Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [1970] – A Italian Political Satire of the Highest Order

Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is a grotesque, political satire that seems to be cut from the same cloth of Kafka’s parable. Our essential notion of law is based on the general principle of equality and non-discrimination. But what if ‘law’ is just another institution which castigates humanity and is driven by norms and rules closely linked to fascist ideology? Law as an iron fist institution will only uphold hegemony and pat on the back of a rigidly structured ideology. In such a scenario, the ones with a power to (legally) judge will always be placed out of the bureaucratically enforced rules and norms. The powerful figures of bureaucracy become the noble class, enjoying their exclusive access to law to perpetually repress the common citizens.   

Petri’s incendiary political drama, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is based on this particular idea that some citizens are above suspicion. It’s just like the famous quote in Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more than equal.” The film, nevertheless, opens like a conventional crime genre film. Adorned by Ennio Morricon’s flamboyant musical score, in the opening frames we see a man discreetly entering his mistress’ Roman apartment. He kills her with a disposable razor during sex. But uncharacteristically, the killer starts leaving ample clues to implicate him in the crime. He leaves finger and foot-prints all over the crime scene. He leaves a large sum of money for the investigators to strike off robbery as a motive. Furthermore, he leaves a loose thread of his lavender silk-tie in one of the murdered woman’s sharp nails.

Before leaving the crime scene, the man makes an anonymous call to the homicide department. Finally, while leaving the apartment building, he walks out in the presence of a young man, a ploy to secure a witness. Later in the narrative, a homicide detective tells his department chief, “The killer must be an idiot”. The chief agrees, “Yes, an idiot”. But the detective doesn’t know that his chief (Gian Maria Volonte) is that killer. Of course, the unnamed sociopathic chief has killed his lover, Augusta Terzi (Florinda Bolkan) to absolutely prove his hypothesis that he is ‘above suspicion’. The narrative brilliantly and viciously chronicles the chief’s power trip, starting from his return to the crime scene, now as an investigator, and he once again touches everything in the apartment.

Elio Petri often cuts to flash-backs, recounting his days with Augusta. Augusta Terzi is clearly fascinated by the power the chief of homicide department withholds. His affair with Augusta gradually leads to erotic games based on staging of murder scenarios. This explains the film’s opening exchange between Augusta and the chief: “How are you going to kill me this time?”, she teasingly asks, to which the man replies, “I’m going to slash your throat” and then embraces her. The fetish for staging and photographing the homicide scenarios reflects the protagonist’s infantilism and psychosexual conflict, which he effortlessly masks in the public by being a traditional patriarchal figure to the lawmen, relentlessly exuding macho attitudes.

In fact, apart from wickedly testing the boundaries of his power, the chief kills Augusta because her fascination with his power gradually wanes, and she expresses contempt over his sexual inadequacy and arrested sexual development. He thinks that by teasing his sexual shortcomings, she has indirectly derided his authority. Hence that becomes the hidden motive, which becomes clear as the protagonist causes more chaos. On a broad scale, Petri uses the chief’s pre-occupation with power to examine how the system of law deems which citizens are ‘above suspicion’ and which citizens are the ‘natural suspects’. After striking out Augusta’s husband’s involvement in the murder, the police considers her upstairs neighbor, Antonio Pace (Sergio Tramonti), a young anarchist, the same man who had ‘accidentally’ seen the inspector chief leaving the crime scene.

 Nevertheless, the chief doesn’t want an innocent person to take his place. As he argues to himself, “if you send an innocent man to prison in your place, then the fact that you're above suspicion has not been proven.”  So, he wants the officials above and below him (in the power ladder) to know he is the culprit and yet be absolved of his crime (because he’s ‘above suspicion’). Director Petri wants to showcase that in an authoritarian power structure, the ones who are legally deemed as ‘guilty’ has nothing to do with committing a crime, but they are unlucky to fall under the parameters (grounded in social status, ideology, and race) of guilt.

This is splendidly emphasized in a scene the inspector chief delivers a thunderous monologue, addressed to his colleagues, increasingly blurring the lines between criminal activities and democratic expression of dissent. He equates a bank robbery with subversives involved in strikes and sit-ins: “They both have the same objective. They just use different methods. Their objective is to overthrow the current social order.” This insightful trip into the mind of a power-wielding fascist ends on a thoughtful note. He proclaims: “Let others take up the task of healing and educating. Our duty is to repress them! Repression is our vaccine! Repression is civilization!”

