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Their own idiom
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The Chennai Hyundai Film Festival showcases the works of the masters
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THIS YEAR, Jiri Menzel, as head of the Jury at the Bangkok film festival, gave the Best Artistic Direction Award to Amol Palekar's Marathi film "Anaahat". Menzel himself is now more involved with theatre. But the world knows him still as a film maker, whose contributions to the Czech New Wave cinema of the 1960s include the Oscar winner "Closely Watched Trains". Bohumil Hrabal, the novelist on whose work it was based, preferred the film to the book. His "Larks on a String" which satirised the Communist regime was banned but released to high acclaim in the 1990s. Menzel also acted in his own and his friends' films.
The Hyundai Chennai International Film Festival brings four works by the Czech master to the city — "The End of Old Times", "Those Wonderful Men with a Crank", "Crime at the Girls' School"; and the Oscar nominated bucolic comedy "My Sweet Little Village". The last revels in slapstick irony, with its own Laurel and Hardy in a truck driver and the village idiot. Those with a penchant for the quixotic and the non conformist will find a kindred soul in Menzel who uses farce, not only to trounce the repressive socialist regime, but anything that smacks of regimentation.
The world has been celebrating Yasujiro Ozu's birth centenary this year with retrospectives and seminars. Though long acclaimed in his motherland, the Japanese film maker was introduced to the West much after colleagues Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, because his countrymen believed that he was `too Japanese'.Traditionalist to the core, Ozu is also most relevant to the modern temper. His style fascinates with its paring down minimalism, finicky demand for precision, and originality. The theme is always the family caught in transition, metaphorised in the changing seasons. The camera hardly moves, but the characters do — in their hearts and minds, and the viewers with them. The two films at the Chennai festival — "Late Autumn" and "Equinox Flower" (Higan Bana) — show just why Ozu said, "For me there was no thing as teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength." They reveal how the master broke every rule of Western film making to craft his own idiom. "Late Autumn" is a lovely melody of changing relationships between mother and daughter. "Equinox Flower" looks at a conservative family where the daughter disregards her father's right to choose her husband for her. The father's fury and dismay shape his character with love. The film ends on a note of reconciliation, but not before the generation gap is scrutinised with irony and empathy.
G.R.
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