the news in recent days as an Indian court ruled it to be similar to abetment of suicide, provoking Jains to point out that it conflicted with their fundamental freedom guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.) The option before Maitreya is not a Hobson’s choice. However, Maitreya’s  final decision in the film makes one rethink about all our own moral stands, not just his. What director Gandhi’s film asks is if a critical organ transplant can change the views of a well-read, ethical person as well.

Wrecked and junked cars are a metaphoric backdrop for a converstion on
the illegal human organ trade 

The third segment of the film Ship of Theseus deals with the growing problem in India where the poor and the uneducated are robbed of their organs without their knowledge by a growing organ transplant villains who sell their spoils to unsuspecting rich clients worldwide who need the organ to survive. In this segment, Gandhi’s film questions the ethics and morality among the world of organ recipients, the organ robbers and the amazing evolutionary changes in the views of morality of those who were actually robbed of their critical organs. A young bright stockbroker Navin (Sohum Shah) stumbles on the larger story of unethical human organ transplants and tries to help a poor labourer, who was robbed of an organ unwittingly. But the outcome of his efforts is even more thought provoking.

Young Anand Gandhi brings all the three protagonists of his film Ship of Theseus together reprising what the famous Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski had done at end of Three Colours Red (his final part of the trilogy, made in 1993-4) by bringing the critical characters of Three Colours Blue, Three Colours Whiteand Three Colours Red briefly by a seeming cosmic coincidence. Kieslowski showed the characters as lucky survivors of a boat tragedy, but Gandhi shows his varied characters as lucky survivors of the organ transplant medical operations in India. In Kieslowski‘s three celebrated films, a key character always cried at the end. In young Gandhi’s film, no one sheds tears as the characters from the three segments watch a film together on caves and the exploration of the unknown, a visual metaphor of the film in itself.

Anand Gandhi and Aida El-Kashef have won accolades at international film festivals for their respective contributions to Ship of Theseus. Equally creditable is the contribution of cinematographer and co-scriptwriter Pankaj Kumar, whose talents are quite evident. Several handheld photographic sequences of the film such as the sequences  involving extremely narrow and winding approaches to the labourer’s living quarters and the exterior shots of the peripatetic monks against modern windmills and electric pylons taken from another high vantage point, ask questions of the viewer the effect on the rapid changes in Indian society on past beliefs and social views that also relate to the same primary Ship of Theseus conundrum. Pankaj Kumar won awards for his contribution as a cinematographer for Ship of Theseus at the Transylvania film festival, the Tokyo International Film festival, and at the Mumbai International Film Festival. The talented Pankaj Kumar has subsequently moved on to commercial mainstream Bollywood cinema working on films such as Haider and Talwar. Ship of Theseus also brought to the limelight a fascinating stage actor Neeraj Kabi, who plays the Jain monk in the middle segment of the film. Kabi, according to reports lost 17 kg in weight, over 5 months, to enact the starving monk. Actors such as Kabi are rare to come by and he was spectacular in his role. 

The movie Ship of Theseus not merely raised the quality of contemporary Indian cinema but proved that good cinema can be made with low budgets, if truly talented people made the film. Most importantly, it is a rare film made in India that forces the viewer to think about philosophy rather than provide escapist entertainment. Such films do not just win international awards but provide quality entertainment for the discerning viewer. Evidently, it was not considered as an Indian entry for the Oscars because the film is in English, which eliminated it from being considered in the foreign film category. Young Anand Gandhi needs to be congratulated for roping in the rich talent from diverse fields to make his remarkable debut film with a limited budget.

P.S. Indian cinema has seen some young filmmakers accomplishing interesting works with limited budgets in recent years. Sudevan’s CR. No. 89 (2013) is one such film made in Malayalam language reviewed earlier on this blog. Another is Praveen Morchale’s Barefoot to Goa (2015) in Hindi, also reviewed earlier on this blog.

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140. Uruguayan director Rodrigo Plá’s “La Demora” (The Delay) (2012): Meaningful and mature cinema that has universal relevance

An evocative poster of the film at the Berlin Film Festival

The conventional poster

Uruguay is not a country that one would easily associate with great cinema.  Even for Latin American standards, Uruguay cannot boast of major cinematic works.  And yet, Rodrigo Plá’s La demora (The Delay) offers without any doubt a major Uruguayan contemporary counterpoint to Michael Haneke’s Amour (Love), both films made in the same year, both major winners on the film festival circuit, both offering quality cinema that will grip the viewer right up to the end.

While Amour dealt with uxorial love, The Delay is all about paternal love. Both films deal with the problems of the elder citizens today. While Amour dealt with the problem within the economic comforts of a small Parisian apartment where the principal characters could afford hospitalization, home nurses, a baby grand piano, a good music system, and a concierge to buy groceries, The Delay pushes the viewer to the bitter realities of the Third World. These Third World realities include possible loss of a job that economically sustains the sizable family, the costs related to bringing up three young children by a single parent, old age homes in Montevideo (Uruguay’s capital) that are either too costly or are over populated with severely incapacitated elders to accommodate a less severe case of an old man struggling with the onset of dementia. While the world goes gaga over the subject and storytelling of Amour, the Uruguayan film The Delay is comparatively a lesser known and lesser celebrated cinematic work that underscores several social issues Haneke’s more sophisticated work never dealt with.

