Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes

Klaus Kinski had to play only himself; but it is the way that Herzog restrains himself in his critique of the West’s lust for power and riches, not going overboard and yet being to the point, that defines the astonishing film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (int’l title: Aguirre, the Wrath of God). And it is the music of the film that gives that elemental touch to the film, when man is at war with nature: nature not only of the Amazon but also nature within, where man makes a slave of himself in pursuit of mastery over everything and everyone. Power brings with it the subjugation to the oppressed: something unfinishedly said in Orwell’s “Shooting an elephant” and more refinedly in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. For when you establish a power over someone’s body and wealth, his will and land, you tie yourself up within the realm that that power gives you; the more vast the reach, probably the wider is the radius of your tether, and yet tied you remain. And sometimes like a hurt animal ready to bite, as Aguirre (Kinski), mad but ready to pierce every envelope, and madder for he has the intelligence to feel that this was not a prison worthy to broken, a fort worthy to be taken; gold means nothing, for fame and power are absolute to him; and yet, if he had attained that fame and power, would he have finally felt satisfied? Or, like Ashoka, been driven on to that eternal lust of repentance and God?

Werner Herzog would have been the right man to make a film on Ashoka, for here he leaves the business unfinished; the final realization, that the powerful is the most powerless, is here only as the apparent truth, but what about the implied truth, when even the senses say otherwise? But given the limited scope of the film, he does marvellously: the way he only touches upon the aspect of incest since the start of the film; the manner in which he handles the pristine beauty of the landscape without letting it be the central element of the film; and how he handles, sparingly, Kinski himself. Rather than any antics or rhetoric, it is Kinski’s burning, blue eyes that bespeak the maniac in him, the man who is not the average but who has risen to only so far as to despise the others, not more above. A bully besotted with himself.

L'avventura

When you do not believe in anything, how empty is your life? A story stunningly portraying the decay of Western civilization, L'avventura (literally The Adventure) goes where films as a rule don't go: a sincere attempt to comprehend reality. The film stops where Sandro stops: wanting sympathy, in despair, and himself not knowing where is the response. And, outside the pales of forgiving or forgetting, having crossed the sense of culpability in loving a forbidden, does Claudia know anymore?

Like leaves without wills blown at wind's whim, men and women flow about: what they leave behind is facades, ruins and church bells. What they desired is an answer to who they are: but they forgot to seek it in the other; they forgot to ask who the other is. Obsessed with the quest for themselves, every human comes crafted for them: Anna and Sandro have merely utilised each other in this lonely and selfish quest, and none has ever really thought about the other. None has known how horizons can be expanded; tragically, Anna's mysterious vanishing will only bring to the fore the inability to cope with themselves as they are. Sandro does find himself, would know what he is: a man unable to love. He will not need to look in Claudia's eyes for that judgment; he will need to look at the sky, or he will need to look at the buildings he never built. He is but the man who watches, envies, takes malicious pleasure in destroying the beauty he seeks, and tries to leave furtively; he is but the pitiable human who are born for greatness but are lost for ever in trying to deconstruct beauty. And the woman, Claudia?

Among the few women's films, l'Avventura is one. Monica Vitti (playing Claudia) neither is pretty nor knows very well to act, but the way Antonioni has used her is remarkable: she is not exactly wooden either, and her beauty is the kind that you will believe in one day and not the next day. Which is why, the constant focus on her face gives the film a double edge: a sympathy that she is ruining her life by falling into that love, but that she could not do anything otherwise. She is the one who still believes, who has that courage; and she has the horrible destiny of being undeceived: of how the others don't, and of how they can merely fit you in the scheme of things. Her belief, whether in Anna's being alive or whether in love and happiness, is never very well founded, yet never seems crazy, and seems a better thing to have than coldness which would be called realist by some.

It is a wonder to me how could a film be made so well demonstrating the decay at the heart of the West, and yet not take a preachy or a flippant tone. In a way, Fellini does the same thing with 81/2 but he adds in a lot more absurdity, which makes the effort that much less touching. Rohmer does the same thing in all his films, but Rohmer is more like Zola: he is empty of ideas. He only points the microscope at the bacteria, but has no ideas about the bacteria's place in universe. In addition, using stilted dialogues and contrived situations, Rohmer can often be preachy and indulging in vanity. But, here, we have a storyteller who knows the phenomenon and knows the evolution, who knows the germ and who knows the fruit: and one who is in love with stories and humanity, and thus with himself.

L'uomo che verrà

It is as simple as a Daudet tale and it is as touching as the silent moonlight is: with a surprising sincerity even when the subject is Nazi devastation, avoiding rhetoric and background music scores that seek to put a story in relief, and treating children more like adults, L'uomo che verrà (int'l title: The Man Who Will Come) is first and foremost a story that desires respect for being story, for being truth: references can be dispensed with, even the actual Marzabotto massacre on which the film is based. If you've liked Hollywood and Polanski, you will not like this film: insincerity, pomp and loud activism find not a single echo here. If you love Tarkosvkiy and have asked yourself the question what can make a man so cruel, you will want to watch this film.

Education? That is the central question of the film: can it immunize a man to everything, and all the morals and all the conscience are only an education, a conditioning we have been born bathed in? Goring a human flesh and using a woman as your lover as good as it lasts: is there something wrong in it? Is it only yet another argument to justify cruelty, or is there no cruelty but in the head, in the imagination, in the fulfilment of the Other's desire through you? People want to be humane, as they are expected to behave so; they can easily want to be efficient killers, if they are started being expected to behave so? Where does desire get born? In yourself or in the Other? And yet, sometimes a shooting squad member will falter, a boy's blue uncomprehending eyes will ask him strange questions: is it simply that he was too grounded in his earlier education of morals and stuff? Those blue eyes, they don't trouble the other serial killer, after all. Shouldn't the blue eyes trouble every potential killer so as to prove an absolute?

In a very different way, the film raises almost the same questions as Tarkovskiy's beautiful Andrei Rublev raises, most notably during the Tatar raid in Rublev: an almost Salvador Dali-esque sequence, but instead of laughing in its face more intent on asking and asking. Beautifully shot, parts of the film will remind you of that yet another great movie, L'albero degli zoccoli; the grinding poverty of an Italian village and the dominant Catholic influence (absent in present-day Italy) do not serve to pigeonhole the film in an epoch, but only mark the universality of man's material concerns: food for himself and for his horse, clothes and marriage. A son, a daughter. Like many other Italian films, the film does not employ actors quite known, except Maya Sensa, who slips into her quiet role very efficiently; editing is not fancy but simple, and the film slowly lurches from grim monotony to shocking barbarity: just like it would have been for the inhabitants of Marzabotto. Disbelief. No, this can't be possible. Surely, not the church? Surely, not the women and children? Surely, not the priest?

