The White Reindeer

This is supposedly the first Finnish B/W horror film made in 19 52. 

This is what briefly MUBI says:

Drawing from the deep well of beliefs of the semi-nomadic Sámi people, Erik Blomberg’s Finnish folk horror is a snow-encrusted tale of shape-shifting shamanism. Weirdness lurks deep in the desolate landscape of Lapland, where the fight to survive rubs up against the insatiable hunger for love. 

But it’s not a horror movie - it’s a movie which gives you a glimpse of life in Lapland in the 1950's. The first few shots are very similar to a desert, it’s just that instead of sand it’s only ice everywhere. Here the mode of transport is reindeer which is tied to a sledge. Instead of goats and horses or cows they have herds of reindeer which they take to different places so they can find food. Every surface is covered with snow, all houses are made of wood and in those times there were 20 homes in a desert. 

The beauty of movies which are now getting streamed at  your home is to experience the world sitting at the comfort of your home. Movies are your gateway to the past, present and future, the culture of that land and lifestyle. Like the native Indians of the Americas or The Aztecs and even India - the mode of worship is different. It’s all about nature (land - river - sea - animals etc) & spirits. Even in this movie it plays a critical role in changing a housewife to a witch. 

It’s a small film which is shot beautifully and transports you to a place and time which can’t be experienced now. See it on MUBI as part of it’s rediscovered series which has a collection of movies which has been restored from prints which were not in good condition.

It all starts with a photo

Time to Love is a Turkish movie by Metin Erksan which I recently saw on MUBI. The movie was restored in 4K by MUBI and is a movie which is based on a folk tale where a person falls in love with a photograph. Well the end is something which I would not like to reveal.

In the movie, a simple painter falls in love with a photograph but he does not want to fall in love with the person. The girl who is very rich & does not believe in love at first sight falls in love with the man seeing her love and throughout the movie tries to win her love. The reason given by the painter is very insightful: he says “the photograph will always love me because her gaze won’t change but your love will change with time, you may not like my shabby look some day or the fact that I live hand to mouth and exist on contracts”. 

Reflecting on it I realise why we build a platonic / spiritual relationship with authors, directors / painters through the objects created by them. Or, maybe it is the character like Potter or Arya Stark of GOT or Holmes with whom we build that relationship - the insight is the same, they don’t talk back, the acceptance or rejection is in our hand. But in a physical relationship it’s a 2 way street and yes people do change & I am not surprised when someone says “How did I live with him for the last 15 years?”.

This also takes me back 23 years when my marriage proposals started coming in, in the form of photographs and ultimately one of those photo’s led to my marriage - 2 kids. And yes both of us have changed over these years but we have also learnt to live and let live with each other.

Time to love is a B/W gem where apart from the actors the landscapes which is essentially the Princes island across Istanbul, the turbulent sea, lakes, rain play and music play an important role in making this movie seem more like a photo essay where every shot looks like sketched and shot. This was made in 1964 so it’s all real, no effects. This is again one of the movies where you can just switch off the dialogue and see the movie & soundtrack and you can see it endlessly.

Postscript:

Isles of Passion on Notebook | MUBI

The Housemaid

“The Citizen Kane of Korean cinema” - This is what Bong Joon-Ho, now famous for Parasite, had to say for the movie. Kim KI-Young who is the founder of Korean Cinema. Made in 19 60, the movie was restored in 2008 by the Korean Film Archive. 

It’s a fascinating movie which has many parallel themes running in the movie. This is what MUBI has to say:

Gut-wrenching yet spellbinding, The Housemaid eludes any genre. Kim cuts abruptly from the preamble—a husband and wife musing on the nature of infidelity—to the main plot, in which two young factory workers fall for their music-club teacher. When one of them is suspended after passing him a flirtatious note, the other infiltrates his household pretending to want piano lessons, and then hires yet another wayward colleague as the family’s housekeeper.

What follows is a torrid tale of forbidden love, sexual aggression, blackmail, and, ultimately, murder. Ki-young handles this contorted plot with such assured brazenness—mixing social critique with elements of horror and grotesque—that it’s hard not see The Handmaid as a model for all Korean horror made since. Last to last years Palme d’Or winner, Parasite, by Bong Joon-ho, for example, bears great affinity with it. Both films portray a hard-working family whose frustrated economic ambitions turn the whole world upside down. To an extent, Bong’s film is a playful pastiche on the classic story of the unsuspecting family exploited by a social “parasite.”

