Short Notes On Some Winners of Golden Palm

Last weekend the Collective Chaos film society had organized a mini-festival of five films which had won Golden Palms at the Cannes Film Festival in previous years. One of them was The Tin Drum, of which I wrote about here.

First, two really boring and rather uninteresting films. Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha was a disappointingly shallow epic story about Samurai warlords in medieval Japan. When a powerful warlord dies in one of his wars, a poor thief, who is his double, is asked to impersonate him. The thief finds it difficult in the beginning and clashes with the "spirit" of the warlord but eventually gets into his new role. Kurosawa attempts to give the narrative some depth by getting into the philosophical questions about what really constitutes human identity and things like that but his efforts in that direction remain essentially half-hearted. And at around three hours, it really tests your patience. Btw, I was surprised to see the names of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in the list of the executive producers of the film. Was this the Hollywood movie Kurosawa trying to make? Perhaps that would explain the shallow spectacle part.

Another boring film was the (former) Yugoslavian film Underground directed by Emir Kusturica. The film recreates the entire Balkan history, from the second world war to the eventual dissolution of Yugoslavia into small states, using really outlandish fantasy narrative. I had seen the film before and I had no desire to sit through all the childish sequences again. The film does make you feel at the end as if you have seen an entire life time of those bunch of characters but Kusturica is so busy creating those fantastical set-pieces that he neglects actual historical events which underpin the narrative. So after the film you are as clueless about the history of the Balkan states as you were before. There are a few funny moments but they never work as a part of the whole. I ran out in the middle of the film.

Now two interesting, if still boring, films. Lars von Trier plumbs new heights of melodrama and absurdity in his Golden Palm winning Dancer in the Dark. In my opinion this is von Trier's weakest film (of all that I have seen so far). Perhaps the Cannes jury were undoing the damage they did in previous years by awarding genuine masterpieces like Breaking the Waves and Europa second rung prizes. But still I liked the song sequences specially when Bjork croons, "I've seen it all"! At least the deconstruction of the musical genre, although childish and simplistic, was interesting. Anyway the film ends tragically, which redeems many of its shortcomings (at least to me)! That's what persuaded me to sit for the second time for the film :)

The best of the lot was undoubtedly Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry. I was seeing it the second time too and I was just floored by its simplicity. This film manages to raise big metaphysical questions without sounding pretentious for a moment. For more check out this essay on the film.

This weekend it is the set of three Guru Dutt's films. I have seen them all, but never on the big screen. Should be good hopefully.