Scenes from a marriage: A peek into the complexity of being together

Bergman is a master of portraying self-introspection. According to me, Wild Strawberries is probably the best example of it. I went back to Bergman after a long time. And it took me very little time to get lost in this intense story. Scenes from a Marriage shows how often we forget to introspect our lives which reeks of conformity. We get too comfortable and one day when we finally indulge in retrospection the horrors haunt us. I had always heard that the TV version of Scenes from a Marriage is better. I have not seen the theatrical version but not a single minute of this six-episode five-hour drama felt unnecessary. In this "golden age" of TV what I miss are good one season dramas. In the last two years, both The Young Pope and Horace and Pete have done justice to this format. With Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman elevates this format to a different level. Something that makes this so intense is Sven Nykvist's closeup cinematography. You feel so close to both the main characters that any display of emotion feels so personal. The dialogue is almost a philosophical study of the institution of marriage. But at the helm of it I think is Bergman's portrayal of the futility of our illusion that there is a sense of permanence to love.


The story starts with Johan (Erland Joshepson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman) being interviewed by a women's magazine on their tenth anniversary. Their marital bliss seems too perfect but when Marianne is asked what is happiness, she answers, "Happiness is contentment." It seems there is a compromise somewhere within.

Following this, they are visited by their close friends Peter and Katarina for dinner. The marital troubles of Peter and Katarina come out in a vulgar and toxic manner. It seems Johan and Marianne enjoy quite a contrasting relationship. By the end of this episode, troubles start in paradise as Marianne gets pregnant and has an abortion. Both Johan and Marianne's approach to the pregnancy makes them ask different questions about their relationship. In the next episode, we find out about their problems in their sex life and how an undercurrent of bitterness has been growing over these years. In the third episode titled Paula we find out that Johan has been having an affair with a young woman called Paula and he wants to leave for Paris with Paula. Marianne is devastated and begs him to stay, but it falls on Johan's deaf ears. This seems to be the turning point in both their lives. In the next episode when Johan visits Marianne after several months we find that Marianne has used this opportunity for self-discovery and Paula has been a disappointment for Johan. The fifth episode The Illiterates is about them finalising their divorce. It is one of the most moving and painful portrayal of the depths human toxicity can sink to when the individual is stifled. The sixth episode takes us ten years after the first episode. Both Johan and Marianne are married but they are cheating on their respective spouses with each other. They discuss how time has made them bitter and unfulfilled but yet they try to be content with the lives they have. There is this scene in this episode where Marianne gets a nightmare and then she feels she has never loved or felt loved by anyone. Johan says, "We love each other in an earthly and imperfect way".  

I feel this line kind of encompasses what Bergman wanted to show. That love and relationships come with its own imperfections. But most important thing is the communication of the emotions how hurting they are.  It is so easy to symapthise with Marianne more than Johan. Marianne is a much more strong and life-affirming character. But Johan is a result of societal constructs about masculinity and expectations. This academic is so riled with insecurities, fears, disappointments of life that his loneliness defines him in a highly painstaking way.

Scenes from a Marriage is a highly realistic description of how life treats us all in a cruel way and how it's no different even if you are in the labyrinth of traditionally secure institutions as marriage. It is tough not to associate some part of yourself with either Johan or Marianne. Go ahead, watch this masterstroke and delve into all the questions and doubts you have about the highly complex event of "being together with someone".

The need to move away from the Ray nostalgia

Today being the birthday of Satyajit Ray the internet is flooded with articles remembering the genius of Ray, his impact on Indian cinema, his impact on Western filmmakers and so on. It has been 25 years since Ray has passed away. A quarter of a century has passed but still Bengali cinema has not been able to get out of the Ray nostalgia. Now you may argue that nostalgia, be it about Tagore or Ray, is an integral part of Bengali culture and thus this is unavoidable. Maybe this is true to a great extent but I want to argue why the time is ripe to move away from the Ray nostalgia for the Bengali parallel cinema to go back to its glory days. And moreover, the death of Rituparno Ghosh has exaggerated this need to move away from this Ray nostalgia.

Both Aparna Sen and Rituparno Ghosh were two directors who kind of inherited Ray's style to a large extent and this was inevitable because of being so close to Ray's time. (Aparna Sen has frequently mentioned that Bengalis have received Tagore and Ray as some kind of inheritance).  The two films Aparna Sen made in the early 80s, 36 Chowringhee Lane and Parama had traces of Ray's influence but were original in its own way. Both movies were directed in a much more aggressive way than Ray would have ever done. I suppose since Ray was still working in the 80s Aparna Sen made a conscious effort to be different.  In case of Rituparno Ghosh, the influence was much stronger but by the end of his career he had developed his own style too. Jeevan Smriti, Rituparno's last work, which is a documentary on Tagore is surely better and quite different than Ray's documentary on Tagore, the earlier being much personal and emotional than the latter. Although Rituparno's portrayal of female characters was influenced by Ray it was more nuanced and much more emotional. I feel Rituparno's characterisation of women is much closer to Aparna Sen than to Ray. This can be very well understood if you watch Parama, Dahan and Utsav. Being influenced by a certain director is natural, but it is important to develop a personal style which is distinctively different. The best example of this is Wes Anderson. He is a western director whose work has been extensively influenced by Ray. He even made his Ray homage film, The Darjeeling Limited,  but nowadays a Wes Anderson movie can be identified just by its style.

Handling rural issues

Ray is a director of the bhodrolok, he is a director of the city. In my eyes, Calcutta trilogy and Jana Aranya are Ray's best works. Ray's understanding of Calcutta is surely much refined than his understanding of rural Bengal. In the Apu trilogy, only Pather Panchali is a truly rural story. Ashani Sanket is another not so great an attempt of Ray at understanding the rural life. Ritwik Ghatak, although was too melodramatic, had a better understanding of rural Bengal. Titas ekti nadir naam corroborates that fact. Ray, in some of his interviews also has expressed his disappointment at not being able to address rural issues better. 

Today also Bengali cinema is lacking in the same area. Parallel Bengali cinema needs to indulge in portraying the nuances of the struggles of rural Bengal. Rural Bengalis are going through a significant phase change in their lifestyles. This change has to be captured efficiently on silver screen. Also, tackling the issues of mofussil is also needed. These are areas where directors can develop their own styles. Kaushik Ganguly's Cinemawallah does a good job in depicting the mofussil life.

Rather than pandering to petty middle-class sentiments, Bengali parallel cinema needs to portray the issues the "daily passeneger" class faces. I am not saying that movies about the posh bhadrolok should not be made.  But probably at this juncture, a movie like Shobdo or Labour of Love is more necessary than an Apur Panchali or Antaheen. Movies need to speak a universal language.  Ray's films did that, but now we have to move away from his style.  We cannot delve in the same nostalgia for 30 more years. It's high time the filmmaker of the aantel learns to make movies which rather cater to the "aam janata" than to the scotch-drinking bhodrolok of South Calcutta.

 

Rewatching Woody Allen: Hannah and her sisters

Whenever I have gone back repeatedly to Woody Allen's films it has been mostly among Annie Hall, Manhattan, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris. Although Hannah and her sisters is Allen's one of the most acclaimed works I never went back to it and after rewatching it after a long time I cannot seem to remember why, maybe it didn't affect me so strongly when I watched it for the first time. I have to confess I watched this in my early years of film watching and maybe I couldn't connect to the dilemmas of adult life as shown in the movie.

This film is really about all the problems and complexities adult life throws at you and how all of us in our imperfect yet humane ways deal with them. The movie is about how Hannah's sisters grow with time and how Hannah (Mia Farrow) plays an indirect role in both of their gradual growth. The movie starts and ends with a thanksgiving dinner. Between these two dinners, Hannah hasn't changed much but the change that Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest) undergoes portrays Hannah in a slightly unsympathetic light. Woody Allen in most of his movies has caricatured the "intellectual". But in this movie using the nuances of sibling rivalries he shows how the unintentional follies of the intellectual or the successful one allows the other people surrounding her to break out of their shells.

The story of Elliot (Michael Caine), Hannah's husband and Lee is so fallible and yet so touching that you symapthise with both of them. Elliot is completely smitten by Lee at the first thanksgiving and Lee is also aware of it. They have a passionate affair for a year but completely ridden with guilt.  

This affair allows Lee to get out of a toxic relationship she has with Frederick (Max von Sydow),  an older artist who once was Lee's teacher. When Lee leaves Frederick he says, "What will I do? You are my only connection to the outer world.", Lee replies, "It's too much responsibility for me, it's not fair". This scene mocks the "intellectual" but the audience doesn't know whom to be sympathetic with. A perfect example of Allen's brilliant writing. Elliot and Lee also part ways when the guilt starts playing the bigger part. She moves on to a guilt-free relationship with another professor of hers' only to be a part of the similar and probably flawed relation. Micahel Caine's performance in this role for which he won an Oscar is absolutely flawless. His portrayal of the ineer struggles of Elliot is a delight to watch.

