Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Artist – Clichéd, Melodramatic But Brilliant

Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Actors: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman
Rating: 4/5

Imagine a feature film made during the silent era, lost and forgotten, to be found 80 years later? Would it even be released? Would it be a hit? Your perception perhaps would be a definitive no but as ‘The Artist’ has shown, once again, that sound in cinema, is highly over rated. After all, for those who have forgotten, cinema is first and foremost, a visual medium.

Yet, ‘The Artist’ is as clichéd and melodramatic as they come. If it were competing with the best of the lot in the 20s and 30s, it would have been amongst the average films then, perhaps garnering no critical or commercial success.
Come, lets zoom right ahead into the past... 
 The film thus works only in the context of the present since many of you have not watched a silent film in their lives and would be shocked by its temerity to hold your attention without uttering a word. One thus only hopes that ‘The Artist’ becomes an excuse for you to revisit the masterpieces of the 1920s and 30s, the films of masters like Charlie Chaplin, F W Murnau, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, King Vidor, D W Griffith etc. Watch for example Murnau’s ‘Sunrise’ or Frank Borzage’s ‘Seventh Heaven’ which matches ‘The Artist’ in its melodrama.

Having said that one has to give ‘The Artist’ its due. It is witty, intelligent, funny and poignant at the same time. The story - that of an artist who finds himself obsolete with the changing times and technology and unable to cope, has been told several times before (one of the best being Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Limelight’). Yet, it has a freshness that tugs at your heart even when you cringe at the excessive melodrama.

You also forgive the makers for the melodrama and the excessive pathos. In our times, there was perhaps no other way to make you realise the power of silent cinema than by making it this simplistic and unashamedly melodramatic.

In essence this is also Charlie Chaplin’s story, who refused to move to talking pictures even as the world did and in rebellion made ‘Modern Times’ - a huge hit despite hardly having sound. And even when he spoke for the first time in cinema, in ‘The Great Dictator’ he did so to call for peace and justice for all in the world.

There is no doubt that a lot of hard work has gone into the making of ‘The Artist’. For that and for the conviction of the producers to fund something like this, the film deserves to be seen as widely as possible. See it and you’ll definitely want to go forward into the past where silent black and white cinema scorched the silver screen and your mind space.

This review was written for the newswire service, IANS (Indo Asian News Service). 

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Warhorse – Sloppy Melodrama Rescued By A Beautiful Intention

Director: Steven Spielberg
Actors: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, David Thewlis
Rating: 3/5

Every writer, artist, musician or filmmaker develops a certain style of representing his work that makes his work easily identifiable. ‘Warhorse’ is an example of what one can call either ‘Spielbergish’ or ‘Spielbergesque’ cinema with simple scenes overly dramatized and melodrama that is out of place and seems desperate and thus despicable.

Yet this, one of Spielberg’s worst directorial works, is rescued by three things – technical brilliance, a lovely metaphor and most importantly its beautiful, anti-war sentiment.
A kind of a war-based retelling of Anna Swell’s ‘Black Beauty’ ‘Warhorse’ is based on a children’s book of the same name by Michael Morpurgo that was adapted for stage by Nick Stafford. A beautiful and powerful horse passes through many hands before and during the First World War, observing with his silent, kind eyes the horrors that man inflicts upon man.

Steven Spielberg is a master at making aliens look and feel human. Making a horse more human than most human around would not have been such tough work for the master. And best of all, he has chosen a subject which is so rich in allusions and allegories, that even a decent direction would have sailed it through.

The beautiful, kind and powerful horse is a metaphor for humanity. In the true spirit of animal books or movies like Anna Swell’s ‘Black Beauty’ or Robert Bresson’s donkey ‘Balthazar’, he becomes both the symbol of humanity as well as an observer of its abundant lack and occasional triumph.

Thus in the end when it is trapped in barbed-wires of war in no man’s land where nothing survives, it needs the help of both warring factions – both of whom he has seen and served as a warhorse – it gives a strong message to us all. Love, compassion and humanity is in desperate need of patronage. In the absence of this, it will wither and die, trapped in a no-mans land it cannot get itself out of.

You cannot pick a bone with the film in terms of its story or its technicality. The last scene of the unmanned horse running through the battlefield with bullets and shells flying all around, not because it is scared, but because it is too proud and humane to take this insanity, is one of the most technically brilliant scene you would have seen in cinema.

Yet, you can indeed find flaws in its excessive emphasis on melodrama, especially in the end. Spielberg has a knack of making even small, ordinary moments look magical. However, excessive use of melodrama, especially at the end in an desperate attempt to wriggle some salty water from your eyes will perhaps indeed make you cry but only wondering where Spielberg has lost his directorial way in the film.

It is also too literal for its own good. A good director needs to trust his viewers to understand some unsaid thing. Hence the scene where a woman explains why she lives with a drunk husband or where it is directly making statements against the absurdity of war, seem not needed.

However, they seem unnecessary if you look at it from adult perspective. If you look at it as a children’s film, after all the original book was for children, you would really have no complaints with the film. Perhaps that is what Spielberg indeed intended – to make a children’s film. If that be so, he succeeds magnificently.

This review has been written for the newswire service Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).