sinjinisengupta Reviews

Tamasha (2015)

Tamasha was anything but a love-story!

[9/10 · 9 December 2015]

Imtiaz Ali – I do not know what to say to you (so that I can say it well and say it all, which I probably cannot), but I cannot but say to you a few things anyway.

One – you've touched a cord layers deeper inside, much, much well inside - somewhere, where it is not just hidden away from the rest of world but from the self too. In our quest of product management, we kill or at least sedate that layer the first thing. Thank you for striking it hard with your Joker!

Two – this is not the first time with me, with you. I, too, had thought I'd not be able to survive the world outside that bedsheet tent you had made Jordan and Heer. I perhaps didn't survive too – what I now see in the mirror is just a soulless leftover. But whatsoever is left in that, with it I understand where you came from where you said that in Rockstar. I had realized that what I think of love (which by the way is a kind of spiritual sojourn for me and the only form of divinity I have or will ever believe in) perhaps, it is somewhere tad similar to what you think of it?

Read the whole review at http://sinjinisengupta.blogspot.in/2015/11/kya-tamasha-hai.html

Three – It was not just Rockstar, or Tamasha now. Remember Jab We Met? No, I didn't like it for the popular reasons upon which it had become so popular… I loved it because I know that kind of a lover! That kind of love where you leave your beloved to her beloved, because…? Because… well, not because you think that will be best for her, not because you are magnanimous, and certainly not because you are trying to prove yourself. You do that because, simply, because, well, you love her! Perhaps, you love her more than you love yourself?

Four – With Tamasha, I realized that it is not just the concept (religion?) of "Love" where I agree so deeply, so closely with perhaps what you think of it. In Tamasha, as harsh as it may sound for a movie which is being celebrated essentially as a love-story of some form, I understand that it wouldn't have mattered if Taara would have been lost thereafter. She was, at the end and in the soul of it, an agent. Not "just" an agent, the Agent indeed – and yet, however, agent! Of course, Teja's gold was very much with her, as you pointed out when half the auditorium had already gotten up and leaving. And yet, I must say - this was, essentially, the story of Ved, a story of believing in the impossible that perhaps many of us (All?) already are and yet, ironically, we have designed the world ourselves in such a way so that we conveniently forget – "almost" all of us! Seriously, whose design was it, to queue up and enter the boxes, to strive to become common?

Tamasha was anything but a love-story!

But then, having said that - take Rockstar (again!). A Jordan would not be able to write, to sing; and worse, a Heer will not have even her veins supply blood the way her physiological body demands, unless... You get it! So, when passion meets passion, Life happens I guess. Else, we are all, mere mortals, just managing, just about surviving, as if out of duty, as if we have to breathe till we can! What pity!

Five – I think (and this is just a personal star-gazing!) you have something, some tangible connection with that scene – a stage, and the wings – where lovers meet. It comes back over and over. Of course when you have something in form of a concept you can iterate and give it many a shapes. But when you have a certain memory whatever that maybe already in shape of a memory, it's hard to come over! Thinking of it, I cannot but think what will I depict when and if ever I tell my thoughts in a movie? I'll perhaps throw in that scene every time – that scene when, even though I didn't know that I was going to do that even two seconds before it happened, I did… forget it! (We'll see if I ever actually "become" Me and do make a movie or say my story whatever!)

It has barely been half an hour since I reached home after the show got over, and more, it is now two-thirty by the clock, after mid- night. I should be sleeping. But then, I skipped my sleeping tablets so that I can be awake, because I needed to write this down, as incoherent as it may be. As I said, bear with me!

Thank you, Imtiaz Ali! I am feeling very, very grateful towards you at this moment.

PS:

Before I could reach home, I had taken out my dying phone and typed this out on FB as an immediate tribute while wiping the water on the cheek with the other hand. (Yes, I cried, a lot actually, but that was for anything but sorrow. Probably, the ecstasy of being understood, feeling connected? Whatsoever!)

Here it goes:

How does he manage to do it, how does he pull it off, to put his finger right there where it pains when no one watches? And oh, it pains so goddamn much!

Well, you don't get a letter from Hogwarts alright, but then, you can still become You!

I love you, Imtiaz Ali.

Still Alice (2014)

Letting go - all of these - first one by one, and then, almost, all at once.

[7/10 · 9 December 2015]

When I had sat myself down to watch this movie, I was uninitiated, totally uninitiated. Of course, I had chosen it only because Julianne Moore, who played the protagonist in it, won herself the Oscar for it. Little did I have a notion of what to look for, what to think of it. But, having watched the gripping tale of "Still Alice", all I can say is – it truly has been a lesson, at least. A lesson that, one, can really never learn!

