1. Chalo dildar chalo (Pakeezah; Mohamed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2bl57tFlLQ
Memories: the hot sun, the strong smell of summer fruits (mangoes, karundas (corrindacs sp.?), jamblons, caramboles, bilimbis) the sounds and smells of the sea, the breeze through the filaos. The old Philips radio blaring these songs. This is Melville Road, Grand Gaube; my infanthood. Happy days, surrounded by a lot of adults. Early memories.
2. Teri duniya se door (Zabak; Mohamed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxbAXlFBuQ
See above, #1. For some reason, I am reminded of TiBap every time I hear this song. This fellah was strong as an ox, and I guess because I first heard him mention Mahipal, the actor in this movie, I always associate TiBap with this song. It also reminds of Capo who had by then left for England.
3. Diye jal te hain (Namak Haram: Kishore Kumar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwgsJellqdE&feature=fvw
This one goes back to Beau Bois Road, Bon Accueil, first time I moved in my life. Joe of course, mentioned this film - he probably saw it at the movie. But this song captured the mood of those days, when it rained more often, and the sky was greyer than in Grand Gaube.
4. Sawan ka mahina (Milan: Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSqwfhYAoxs
Beautiful song which sends me back to the peiod when I was 7-10 years old.
5. Kai sadiyon se (Milap: Mukesh)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPVcGGu_luY
This one reminds me of my early teens. And for some reason, my cousin Miko (Vikash Peerthum), cause he could sing this, even a child, correctly.
6. Yeh duniya yeh mehfil (Heer Ranjha; Mohamed Rafi)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxP-Kd24mM
The sunny days of my childhood in Bon Accueil. Wathcing this movie on a Saturday afternoon filled me with sorrow and left me with a heavy heart. The transition of Raj Kumar's youthful looks to a bearded, unkempt wanderer aptly captures the passage of time - a vision that has endured with me for thirty odd years.
7. Din jhal jaye (Guide; Mohamed Rafi)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64wIAbFDdO8
I always knew this song, but never knew where it came from. The despondency in the lyrics and the music somehow intrigued me.
8. Maine poocha chand se (Abdullah; Mohamed Rafi)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leRDOA0pOwA
My early teens and my first year in secondary school (Royal College Port Louis). Buses used to boom music in their systems back in the day and this is just a beautiful song. It reminds me of Ajit Peerthum - he liked and could sing this song and he was is still singing it four years later in 1984.
9. Kia hoowa tera vaada (Hum kisi se kam nahin; Mohamed Rafi)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD_YVdD8tlQ
This one reminds me of my last year in Primary School, and that memorable one week school trip in a retreat at Anse La Raie. Boodhooa, who still lives in Bon Accueil, sang it live in front of 200 kids in a song competition. I always remind him of this whenever I see him (last I saw him was 10 years ago). This was also one that got massive airplay in the buses for the next three or four years. The song also reminds me of the walk in the sunny afternoons back home from school, through the fields, the grass and the locusts, butterflies and birds.
10. Aye mere dil kahin aur chal (Daag; Talat Mahmood)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSo_CmveMek&feature=related
This one reminds of early mornings when it was still dark and my Father would wake up to get ready for work. The voice of Talat distilled through the trusted Philips (see above) in the early hours.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
My 10 Favourite Films
As I get older, I have been reflecting on the films that have made an impression on me. I thought I would make a list of my ten favourite movies, as I write, that have been most meaningful to me. These are movies that I enjoy watching, and would watch over again. The list is of course not constant - ask me for a list again five years down the line and it is bound to be different.
1. Papillon
By Franklin J Shaffner, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman
On a personal basis, this film means a lot to me. This is a fim about life itself: the ups and downs of fortunes, the search for freedom and liberty, friendship and trust, revenge, hope and belief in the face of adversity, repentance and above all, a man's will to never give up. And I mean, Henri Charrière, aka Papillon (which means Butterfly in French) never gives up on his dream of escaping and living as a free man.
