T Jena – Google

I was 22, out of University in India looking for a job, when I saw this film in a Festival. I was heavily into film history and aesthetics when I saw the film, but it took me five more years to see my next Woody Allen film, Manhattan, in a commercial theatre. Those days we had real difficulties in watching Hollywood movies in India on the commercial circuit. The other limitation I had was I hadn’t seen NY and not been to the States. In spite of those Annie Hall made an instant connection in my mind to archetypal male grooming his girl only to fall behind in both his and the girl’s expectations. Woody Allen set this story in the intellectual settings of a mega city in a typically 1970s cultural environment I grew up in mentally. I was so enamoured by the efforts of Allen’s character to come out of his self pity and courageously harness his wounded emotion to convert it to a drama thereby accepting his life and world with matured humour. This is a film for serious people who possess enough intellect to not only connect with the various references brought in by Allen but also have the ability to handle emotion in a complex world. I chanced upon this film on cable tv today while confined to home in my native village on East Coast of India during corona lockdown, a perfect time and set up to revisit this film in my matured years and, most importantly, after getting sufficient exposure to both coasts of US the film engulfs. I highly recommend this film to those who are widely exposed intellectually so as to catch the complex emotions woven by Allen both through his dialogues and the visual style of mixing time with frequent mixed screen sequences. Annie Hall and Manhattan made me fall in love with NY and I’v never found a reason to reconsider it after long stays and many visits to the city. No film maker has made such intimate films around his city as Woody Allen here, may be Federico Fellini for Rome, Rainer Warner Fassbinder for Berlin.

Chinatown is an immense film by Roman Polanski. With the incredible casting of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, and the epic script that merges Biblical references with TS Eliot ‘s Wasteland, it creates supreme allegory for human civilisation. The irony of the Water Engineer drowning in the midst of a terrible drought is the story of modern society. Manorama Six Feet Under is a creditable effort to adapt the Chinatown theme from the desert of California to that of Rajasthan with water and political decadence as the common theme. Though it lacks the flowing quality of the Polanski story and also the formidable acting talents, I like Abhay Deol in the low key role. He is as honest an actor as you can get amongst the modern Bollywood generation. I just love that boy. Though the film is thematically too sophisticated, the modern smart phone wielding crowd should be smart enough to enjoy it. Just google Chinatown to prepare yourself for this movie. Even it has an important sequence playing on Balak and white tv in Abhay Doel’s residence where Polanski himself cuts the detective character’s (Jack Nicholson ) nose for being a nosey fella!