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The 1982 List



##. Film (Director) points/votes(top 5 placements, aka likely votes in decade list)/highest ranking

01. The Thing (John Carpenter) 247/12(6)/1
02. Fanny och Alexander [Fanny and Alexander] (Ingmar Bergman) 245/11(8)/1(x5)
03. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese) 226/12(7)/1
04. Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 184/9(4)/1
05. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog) 165/8(5)/1
06. The Draughtsman's Contract (Peter Greenaway) 159/10(2)/1
07. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) 157/8(4)/2
08. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling) 146/11(1)/3
09. Missing (Costa-Gavras) 130/9(2)/2
10. White Dog (Samuel Fuller) 124/7(4)/4(x3)
11. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg) 108/5(4)/2(x2)
12. The Verdict (Sidney Lumet) 102/7(2)/3
13. Moonlighting (Jerzy Skolimowski) 101/7(1)/2
14. Diner (Barry Levinson) 99/6(2)/2
15. 投奔怒海 [Tau ban no hoi] [Boat People] (Ann Hui) 83/6(2)/3
16. Passion (Jean-Luc Godard) 74/5(1)/5
17. Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel) 70/4(1)/4
(tie) Tenebre (Dario Argento) 70/6(2)/2
19. Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones) 69/4(1)/2
20. So Is This (Michael Snow) 61/3(2)/1
21. Gandhi (Richard Attenborough) 57/5(1)/3
22. Burden of Dreams (Les Blank) 54/3(1)/3
23. Pink Floyd: The Wall (Alan Parker) 53/3(2)/3
24. One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola) 52/4/9
25. Danton (Andrzej Wajda) 50/3(1)/4
26. Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman) 47/4/8
27. Stand der Dinge [The State of Things] (Wim Wenders) 45/2(2)/3
(tie) Der Fan [The Fan] (Eckhart Schmidt) 45/3/8
29. Le Beau Mariage [A Good Marriage] (Éric Rohmer) 44/3/9
30. La notte di San Lorenzo [The Night of the Shooting Stars] (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani) 43/3/7
31. Les Fantômes du chapelier [The Hatter's Ghost] (Claude Chabrol) 38/2(1)/4
32. Shoot the Moon (Alan Parker) 37/2/6
(tie) The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir) 37/4/6
(tie) Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper) 37/3/10
35. Une chambre en ville [A Room in Town] (Jacques Demy) 36/2/7
(tie) Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 36/2/8(x2)
37. 爆裂都市 バースト・シティ [Bakuretsu toshi bāsuto shiti] [Burst City] (Gakuryū Ishii) 34/2(1)/1
38. Colpire al cuore [Blow to the Heart] (Gianni Amelio) 33/2/9
(tie) Tempest (Paul Mazursky) 33/3/9
40. L'Ange [The Angel] (Patrick Bokanowski) 32/2(1)/1
41. Gli occhi, la bocca [Les Yeux, la Bouche] [The Eyes, the Mouth] (Marco Bellocchio) 30/2/7
(tie) Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner) 30/3/11
43. Britannia Hospital (Lindsay Anderson) 28/3/13(x2)
44. Conan the Barbarian (John Milius) 27/3(1)/4
(tie) The Snowman (Dianne Jackson) 27/3/9
46. Identificazione di una donna [Identification of a Woman] (Michelangelo Antonioni) 26/3(1)/5
47. Le Retour de Martin Guerre [The Return of Martin Guerre] (Daniel Vigne) 25/3/11
48. Befrielsesbilleder [Images of Liberation] (Lars von Trier) 24/2/8
(tie) Made in Britain (Alan Clarke) 24/2/11
50. Den enfaldige mördaren [The Simple-Minded Murderer] (Hans Alfredson) 23/2/9
(tie) The Border (Tony Richardson) 23/2/10

ALSO-RANS

The World According to Garp (George Roy Hill) 21/2/14
Delivery Man (Emily Hubley) 21/2/15
The Secret of Nimh (Don Bluth) 20/2/14
Cat People (Paul Schrader) 17/2/12
The Grey Fox (Phillip Borsos) 15/2/13
Grease 2 (Patricia Birch) 15/2/15
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler) 13/2/18
The Missionary (Richard Loncraine) 13/2/19
Smithereens (Susan Seidelman) 12/3/21(x2)
48 Hrs. (Walter Hill) 11/2/16