La Collectionneuse

Words, works of art - and silences - are but the razor blades to keep an annular space of void, a zone of no-entry, between the world that constantly endeavours to attack us and the self. That is what Daniel articulates but that is also what every Rohmer character does in La Collectionneuse. The film is nothing but a deep, patient study of the decay of society: Adrien's vain solitude and Haydée's pointless flirtations and love-making are sadly not even due to an inordinate appetite, but those are the razor blades that each one has selected to keep everyone else at bay. At once narcissistic and unable to love, the choice before them is to manifest in deeds and words - or silences - their identity and their existence.

The private space of any human being is sacrosanct, but that private space is also peopled, and not sterile: peopled however by one's own emotions, beliefs and love for others, because alone in myself I cannot know myself. It is in the other's eye that I have a role, it is in the other's laugh: mechanical sex only makes me identify myself as a pump though I may believe that I have given the world a pump and retained myself intact. Which and what myself? Love is in the loving.

Haydée Politoff as Haydée is perfect; it is surprising that how did she never become a famous actress, considering that she is not only beautiful and can look dumb, but also that she is someone who would slip into most parts very well: she is not gorgeous and yet charming, and the air of mystery that can be construed both as real mystery and as dumbness multiplies the number of possibilities of roles for her. Camera work in the film plays a key role; it's a leisurely observation of chameleons basking in the sun, and all one should keep in mind is to let the viewer feel everything: every movement and every smile, the nap in the sun and the swim in the sea. Expressions on the faces of both the lead characters are focussed upon for great lengths of times, and the rest of the characters have been given a bit of a short shrift.

It's always puzzling to me why Rohmer used to make such films? If you remove the prologue, most viewers would be at a loss to understand the film: most of them anyway I guess watch it to gawk on Haydée Politoff. The film is like a camera observing how flies die: however, Rohmer instead of showing human existence as purposeless shows how the riches and the beauties are there and yet it is we who make of ourselves the flies. Words are for reaching out, and there already exists a void between the expression and the enunciation, so there is never the danger of the sacred space getting violated: yet, when we begin to understand ourselves from our own words, when we begin to take the proof as the all there is to it, when we lose track of discrepancy between the parole and the parler, it is then we erect razors, and we see words as razors: it is then that we start searching for our identity in every night's pleasure and in every witty statement.

A beautiful film by Eric Rohmer, with the typical French pace of cinéma, there is hardly a moment where the viewer is not engaged.

Höstsonaten

I haven't ever read interviews of Ingmar Bergman, or rather anything about him - the way I know him is his work, his films. He is, to me, one of that rare breed who are not afraid to doubt - who stand within the pales of religion and yet take a promenade in there. He is a "doubter" - not just in the sense accepted, that of doubting religion and God, but also doubting the arguments contrary to it. Bergman's overarching pain, which he imposes on others through his films, has been striving to understand the perfection of a world which has so much ugliness as well; if man is God's work, why the ugly institutions he created to venerate the same God? Why, Man whom Eva alludes to in the film as having the highest and the lowest in him at the same time, why that man who bears the image of God in himself does need the external symbols and securities? Eva loves: this is the expression of Man, and we give it names. She loves; and thwarted in a world long decayed, she tries to learn to live, wherein every day is a practice.

A beautiful film, which on the face of it is about a failed relationship between two humans, a mother and a daughter, Höstsonaten (int'l title: Autumn Sonata) delves much deeper and brings into play all the themes Bergman struggled with, all the things he tried to understand. One of the features of most Bergman works, one which is not met often in literature or films otherwise, is that it is the women who are successful (and also often prey to that success, just as men are in others' works): forgetting the successful pianist Charlotte, even the tormented and unloved daughter Eva comes across in a way successful compared to her silently suffering husband, Viktor. That is the way Bergman plots the film: although, of course, a silence does not mean that a person does not suffer, yet Viktor is, for Bergman's film, dispensable; he is merely a "detached" narrator, a man playing a side role in the prominent story of a daughter who wants to be loved as she is, without questions and without judgments, without expectations and without bouts of enthusiasm and worry about her. She wants to live but be loved, but not be weighed down by love. Or the affected love - as that of her mother.

Autumn Sonata brings in one more very strange constant of Bergman's work: an old, cynical, intelligent man, a man who understands the world very well but is always a bit bored and wants to keep himself amused by a novelty (Stavrogin if you have read Dostoyevsky, Uncle Erland if you have seen that marvellous Bergman film Summer Interlude), who finds a new prey in a young girl, ready to believe and love, ready to adore and pray, a girl whose spirit is strong but who is what the world will call as naive (it is interesting that in a politically correct world, all the actual cruel words do keep on existing). I consider the Leonard-Helena happening as a complete byplot in the film: probably, in structural terms, it is even a defect; it distracts from the main body and that for a long time in a mere one-and-half-hour film. Yet, who will mind? To glimpse what goes in Bergman's mind, and what dark shadows lurk there, is more fascinating itself.

The question that Bergman never really asked openly - maybe he never got further to the pith, or somehow he just didn't want to - is not a mere rhetorical one, that why this? It is, rather, why the boredness? At the same stroke, Bergman, almost, attacks the religious institutions and glorifies God: in a world of thousand things and patterns to learn, or as Eva says in a world of many alternate realities than we can sense or know ever - God - there is the pew-sitting, there is the sacrament, and there is the choir - religion - someone instilling and instilling always inside us, as if we were mere cardboards, as if our desires and hopes were unclean, as if they were not enough to make us learn ourselves. Instead of trying to know the other realities, we don't even know ourselves - but run after a shining wax model erected by someone and told as desirable, all to protect us from our insecurities, a deus ex machina for the times that we are in doubt of us.

For, yes, we are doubters: and it is good that we are doubters. The inherent opposition between the concept of God and the idea of religion has probably never been so brilliantly put, excepting Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Brilliant acting performances, especially by Liv Ullmann, and a simple film with no editing tricks elevate Ingmar Bergman to a master story-teller: the one who touches hearts, who can feel oneself.

Ivanovo detstvo

Tarkovskiy's first feature, Ivanovo detstvo (int'l title: Ivan's Childhood), lacerates the viewer with pain, questions, and a moody silence: Kolya Burlyaev as the 12-year-old Ivan shows a maturity of acting skills unsurpassed and is the pulse of this wonderful film, another example of what a fine black-and-white film can achieve and how strange it is that poetry is felt when one watches beautiful cinematography in black and white.

