THE READER

Several Hollywood critics have derided Stephen Daldry’s The Reader as ‘yet another Holocaust movie’, ‘an excuse for soft porn and Kate Winslet’s extensive nude scenes a misplaced measure of her commitment to craft’, ‘a cold, disconnected drama’ etc. While the film doesn’t come together quite as precisely as Daldry’s earlier work The Hours did, this David Hare adaptation of a popular German book by Bernhard Schlink, is anything but simple or trite. The Reader isn’t about the Holocaust, but an indictment of all the ordinary Germans who aided/abetted Hitler’s genocide either by participation or tacit support, a second generation that shouldered the shame, guilt or anger about their collective responsibility in the program and the idea of selective memory and justice. It’s also a profound comment on how much a single event can alter and define entire lives; the complexity of human nature, the ebb and flow of emotions and ultimately, the burden of past choices that weighs upon the present and in some ways shapes the way futures evolve.

Spread across four decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, it’s the journey of two characters whose paths cross quite by chance. Michael (David Kross) a West German school boy gets off a tram and is sick outside a non-descript building, when a woman mysteriously emerges from the shadows to help him clean up. Three months later, Michael lands up at her doorstep and his unabashed adulation and her lack of human contact launches them into a torrid physical relationship. For the boy, it’s an initiation into adulthood, for the woman, Hanna (Kate Winslet), it seems like an opportunity to revel in her favourite pastime – books. Yes, a crucial element of their bargain is Hanna’s insistence that Michael read to her before and after sex – there’s everything from Homer’s Odessey to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tin Tin comics on the menu. But there’s more to Hanna’s obsession with being read to than she’s ready to reveal, and the narrative is sprinkled with clues leading up to the second phase of their lives nearly a decade later, long after Hanna suddenly disappeared from Michael’s life without a goodbye.

In 1966, Michael is studying law and accompanies his liberal professor (Bruno Ganz who’s a chilling reminder of Hitler’s ‘Downfall’) to a trial of Nazi workers in a nearby town, initiated because of the publishing of a tell-all book by a survivor’s daughter. There, amongst the defendants (mostly a bunch of unremarkable middle-aged women) shines through a voice who’s not afraid to be forthright – “What would you have done?” she asks the judge when he tries to pin her down to crimes she committed in Auschwitz. Hanna is matter-of-fact about her role as a guard who was doing her duty as was demanded of her – resulting in the burning of 300 inmates in a church fire. But pride and shame drives her to withhold a crucial piece of information, which has a direct impact on her sentence. For these trial scenes alone Kate Winslet deserves all the awards in the world. The range of emotions she conveys sitting in the dock far outweighs anything else she’s done on screen in the past decade and a half.

Later, the professor brings up the tricky issue of morality versus legality as an angry student expresses disgust about his parents’ generation for their contribution to Hitler’s cause and inability to acknowledge the truth. Hanna’s conviction is, in a sense, determined by Michael’s decision to remain silent despite being privy to her weakness – brought on due to anger, confusion and a bruised ego. She goes to prison, he into a lifelong shell that not even his grown up daughter can draw him from.

In 1995, Michael (Ralph Fiennes) is a lonely man haunted by his memories and still unable to shake off the past. He’s spent Hanna’s prison sentence making audio tapes of books and despatching them to her on a regular basis. Both are defined by their choices. But many others get off with a much lighter sentence and somehow this skewed justice stinks. Eventually, there’s no closure for Hanna or Michael – as the writer whose book led to Hanna’s trial tells Michael towards the end of the film, there’s no catharsis in the Holocaust story. Which may well be the reason filmmakers turn to it over and over again, in the hope that revisiting this horrific period in recent history might help prevent its recurrence. But as Daldry’s film plainly suggests, there are innumerable other crimes and atrocities that go unnoticed because like everything else, we pick our causes.

Deepa Deosthalee

I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG

It’s scandalous to know that Kristin Scott Thomas didn’t even get an Oscar nomination for French writer Philippe Claudel’s debut film I’ve Loved You So Long. Not that the Oscars are any measure of greatness. For, a finer portrait of anguish and fortitude one hasn’t seen on screen, and that in a character who seems utterly irredeemable. When the film opens, Juliette is nervously smoking away in an empty airport lounge. Her sad, listless eyes, creased forehead and fidgety body language suggest suffering. On the other side of the glass is her sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein, an equal foil) fumbling out of her car and rushing in to receive her. Juliette has just been released from a 15-year prison sentence for murdering her little son; social services called her sister, and Lea decided to have her over at her home in the town of Nancy, where she teaches literature and lives with her doting husband Luc and two adopted daughters. For Juliette, it’s a long journey back amongst the living, a rigorous process of re-humanisation she must undergo, often without feeling the need for it. For Lea, it’s a tentative rediscovery of the sister she’d always looked up to, and sorely missed through the period when her very existence was erased from her life.