ORPHANS

Film (Director) highest ranking

എലിപ്പത്തായം [Elippathayam] [Rat-Trap] (Adoor Gopalakrishnan) 12
Ulysse (Agnès Varda) 11
Le Jardin des âges (Alain Mazars) 21
Baal (Alan Clarke) 10
Мой друг Иван Лапшин [Moy drug ivan lapshin] [My Friend Ivan Lapshin] (Aleksei German) 12
The Last Unicorn (Arthur Rankin, Jr. & Jules Bass) 23
Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards) 18
La Balance [The Nark] (Bob Swaim) 20
五遁忍術 [Ren zhe wu di] [Five Element Ninjas] (Chang Cheh) 6
沖霄樓 [Chong xiao lou] [House of Traps] (Chang Cheh) 14
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Christopher Petit) 22
Honkytonk Man (Clint Eastwood) 1
Cannery Row (David S. Ward) 13
Basket Case (Frank Henenlotter) 25
Barbarosa (Fred Schepisi) 13
Vice Squad (Gary Sherman) 16
Wênd Kûuni [God's Gift] (Gaston Kaboré) 5
Creepshow (George A. Romero) 16
The Man from Snowy River (George T. Miller) 23
Le Ravissement de Frank N. Stein [The Ravishing of Frank N. Stein] (Georges Schwizgebel) 19
Вариола вера [Variola vera] (Goran Marković) 18
Frances (Graeme Clifford) 22
Parsifal (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg) 10
鬼龍院花子の生涯 [Kiryūin hanako no shōgai] [Onimasa] (Hideo Gosha) 6
Cecilia (Humberto Solás) 25
Duran Duran: The Chauffeur (Ian Emes) 16
Relasyon [The Affair] (Ishmael Bernal) 10
Alone in the Dark (Jack Sholder) 10
Možnosti dialogu [Dimensions of Dialogue] (Jan Švankmajer) 2
Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd [The Flight of the Eagle] (Jan Troell) 2
Scénario du film 'Passion' (Jean-Luc Godard) 17
En rachâchant (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet) 10
Austeria [The Inn] (Jerzy Kawalerowicz) 7
The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson & Frank Oz) 25
66 scener fra Amerika [66 Scenes from America] (Jørgen Leth) 18
La Truite [The Trout] (Joseph Losey) 15
Upír z Feratu [Ferat Vampire] (Juraj Herz) 13
Egymásra nézve [Another Way] (Károly Makk) 11
蒲田行進曲 [Kamata koshin kyoku] [Fall Guy] (Kinji Fukasaku) 19
Q: The Winged Serpent (Larry Cohen) 9
Pictures on Pink Paper (Lis Rhodes) 16
Lo squartatore di New York [The New York Ripper] (Lucio Fulci) 7
Scrubbers (Mai Zetterling) 18
The House on Sorority Row (Mark Rosman) 20
The Plague Dogs (Martin Rosen) 8
Home Sweet Home (Mike Leigh) 23
খারিজ [Kharij] [The Case Is Closed] (Mrinal Sen) 8
烈火青春 [Lit foh ching chun] [Nomad] (Patrick Tam) 4
Lonely Hearts (Paul Cox) 23
Bad Burns (Paul Sharits) 25
Laberinto de pasiones [Labyrinth of Passion] (Pedro Almodóvar) 17
Oro, Plata, Mata [Gold, Silver, Death] (Peque Gallaga) 1
Kolmnurk [The Triangle] (Priit Pärn) 11
प्रेम रोग [Prem Rog] [Sickness of Love] (Raj Kapoor) 15
Het dak van de walvis [On Top of the Whale] (Raúl Ruiz) 23
Don't Go to Sleep (Richard Lang) 6
Brimstone & Treacle (Richard Loncraine) 25
Personal Best (Robert Towne) 23
Pra Frente, Brasil [Go Ahead, Brazil!] (Roberto Farias) 15
Deathtrap (Sidney Lumet) 10
Smiley's People (Simon Langton) 17
Tron (Steven Lisberger) 23
But No One (Su Friedrich) 20
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack) 24
Thunder (Takashi Itō) 1
First Blood (Ted Kotcheff) 16
Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Terry Hughes & Ian MacNaughton) 14
Vincent (Tim Burton) 22
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace) 9
Toni Basil: Word of Mouth (Toni Basil) 19
Toni Basil: You Gotta Problem (Toni Basil & Alan Walsh) 24
Next of Kin (Tony Williams) 22
ลูกอีสาน [Luk e-san] [Son of the Northeast] (Vichit Kounavudhi) 14
Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang) 7
Chambre 666 [Room 666] (Wim Wenders) 13
Hammett (Wim Wenders) 19
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (Woody Allen) 18
牧马人 [Mu ma ren] [The Herdsman] (Xie Jin) 11