How?

Well, Imagine you're an accomplished, fulfilled, reasonably busy person – an illustrious career of a Linguistics professor by occupation, while an equally if not more charming, loving wife and a doting mother of three grown-up kids - a sure picture of an able hand in both spheres.

Done… imagining?

Good! Now, imagine… Letting go!

Yes - you read me alright! Letting go - all of these - first one by one, and then, almost, all at once.

It indeed comes as a cruel irony when for someone as Alice, when her very tools of trade – vocabulary – start to fail her, betray her. As we'd all do, she too brushes it aside at first, but for not too long. And thus she lands up at the neurologist's cabin one day, on eventually many more days - with tests, questionnaires, scans one by one pointing her towards the very inevitable. Yes, barely fifty years old, Alice has been detected with an early onset of Alzheimer's!

And not just that! Hers is a rare kind, one which is passed on genetically, one in which – if it has been passed on as can be tested out surely – the child will have a cent percent chance of developing it eventually. "Sorry!" – she chokes as she tries to, failingly, hold her fort strong, while breaking the news to her children towards whom she cannot but feel very responsible, and of course, guilty!

The decay, thereafter, is fast paced. She loses her words – slowly, erratically. She loses her job – essentially. She loses her basic abilities to get around, to get along in life. So much so that she soils her clothes because, well, because she could not locate the washroom in her very own home!

Your entire self-esteem - everything that was once yours and now you cannot remember, cannot quite be sure – they, now, are placed on a tricky slippery ground. It now all depends on if people do treat you as if you're still who you once were when you had, unfailingly, done them proud and done them good. Easier said, no?

So it is, for herself too! And all these - so suddenly and yet so surely that - she cannot but cope with it with a self-scripted, self-designed suicide plan.

But guess what? Even to accomplish that she needs help! And so she sets up herself, a version of herself from the past, to read out the instructions to that future version who has now reached the need to carry out the action plan – so that, still, the day can be saved. You can, really, be so embarrassed to live that you can well be pushed to choose not to, of course!

But no, she had over-estimated herself. She – despite her own planned instructions playing out to her in loops – turns out to be incapable of even that!

Imagine... Can you?

Well... personally - I can, somewhat at least, actually! Having been chronically clinically depressed for nearly a decade - surviving on anti-depressants that seemed to never work on your mood but instead on everything else and negatively, on sleeping tablets that your sleep or lack of it have by now got immune to, on analgesics that seem more compulsory than your daily meals, and essentially on Alertness boosters without which you wouldn't know how to get up just like you hadn't known for long how to sleep – I now, too closely, can imagine how it possibly can feel when you're no more, well, quite yourself! How it may feel to let go, lose, one by one. To want but fail to – care, for things; take care – of things; to eventually – therefore - give up, give in! To, lose yourself, inch by inch…

But of course having said all that, at the very same time you cannot but feel blessed, fortunate - even lucky if you may - that you are still you and not her. Not Alice, yet.

Not, still, Alice… What relief!

It's not easy to grope with a reality as dark, as uninitiated, sudden and yet as stark, as Alice's reality becomes. You start identifying with her sooner than you know… You wish her strength and courage, and yet, inside your own heart, you start getting scared for her. For her, and perhaps, for yourself too…?

"I wish I had cancer. People wear pink ribbons for you and go on long walks. I wouldn't have to feel like a social…I can't remember the word!"- She says.

And yes, it's true as hell! I know it!

And you know what? All you can do, if you want to help an Alice you meet on your way in life, is this:

Just, help them feel, still, important. Help them believe, if you can, that they are - despite the disease, despite the scans, the tests and the symptoms - they are...

Still, Alice!

The Guitar (2008)

what would you say about one that's - surely and day by day - dying...?

[8/10 · 9 December 2015]

That she is dying and has something from a month to a two to go, was spelt out to her in a professional, perhaps slightly compassionate and yet disengaged tone. The verdict had been handed out, clearly and unambiguously. She was further explained how she'd first lose her voice, then her sight, and then, decay, not quite slowly. And yet, as funny as it may sound, this is not but the only verdict she was handed out on the same day. As if she wasn't yet quite done with! And so, the next two follow: that, she has been "downsized" at her job, and unloved by her lover.