Woody Allen obviously reserves the most comic scenes for himself. He is Hannah's ex husband, a hypochondriac and terribly with disappointed with life. There's a line in Annie Hall where he says life can be divided into the horrible and the miserable. He follows a similar disenchanted view here too. After he survives a cancer scare he decides to leave everything as the meaninglessness of life dawns upon him more heavily.

                               

But as in most Allen movies, after all his futile efforts in the search of faith, the simplest of things makes him understand that how that we should enjoy the meaningless journey called life. Here he discovers it through a Groucho Marx movie, surely a delightful scene after his rants about the futility of being.

The movie's most drastic arc is Holly's transformation. She transforms from an inferiority-complex ridden cocaine addict to a succesful screenwriter who marries Woody Allen by the end of the movie. This ending shows how unpredictable life is as Hannah had try to hook up Allen and Holly and they ended up deriding each other after a terribly bitter evening. With Holly's character Allen shows how is the aboslute master when it comes to writing women characters. He shows how horrid and nauseating this woman can be at her most vulnerable times and how charming and loving she can be when someone acknowledges her efforts. Diane Wiest surely had her mark on this film with her powerful Oscar winning portrayal of Holly.

The story of Hannah, is about a woman who is too independent and around whom most people don't feel needed. She is an extremely kind person but her lack of need for emotional support from her relations makes it suffocating for the people around her and they end up resenting her. Allen shows how we want to be feel needed, we can never stay in a relation just because we admire the other person. This movie is a pinnacle in Allen's understanding and writing about brilliant women characters.  As with Annie in Annie Hall he shows how Holly and Lee are more charming because of their vulnerabilities, self-doubts and follies. To err is to human but to err and become charming is to women.

Elle: walking on the borderline of absolute perversion

In one of his interviews, David Fincher says people are perverts and that this is the foundation of his career.  In the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek interprets movies in a highly Freudian sense to show how directors have shown us the perverts in us by making us enjoy their work. Although I don't agree with Zizek everywhere in that documentary I feel every complex movie has to flirt with perversion in some sense or the other. There are very few movies which flirt with absolute perversion and I think Elle is one of them.

Elle is the story of how Michele LeBlanc (Isabelle Huppert), a succesful CEO of a gaming company  reacts when she is raped by an intruder in her house. The movie opens with this horrifyingly violent and detached rape scene which is being observed by her cat. The sexual grunts which her heard from the rapist and from Michelle are so close but yet so far that you are already sensing a tale of perversion by the first couple of minutes. She, being a part of the civil society, doesn't even get time to grieve. This is shown beautifully when she wipes off her vaginal blood during taking a bath after the incident. She tries to go ahead with her life in a normal way. She visits her mother who is shown to be quite voyeorus which Michelle despises. In this scene her mother tells her "you always have wanted a sanitised version of life". The main question of the film is has she wanted one or she has been forced into one? The cold way she discloses the rape story to her ex-husband and her friend Anna and her husband Robert at a dinner is characteristic of the inner struggles she is experiencing.

As the movie progresses, we find that Michelle's father is a murderer who murdered half of their neighbourhood when she was 9 and then burnt their house down. People have believed that Michelle have been complicit to her father's horrendous acts that night. She has lived with this identity and yet made a succesful life for herself. Her mistrust in police is understandable. In the meantime, the rapist sends sexual messages to her. Also a morphed video of her being sodomised by a computer monster of her game is realeased in her office. All these incidents make her try to hunt down the rapist.

Meanwhile, she has been sleeping with her Anna's husband which she wants to stop as she is attracted to her next door banker neighbour Patrick. There is a beautifully crafted Hitchcockian scene where Michelle masturbates to Patrick while spying on him with a binocular as he sets up the nativity scene for his religious wife. Michelle eventually tries to seduce Patrick while she invites everybody for a Christmas eve dinner. Michelle's mother dies during the dinner and she finally visits her father in prison. But her father commits suicide after knowing that Michelle would be visiting. This event shockingly makes Michelle happy as she whispers to the the dead body that she killed him by visiting.