I loved the way Juliette looks at the world around her -– with the eyes of an outsider who doesn’t make much of the charade of everyday life. It’s not contempt or indifference, just the knowledge that it’s all so delicately balanced because there’s always an air of mistrust around her. And it’s so palpable, the narrative takes on the tone of a mystery as we view her every action with the same suspicion that everyone around her (with the notable exception of Lea) harbours about her motives. (This may well be the entire point of the film -- how human beings perceive social aberrants and constantly judge one another.) Besides, physical freedom really doesn’t mean much to her battered soul. Her arrival throws Lea’s life into a tizzy –- with Luc disapproving Juliette’s presence around their daughters, her older child posing awkward questions that nobody wants to answer and a social circle simmering with curiosity about Lea’s mysterious sister. Lea is a bundle of nervous energy trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy, while herself eager to know what drove Juilette to commit the heinous crime. As the film progresses, you realise her need for her sister’s love is as acute as her desire to gently reassure her.

This is one of those films where every sentence and gesture is loaded, characters rarely speak their mind and what’s left unsaid is very unsettling. Claudel juxtaposes Juliette’s spiritual incarceration with other characters in the normal world who are equally trapped -– her demented, institutionalised mother who once disowned her, her edgy parole officer starved for company, Lea’s father-in-law struck silent by a stroke and lost in the world of books and her colleague Michel, a widower who carefully guards his past. Juliette tries to keep a detached distance from her new environment, but is gradually drawn out of her shell and tentatively starts building new bridges. In the end the writer/director offers her redemption (on a platter it may seem; to me, it isn’t really the point), but although love and understanding help, we know that she won’t ever properly fix her broken heart.

Claudel keeps a tight control on his screenplay with scraps of information carefully scattered for maximum impact. He uses the camera to scan the inner landscapes of his characters with savage transparency. Scott Thomas loses herself in a role that becomes her so perfectly, it’s impossible to tell them apart. It’s a face that’ll haunt you for days. And a film you can’t easily forget.

Deepa Deosthalee

GHAJINI

10 reasons why Ghajini deserves to be the biggest blockbuster of Hindi cinema:

10) 177 MINUTES: That’s how long it is. So straightaway, you know you’ve got your money’s worth.

9) 200 BEEFY SOUTH INDIAN MEN: I didn’t start counting from the beginning of the film, so that’s just a conservative estimate. All of them are tall, dark, oily and unshaven, with piercing black eyes. Each one gets battered to pulp by Aamir Khan.

8) SHORT TERM MEMORY LOSS: Both the director and the editor have this peculiar ailment. Just when you think the story’s moving ahead, they go back to square one and start all over again. Take it from the top, in slow-motion. 

7) THERE WILL BE BLOOD: This truly is a revolutionary film (no pun intended). There’s such breathtaking gratuitous violence, it opens your eyes to the pleasures of killing people for a sport. Never again will I baulk at the sight of blood. Move over 300 and Gladiator, Ghajini is here.

6) THE VILLAIN: That’s Ghajini. Although I still don’t know what the name means. The way Pradeep Rawat plays him, he’s the embodiment of all the B-movie villains of the 1980s and 1990s – gold chains and bracelets, kohled eyes, gnarling teeth, five ugly cronies and of course, a will to kill. But in Ghajini, he’s also the owner of a large pharmaceutical company who gets invited by medical colleges as chief guest for their annual day functions. Go figure.

5) THE MUSIC: To be fair to Oscar award-winning composer A R Rahman, I watched all the songs in fast-forward mode (ah, the pleasures of home viewing). You should try doing this. It might just fool you into thinking the film has a fluid narrative.

4) THE GUY WHO PLAYS COP: Why did they kill him so early in the film? He’s this really handsome man with a Hanuman-like pout, tight jeans that sit nicely on his stomach and stiff, toned muscles bulging out of his blue shirt. Did Aamir Khan feel threatened because he’s a foot taller than him? Or was his death imminent to the plot? Either way, they bumped him off just when I was rolling on the floor watching him chase Mr Khan to his Hiranandani flat.