16 lists submitted

Thank you swo,

1. So is This
2. Diner
3. Fanny and Alexander
4. Eating Raoul
5. The King of Comedy
6. The Thing
7. Slumber Party Massacre
8. Veronika Voss
9. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10, Der Fan

The House on Sorority Row
Personal Best

Thanks swo! I voted for this round but I can't for the life of me remember what my number one was, as I'm pretty sure 2 and 3 were Slumber Party Massacre and Gandhi based on the votes-- maybe it was Fanny?

EDIT: Yep!

01 Fanny och Alexander [Fanny and Alexander]
02 Slumber Party Massacre
03 Gandhi
04 Les Fantômes du chapelier [The Hatter's Ghost]
05 Passion
06 Don't Go to Sleep
07 Fast Times at Ridgemont High
08 Der Fan [The Fan]
09 Shoot the Moon
10 Alone in the Dark
11 Eating Raoul
12 Diner
13 Chambre 666 [Room 666]
14 the Secret of Nimh
15 Grease 2
16 Creepshow
17 Laberinto de pasiones [Labyrinth of Passion]
18 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
19 White Dog
20 Tenebre

Thanks so much for this work Swo and to those who voted for the Snow and Hubley. Really makes me feel like championing films here as worth it.

Whoops, forgot Fanny and Alexander as only graded the longer cut that came out years later. I think it would have been number one too with my points.

Also, too late now to challenge it, but Danton had did not premiere and had no screenings until 1983, so it wasn't on my radar for this year or to sense check its date.

I initially had Danton as 1983 but moved it to 1982 based on this (winning an award in 1982). And if variant versions of a film come out years later, the film is generally going to be assigned to the earliest release date.

You are always going to miss something or other if you don't closely review the eligibility lists

I was pleasantly surprised with how well Danton did in general! Barely escaped my top ten

The Indian films I’ve seen from this year, ranked. Part one of two. A clear first choice and some wins with asterisks. Some musical highlights in the links.



1. Kharij / The Case Is Closed (Mrinal Sen)

An urban working couple hire and house a boy from a small village as a servant; they are surprised by a tragedy.

Kharij is so straightforward and contained I started to worry it a social issues film, but its study of casual neglect and defensive human behavior is told with such calculated middle-class restraint that its accusations seep in and sprawl outward, produce perpetually applicable condemnation. The film is now as much about globalization as any particular domestic institution, but confining most of the action to one neighborhood community, and often one house, wrings tensions between moral outrage and sympathetic guilt to an unbearable degree.

A father’s biting and bitter words at a ceremony are devastating in the way they could also be plainly grateful and envious.

Having first encountered Sen through his formally playful Bhuvan Shome (1969) and playfully furious The Interview (1970), it’s a shock how classically shot and assembled Kharij can feel. It serves the locked-down nature of the work (and apparently matches the style in the two movies with which it forms an unofficial thematic trilogy, Ek Din Pratidin (1979) and Ek Din Achanak (1989) – I’ve seen neither, yet); instead of bursts of emotional expression or the tangled tracking of Akaler Shandhaney (1981), Sen focuses on triangulating layers of spectators and makes pronounced point of what he doesn’t include – the voices we do not hear, the places we’re reluctant to go.

Kharij won the Jury Prize at Cannes.



