IFFI 54, 03: IFFILMS, In retrospect

In my last post, I talked about the Competition Films that I saw. Didn’t catch many, but you can never have enough of them. Here, I will move on to the other sections, which, too, had a mix of the very good, the good and the fair. From these, I will begin with the opening film, Catching Dust, which was described in the catalogue as a slow burner thriller.

Catching Dust

Slow burner it sure was, but the thrills were few and far between. The first thing that must be said about the film is that it had a way out plot that was genre defying, and that was a good idea. The director, Stuart Gatt, who also wrote the screenplay, makes his feature film debut with Catching Dust.

In the film, a couple takes the idea of isolation literally, and finds a large plot of land where it can discover each other and let all the demons come out in the open. It is Texas’s Big Bend that the couple choose, and the plot is an abandoned commune. They move to the location in a trailer, and the man goes to the nearest small town to bring supplies, every few days. Even as the darker sides of both begin emerging, another couple moves in, and the two pairs are now a sort of mini commune. A film that is not likely to appeal to Indian audiences because of its strong American flavour, and its slow pace, peppered with sudden outbursts Catching Dust was not an ideal film to open the festival. It is what can be described as a realistic fantasy of utopia or dystopia, depending on your own sensibilities.

Rating: ** ½

About Dry Grasses

A disappointment was in store for me, because the closing film, on 29^th November, About Dry Grasses, had to be given a miss. I had to leave on the 27^th night for Mumbai, to catch a plane on 29^th morning for Jeddah, to attend the Red Sea International Film Festival. Of course, there must be much to admire in a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the famed Turkish director. Ebru Ceylan, who is married to Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is an actress, photographer and screen-writer. After graduating from the film and TV department of Marmara University, Istanbul, Ebru did her master’s degree at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts. Her first short film, On the Edge (1998), was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Ebru was the lead actress in the feature, Climates (2006). She was also the art director of Three Monkeys (2008) and co-scriptwriter of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or winner, Winter Sleep (2014).

Nuri’s 2018 film, The Wild Pear Tree, was a quaint mix of writing talent: Ebru Ceylan and Nuri did the screenplay, which was based on several Anton Chekhov's stories. It also had quotations from Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Gide and J. London.

Nuri’s work has always been lauded at Cannes, where his Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) won the Grand Prix, and Merve Dizdar won the Best Actress Award for About Dry Grasses at Cannes this year.

This one is the tale of a teacher, who is posted in a small village and told that after his four-year mandatory stint there, he will be working in Istanbul. The film resonated with my own life, when I was offered a job in Raipur (Central India, now the capital of Chhatisgarh state), with the assurance that, after a few years, I will be relocated to my home city of Mumbai. I turned down the offer because I was living with my aging mother, and could not imagine leaving her for alone.

Anatomy of a Fall

Anatomy of a Fall (France) began with a flourish, and then had a fall. A little less conversational than most French films, it coupled an author’s lonely world with a murder mystery. German writer Sandra, who lives in the quiet and lonely Alps, is the prime suspect in her husband Samuel’s death. All the picturesque snow, the couple’s blind son and a dog were ingredients for a suspense thriller, but co-writer and director Justine Triet had very few characters to play with. Although it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, I was not too impressed by the bare narrative. There were two or three twists, but they did not have enough impact to keep you on the edge. Incidentally, the tile must have been inspired by the 1959 murder mystery, Anatomy of a Murder.

Rating: ** ½

Io Capitano

African migrants leaving home for a better life on western shores is not a new a subject, but director Matteo Garrone gives it some spin and from the hopefuls who set out by boat to reach Europe emerges Io Capitano (Me Captain). It is the usual sleaze of forgery of passports, travelling in containers, hiding money in a body part that was designed for another utility, and facing an uncertain future. Two bosom pals in Dakar save for years to pay for the hazardous journey, through deserts and hostile terrain, where they will encounter, among many other hurdles, a group of Libyan rebels. Good, natural, all round performances and a an open ending raise the film to watchable levels.

Rating: ** ½

To be continued.