Slowly, Steadily, Unsurely-Meek's Cutoff

Barely registered the Sydney Film Festival this year but I did manage to catch a film on the last day, Meek's Cutoff. It helped that it had Michelle Williams who to me is never bad in anything, including the disappointing Blue Valentine. It turned out to be another dose of Americana for this month, though this time set in Oregon's uncharted territory circa 1845. Its easy to toss around the words minimalist, sparse, anti-Western and the like about the movie - and it is all these things. But it is also an oblique political and philosphical take on the act of migration, the dilemmas it brings and the choices one must make. It does so while taking away the mythic and grounding the movie in the everday slog of the journey. I am a bit ambivalent about the fact that it is a bit of a feminist tract. By making Michelle Williams's character the moral centre of the piece (in so far as posible, Reichardt is too subtle to hammer in the point) as well as the sort of but not quite veering towards a conventional liberal left reading of the relationship between whites and the Indians whose lands they would soon occupy, Reichardt leaves one with the lingering feeling that a potentially great film is merely good. Its ambiguous ending suggests this great film by showing how each decision is fraught with ambivalence, its outcome unknown.

Reichardt's other films are also set in Oregon (Old Joy  - I am simply unable to get a copy for the past few years, Wendy and Lucy) but perhaps in relocating the movie to the past and evoking the nation's history (the journey was actually made), she has made a film that is more important than these though her rhythm as a film-maker is apparent in all three.

The film surprisingly was sold out. More surprisingly the audience stayed silent through what is a very slow film, immersed in the quotidian. And the ending earned a collective gasp.  That in itself suggests that Reichardt is a film-maker to be watched.

Frank Fairfield

More old-timey stuff. Not a loose modernised interpretation, but a deliberate attempt to create the sound and look of a bygone era.

Forget the music, no one can complain about a man who wears buttoned up shirts, high waisted pants and has Brylcreem in his hair.

NYT on Frank Fairfield and the Guardian on the singer

More songs here.

I Draw Slow

Can I resist a name like I Draw Slow?

Or bluegrass/Americana as interpreted by the other side of the Atlantic (and possibly the home of American folk to which it now returns filtered through the American experience)?

The answer is no.

While their take on a lady of ill-repute offering up her all for a lover is fine enough, I will go with the live recording of Swans for this post.

Bits n Pieces

I should probably feel a sense of pride at being unable to read or view anything significant this year due to a lot of ongoing stuff...but I feel vaguely guilty, as if my self-imposed ongoing education is incomplete :-) In Mumbai, I managed to finish Alice Albinia's Empires of the Indus over an extremely long period of time (certainly the longest I have taken to read a book).  A history of a forgotten river, it is the kind of charming, thoughtful and meandering book that I like and instantly blog about but didn't.  Albinia jumps casually from Vedic times to the present, all the while zigzagging through other eras.  Somehow inspite of being ambitious in scope the book feels modest and...meandering (there I said it again just to drive home the river analogy) but this I think was a perfect fit for the break.

In India, I picked up a few DVDs and books but for the most part they lie unopened.  I did get around to seeing Jabbar Patel's Jait re Jait which turned out to be a perplexing mix of ethnography and self-concious art film. It was of course largely famous for its songs (and this is how I know about the movie, thanks to uncles who played them all the time) and charming as they are in isolation, they do not fit well with the movie-there is something slightly inauthentic about a smoothly produced Lata song in a tribal setting.  Of course this goes for the actors who all look like middle class folk playing dress-ups,  excepting a few including the very lovely Smita Patil.  The story itself eluded me though I think its vaguely about obsession and there must be some metaphor of sorts in searching for a queen bee when she is very much on hand in the form of a comely wife. And oh yes it has a hill that consumes people obsessed with it - much like Picnic at Hanging Rock.  It's not a great film by any means but a pretty good record of experimental film making in the 70s.

My train reading has consisted of  T. Janakiraman's Amma Vandhal (in translation and it appears to be an effective one), a book that I picked up because it was one of my mother's favourites.  There is the obvious shock value, not too many books deal with a menage a trois in an orthodox Tamil brahmin house.  I don't think the book is obviously moral about this though there is a good deal of discussion on sin - e.g. the central character has been sent away to a veda pathashalai as an atonement. That's fine - given that a movie like Jules et Jim ended with obsession, madness and death the happy, guiltless menage a trois (if it exists)  is not exactly meaty material for a book.  In fact the sexual lives and feelings of the female protagonists in the book are fairly free - and not in the "icky" sort of way that is so endemic to Tamil film and literature. What I really liked about the book is that the world the novel creates - both its physical and emotional contours -  is so entirely internally consistent that it all rings true.  Plus I have rarely read an Indian book that is so compact and cohesive that nothing feels superfluous.  I can't wait to finish it and its a pity that there are so few books of Thi Jaa's in translation.  Pity too that my Tamil is so poor.

When I was in India, I found myself strangely addicted to Mala Sinha (whose car my father once owned - true story - must be some strange karmic connection there) and was quite convinced for awhile that in a very Indian way she was one of the best actresses around.  Anyhow, I thus picked up Dhool ka Phool undeterred by Mr. Kumar being in it.  I have yet to see it but I saw the songs (the DVDs helpfully provide an "only songs" track) and yes Ms. Sinha is not in this one but I kind of like the one below.  Mostly it makes me want to walk around in a billowing sari :-)