Although Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion opens as a traditional crime film, it is much more than a narrative about a powerful man getting away with murder. It was both a timely as well as timeless exploration of how authoritarian power works and thinks. In the film’s beginning, the unnamed chief of homicide department is promoted as the chief of political intelligence. Augusta Terzi’s murder happens on his last day in homicide. Political Section is ostensibly engaged in a bigger operation, wiretapping thousands of alleged ‘subversives’, ‘anarchists’, and ‘leftists’. While walking through a long corridor of files (collected through eavesdropping and wiretapping) and entering into a room consisting of a wall-length computer (that instantly searches for the files on subversives), the chief’s lust for power reaches a crescendo (he gleefully shouts, “America has arrived!”).

Elio Petri and his co-writer Ugo Pirro’s acerbic portrait of corruption and fascism were considered timely because it perfectly reflected the actual political situation in Italy in the late 1960s. In the Senses ofCinema article (by Gino Moliterno), it is mentioned that when Petri privately screened the film for his contemporaries Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola, though they were enthusiastic about the film, they also agreed to the possibility that Petri is going to end up in prison. In the wonderful Criterion essay (by Evan Calder Williams), I learnt how Petri throughout his short career (he made only 12 films and prematurely died of cancer at the age of 53), was reprimanded by both the studios and far-left critics (one side feeling Petri is too political, whereas the other side lambasting him for not being deeply political).

Yet despite the widespread political unrest of the time and the vitriolic critique from the far-left, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion was the single biggest successful film in Petri’s career, reaping both awards and blockbuster status. The film won two awards at Cannes (Jury Prize and International Critics’ Prize), and eventually got the Best Foreign Academy Award (while it was also nominated for ‘Best Original Screenplay’).

Alongside Investigation and the two films Petri made immediately after it – The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) and Property Is No Longer a Theft – they came to be collectively known as ‘Trilogy of Neurosis’. The inspector chief at one point in the narrative states, “It’s a disease I probably contracted from my prolonged use of power. It’s an occupational disease.” As the Sense of Cinema article emphasizes, if 'Investigation' “had been an exploration of the neurosis of power, The Working Class Goes to Heaven was meant to explore the neurosis of work, while Property is No Longer a Theft (1973) caustically satirized the desire for property and money as pathological.”

Like any stories dealing with infallibility of law and bureaucracy, 'Investigation' is riddled with Kafkaesque strains. In fact, Petri ends the film with Kafka’s quote (from his 1915 novel ‘Before the Law’): “Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgment.” Just like what Kafka does with his pointed tales, Petri makes a critique of power and reveals the obscure mechanisms (largely invisible to the common populace) essential to keep rolling the wheels of hegemony. Eventually, apart from Petri’s clear-eyed direction, Investigation’s success and impact is multiplied due to Volonte’s emblematic central performance.  The perverse delight with which he flaunts his culpability and his earsplitting speeches perfectly realizes a fascistic creature.

Overall, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (115 minutes) is a grim allegory on the nature of unchecked power and authority that isn’t far removed from the political realities of the present. Elio Petri employs absurdist, satirical narrative tone to make us face the hard truths about the 'true' status of law that’s both unsettling as well as thought-provoking. 

Trailer

Lonely Are the Brave [1962] – A Free-Spirited Cowboy Thrust into the Modern Age

The bonafide Hollywood Superstar Kirk Douglas was best known for playing discomfited small-town reporter Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder’s Ace In the Hole, a humane commanding officer in Kubrick’s Path of Glory (1957), the rebellious slave in Spartacus (1960), a reprobate movie producer Jonathan Shields in Vincent Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), the revered painter Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956). He also played excellent roles in Out of the Past (1947), Champion (1949), Gunfight at O.K. Corral (1957), Seven Days in May (1964), Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), etc. But Mr. Kirk Douglas himself considers playing John W. Burns (a lone cowboy smothered by disorienting modern times) in David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962) as his most favorite moment in the long career. 

Dubbed by British film-maker Alex Cox as ‘leftist American Western’, the film was based on Edward Abbey’s 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy. The novel was adapted into script by Douglas’ friend and the most famous among Hollywood’s blacklisted professionals Mr. Dalton Trumbo. Although Trumbo started working on the script by 1958, two other Kirk Douglas star vehicles – Spartacus & Robert Aldrich’s The Last Sunset (1961) – released before it. By the time Lonely Are the Brave released into theaters, the blacklist was lifted (although it took few more years to reinstate the Oscars Trumbo won for script writing which he wrote under pseudonyms), but unfortunately the movie wasn’t a commercial hit. Despite writing in an era of despair, Trumbo didn’t use the material to preach. He writes a simple yet powerful character study of a tragic Western hero, where the actions speak for itself. 

