THRONE OF DEATH (Murali Nair, 1999)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

One of the most brilliant satirical films in recent memory, Marana Simhasanam, from Kerala, India, in the Malayalam language, is Murali Nair’s first feature. It won Nair the Caméra d’Or at Cannes.
     Along with his wife, Krishnan has one more day of seasonal low-caste/subsistent-pay employment to go. The film opens with him in the throes of hard physical labor; when he takes a cigarette break, no one will doubt he has earned it—and thus he ekes out the extra day. Years of hard work and deprivation have made the couple look prematurely old, and the introduction of a young boy as their son comes as a shock.
     “How long can we starve?” his wife asks Krishnan. That night, Krishnan attempts to divest the landowner’s tree of some coconuts, but his timing couldn’t be worse. Somehow, miraculously, perhaps by dint of higher caste, the landowner knows what Krishnan is up to beforehand; as he reaches for a coconut, there comes the posse already, by water, to apprehend Krishnan. Also, it is election season, and poor Krishnan becomes everyone’s pawn as candidates and supporters eke out what electoral advantage they can. The party in power adds an unsolved murder to Krishnan’s criminal résumé, while a Communist opponent goes on a hunger strike on Krishnan’s behalf so that Krishnan, rather than being hanged, can experience the “blissful death” delivered by the U.S.-invented “electronic chair” whose widespread distribution the World Bank is planning to underwrite! The end of the hunger strike and Krishnan’s execution each prompts a public event, with fanfare and grandstanding speeches. At the former, amongst a flurry of faux-documentary interviews, a villager says: “While I’m sorry he is going to die, I am happy that Krishnan’s death will be blissful.”
     Media influence!
     Grim, hilarious.

SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 2002)

The 1948 version of Xiao cheng zhi chun, directed by Fei Mu, was adjudged at the 2005 Hong Kong Awards to be the greatest Chinese film ever made. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s recent remake had partly inspired a reconsideration of the original—a film that is brilliant, stunning, unshakable.
     For me, it is Tian himself who has made the greatest Chinese film, Horse Thief (1986), and his The Blue Kite (1993) is also an estimable work. However, his Springtime in a Small Town, because it is a remake, is almost inevitably inferior to the original.
     Fei’s film is much more stark, distanced (hence, intellectually engaging), revelatory of hidden human emotions, compelling. Tian’s version, on the other hand, is more languorous and lyrical in its lonely longings (nearly Wong Kar-Wai-ish, in fact), more tediously obvious, safer, prettier. It is more luxuriant; it doesn’t bear the same strong sense of war’s damage. Tian perhaps meant to hide the melodramatic nature of the material, to aim for something finer and artier. As a result, he has made a selfconsciously great movie, while Fei made an actually great movie.
     Still, Tian’s version is a good film. Perhaps the key to understanding its necessity, from Tian’s point of view, is its camera style: the slow pans, slow trackings, appealing long-shots, shots that glimpse its characters through trees and elaborate lattice windows. This style suggests that Tian is traveling back through the past, undoing the distance between the present and the postwar time in which Fei’s film is set, before the Cultural Revolution. Symbolically, Tian means wishfully to erase the Cultural Revolution.
     The actors in this version closely resemble the actors in the original, but are more glamorous: ironically, a sign of the decadence with which the Communists charged Fei!

OKRAINA (Boris Barnet, 1933)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

In “the backwaters of tsarist Russia,” life exists at a sleepy remove: ducks feed in murkily reflective water; a man dozes in his spindly coach as his horse shakes its head, the epithet “Good God!” seemingly coming from it, but as likely coming from its come-to offscreen master; a smiling girl, alone on a bench, noting couples—and an alternate possibility of her future: an unhappy unattached woman. From the outdoor leisure of strolling couples, the camera cuts to a shoemaking workshop: an unseen woman’s foot is measured; the sounds and sights of speedy mass labor. Thus begins Boris Barnet’s inventive, comical Okraina (literally, Outskirts, a.k.a. Patriots), an early Soviet sound film, and a brilliant antiwar film.
     Two things rouse the town: a factory strike, compelling the cobblers to stop cobbling and join their comrades in solidarity; German invasion and war. The latter is a touchstone of the plot regarding the girl on the bench and her father, one of whose tenants is a German friend with whom he plays checkers. War sets them to bickering, the tenant moves out and they are friends no longer. Later, the daughter becomes infatuated with a German prisoner-of-war, stealing him into the boarding house before, roused from sleep, her father tosses him out. The boy, the one shoemaker in town willing (and eager) to work, is beaten up by folk, as though the town were the front. Meanwhile, the scenes at the front are trenchant, disclosing the horror of war. An extreme long-shot of one surrenderer and a man from the other side coming peaceably together, each followed by a flurry of soldiers, is surpassingly moving, as is the weary march of prisoners-of-war into town. Gorgeous lyrical inserts of Nature mark the 1917 revolution. Tsarist Russia is no more.