Marriage Made In Celluloid

Freida Pinto in Trishna

Trishna is technically a British production, even though Mumbai filmmaker Anurag Kashyap is listed as a producer. It라이브 바카라 one of the five India-themed films—the others are Ribhu Dasgupta라이브 바카라 debut film Michael, Akshay Kumar production Breakaway, Suseendran라이브 바카라 Tamil film Azhagarsamy라이브 바카라 Horse and Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara라이브 바카라 Bengali film Chatrak (Mushrooms)—that played in the last 10 days at the recent Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). A sixth film, Pankaj Kapoor라이브 바카라 Mausam, pulled out at the last minute.

TIFF, along with Cannes, Berlin and Sundance, is one of the most prestigious and high-profile international film festivals and the only one amongst them that has had a strong and consistent Indian presence. In recent years, TIFF has premiered films ranging from Vishal Bhardwaj라이브 바카라 Maqbool, Nandita Das라이브 바카라 Firaq to Kiran Rao라이브 바카라 Dhobi Ghat and Kashyap라이브 바카라 That Girl in Yellow Boots. Driven by the interest of the large desi diaspora, the festival has been attended by Bollywood A-listers like Shahrukh Khan, Karan Johar, Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar. The highlight of this year라이브 바카라 TIFF was an interesting conversation between filmmaker Deepa Mehta and author Salman Rushdie on their collaboration on the film version of Midnight라이브 바카라 Children, shot earlier this year in Sri Lanka and currently in post-production in Toronto.

Naseeruddin Shah in Michael

Media interest was the strongest on Freida Pinto. Trishna is Pinto라이브 바카라 fourth film since her debut in Danny Boyle라이브 바카라 Slumdog Millionaire. Her work since then has been uneven, but in Trishna she delivers her best performance to date. Hers is a fully developed, vulnerable character who ties her destiny to Jay, believing in their romance, although the man often overlooks her emotions. However, Riz Ahmed, who last year appeared in the British comedy The Four Lions, turns out to be the real star: seductive, charming, even as his character portrays negative tones. He is slated to play the lead in Mira Nair라이브 바카라 The Reluctant Fundamentalist, based on Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid라이브 바카라 novel of the same name. While the third act of Trishna is drawn-out and repetitive, the film ably captures the quietude of Rajasthan and its fine hotels as also the street energy of Jaipur and Mumbai.

While Anurag Kashyap was not present at TIFF this year, his name appeared on two films. In addition to Trishna, TIFF also showed Michael, the third film that Kashyap has produced after Udaan and Shaitan. The film rests on the performance of Naseeruddin Shah playing Michael, a disgraced cop in Calcutta, now a film projectionist and a DVD pirate, who must cope with his impending blindness, as he also receives threatening phone calls from a menacing stranger. The film starts on a high note: a broken down Michael (Shah, with his weathered face) standing in the middle of a busy Calcutta intersection. The veteran actor carries the film up to a point, till the limiting script by Debaloy Bhattacharya, based on director Ribhu Dasgupta라이브 바카라 story, gives him no further room to explore the character. The cinematography, especially the night scenes of rain-drenched Calcutta, coupled with music and sound, create a dark mood, but eventually Michael does not work.

Chatrak

The other interesting films at the festival were the Tamil film Azhagarsamy라이브 바카라 Horse—director Suseendran라이브 바카라 comic tale about a village planning a temple festival to please the rain gods; and Chatrak, Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara라이브 바카라 slow-paced Bengali film about a man searching for his lost brother, who may be living in the forest as a wild child. It starts on an odd note: a young bald European soldier guards the border between India and Bangladesh. No explanation is advanced about how the soldier reached there. And much of the film itself was just as inexplicable.

The films aside, it was the conversation between Deepa Mehta and Salman Rushdie (at his witty best), moderated by TIFF라이브 바카라 co-director Cameron Bailey, that proved to be a big success with the audience that packed a theatre in TIFF라이브 바카라 spiffy new headquarters in downtown Toronto라이브 바카라 Entertainment District on a weekday afternoon. Mehta and Rushdie showed 10 minutes of unrelated rough-cut clips from the film, wherein the audience spotted some familiar faces from Bollywood: Soha Ali Khan, Rajat Kapoor, Rahul Bose and Shahana Goswami. They shared several tidbits about the making of the film. Like how Rushdie originally wrote a 267-page script based on his novel, but had to trim it down when the team realised that they would not get funding for a two-part film. Mehta also spoke about how difficult it was to recreate the Bombay of the 1940s and 1950s in modern Mumbai. “Sri Lanka still resembles the post-colonial Bombay,” she said. “And we felt safer in Sri Lanka”, alluding, obviously, to the political problems that her previous films have faced in India.