3) ASIN’S ACCENT: Not since Sridevi disappeared from the screen have I seen such an authentic South Indian accent in a Hindi film. She even tries to imitate Sri’s impish laugh (remember Chandni?). Oh, and did I mention both she and Jiah Khan, the other girl with a funny accent, are half Mr Khan’s age and hence perfectly suited to play his love interest. BTW, this is probably part of the collective memory loss syndrome, but the character Mr Khan plays on screen is apparently born in 1975.

2) AAMIR KHAN’S GROWL: Actually, to give Mr Khan his due, he doesn’t hog all the growls in the film. Everyone gets his/her fair share. But he has the growling glory moment when he first takes his t-shirt off before the mirror, feels up his entire tattoo-littered eight-pack upper torso and growls, grunts and jumps around in a mad rage. I suppose looking at your own reflection can induce such extreme feelings.

1) NO THANKS TO MEMENTO: Most of all, Ghajini deserves a huge round of applause for not acknowledging Christopher Nolan’s Memento as its source material. Generally, we don’t do such things in Bollywood, because when we remake Hollywood films (or remakes of Tamil remakes of Hollywood films), as a rule, we mutilate them beyond recognition. In this case, there really wasn’t a case of copyright infringement, because hey, we merely borrowed the idea of a guy who suffers from short-term memory loss, believes he needs to kill someone to avenge his lover’s death, tattoos notes to himself all over his body and takes pictures of people to remember them. 

I mean there could be hundreds of films with such a premise, couldn’t there?

Deepa Deosthalee

Revolutionary Road: Where Life Stands Still

“Knowing what you’ve got, knowing what you need, knowing what you can do without –- that’s inventory control." –- Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road.

Revolutionary Road, based on a popular 1961 novel by Richard Yates, is set in America of the mid-1950s. The period is important in a certain sense. And then again, it’s not. What gives Sam Mendes’ suburban nightmare a universal quality (far more than his earlier American Beauty) is that it sort of typifies most marriages anywhere in the world. Two people often come together with the notion that they nurse common dreams, which could become the basis of building a life together, different from scores of others. But it’s entirely impractical, nay, totally impossible for this belief to actually last a lifetime. What does happen, more often than not, is what Frank and April Wheeler play out on screen. They stop listening, hit each other where it hurts most (for, living together actually opens out all their warts and weaknesses), and foist their bitterness and misgivings about their own failures upon one another, so that even inane conversations become potentially explosive situations. But the tragedy cuts deeper because Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet make such a handsome, electrifying couple, it’s depressing to watch them tear each other to shreds in scene after scene. This isn’t the romantic reunion their Titanic fans would’ve wanted. They’re so merciless you want to beg them to stop. Although anyone who’s been married long enough should know that they just wouldn’t listen, because that’s what marriage does to the best of people. It sort of dehumanizes them by putting their individual personalities in a box and forcing them to pretend that the act of coming together wiped out much of what was distinctive about them, in an irrevocable way.

That Frank and April live in the conformist ‘50s, contextualizes their despair – he’s trapped in the same mechanical job his father had done 20 years earlier in a company that makes adding machines, she, in playing suburban housewife and mother of two when her spirit longs to be elsewhere. You can watch the film twice, as one critic suggests – from either character’s point of view. Both, unfortunately, are equally valid. Neither knows what they really want, except that the life they’re leading is as far from the one they’d envisioned when they first met at a New York party, as possible. Mendes doesn’t dwell on their romance at all, cutting straight to their pretty white house with a prim, manicured lawn on a street ironically named Revolutionary Road, which was meant to be a temporary abode, except that two children and a humdrum existence tied them all up in knots. The hope of escape comes in the form of April’s naïvely romantic suggestion that they move to Paris and start afresh. Frank doesn’t really comprehend what this means for him (she plans to get a secretarial job and leave him all the time he needs to ‘find himself’) but decides to play along simply to escape the boredom of the existing predicament that’s punctuated by a listless affair with an office secretary. When he’s explaining the idea to friends and colleagues he seems to be convincing himself, more than reassuring them that it’s a brilliant and workable solution. They, in turn, are skeptical, yet envious.

