About Elly: A Tour Gone Sour

IFFK 2009 - Day 6

I watched three films today. I had planned to watch four films. However, I could not watch any of those four films because of a seemingly endless traffic jam in Thiruvananthapuram city. In the end, I managed to watch Ploy (an Indonesian film by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang), Once Upon A Time (an Italian film by Francesco Rosi), and About Elly (an Iranian film by Asghar Farhadi).

Ploy

Ploy is a kind of not-so-good not-so-bad film. It deals with a decaying marriage life, or what is famously knows as the seven year itch. The protagonists, a man who runs a restaurant in USA and his second wife, who had been a film actress, come to Indonesia to attend a funeral. The film starts with an aero plane landing. For most of the part, the events take place in a hotel. The husband meets a teenaged girl, named Ploy, who is waiting for her mother to arrive from Sweden later in the day, and invites her to the room. The arrival of the girl irks the wife. Slowly, the lack of love and communication between the couple unfolds.

The wife leaves the room afterwards and ends up being drugged and raped. In some separate and slightly unrelated sequences, the bartender and cleaning girl of the hotel makes love in another room. The only thing that links the detailed love-making scenes with the main plot is Ploy’s reference to a dream she had in which she sees the same people making love.

One good thing about the film is what can be called visual humor. Some unusual sequences and camera angles create subtle humor without the help of any action or any dialogues.

The film started 15 minutes late, as the director, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, could not reach the venue in time. In the end, screening started without the director making his customary introductory speech. It only helped in spoiling the film-watching plans of many delegates.

Once Upon A Time

This techni-color movie starring Omar Sharif and Sophia Loren is indisputably the worst movie I have watched in this festival. Some of the older folks may have got a feeling of déjà vu and nostalgic memories by seeing Sophia Loren. However, the response of the delegates gave the impression that most of them were plainly bored by the film.

About Elly

This is a competition section film. I won’t be surprised if it wins the award (though I pray that Soofi Paranjha Katha or Madhyavenal win the award). It is a deftly woven film which reflects many complex issues of life and human psyche by narrating some simple things.

The plot can be described as follows. A group of young couple go for a picnic in a seaside town. One odd person in the group is Elly, the nursery teacher of the daughter of one of the couples. The first half shows typical incidents of a picnic. The mood of the film changes when a young boy of the group is trapped in the waves. The grown-ups somehow rescue the boy, but then they notice that Elly is missing. They search frantically for her, but to no avail.

However, the incident slowly reveals many uncomfortable issues between the couples. Soon, the whole group gets entangled in a web of lies. What was seen in the first half of the movie as pleasant interpersonal relationships start getting bitter. Towards the end of the movie, Elly’s fiancée too enters the fray, complicating things further.

The director, Asghar Farhadi, remains impressively non-judgmental and impassive in the treatment. The viewers feel like peeling an onion called life. The outer layers seem bright and easy. However, as one goes inwards, the texture and complexion of the layers change, and the characters appear unrecognizable from the ones shown in the first half of the movie.

IFFK Blogs

The media coverage and the coverage on bloggosphere about IFFK have been subdued, compared to the previous years’. Two notable blogs about IFFK are dear cinema and passion for cinema. The writers are knowledgeable, passionate about films, and write seriously well. IFFK this time has an official blog too. Kanikonna, a Malayalam website, too publish stories occasionally. It contains many interesting posts. Delegates and guests can contribute to the blog by sending their posts to iffk.blog@gmail.com.