skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Whoever thought Bertolucci’s films couldn’t get any more controversial and scandalous post-Last Tango in Paris, were given sharp taps on their knuckles in his very next film, viz. 1900. A master class to some and a disappointing mixed bag to others, this gargantuan epic (the film’s original cut, which I was fortunate to have watched, runs over 5 hours) divided the critics right down the middle. This cinematic equivalent of bidungsroman has at its forefront two protagonists – the amorous Alfredo, a wealthy landlord’s son, and communist-minded Olmo, born to a family of poor farmers, conceived on the same day at the turn of the 20th century. Though friends as kids, the two go on to share a complicated relationship as they take divergent routes as adults; and through them the director has presented a captivating picture of Italy’s chequered and volatile history over the nest half a century or so. Breathtakingly photographed and accompanied by Ennio Moricone’s glorious soundtrack, the film has its fair share of spectacular highs and avoidable lows – a film of this staggering length always runs the risk of turning out disjointed, yet it also had the luxury of having a leisurely paced narrative suiting the film’s epic scope. It boasts of an all-star cast, with Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu giving fine turns as the two protagonists. The best piece of acting, however, came courtesy the thunderous performances from two seasoned American warhorses – Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden. Donald Sunderland, too, was good in his disturbing, if not entirely believable, character.
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Epic/Ensemble Film
Language: Italian
Country: Italian
Bernardo Bertolucci stretched the limits of social and moral conventions, and literally played with fire, in movies like The Last Tango in Paris and The Dreamers. On the contrary, in The Conformist, the movie that won him international acclaim and that probably remains his most famous movie till date, his provocateur nature was far more subtle – the provocations were more through the story’s ideation and the characters’ gestures, than through explicit images. Marcello, who willingly conforms to the implicit demands of the society around him, agrees to the orders of the Nazi high command in Italy to undertake a mission in Paris to assassinate his former mentor who is now a political dissident. The relationships that he shares with, and the tantalizing tango that he participates in with his mentor, his mentor’s beautiful wife, his blind friend (cum sympathizer of fascism), and his young and naïve wife, do not just make for complex character study, but also in many ways a powerful commentary on the rise of the horrific movement in Italy and other European countries post World War I. The film boasts of staggering cinematography what with its exquisite camera work, expressionistic photography, rich colour compositions and a heavy usage of stylizations. That, along with the lilting background score reinforces the inherent sense of melancholy and ambiguity that pervades every frame of the movie.
Director: Bernardo Bartolucci
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Very few filmmakers apart from Charlie Chaplin have been fortunate to have had their names turned into an adjectives to describe their respective style and/or school of filmmaking. Federico Fellini was one, and consequently La Dolce Vita, considered along with 8 ½ as one of the two greatest masterpieces of the Italian maestro, can only mostly aptly be defined by the epithet Felliniesque. The movie is an astringent portrayal of the rabid celebrity-obsession and fixation that has come to define “modern” society, littered with paparazzo, yellow journalism, hedonism and an overall shallowness. In one of the most widely recognized onscreen performances, Marcello Mastrioanni starred as a bohemian gossip journalist and wannabe litterateur, who spends his days and nights swamped with bored socialites and hookers at various parties and nightclubs. And the ennui, lack of emotional involvement and spiritual dissatisfaction of our picaresque hero form the perfect mirror for the decadence, desolation and debauchery that the Rome he wanders through is perpetually filled with. His boisterous tryst with a beautiful and voluptuous but intellectually vacuous actress (played with carefree abandon by Anita Ekberg) at a Roman fountain remains one of the most iconic movie moments. Shot in glorious black-and-whites, the movie’s circus-like depiction of life’s excess and the emptiness therein made this a landmark European arthouse movie with few equals.