As a film, a young director's flaws do come out and at times there is more intellect than heart, more the intention of sending out a message than an attempt to understand and explore the message oneself using the medium of a film this time: some of the dream sequences like the apples one and the final fantasy of all gathered in a paradise? seem imposed on the film, seem like tacked onto it. However, even the flaws of a genius are beautiful to watch or experience, and such foibles do not in any way take away from the rare thing that Ivan's Childhood is: a humane attempt to make sense of an insensible world, a struggle to not reject, to not give way to the easy method of denial of everything. This is where the stunning performance of Kolya as Ivan comes to the fore: his burning hatred not just provides him with the fodder to live on, and the will power for action, but it also would have led him to a more enlightened self, through which he knows himself, that what he is, who he is, and probably that there are differences between the what and the who.

The subplot of Masha seems like a complete early Ingmar Bergman film: however, it does seem unneeded to me in this film. There is little time already in a one-and-half-hour film to devote to Ivan; outside of his dreams and his hate-filled eyes, there is little to choose from, and had it not been the expressions on Kolya's face which are themselves a million stories, the viewer would have been stifled. Tarkovskiy gives glimpses of that rare ability that Resnais had, to play with time, but compared to the latter, he still is green. I did not like the voiceover at the end when Ivan's fate was revealed to the viewer: the voiceover is a simple trick but ungainly because in real life there are no voiceovers (sometimes, it is effective, but those are different sets of circumstances). It very much reminded me of an opening scene of the Hindi classic Saahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, where the discovery of some broken bangles by a civil engineer leads to the unravelling of a past, forgotten story (here, the discovery comes only at the end, but again the end of the protagonist can only be guessed at by the person who discovers the remains of a life lived passionately). Time, even though we see it as so separate, is so kneaded: why to use voiceovers and flashbacks to reinforce the notion that time is separate, divided into discrete periods? Considering the intention Tarkovskiy set out with, I felt the story betrayed, the boy betrayed. He looked for synthesis everywhere: his quest for justice and vengeance was nothing but a search for resolution. A resolution above all in time: the old man who has lost his wife, he himself who has lost his family, Russia whose future is uncertain and present black, and Siberia where time and space both seem to stand still, for even 200 or 2000 kilometres in Siberia is not far.

L'Humanité

In a world increasingly caught up in abstractions, trying to always avoid facing realities, is Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité one of the last-ditch efforts to try to make face people themselves, to recognize the stories in their lives, and to make an effort to clean up themselves, to find meanings in the beauty they could be grateful for?

The film is a stunning, brave, and unintimidated answer to the direction cinema has been taking over the past half-century: not just the Hollywood penchant for futuristic fantasies, but also the so-called arthouse or intellectual cinema of directors like Godard. It's ironic on first news that Bruno Dumont is an erstwhile philosophy teacher, but not anymore so, when you realize that sucked into a pseudo-science he realized how he's lost contact with the people, how he can't touch them, and thus he turned to film-making. This is where the wide gulf is between Dumont and Godard. Godard is what I call as "a philosopher" in cinema, referencing and referencing, stacking layers upon layers of meaning, and creating an edifice that will yield high cerebral pleasure to the ones in the esoteric circle; he forgets that cinema as the knowledge of life should touch people and should draw from people. But Dumont knows that the most beautiful edifice is only when it can be built from lay notions, lay words: humanity is a participatory experience, of senses, of impressions, of images and sounds and whatever we sense, and of the people we interact with. Stories are the most beautiful creations, whether fairy-tales or the tales of reality; and when told well, when the narrator is sincere to each of his characters and uses his voice only as the medium to communicate but nothing more, then the story is loved, speaks at least to someone's heart, incites passions and emotions and something to think. To different audiences, I may speak in different languages; but when I change the language, the heart should not go missing, the cores should remain intact.

Many people and critics, among whom some I respect, compare Dumont with Bresson. I do not agree. It is very difficult for me to explain why, but Bresson's camera is an objectifying, deadening gaze; it looks around without searching for meaning, without finding meaning. Dumont's camera is an absorbing, non-judgmental gaze: it looks around without judging, but still trying to understand the meaning. Note that even trying to understand is a kind of judgment, because what you are still trying to understand is not something you're still comfortable with and hence your mind is still active with it. On the other hand, can a complete deadening gaze of Bresson be called non-judgmental? Or, would you call it an indifferent gaze, figuratively speaking a cold gaze?

The remarkable thing about this film, L'Humanité, is that Dumont also finds an actor, Emmanuel Schotté (playing Pharaon de Winter), whose gaze is as absorbent; the character of de Winter reminds one a lot, a real lot, of Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin. It is a very, very difficult task to show how a man can feel utmost contempt for the crime, the act, and yet love and/or pity for the criminal, the perpetrator; how one can be in love with humanity, even if one keeps on encountering actions of a bewildered humanity, actions that one not only hates, but which eat up your soul constantly with their why?, how is it possible?, why?. De Winter is sexual and yet sexless; he can keep hoping blindly and endlessly for his neigbour Domino (played by Séverine Caneele) and watch her with a voyeur's gaze, and yet he can do that without a voyeur's delight, as if all the time he's trying to put 2 and 2 together, as if he's trying to understand the motor impulses of a human being, of humanity, that impels them to things like rape, murder, and the very commonly found insensitivity to another person. For, everyone's busy in their insensitivity: de Winter's mother, Domino herself, and all the world; life is a burden upon them, that they try to shake off, do a jig, and grunt again under its load. For de Winter, it's the uncomprehendingness ("incomprehension" means something else; I don't mean that) that is a bigger burden, against which he wants to scream; for once, he also feels the burden of the society that won't let him shriek when he wants to.

Manon des Sources (1986)

(For entry on Jean de Florette, refer here.) Borne on by the beautiful music of Jean de Florette and the strong presence of Yves Montand, the second part of this Marcel Pagnon saga spread across generations, Manon des Sources (int'l title: Manon of the Spring), is resolved to balance out the injustice and play the judgement game; and as a story, it suffers a lot on that count. Emmanuelle Béart might be very pretty, but she also looks hardly the role of an intelligent, wild woman: and her shortage of acting skills are in full evidence. The issue here is that she is playing the title character, and as much as Yves Montand can do to shore up the film, it is Béart who must light the film.