The eponymously titled movie recounts the story of one Henri Charrière, played by the majestic Steve McQueen, a small time hustler in the Paris underworld, who attempts to escape imprisonment on numerous occasions. It is based on the autobiography of Charrière, but the story should best be viewed as being half autobigraphy and half fiction. Charriere, dit Papillon, is condemned to a life sentence and hard labour to the brutal penal colony of French Guyana, more specifically on Ile du Diable (Devil's Island), for the murder of a pimp. While guilty of many misdemeanours, Papillon vehemently denies the crime - so in effect, during the movie, we are empathising with a man serving an inordinately harsh sentence for a crime which he has not even committed, but found guilty by the implacable machinery that is the French justice system. By the way, this is one of those films where a suspended moment of disbelief is required - while it is a French story with French characters, location and surrounding, it is a movie made by Hollywood with American actors who are all speaking Engish. Personally, this is the only imperfection that I think the movie has.
Indirectly, the movie is also a damning condemnation of the French penal system. Conditions in the tropics are harsh and life is cheap. Punishment could be atrocious; for example, months of solitary confinement in a dark, damp cell without sanitation and bad food. This could reduce Papi, as he is sometimes called by other inmates, to catching and eating cockroaches and also losing his teeth.
Despite numerous failed attempts to escape, Papi's spirit is never broken. When every hope is gone and he ends up a tired old man (in fact, he only looks physically old because of his poor lifestyle), Papi manages to escape for good by leaping off a very high cliff into the sea on a raft made from sacks of dry coconuts.
I have three memorable scenes from the movie:
1. For one of his first attempts, Papi bribes one of the guards to allow him to escape and approaches by opening up his shirt, showing him his butterfly tatto on his chest and saying: How much to allow this butterfly to fly freely?
2. When he meets the leprosy ravaged underworld lynchpin in the Amazonian jungles, the latter offers him his half-smoked cigar to test Papi. Most of the audience would expect Papi to either decline, or draw a feeble drag daintily. Papi puts the cigr firmly in his mouth and draws a full drag. (As it turns out, the leper asks Papi "How did you know my leprosy is not contagious", to which he replies "I didn't know it wasn't.")
3. My favourite scene is the dream sequence with a brilliant background music, towards the beginning when Papi, who throughout the movie appears haggard, unclean and dressed in tattered rags, for once appears looking like a million bucks, walking across a desert towards a line of twelve jurors facing him. The judge, in the middle of the jurors, announces that he is sentencing him and when Papi asks him for what, he says "For a wasted life". To this Papi asnwers "Guilty, guilty....". For me this is Papi's repentance and spiritual salvation, which goes to show that he has grown beyond the small time crook we have come to know. Simply writing about this scene brings the goosebumps.
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
By David Fincher, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
For me personally, the movie is aptly summarised by Benjamin Button towards the end, accompanied, indubitably, by snaps of memorable moments from the film: "Some people were born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people, dance." This too, is a movie about LIFE.
3. El Laberinto del Fauno
By Guillermo del Toro with Ivana Baquero and Sergi Lopez
Del Toro's beautiful fanatsy tale is set in Franco's repressive régime (Espana, circa 1944) and is seen through the innocent eyes of/narrated by Ofelia, a pre-pubescent girl who likes fairy tales. There are two stories weaved together in this movie: Ofelia's and her pregnant mother's sojourn in the mountains in Capitan Vidal's camp, and the fairy tale that Ofelia lives through. The story revolves around Capitan Vidal cruelly wiping out the last vestige of guerilla resistance in the maquis, interspaced with Ofelia's meeting of a fairy in the shape of a stick insect who leads her to a Faun in the rock garden. The Faun reveals that Ofelia is in fact the re-incarnation of Princess Moanna who a long, long time ago, dwelled in the Underground Realm. Curious about the world above, she escapes to Earth despite her father's wishes, but the sun blinds her and she forgets her past. She then gradually weakens and dies, but nevertheless, her father retains hope that one day her spirit will eventually return to him.