Director: Federico Fellini
Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Media Satire/Urban Comedy
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Once Upon A Time in the West has been called by many as Sergio Leone’s greatest masterpiece. Though I wouldn’t go that far (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly still remains my favourite), I must however concede that this would rank among his most ambitious ventures. Like Once Upon A Time in America, this too is appropriately named as it chronicles the demise of the West and forms a love letter to the iconic American frontier. When a family residing in the ironically named locale called Sweet Water is brutally slain by the vicious Frank (played brilliantly against his type by Henry Fonda) and his gang, an enigmatic loner forever playing an eerie tone on his harmonica and an unstoppable gunfighter (Charles Bronson) and an oddball but equally capable outlaw (Jason Robards) take it upon themselves to protect the newly arrived bride (Claudia Cardinale) of the dead head of the family and her piece of land. Virtually given a carte blanche by the producers, Leone turned the elegiac film into mythic proportions. As with all his films, the harsh and unforgiving landscapes have been majestically captured, the Ennio Moricone score, though not his best, nonetheless elevated the epic to the next level, and the languorous pacing helps the film to grow on the viewers. Arguably the most fascinating part of the film, though, is the elaborate and the absolutely riveting opening sequence.
Director: Sergio Leone
Genre: Western/Spaghetti Western/Revisionist Wester
Language: English/Italian
Country: Italy
Watching a universally renowned movie like L’Avventura –Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking masterpiece – can sometimes be a discomfiting experience. The reason is simple, you watch with huge expectations and the viewing experience might sometimes just fail to scale the stratospheric heights you’d hoped it would; something of that sort happened with this movie for me. While a group of blasé, affluent jet-setters is vacationing in a yacht, a successful but jaded architect’s neurotic fiancé goes missing, and during the process of searching for her, he ends up developing a relationship with a beautiful but emotionally fragile lady who also happened to be his fiancé’s best friend. A complex examination of human behaviour and a sharp critique of the shallow decadence of wealthy socialites, it isn’t really difficult to understand what made this the archetypal ‘Art Movie’ – especially given the deeply ambiguous ending. However, on the flip side, the slow, lumbering narrative, numerous moments of seeming inaction, and the long running time, were factors that slightly alienated the movie from me. Further, the acting, though good, in my humble opinion, isn’t great. Perhaps I shouldn’t be expecting a crackling movie like Breathless, 8 ½ or Shoot the Piano Player every time I watch a European movie from that golden era, irrespective of how acclaimed it is.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Avante-Garde
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
One of the highest rated Italian movies of last year, Gomorrah is a bleak, stark and an unflinching look into the crime-ridden underbelly of the Province of Naples. Through five loosely connected stories – a teenager getting seduced by the crime culture around him; two neurotic guys thinking they are beyond the Mafia’s reach; a haute couture tailor trying to earn some extra money by working with a Chinese cloth manufacturer; a young guy getting acquainted with some harsh reality while working for his boss whose business it is to dump toxic industrial wastes; and a money runner trying to survive the clan wars around him – the director has provided a detailed documentary-style exposé of the Camorra, one of the most feared organised crime syndicates of Italy. Filled with grim realism, the movie has a neorealist feel about it, with its mostly outdoor shoots, natural lighting, characters enacted with spontaneity that gives a non-professional feel to the performances, and a complete lack of any high drama, showmanship or ostentation. Viewers might find it slow and difficult, but this deglamourized gangster movie is a fine no-nonsense work all right.
Director: Matteo Garrone
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster Drama/Slice of Life/Ensemble Film/Docu-Fiction
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
She is every man’s wettest fantasy and every woman’s biggest envy, she is so impossibly beautiful, voluptuous and enigmatic that when she saunters out of her house, the whole town comes to a standstill, and yet, her jaw-dropping beauty becomes her greatest curse, making her an extremely lonely and a heavily misunderstood woman – yeah, that’s Malena for you. A bittersweet coming-of-age story of an adolescent Sicilian boy, who gets hopelessly enamored by an older woman during the turbulent times of Mussolini’s Italy, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena is reminiscent of another wonderful coming-of-age movie of his, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Some critics have been irked by the so-called objectification of Malena’s character – but one must remember that the narrative is through the thirteen year old Renato’s eyes, and hence our perception of Malena is directly related to his; in that perspective Malena’s character has been developed exactly as it should have been. Monica Bellucci (she's one stunning beaut!) has done full justice to the role by balancing the character’s electrifying charm and sexuality with her fragile life and vulnerabilities. The director’s fine portrayal of inner workings of the kid’s mind (filled with vivid, erotic fantasizing) and the hypocritical, self-centered nature of society has been superbly aided by luscious photography, and the legendary Ennio Morricone’s evocative background score.