Director David Miller didn’t have a distinguished film-making career. Except for the noir thriller Sudden Fear (1952) starring Joan Crawford, Mr. Miller’s projects were mediocre at its best (after Lonely are the Brave, Miller once again worked with Trumbo for the reasonably good conspiracy thriller Executive Action). However, David Miller’s exploration of extremely polarizing American society and disarrayed system is full of subtle visual cues which we don’t often see in studio-backed Western films. Trumbo’s meticulous, non-didactic script touches on themes of individual freedom, illegal immigrants, systemic crackdowns, escalating militarization (themes which are more relevant in contemporary America).  The film opens with a spectacular scene: a cowboy breaking his mischievous and clumsy horse Whiskey on the open range. The atmosphere and the playful character is something we have seen in hundreds of Westerns. But when the cowboy lifts his hat to look up he sees jet smoke in the sky. Suddenly we are bestowed with the fact that the tale isn’t set in mid or late 19^th century, but at the present (early 1960s).

The cowboy named John W. Burns (Jack for short) rides through New Mexico, cutting the barbed wires established by private corporations, not because he is a proletarian who condemns private ownership, but simply because he is a genuine free-spirited soul. There’s a beautiful shot when Burns and Whiskey ride into town, crossing the very busy road. As he struggles with his horse in the middle of the road with cars & trucks blasting through, the predicament of the cowboy in modern reality becomes plainly visible. Burns rides to his best pal Paul’s (Michael Kane) house where he learns from his beloved wife, Jerry (Gena Rowlands) that he is in jail. Paul is imprisoned at the local prison for providing sanctuary to illegal Mexican immigrants. Burns decides to help his friend before he is moved to upstate prison. He deliberately gets himself in a fight at local bar and that too with a bullying one-armed war veteran.

Later at the police station, when the officer turns him loose since the prisons are full, Burns delivers a vigorous blow on the lawmen. With an amplified charge-sheet that will at least get him a year, Burns finally meets Paul in the cell in order to tell his plans of breaking themselves out. However, Paul denies the offer as he doesn’t want to bring more misery on himself and his family. He doesn’t want a life on the run. It is evident that despite an undeniably charming posture, Burns is deeply averse or even afraid to modern rules and the enclosed spaces. After failing to persuade Paul, he decides to breaks out on his own. He takes Whiskey across the vast, open wilderness. A disdainful, annoyed local sheriff named Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) leads the police pursuit. The odds are clearly stacked against Burns’ mad dash to Mexico, since military men volunteer themselves to track down the cowboy in helicopter (the general calls it a practice). We hope that the cowboy dodges his pursuers, metaphorically rising his middle finger to the stern system.

There are plenty of fascinating touches in Trumbo’s character sketches. The relationship between Burns and Jerry is at once both enigmatic and deeply emotional. They both have been friends from childhood and it’s evident that Jerry is in love with Burns, but Trumbo’s writing doesn’t denigrate their connectedness or romanticizes it. Although Trumbo’s characters involve themselves in acts against the system, he doesn’t charge it up with overbearing ideology. Paul’s act of human decency, Jerry’s decision to commit herself to son Seth and husband, Paul and Burns’ non-conformity stand against government thugs could be understood and related without scrutinizing it through a political lens. 

Director David Miller does a commendable job in realizing Trumbo & Abbey’s vision of inhumane, apathetic modern world. Flawlessly photographed by Philip Lathrop, each expertly staged scene brims with naturalism. The barroom fight and shots of Burns gliding up the mountain with rocks tumbling down creates truly menacing atmosphere. The best scenes in the film are when Burns tries to break in Whiskey in order to help him escape. On such occasions, the disobedient Whiskey stands-in as representation of cowboy’s existential crisis. He repeatedly tries to hold onto its rein, the struggle reflects his broad struggle with the external factors to hold onto his cherished vision of freedom.