The film also has an extraordinarily slow pace, probably because the story is a little puzzlingly simple. It is not clear why would Manon's mother leave her for the operas; it is also not clear that what was Manon, if she was filled with that much hate for the Soubeyrans, doing all this time? Happily singing to her herd of goats and waiting for a schoolteacher to arrive to enlighten her? There is also a serious disjunct between her father's character and hers: which of course is something that happens all the time, but the only thing is that a revenge story craves for a justice arrived at, rather than being meted out.

Ben-Hur is a great film not just because of its story of miracles and its sheer belief in humanity and life, but also because Judah's wife asks him: You've become the very thing you set out to destroy, Messala! This is the poignant crux of life: to kill the killer I need to become the killer, and then what is the point of that justice I am seeking? A mere unspent bloodthirst? At this important point, Manon des Sources fails.

Daniel Auteuil has little to do in the film, while Montand has simply the role of a tired man doomed to the results of his wickedness; his remorse, the revenge for him, is only because Jean was his own son, but he would still do the same thing tomorrow to some another man who wouldn't be his son. Is that even revenge? Béart is insipid, while the rest of the village's sudden desire to talk about an affair that happened more than a decade back is strange, as is their newfound ability to suddenly connect the drying up of water with what happened at the Romarins. However, on the whole, the two films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources are classic examples of French cinema: slow and thoughtful, lingering shots, a woman's nudity as a fact and beauty and not in the way most American films show, a simple story with not many twists, life's ironies and realities, ordinary acting and beautiful music, and an emphasis to content over style. I could watch these two films just for Dépardieu and Montand and the Verdi music that is the refrain of the film.

As an aside, I must say that have the DVD poster-makers started making posters without seeing the film and from their own imagination? The current poster higlighted on imdb.com for Jean de Florette (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091288/) is not only not a scene from the film, but it couldn't have been: the sheer tragedy of the films lies in the fact that Montand drove his son to his death and ruin without even ever meeting him, his eyes, his voice.

Paltadacho Munis

A searing critique of institutional religion and the ways it is wedded with politics, Laxmikant Shetgaonkar's film Paltadacho Munis (int'l title: The Man beyond the Bridge) is first a thoughtful, beautiful story of a lonely forest guard fighting off his loneliness as much as the greed and corruption around him, with nothing but a big heart and a cane in his hand. The film's strength lies in that without using dialogues, it's sort of a monologue: the forest guard (Chittaranjan Giri) is an insignificant peg in a vast administrative network, and the forest is his closest friend. Every element of the forest means something to him: including the mad woman he first falls in lust with, and then love with.

The theme of loneliness is not simply explored through Giri's nonchalant character, but also through the mad woman's (Veena Jamkar). If she has escaped the taunts and the stones of the villagers, then was it only to lose the last remnant of independence: her ability to roam and to laugh at her own will? Giri wants to care for her, but in the process he forgets how she came to him: and he tries to cage her, and give her an image of his own. But water is not molded; it has to break free, it has to flow on. Giri and Jamkar realise their limitations, and also how each must respect the other, and only then could love continue: because the forest is not only full of silences but also predators. Outside, there is only the forest; and the warmth must be made within, even of themselves, themselves the flint and steel and themselves the fire.

Throughout the length of the film, the hypocrisy of religion, rituals, and politicians is well exposed, albeit as a silent observer. The way in which Giri chooses to fight is being himself, by doing what he wants; rather than anything symbolic or grand, he dares to love, and he dares to protect. And so does Jamkar. The man beyond the bridge may be outside the pale of civilization, but it could be that the world is more beautiful on that side.

Shot in the beautiful Goa-Karnataka border region, the film is made in Karwari and Bardezi dialects and available subtitled in English.

Vendredi soir

The film Vendredi soir (international title: Friday Night) draws in and repels in equal measures: without a story, with its object of simply showing a one-night stand, the film revels in images and senses; a Paris of the congested roads because of the proverbial French strikes, but also a Paris of the now-empty, again owing to the strikes, cafés and hotels; a Paris of loneliness where the radio announcer hints the car-drivers to give a lift to passers-by for it can be "fun," to a Paris of crowds of islands roaming in the night, seeking pleasure or a final edification.

To talk of the theme, Claire Denis probably means to show a woman's decision to be a part of a one-night stand as women's lib, as some feminists do believe it to be; the final image that rests with the viewer is an ecstatic Valérie Lemercier after a night of pleasure: there is neither guilt nor a lust for an encore. She is satisfied and happy. However, that jars in when compared with the attitudes of the two brief lovers for all the time: the man (Vincent Lindon) is cool, detached, and very sure of himself (and probably, as the woman later suspects, he used, though maybe not, the ten franc change to buy condoms, before the woman had even evinced any apparent interest in him). He is not bothered if the woman leaves, but he feels welcome to her body if she would let him. The woman likes being suddenly cared for; driving alone on the streets, living a monotonous life, the man comes as an ephemeral spark to her, and she need not even take any initiative. Now if the film were to be a non-committal comment on urban life, this would have been another story that happens: even now, this does indeed remain a very credible story, but then it does not say why should it merit one and half hours of footage? Why should the film want to give a message at the end, and freeze it there: does the film itself intend to be treated like a laxative? It is strange liberation being suggested when the man is sure of his sexual possession over the woman: even if one could argue the woman has only used him instead for that night, it would only lead furthest to the conclusion that the man didn't possess her but rather she wanted to be possessed; is that the women's lib the director believes in?

As for the style in which the film is made, I would say the film is to cinema what a haiku is to poetry: nothing but the impressions of a night in an urban environment being gathered by a woman. The man is dead, the woman is dead: they are concentrated in themselves and seek each other out as ejaculations; it could be a film of masks. Haiku however are often beautiful if well-conceived, for they do not drag: this film drags for half an hour on the traffic jam and for the remaining time on the fling. I think sex scenes are often quite tragic in films: they purport to show an intimacy that gets violated the instant it is being shown on screen. Here, Denis obscures many details in darkness, or moves the camera here and there, or shows the act here to be a slow kill rather than a wild dash; however, she only succeeds in prolonging the torture: any eroticism, if it could have been imagined, is flushed out (one could have simply recorded a couple all night and called it a film!), and what remains is a sick tale of what all possiblities are present in life.

There's one saving grace of the film: the shots of Paris in the opening; rooftops, houses, a falling day.

