First Take | When screen heroes resort to extreme steps for justice

I had no idea Costa Rica had a film industry. Or maybe they did, we just don’t know about it. Clara Sola the Costa Rican entry to the Oscars in 2021, is a fabulous introduction to a part of the world where mystique and mojo, purity and puerility go hand in hand.

There is something very disturbing about the quietude that shrouds the film’s middle-aged heroine Clara, played by Wendy Chinchilla Araya.

Wendy, I came to know, is a recognized dancer. That explains why and shows she plays this graceless character with such grace. There is a compelling quality to Clara’s clumsiness. She moves like a marionette, she communicates with animals and insects on first-name terms specially a white horse on her mother’s farm named Yuca who is almost like Clara’s soul mate.

She shuffles uneasily on human contact and blossoms under the gaze of the sky. She is a night creature prowling howling and protesting when human beings try to make her do the things she abhors, like playing the spiritual healer of her village, remaining anointed as the Virgin Mary’s emissary which means Clara’s sexual appetite must be curbed, even if it means that her mother must dip her finger in red chillies.

It is a chilling portrait of isolation and longing rendered lyrical by Sophie Winqvist Loggins’ cinematography which remarkably captures the sights and smells of the forest. As Clara wanders in the wilderness. Nature is a muted witness to her restlessness, never intimidating.

In the way the actress Wendy Chinchilla Araya connects with Nature, I was reminded of Shabana Azmi in Aparna Sen’s Sati. There is a frightening primeval look in Clara’s eyes. It is the look of a woman on the brink of disintegration, when suddenly a handsome farmhand arrives.

Santiago (Daniel Castañeda Rincón) is exceptionally empathetic, a man any woman would want for her own.When Clara who is as primeval as a woman (or man) can get, suddenly drips menstrual blood, Santiago whips out his handkerchief and gives it to Clara, and carries her slippers as she hobbles ahead. When she offers herself to him on a platter, Santiago firmly but kindly refuses. This is not a woman meant for a tumble in the hay.

So what is Clara meant for? A tumble in the hay, a sexual experience before it is too late seems top priority on her wishlist.

This is a story of a primeval woman who is told she is not meant for basic earthly pleasures. But she wants exactly those. She wants a pretty blues dress and a dance with a man, just like her pretty cousin Maria. The pulls and pressures of a life torn between the spiritual and the carnal are extraordinary in this gentle evocative ode to D H Lawrence’s Lady’s Chatterly’s Lover and Stephen King’s Carrie.

Clara Sola is deeply layered and its core is not easy to reach. On the surface it is a quiet, restrained, easygoing drama about a Cinderella whose Prince Charming thinks she is meant for a higher life. Hell, Clara could do with some serious sex right here right now, right under the wide-open blue sky.

Clara has a secret name for everybody and everything. I have one for this film: a gem.

Sometimes the screen hero has to do what he or she has to do, no matter what the repercussions. When all fails. A society on the verge of collapse needs a jolting wake-up call. Dijo Jose Antony’s Jana Gana Mana (in Malayalam) is that nasty wake-up call that cinema was invented to provide but seldom does. Writer Sharis Mohammed dares to address the ‘otherization’ of Muslims by fringe sections of the right-wingers.

But halfway through the film changes it mind and trains its guns on the very smothered community it wants to speak up for. It starts with a Muslim academician Saba Mariam (played rather ornately by Mamta Mohandas) being brutally murdered and burnt to death. A politician at a condolence meeting in the tense college campus speaks of the victim being ‘one of those’ etc.

Hold on, this is getting serious. A cop Sajjan Kumar (played by the brilliant Suraj Venjaramoodu ) is brought in to deal with the volatile situation . He decides to fight for justice for the slain activist professor in a college that looks like JNU from afar.

So far, so strong, I thought. But then the plot takes a U-turn and a rather clumsy one at that. Suddenly this is no longer the hard-hitting political statement that it had set out to be. The screenplay now turns into a full-on screamplay, a kind of eclectic hectic impromptu whodunnit with characters shedding their masks as though the pandemic had just decided to retire.

