SLIFF 2008: Amal

2007 // Canada // Richie Mehta // November 19, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Richie Mehta's fable of Delhi slums and mansions, Amal, aims quite explicitly to be a Diwali Gift of the Magi. While its Indian setting is rarely superfluous, Amal's focus on the endurance of decency and the morally eroding nature of privilege is uncluttered and accessible. The film presents autorickshaw wallah Amal—portrayed with captivating subtlety by Rupinder Nagra—as just about the most honest, patient, and gentle soul in the world. His kindness towards a grumpy vagrant triggers an amazing destiny that rushes invisibly towards him, even as he struggles with the suffocating demands of clients, his mother, and an injured orphan under his care. Implausibility worries the edges of Amal's character, but Nagra convinces with his tentative speech and nervous smiles. Some of the film's characters border on cartoonish, and Mehta never quite attains a needed balance between the film's sagging realism and its fairy tale glint. While the pacing staggers around a bit initially—Mehta seems reluctant to reach obvious conclusions and essential destinations—Amal picks up steam in its second half, when the twists and revelations quickly begin to click into place. It's no kind of masterpiece, but it is a sweet and memorable tale.

SLIFF 2008: Son of a Lion

2007 // Australia - Pakistan // Benjamin Gilmour // November 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

In some respects, the war-rattled Pakistani setting of Benjamin Gilmour's Son of a Lion is almost incidental. The film assumes the shape of a thousand other tales about a father-son conflict over values, rarely discovering novel territory. However, the contemporary relevance of its cultural specifics engage, as does its grubby dusting of authentic familial pain. Eleven-year-old Niaz (Niaz Khan Shinwari) works as an apprentice in the village gun shop owned by his harsh father (Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad), a devout, humorless veteran of the Afghani mujahideen. With sensitivity and a studious gaze, Gilmour reveals that the illiterate Niaz dreams of attending school, perhaps to study music, an aspiration encouraged by his urbane uncle in Peshawar. Sher Alam will have none of it: He thinks only of his glorious battles against the Russians, his notion of Pashtun masculinity inexorably bound up with his religiosity and lust for firearms. Gilmour eavesdrops on conversations that hint at the complexity of the mainstream street-level worldview in central Asia, one characterized by hand-to-mouth despair, political canniness, and disgust with terrorists. Yet Son of a Lion's fundamental strengths are the heartbreaking performances from Shinwari and Ustad, who lend muscular pathos to a well-worn formula.

SLIFF 2008: Wonderful Town

2007 // Thailand // Aditya Assarat // November 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Evincing more canny perception for the beauty and tragedy of life than Apichatpong Weerasethakul's mesmerizing but baffling creations, Aditya Assarat's touching, wrenching Wonderful Town is a tearful gem of a film. A young architect, Ton (Anchalee Saisoontorn) arrives in a Thai coastal village devastated by the 2004 tsunami. For the duration of a local project, he takes a room at a run-down hotel managed by a shy young woman, Na (Supphasit Kansen). In a manner wholly natural and wracked with authentic heartache, we watch as Ton and Na slowly fall in love. Assarat positively revels in the sheer process of a tentative romance, the ballad of looks, words, and gestures that thrill something deep within the human spirit. With empathic clarity, Wonderful Town conveys the mystery of stirrings that seem beyond elucidation. However, Assarat is not satisfied with a mere joyful anecdote, and the film admittedly teeters a bit when he begins to summon a breeze that foretells calamity. Some viewers will likely walk away disgusted with Wonderful Town's ultimately ruinous destination. I can only marvel that in the same film, Assarat is able to realize a film of such potent longing and such cold cruelty.

SLIFF 2008: Opera Jawa

2006 // Indonesia // Garin Nugroho // November 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

If Julie Taymor had been born in Jakarta, she might have created something like the surreal marathon of Opera Jawa. Garin Nugroho's two-hour gamelan opera of the Javanese Ramayana will be wholly opaque to many Western audiences, but not due a dearth of visual spectacle or sheer cinematic novelty. Nugroho sets the tragic love triangle of Setyo, Siti, and Ludiro (that would be Rama, Sita, and Ravana for those more familiar with the Indian epic) in a contemporary rural setting. Exhibiting an eye for hallucinatory pomp and a divine patience for the operatic art form—which I found alternately dazzling and wearying—the director adds a welcome sparkle to what might otherwise be an aimless babble of exoticism to American viewers. Aimlessness is less a problem than the sharply disjointed nature of Nugroho's storytelling; scenes dribble in without much purpose and fade away. The film is distracted, often to the point of exhaustion, with evoking tableaus and gestures rich in native semiotics, a language unfortunately lost on me. Opera Jawa has its treats, most notably a lively performance from the simian, goblin-faced Eko Supriyanto as Ludiro, but like a work from another planet, its appeal is limited.

SLIFF 2008: Luxury Car

2006 // China // Chao Wang // November 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Chao Wang's Luxury Car strives to achieve two things: a socially relevant time capsule of China's stumbling shift from languid rural patterns to glitzy urban rot, as well as a family melodrama about loss and secrecy. The film never quite succeeds at either, perhaps because Wang has little sense for how to effectively syncreticize these two currents. Qiming (He Huang), a schoolteacher from the countryside, comes to Wuhan to visit his urbanized daughter, Yanhong (Yuan Tian), and search for his son, missing for two years now. Unbeknown to Qiming, his daughter is working as a karaoke "escort," and sleeping with her oily boss (He Huang). Wang studs Luxury Car with graceful moments that capture his themes with quiet assurance: Qiming gazing in bewilderment on a college campus he hasn't seen in four decades, or Yanhong tearing away her roommate's sex-drenched bed linens in shame. However, the film's glacial pacing never conveys the emotional depth Wang hopes to reach, and one gets the sense that he's slowing down to conceal his clumsy weaving of Luxury Car's thematic elements. The result is a work too flimsy to support either its thriller twists or its endless sighs and hesitations.

SLIFF 2008: Let the Wind Blow

2004 // India // Partho Sengupta // November 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Let the Wind Blow is a bleak portrait of a Mumbai college student on the cusp of several life transitions, as rumors of nuclear annihilation swirl like hot dust in the streets. Aniket Vishwasrao portrays Arjun with a fine insight into his blend of awkward charisma, embryonic sensitivity, and reflexive tendency to sabotage the few positive things in his life. Tempted by dreams of a fast buck in Dubai, enchanted by a high-caste drama club beauty, and anxious at the shady schemes of his friend Chabia, Arjun despairs of finding contentment. Political quarrels and demonstrations fill the streets, and the television pumps warnings of atomic fire. Director Partho Sengupta unfortunately gets lost in his narrative far too often, permitting vaguely sketched conflicts and portentous monologues to overwhelm the film's appealing sense of youthful immediacy. Let the Wind Blow's arty visual indulgences and minimalist soundtrack impress much less than Sengupta's skill for discovering small, intoxicating details, such as an urchin hawking business self-help books or a Hindu deity who approaches Arjun for a cigarette. Lamentably, the film's thoroughly black conclusion, plainly born of moralizing intentions, feels a little like an escape hatch.