The best films from the Mumbai Film Festival: Court, Mommy, Boyhood and more

By Deepanjana Pal and Mihir Fadnavis

The 16th Mumbai Film Festival comes to a close today. For festival regulars, it’s been seven days of shuttling between theatres, eating entirely too much multiplex food, arguing with strangers about the merits or demerits of Jean-Luc Godard and Lars von Trier’s films, braving queues that turned into human battering rams and, of course, watching movies.

Here are our favourites from this year’s MFF line-up. There’s just one film that appears in both lists, which goes to show that there was a fair range of films on display and that the likelihood of Deepanjana Pal and Mihir Fadnavis being of the same opinion remains low.

Deepanjana Pal:

COURT

A folk singer who sings about social ills is charged with abetting the alleged suicide of a BMC worker and thrown into judicial custody. What follows is a acidic satire that shows the absurdity of the Indian legal system and society’s callousness with elegant savagery. Court manages to talk about everything from the need for judicial reform to freedom of expression without ever turning preachy or becoming self-indulgent. The cast is made up of theatre actors and non-actors who comfortably slip between Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English. Frequently hilarious, rich with despair and riddled with bitterness, Court is a magnificent debut and it’s easy to see why it’s won so much acclaim at places like the Venice Film Festival. This is director and writer Chaitanya Tamhane’s first film.

MOMMY

When a 25-year-old filmmaker wins the top honours at Cannes Film Festival, you know that this is a film that will either make you roll your eyes or leave you seriously impressed. Xavier Dolan’s award-winning film Mommy is about Ann, a troubled, single mother who must raise her equally troubled and occasionally violent son, Steve. She finds help unexpectedly from her mysterious neighbour, Kyla. There’s a little bit of the sexual tension and chemistry that would give Freud triumphant goosebumps, but more than those provocative details, what stays with you is how Dolan is able to find beauty and joy in the mundane. And who knew something as stodgy as aspect ratio — the shape of the frame that you see on screen — could be used so cleverly? Mommy will leave your heart broken, but singing.

COMING HOME

No martial arts or fluttering fabric this time from the man who brought us films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Director Zhang Yimou turns his attention away from wuxia and settles into modern China. His hero is a professor who is arrested and sent to a labour camp during China’s Cultural Revolution. After the revolution, when he returns home from a labour camp, he is reunited with his wife and daughter after 20 years, but nothing is as he thought it would be. His wife has amnesia, cannot recognise him and is haunted by traumatic memories of the past that she struggles to suppress. Their daughter has had to give up her artistic dreams and is a factory worker. See Coming Home as a film about a family, and it’s a sentimental little story. Read it as an allegory for modern China, and it becomes a powerful and moving statement about freedom, history and art.

RED ARMY

Had either Sony Pictures or MFF bothered with checking if the Russian parts of this fantastic documentary were subtitled, Red Army would have been higher in my list. However, to not have subtitles for about 40% of the film and depriving the audience of knowing what interviewees like a retired KGB agent said, is unforgivable. Gabe Polsky’s documentary about the legendary Red Army ice hockey team of Soviet Russia. Following the story of its legendary player and captain, Slava Fetisov, Polsky presents a fascinating look at how sport embodied the differing philosophies of Soviet Russia and the West during the 1980s and 1990s. The director also makes very clever use of himself in the documentary. He’s the one listening to Fetisov’s stories but fortunately for the audience, he doesn’t believe everything Fetisov says and Polsky makes this clear subtly but unmistakably.

BOYHOOD

Richard Linklater’s new film got everyone talking because it was shot over 12 years, using the same actors. The idea of taking a little boy and letting him grow into the role of a young man is perhaps the most gentle example of a radical act, but that’s Boyhood for you. Ellar Coltrane is not a particularly good actor, but surrounded by the likes of Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, who play Coltrane’s divorced parents in the film, Boyhood ends up to be an elegant look at 21st century Americana. Coltrane plays Mason, who lives with his mother and sister and is visited occasionally by his father. As his mother moves around Texas, bouncing from home to home and husband to husband, Mason and his sister do what everyone does: they grow up. There’s nothing dramatic in their lives. They’re regular, normal kids who grow up to be regular, normal teenagers. In the process, Linklater cleverly shows us how norms have changed and how the notion of what is acceptable and expected has mutated over the past decade.

Mihir Fadnavis:

SCHIMBARE

What would you do if your loved one were terminally ill? How far would you go to save her? Would you take the life of someone else to save her’s? How noble would that be? These questions are explored to brutal levels in Alex Sampayo’s Spanish drama thriller, Schimbare. Through the eyes of a truly desperate couple (superbly played by Candela Pena and Luis Zahera) we’re taken on an existential dilemma wrought with manic depression, blood, murder, illegal organ transplants and kidnapping. Not for the faint hearted, but certainly a feast for hard-boiled film buffs.

BARF

With great performances, seriously terrific writing and direction, Mehdi Rahmani’s Barf is yet another Iranian drama that occupies a place in the pantheon of the country’s cinema output. It’s is a very Asghar Farhadi-esque movie, both visually and the way a domestic mystery slowly unravels over the course of a family breaking down. The film explores the issue of abandonment and the need to get away from problems instead of facing them. The dialogue is crackerjack, veering from laugh-out-loud comedy to bitterness, and the characters exude sympathy despite being responsible for destroying everyone else’s lives – it’s a testament to Rahmani’s sensitive direction.

KILLA

A stunningly assured directorial debut from cinematographer Avinash Arun, Killa captures nostalgia, childhood, parenthood, loss, friendship, school all in gorgeous detail. Never before has an Indian film about a bunch of kids been so immersive. The film features terrific performances from Archit Deodhar as a child trying to cope with constant change and Amruta Subhash as his single mother. The cherry on top is the background score by Naren Chandavarkar.

MOMMY

At the grand old age of 25, Xavier Dolan continues to demonstrate why he’s one of the most talked about filmmakers of our generation. Chronicling the dynamics between a single mother and her emotionally unstable son, Mommy hits hard, right in the feels. It also somehow manages to seamlessly make you laugh and then cry uncontrollably, then laugh again; all in less than two minutes. Dolan uses a unique visual technique of 1:1 aspect ratio to portray anger, depression and happiness from the POV of the protagonist. The sequence featuring the Oasis song “Wonderwall”, where the kid literally breaks free from gloom, has got to be the cinematic moment of the year.

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

The most audacious film to play at the fest, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film about a lonely vampire girl is pure cinematic bliss. It’s shot in dreamy black and white and laced with terrific electronic music, and is by far the most stylish, gorgeous, eye popping movie you’ll see this year. The film mashes together horror, social commentary, romance, Western and noir – it’s unlike any vampire movie you’ve seen before. Not to mention the fact that the film features a lot of drugs, nudity, sex - elements completely alien or absent in Iranian cinema. It’s essentially Amirpour showing the finger to the industry in her home country.

Honorable mentions:

Two Days, One Night – The Dardenne brothers’ long single takes take us through Marion Cotillard’s fine performance as a working class mother trying to get her job back.

Black Coal Thin Ice – Diao Yian’s Chinese drama thriller is an indulgent deconstruction of a murder mystery.

Party Girl – a wonderfully ‘meta’ film that makes a bold statement on choices in life and dysfunctional behaviour.