 It’s understandable why Kirk Douglas loved playing this flawed yet fascinating cowboy. There’s a sense of calm or lack of forcefulness in his performance. There’s no extra glorification added to celebrate Burns’ act of self-preservation. Douglas eventually lets Burns be the confused guy and the one detached from reality without trying to justify himself verbally. The supporting cast including Gena Rowlands and Walter Matthau are also nothing short of excellent. Matthau’s splendid sardonic humor dispels the otherwise gloomy chase. Nevertheless, the film ends with one of saddest and most memorable shots. The dazed look of the cowboy, the empathetic gazes of passersby, the blaring horse writhing in pain, and the relentless downpour; ‘will humanity ever triumph over the inflexible, conformity-seeking world?’ the question haunts our mind as we look at these most brilliant visual compositions. 

Lonely Are the Brave (108 minutes) is a singular and achingly sad Western drama about a fiercely independent cowboy fleeing away from the clampdowns of modern industrialized society. 

Trailer

City Zero [1988] – An Uncanny Absurdist Discourse on the Soviet Reality

Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to power in 1985 as the General Secretary of the Communist Party led to the policy of Perestroika, which was an attempt to revitalize Soviet Union economy. Another Gorbachev policy is that of Glasnost, which sought reforms like governmental transparency and freedom of speech. Nevertheless, the policies didn’t rectify the stagnation in economy or decentralize the power, leading to the unforeseen collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now historians perceive the Brezhnev’s rule (1964-82) as the Era of Stagnation, while perestroika and glasnost period supposed to have seen through the lies and illusions of social stability and economic progress broadcasted by the Soviet high command. The social and political thought of those years (mid to late 1980s) is presented through a fantastical and comically absurd scenario in Karen Shakhnazarov’s City Zero (‘Gorod Zero aka ‘Zerograd’, 1988).

City Zero opens at one hazy, beautiful predawn morning in a deserted railway station with a lone man getting off the train. The man is an engineer from Moscow named Aleksei Varakin (Leonid Filatov). The provincial backwater town is unnamed and Varakin takes up a taxi to the hotel. The gloomy, empty spaces foreshadow the succession of unusual events and the subsequent entrapment of Varakin. As our middle-aged protagonist pays visit to the town’s air-conditioner manufacturing industry to negotiate regarding panel design with the factory director, he comes across a young secretary sitting naked before the typewriter. The woman’s nakedness isn’t noticed by anyone but Varakin. The factory director’s (Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) behavior is also strange as he calls for his chief engineer who has been dead for eight months. Moreover, the meeting ends on an unproductive note. Varakin decides to take the evening train back to Moscow, and visits a restaurant for lunch in which he is the lone diner.

Things get increasingly weird as the waiter brings a cake for dessert which Varakin didn’t order. The cake is the mirror image of Varakin’s head. Suddenly a musical troupe starts playing and the waiter slices up the cake to offer it to his only customer. Varakin refuses to eat and pays off the bill. The waiter warns if he doesn’t eat the cake, the chef might shoot himself. Varakin doesn’t pay attention to this bizarre warning and makes to the door when he hears a gunshot. The chef seems to have shot himself. Varakin is summoned by the police. From then on our hapless hero is caught under the illogical Kafkaesque social system of the place which demands Varakin to never leave the place.

The narrative’s series of bewildering segments includes a jaunt through an underground makeshift museum (that was once a coal mine) of the town’s idealized past. From Troy, Attila the Hun to Gulag and young Stalin, the museum curator highlights (in a deadpan manner) the whole span of Soviet history that's somehow absurdly rewritten to strongly link it to the town. The museum also pays tribute to rock-and-roll, displaying the figures of the first couple in town, who were bold enough to dance to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (the fates of those two, of course, turned bleak after this incident) during the 1957 youth festival. Furthermore, the museum and later the writer Chugunov (Oleg Basilashvili), head of local writers’ organization, informs Vakarin of an ongoing political feud between members of the Stalinist past and others trying to catch up with the modernity as promised by Western nations. Naturally, the feud only adds to Varakin’s confusion (obviously a symbolic figure representing the Soviet public) and eventually we once again see him alone, adrift in an oar-less boat on a fog-bound river.  

Writer/director Karen Shakhnazarov and his co-writer Aleksandr Borodyanskiy view the shockingly absurd atmosphere as the consequence of constant upheavals in Soviet society. Influenced by ‘Gogolian’ humor and ‘Kafkaesque’ existential despair, director Shakhnazarov vibrantly stages each of Vakarin’s inexplicable troubles without ever depleting the comic energy in the narrative. The writing repeatedly hints at an objective reality, full of pretense and deception. For instance, the subjective perspective of Varakin is often at odds with the collective objectivity: only he is confounded by the naked secretary or the cake that resembles his face or the re-engineered past dispersed throughout the museum. This unsettling as well as preposterous picture of the community certainly offers a definitive comment on Soviet political and cultural upheaval.