The movie explores many perverted and dystopian scenarios in the life of this woman and how she reacts to them. Some of her reactions are utterly perverted and disturbing but we have to remember that this is a women with extremely troubled past. If you haven't seen the movie I would urge you to stop here and comeback for the rest of this. It's an extremely well balanced movie which flirts with abolute perversion but still presents us with a tale of suppressed feelings, latent sexual desires and utterly humane characters. Isabelle Huppert has given a performance of a lifetime. She has explored all the nuances and struggles of this character in an utterly elegant fashion.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Michelle is attacked again and she in this violent encounter she founds out that  Patrick is her assaulter. When asked why he did it he says it was necessary. The most sickening twist of the movie is when we find out that Michelle starts an abusive affair with Patrick. The film leaves the audience to decide whether she cannot help being in this abusive affair or it is her bigger ploy to get revenge upon Patrick. She joins the after party of her game launch with Patrick. While they return Michelle acknowledges that she feels what Patrick and she has is sick. Patrick is killed by Michelle's son when he finds Patrick assualting her. The movie gives us a desired ending but a conversation between Patrick's wife and Michelle reveals that she knew what was going on and she wanted Patrick to find whatever sexual satisfaction he was looking for.

The movie shows how we all are perverts inside but still humans. It wants to tell that you cannot judge a person harshly even if he is into heinous and devious acts. It wants to show us that with all these centuries of civilisation we may have been able to train ourselves according to expectations  of the civilised society but still there is an other side hidden inside all of us and everyone of us will find those demons if we look carefully enough. Elle asks us to question what does it mean to be civilised. Are we forbidden to access our most perverted desires and if we do access how do we do it? The answer is much more complicated than this beautifully made film.

Brief Encounter: the perfect British affair

I recently read Orson Welles commentary on Casablanca. He notes that both Bogart and Bergman were ordinary in the film but together they create something beautiful. Casablanca came out in 1942. It was a dreamy movie.  The line "Here's to looking at you kid" ranks high in the fantasies of many young men, including Woody Allen who plays it in Play it again Sam.  Three years later a film called Brief Encounter was released in Britain which is often referred to as British Casablanca. I have some reservations against this nomenclature. Although both movies are masterpieces when it comes to dreamy affairs, but I feel  Brief Encounter is a richer film. It's no surprise that in a 2010 poll conducted in Britain, this film was voted the best romance of all time. The film alongside dealing with simple unattainable things also puts in a bit social commentary on class in its subplots.

Brief Encounter was adapted by Noel Coward from his own one-act play Still Life. Directed by David Lean, it is the story of an extramarital affair between Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a married doctor and Laura (Celia Johnson), a housewife in a "happy marriage" with two kids. The first encounter between the two lovers is surely just an ordinary coincidence. Laura gets a piece of grit in her eye on the platform of Milford junction and Alec being a doctor succesfully takes it out of her eye. Their encounters are random in the coming weeks, till one day Alec joins her for lunch as they meet each other in the same restaurant. They spend a lovely afternoon which marks the start of their brief encounter. In the following weeks, these two adults start dreaming again, they live childish moments of laughter together just to fall madly in love with each other. Somehow both of them know what they are enjoying seems like a dream in a parallel world, they try to avoid the societal norms, only to be cruelly brought down by them. When Alec borrows his friend's apartment and plans to spend a private evening with Laura there, his friend finds out only to potray this beautiful affair in a cheap manner. This incident grounds them, suddenly Laura has to think about decency, and self-respect. Alec knows that this is the beginning of the end. He understands how guilt and societal expectations will shroud Laura's feeling about this relationship although they are in love. The movie is from a time that people thought about family first before ther own happiness, they thought about how society will judge them rather than selfishly reaching for their own happiness.

In the refreshment room of Milford junction, where this relationship started and ended, there also goes on a continuous flirtatious banter between the ticket-checker and the lady and the counter. The difference between Alec and Laura and these two people is a subtle commentary on the boundaries our social status and class differences impose on people.

The movie starts with the last encounter between the lovers, one of the most mature goodbye scenes in cinematic history. Alec leaves for South Africa for a new job and Laura back to her family. Laura goes back home and while sitting infront of her husband narrates the whole story as if she is confessing to her husband in her mind to get rid of her guilt. Celia Johnson gives a performance of a life time in this film. The chemistry between the leas pair is extremely natural. Brief Encounter is a movie about two adults trying to escape into something which both of them know is unattainable from the point they start their dreamy journey. It shows how all adults have a child inside them which  wants to reach for the stars, only to be grounded by something called reality.

Yoy can enjoy this mastepiece here.