Icarry home memories of a cathartic week, having sampled the motley flavours of cinema from acros the world. Every person exposed to the sheer variety of the stories on dispay is all the richer for it — their film tastes more diverse, their very understanding of the human condition much deeper. What’s it to be madly devoted to your passion (Scary Mother)? What’s it like to be an immigrant in New York, struggling for daily survival (Most Beautiful Island)? What’s it like to be holed up in a basement as you wait for the right time to illegally immigrate into a safer country (Daha)? What’s it to feel the unbearable pain of a heartbreak (On Body and Soul)? What’s it like to be an overweight, white woman, who realises that rapping is her calling (Patti Cake$)?
It isn’t just the stories, of course. If you, like me, have grown up on a general diet of regional cinema, there’s a lot more to take away from these films. You will notice the almost complete absence of songs as we have gotten used to seeing them. You will notice the miserly use of background music, the sound mainly restricted to atmosphere: the sound of footsteps, the soft thud of a refrigerator closing, the rustling of paper as the pages of a book are turned… You will notice how long some of the shots often are. You will notice how slow and how realistic the conversations are. You will notice how the stories are in no hurry to develop and hurtle towards their end, and how once you get used to this deliberate slowness of pace, these film often transform into wellsprings of storytelling joy.
There was also the privilege of being able to catch some powerful films that will likely get their commercial release later this year.They include S Durga, Loving Vincent, Last Flag Flying, Omerta, and Mother!. It’s not just the films I’ll remember the Mumbai film festival for. I’ll remember it for all the frenetic shuffling between the PVR theatres in the city. I’ll remember it for the efficient autodrivers who don’t need to be coaxed into turning the meter on. I’ll remember it for all the new people I met, for all the films we had conversations about. I’ll remember the all-consuming contentment you feel after gorging on four delectable films a day. These memories should keep me insulated till next year’s festival.
Sudhir Srinivasan
This week-long column is a contemplation of the films watched by the writer on each day of the ongoing 19th Mumbai Film Festival