Furthermore, the premise offers an exploration of a past and present that’s emptied out of substance or meaning. Each of the enactments, bathed under flashlights and a overstated carnival score, plus the writer’s recollection of the town’s alleged historical significance deems to propagate a sense of deification (from Prince Dmitry Donskoy to rock ‘n’ roll) with zero meaning. If the town’s first rock ‘n’ roll performance (in 1957) carried a message of revolt, the jubilant mood in the present-time rock ‘n’ roll club (of 1980s) looks like a vacuous affair. The beautiful, young woman who danced with Nikolayev (seen in an energetic flashback sequence) visits Varakin at his hotel room, now a heavy woman with coarse features and literally robbed off her voice. She says (her son reads what she writes) Nikolayev has kept the ideals alive. But under the weight of political tyranny and disoriented truths, the ‘ideals’ seems to have worn out.

From a directorial perspective too, Karen Shakhnazarov amplifies the satirical nature of the scenarios (I am looking forward to repeat viewings to unearth many of the aesthetic treatments). Take the scene when Varakin is visited by various members of the town, each entering the room under different pretexts. They drink some beer, share dumplings, and sing a melody. The foundational notions of Soviet socialism comes alive for a brief time, before they all leave the room to pursue after a dubious historical story related to Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy and an ancient oak tree. The visuals in the very last scene also vibrate with meaning: we see the museum curator gradually switches off the lights adoring the sugary re-enactments, leaving it to darkness (sums up what has to be done with this manufactured falsities) while Varakin drifts off into the mist (the absence of oar in the boat may underlines the atmosphere of hopelessness or uncertainty).

Overall, City Zero (103 minutes) is an engrossing sociopolitical allegory on the waning days of Soviet Union.  

Trailer

I Live in Fear [1955] – Akira Kurosawa’s Hauntingly Poetic Drama

Akira Kurosawa’s grim feature I Live in Fear (‘Ikimono no kiroku’, 1955) was the first of the master film-maker's work to comment on the paranoia and fear of nuclear age (the other were ‘Dreams’ & ‘Rhapsody in August’). Made immediately after the completion of Seven Samurai, I Live in Fear was a notable commercial failure for the director. Nevertheless, the film is highly interesting for the way Mr. Kurosawa tackles the politically-minded subject in post-World War II Japan. Though a family melodrama than a piercing study of psychic and social toll of Japan’s nuclear attacks, I Live in Fear is watchable for the master’s astounding visual compositions and Toshiro Mifune’s grandstanding performance as the 70-year-old patriarch (the then 35-year-old actor in an excellent elderly man make-up).

America’s occupation of Japan ended by the year 1952 and a year after that the Korean War commenced. It was labeled as ‘proxy war’ conducted by the two nuclear super powers. By 1954, US started conducting Hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that the Japan’s consumption of sea food drastically came down (owing to fear of contamination). With the new H-bombs more powerful than the ones annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fear for impendingnuclear attacks was very real. Japanese cinema expressed this fear in a metaphorical and entertaining manner in its 1954 block-buster Godzilla (a monster created out of nuclear testing and radiation). ‘I Live in Fear’, on the other hand, isn’t simply an expression of the fear, pertaining to nuclear age, but also tries to showcase the disintegration of one's inner-self due to the suppression of that fear.

The opening credits capture the thriving urban modernity of Tokyo with shots of city’s populace moving through the junctions & streets in a frenzied manner. The story revolves around Kiichi Nakajima (Toshiro Mifune), a wealthy ageing patriarch who is brought to court by his own family to declare him ‘legally incompetent’. Nakajima runs a foundry company, staffed by faithful workers, and has full control over the assets. Lately, he has grown anxious of the H-bomb and the possibility of atomic holocaust. Enveloped by this mortal terror, Nakajima plans to move his entire family – including two mistresses and their offsprings – to Brazil where he believes they would be safe from the radioactive fallout. Nakajima decides to trade his family business with a Japanese businessman in Brazil for a farm. The old man’s legitimate children, especially the two adult sons, fearing that they would be robbed off their inheritance convince the mother to file a petition in court. When the family court rules against Nakajima, he files an appeal and takes drastic actions to supposedly save his offsprings.