Raavan

While the epic Ramayana, which the film has for its storyline but in modern settings, is a victor's account of the quest for supremacy of Aryans over Dravidians, Raavan does the magic trick of pushing the same struggle between state administration and guerrilla justice at the periphery, rather simply a context. Foremost, Raavan is the story of truth: and of truths. The absolute is in the eyes of Ragini, which make Beera transcend himself: and the moment he attains it, it is then that Ragini must face and live with the pain of that truth. And taut between this continuum of absolutes, there are the truths: in the name of dharma (duty), in the name of possession, in the name of revenge.

Raavan as a film is primarily designed for being a visual treat: but the design has not been done through any visual effects, but through the stunning nature and diversity of the Western Ghats, one of the countable few remaining ecological hotspots and treasuries in the world. The camera does not play tricks: rather, it brings out every beauty. From the creatures endemic to the Ghats, to the roaring southern rivers amid wild herbs and mists, to the drops of water, mud, turmeric, tear, sweat, fear on the protagonists' faces - the camera is in an observant mode, as the story of stoicism plays out. If Ragini had not been as pure as her cries that only come back to her in this world where man and nature share a home's warmth, if she had been more afraid of the vulture who comes near to pounce, then this could have been a mere Thomas Hardy story: where the frailties of humanity are mourned; or a modern counterpart, where they are celebrated. But, even if Beera is a dacoit steeped in blood, even if Ragini has been immune to the truths around her and yet dares to think herself as true, even if the Superintendent of Police plays with life and its denizens like a cat with mice: even then, the desire to win the water that shall sweep everything away, the battle to win a heart, the scorn for the hand to protect for it seems a master reign the field, as if nature has gained ascendance over them and imbued each of them with an own freedom, an own whim, a liberty defined by the furthest mountain, the most treacherous cascade. To which, there is no end.

The character built for Beera deserves special mention, and I also think Abhishek Bachchan has played it to a difficult perfection. It is a hero unlike any hero or anti-hero or even any character role that I've seen in any film across the world and Hollywood cinema; he is built as if to alienate audiences! Except for his staunch figure often silhouetted on the screen, he has hardly any dialogues: and when he has, they are noises, they are his irritations and his amusements and his angers venting forth in the form of some of his typical mannerisms, which do not change but keep repeating throughout the duration of the film. His smouldering eyes are probably the only indication of how alone he is within himself, of how much depth he is capable, and how quick he is to divine things. The opening half-hour of the film, and Beera throughout, also reminds a lot of Peer Gynt: there's the same lyrical drama structure, and while Peer Gynt plays around with girls and doesn't know where his happiness could have been till late, Beera plays around with blood and doesn't know where his actual death would come from - Ragini, the woman he respects and desires - till late.

Talking of the other actors, Aishwarya Rai fits in the film well; somehow, her kind of beauty and figure blend in with the story, and her eyes always seem to say as if she thinks herself superior, so they match with the character of Ragini. The remaining however, except for Priyamani, do not fit; and there lies a major weakness of the film. The greatest weakness of the film is however in its loose editing: but Ratnam lapsed with this job even with Dil Se, which I consider to be his best ever, and was probably only on the mark, to some extent, with Guru. Rahman's music is again brilliant, though most of the scores also feel to me a rehash of his old ones: in particular Beera has an echo in Dil Se. But Gulzar's lyrics light a fire unparalleled: he has probably surpassed even himself with the lyrics of Behene de.

The one aspect where Ratnam disappointed me the most was his sudden use of northern Indian motifs, in and around Jamuniya's marriage scenes. From Maharashtra to Kerala, the coverage of Western Ghats that is present in this film is in itself locating the story at too many places, because the Ghats differ a lot as one moves a few hundred kilometres; but to show houses and ceremonies in a manner which could not happen in that Indian world, and on top of that to show a highly rich and bourgeois style of marriage considering that it's a guerrilla leader's sister who's getting married, is a bit jarring and offputting to say the least. One of the marks of a good film is consistency, and I am afraid Raavan does not have it in many respects. However, if for nothing else, the film is a must-watch for the exploration of one of the most dangerous and beautiful places in the world: the Western Ghats.

Kites

Yes, Kites is indeed Koyla stylised, repackaged, and trimmed, and in fact a much inferior version of the latter. Yes, the Indian critics are right to rip it off for its complete lack of story and the actors' non-acting. But yet, the film I would say is more rather an introductory tutorial into the world of Indian cinema for the Western audiences, and in that it does the job: the warmth of the film stunningly contrasts with the coldness of Hollywood films and has been a major factor besides its very design that has made it the first ever Indian film to make it to the US top ten at the box office, and the chemistry between the lovers - Hrithik Roshan and Barbara Mori - is a sight to watch in spite of the two different languages they speak in - English and Spanish. Love is a lot like music.

While Koyla brimmed over with anger and focused on the angst of a man, Kites chooses to remain being a simple love story doomed to failure: in some senses, there is more of Ghai's Kisna to it than any other film. But instead of the Himalayas, this time we have the New Mexico's sunflooded arid landscapes. The beauty of Kites lies in the fantasy feel to it: the love between Roshan and Mori seems like too good to be true, and yet it seems to be true. Even though the actors themselves don't know much about acting and have a limited stock of expressions on their faces, the chemistry between them is just alluring, and forgotten is their greed for money which brought their cruel fate onto them in the first place.

What is sad though however is so much non-use of Kangana Ranaut as to force her name as in a guest appearance in the credits roll: one of the finest actors of the world that she is, and reduced to a few minutes' screen time? Her character, too, could have been developed more: her father's one dialogue that he has seen her happy after a long time in itself sets in chain a thousand sequences that could have come off, that could have established another niche in the film, and all we have is just a jilted woman, who is shown to be obsessed so that the audience may not sympathise with her at all. On the other hand, the brother is rather more focused upon, in the old tradition of Hindi films where the villain was equally important as or even more than the hero, and it only makes the film a bit caricaturish. But then, as one US critic said of the film, everything is forgiven. It's a warm, crazy film, and just for the sake of that, it's not all that bad.

Roma, città aperta

Probably, stripping away the old Hollywood flair and style meant "neorealism": Roma, città aperta (Rome: Open City) works well, and grippingly enough, for a small snippet from the occupation days, but realism? Melville's L'armée des ombres, a film strikingly similar, would have highly merited this tag; Lino Ventura, even if an actor, looks more natural than the "non-actors" here. Realism doesn't just mean filming in devastated cities and showing life to be hollowed out (which is what was also probably thought by the Bicycle Thieves maker) but life as it is. The German officer might scorn the rhetoric that Italians are fond of, but there is hardly any visible rhetoric in any actor's mouth: instead, the director indulges in much of it - the running betrothed woman was bound to be shot; the German officer had to forget his cruelties in drink; the woman who gave them away had to swoon; the whistles sing before the priest is shot. Is this not rhetoric?

