ZAKHM (Mahesh Bhatt, 1998)

Zakhm—English translation: Wound—plays off the connection between mother and motherland. From India, it is set against the 1993 communal riots in Mumbai (Bombay) that had been triggered by the December 1992 demolition of the Babri Mosque. The city has become a battle zone for opposing Hindus and Muslims, and Sonia, despite music director Ajay’s protests, wants to leave for England to have their baby in peace and safety. They are in the midst of quarreling over the matter when Ajay learns that his mother is stranded at church, where she routinely goes to pray. (“Church,” as in Catholic church.) Proceeding through a burning patch to bring his mother home, Ajay learns that she was taken to Holy Family Hospital, where he finds her holding onto life by her fingertips—literally, writer-director Mahesh Bhatt shows only an agonizing flexing hand—with 80% of her body burned. It turns out that Mrs. Desai isn’t a Christian at all but a Muslim, whose union with Ajay’s father was possible only by such pretense. Now her dying wish is for a Muslim burial, despite fundamentalist pressure on Ajay to opt for a Hindu burial, so that (by freely acknowledging her faith) she can rejoin the spirit of the love of her life, Ajay’s late father.
     Simpering and ethereal, this film schematizes serious religious conflict. Also, the production is inflated. Bhatt has dedicated Zakhm to the memory of his own mother.
     Okay, though, are flashbacks—a convergence of Mrs. Desai’s and Ajay’s—to the time when the mother, considered a “concubine,” was raising young Ajay. Of fleeting interest, too, is Ajay’s brother’s involvement in a right-wing organization of militant Hindu extremists. However, this is too silly and laughable a film to be worth a look, let alone a thought.

AMADA (Humberto Solás, 1983)

Beloved, one of cinema’s great love stories about thwarted passion, is a visual feast served up by legendary Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás—some sources cite co-scenarist Nelson Rodríguez as co-director, some do not—and exquisite color cinematographer Livio Delgado and composer Leo Brouwer, the main theme of whose score sweeps one up in its gigantic mood of melancholy. Conjuring memory, its echoes of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), from Giorgio Bassani’s autobiographical novel, and even a bit of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), from Tarkington, suit its historical location between Cuba’s War of Independence from Spain and the Castro Revolution. It begins in 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, which drove up the price of sugar, Cuba’s signature export; the previous year saw the election of President Mario García Menocal, who favored both corporate business and Cuba-U.S. ties to the needs of ordinary Cubans and ran a deeply corrupt administration. Solás’s focus is an aristocratic family, the Villalosas, whose wealth derives from past slave-trading. Amada’s unfaithful spouse, Dionisio, uses her prestigious family to pursue political ambitions. Amada falls in love with her young cousin, journalist Marcial, who at first resists forsaking his revolutionary principles and running off with her, and later, when he capitulates, because he is in love with her, finds her unwilling, or unable, to do this. The beating that Dionisio gives Amada exposes his double standard when it comes to adultery—and his pride.
     Amada’s appearance of sepia substitutes reddish-brown for beige and brown, hinting the spilling of national blood; the sculpted images, including the constrained light inside the cavernously dark Villalosa villa (Amada’s one surviving parent, her mother, is blind), bespeaks an insulated existence stored in closets of the past.