At certain occasions, Akira Kurosawa studies this tale of madness and fear from the perspective of Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura), a dentist who is one of the members of special counsel appointed by the family court. He and two other men hear Nakajima’s case. Although the ruling declares the patriarch legally incompetent, Dr. Harada is very sympathetic to the old man’s despair and convictions. The doctor feels so guilty about delivering the verdict that he starts reading a book on radioactive fallout. Shimura’s everyman character clearly serves as a window for audience’s entry into the picture (like us Harada is unable to judge Nakajima for his irrational behavior). Moreover, by maintaining a genial on-screen presence, Shimura balances the histronics of Mifune’s acting. Eventually, Dr. Harada’s objective observation serves an important role in perceiving the sour relationship dynamics within the Nakajima family without resorting to excessive melodrama.

Even a lesser work from Akira Kurosawa boasts a kind of unique, understated visual sense that can’t be found in the alleged masterpieces of contemporary film-makers. In I Live in Fear, Kurosawa constructs a world where people have learned to abide by or disregard the existential fear, conjured by the external threats. In one marvelously staged scene, Nakajima vists his mistress and hears the shrieking sound of fighter plane jets (American jet planes patrolled the air over Tokyo even after 1952). Then there’s a flash in the sky. He immediately crouches on the floor, trying to protect his infant son. The young mistress, while calmly doing her chores at the kitchen, watches the old man’s actions with curiosity. It turns out that the flash is just lightning, not the blinding light of a mushroom cloud.   

Kurosawa’s cinematic eye allows Nakajima’s descent into madness do all the talking. There’s something Shakespearean in the way Kurosawa imparts the particulars of Nakajima’s despair into the story, which precedes the legendary director’s later adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Throne of Blood in 1957) and King Lear (Ran in 1985). I have found the film’s final scenes set in insane asylum to be utterly unforgettable. The shot of stairway in the asylum is particularly brilliant (the meaning of this shot was perfectly explained by this essay by Mr. Fred Kaplan).

The decision to cast Toshiro Mifune in the role of elderly man might have raised certain concerns. But Mifune was totally convincing as Nakajima, whose stylized performance is in fact oe of the positive aspect of the film. As always the actor brings a great physicality to the character. His transformation of controlled patriarch holding the family to the frailest of human being is painfully distressing to watch (Mifune is especially great in the moment his character apologizes to the loyal workers).

‘I Live in Fear’ isn’t definitely an intensely subjective examination of a paranoid personality, unlike Jeff Nichols’ devastating Take Shelter (2011) or William Friedkin’s shockingly visceral Bug (2006). What Kurosawa grapples with is the idea of insanity and irrational behavior in the nuclear-age. Even though the fear of nuclear holocaust is a distant knowledge for us, we could attune to the film’s central message: how an unrelenting climate of fear ruins human existence.    

Still Life [2013] – A Slightly Mawkish yet Greatly Affecting Portrait of Loneliness and Disconnection

Uberto Pasolini’s contemplative drama on loneliness and alienation, Still Life (2013) opens with the shot of a cemetery, followed by a funeral ceremony attended by a single mourner that includes a refined eulogy, read by the priest. Over the next few somberly framed vignettes, we see the same parochial and calm man, dressed in the same greyed, drab suit, solitarily attending different funerals. But Still Life (2013) isn’t a movie about funeral and death. It’s a gentle drama about finding life. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?” says the angel in Frank Capra’s classic melodrama It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Writer/director Pasolini takes a largely meditative approach to examine the empty hollow feeling following a loss, and in turn cherishes life’s value, irrespective of the human foibles and mistakes.

Uberto Pasolini, an investment banker and economist, embarked into cinema by taking up the role of producer in the highly acclaimed British drama The Full Monty (1997). He made his directorial debut with sports comedy Machan (2008), which was about Singhalese handball players, invited to a tournament in Bavaria, Germany. Although less-seen, the film perceived the themes of illegal immigration and poverty with sensitivity and lucidity, rarely found in Hollywood movies (made on the same subject). 

Pasolini is the grand nephew of legendary Italian film-maker Luchino Visconti, whose masterpieces The Earth Trembles (1948) and Rocco and his Brothers (1960) centered on immigration. For his second film, Pasolini has chosen the theme of isolation, something that broadly resonates with the western society. Pasolini in an interview (to Cineuropa) states the idea for a film came from the visual of a solitary burial and a London newspaper interview of a Westminster funeral officer. Over the next few months, Pasolini met other funeral officers and gradually molded the character of John May.