The only person who actually thinks they’re doing the right thing is their realtor’s (Kathy Bates) insane son John Givings (a brilliant Michael Shannon) who was once a mathematical genius but is now confined to an institution where he’s undergone extensive shock therapy. He is nervous and fidgety, but the only problem he really seems to be suffering from is extreme truthfulness in a time and age where propriety mattered more. As April screams in an emotionally charged moment, “No one forgets the truth. They just get better at lying.” But by the time John comes to their house on a second visit, things have changed dramatically. Frank gets a lucrative promotion and April gets pregnant in that brief rekindling of their relationship with the promise of change, so that suddenly, Paris becomes a distant dream all over again.

Justin Haythes’ screenplay reflects Frank and April’s story on those around them very effectively – particularly their equally discontented neighbours who choose to sink back into their delusional life than confront their fears. But he keeps the Wheeler kids firmly in the background, which is a mistake – children exacerbate the marital tragedy, and it’s their presence which often fuels the necessity of building the illusion of a ‘stable family’. Cinematographer Roger Deakins creates an accurate sense of the boredom of prosperity, with squaky clean, colour co-ordinated compositions and Thomas Newman’s music punctuates the tension with a false sense of calm. But it is the lead pair that lends this film its emotional edge. If DiCaprio’s boyish looks heighten the frustration of a man staring at an empty life ahead, Winslet’s slightly wrinkled brow and taut face can scarcely mask the anxiety lurking under her pleasant demeanour. Their final scene together is a study in desolation – no two people sitting so close at an ordinary breakfast table could be as far apart. At the end of a lifetime together, they’d have turned their disappointment into a sport in the fashion of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

The tragedy of Revolutionary Road is that most people would watch it with a mild sense of detachment. At a time when the world as we know it is falling apart in the wake of financial doom, perhaps its time to look inwards, throw caution to the wind, and embark on a journey to rediscover who we really are. As John surmises, “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” And even more perhaps, to move on from there….

Deepa Deosthalee

Dev D: A truly modern film

I’ve never liked Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas. The eponymous ‘loser’, to me it’s success is a symbol of our voyeuristic fixation with an unheroic protagonist indulging in self-pity, pining for a lost love (lost, on account of his own cowardice), then drinking himself to death and collapsing at her doorstep after wallowing at the bosom of a prostitute. Both Paro and Chandramukhi were far more interesting characters in the book and in Bimal Roy’s cinematic interpretation (one wouldn’t want to get into Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘operatic’ but passionless Devdas at this point).

Anurag Kashyap and Abhay Deol (who’s credited with the concept for this film) have turned the Devdas story on its head and ripped the tragic mask off this character’s face, while giving the Hindi screen, and dare we add, Indian society too, a taste of kick-ass subversive cinema that’s sure to prove unsettling to many. Is it merely an accident that their Devdas is set in the same idyllic Punjab that’s Bollywood’s bastion of regressive values, where every Simran meekly bows down to the patriarchal order while Raj won’t take his bride without Bauji’s blessings even in the 21st century?

Here, Dev (Abhay Deol) who’s been sent away by his father to London as a teenager, talks sex on the phone with his beloved Paro (Maahi Gill) while she indulges his whim by sending him topless pictures of herself, instead of baulking at his suggestion. Neither of them is apologetic about their lusty obsession with one another. Paro’s bold enough to pin him down in the sugarcane fields and mock at his hypocrisy after he foolishly spurns her advances out of weak-minded suspicion (typical Indian male’s presumed ownership of his woman’s body). She speaks her mind, expresses her anger and marries a father of two young kids, but without regret. Instead, she breaks into a spontaneous dance at her own wedding, while the husband watches agape and Dev drinks himself silly over her ‘emotional atyachaar’.

He follows Paro to Delhi and is lured into a den of vice by Chunni the pimp. The Chanda (Kalki Koechlin) he meets here is nothing like Sarat Chandra’s noble prostitute. She’s a feisty half-Indian teenager from Delhi who got embroiled in an MMS scandal (half the country gleefully saw the video, while she was labelled the slut, she matter-of-factly informs Dev). Her father first watched the video and then committed suicide, presumably out of shame, and Leni (as she was formerly known) found herself in the shadowy streets of Delhi getting an education by day, and servicing clients by night. She isn’t ashamed of her chosen profession or bitter about life’s hard knocks. Unlike Dev, both Paro and Chanda have embraced their fate without much fuss.

