Reviews

It is a film that makes you feel and understand loneliness in its truest form. I cannot speak more here without spoiling it. But it is a deep film, makes you think about your feelings. After viewing it almost halfway, the film started to unfold before my eyes. And now that I have completed the first view, ranked it here -- I am now going to watch it again. This is going to be a view with preparations -- I know how much to register read and grasp the details -- and then crosscheck them with my own comparable feelings. And maybe with so many things that I have read and heard about how these things really are. And with all my thoughts all my life about how they are or how they should be. We explore to understand them with science, mythology, beliefs and all, but nothing explains. At best it can be a conjecture.

This film is too a conjecture like that, but a very sensitive artistic conjecture. It really makes you feel and think.

" ... it seems like watching a portrait of timeless death and loneliness ... " -- this is from a comment of mine on this film on another webpage. At the start the whole approach is too scattered and seemingly without a focus. But that documentary-fiction kind of take of the film had a pull all through. After some twenty+ minutes it gradually became intense -- and finally all the pieces got together to create a very sad and lonely film about a dying village and the old people of the village going on living repetitively their celebrations that were more sad than sadness -- the repeating motifs of old age, sex, drug and everything portrayed only one thing -- that is loneliness. And what a take it was, so distant, dis-attached and aloof, yet intensely observant. It never romanticized, only depicted. That made it more ruthless. The violation of the woman -- alone and naked in the middle of nowhere, never spent a single second more than needed. And long shot became so very powerful all through. Very nice and touching film, I would say.

Sonbahar represents a realm that metaphorically speaking belongs to silence. Yousuf seems to have that depth with which he can journey from speech to whisper to silence.This film took sadness to a height what I have rarely witnessed in films. The Russian hooker, who is a very young mother too, says to Yousuf, "You know, you seem like you don't live in the present. ... It's like you've walked off the pages of a Russian novel." Exactly that is the point. Everything is past for Yousuf -- even his sadness too -- which is now blank because, as Michail says, everything has gone -- even socialism. Now their girls become hookers. Yousuf remains in the past, he is past everything -- even pains and all. The young boy whom he tries to teach rejects him too. All the memories of university jail and all come like scattered pictures. And that exactly is the depth of blankness depicted in this film. The sad hooker goes away. Only waves rise and fall -- rise and fall -- and everything ends with a death -- a procession of death walking through the valleys. And one thing to say, the eaarlier review by 'eray-basma' mentioned that Sonbahar tries to be like Tarkovsky. I do not know why she/he said it. But, on my part I can say, for more than the last four decades Tarkovsky is like a god to me, both Tarkovsky and his poet father are like a milestone to me in human culture. But not a single time I remembered him during the movie. When it is only sadness and sadness -- the sadness becomes blank and all pervading. Sonbahar is that. Salute to the director.

This is a brilliant film. I never even heard the name of the film, and so I was really startled, once I started watching it. For me it never became a 'home-coming' film as some people have commented on these user pages. All through this film meant a coming back to one's self. If Modi & Co had not made any reference to Old Hindu Scriptures equally vulgar, I would like to say, it seemed like the 'know thyself' journey as in Upanishad. After the film ended, I discovered that I was too trying to answer that extremely difficult question of the child -- why their own festivals are not mentioned there in their own books. The brilliance of the film resided in its not being judgmental -- not for a single moment, anywhere in the film. In Tashi's trying to know his 'self' he allowed both himself and us in knowing the reality -- not passing judgments about anything. (If any of you know anything about the director, I would really like to know, please post it here.)

Amenabar in The Others was a gem. With that expectation I watched this. And what I got was a lot of promises, showing the signs that this person will, after some time make a great movie, but not a great movie itself. It has quite a lot of those youth eccentricities, starting from the incident of Castro as the name of the teacher, and in reality there in the Academy a teacher having that name, the very youthful tendency of talking in multiple removes, starting from the very concept of the circular structure, a film about gore around 'snuff' films being made in a 'mass communication' academy, that is, a film study center. Continuously the 'mass communication' thing cross reference is there. Quite a lot of them are very witty, like, the list of camera buyers including the name of the director, and interplay of happenings between TV and film, and many more. But, after all, they have that 'terrible infant' effect, while I was expecting the mature master touch of 'The Others'. Quite a lot of the thrill thing was technical thrill, not a product of internal tension. Anyway, a good film, and showing the making of a talent.

I first saw Bhumika when I was in my college. Now, last week I saw it again from a DVD. And the movie actually is haunting me still. This is not about Usha, not about just the 'Role-playing' (like say, the Gita motif is going to hit you hard: that this reality is nothing but a show, where everyone is just going to play on and on and on everyone's role), it is a movie, that most probably went beyond what Benegal wanted it to be. It is extremely dense, multilayered in its depiction and enactment of coloniality. The colonial subject, Usha, suffering from the colonial lack of self-esteem goes on trying to discover and rediscover herself, only entangling herself into a new layer of coloniality. Why I am calling it 'colonial'? Just see the movie to understand it. Only a newer and more dense power can pluck her out of the older tangle. And that is just a new drama where she plays a new role. Nothing else. And some unfathomable depth and sublimity has come into the film, that is always beyond the conscious scheme of an artist. Great makers can wait for the moment of creation of a movie like that, but, one cannot ever know it before making a film like that.