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I t is not often that you come across a film that looks innocuous at its beginning and then develops gradually into a truly uplifting and amazing work of cinema. Still Life is a tale of a lower-rung British civil servant John May (his name could well have been John Doe in the US or Joe Bloggs in the UK ), unmarried and yet married to his job with a diligence that makes our own attitudes to work in offices (and homes) look a tad unprofessional in comparison.  The name John May sounds as colorless as is the individual that the director and original screenplay writer Uberto Pasolini gets actor Eddie Marsan to play. The incredible character is a lonely chap working in a small office in UK all alone with files all neatly stacked just as neat and orderly is his small desk with a phone.  And Marsan and Pasolini get around to develop such a colorless individual that some unsuspecting viewers of the movie assumed that the film would be as drab as the character and were seen walking ou...

L ars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is just amazing cinema. It is essentially a film about the relationship of a newly married couple Bess (Emily Watson) and Jan (Stellan Skarsgard). It is an unusual film as it never really bothers to explain to the viewer how this couple met or decided to get married. For the director von Trier and his co-scriptwriter Peter Asmussen, those are not details of importance. For the director and his co-scriptwriter the film is all about the post-marriage events—not what led to the marriage. Even Bess’ sister-in-law Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge) who, we learn as the film unfolds, is the closest person to Bess and lives in the same house, states early in the film following the marriage that she does not know Jan well and that she hopes Jan would take good care of Bess. The viewer soon realizes that Bess is still a virgin right up to her marriage and that Jan too is totally devoted to his bride although they obviously never had sex before marriage, unusual detai...

A lot of thought goes into writing a good screenplay. Unfortunately movie directors often walk away with the credit that ought to be shared with the screenplay writer first unless, of course, the director comes up with a cocktail of visuals and music that takes center-stage pushing the script into the background. Among the best of American screenplay-writers that come to ones’s mind are Horton Foote ( Tender Mercies and To Kill a Mockingbird ) and Ernest Lehmann ( Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ).  Another brilliant screenplay-writer in the same league was the late Carole Eastman (credited under her pen name Adrien Joyce), who wrote the screenplay of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Going by the movie credits, the original story was co-written by Rafelson and Eastman, which was developed into a screenplay by Eastman. Nicholson as Bobby Dupea, the blue-collar oil worker C arole Eastman’s screenplay is simply brilliant. For nearly half of the film, she builds the character o...

A sk any film-goer familiar with Ridley Scott’s work and the movies he will be associated with are likely to be one of his blockbusters such as Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, or even Prometheus, all of which Scott directed. But it is unlikely that anyone will have seen or could recall his debut film The Duellists , which if re-released today could possibly make the box office jingle in response to the footfalls of knowledgeable cineastes. The Duellists is a small budget film that resembles a big budget movie, tastefully photographed with a host of remarkable performances by a handful of talented actors. It is a film with finesse and subtlety rarely encountered among debut films. It is a film that introduces the viewer to a director who loves his craft and can hone it to perfection. It is not surprising that The Duellists went on to win the Cannes film festival’s best debut film award in 1977. None of his later, more popular Oscar-nominated fi...

Y oung Praveen Morchhale evidently wrote an original screenplay for his debut film that was pegged on the tenuous relationships of the typical family as larger family structures of traditional rural India are dismantled into smaller nuclear families in their urban contexts. The sweet grandparent and grandchild relationship gets diluted by distance and economic constraints in the modern developing India. Morchhale’s debut film achieves what it set out to achieve—to underscore the importance of the larger Indian family. Love through sweets The film is a tale of two school kids who decide to visit their ailing grandmother in Goa without the knowledge of their parents who live in a modest apartment in Mumbai. It is a road movie with a difference. The kids get on trains without tickets and get off trains without any plan of their next mode of transport to their destination. Director Morchhale is not interested in pre-occupying the viewer with details such as their likely encounter with the...

A   half century after La Strada was made and widely accepted as a world classic, the film needs to be evaluated by its content as much as by its often touted “neo-realist” style.  Interestingly, Pope Francis considers La Strada to be the film that he loves the most. Director Frederico Fellini considered this work  to be his most “representative film”, most autobiographical, and one which he had the greatest trouble “realizing” and finding a producer (p. 85 in Edward Murrays’s Ten Film Classics ). Fellini also felt close to all the three principal characters in the film (p. 115 in Gilbert Salachas’ Federico Fellini ). F irst, it is interesting to study the three lead characters--three distinct types of idiots/fools—that Federico Fellini and his co-scriptwriters, Tulio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, presented us. These are characters  that provide the basic, pivotal elements of the film. What made them create the three major characters? Were these characters fools or in...