A Film a Week - Myth & Pieces / Kalponik

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

We tend to see India as a single country, no matter how complicated. But even geographically, it is a sub-continent, while the diversity of its social landscape reminds us that it should be seen as a complete civilization. And, where is the whole civilization, there is a plenty of the axis of division: linguistic, religious, ethnic, class and caste. Sometimes it is quite a hard task to govern such a country and achieve some kind of balance in it.

The diversity also applies to the national cinema with different “schools” of it in various states. Coming from Kolkata, one might assume that “Myth & Pieces” (“Kalponik” in original), written and directed by Arka Mukhopadhyay, could be something along the lines of art house cinema. However, it is a mix of fairly conventional sub-genres of thriller, with an investigative, political and even symbolic mystery angles, which in theory sounds fine and dandy, especially when packed in a compact 90-something minutes format. In theory…

Mukhopadhyay takes some sweet time for exposition, introduction of characters and situation, with a hint of plotting the matter. Maithili (Satakshi Nandy) was once a promising journalist, but facing the sensationalism in her house, she decides to change her employer. She starts working for the paper supporting a seemingly progressive rising star of a politician Adhiraj Mitra (Sahidur Rahaman) who tries to improve his chances on making a splash in the upcoming elections. One of the first stories she stumbles upon is the one of a legendary lost temple served to her by the professor Shom (Janardan Ghosh) which turns to be a great hit.

However, when an old Hindu statue is found underneath the Muslim temple, the tension rises in a seemingly peaceful West Bengal town, culminating with a murder of the professor Rakshit (Rajatabha Dutta) who previously contacted Maithili in attempt to debunk Shom’s theory. Aided only by the filmmaking student Meghnad (Sudip Mukherjee) who was the last to interview Rakshit, she starts her own investigation. Also, in a different plotline, we get to follow a man named Dilip (Sayan Ghosh) who struggles to get the money needed to buy an apartment in a new building…

The thing is, the exposition part takes something like two thirds of the film before the plot even starts to take a shape, juggling with characters to develop and topics to explore. The thing is, none of the two is done in a satisfying manner, since the characters remain as given at the beginning, without much change due to their findings as the plot thickens, while the topics of the divisions and tensions within the society in India are explored only superficially. The mystery to bind the whole thing together is not strong enough to succeed doing so, effectively ending on the level of which character plays which part in the mosaic.

Production values are solid throughout, and so is the acting, but none of it raises above the level of passable. The impression is further reinforced by Mukhopadhyay’s directing that is pretty functional, “invisible” and devoid of anything resembling style. The thing is, the complicated story with such a number of characters, events and discoveries does not fit the compact format, especially in such moderate pace and without proper dynamic accents, which might be the fault of the editor Amitava Dasgupta. In the end, it seems that the final version was extracted from a much longer one and that some continuity fell a victim of that. With such plain directing, “Myth & Pieces” seems more like a two-episode pilot for a season of a TV show which would let the characters and the plot breathe and develop properly.

A Film a Week - Santosh

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Like India itself, its cinema tends to be very diverse. The cultural diversity of the country itself powers the diversity of cinematic styles and schools, while also diversity genre-wise can be noted, from Bollywood spectacles and popular action flicks via highly artistic stuff, documentaries and docu-fiction to proper genre flicks like fantasies and horrors. Genre-mixing also occurs and when it is done smartly, the results can be very interesting. In the case of “Santosh”, the genres in the mix are procedural crime thriller and a naturalist social drama with certain documentary ambitions. The film premiered at Cannes’ Un certain regard and we were lucky enough to catch it at Zagreb Film Festival.

The titular protagonist played by Shahana Goswami is a widow of a police officer who was killed on duty. Her in-laws hurry to take her back to the family she came from, having her for a “cursed witch” who was somehow responsible for their son’s death, possibly still unable to reconcile with the fact that their marriage was not an arranged one. A lucky break happens to Santosh when she goes for a “compassionate appointment” scheme through which the widows (or widowers) of the police officers fallen on duty are offered training and constable position with the paycheck on top of their partner’s pension.

She accepts it and soon enough, even though she is not highly regarded by her male colleagues, she gets some respect from the community. Pursuing a path to help an illiterate Dalit man to file a missing person report for his teenage daughter, she soon enough stumbles upon her first murder investigation. The victim is the same girl whose missing her father tried to report and the primary suspect is a Muslim youngster from the village nearby, Saleem (Arbaz Khan) who tried to seduce her. Guided by her mentor Sharma (Sunita Rajwar of the “Stree” serial), Santosh uncovers how the system divided along the lines of gender, class, caste and religion really works in contemporary rural areas of Northern India. Newsflash: the idea of justice is merely a dream, the games of power and humiliation are played constantly and “railroading” the convenient suspect is quite a common practice in the police force so defunded that it is not able to conduct a proper investigation.

