There was a time when films with a female hero were known as female-centric. Now we’ve moved on to female-eccentric. Not that it is a big leap for the feminist movement. But at least we are getting there.
To describe Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman as a film about time travel (which it is, if you want to be facile) would be as unfair as to describe Devdas as a cautionary tale on alcoholism. Petite Maman is slender (only 72 minutes!) and tender film with such a detailed eye for characterisation and craft that within its conscripted time scheme it will flood your senses with a sense of mollifying gratitude.
It is the story of a beautiful 8-year old girl Nelly and her mother (Nina Meurisse). Both grieve for the same loss: Nelly’s grandmother who has just died in an old folks’ hope where Little Nelly walks with her portable memories. Nelly and her mom move to their grandmother’s very Hansel-Gretelish cottage in the forest.
As the two ladies settle down to a brief bonding of shared mourning before the mother departs unannounced, we realise, with a sense of surprise, that there is a man too in the house. Nelly’s father (played by Stéphane Varupenne) emerges from the shadows only after Nelly’s mom leaves suddenly. No, he is not a bad father. But a bit befuddled by the two women in his life.
This foreshadowing of feminine characters is typical of the cinema of Céline Sciamma.In her scheme of things the ladies always come first; whether it was her debut film Water Lilies in 2007, followed by Tomboy in 2011, Girlhood in 2014 and that luscious lyrical lesbian lament Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, the men emerge from the shadows only if the women want them to.
Petite Maman is Céline Sciamma’s gentlest fairytale-like film. It envelopes us in an aura of love and nostalgia as the five characters converge in the quietest of recollections. Although it has its 8-year protagonist travelling back in time to meet her mother when the mother was 8 years old (going on nine, and there is very fine cake-cutting episode that will make your head swim with its tender evocations of feelings long forgotten) it gives us no clue as to how this miracle happens. The very existence of this film proves that they do.
Let me say right away that this delicate work of wispy beauty wouldn’t have worked without the two 8-year old girls who play Nelly and her mother-as-a-child Marion. They are played by real-life twins Josephine (who plays Nelly) and Gabrielle (who plays Marion).
Dare I say, the director probably thought of the idea for this unimaginable girl-bonding drama, only after she found these two wonderful girls, both natural-born actresses who at 8 display inborn wisdom that imbues the film with emotional and spiritual shades that do not exist in the manmade book of colours.
Josephine has a larger role to play—she is the girl who willy nilly becomes the time traveller a journey process that takes her from her grandmother’s death to her mother’s childhood.
It’s a breathtaking achievement done with an economy and precision of expression that we find in the rarest of rare movies on transcending the inbuilt constraints of family ties. Just to see the two girls, one her daughter and the other her mother in the future, is to be witness to a process of sublime soul-searching.
Petite Maman is soulful and sublime, timebound and timeless at the same time. In the vision of cinematographer Claire Mathon, every frame looks like a dream aching to find a place in the real world. Céline Sciamma and Claire Mathon have collaborated earler on Portait Of A Lady On Fire. Petite Maman is prettier, deeper and more powerful in voicing the attitudinal chasm that separates three generations of women and yet unifies them in a mercurial embrace of destiny.
Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World is not among the best films on the planet. But it comes close. It is a gem of a film sparkling with inner wisdom and an outward glow that captures the flow of life in welters of recognisable emotions.
If you are at all familiar with the films of the Norwegian director Joachim Trier you would recognise certain uncommon elements common to his vision. The light in which he captures a life in transition as it goes with the flow is not only vivid and vigorous but it also perfectly manifests the emotional turbulence of the protagonist as he/she goes from one stage of self-seeking to another.
Renate Reinsve who won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, made her debut in Trier’s Oslo August 31st in 2011. Playing the titular role in The Worst Person In The World, Renate immediately gravitates into the august company of the best actors in the world. Insanely beautiful, she is also that rare species of actor who doesn’t seem to act at all.
Renate Reinsve plays Julie who is shown in the first chapter (the film is divided into 14 chapters, like a book) flitting from one profession to another, from one relationship to another, thereby immediately establishing herself as an unreliable protagonist.
