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.

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.

THE FALL - visually stunning but, more importantly, heart-breaking

THE FALL is a stunningly beautiful, imaginative, heart-rending film that passed in a flash and made me cry. I can't wait to watch it again: I haven't been this excited about a film since PAN'S LABRYNTH. Having said that, I should fairly warn the prospective viewer that THE FALL is an alpha-gamma film. It has attracted the ire of the pragmatic film critics. They have called it indulgent, a vanity project, all style and no substance, and a colossal waste of money. Presumably these people would rather watch tightly scripted genre films that do what they say on the tin, but not a millimetre more.

THE FALL follows in the tradition of films like THE WIZARD OF OZ, PAN'S LABRYNTH or even THE USUAL SUSPECTS - in which a narrator tells a story that is influenced by prosaic details of everyday life. Writer-director Tarsem carefully weaves the two together and the conceit works perfectly. He also ties in a commentary on the nature of film and film-viewing. The little girl at the heart of the story - Alexandria - is always playing with optical illusions - shadow figures and images projected in sunlight. She understands in an intuitive way that cinema, and story-telling, is all smoke and mirrors. She also understands that stories belong to the people who listen to them - and that the good storyteller will bend his story to take into account the audiences' emotions. (To that end, it is ironic that negative reviews have accused Tarsem of doing just the opposite - bludgeoning them with his obscure and superficial vision.)

Anyways, let's get to the heart of the matter. THE FALL is set in a Catholic hospital in 1915 Los Angeles. Roy is a broken-hearted, suicidal stuntman who has shattered his legs in a stunt designed to impress his then-girlfriend. Alexandria is a precocious Romanian girl with a broken arm, who isn't above spinning a tale or too to stay in hospital longer and hear the end of the story that Roy is telling her. Roy and Alexandria immediately hit it off. He is amused by her straightforward, literal response to his story and welcomes her attentions. She is charmed by his tale of bandits, kidnapped princesses and wondrous palaces. (And it is wondrous. Costumes, locations, staging - all staggeringly wonderful and evocative - particularly scenes filmed in Rajasthan.) But Roy is also baiting Alexandra with promises of further installments so that she'll steal the morphine tablets he needs to commit suicide.

What I love about THE FALL is that there is no easy resolution. Roy's soul isn't saved by Alexandria in a flash. In fact, he is capable of being cruel and unsympathetic - killing off characters and forcing his bleak view of human nature onto her. There is a resolution of a sort, but we are under no illusion that Roy is a deeply damaged person. Moreover, Alexandria is not a simple innocent child. She has seen her father killed by thieves who burned down their house. And she is a child-labourer picking oranges for a living. She is capable of conjuring up brutal images herself. The difference is that she still has hope.

THE FALL is a beautiful film but it is more than that. It's an intelligent commentary on what stories and movies do and how they change in the telling. But most of all, and counter to the harsher reviews, it has heart. This is down to some effective writing, but most of all to a pair of great performances from Lee Pace (PUSHING DAISIES) and new-comer Caterina Untaru. They have real chemistry - you completely believe that they are friends - that his heart is broken - and that she would do anything for him, even when he is trying to break her heart.

THE FALL played Toronto 2006 and Berlin 2007. It was released earlier this year in Russia and the USA and is currently on release in Japan, Thailand and the UK. THE FALL is available on Region 1 DVD.