Seldom have I seen a polarized plot. The two halves display a split personality, with the second half systematically though not effectually demolishing all the Islamophobic arguments of the pre-interval portion by turning the pretty professor’s murder into a vendetta story.

As Prithviraj steps stylishly with a chic limp into the puddle of the plot, the narrative heaves sighs groans and lurches into a full-on commercial mode, rendering the narrative’s earlier, far more controlled half, null and void.

So what do we make of this schizophrenic film? It generates excruciating tension, to begin with, it tells us that Islamophobia exists and then it tells us to relax, it’s a political game. No, not even that. One villain-politician the home minister (played by G M Sundar) who is to this millennium what Sadashiv Amrapurkar was in Govind Nihalani ’s Ardh Satya during the last millennium. Get rid of scummy politicians and all will be well in the world.

Prithviraj’s motives for exposing the politician in the countroom are rendered muddled by some haphazard quick-editing. Maybe the makers plan to give us a more coherent account of what really happened to this discernibly wounded character in Part 2.

Yes, there is a Jana Gana Mana sequel which, for all the faults of a fractured narrative in the first part, I am really looking forward to. Jana Gana Mana is more admirable for what it attempts to say rather than what it finally puts on screen.

There are some embarrassing performances in a film that ought to have been more quality conscious. But Suraj Venjaramoodu in the first-half and Prithviraj in the second are in fine form. They remind us of the virtues of a patriarchal cinema; even in a film that raises its voice against injustice to women, it’s the men who do the heavy lifting.

In Caroline Vignal’s eccentrically titled My Donkey My Lover & I, Antoinette Lapouge is the kind of clumsy, tactless heroine whom the French like to put in uncomfortable situations. She is prone to fits of mortifying impulsiveness. And in the oddly entitled My Donkey, My Lover & I—no, they aren’t calling the lover a donkey, there is actually a donkey playing one of the main characters—when we first meet Antoinette she is making out with one of her kindergarten student’s father in the classroom. If you think that’s as inappropriate as her conduct is going to get, you are wrong. It gets worse and worse. Her lover Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe) is a much-married man with a wife and a daughter whom he takes on a vacation at a scenic resort known for its donkey trekking. In a face-palm action of desperation, Antoinette follows her lover to family holiday. What follows could have all been very predictable and horny. Horny, it is. Once at the holiday resort Antoinette makes out with her lover right under his family’s nose. She is disgusting in her carnal urgency, pathetic in her futile efforts to win him back and embarrassing in her intrusions into her lover’s family vacation.

Miraculously the film allows Antoinette’s clouded judgement to remain untouched by extraneous intervention. It is as though she is the master of her own destiny, no matter how twisted. In the hot pursuit of her two-timing lover, the plot is often prone to bouts of moving introspection, lighting up Antoinette’s trekking time with tons talk time with her stubborn donkey. My Donkey My Lover & I delivers the expected, though in unexpected ways. It is spiked and smooth simultaneously. While Antoinette thinks (pretends?) nobody can see her adulterous moves she is also a very self-aware evolved human being who knows the mess she has gotten herself into. In the end her friendship with her travelling -companion donkey seems not only pre-destined but also moving. Laure Calamy (already a star in Call Me Your Agent) provides her character with a rare empathy.No matter how goofy her moves Antoinette never appears undignified. She may be in a situation that most educationists wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy. But Antoinette knows how to make lemonade when life serves her lemons. Her confrontations with her lover’s sensible sharp practical wife (Olivia Cote) make Antoinette look misbegotten. But her mistakes are hers to make. She never disowns them. Even in her worst moments, Antoinette is self-aware. Having a donkey for company needn’t be an exercise in stupidity. What if the donkey is far more intelligent and sensible than the human it must bear?

Such are the questions that weave in and out of this typically French film which tells us that screen heroes can be as obstinate as they come. That’s what makes them heroes sometimes.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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