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.

Under the covers

My Mirror column:

A chilling new film called The Tale unravels one woman’s narrative of her sexual self, and may help us all grapple more honestly with our own.

‘‘We tell each other stories in order to live,” runs the famous line from the American essayist Joan Didion. The line appears early on in Jennifer Fox’s disturbing new autobiographical film, The Tale, when the central character, who is modelled on Fox and shares her name, says it to a classroom full of documentary film students. The film’s Jenny Fox (played by Laura Dern) is a 48-year-old filmmaker and professor of documentary, and, at one level, the sentence is just about her trying to get her students thinking about how they might think about narrative, how we all use stories to give our lives structure. At another level, the Didion quote cuts straight to the heart of what The Tale is about: how we remember things, or how we choose to forget.




In her 1979 book The White Album, in which the line first appeared, Didion carried on: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” The Tale, which came out on US television in May and can be seen on streaming services in India, is about Fox’s adult re-examination of the narrative line she imposed upon her own childhood – or certain events in it.

48-year-old Jenny is on her way back home from shooting a documentary about women in India, when she starts to get distressed messages from her mother Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who has just discovered and read a ‘story’ that Jenny wrote in school. That ‘story’, which Jenny’s writing teacher apparently accepted as a work of the 13-year-old girl’s highly-developed imagination, was about a sexual relationship she had had with a 40-year-old man, a running coach called Bill Ritter who was the lover of a Mrs G, Jenny’s adored riding instructor.



But what the film really wants to emphasise is that the ‘fiction’ lay less in Jenny telling her teacher that she had ‘made it up’, and more in her belief that what had happened to her was not sexual abuse but a “beautiful” experience: a love affair from which she had withdrawn, leaving the older Bill devastated. The Tale makes terrifying use of the power of cinema, to show us how we might deliberately, or subconsciously, misremember things “in order to live” – as when we watch Jenny’s first meeting with Mrs G and Bill, first played by an adolescent actress, and then (after her mother shows her a picture of how she actually looked at 13), by a much younger, chubbier actress.



One of the many subtexts in the film is the passage of time. We encounter it, of course, in the splicing together of the 13-year-old Jenny and the 48-year-old woman, each as stubborn as the other, with the older one trying somehow to defeat the anti-victimhood narrative that her younger self has cultivated for years. But we also encounter it in the adult Jenny’s repeated shrugging away of what happened as part of a time of sexual liberation: “It was the ’70s”. Mrs G and Bill’s extramarital relationship – and the fact that they confided in Jenny – made her feel special, not just because they were adults she admired, but because they were adults who seemingly rejected the social/sexual rules by which her own parents lived. “You see how miserable people look in their little nuclear units? Monogamy, marriage: it’s just killing people,” pronounces Bill to Jenny at one point.


The Tale might be interestingly read as the flipside of another film about a teenager in a sexual relationship with a much older man: Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenaged Girl (2015). While also based on a personal memoir of a real ’70s childhood – Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel set in 1976 San Francisco – The Diary could not be more different. The Diary’s 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley) embarks on a sexual affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe. But even at its messiest, the sex seems driven by Minnie’s wanting it. And herein lies the rub. Does Minnie misremember?



The Tale does not share Minnie’s or The Diary’s sense of sexual discovery. It is definitely a #MeToo film, in that its existence is enabled by this new moment of sexual politics, when women are finally letting themselves (and each other) speak of abusive, exploitative sexual encounters that have for years been couched as ‘normal’. Instead of The Diary’s joyful (if sometimes confused) sexual abandon, The Tale has the grim feeling of something still being grappled with: how the sexual repression narrative was flipped into a sexual liberation narrative, without women asking enough questions about whose freedoms were actually enabled, and what sorts of things could pass under the radar. As we are finding in India, in our own #MeToo moment, there is no shortage of ‘liberated’ men ‘teaching’ younger women to be free.



It is up to us all to ensure that the sexual freedom we so absolutely need doesn’t end up working, undercover, as yet another form of sexual oppression.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 June 2018.

Film review: The Tale

A dark tale of awakening

An immersive, often harrowing drama based on writer-director Jennifer Fox's own experience of sexual abuse, The Tale (recently released on Hotstar) deserves the attention it has received abroad. Part of that attention is due to the #MeToo movement, of course, and one wonders if the film's narrative -- which investigates the 13-year-old's experience via the 48-year-old's confusing thicket of memories -- is also a product of #MeToo.

Earlier, there was little space for discussions of consent and power differentials within sexual encounters. It was more empowering to tell yourself that it was a choice you had made.

On the face of it, Jenny's childhood experience -- her adored riding teacher, 'Mrs G', groomed her into having sex with 40-year-old Bill, who was Mrs G's lover and Jenny's running coach -- might read as a textbook case of abuse. What makes The Tale so powerful, though, is that it shows us how conflicted Jenny felt about the incident.

Simultaneously ignored and policed by her parents, she finds the attention of adults she admires impossible to resist. Once persuaded that she is special, she doesn't see that she's being exploited. Even after she extricates herself from the 'relationship', Jenny remains convinced that Bill had loved her, and was devastated.

Everything she tells herself over the next three decades is based on that narrative of strength. But that interpretation is also a form of denial: "You want me to be some pathetic victim? I'm not." Sometimes we need the past to break down the defences we've carried into the present.

The film begins with the adult Jenny (Laura Dern) getting agitated calls from her mother (Ellen Burstyn) after she finds a story Jenny wrote about these events at the time: the 'tale' of the title.

That first teenage 'fiction' works beautifully as a cinematic device, but it is also a way in which to lead us into what is clearly Fox's preoccupation here: How do the stories we tell ourselves about the past shape who we are? In a chilling use of the visual medium to portray the trickiness of memory, Jenny's first meeting with Mrs G is portrayed by a teenaged actress (Jessica Sarah Flaum). Then Burstyn points her to an actual photograph, and the sequence runs again, now with the much younger Isabelle Nelisse: a chubby shy child whose vulnerability to praise is all too apparent.

Published in India Today, 22 June 2018.