Eddie Marsan is the perfect choice for the lead role. He is known for playing violent, demented individuals, the ones that are defined as character roles. Although he has worked with top-notch directors like Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Mike Leigh, Still Life marks his rare protagonist role. Blessed with a deep, empathetic set of eyes and a dignified smile, Eddie Marsan easily erases our memory of seeing him as the short, crazy guy and makes us embraces this meticulous and brilliant embodiment of John May. Mr. May is a London council officer working for ‘Client Services Department’. His job is to seek out next of kin/friends of the people who have died alone in the London borough of Kennington. 

Most of these deceased people were found by caretakers, neighbors or landlords after complaints of ‘smell’. It would be lot less burden for the council worker to make a rough search and move the status of case to ‘closed’. But Mr. May is a gentle and thorough guy. He doesn’t go over his cases fast, but cares a lot about providing a good funeral. He tries his best to get the living to pay their respects and writes elegant eulogies with carefully chosen words, by going through the deceased’s photo albums and personal mementos. Even if no one cares to attend to the funeral, as is usually the case, Mr. May will.

Mr. May has done this scrupulously for 22 years and one day his thick-skinned boss Pratchett (Andrew Buchan) announces downsizing. May is allowed to close the case at hand, before saying goodbye to his job. His last case is of William Stokes – an old alcoholic who was found weeks after his death. May goes throug the man’s old photographs and finds semblance of joyful past life; a handful of smiling photos of a little girl. He sets out to track down the man’s relatives or the presumed daughter. This task takes him on a journey and infuses glistening colors to John May’s still life. As he searches for Stokes’ past connections, he finds human connection for himself.

Pasolini’s visualization of May’s quotidian life resembles the understated yet extraordinarily captivating works of Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki. Although Pasolini’s themes concerns much with the individual unlike Kaurismaki’s social-realist themes, the rich color designs, elegant compositions, and sly, deadpan humor are close to auteur’s touches of still-life. Much of the brilliant shots in the film are realized as the director subtly finds traces of life in the grim, isolated corners. The creases in a pillow where a head recently rested, photograph of a cat, a finger imprint in a tub of moisturiser are all simple objects, but the weight with which the camera perceives these objects adds poignance and breathes life into the still frames. Marsan and Pasolini have done a commendable job in creating the character of John May with extreme care and painstaking details. 

John’s strive for perfection is often seen through his little gestures: the manner he symmetrically arranges the objects in his work desk  or the way he takes a snack in a commuter train, before gathering the scattered crumbs and depositing them into his empty coffee cup. Even though Pasolini withhelds backstory for Mr. May, it is to Marsan’s credit that we care much about his saintly character, and deeply feel his troubles and disappointments. The narrative does become a too measured and manipulative during its final act. The unabashedly sentimental ending and unsubtle spelling-out of the movie’s moral seems totally out of step with its sedate, reflective style. Despite this mis-step, the lyrical, humanistic tone of the narrative stays intact.

Death is an ultimatum that can’t be revised or rejected. We can’t stop any one from dying, but that doesn’t mean we should stop caring. Still Life (91 minutes) proffers such very familiar message about finding life even in the finality of death. And, it is channeled with great sensitivity and poignance so as to forge a robust emotional connection with the viewers. 

 Trailer

Garage [2007] – An Emotionally Devastating Drama about a Simple Soul

Sometimes the simple, quieter and thinner films would set out to touch a deep chord within us. Lenny Abrahamson’s soul-crushing Irish film Garage (2007) is one such movie. On the surface, its minimalist narrative deals with the mundane life of a lonely innocuous misfit Josie, a garage attendant in rural Ireland. But through Josie’s solitude, inarticulability, and awkwardness the film offers a piercing portrayal of a mentally challenged individual and how the apathetic rural society, which was itself marginalized or rendered passive by economic depression, tags him with a pariah label. 

Written by Mark O’Halloran, Garage offers a very distressing and contrary view of modern rural life, unlike the old Ealing studio comedies where small-towners band together to win over the hopeless stagnation. The crumbling, shabby man-made structures and the bored, passive inhabitants remain as an unerasable splotch amidst the vast, breathtaking landscape. The narrative may not provide a profound commentary on the poverty and class in rural Ireland, but it perfectly works as a subtle character study, thoroughly invested in taking us through aspects of human experience we may not have given much thought or simply ignored.