In the film’s best scene, Paro visits Dev at the seedy hotel he lives in, gets him to clean himself up (washes his clothes as well) and leaves him with her candid opinion that he’s incapable of loving anyone because he’s too full of himself. Bravo! Hers is the best-etched character in the film, because it conveys so much with such economy, while the director lingers indulgently over Chanda, dragging the film down in the second half, only to redeem himself with a fitting denouement that finally liberates the Devdas metaphor from its misery.

Anurag’s unusual vision is backed by a tremendous musical score by Amit Trivedi (it’s outrageous, catchy and totally apt) and Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography that captures the rawness of Paro’s Punjab and Chanda’s surreal, psychedelic Delhi equally deftly. In the second half, the film is reminiscent of Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (isn’t the Nicholas Cage character the Hollywood version of Devdas in any case?). True to the source material, Abhay’s Dev is a shallow, self-centred idler happy to drown in a booze and drug induced haze. At no point do you warm up to this character and that's to Abhay's credit. He’s probably the only thinking actor one has seen in mainstream cinema in recent times, always astute in his choice of films, and eager to be moulded into different parts.

Even more commendable is Anurag Kashyap’s journey. That he stood his ground even though his debut film, Paanch didn’t get released, Black Friday got horribly delayed, No Smoking bombed and faced unprecedented ridicule, to come back and make Dev D is a remarkable achievement. Whatever fate it meets at the box-office, this is a film that’s opened doors which Bollywood traditionalists will find very, very hard to shut.

That’s Dev D’s greatest triumph.

Deepa Deosthalee

Mumbai is Burning. Again!

It seems we’re finally tired of singing paeans to the resilient spirit of Mumbai, which, simply put, actually means nothing more than a daily fight for survival. We can glorify it all we want, but for a large number of people in this city, living from day to day itself is such a huge struggle, the threat of terrorism seems only like an occasional blip on their already busy radar. Last year, an office boy who worked with me in a fashion magazine lost his life falling off an overcrowded local train just outside Kandivali station as he was heading to work. He left behind a wife and three little children and it didn’t take any ammunition to snuff out his innocent existence. Life and death is mostly a matter of chance in this heartless city – now, not only for the teeming masses who can do little to determine their destinies, but also the privileged, who may put themselves at risk merely by stepping out for a five-star dinner. 

There’s no logic to survival, beyond the realm of accidental choices, or the presence of a supreme force orchestrating our lives, depending on your personal line of belief. Ask all those who miraculously escaped the terror attacks and warded off death by mere seconds entirely on account of random decisions that somehow took them away from the war zones at the Taj and Oberoi-Trident hotels or kept them safe even in the face of extreme danger. Others paid the ultimate price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s only at times like these that we take a pause from our robotic existence to reflect on our inherent vulnerability. And naturally, it frightens us. For a long time to come, many of us will be looking over our shoulder wherever we go and will never feel safe no matter how much reassuring rhetoric flies around. We already know that our political system inspires absolutely no confidence, although we now have renewed faith in our security forces and brave police officers. Yes, the very same who, until days ago were being maligned for their communal bias, but were the first to go in and face the fire with their pathetic safety equipment.

Our politicians, on the other hand, are treading the thin line now it seems, and one hopes it is they, and no one else (especially not innocent citizens), who bear the brunt of the public backlash. Maharashtra’s chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh’s single largest achievement in office so far has been to hold on to his chair for as long as he has managed. He is, arguably, the least effective chief minister this state has ever known and it boggles the mind to imagine that such an uninspiring man is at the helm of affairs in times of crisis. Home Minister Shivraj Patil believes nothing that happens in the country has any reflection on his role as Home Minister, and hence, he can’t really be held accountable for such frequent and sustained terror attacks in several different cities. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hasn’t been able to assuage the citizens with his muted rhetoric summoning the ISI Chief to Delhi. L K Advani keeps threatening to scream POTA, POTA , and only just stops himself. Narendra Modi goes around making a nuisance by meddling around in Mumbai when we all know it didn’t take any terror attacks to eliminate thousands of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Raj Thackeray, meanwhile, has either been hiding at home, or lauding the brave ‘Marathi’ policemen who lost their lives in the gun battles. The rest can go to hell for they’ve no business defending lives on his ancestral territory. Already, various politicians have put up hoardings around Mumbai saluting the policemen who lost their lives in the encounter – for a change, we don’t see their own smug mug shots plastered all over these unauthorized publicity hoardings. 

