Bourne vs Cercle Rouge

Sometimes you need to be told exactly why a particular book is great or a cricketer valuable. The same of course can be said of films, and in particular Le Cercle Rouge. Funnily enough, the opposite holds true about the other film I saw this week, The Bourne Identity. It seems that you sometimes need to be told why a film is not so good as well!


The Bourne Identity

An immensely entertaining film. The partner and I came away satisfied with promises that we'd be back for a second viewing. What I couldn't figure out however, was whether Ultimatum is a great film and if it really deserved all the critical acclaim it got. Rottentomatoes gave it a 93% freshness rating; which is, if you are a regular 'ttentomato', as close as it can get to a hundred percent. But on the other hand, this rating only reflects the popular verdict.

David Bordwell* offers a more nuanced view in his post Unsteadicam Chronicles. For those who don't know this - The Bourne Identity has been entirely shot by a camera called the Steadicam which doesn't require a tripod or stand. So when Jason Bourne runs, the cameraman - onto whom the camera is strapped to - runs behind him. When he jumps, the cameraman follows suit. What it yields is a wonderfully spontaneous effect because the viewer is right there with Bourne. At this point, let me quote Bordwell,

The handheld camera covers three mistakes: Bad acting, bad set design, and bad directing. It’s worth considering, as some of Ebert’s correspondents do, what Greengrass’s style may serve to camouflage.

Perhaps the non-stop action also hides loose plotting. Some questions worth considering, Why would the CIA set up office in a building so easily viewable from another building across the street? How does Bourne get into Noah Vosen's office? How does he steal the Top Secret file? (Fine he recorded the phone conversation, but how did he get over the thumb scanner problem?) So it turns out that the film is not perfect after all. But it sure razzle-dazzles you. And I would certainly watch it again if I got the time. In the meantime do read all three of David Bordwell's posts on the film, they touch on a number of issues, from the fight scenes to the way the film was shot, edited and scripted.

Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle)

This is a 1970 heist or gangster film by Jean Pierre Melville, of French New Wave repute. If The Bourne Ultimatum has in its entirety 3200 shots, making for an average of just 2 seconds per shot, then Le Cercle Rouge is the opposite. Shots are carefully & lovingly composed, they last several seconds, in some cases minutes as well. There's not much dialogue, which forces you to concentrate even more on the screen. The movie's also shot in a predominantly blue tone with large amounts of yellow as well, as you can see from the still here.



More stills can be found at Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind post from where I swiped this photo. Everything about this film is different from Bourne, even its 'freshness' in Rotten Tomatoes. Le Cercle Rouge manages the almost impossible 96% freshness rating.

For those whose secret wish is to have an all expenses paid stint at a film school, the Senses of cinema page on Melville's directorial style is very revealing. His characters, to quote from the write-up,

often appear trapped within a particular moral framework or aesthetic design

...which explains a lot. For instance it helps you understand why Corey is stoic, unassuming and honourable. Finally, why name the film Le Cercle Rouge? The Criterion Collection page takes a stab at explaining the symbolism in the film. Mighty interesting stuff. You wouldn't lose much by reading it. And yes, in case you're afraid I missed the whole point, the film was fun to watch! : )


* Was introduced to the fantastic David Bordwell by Jayaprakash.

Offsite blues

Green and verdant Punjab, where effective irrigation enriches land that's been described as a 'happy geographical accident' (5 rivers flow through the land) rolls by. But in this horror of a bus, there's not much time to appreciate that. The photo of the bus reveals benign interiors, but surely you know pictures can lie? During our journey one of its interior light panels fell off and as night approached the bus began to look like a seedy bar complete with yellow lighting, beer fumes, kebab smells and cigarette smoke.

Office offsites are supposed to help you slow down, consider your work and brainstorm. You're supposed to come up with bright ideas that will eventually help your company sell more ads at better rates. But I suspect our bosses had settled on slightly less ambitious goals - come back safely without killing each other, seems to have been the brief. And so it was that a motley bunch of political reporters, news features people, bureau reporters and cameramen began their journey from Delhi to a resort in the Shimla hills that nobody had heard of.

The music system in the bus - if it could be called that - was of stone age vintage. The kind that plays tapes with the volume fading up and down. Not that the selection on offer was exciting either. This should help you understand the kind of stuff we had to listen to, "Sab tho milake peethain hain, paani sharaab mein. Mein peegayaa jawani sharab mein." Anyway, our Sikkimese friend fiddled with the tape 'deck' and conjured up a servicable arrangement, consisting of a mic placed next to his Nokia phone on speaker mode. Thus were we treated to mono sound renditions of 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' (hah!) and other such classics.

The journey reminded me of Calvin & Hobbes and the trips Calvin's family takes for character-building. In the books its rainy and the fish aren't biting. Here the journey was uncomfortably long and nauseating. Several colleagues experienced catharsis in a plastic bag, if you know what I mean.