Kim ironizes South Korea’s consumerism with blunt, at times outrageous wit, as Bong does. And like Bong’s prize-winner, Kim’s masterpiece evinces moral ambivalence: a fallen husband too eager to purge his guilt, a wife whose self-abnegation makes her—depending on how you see her—a martyr or a despot. Kim Deok-jin’s cinematography creates a claustrophobic universe full of spying and of hidden threats.

It gave me goosebumps and reminded me of Hitchcock and his movies. Older movies when VFX was not there and especially the B/W ones a lot depended on dialogue delivery, emotions portrayed by the actors and the overall cinematography of how the screen shapes in front of you. The shadows especially tell its own story. The quarters are cramped and to shoot in that place with cameras and people around must be a big challenge or maybe it was easier - because it’s almost like a theatre. 

In my life too maids were our safety net, we were lucky to have maids who were like an extended family and took care of both my daughters. We helped them economically and my wife would patiently hear their painful stories of husband getting drunk, taking money from her, beating her & children etc. This was 10 years back when mobile was still a luxury for them. But now things are different maids have as younger ones are more ambitious and want to fight for their rights and their place in society. Which is what Kim shows in 1960’s Korea is the new reality of India.

The transgressions shown in this movie are more heard in Mumbai where the rich and famous fall, at least 2 cases are well documented. Hope there are not more. 

Postscript: 

About Kim Ki-Young: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ki-young 

Transience of Memory

As I write this I read a post-it stuck on my soft board. It says ‘Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers it in order to recount it’ & on my shelf is the book ‘The Memory Police’ by Yoko Ogawa. Our memory in many ways determines our current day, our reactions to what we speak & share with friends & family. 

The transience of memory is a central theme of Alain Resnais's french movie ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ of love and horror in Hiroshima.. The movies was made in 1959 14 years after the bombing which was carried out on 6th and 9th August 1945 in Hiroshima & Nagasaki. We are in November 20 22 - 77 years after the bombing nuclear war rhetorics are again in media with multiple conflicts spreading across the world. 

I saw the movie more as a cinema buff and found it not only a poetic & a beautiful love story but a masterclass in cinematography, music, acting and story telling - hitting you with a striking message on the impact of the bombing. What the civilians went thru, for the first 30 mnts it’s almost like a documentary where it shows the effect of Hiroshima but intertwines beautifully  with the voiceover of Emmanuelle as she is talking to her Japanese lover - telling her what she has seen in Hiroshima.

I would love to see it again without reading subtitles - since now I understand the story just to admire the photography. The parallel drawn between the memory of Hiroshima & the love story of Emmanuelle (the lady) is beautifully told. In a way as we see in the concluding scenes the love story equals the place where it takes place i.e. Nevers in France. So, the story is of Nevers and Hiroshima and what happened.

When we love someone or something and it gets taken away - initially the brutality of it hits you so hard that it knocks you off in the movie it makes her mad (almost) but over a long period of time you forget the memory of what happened the actual images or the scene which played out in front of you. At moments, you hate yourself for forgetting this memory. You question yourself - How can I forget the memory of a person who was my life or played an important role in making me what I am. That triggers a rage which sometimes self destructs you or spoils the current relationship. That is the essence of the movie.

While love is a personal memory. Hiroshima is a collective memory like partition in India’s case. Many of us may not be there but even now there are books which put a lens on what happened during partition. A recent book - Remnants of partition talks about objects which people carried back to India and the story behind it. 

Do places have a memory? This thought stuck me when I was in my return journey from Delhi, As I was emptying the divans, and double beds of quilts (i prefer rajai), dolls  with which I played 50 years back, photographs, shirts I had gifted but not worn…objects almost each of them had a story. As the taxi moved from various lanes of Vikaspuri so many memories got triggered from things as mundane as a place where I made my specs or puja shopping or ram leela ground and places from where I used to take the bus for my college. So many trips and so many memories of love and grief which faded away long back but now comes back as the flight takes off from Delhi. I settle down for a movie in my head 

‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ is a slow languid movie alternating between love and grief imitating life. See it and you will feel your story come alive after the credit rolls. 

Postscript:

Read about the movie here: In the below note I liked the fact that the movie was made on a brief

Scores on Screen. The Obvious Necessity for Memory: Music and Memory in "Hiroshima, mon amour" on Notebook | MUBI (it was a seminal movie for those interested google endlessly but mubi and criterion has the best articles) 

Read about the bombing here: It made me realise how history is depicted as a rational and factual note, that’s the way we have read history books. This education or history completely overlooks the human side of it & that is why non of us could relate to it. It was just memory of dates and events.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki