|
Toronto Film Festival Diary
Ranjita Biswas/Trans World Features
The Toronto International Film Festival (Sept 4-13,TIFF08) is one of the biggest in the international film festival circuit. It combines the right mix of art-house films, box-office premiers and glamour quotient.
 |
|
| |
From the large number of feature films , making the buzz are:
Appaloosa, the new film by Ed Harris (Pollock), a somewhat new approach to the Western film genre of the 60s. Starring Renee Zellweger and Viggo Mortenson in the main roles, alongwith Harris himself, the film is a gripping tale of characters set in vast West, the kind we used to see with John Wayne, Clint Eastwood ,etc. When asked why he was experimenting with the western genre at this age when there is no new land to ride into, he said in a press conference that he did it because he "liked" western films: "There's a kind of simplicity about westerns- there's less clutter."
In the film, Harris is appointed a sheriff by people in a remote town who are terrorized by a rancher (Jeremy Irons) and his gang . Harris has Mortenson as his deputy and both soon bring some order into the town' Into this scenario walks in Renee, who disrupts the harmonious work-and friendship relationship between the two men. For the first time Harris thinks of setting up home. That Renee is not the most faithful would-be is another matter.
Harris said that the challenge of making this film was that he wanted to make an intimate story in the wide canvas of a western film. Appaloosa, by the way, is the name of a town. The film was shot in New Mexico.
Slumdog Millionaire , by Danny Boyle (UK) is very much an "Indian" film in its setting- about a slum kid Jamal dreaming it big and making it, though accidentally, by winning a quiz contest. For Indian viewers, it's like déjà vu because the quiz show is built around the wildly popular Kaun bonega Crorepati.
But the story, as befitting Bollywood film, has a happy ending, but there is a tragic story at the core, starting with the riot in Mumbai when slumkids Jamal and his elder brother Salim become orphans . Their journey is also a journey through the squalor and ugliness in the lives of street children, and their exploitation. Jamal happens to know all the answers because every question asked at the show had to do with something in his past. And there is even a love story woven into it, his love for another lost kid Latika, who is trained to be a dancer and be sold to the highest bidder by an underworld don. This man had once pretended to give the brothers shelter with the ulterior motive of turning them into beggars.
For the Indian audience, though sometimes the film seems to stretch the limit of fantasy too much, it seems to have succeeded in weaving a Bollywood style story approached in a different way. In any case the audience here , and critics, seem to have loved it.
Nandita Das's directoral debut Firaaq has a riot situation too, but she calls it a "carnage" i.e. Gujarat but it is more about violence and its aftermath on people's lives and the treatment and story is completely different from the other.
Steven Soderbergh's two part epic Che on Guevera's life from the time he lands in Cuba with Fidel Castro, and later his journey to Bolivia and his death , has also made waves. The film is very different from The Motorcycle Diaries as it begins with Che's revolutionary ideology, honed during his journey across South America, taking shape in Cuba. The second part of the film shows the slow decline of his hold on the people, not necessarily his ideology . In a way it is kind of tribute to the revolutionary and his ideology. But when Che fails to move the people of Bolivia for whom he leaves behind a comfortable life in Cuba , and remains a foreigner somehow, though it was not the case in Cuba, one can also understand the underlying truth that when the larger section of people are not with a leader or his/her ideology, and lack an innate urge to change, even the most sincere leader fails.
|