Koti resorts wouldn't set your pulses racing, but at least the rooms and toilets were clean, the water decently hot, the food strange but certainly not mouldy and the views excellent. We went on a really long, aimless walk that saw us shimmy up and down forested slopes and ended up on a golf course where we played cricket. (!!) Too tired to go back walking, some of us hailed a bus. Didn't know bus conductors could be courteous, but here apparently they are. That evening, the icing on the cake - the India-Australia Twenty20 semifinal in front of a bonfire.

What kind of people go on a three-day vacation and spend two of them travelling? I wouldn't want to explore that quesiton myself, simply because it could lead to disturbing conclusions about us, but no, the trip wasn't a dead loss. I got to know some of my colleagues, found out that the Patna correspondent really cannot function without three cell-phones and tasted single malt whiskey for the first time.

Too tired to attempt returning all the way by bus, we settled on the Shatabdi Express back to Delhi. It should have been a nice journey, with our sleepy heads nodding in unision to the rhythms of the train, but for some reason or the other some of us got into a version of the 'what ails India' discussion. The two loudest chaps were the pro-control leftist and the free-market liberal (that would be me) and I think we pretty much pissed people off in the train. While disembarking, a lady asked my colleague if we were wannabe journalists. It was that kind of trip.

In sight of Twenty20

This piece was cross-posted here.

Like most people I was ambivalent about Twenty20 cricket. Sure, the name was eye-catching (pun unintended) but it seemed like a distraction for a guy who was only beginning to appreciate the finer nuances of test cricket. Yes, I was happy that the format had re-ignited interest in England where cricket was dying a slow death, but if I ever thought about it all in the Indian context, it must have been only in passing.

Until a few months ago. Channel-surfing, I happened onto one of those anonymous recordings on a sports channel, a South Africa-Australia game (or was it?), in which something strange was happening on the field. The captain Graeme Smith seemed to be having a running conversation with the commentary box while fielding during the game, discussing tactics. At first I was puzzled; then it dawned on me. This was clearly some fun show, somewhat on the lines of Nokia Football Crazy. The realisation that it was in fact a Twenty20 international, with the whole Cronje-earpiece-given-a-delicious-twist was enough to make me fall off the proverbial chair.

Since then, all attempts to catch it live on TV have come to nought. I even missed India's lone match during the South Africa tour last year. But like many of you, I'm happy to be carried off in this cloud of hype (happily there has been little, given India's show during the other World Cup) and I've made up my mind to make an offering of the next few evenings to the sport.

Knowing nothing about the experience of watching this format, I thought I might as well go back to the past when ODIs, or Limited Overs cricket as it was called then, had knocked on the doors of test cricket. It was with much amusement that I discovered a certain Geoff Boycott had faced the very first ball in the very first one-dayer in 1971. And dipping into the Wisden Anthology offered what could be seen as a parallel comment. Don Bradman, writing in the 1986 Wisden Almanac said of ODIs,

...the Achilles' heel of the limited overs match, [is] namely the premium placed on defensive bowling and negative and defensive field-placing...But let me turn to the good thing about one-day cricket. It rids the game of the unutterable bore who thinks occupancy of the crease and his own personal aggrandisement are all that matter. It demands fieldsmen of great speed and agility with good throwing arm...

In contrast to what many stone-faced pundits predicted, one-day cricket revitalised tests and I'm hopeful that Twenty20 will do some good for this game we love so much. But lets for the moment leave the last word to Sambit Bal who looks at all angles in this excellent piece,

...For the true lover of the game, Twenty20 deviates from cricket's central, most appealing qualities: the length, the leisurely pace, the turns in the plot, the contest between bat and the ball, and the individual contests within the team game.

Kapuscinski: a window to the world

It's probably happened to you before. You hear of someone famous for the very first time, and suddenly you begin to see his name cropping up in the oddest places - conversations, newspapers and TV - in the next few days.

I first came across this strange sounding fella Ryszard Kapuscinski, in The Granta Book of Reportage. The very first piece in the book, The Soccer War is by this Polish journalist. This short war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, reportedly sparked off by a football match defeat during the 1970 World Cup qualifiers, is described vividly and concisely by Kapuscinski. I was hooked at once.

A few days later I ran into him in A Mighty Heart (the brave life and death of my husband Daniel Pearl). In it, Daniel Pearl gifts Shah of Shahs by Kapuscinski to Mariane Pearl while he's courting her.

Now I see that Travels with Herodotus, his memoir is available in bookstores. The premise of the book is tantalizing - Kapuscinski's wanderings from an early age across the world as a journalist, segueing into thoughts on Herodotus, one of his heroes.

Thanks to a self-induced embargo on buying any more books till October-end, I won't be able to lay my hands on it. Any rich uncles out there?

P.S. Kapuscinski, the internet tells me, was a favourite for the Nobel prize for Literature a few times, but never received it. He died early this year and has a devoted following around the world. He wrote in Polish, but his crisp writing shines through even in translations.