Josie’s plight deeply resonates with us because we may have come across a Josie in our life or we may share some of his traits to fully understand what it means to be treated as an outcast. And, popular Irish comedian Pat Shortt’s performance in the lead role is pitch-perfect. Josie’s life is defined by uncomplicated series of chores. He works at a rundown filing station near a village whose customers are mostly the local ones who either laughs with him or laughs at him. In the initial scenes, Josie’s unremarkable life is showcased with tinge of absurd humor. 

It may give off feeling that it’s a one-note joke about a mentally challenged guy. But the great synergy between writer Halloran and director Abrahamson provides a much deeply textured character that we aren’t able to categorize with mere societal labels. Josie lives in a dingy room behind the station and his daily wages pays for the food and few quids to have cans of beer at the pub. Men in the pub bully him or snigger behind his back, but Josie brushes it off with an awkward laugh. Afflicted by pains in the hip, Josie walks in a distinct manner and he often goes for a walk around the beautiful countryside in the morning. He befriends a horse by giving it few apples. He fancies a woman at local grocery store, Carmel (Anne-Marie Duff) who rebuffs him with ferocity.

Things change when Josie’s boss (John Keogh) employs a 15 year old teenager David (Conor Ryan). Josie is visibly happy to train David to cover the menial tasks of car valet business. David is a quiet, bored guy who has very low expectations about his job and life in the town. His only best friend now seems to focus his attention on his new girlfriend. But David soon warms up to Josie’s genuine and friendly nature. They share a beer after a day of work and for the first time in his life, Josie feels he’s got some real companionship. Despite having the will, innocence and hope the trouble is that life doesn’t go our own way. Ironically, the character’s social isolation and intelligence (or lack thereof) which projected him as harmless endangers or threatens to further degrade his societal position after an 'incident' [‘The town looks after its own’, a truly ironic proclamation]. It all leads to a minimalist, wordless yet a subtly heart-breaking ending.

Garage might be chronicling the emptiness of life in a marginalized society, but Abrahamson’s visuals are rich in detail and loaded with meaning. He observes the prosaic life with an authenticity and expressiveness that it gradually immerses us in the squalid atmosphere. The other interesting element of Abrahamson’s direction is conveying deep emotions through what’s left unsaid or not well-articulated. In fact, the dialogues in Garage aren’t loaded with what we’d like to call as ‘message’. The writer and director are much fascinated in zeroing-in on emotions that couldn’t be verbalized. This choice eschews any of the conventional dramatic elements in the narrative. 

Although Josie’s growing camaraderie with David provides room to turn it into comedy of misfits, both Halloran and Abrahamson earnestly focus on the quietude between them (indeed, silence speaks volumes). One particularly devastating scene towards the end when Josie makes tea for his boss Mr. Gallagher impeccably conveys woeful emotions through things not articulated. We know why Gallagher is there and Josie knows too. But on-screen, we only see Josie fretting over a tea in order to mask the distress deep under the surface. The director also cuts at moments that are totally unanticipated. Rather than encountering significant moments in the film with explicit dialogue or openly emotive manner, the director discards the shot at quietly intense points which happens to linger long in our memory (even within dialogue and sentiment-heavy movies like Frank and Room, director Abrahamson maintains this tactic).

The good thing about Halloran’s writing is his balanced portrayal of small town life which isn’t just delineated by its casual cruelty. There’s a deep layer of sadness affixed to the town dwellers that we do feel for their predicament despite the harsh treatment of Josie. Moreover, since the film is really about humanistic observation of Josie’s unremarkable life, Halloran doesn’t burden the narrative to deal with cliched scenarios of the depressed town. Much crucial to the movie’s elegiac tone is the understated performances of a talented cast. Pat and Conor’s friendship very well developed with a dry sense of humor. Pat Shortt flawlessly builds up the character of Josie, right down to the little details of how he walks, speaks and bears himself around others (uttering ‘Now!’ with a clumsy smile). Both Conor and Pat provide glimpses of their characters’ inner life without doing any of the usual ‘acting’. 

Garage (85 minutes) is a darker and realistic portrayal of life at the margins of contemporary rural society. It employs obscurity and silence in a finely-attuned, instinctual manner that it infuses much depth to a seemingly simple story.

Trailer