WillOTheWispIt’s been a while since I have watched a film that held me in thrall as much as my first viewing of Gela Babluani’s 13 Tzameti ( 13 13 ). Subsequent viewings have helped extend that state, contrary to the fatigue that usually sets in.
I’ve often wondered whether it is the theme(s) that impel me to chase up a director or the treatment(s), as far as my chain of viewings goes. In some cases, it is, I realise, the latter – Rodriguez, Burton, Ritchie and Tarantino spring to mind immediately. The themes usually follow from variations of the standard Noir, to which I confess an insatiable appetite for. And it is here that I would part ways from the American circus and look towards the east and south. Haneke was a radical eye-opener to what you can do with a minimalist palette. And then it was natural to follow it up with Belinsky, Shane Meadows and a host of relatively unknown independent releases.
I had been watching what has been happening in the Desi Scene fairly carefully over the past six-seven years and I have been finding myself fairly excited at the prospect of more cinema to the order of Anurag Kashyap, Anurag Basu, Sriram Raghavan, Raj Kumar Gupta, Navdeep Singh and Vishal Bharadwaj. This is not the ordinary – ‘different’ junta, but acquire difference from the evidence borne by their work – that here are directors who have each a distinct perspective, at best agnostic and at worst blase, expressed with that kind of confidence which can only stem from deliberate study of the genre(s) and acquisition of craft.
However, there was not yet an experience equivalent to what I mentioned at the preamble. I’d delayed watching Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye for a long while. And then late last year, I saw it. I had no hesitation in asserting to myself that it was the finest Hindi film I had seen so far. I did not gravitate towards his first, it being a gentle farce. I’ve caught about one third of the film about four or five times on cable, always the last third and amused myself, but never impelled to watch it in full.
I was in two minds whether to watch LSD or not, eager though I was to see what could Dibakar Bannerjee do further with themes more than a little hyperstylised by Kashyap in Dev D. And then I was waiting for Raja Sen’s Rediff Review.
Read it. I went and watched the film today. We have a keenly-observant genius amongst us now. Keep Note.