A modern "King Lear" played by first time actor Vallarino

One of the key issues The Delay deals with is with the travails of a single parent. At no point in the movie do the viewers get to know anything about the children’s father. Is he dead or alive? Was the mother married? Neither does Maria, the “Mother Courage” who is in her forties in this movie, ever talk about him or even indirectly refer to him. Rodrigo Plá’s film built on Laura Santulo’s script is very clear: the focus of the film is the relationship between a daughter and her aging father, just as Haneke’s film zooms in on the husband and wife relationship. All other characters in both films are mere foils to build the central relationship. The Plá-Santulo script includes a brief plea from Maria to her married sister to help take care of their father and the response is negative. The interaction is not so much to introduce and delve on the sister, but more to reiterate the situation of Maria and her commitment as a daughter to take care of her dad and her household of three growing kids all dependent on her as the sole breadwinner.  The script is equally silent on the absence of Maria’s mother—one can only assume she is dead.  So is the script clever in sidestepping the relationship of Maria with a male admirer, now married, who remains Maria’s only help in emergencies.  The script is equally clever in sidestepping the obvious action Maria ought to have taken in her search for her father, which she does at the end of the film. But then it is this cleverness that makes the film tick.

It is interesting to compare the scripts of the two films Amour and The Delay even further.  The response of Maria’s sister in The Delaycontrasts starkly with the daughter of the old couple in Amour—both are averse to taking direct responsibility of the parent in distress and in urgent need for care.  The European and the economically stable frameworks presented in Amour’s screenplay offer a convenient way out for the daughter—place the parent in an affordable old age home. In The Delay, even for the less caring of the two daughters, the option would be to take care of the parent herself—which she refuses point blank for reasons never discussed in detail in the film. 

Maria (actress Blanco) combining "Cordelia"and "Mother Courage" 

The financial stress for the family plays a major emotional chord in The Delay, even though Maria’s family is not extremely poor by Third World standards. Maria works as a tailor/seamstress for a struggling medium-sized company and what she earns has to be hidden away in her stockings so that the money is not stolen or misspent. Even this hard earned sum gets almost destroyed when the stocking is put into the washing machine accidentally.  Director Plá and scriptwriter Santulo are able to weave in the financial stress and wry humor into the larger tale with a felicity that is commendable.  A hair-dressers wife in the movie wryly snaps at her husband (Maria’s long-term admirer) by stating that the value of his modest establishment has just hit the sky on the New York Stock exchange. And yet director Plá is not showing the warts of Uruguay’s less endowed environments but instead the middle class parts of Montevideo, clean and well maintained.

While Michael Haneke’s script of Amour focused on love between husband and wife, the Plá-Santulo script of The Delay deals with a similar love of a daughter for her father slipping further into dementia and/or aggravation of the Alzheimer’s disease. The financial stress leads to a sudden impulsive decision by the daughter Maria in The Delay, which is not very dissimilar to the sudden act  of the husband to end the misery of his wife in Amour. A viewer of The Delay could wonder where the love of the caring daughter seems to vaporize from that impulsive point onward.  And it is this brief switching off of the parental love in The Delay and the final resolution of the tale that makes the film admirable. The film provides sufficient clues that there is no fracture in the love between daughter and father. In fact, Maria is not just a daughter to her father but a “mother” to her father.

But how does director Plá make the script come alive? He gives ample footage to prove that the father has faith in his faithful daughter, like a Lear for his Cordelia.  He can wait and brave the cold and desolation in the faith that his daughter will ultimately rescue him. Even the sequences of strangers trying to help the old man are to no avail—the old man has faith in his daughter.  He is convinced that the true love resides is in his daughter’s heart, a love stronger than that of well meaning strangers. The old man not only refuses food and shelter but also urinates unwittingly while sitting on a park bench in the cold winter night and wants someone to clean him up, possibly the way his daughter would have done if he had done this in his daughter’s apartment. The director Plá’s ability to capture these feelings in a lonely cold urban landscape makes The Delay a major cinematic work of the year.

Unlike Haneke’s Amour, which had top class actors for Haneke to manipulate, director Plá had only actress Roxano Blanco (playing the lead role of Maria) who was a professional actor. Maria’s father, Augustin, is played by a first time actor Carlos Vallarino. Perhaps Mr Vallarino’s lack of confidence in front of the camera helped in portraying the forgetful and genial old man in the evening of his life. It is not surprising that some of the awards at minor festivals for this film have gone to Ms Blanco (at the Biarritz Latin American Film Festival) and to Mr Vallarino (at the Hamptons International Film Festival).  The more significant awards the film has picked up include the Celebrate Age Prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival, the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival 2012, and the Best Director Award at the Pune Film Festival 2013–all deservedly for Rodrigo Plá—and the Best Screenplay Award for Laura Santullo at the Lima Latin American Film Festival. The spectrum of awards won on three different continents by this amazing little movie could not have accentuated its inherent strengths any better. It is a lovely counterpoint to Amour “sung” visually in a different style to highlight the sufferings of the elderly and the travails of those who try to ameliorate their pitiable condition.

P.S. La Demora (The Delay) is one of the top 10 films of 2012 for the author. It was also Uruguay's official submission to the Oscars 2013.

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