Unreliable, Julie is to those who come into her life. In a film saturated with a kind of inverted magical realism where the rites of passage unfold in real time but like a dream, Julie struggles to barely make herself stand straight with dignity; the lowest point in her moral history is reached when she tells her devoted, kind, considerate, and, alas more successful than she, lover Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) that she is leaving.
No explanation was offered. There are none. Julie is now with Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) who is blown away by her feyness from the moment they meet.The Julie-Eivind meeting is my favourite chapter in this book of lies, deception and reconciliation: Julie gatecrashes into a party, and meets a charismatic stranger. They talk. They giggle over silly things like smelling one another. They don’t have sex. That comes later.
The Worst Person In The World is a strangely sad yet uplifting film. It doesn’t endorse a lack of commitment in a relationship. But it doesn’t condemn Julie when she leaves the strong and reliable Aksel. But when something happens to Aksel and Julie returns repentant, we hate her for the first time in the film even as we recognise the sad truth about relationships: no matter how intense, they may eventually lose their validity for one or both the individuals in a relationship.
Shot with breathtaking fluidity in and around Oslo, The Worst Person In The World is a multi-layered treat. At the most noticeable level, it showcases Renate Reinsve’s resplendent rhythms as an actor who doesn’t act. But underneath the sheer beauty of talent, there is a not-so-fetching universe of betrayal and heartbreak throbbing in the film’s underbelly.
This is one of those rare films that you won’t find easy to fall in love with. But once you do, you will be enthralled and enraptured for keeps.
There is a magical episode where Julie rushes out to meet Eivind. Time freezes literally on the streets with passersby turned into statues. It is a timeless moment. But also a reminder that those sharp stabs that feel in your heart are love on the warpath.
Neither possessing the delicacy of Petite Maman nor the slicing cynicism of The Worst Person In The World, Bhamakalapam (in Telugu) gives us a heroine who is meddlesome, muddled, infuriating and deeply annoying. The last time I saw a heroine who was such an irksome busybody was Vidya Balan in Tumhari Sulu, though in hindsight I find Vidya Balan’s performance a tad overrated.
I saw Sridevi in Sulu, I saw her again in Priyamani’s outrageous antics as Anupama, the culinary YouTuber who loves to peep into her neighbours’ homes. Her partner-in-crime is her househelp Shilpa (a delightfully docile and devilish Sharanya Pradeep). Anupama bullies her maidservant into committing borderline crimes like stealing into a neighbour’s home to gather information on a crime that may have happened there.
Anupama thinks she knows it all. She loves to fly off the handle, much to her husband’s abiding embarrassment. Apart from the cartoonish villain (played by John Vijay) the men are all shadowy and vaguely sketched, and that includes Anupam’s eternally patient husband Mohan (Pradeep Rudra).
I would have liked to know why and how Mohan is so tolerant towards a spouse who is clearly a nuisance. When the male spouse creates chaos, we get films about wives rising from the ashes (Arth, Subah,etc). But when the wife is the errant partner the husband is shown to be a tolerant “understanding” mate, a silent sufferer.
To extend the cordon of complaint, why do we complain about women characters being given a raw deal? But no one says a word when the men suffer the same in scripts that clearly want to celebrate womanhood at the cost of the male characters like Tumhari Sulu.
Bhamakaplan is one such product. I didn’t mind the gender bias. Priyamani is so much fun to watch. Not only here, but in whatever she does. I thought she was so much better as Manoj Bajpai’s confused wife in The Family Man than Samantha Ruth Prabhu whose terrorist act was nowhere near what Ayesha Dharkar did in Santosh Sivan’s Terrorist and Tabu in Gulzar’s Hututu.
Priyamani is hardly an actress who gets talked about. Maybe she needs a better marketing team. She is delightfully goofy in Bhamakaplan as a mixture of messy Tarla Dalal and a nutty Nancy Drew. Abhimanyu’s direction is uneven, even jerky, and the editing leaves many loose ends hanging out of the narrative like hair from the ears. Priyamani irons out all the rough spots, smoothens out all the erratic edges, and actually makes this film enjoyable.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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