“Santosh” is a feature-length fiction debut for the British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri who previously made her name with two documentaries – “I for India” (2005) and “Around India with a Movie Camera” (2018) – in which she explored the country’s reality both after and before gaining independence from the British colonial rule. The documentarian background of the filmmaker can be observed both in her script that uses a relatively simple crime-thriller-”sunny noir” plot to explore the contemporary reality in its background and in her approach to directing in which she opts for naturalism through dimly lit hand-held shots in more actiony sequences contrasted with longer and calmer observational shots that try to depict ordinary life.

Both the cinematography by Lennert Hillege and the editing of Maxime Pozzi-Garcia deserve praise, and so does Suri’s work with the actors that are kept in various registers fitting for the types and the functions of the roles they play. For instance, Shahana Goswami is beautifully subdued as the protagonist who has to stand a lot of inner turmoil at her new job, and so is Arbaz Khan as the frightened suspect, while the actors who play the characters who provide the film with the concepts and ideas rather than emotional grounding are instructed to use broader strokes, which suits Sunita Rajwar and the rest of the cast members who play the figures of authority quite fine.

However, “Santosh” does not fare that well as a genre piece since its overall energy is much calmer from what the audience expects and the dynamic accents are not as strong as they should be for such a film. On the other hand, it is hitting the mark of a socially conscious and emotionally charged drama, a character study and a morality play. The end result is an art house flick that is extremely friendly with the festival-attending audiences.

A Film a Week - Control / Het Tweede Gelaat

The third instalment of Vincke-Verstuyft film series based on Jef Geeraets’ hit crime novels titled Control (the original Flemish title with the direct translation Double Face makes a bit more sense, while avoiding confusing the film with a dozen others) came eight years after the second and the whole 14 after the first one. While The Memory of the Killer (2003) was a considerable international hit that year, even dubbed the year’s best crime thriller, Dossier K. (2009) never raised above the local level. So far, Control falls somewhere in between those two: it is a well-done, slick crime thriller / procedural with some festival and video exposure world wide, yet nothing exactly groundbreaking.

Directed by Dossier K.’s Jan Verheyen, Control is the strongest in portrayal of two Antwerp ace police detectives working on especially complex cases, Fredy Verstuyft and Eric Vincke (Werner De Smedt and Koen De Bouw, respectively, both reprising their roles from previous films) and the rift the time has created between them. The case in case here is the one involving a vicious serial killer who leaves naked, decapitated bodies of women somewhere in the eastern part of Flanders. While “by the book” Vincke, now superior to his former partner, wants to explore the murders connection to similar cases in Cologne and even employs a profiler from Netherlands Mulder (Marcel Hensema), “rogue” Verstuyft thinks the key to solve the mystery is Rina (Sofie Hoflack), a minor celebrity psychologist / owner of a rehabilitation centre and a party animal whom he found naked and possibly drugged in the vicinity of one of the crime scenes and took for intended next victim of the killer. The woman drives the rift in between two of them and the things worsen when Verstuyft starts a romantic relationship with her…

The good thing is that Control is more modest than ambitious, which serves perfectly for a police procedural / serial killer flick. The particular subgenre was bled dry in the 90’s, so some kind of relocation and re-contextualization would not do suffice to save it. Verheyen, however, goes for the familiar “meat and potatoes” appeal for serial watchers and fans of the genre with a dash of euro-chic taken from Scandinavian thrillers and neo-noirs from the first decade of the new millennium, mostly felt in crisp digital cinematography by Danny Elsen that starts with lots of modern architecture in cold palette shifting it to depleted city centre flats and warmer bloody reds nearing the end and in Joris Oonk’s and Chirsnanne Wiegel’s electronic score discretely dictating the tempo.

Well-acted and well-directed, Control does not wear out its welcome even in the format of a notch over two hours. The script by Carl Joos (of Broken Circle Breakdown fame) is functional enough to propel the film from point A to point B to point C and so on, the dialogue is witty at moments and Joos acknowledges the limitations of the genre as in the limits of the pool of suspects, deploying plot twists in all the right places. The director Verheyen deserves kudos for hat-tips to sleazy thrillers of the 90’s and especially to Paul Verhoeven’s masterpiece of the genre, Basic Instinct, as he does for a couple of sex scenes between Fredy and Rina. No matter that they are, like, ridiculously pretty people (movie star level) we probably could not see in real life. Well, how about those beheaded corpses in densely populated Flanders? I did not think so either.