Reviews

I've just moved to Bangladesh for work and thought that one way of learning about the place is to watch some films made here. This is the first one I've seen, chosen almost at random at a local DVD shop. It's set in a rural area at an unspecified time and focuses on a varied set of characters. Montu is a young bachelor and he starts to fall in love with Tuni. She also falls for him but she is already married - to an old man who has two other wives! That's the basic story but the film shows many other characters and situations. There is another woman who also falls for Montu (lucky guy), there's an evil wife-beater, a daughter who doesn't want to get married, and various other characters in the village.

Despite the title (in English, 'Symphony of Agony') it's not all grim. There are funny scenes, songs, and some nice scenery. But there is a fair amount of thwarted love, desperation, and a cholera-outbreak.

The film is very slowly paced. This will be frustrating if you're used to the frenetic pace of most modern films but if you accept that the film wants to tell its story slowly then you'll get a lot more enjoyment from it. The acting is generally fine and the direction is good but the scenes are sometimes stilted. The film is episodic in structure so you can enjoy parts even if others make no sense; it's not always clear what is going on, and why characters are doing what they do.

There's also an interesting framing device, whereby the story of the film is told by a singer who is telling it by song to some village people, and then something curious happens at the end - but I'm not spoiling it!

Recommended.

Five short films joined together. I guess they're all about Love and Anger but then just about any story could fit that vagueness.

'Indifference' by Lizzani shows people being indifferent to a woman being attacked, homeless people, and some car-crash victims. It has an unsatisfactory ending. Was probably pretty topical at the time - a woman called of Kitty Genovese was killed in New York in 1964 while others looked on.

'Agony' by Bertolucci is awful - just a bunch of people in a room dancing around and occasionally making cryptic statements. I strongly recommend you fast-forward this one and stop it only if you seem some interesting images. At this point in watching the film I started to get worried: pseudo-intellectual artsy stuff. And we hadn't even got to the Jean-Luc Godard segment yet.

'Sequence of the Paper Flower' by Pasolini shows an idiot wandering the streets of an Italian city (Rome?) and chatting to people. Double-exposed over him are shots of war and politicians so this is probably trying to say something deep but it wasn't clear to me what.

'L'Amore' by Godard is actually pretty good! Witty dialogue between a couple talking about another couple in a film, along with some striking images. This one warrants a second viewing.

'Talk, Talk' by Bellocchio and Tattoli is also good, showing a group of students acting out a protest against university establishment. In May '68 there were many student takeovers of universities in France and around the world so this was pretty topical. The arguments are great, tackling whether to reform the system from within or to strike at it from without. My guess is that the title implies that students were engaging in too much talk and not enough action.

So only two of the five films work but at least all the films try to say something interesting which is more than most films today do.

The film looks fine - it has decent cinematography and period detail - but it completely lacks any interesting characterisations or subtlety of plot. All we get is relenting grimness. Of course, that is to be expected in a film on this subject, but the grimness should be seen through the eyes of some characters we can identify with. Part of the film is from the point of view of a reluctant Japanese soldier which could've been interesting, but the idea is not developed and we just see more of the horror that the Chinese endured. The film seems to me to be a good illustration of the Hollywoodisation of world cinema. Instead of any interesting stories, ideas, or characters, we get pseudo-artsy photography, slow-motion sequences, sombre syrupy music, and over-emoting actors.