Three verdicts - each unknowing and indifferent to the other two; each, brutal times more due to the other, and yet oblivious; each, each alone, having the power, proved over history, to easily crumble and perish a soul to dust but not before mercilessly tossing it aside into a nothingness safely and surely unknown to one who hasn't walked that road or died those deaths that she was about to, starting that day.

So well, you tell me! What do you do when you're handed out such a destiny, and you know that they happen, for sure, and all you might do is to accept them and know, tell yourself, in capitals, bold and underlined, that – Very well, girl. This is it!

Know what? Idea!

You… accept.

And thus starts a love affair between Melody - a once beautiful now pale, hoarse in the voice and weak at the knees, dying and yet not sure what it means, girl of perhaps twenty something - and that mystery called Life. An affair, as short as it might be, an affair, nonetheless. An affair that was - howsoever brief - final…

Well, to begin, first. She let's go, as we had already said. You think, it really isn't perhaps as difficult as it sounds, right? However it seems simple, it does. It seems all too simple as she lets go everything. Not one by one, but at once. Everything. Everything! She gives up everything - from her house to her belongings, to the last piece of cloth that she wore. Just, save for her about half a dozen credit cards.

And then, she acquires a new everything instead.

Shifting into a plush moon-white palatial loft sprawling wide and long on a short-term rent, she glosses through the pages of magazines to pick up the fanciest products in everything - the special menus from restaurants for every meal to the most expensive beds and sofa-sets and chairs, from the majestic clothing lines to the most chosen lamp shades and curtains. She lives off her credit cards that she believes that she wouldn't never have to pay off.She gets everything she can get, she spends on everything she can spend on. She eats her best, she wears her best, she sleeps her best. The furniture-delivery Afro-American guy to the pizza-delivery teenager looking tomboy, she loves and sleeps and wakes to glory. Short-lived as it may be, she doesn't count her days or knows the date on the calendar or the time on her watch anymore.

And, The Guitar!!

On the very first nights that she had made herself this new way of life, she had been having a recurrent dream, a flashback into her own childhood that had been buried down in her recent life - one, of a guitar. A red electric guitar, a sight across the showcase of the shop Melody would often pass by as a child, that one thing that she fancied and even asked for from her parents but tey didn't have enough to give way to such expensive fancies.

She now bought The Guitar too! Oh, and she takes a short beginner's course in playing the electric guitar, too.

She has the money, albeit on her cards, but no time to live any later, and so she lives now. She lives her life behind the doors, never stepping out into the rest of the world. She eats, sleeps, smiles, makes love. And she plays the guitar. She lives - for she has nothing to lose, afterall!

Read the whole review here - http://sinjinisengupta.blogspot.in/2015/12/the-guitar-fling-that- turns-into.html#more

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Oh yes, class mattered to her; it did. If not class, comfort, at least. But then, perhaps, not as much as love! And so, she let go. Everything. Over love. And, over revenge.

[9/10 · 9 December 2015]

Jasmine, once Jeanette and then changed her name, had been swept off her feet in love by a charming prince while "Blue Moon" played in the background; and that, when she was still in college. What would she do becoming an anthropologist, she had thought, and dropped out of college into a life with him.

Living had been one of an empress ever since. Park Avenue, New York - she would proudly recall, chin up. Her husband was a successful, prosperous Manhattan financier, and if anything, that's an understatement when it came to wealth. He got her anything, everything practically, before she could ask. They lived the most enviable lifestyle and hosted the most talked about parties of the town. They had a son from her husband's earlier marriage, who did them proud in academic achievements and was actually more proud, in turn, of the father he had that the world looked upto. The father was indeed a successful man!

But then, it comes out that her posh rich husband was actually a crook in the business world and made money in illegal ways. And you couldn't exactly tell if she knew or not knew given how in love, looking away, and oblivious she was in her life. She had her name and signatures on any paper he would ask her for, and wouldn't stop to read. The police arrested him in the open daylight on the street, and she, too, is called upon and then released later on. As the trial progresses, the disgraced, busted husband kills himself. The house of cards crumbles down, the bubbles, all of them, burst at once.

Xxx

And then, there she was! Talking all by herself - to strangers in the plane, on the street, and at the wall - about how it happened to her. All the memories of the life that once was – the beach house, the doting husband, the trophy stepson – and how she had had everything the most of rest of the world can only dream of.

The Jasmine, of the now, however was penniless; broke, broken. Flying first-class because she cannot otherwise, yet free loading at her divorced sister's modest, incongruous household, one whose life her husband had once ruined by playing away all her ex-husband's fortune and whose present moving-in plans with her current boyfriend were held up on her arrival. "To make a new start," she'd say, was what she was there for.

