Review of the dutch film Holiday (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7328154/    (Available on MUBI)

How does a rich man who has nothing going for him other than money ( no looks, no charm, no humour, no intelligence, extremely boring friends) maintain a very good looking young girl friend, who if she so desires can have any man she wants (at least for sometime because any intelligent guy would find her boring eventually). 

This movie is a tutorial on that subject, the drug lord boyfriend is aware of what he is dealing with and how he has to control her and he does exactly that.

The fact that this movie has such poor reviews on IMDB shows how the audience are living in denial regarding the barbaric materialistic culture we have around us today.

The movie is totally focussed on Sascha a danish girl who is obviously not very bright but has extreme attraction towards money, fashion and things money can buy. She is stingy about the hotels she lives in and believes she deserves a lifestyle and is having a lifestyle of a princess when in reality we as an audience get to see her facing humiliation on multiple occasions. She is obviously not someone who holds  ambition of going to university hence sees living with her middle aged not so good looking rich drug dealer violent and abusive boyfriend as her only way of indulging in the rich lifestyle. It takes a lot to be part of that family and she along with other side characters will go through all the abuse to enjoy the lavish lifestyle that comes as being part of the family.

Her character is explained very clearly in the first 10 minutes of the film where we are shown how she has a strong need to look attractive and will go to any extend to buy the things she needs in order to look attractive. She takes 300 euros from the 30,000 euros she is suppose to deliver to another dealer who is a business partner of her boyfriend with the hope that she can seduce him into letting her get away with it. Through his retort we are shown the worldview she nurtures and though she only gets humiliated by him, later we see she has a constant need to getting validation from good looking men regarding her own attractiveness and she very easily does get that attention. 

The dutch guy she gets attracted to during the Holiday with the boring family (the family in fact is so boring and mindlessly violent that it makes watching the movie excruciatingly painful and Sascha is often seen trying to find ways of getting away from them out of boredom and she is not even very bright herself) is a philosophical guy trying to find meaning in his life. He is seen talking about discontentment he had in the usual materialistic world and why he rather chose to live on a boat to enrich his soul.

The boyfriend Micheal questions him on what he means by his soul, he can only think of the dutch guy to have chosen such a lifestyle in order to seduce more women, in his world worrying about enriching ones soul is quite an alien concept and as we find out later that he is right. The movie later shows that we do live in the world where people live with one and only one agenda and that is to enjoy money as much as they can and no one really cares about their soul, and people like the dutch guy really are just weak people who can be murdered so easily by strong people like Micheal the boyfriend.

Sascha does make an attempt to set things right at one point by going to the police station but we are shown that the cops themselves are thinking of robbing a bank because unless they have lots of money they cannot hope to have an attractive wife. Seeing the cops she comes back to her senses and walks off without confessing anything.

In the end it is money and power that wins over human sensibilities a bleak view of the world we live in but a very realistic view coming from a Danish filmmaker as a critique on a society that claims to be extremely cultured and progressive but it seems the focus of beauty is only on the outside, while on the inside everybody’s soul is either corrupt or has to be corrupted to fit into the glossy dignified veneer of an advance, aesthetically beautiful, hedonistic, materialistic society.

The use of music in the film is brilliant in depicting the soulless world of the characters.

Review of the Indian film Photograph (2019)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7778680/ (Available on Amazon Prime)

Ritesh Batra seems to be very diligently creating his language of cinema and is sure to be recognised as one of the few auteur film makers from India, and in this film he creates his version of a quintessential bollywood film, rich girl falls in love with a poor boy...the ensuing drama of parents disapproval is inevitable but thankfully we are not subject to it. Never the less the underlying tension that it creates pervades everything in the film. The film seems to have borrowed many elements from Wong Kar-Wai's 'In the mood for love' (probably the most romantic film of this century and definitely one of director's favourite films ) - taxi scenes, monsoons, restaurant scene, suspense of what actually happened, the thin line between pretension and reality and finally the lack of chronological order. The director's artistic integrity is intact in this film (even after all the plagiarism from 'In the mood for love') which is definitely one of his less accessible films mostly meant for his fans...lack of background music, usage of a couple of old powerful songs, completely no use of makeup to make the actors look glamourous. While Sanya fits perfectly into the role of an introvert girl, nawaz's performance seems to lack a certain purpose, Nawaz himself seems a bit confused about what he is about and his grand mother surely comes across as someone irritating...When trying to recollect some of the endearing grand moms in Indian cinema Shyam Benegal's Mammo comes to mind, but here the grand mother while trying to look too realistic (coming from a poor UP muslim village) alienates the audience since her compassion seems too self-centred. The last scene would not come as a surprise for someone who is well versed with the director but without the last scene the movie looses all its value, so in that sense the film becomes more of a concept film rather then a film like Lunchbox which can be seen over and over to indulge in the sensibilities of the characters portrayed in every scene of the film.

Ironically i later found out that the two films mentioned in the review are also 2 films that are their in the watchlist of Nawaz's on IMDB...is he pretending that he has not seen these films or did he forget to update his watchlist?