Rhetoric might be a reality in people's words, it hardly is when it comes to life. Things don't happen so opportunely, especially when one is not seeing in hindsight. A key force to realism is lent by an inability to see backwards or forwards: one lives in the moment, just as one lives life. To show depressing sights is not the answer; for that one can see a grim documentary. A film must work on the level of fantasy - even if it tries to project reality - the fantasy of a tightly strung thread running through; reality does not work on the basis of what might have been and eliciting such sighs from the viewers, but the brute slap of what happened and can happen, the realization and the fear, the action and the anticipation.

Though Melville's film came much later, as a viewer of the modern age having once seen it I see little to choose in Rossellini's film. The story of Rome: Open City is fortunately centered around only few characters, and yet a poor cinematography and lack of characterization make the film appear like one were watching a story through binoculars; there is hardly any depth to the film, and it seems to make blanket statements for or against each of the protagonists, covering all in a shroud of inevitable tragedy. As long as one breathes - which is reality - nothing's inevitable, nothing's impending!

Harishchandrachi Factory

It is not only a marvellous story of the pioneer of the world's largest film industry, but also in equal measures the story of an always enterprising India, the story of a middle-class Hindu family, and the story of a man who refuses to die whatever the moment be. Nandu Madhav stars as the irrepressible Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, a man fascinated by stories and magic and machines and now bent upon learning and unfolding the magic of moving pictures upon the world. The best thing that Harishchandrachi Factory (English: The Factory of Harishchandra) does is to stick to its title; it has no interest in showing the multiple facets of Phalke: the brilliant photography student from the MS University of Baroda or the man obsessed with printing machines and who went to Germany to learn more of them or the man who worked with Raja Ravi Varma and learnt magic from Carl Hertz. The film is only about the making of the first Indian film, Raja Harishchandra, and almost parallels the enthusiasm in a similar story shown about the first Romanian film's making in Restul e tăcere.

Where the film however makes a mark is in situating the story firmly in the Indian context: while the few slogans for Tilak and pictures of Kesari are just artificial ploys to make the film appear in 1910s, it is the brilliant artwork and well-written dialogues that do the job. Hardly has anyone succeeded in so meticulously constructing a typical Hindu family's lifestyle and dynamics as Paresh Mokashi has in his directorial debut. The chemistry between all the four family members is a sight to watch, and each member of the family shares work and respect equally; coupled with the humor attending the never-say-die spirit of Phalke, who makes the bleakest of situations appear as games to be played, the film is a life-changing story.

One thought that strikes the viewer is the large contrast between Benigni in Life Is Beautiful and Madhav in Harishchandrachi Factory. Benigni comes upon suddenly as an overacting, highly affected actor in comparison to the natural skills of Madhav, who seems to be lifted out from life and placed in the film. Benigni 'keeps' himself happy, Madhave knows to be happy.

And a special mention to the film's effervescent music: not only capturing the days of old Marathi cinema, but also tilting the viewer into the craziness of DG Phalke.

Road, Movie

The much-touted, much-anticipated Indian answer to Cinema Paradiso never materialises in spite of a talented cast, stunning locales, and a vast and diverse country as the backdrop: Road, Movie never adopts a story, instead ending up with a confused one that wanted to tackle all the Paradiso themes of coming of age, journeys, and the magic of cinema, and yet ends up with only an abstract shimmy into the hot, arid desert landscape of Kutch-Rajasthan. Where it fails even more miserably is by giving the story the typical oft-seen Hollywood notion that young men have to come of age; on the other hand, in Paradiso, Toto came of age at every moment of his life: the childhood of learning from Alfredo, the youth of love and waiting for love, and the old age of the magic still alive and yet the realisations and the revelations never ending, a life thrilling to touch at each moment. A life to live with the gumption of Alfredo, whatever it may bring: there's always a story, romance.

Abhay Deol carries his Dev D mistargeted angsts to this film and set against the flimsy hairoil business of his father that he hates, the undecided nature of the film sets in. The film from there on does not manage to balance the several threads running right through: molière-sque farce and life-changing journeys. It does not explain how does the Rajasthani boy manage to pronounce Starbucks so correctly, and how does Yashpal Sharma, the water dacoit, manage to pronounce the English "~tion" as "shun" and "son" both. The sweet Rajasthani dialect or the salty Kutchi one, wherever the film is meant to be placed, is completely absent, and instead we have every character speaking khariboli Hindi; how? If a lonely truck roaming in the desert picks up a gypsy woman who speaks just like a woman you met in a real Starbucks cafe would have, and when this woman roaming in search of water even manages to have a full coat of lipstick on her lips, then how do you manage to feel the film? Especially when the whole point of the film is somehow to just get lost in the hotness, the ballooning white skies, the sheer struggle of finding oneself through travelling. And not just find places, not just peace for yourself, not get lost in wildernesses, but to find humanity, outside and within you.

There are times though because of the beautiful landscape that the film does work and shows travel to be what it is. Punctuated by a selfish Abhay, bright Mohammed Faizal (who seems to be simply the most effortless actor I have ever seen, and with a head on his shoulders; a good match-up for Ishqiya's Alok Kumar), a maverick and lovely Satish Kaushik, and a sultry gypsy Tannishtha, the film is essentially hardly cinema and its magic, but just the various colors of this world, and how each life, each voice, each background, each drop of water carries a story, a breath, a dream. This is what travel is and this is what Abhay realises, alongwith finding a bit of more humanity in him than he was wont to. Showing remote human settlements cinema is just the guise for Abhay, and the filmmaker.

For lovers of the beauty that India presents, the film is a gift: though not going outside the desert, there is enough to make the viewer curse that why did the director not make a full Hindi feature-length film, instead making some chopped-headed 2-hour-or-less film. Short length is a major weakness of the film: when you start with Lawrence of Arabia landscapes, and try to play some of the same tricks that Lean played masterfully, then you also have to let your films seep into the viewer's mind, into his consciousness. Lean was able to ignore the Hollywood commercial guidelines and still ended up a winner, since his films were good: and even if they had not worked, he wouldn't have shelved his grand sequences that got into the sun and wind of a shot.

It's still a wonderful film for a traveller: s/he will know the pleasure of being on the open roads and the not-roads. But a film is meant to be a story at some level, and Abhay's character didn't excite me to write a story about him - how to build a film without any empathy, or hate, for or with the hero?

