DEAR JASSI*** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Official Competition - Day 5

Tarsem Singh's latest movie is a hard-hitting true crime story that sheds light on the phenomenon insultingly known as Honour Killing. Based on a famous and now rather historic case, this important film shows us how the Indian diaspora has taken its cultural norms to its new host nations, both the good and the bad, and seen the latter calcify into something unbending and ruthless. (I know whereof I speak here, as a second generation Punjabi immigrant in England). 

The first hour of the film is a sweet, earnest and almost naive love story between Jassi and Mithoo. The former is a Canadian citizen, living an outwardly wealthy modern life, but we can tell from her home set-up that her family is still incredibly traditional and controlling. They live in a multi-generational joint family, where even the married adult children do not establish themselves as independent, and Jassi is dropped off and picked up from work, her pay packet taken by her parents.  On her annual vacation she goes back to family relations in northern India who are similarly controlling. Her cousin Santo is not allowed to date either. But despite all of these restrictions she still manages to meet and fall in love with a handsome Kabbadi player called Mithoo. The problem is that her family will never approve of her marrying "beneath" her to a lower caste uneducated poor boy.  

The second hour of the film becomes far darker as the naivety of the young lovers is met by the intransigence of her family. This gives the film more energy and narrative drive.  The first half is sometimes cloyingly slow-paced. We are as desperate as Jassi for Mithoo to do something. But the second half of the film is a Kafka-esqe world of immigration rules coupled with the highest stakes of whether the couple can be reunited.  I won't spoil the events if you are not familiar with them, or cases of this type. Suffice to say that Jassi's big mistake is to go back to India where bribes allow her family to act with impunity. This is not to say that there aren't horrific acts of violence against Asian girls in Britain, but clearly justice is even more corrupt over there. 

I am full of praise for Tarsem Singh both in his tenacity for bringing this important subject to the screen but also in the way in which he handled it. We get his beautiful trademark visuals, helped by DP Brendan Galvin, but there is a restraint in what they are showing and how. This is not touristic magisterial India but everyday rural Punjab in all its beauty but also its run-down ramshackle chaos. Without spoiling it, the way he handles the pivotal final scenes is masterful and searing but never exploitative.

DEAR JASSI has a running time of 132 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2023.

PLANE***

PLANE ain't nothing but a good, stupid time.  It's just an honest silly action film, and feels no shame in that.  Gerard Butler stars as Brodie Torrance which should tell you everything you need to know about the film. He's ex-RAF, a widower, proudly Scottish, and now flies commercial jets. He just needs to get the final bunch of passengers to Tokyo and get home to his teenage daughter, COMMANDO style.  But bad weather forces an emergency landing on an island that happens to be run by TROPIC THUNDER style armed-to-the-nuts ransoming rebels.  The good news is that Brodie, while ageing and out of breath, still has moves, and he's also transporting a French Foreign legion soldier wanted for murder - Mike Colter aka Luke Cage aka the predictable action hero with a heart.  So the two of them set about keeping the passengers safe until Tony Goldwyn's airline exec's private rescue mercenaries show up.

The action set pieces are great fun as is Butler's brand of low-key smarmy humour. I like that they acknowledge he's human.  He gets puffed out after fighting off a rebel in a telephone exchange.  When he's succeeded in landing the plane at the end he takes a moment just to let the adrenaline run down and to have a bit of a manly cry.  I also love  how they film the plane. There's a really great shot at the end where they frame it from the perspective of the top of the fin, perfectly symmetrical. And I'm not going to lie. Under direction from Jean Froicois Richet (MESRINE), I was seriously stressed out in the final set-piece, totally involved in whether the plane would make it.  So mock it all you like, this film may be hokey, but it works!

PLANE has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

MIRROR MIRROR

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a visionary called Tarsem Singh made a movie of such beauty and pathos that it broke my heart. Ever since THE FALL, I've been hoping for him to create something as simultaneously whimsical and powerful, but in vain. IMMORTALS was quite simply unwatchable - dull narrative, bad acting, absurd casting - but worst of all, Singh traded in his singular visual style for a cheap rip-off of Zach Snyder's 300. 

MIRROR MIRROR isn't as bad as IMMORTALS, but it's still very, very disappointing. The good news is that the movie looks wonderful and has a visual wit that was entirely absent in IMMORTALS. I simply adored Eiko Ishioka's stunning costumes (sadly her last film before she died), and I loved the imaginative touches of dwarves using expandable legs, and a mirror that leads to an alternate dream reality. I even loved the casting of the gamine Lily Collins as Snow White, the not unattractive Armie Hammer as the Prince, and was intrigued to see how Julia Roberts would interpret The Queen.

The problem with the movie is, however, a fatal one. The script simply doesn't match the production design. I think the problem is that Jason Keller (MACHINE GUN PREACHER) and Marc Klein (A GOOD YEAR) wanted to write a SHREK-like post-modern post-feminist fairy-tale, where ageing queens go for extreme Hollywood makeovers and the dialogue is full of attempts at wry wit. But this stands in sharp contrast to the design of the film, which takes a childish delight in all things magical and wondrous and beautiful. The result is a film that is tonally all over the place, sparse on laughs and awkward in its romance. A tremendous waste of a beautiful production and yet another disappointment from the man who gave us one of the best films of the last decade. 

MIRROR MIRROR is on release everywhere except Japan where it opens on September 14th.

iPad Round-Up 5 - IMMORTALS

Tarsem Singh's last film, the visually stunning, whimsical, deeply emotionally affecting THE FALL, is one of my favourite films of the past decade. In my mind's eye I can see vivid imagery - breathtakingly framed action sequences, wondrous costumes and locations - but I can also feel how heartbroken I was in a pivotal scene where a sweet little girl is bertrayed by the injured man she is trying to help.  It's a movie that has so much heart - such a simple story, when all is said and done - that it compensates for the distancing effect of the highly-stylised visuals and the baroque story-telling style.

Tragically, IMMORTALS is a movie in which there is style, too much style, too many artfully staged, framed and HD-colour-timed visuals, and too little narrative or emotional clarity.  The resulting film is dull (literally - not sure what was up with my iPad download but it was so dark in places I could barely see the action) and then simply unwatchable.  In theory, the movie is about the Greek myth of Perseus, the Clash of the Titans, and the Minotaur.  I studied these myths in school in depth.  But even I didn't have a clue what was happening, or care why.  The actors do the best they can, I suppose, but they're swamped by the visual effects and no-one comes out of it with any credit.  I also suspect that Mickey Rourke, as Hyperion, was simply mis-cast.

Avoid at all costs.  

IMMORTALS was released in November 2011. It is available to rent and own.