The Faun sets Ofelia a series of tasks that she needs to pass in order to be re-united with her father in the underground world and become immortal again. She completes all the tasks successfully but while Vidal's cruelty rages on, nearly decimating the network of guerillas (fo whom Mercedes, the housemaid, acts as a spy), Ofelia's mother dies in childbirth. In some violent scenes that follow, Mercedes cuts up Vidal and manages to escape while Ofelia runs to the Faun's labyrinth in the rock garden with her new-norn brother, with a wounded Vidal hot in pursuit. When Ofelia reaches the centre of the labyrinth, the Faun sets her a final test - she has to drop blood from an innocent to open the portal to the Underground Realm. The innocent is of course the baby, and Ofelia flatly refuses to harm her brother. By that time Vidal catches up with her and we realise that Ofelia had been living all these scenes in a fantasy world in her head as the camera pans from Vidal's angle: Ofelia, holding the baby, is talking to herself... (Or, is Vidal too cruel to see what only the pure can see?) He snatches his son away and shoots Ofelia in the stomach, who falls on the floor by the concentric circles forming the portal. (This, by the way, is also the opening scene). Her blood drips in the furrows forming the circle and the portal opens, revealing a scene where Ofelia is being led to her father by the Faun. She is told that giving her life to save the baby was her ultimate test and sacrifice. She regains her previous form and becomes Princess Moanna and immortal. Meanwhile, above ground, Mercedes and the maquisards catch up with Vidal, who realising the game's up, hands them his son and is shot dead.
4. Itinéraire d'un Enfant Gaté
By Claude Lelouch with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Richard Anconina
The French invented cinema and no one does it better than them. J-P Belmondo is my favourite actor ever and his movies are bound to be in my top ten. This particular film is however quite different from the ones he has built his reputation upon, and those that I grew up watching on TV as a little boy. This story is about a poor abandoned child who becomes immensely rich as an entrepreneur and then gets bored with it all. He schemes his disappearance while at sea and travels the world incognito, re-visiting his old haunts (places he visited with his first wife, played by the singer Clio, in flash back, who dies tragically in a car accident at a young age) and comes back to France to live as a simple man. Belmondo is once again majestic in this movie, and even manages a few comedic moments (when he camps as an old retired boxer working in a gas station). The one advice he gives in the movie could be applied in real life: never show that you are surprised - always keep a smile on your face.
5. Le Retour de Martin Guerre
By Daniel Vigne with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye
Another French movie that marked my youth. The Americans liked it so much that they made their own version with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster using the Civil War as a backdrop. Gerard Depardieu is Martin Guerre, who comes back to his native farming community in the 1500's after the war - except he has grown up from the scrawny teenager and is not immediately recognised by his relatives. Eight years earlier, he had married Bertrande when they were both very young (Martin was a sickly teen), but now Martin looks mature and robust. Some people doubt his identity because he has changed so much, but Martin knows all the details about everyone in the village.
Bertrande accepts and adopts Martin readily and is happy with her married life. However, a couple of vagabonds visiting the village cause a consternation when they identify Martin as Arnaud de Thil, who they had known as a small time ruffian and thief during the war. The shoemaker notices that Martin's feet are now smaller from the mold he had taken eight years ago - feet usually grow with age, but he has never seen feet that shrink..... The protagonist is brought to court and a judgement has to be made. Bertrande is adamant that Martin is her husband. It is revealed that she is happier with this fellah than the younger version she married, and then of course there is the dramatic entrance of the amputee, Martin himself.
6. Once Upon a Time in America
By Sergio Leone with Robert de Niro and James Woods
This is cinema itself. It is more visual than auditory. There are long scenes of silence, with maybe a background music (with composition by Ennio Morricone). Leone is a master of the camera and this regal feast of the eyes is set across three decades of US history. It starts during the depression era and follows the lives of Aaron 'Noodles' and his acolytes in their rise to hoodlums in the Jewish community of Lower Eastside. Robert de Niro really turns for this one with James Woods by his side.
There is an ambiguous interpretation of this movie: is the whole story a dream like fantasy that Noodles is experiencing in the Chinese opium den, or did it really happen?
7. Les Miserables
By Claude Lelouch with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Michel Boujenah
Lelouch retells, or rather has Jacques Fontin (Belmondo again) relive the story of Jean Valjean in this war time epic.
8. Taxi Driver
By Martin Scorcese with Robert de Niro and Jodie Foster
9. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
By George Roy Hill with Paul Newman and Robert Redford
10. The Fight Club
By David Fincher with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.
1. Papillon
By Franklin J Shaffner, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman
On a personal basis, this film means a lot to me. This is a fim about life itself: the ups and downs of fortunes, the search for freedom and liberty, friendship and trust, revenge, hope and belief in the face of adversity, repentance and above all, a man's will to never give up. And I mean, Henri Charrière, aka Papillon (which means Butterfly in French) never gives up on his dream of escaping and living as a free man.
