A Film a Week - Photograph

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

After his two attempts at the international glory with English-language movies “The Sense of an Ending” (2014) and “Our Souls at Night” (2017), Ritesh Batra is back to the territory he is most familiar with, the heart-warming Indian romance he created with his feature debut The “Lunchbox” (2013) which became a huge festival hit. His newest film, “Photograph” (2019) walks pretty much the same ground, content-, execution-, and festival distribution-wise. After its world premiere at Sundance last year and European premiere at Berlinale, it went on an extended, seemingly never-ending festival tour parallel with the wide cinema release. Better late than never, could be said for its screening at this year’s online edition of Zagreb Film Festival and the review here.

Our man Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a forty-something street photographer whose pitch to the tourists at The Gateway of India is that the photograph is an all-senses memory experience: once they see the photograph, they will remember the sounds and feel the wind, which would all be gone in the case they turn his offer down. He has a brief meet-cute moment with our girl Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) who accepts his offer, but is called before he could print it, put it into the envelope and collect the money.

Rafi makes a modest living, but dreams big, and has no intention of returning to the farmer’s life at his native village. The trouble is that he is pressured by his grandma Dadi (Farrukh Jaffar) to get married to the extent that she herself goes on the quest to find him a suitable bride. Having the extra photo of Miloni in his pocket, he decides to fend the granny off with a lie that he already has a girlfriend. The trouble is that Dadi wants to meet her in person, and, with the help of a gigantic billboard with a familiar face on it, he sets on the successful quest to find her in an 18-million-people city of Mumbai. It turns out that she is also pressured by her parents to make a career in accounting and to continue studies in the US, finding a suitable husband beforehand, so Rafi might seem like a way out for her, too.

What ensues is a gentle romantic (not necessarily “love”) story between the two, with a variety of class-, caste- and religion politics of Mumbai and India. The worlds of the two “lovers” could not be more apart. He is a poor Muslim from a rural area, she is a bourgeois urban Hindu girl. Their romance seems impossible right from the start, but their need to change their lives guided by the rigid structures is equally strong.

The treatment of the romance might be too soft and gentle, but that is Batra’s style. “Photograph” seems naive, almost fairy-tale-like and the social differences aspect is also pretty tamed. One could argue that Batra has found the formula how to present his country in a way that is universally understandable, somewhat simplified, but devoid of the unnecessary exoticism. It might seem a bit too safe, but it suits the purpose.

The same could be said for his functional directing that is pretty much by the book. He is at his best when it comes to the approach to the actors makes both of the leads shine in their roles, with just the right blend of the underplayed, gentle and largely silent expressiveness on their faces he captures in the plenty of close-ups. The character of Dadi is a much needed comic relief, and Jaffar plays her spot on, while the character of Miloni’s professor played by Jim Sarbh serves to hint some darker undertones like the abuse of power and status.

Batra’s films are always beautiful to look at, perfectly designed (kudos to Shruti Gupte and Niharika Bhasin, who handled the production- and costume design, respectively) for the purpose of his inherent romanticism, and the execution here is just stellar, thanks to the camerawork by Tim Gillis and Ben Kutchins. John F. Lyons should also be commended for his smooth editing work, making “Photograph” a thoroughly beautiful, heart-warming viewing experience, despite being quite naive and predictable on the narrative level.

The Frog / Žaba

previously published on Cineuropa

Based on a record-breaking theatre play that has been on stage for almost a decade now, The Frog has some serious shoes to fill in domestically and on the regional level. Directed by Elmir Jukić who has done most of his work on television and written by him and Pjer Žalica (Fuse) based on Dubravko Mihanović’s theatre piece, The Frog strives to be as faithful to the riginal play as possible so it keeps all of its actors. After the world premiere at Sarajevo Film Festival, it hits the Croatian audience at Zagreb Film Festival (out of competition) where the script was developed years earlier through My First Screenplay workshop.

Zeko (Emir Hadžihafizbegović in the second great role this year after Men Don’t Cry) is a barber and a war veteran suffering from PTSD whose family has left him because of his violent outbursts. He wants to start the new chapter of his life and he thinks that the way to do it is to try to help the only two people he cares about, his brother Braco (Aleksandar Seksan known for Our Everyday Life) and their friend Švabo (Bosnian for Kraut) played by Mirsad Tuka. They both have serious problems, Braco is a gambler and a drunk angry about the current state of things in the country while reminiscencing of the “golden”, pre-war times, while cab-driving Švabo, who spent the war time abroad (hence the nickname) and does not get all the post-war mojo very well, cheats his wife with a much younger lover. What would be a better day to fix their lives and make them start over again than the Muslim holiday of Eid, so they meet in Zeko’s barber shop for a cup of coffee, some cookies and talk, but the things get out of control quite quickly, fights ensue and the threat of violence is constantly in the air.

The title animal occurs in conversations twice during the film, never in its literal form. At the very beginning, it is an old car, Citroen DS, nicknamed the frog in parts of Yugoslavia, once owned by Zeko’s and Braco’s father, driven by two of them for their youthful adventures. The other frog is the character of Haruki Murakami’s story Super-Frog saves Tokyo from the after the quake [the title is being written that way] collection. For some reason, Zeko finds the part of the story published in newspaper his new guiding light and life’s philosophy urging people around him to change, while being unable to change himself. The arrival of the book salesman (Moamer Kasumović) in the crucial moment for Zeko will explain the mystery of the latter frog and offer a key for the interpretation of the film and the frog as the constant search for the meaning in life, working both in local and universal context.

Theatrical background of the source material is notable from the setting of one single space for the most of the time, sometimes long takes from hand-held camera and few significant characters. Jukić also breaks the frame, at times taking the film outside the shop, introducing flashbacks from Zeko’s memories and writing new cameo-esque characters into the script, some of them were played by legendary actors like Boro Stjepanović and Vlasta Velisavljević. However, the acting style of the ensemble reprising their roles from the play is different, cinematic and more realistic, making The Frog far more than merely a piece of filmed theatre.