She was haughty, arrogant, non-adjustable, and then, regretful. And then, hard-working, single minded, awaiting and working at her second chance in life. The only trace of fortune that had once been were left in her attires and accessories, and in the way she spoke and walked, and in all those things that she could not bring herself down to but yet did, like playing a receptionist at a dentist's while learning how to use a computer which she will in turn use to do a course in interior decoration. She had realized that her strength and skill-set has been, and perhaps only been, in an exceptionally good taste in clothes, accessories, decorations and soft furnishings.

And, all this, while creepily talking to herself almost all the time - of things bygone, of her life bygone, of moments from the past.

But then it comes – first in slight hints, and eventually, at the end, all at once.

Jasmine - the ever so proud and still somewhat defensive of her husband of what her husband did and died due to - and yet, her eyes gleam, twinkle, as she describes, avoids yet describes, not flinches, at how the neck snaps when someone hangs himself. How he did hang himself - her husband, in the cell. How, he killed himself. If you were to describe her then, you'd perhaps think of a wounded tigress.

But then, and yet, she cannot stop but always, always talk about how life has been – how she fell in love with him back in college, and had let gone everything else to be with him, what an empire they, she, owned, and how luck had turned.

xxx

And then it comes. Jasmine, by turn of some events and after a ill- fated, miserably failed attempt in pretense at resuming life with a prosperous prospective man for a husband, meets Danny, the stepson. At this downfall, Danny the stepson had dropped out of college as well. Not because he couldn't afford the fees but because he couldn't face the people who once thought his father was all that he said he was and now knew the truth.

Now as she meets him years later - and as she pleads with him and he vents out in confrontation - Danny tells her how it's not as much about his father but about her, Jasmine. He tells her that he knows.

He knows!

xxx

Well, Jasmine wasn't stupid; at least not stupid enough to not know something was amiss in how and how much the husband minted money; the luxury, the pomp, the bubbles. But then, he loved her, and she loved him too. She even asked him a few times, didn't she? He had neither confided nor denied, but had said – "Stop worrying, Jasmine, leave it on me." She did.

Read the whole review here - http://sinjinisengupta.blogspot.in/2015/02/blue-jasmine-woody-allen- film-review.html

Unfaithful (2002)

- It's a mistake! - What's a mistake? Either you do things, or you don't.

[7/10 · 9 December 2015]

Unfaithful!

So, as far the storyline goes, it's known to most, and yet, worth a quick recap for the interest of some. A wife, apparently well settled into an eleven years old marriage with a eight year old living proof for a boy-kid, busy and lonely perhaps just as most at her age and standing would be, steps into that infamous pit that society calls adultery. She bumps into this stranger one fine stormy afternoon, joins him for coffee, and thereafter for sex the next day and every other days thereon. Husband starts with getting an inkling, investigates, finds out, and then, confronts. No, not with the woman but with the lover. The confrontation that starts so well that it could even dig into the profound "why" and take the issue (no, not problem! Issue.) by it's horn, however, unfortunately, rather, turns into a murder scene as the husband loses control over what he was meant to do and hits the guy on the head with a gift that he gave her and then she gave him in turn. The rest of the movie becomes a matter of eventual mutual knowledge, that they know that they know, and of course, police. It ends with a note where a peaceful kid sleeps in the car backseat while the couple, musing over how their rest of life could be a beautiful escapade, both term as important, pulls up their car outside the police station and kisses passionately as the traffic signal goes from red to green to yellow, back to red.

Poetic? Maybe.

Unresolved? Yes.

But, question remains. What about that bull that we did not take by the horn? Really, what about that?

Why did it happen? Why does it happen, that way?

Just the feeling of feeling special, that? That thing of being treated like not just a wife but a woman? Being told she's beautiful? Being awaited, being looked forward to, being seen off, being missed? Being treated like she exists? Being taken interest in? Oh yes, perhaps!

Or perhaps, more. Perhaps, knowing that life holds more treasure than what 'they' hand out to you if you don't ask. Perhaps!

No, viewer. You don't have to wrap it up with a certificate, good or bad. Neither do you have to play safe to just say, yeah perhaps.. but no, not safe! Not judgment, not wisdom. Not the trap of security; not the courage to break free, either.

Just, accept. Accept that it happened. Accept that it happens.

• It's a mistake! - What's a mistake? Either you do things, or you don't.

PS: And hence, bear with me – A poem! - Mistakes, memories!