Media Junkie

I wasn’t planning to write a review of I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone since I was so tired I slept through a significant part of it, but the 60 percent of the film I saw still haunts me. I missed all the connections, didn’t get the storyline, but the cinematography and the treatment of the plot is disturbing.

The film is a collection of long single shots of odd behaviour - it’s dark and the lack of dialogue intensifies the sound from the movements - so much so, while walking back to the car, driving back, eating, taking a leak — every sound seemed amplified, every moment seemed lonely. This is particularly significant in light of comments made by Shefaly to this post - people with gadgets to talk into but nobody to talk to, people with more chargers than books, people with a fear of the sound of silence- and the discussion thereafter, as well as the significance of the ending to She and He by Eyles Baccar.

I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone has long dark takes of strange behaviour in an abandoned building which make the whole experience gloomy. Long shots of men carrying a discarded mattress through a street to an abandoned building, of one man struggling to help an almost lifeless man defecate. There’s a scene of foreplay between the protagonist - a man living in an abandoned building on a discarded mattress - and a waitress. The air is full of smoke and they’ve both got masks on. Every time they remove the masks to kiss, they start coughing. After several agonizing minutes of attempts and half kisses in between loud coughs - they give up. Some people found it amusing, though.

Attended a discussion on Devdas at Cinefan (hadn’t intended to, but I was given the wrong ticket), where Meghnad Desai compared the three versions of Devdas that he has seen (the sign at the ticket counter said “Devdas is not a film, it’s a discussion). Among other things, he mentioned that Dilip Kumar was under a pressure trying to live up to the 1935 version: for a particular scene, in order to look haggard and tired enough, he ran around the set four-five times. Desai felt that 1935 version was most true to the 45 novella that inspired 11 films in multiple languages, as well as several scenes as tributes in others.

He spoke about a scene in the 1935 version where Paro offers herself to Devdas, so that they may be married, and Devdas refuses - and repents thereafter. That’s something which the subsequent versions dropped, and hence Devdas’ repentance was never as convincing.

Another interesting point - the characters of Devdas and Paro remained more or less the same, but it was Chandramukhi’s character which evolved. Anyway, I haven’t seen any of these films (apart from Bhansali’s version while on a bus between Bombay and Pune), so
I’ll just quote him on Chandramukhi living in a large house, larger than that of Devdas or Paro in Bhansali’s version: “It’s obvious that while crime doesn’t always pay, sex surely does.”

I then went for “Comrades in Dreams”, which was a documentary on cinemas in various parts of the world - Burkina Faso, Maharashtra (India), USA and North Korea. It was interesting in parts - about people whose entire lives revolve around the theatres they run — the wives of the men who run the theatre in Burkina Faso complain about lack of sex because the men are too busy running the theatre, the man from Maharashtra says that one major attribute that he wants in a wife is that she should be willing to accept that he is away from home for five months in a year, with his travelling Cinema in a tent.

The high point of the film are the comments around the Titanic - chappie from Maharashtra says “People here want to see people like themselves on the screen, not a movie about a sinking ship! It hardly ever rains here, so who would want to watch a movie with so much water?” Also amusing (unintentionally this time) were comments on the “true love story - Rose didnt want to leave Jack frozen” etc. I couldn’t get connection because, well, I haven’t seen the Titanic.

The film technician from North Korea said “Films help farmers in irrigation and increase crop production”. Then she explained that they choose films depending on what they perceive as peoples needs - when they show films on farming and irrigation, it’s educational for farmers. You didn’t see that coming, didja?

New year, same old problems. I walked into Siri Fort 1to watch Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff, to find someone arguing with the organizers about being allowed to take a bottle of water inside. It’s entirely random - they allow water in for some shows, not for others.

Later, when I went to buy tickets for a second time, they asked for my “registrations slip”, without which, one isn’t allowed to purchase tickets. This is a new Cinefan irritant, and they’ve brought it in to break the monotony of the usual irritants.

So, now that I’ve been covering the businesses for a year, I know what they’re trying to do. Businesses are about consumer databases, and Osian’s is collecting profile information on their visitors - name, address, email address (strangely, not phone number). Once you have a database, you monetize it. Given the thousands of people who attend this, and the general upper middle class-upper class attendees, that’s quite a useful database to have.
Anyway - I watched 5 films yesterday (will watch 5 more today): Sansho the Bailiff by Mizoguchi, Times and Winds by Reha Erdem, Days of Glory by Rachid Bouchareb, Taki no Shiraito by Mizoguchi (note: the “no” in that name is probably a recommendation) and Night Shadows by Nasser Bakhti.

Met a few friends: Udatta of CanvasM, Prashant and Jeetu, and the world famous Jai Arjun Singh (with wife) who was mobbed by fans who remembered posts that he has forgotten. (Rumor has it they’re rolling out a separate red carpet for Jai today, and putting up an entire section with printouts of some of his posts and doing a re-enactment of a Dharam-Veer song in his honour) Incidentally, there was a board carefully hidden away from regular public view that had the tagline for a movie “It’s gay, it’s crazy”. Old film, with a now politically incorrect tagline.