Melodrama
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Swayamvaram / One’s Own Choice (Dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1972, Malayalam)
Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s debut feature Swayamvaram (1972) is a stark melodrama that marked the beginning of the Malayalam New Wave, an adjunct of India’s Parallel Cinema movement. The film opens with an extraordinary six-minute, dialogue-free sequence aboard a moving bus in Kerala. Shot in a verité style, the camera roves among passengers before settling on the protagonist, Viswam Continue reading
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PARINDA (Dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989, India)
At times watching Parinda is like seeing the handiwork of a geographer dissecting the topography of an urban landscape, flattening and amplifying the fissures of a Bombay milieu that had typically never been printed on celluloid in quite the way director Vidhu Vinod Chopra and his cinematographer Binod Pradhan had in mind when they were Continue reading
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FAN (Dir. Maneesh Sharma, 2016, India) – Star Studies
Fan is facilely about the political and psychological chasm between stardom and fandom. On paper, this seems like a very tasty proposition indeed; especially considering SRK has not made a good film in quite a while. The doppelgänger, a ubiquitous motif, suited to the fragmented, interruptive form of popular Hindi cinema, is familiar to the Continue reading
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HIGH-RISE (Dir. Ben Wheatley, 2015, UK)
Class devours itself. And the politics of class creates an indescribable antagonism that often spills over into violence, and in the case of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, class is explicated through the prism of satire in which modernism is a debauched, sulking creature. Intrinsic to Wheatley’s treatment of Ballard’s writing is an abandonment of logical narrative Continue reading
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BAJIRAO MASTANI (Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India, 2015)
Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films have tended to confound me for their emotional and psychological emptiness, often masked by a fondness for the engrossing worlds he imagines through the art of production design. Bhansali is an unashamed mainstream, populist filmmaker who with his interests in narratives of unrequited love and fatalistic romance recalls the films Continue reading
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