My Movies of the Year - II

My Mirror column:

A year-end list of the films I most enjoyed in 2018, in no particular order. The second of a two-part column.

A still from Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War

Last week, I wrote about my favourites among the Hindi movies released in 2018. This week, I’m going a bit more eclectic. The films below aren’t from any particular place, language or industry. All they have in common is (a) they came out in 2018 and (b) I really liked them.

The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain: Ridham Janve’s film is an absorbing almost mystical, journey into the upper reaches of the Himalayas. As Arjun the shepherd (played by a real-life Gaddi shepherd, also called Arjun) takes his flock in search of pasture, we find ourselves immersed in the starkness and beauty of the mountains. Janve taps into the differential rhythms of time up there — the moss gleaming in the sun, the mist moving over the valley, a glacier-fed stream that can go from a gentle drizzle to a raging waterfall in minutes — as well as the sounds of this particular silence: a screeching hawk, a pitifully bleating lamb. This is filmmaking as distant from a tourist brochure as it is possible to be. One comes away with the thought that nature is effortlessly grand and vast and mysterious; it is only humanity that needs to strain to be epic. 

Aga: Milko Lazarov’s film also sets out to convey the awe-inducingness of the natural world through human protagonists who still live essentially in its embrace. An old Inuit couple live in a yurt somewhere in the endless icy expanse of the Arctic. The old man (named Nanook in a clear reference to Robert Flaherty’s early cinema classic) sets out each day with his dog and his sled, hoping to find an animal to hunt or a fish far below the ice. The old woman keeps house: cooking fish, skinning a fox, stitching a cap out of fox-fur. It is as if they are the only people on earth. But Lazarov takes a more tragic view of where the human relationship with nature is at. The mine we see at the end of the film lays bare all modernity's claims to being civilization. 

Up and Down and Sideways: Completing my trio of humans-in-nature films from 2018 is Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar’s delightful exploration of the community songs people sing as they work in the rice terraces of Phek, Nagaland. As the voices of men and women in one corner of a rice field meld with the voices rising from another, we begin to understand how labour is interwoven with love, love with loss, and monotony with music. This is a documentary that shows much more than it tells, and it is beautiful.

Kaala: Pa Ranjith’s second film with Rajinikanth is one of the most inspiring things I saw this year, taking on the insidious rhetoric of Swachh Bharat with as much glee as the Brahminicalness of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Unafraid to mix animation and hip-hop with the politics of land, or jokey drunken scenes with epic gangster violence, Ranjith channels the superstar's superstardom into a brilliantly energetic, superbly entertaining film that is nothing short of a call for Dalit revolution. It is also, of course, a deliberate Ambedkarite subversion of that other film about a vigilante Tamil don in Dharavi: Mani Ratnam’s 1987 Nayakan. 

Cold War: Pawel Pawlikowski's involving romance unfurls over a few decades of Polish history, taking its two talented musical protagonists from a rural setting chosen for the nationalising of folk traditions to the smoky bars of the Western world. The beautiful people, the lovely black and white photography (just as effective as in his 2013 outing, Ida), the grand departures and fiery betrayals all make for a deliciously satisfying film that has no compunctions about evoking our nostalgia, cinematic and otherwise. 

Dovlatov: Set in a wintry 1970s St. Petersburg, Aleksei German Jr’s film is a superbly deadpan, unexpectedly moving biopic of a Russian writer whose refusal to compromise with the Soviet regime’s requirements for artistic patronage often seems more aesthetic than political. But of course, Sergei Dovlatov, who had to leave his country, was also of Jewish-Armenian heritage. Dovlatov is atmospheric and filled with literary references, but never ponderous: the doggedly unpersuadable writer hero, asked to get into a car at the end, says shortly, “I won’t fit.” It feels like a sad love letter to a time and a type.

Lemonade: A non-flashy, affectingly-acted portrait of a Romanian woman trying everything she can to stay on in America with her little son, Ioana Uricaru’s feature debut has harrowing things to say about two of the year’s hot-button topics: immigration and sexual harassment. 

The Tale: A nuanced and powerful examination of sexual abuse that I’ve written about in these pages, Jennifer Fox’s autobiographical film was a long time in the making. Having come out in the year of #MeToo, it felt like one of the most significant takes on the distressing links between sexual liberation and sexual harassment.

Slut in a Good Way: A sparkling French-Canadian comedy whose original name is Charlotte a du fun (meaning Charlotte Has Fun), Sophie Lorain’s second feature clearly didn’t want to advertise itself to home audiences as the thoughtful feminist film it is. But the complicated love lives of three teenage girls make for a wonderful lesson in sexual politics, social double standards, and the evasive dream of freedom. Bonus: a Bollywood soundtrack that isn’t anything to do with anything but fits strangely and madly in.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Jan 2019.