The eponymously titled movie recounts the story of one Henri Charrière, played by the majestic Steve McQueen, a small time hustler in the Paris underworld, who attempts to escape imprisonment on numerous occasions. It is based on the autobiography of Charrière, but the story should best be viewed as being half autobigraphy and half fiction. Charriere, dit Papillon, is condemned to a life sentence and hard labour to the brutal penal colony of French Guyana, more specifically on Ile du Diable (Devil's Island), for the murder of a pimp. While guilty of many misdemeanours, Papillon vehemently denies the crime - so in effect, during the movie, we are empathising with a man serving an inordinately harsh sentence for a crime which he has not even committed, but found guilty by the implacable machinery that is the French justice system. By the way, this is one of those films where a suspended moment of disbelief is required - while it is a French story with French characters, location and surrounding, it is a movie made by Hollywood with American actors who are all speaking Engish. Personally, this is the only imperfection that I think the movie has.
Indirectly, the movie is also a damning condemnation of the French penal system. Conditions in the tropics are harsh and life is cheap. Punishment could be atrocious; for example, months of solitary confinement in a dark, damp cell without sanitation and bad food. This could reduce Papi, as he is sometimes called by other inmates, to catching and eating cockroaches and also losing his teeth.
Despite numerous failed attempts to escape, Papi's spirit is never broken. When every hope is gone and he ends up a tired old man (in fact, he only looks physically old because of his poor lifestyle), Papi manages to escape for good by leaping off a very high cliff into the sea on a raft made from sacks of dry coconuts.
I have three memorable scenes from the movie:
1. For one of his first attempts, Papi bribes one of the guards to allow him to escape and approaches by opening up his shirt, showing him his butterfly tatto on his chest and saying: How much to allow this butterfly to fly freely?
2. When he meets the leprosy ravaged underworld lynchpin in the Amazonian jungles, the latter offers him his half-smoked cigar to test Papi. Most of the audience would expect Papi to either decline, or draw a feeble drag daintily. Papi puts the cigr firmly in his mouth and draws a full drag. (As it turns out, the leper asks Papi "How did you know my leprosy is not contagious", to which he replies "I didn't know it wasn't.")
3. My favourite scene is the dream sequence with a brilliant background music, towards the beginning when Papi, who throughout the movie appears haggard, unclean and dressed in tattered rags, for once appears looking like a million bucks, walking across a desert towards a line of twelve jurors facing him. The judge, in the middle of the jurors, announces that he is sentencing him and when Papi asks him for what, he says "For a wasted life". To this Papi asnwers "Guilty, guilty....". For me this is Papi's repentance and spiritual salvation, which goes to show that he has grown beyond the small time crook we have come to know. Simply writing about this scene brings the goosebumps.
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
By David Fincher, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
For me personally, the movie is aptly summarised by Benjamin Button towards the end, accompanied, indubitably, by snaps of memorable moments from the film: "Some people were born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people, dance." This too, is a movie about LIFE.
3. El Laberinto del Fauno
By Guillermo del Toro with Ivana Baquero and Sergi Lopez
Del Toro's beautiful fanatsy tale is set in Franco's repressive régime (Espana, circa 1944) and is seen through the innocent eyes of/narrated by Ofelia, a pre-pubescent girl who likes fairy tales. There are two stories weaved together in this movie: Ofelia's and her pregnant mother's sojourn in the mountains in Capitan Vidal's camp, and the fairy tale that Ofelia lives through. The story revolves around Capitan Vidal cruelly wiping out the last vestige of guerilla resistance in the maquis, interspaced with Ofelia's meeting of a fairy in the shape of a stick insect who leads her to a Faun in the rock garden. The Faun reveals that Ofelia is in fact the re-incarnation of Princess Moanna who a long, long time ago, dwelled in the Underground Realm. Curious about the world above, she escapes to Earth despite her father's wishes, but the sun blinds her and she forgets her past. She then gradually weakens and dies, but nevertheless, her father retains hope that one day her spirit will eventually return to him.