Ishqiya

A firebomb of a film, Ishqiya dares to take the viewers through one of the most dangerous places on this earth: the Hindi heartland of eastern Uttar Pradesh, where prospective goons are nurtured, the international arms trade occurs with as much no fuss as onions in other parts, caste wars rage and every single child knows the A to Z of a gun and dreams of an automatic, and where even the passion of love is consumed with the desire of power, to play a game with lives. Till love revenges itself.

What can you say about a film whose only most glaring fault is the distinct dichotomy in pace pre- and post-interval; the languid harpy atmosphere interspersed with two robbers falling in lust and love for a woman who doesn't care for them and the antics of their survival, sharp snapped against the sudden pick-up of tempo as a story hidden resurfaces in all its horror, and the India-Nepal border doesn't simply remain a safe haven to cross for the two on the run, but also a bristling source of the Maoist terrorism existing across a vast swathe of India, sourced through Nepal, funded by ? no the film does not go so far, as first and foremost this is a Vidya Balan film.

The brilliant actress she showed herself to be in her very debut (Parineeta), she has hardly managed to find more such roles; in years and years of film-watching from the world over, I don't think I have ever met such a whole-heartedly strong woman character, as constructed by debutant director Abhishek Chaubey with Vishal Bhardwaj here. It is curious that apart from the swear words, her language is the civilized Hindi; and yet it only adds another twinge of curiosity about her past, her likely upbringing, as does everything else about her. On apparent looking, a beautiful widow; the complex layers emerge and fascinate soon; on retrospect, a beautiful woman with a will to live, with the joy to be able to love and live. It is a fortune to find that the rest of the cast is as creamed into their niches as if they were taken deliberately out from them and placed here: Arshad Warsi, with his open-mouthed stupid seeming looks and murderous darting eyes at any girl and a ready wit when occasion needs, gives in an unexpected good acting performance; Naseeruddin Shah is the run-down elegance personified, a man who has still hankerings left after what he thinks as his alter ego; Alok Kumar the unwitting boy to set the climax on fire; and Adil Hussain the power-hungry man obsessed with his ideals and bloodlust. The selection of previous Hindi film songs played at various times in the movie is a pointer to the excellence of the film: their relation or unrelation in the right degree to the scene unfolding, the characters unfolding, and the complexion of the Hindi heartland unfolding; for where can you move in Uttar Pradesh without hearing songs playing from radios and tape recorders and CD players and MP3 players and iPods?

Ishqiya also catapults the vibrancy of Indian cinema to the very fore: while Hollywood clutters itself with fake characters and parodies of world-saving farces, with mindless comedies and mind-numbing action films, while Europe sticks to the fare of depressing, dysfunctional tales or low-key warm tales of 'ordinary' lives, which maybe it tries to project as more ordinary than they are, the Hindi cinema does not remain to any one stand. It tells stories: not formulas. It mixes ordinary people with extraordinary events, it believes in people with a frenzied warmth and in the potential to discover dramas in lives; it's not a coincidence that on the same day as Ishqiya releases, another film diametrically opposite, Rann, based on the ugly sides of the media industry, also releases, and makes another impression of the breadth of the Hindi filmscape.

Ishqiya, another Vishal Bhardwaj film, another explosive and beautiful combination. Vishal's screenplay, music, and dialogues, and Gulzar's lyrics - who can better the combination? Maybe Chaubey's, and not Vishal's, direction: it infuses a yelp of young energy throughout the film even though none of the characters, even those on the sidelines, in the film is in any way young.

Aamir

Showing Mumbai like never before, Aamir, in spite of a gaping logic hole in the central motive of the plot, leaves you stunned completely: a low-key thriller, daring to take on the world of jehadis, the Muslim society of India, the Mumbai slums, and the urban life where no one is willing to take you on board, all that Aamir does, and with one of the most brilliant acting performances I've ever seen in my life. Rajeev Khandelwal makes you really sit up and wonder, that what has this man been doing on television, in countless soaps and reality shows, and even after this film? The whole 3 Idiots argument of money running in after excellence I think is quashed, right here.

Camera, besides Khandelwal, is the single most important factor behind this film; the music is great, and an ably done camerawork would have sufficed to make this film 'powerful'. However, the camera goes beyond that, and makes the film talk: to our hearts, minds, senses. I could myself feel nauseous when Khandelwal is about to step into a dirty, often-seen toilet in an Indian milieu; and that's the key to a film. Without even showing anything, how to build the tension, how to grip the viewer completely: not least is the expression of individuality that runs right through the story. Khandelwal, playing the title character of Aamir Ali and a young doctor, says "I only want to live for myself", and when pooh-poohed for doing that and not "doing anything for his community", he quite simply says, if everyone were to live for himself, the community would be well served. That - and that statement seen in the context of the film's climax - signifies the film as one breacher of all values plodding along since centuries in the guises of ideals, and keeping men divided: the men and the women, shown as different facets of a moving and a still life at various and all points of the film. As a confused, terrified, tired, and desperate Aamir is made run through the mazes of Mumbai, his gaze falls on unseen slices of lives: lives of perpetrators, participants, onlookers, alienated, all sorts of lives. Lives of people somehow tired, somehow deadened like an outer dermis, and yet somehow alive, who also get tired after all, who can feel it, who would like to stand one day. Someone holding a baby, a woman hanging clothes, an old man now used to look helplessly ahead: and amidst it all, the protagonist trying to give meaning to his day and life, in a few hours his destiny to be decided, not this time by himself. And this is the pride with which the terrorist works and gives the name of khuda to it: a brilliantly paced film, with no sermons attached, the snippets of Mumbai life make you only think, why? Why has man chosen this? Why an imagined heaven instead of one here?

3 Idiots

I almost now associate an Aamir Khan film with the worst of cinema: Dil Chahta Hai, Rang de Basanti, 3 Idiots (of course, I didn't even bother to see Taare Zameen Par). Those three are pretty much united around one single thought: an expectation of how youth behave, and should behave, an attempt to make a norm. The most striking thing is how people love being defined, and hence the films: I will set out on a course trying to learn myself.