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Genre: Comedy-Drama/Coming-of-Age/Romantic Drama
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Had Sigmund Freud ever decided to make a film, it might have been something akin to 8 ½. This deeply autobiographical movie wasn’t just the legendary Italian New Wave director Federico Fellini’s magnum opus, but also one of the landmark movies in the history of cinema. So-called superficial elements like plot, chronology and the literary equivalent of space-time duality have been completely done away with. Instead what we have is a series of montages that blur in and out of reality. Guido, Fellini’s alter-ego and gloriously played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a famous filmmaker; unfortunately, on the eve of his grandest venture thus far, he starts developing a terrible case of director’s block. Further, he is at the cross-roads of his material relationships – be it with his wife or his mistress, he feels trapped in a world filled with buffoonish intellectuals, and his complex sense of guilt (especially those concerning his Catholic belief) are tearing out of his finely managed façade of existentialism and detachment. Thus what we have is an extravagantly surreal and immensely psycho-analytical thesis filled with elaborate dream sequences, flashbacks and the present, which are all ultimately brought together in a jangled and phantasmic mass of “what could have been”, “what ought to have been”, and “what is”. I would however be very cautious while recommending this movie for the simple reason that very few people would have the openness of mind and, I daresay, courage to actually sit through and enjoy it. The movie is slow, it is quirky, it is illusory, it is fantasy-laden, it is delirious, it is philosophical, it is disconcerting, it is even disparaging at times, but it is also unique and splendid.
Director: Federico Fellini
Genre: Psychological Drama/Social Satire/Showbiz Comedy/Avante-Garde/Experimental
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
A beautifully composed film, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso is Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s loving and evocative homage to the world of cinema and a nostalgic look at the simple, unadulterated joys of movie going in the yesteryears. The coming-of-age story of a young boy’s journey (now a famous filmmaker) through poverty, experience of a wonderful friendship and first love, lost innocence, childhood, youth, heartbreak, celebrity-hood, world-weariness, and finally his return from Rome back home to the little village where he grew up thus completing a full cycle, in post-war Italy, is a truly marvelous, touching and heart-wrenching experience. All the while the only constant string is his tryst with the magical world of cinema, which started at the eponymous New Cinema Paradise theatre before completing the aforementioned journey, filled with joy, pain, smiles and tears, thanks in large parts to the passionately honest and heartfelt direction of Tornatore. The acting is exceptional, especially that of the character Alfredo – film-projectionist and the protagonist Salvatore’s best friend during his formative years (the chemistry between them is unforgettable to say the least), the legendary music director Ennio Moricone’s haunting tunes amplify the sense of nostalgia and passing away of an era, and the climax of this timeless classic will surely move even the most hard-hearted cynics.
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Romantic Drama/Buddy Film
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
One of the most enjoyable and loved movies ever made, this Segio Leone masterpiece is his brilliant tribute to the quintessential Ammerican genre of the Westerns – what with its arid and bleak landscapes infested with gold-digging gun-slingers and crack-shots. This also happens to be the final chapter of Leone’s outstanding thematically linked “Dollars” Trilogy. An astonishing tale of fortune hunting, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the movie pits three completely contrasting characters against each other – the Good (the iconic Clint Eastwood’s most famous role as the laconic, enigmatic loner – the Man With No Name), the Bad (Lee Van Cleef in the role of a sinister and scheming “Man of the Law”), and the Ugly (Eli Wallach, as a foul-mouthed opportunist, in what is easily the most fascinating character of the movie). This Spaghetti Western (known so because in a beautiful variation of the more morally upright Western movies, here the heroes are deliciously amoral) has everything that there can be – stylish direction, unforgettable characters, stunning visuals, Ennio Moricone’s haunting score that has entered movie lore, fabulous gunfights, great dialogues punched with wit and humour, and an explosive climax.
Director: Sergio Leone
Genre: Western/Spaghetti Western/Epic
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