The Faun sets Ofelia a series of tasks that she needs to pass in order to be re-united with her father in the underground world and become immortal again. She completes all the tasks successfully but while Vidal's cruelty rages on, nearly decimating the network of guerillas (fo whom Mercedes, the housemaid, acts as a spy), Ofelia's mother dies in childbirth. In some violent scenes that follow, Mercedes cuts up Vidal and manages to escape while Ofelia runs to the Faun's labyrinth in the rock garden with her new-norn brother, with a wounded Vidal hot in pursuit. When Ofelia reaches the centre of the labyrinth, the Faun sets her a final test - she has to drop blood from an innocent to open the portal to the Underground Realm. The innocent is of course the baby, and Ofelia flatly refuses to harm her brother. By that time Vidal catches up with her and we realise that Ofelia had been living all these scenes in a fantasy world in her head as the camera pans from Vidal's angle: Ofelia, holding the baby, is talking to herself... (Or, is Vidal too cruel to see what only the pure can see?) He snatches his son away and shoots Ofelia in the stomach, who falls on the floor by the concentric circles forming the portal. (This, by the way, is also the opening scene). Her blood drips in the furrows forming the circle and the portal opens, revealing a scene where Ofelia is being led to her father by the Faun. She is told that giving her life to save the baby was her ultimate test and sacrifice. She regains her previous form and becomes Princess Moanna and immortal. Meanwhile, above ground, Mercedes and the maquisards catch up with Vidal, who realising the game's up, hands them his son and is shot dead.
4. Itinéraire d'un Enfant Gaté
By Claude Lelouch with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Richard Anconina
The French invented cinema and no one does it better than them. J-P Belmondo is my favourite actor ever and his movies are bound to be in my top ten. This particular film is however quite different from the ones he has built his reputation upon, and those that I grew up watching on TV as a little boy. This story is about a poor abandoned child who becomes immensely rich as an entrepreneur and then gets bored with it all. He schemes his disappearance while at sea and travels the world incognito, re-visiting his old haunts (places he visited with his first wife, played by the singer Clio, in flash back, who dies tragically in a car accident at a young age) and comes back to France to live as a simple man. Belmondo is once again majestic in this movie, and even manages a few comedic moments (when he camps as an old retired boxer working in a gas station). The one advice he gives in the movie could be applied in real life: never show that you are surprised - always keep a smile on your face.
5. Le Retour de Martin Guerre
By Daniel Vigne with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye
Another French movie that marked my youth. The Americans liked it so much that they made their own version with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster using the Civil War as a backdrop. Gerard Depardieu is Martin Guerre, who comes back to his native farming community in the 1500's after the war - except he has grown up from the scrawny teenager and is not immediately recognised by his relatives. Eight years earlier, he had married Bertrande when they were both very young (Martin was a sickly teen), but now Martin looks mature and robust. Some people doubt his identity because he has changed so much, but Martin knows all the details about everyone in the village.
Bertrande accepts and adopts Martin readily and is happy with her married life. However, a couple of vagabonds visiting the village cause a consternation when they identify Martin as Arnaud de Thil, who they had known as a small time ruffian and thief during the war. The shoemaker notices that Martin's feet are now smaller from the mold he had taken eight years ago - feet usually grow with age, but he has never seen feet that shrink..... The protagonist is brought to court and a judgement has to be made. Bertrande is adamant that Martin is her husband. It is revealed that she is happier with this fellah than the younger version she married, and then of course there is the dramatic entrance of the amputee, Martin himself.
6. Once Upon a Time in America
By Sergio Leone with Robert de Niro and James Woods
This is cinema itself. It is more visual than auditory. There are long scenes of silence, with maybe a background music (with composition by Ennio Morricone). Leone is a master of the camera and this regal feast of the eyes is set across three decades of US history. It starts during the depression era and follows the lives of Aaron 'Noodles' and his acolytes in their rise to hoodlums in the Jewish community of Lower Eastside. Robert de Niro really turns for this one with James Woods by his side.
There is an ambiguous interpretation of this movie: is the whole story a dream like fantasy that Noodles is experiencing in the Chinese opium den, or did it really happen?
7. Les Miserables
By Claude Lelouch with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Michel Boujenah
Lelouch retells, or rather has Jacques Fontin (Belmondo again) relive the story of Jean Valjean in this war time epic.
8. Taxi Driver
By Martin Scorcese with Robert de Niro and Jodie Foster
9. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
By George Roy Hill with Paul Newman and Robert Redford
10. The Fight Club
By David Fincher with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.
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