We Mumbaikars have lived with the threat of terror for nearly two decades now, apart from innumerable other equally ominous situations like say, the annual rains or overcrowded public transport, or rash driving. Trains and buses have been targets of terror attacks at regular intervals. We all know that the country’s largest city is totally ill-equipped for crisis management of any sort and after each successive emergency situation, we’ve heard hollow promises from two-faced politicians, riding on the belief that people will forget all about what happened and get on with their lives in a matter of days. We’ve always proved them right by not asking questions, by not raising our voice, by not coming together towards a constructive citizens’ initiative to make the system accountable to us and not just in times of crisis, and actually getting on with our lives as though what has happened may never be repeated, or in fact, doesn't concern us at an individual level at all. It is up to us to make our elected representatives, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the media accountable for the way they function, because everything they do, does impact our everyday lives in some way. If we, the educated and privileged don't do it, who will?

Lighting a candle in the window is merely another variation of the tokenism we’ve seen from our political brass. For the candle is sure to burn down long before the scars and the wounds of the hundreds wounded and bereaved even begin to heal.

Deepa Deosthalee

4 MONTHS 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

That’s the exact duration of time that Gabriela (Laura Vasiliu) has been pregnant when we stumble into her life in a shabby dorm in some Romanian town firmly in the iron grip of Nicolai Ceausescu’s oppressive rule. Abortion is illegal, while a fifth month termination invites an even harsher sentence. Everything from cigarettes to mint to cosmetics must be procured on the black market, even necessities like cooking gas, sugar and meat are heavily rationed, it’s impossible to go anywhere without an ID, the streets are uniformly bleak by day and night, people in any position of privilege exploit their powers and the state impinges on individual lives in a multitude of ways.

It is in this claustrophobic atmosphere that Gabriela’s friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) bravely steps up to assist her roommate in getting the job done and goes about organising things she’s scarcely capable of handling. Through the course of a few hours, both girls are exposed to the worst horrors everyday life could possibly throw up. Cristian Mungiu’s ‘4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ isn’t a tale of transformation and personal growth as ‘The Lives of Others’ (set in Communist East Germany), which offers cathartic closure for the protagonists. It’s a scathing, in-your-face account of the crushing impact that the combined forces of totalitarianism and patriarchy have on the lives of two young girls.

Mungiu throws us right into their precarious situation by stripping his film of all embellishments. The only gimmick he employs (if you can even call it that) is to keep the narrative starkly realistic, with excruciatingly long shots (no close-ups, mind you), maximum use of natural light and hand-held camera, absence of background music and extraordinarily authentic performances. He chooses Otilia as the central figure in his plot and doggedly follows her through all the disturbing events she must face to help out a friend who’s basically cowardly and self-centred. Gabriela leaves Otilia to do everything for her – procure a hotel room after she’s bungled the booking, fetch the abortionist (curiously named Mr. Bebe) even though he’s specifically asked her to come in person, and even borrow some money from her boyfriend Adi to help fund the procedure. Worse, she lies about the exact state of her pregnancy and leaves them both vulnerable to Bebe’s exploitation.

In the middle of this mess, Otilia must visit Adi’s house for his mother’s birthday party -- he’s as self-absorbed and insensitive as her friend and determined to test her loyalty. Mungiu sadistically places the camera at the table in this supposed scene of revelry with a bunch of rude, garrulous people who’re thoroughly oblivious to the plight of the poor girl numbly sitting through this ordeal. The scene is exactly seven-and-a-half minutes long and it goes on, relentlessly, without a single cut as they make stodgy conversation around things like different ways of cooking potatoes and the good old days. An absolute masterstroke to drive home Otilia’s anxiety and helplessness.

‘4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days’ ends as abruptly as it opens, in the middle of a conversation. There’s no polished finish, nor pat resolution. It’s ‘cinema as an experience’ at its best. A few hours of unbearable tension that you must live through with the characters and come as close to touching their lives as it is possible for an audience to do through the artificial medium of the screen. I watched the film twice, back-to-back and interestingly, even though I knew what was to happen, the second viewing was just as thrilling, depressing and engrossing as the first.

Surprisingly, while ‘4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, it didn’t even get an Oscar nomination, and while ‘Counterfeiters’ which won the Best Foreign Language Film award is wonderful, I’m afraid it isn’t quite in the same class. Perhaps the wise old men of the Oscar committee decided they’d done their bit by applauding the voice of the former Communist bloc last year with ‘The Lives of Others’.

The Holocaust, on the other hand, they never can get enough of, can they?

Deepa Deosthalee