3 Idiots does not merely make your blood boil by its propagandist intentions: it also disappoints terribly by having no story at all, and the skeleton that stands without any logic at all. I would have said the ending of the film an add-on eyesore, if I had believed the film to be moving in any direction at all till that moment. Not only could I completely not understand that why a man who claims to be in love with a girl has in fact cut himself off from her quite conveniently and happily and without any compulsions to do so, but I also couldn't understand if this was Ayn Rand in a supposedly light-hearted makeover? After all, if the film starts with hurly-burlies of giving out 'messages', then it should send out the right ones, if any: by suddenly projecting the protagonist as some kind of super-genius, the film in fact reinforces the notions of those parents who want their children to be doctors and engineers - they do that since they don't think their kids to be super-geniuses! And their prescription is, if not, then do this, it will at least ensure money, and thus whatever you want with the money. By equating everything with success, as at the end of the film, what is the point sought to be made?

The actors are decent, there's a zing of freshness to the print of the film (!), and the far and few in-betweens of the Shivaliks and Upper Himalayas are a delight to watch; and on those crutches, a film presumes to call itself a work of cinema. And also earns money, and money, and money. Incredible!

Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year

I call it a toothpaste ad: meant to exude some hazy brightness, where the world of commerce is neatly divided into Robin Hood businessmen and the others, Rocket Singh poses a much more important question: why did the film-maker become a film-maker? To make this?

To take an average middle-class Indian and tell his story is not a sin; neither is to package all the grim pornographic realities of life into a giggle. The former is a necessity; the latter is a style. To tell a non-story is one; to preach is a greater one. The amazing feeling of contrast that one can see this film in with Khosla ka Ghosla is an eye-opener; the latter tells a story with the joy of a story, and doesn't ponder creakily over who's right and who's wrong. It is another matter that Khosla has really the clean men winning and the bad men losing; the win and loss are not fished out from MBA books or heavy history tomes or thou shalt not guides to moral characters, but they are the part and parcel of a life, of a pretence, of a hoodwink. Rocket only manages to pull the usual trick: of preaching; where it fails even worse is that after all the preaching, the preacher himself seems a black sheep!

The start is promising: a Doordarshan-like stillness, seldom seen today, on the different things of daily use in the namesake protagonist's house, with a background score immensely hummable and looking as if it also crept up with the sun in your or mine mind; what strikes you is the clean textures, bright colors. For an opening credits sequence, this only weaves in freshness, and makes you ready for the hours to follow; however, what follows is more horrific set design! The textures continue to be clean, as if every wall in the film was painted yesterday; the clothes continue to be spotless; even the roads seem to me very freshly woken up. It's debatable whether this kind of look was even intended by the director: if intended, he surely would've tried to bring in a decay somewhere? A story purported to be on moral decay of the business world, and glowing in bright, fresh colors: is it to show the optimism that Rocket Singh shares with no one about the world, about people? For that, first of all, it is the sketchily built character of Rocket Singh which would have to be explained, if possible.

Is he an innocent, a fool, a hypocrite, a smart man, or a do-gooder? The problems of the film go beyond the malaise of a stillborn character brought to life. It does not require rocket economics to understand that if a thing costs 20 units and instead of selling it at 25, thus earning something, if you sell it at 21 then the customers are going to come; that's how any small business in this world starts and competes with the larger names. How is that supposed to be virtuous? In fact, forget 21; I might even go for selling it at 19 just to build the business to a certain level. I believe that is the most glaring of sins; when I buy mangoes from the farmer, I buy at a different price than when I buy them from the vendor, and I don't expect the price to be same, nor do I want it.

Why the cloak of virtuousness? Do protagonists have to be? Show the story! Undercutting happens a lot in real life; people even siphon off their company's funds and equipment and tomorrow are business masters, there's nothing to be ashamed of telling a story. A story is what is believable; not a Rocket giving you lectures on honesty. Beyond an excellent understated performance from Ranbir Kapoor, considering that he's considered to be hot and is not much of an actor otherwise, and another one from Naveen Kaushik (as Nitin) till he has a change of heart, the film is only remarkable for the morning mint flavors it comes with; till the intermission, it does still seem like a good jingle, but when the heavy punches of what's right and wrong start landing soon after and a self-help guide of how to run businesses, including even the tea-giving boy having his own lectures to give, the film begins to feel a farce where you are not even able to laugh.

Note: I used "even" for the tea-giving boy. Not in my mind. But the director did use him like the pawn of an "even" and yet smilingly bared his teeth to say that oh oh for him all are "equal", no evens for him. This is where films and books and songs, almost everything in the world begins to go bad; when you think a teamaker a teamaker and you don't think you can say it aloud. Hush, hush, hush! An educated world of educated fairness, hush, hush, hush!

Once Upon a Time in the West

If Sergio Leone hadn't already achieved greatness with the Dollars trilogy, then he does that with the grittiest Western I've ever seen: Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West) . A film that refuses to balance its characters in only the color of blood with no taints no sainthoods, as the Dollars trilogy does, each man and woman is living a pulsing life and struggling in the days of the birth of a great, industrious nation; those days when America was yet discovering its potential, the railroad was slowly bringing civilization to the last fighters against it, and instead of kings and business magnates the world order would soon have the voice for every man. Ennio Morricone once again gives the life its breath: his music defies definition; probably the only thing that can be said it suits the film and its epic story to the hilt, and sweeps up every emotion in human breast in its wake. Constructed from several references to Westerns already made, the film turns out to be a greater whole than the sum of its parts: not least because of a stunning casting coup.

Henry Fonda, who you could never dream of with any kind of negative shade, plays the villain of the film with nothing in the name of a white shade attached to him. He looks ruthless, and not a step ahead of the game. He simply fits the murderer with icy blue eyes, who loves to kill, to maim, to rape, to finish spirits. The nemesis is Charles Bronson, the icy character who refuses to even once take advantage of the woman he protects during the course of his revenge, even if the woman herself so desires. He is also the nemesis of the Man with No Name of the Dollars trilogy, a man who has again no name except that given by the bandit Cheyenne, "Harmonica," but who does not indulge in bloody meaningless duels all over the desert to vanish into dust, but is only after one man, and whatever else it entails. An important difference with Lee Van Cleef's character in For a Few Dollars More is that Bronson, caring only for revenge, remains a good man, helping anyone else he can and remaining grateful to people who help him; while Cleef, again after only revenge, has become ruthless to the whole world after his personal experience. This is the same reason that while For a Few Dollars More relies primarily on the strength of its climax besides the focus on desolate American landscapes, Once Upon a Time in the West achieves greater heights through its redemptive theme, and faith in human goodness. Faith that lasts in spite of a land and times where blood was much more easier to get than water.

A masterpiece from Leone, it was not much surprising that the film was a flop in the United States: it's one long reality, with a music to elevate and almost a documented bit of history to make the things hard to understand for teenyboppers.