2. Umbartha / The Doorstep (Jabbar Patel)

Sulabha (Smita Patil) is the wife of a lawyer and the mother of a young daughter, Rani. They live with his well-to-do family: His brother, a doctor, whose childless wife dotes on Rani to the point of monopolization. His mother, a hospital administrator, who is hoping Sulabha will come to work for her and put her recently acquired sociology degree to use. But Sulabha is paralyzed with restlessness. She does not belong.

She receives an offer to run a rural women’s reformatory hundreds of miles away. It is a place where they put women who do not belong.

Am surprised how much this Marathi drama stuck with me, because it takes forever to get started and for the longest time it feels plain. You can guess how things go when Sulabha arrives at her job. We’re given blunt, heartbreaking testimony from the women kept there, raising a litany of social issues. Sulabha uncovers corruption, steps on toes, seems to form bonds. A showy dream sequence is a desperate acknowledgment of how stiff and plain everything else has been, and also exactly the sort of formal outburst you expect.

But as Sulabha moves from instituting attitudes from the world outside –Compulsory prayer! She tells one woman to smile more! – to properly identifying with the women she oversees, as she sees the reformatory as a place that only serves the world that rejected them and sees the dynamics of the prejudices that put them there at work inside, she feels less involved and more alone. Her isolation resonates. One late surprise (bold for its inclusion, less than progressive in its prescription) reflects back on her in intriguing ways. The extended introduction at home feels like padding while it plays, pays off in a big way down the stretch.

There are some villains, and some easy rights/wrongs, but mostly Patel rejects tidiness. People have mixed feelings, differing opinions, different contexts for decisions made. And though those can often appear punishing, in the end they help make a case for messy personal freedoms. I wish the last shot wasn’t in the film, Patel leaves an expressive ambiguity behind. Patil is excellent, confidently resistant throughout; she’s featured in five films on this list, and at least three of them have her staring into camera, Monika-like. This is the one where that works.



3. Elippathayam / Rat-Trap (Adoor Gopalakrishnan)

Will no one consider the effects of feudalism on the feudal lords?

Unni is the last male heir in a landowning family that has seen their estate shrink and dilapidate as the modern world encroaches. He lives there alone with his two sisters. The eldest, about to advance past desirable marrying age, selflessly runs the house and cares for him; the youngest attends school with people she would once have served her. Workers who tend the estate do so out of tradition or for a chance to pilfer its meager crops. The house has grown rotten and rodent-infested, the estate’s pond is stagnant. Unni’s activity has shrunk to a routine that starts with reading a newspaper and ends at particulars of personal hygiene. He is self-obsessed, indolent, useless, and unable to change, abusing what petty power he still can until that too vanishes.

There is not much story, metaphors and political points aren’t subtle, but those things don’t matter. Elippathayam is a deteriorating state of mind, a mood piece, a (Kat Ellinger voice) gothic horror for anyone who’s let their circle of concern constrict like a snare. A self-imposed Repulsion. (It works as a lockdown movie, not that you need another one of those.) Paranoia and OCD have set in. Pieces go missing; information isn’t allowed to enter the frame, major events drop into ellipses. Darkness swallows the screen.

That darkness is beautiful. Deep pools of black, islands of light, bold primary color swatches. This is the first of two gorgeous Malayalam films featuring mental illness from this year, and I was surprised Gopalakrishnan and Govindan Aravindan have different DPs from different schools and different generations. (Ravi Varma, here.) So grateful Second Run has this and Gopalakrishnan‘s Man of the Story in their catalog. Proofed subtitles! What a luxury.



4. Gandhi (Richard Attenborough)

A UK-India co-production, directed by a bit-player from Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players. The longest film on this list, and to date the only feature to include both Daniel Day-Lewis and John Ratzenberger in its cast.

I struggle where to put this, a film I in many ways admire and enjoy, but an inherently flawed project that’s of a genre for which I don’t much care. It deftly, deceptively simplifies a man and a history; romanticizes aspects of a particular political movement into enlightenment; is made by an emissary from the ousted colonial power who lacks any strong cinematic viewpoint but is eager to soften self-criticism and find himself in the frame. There have been a litany of legitimate objections to Gandhi’s form and the content made by people far more knowledgeable and connected to the world depicted than I; their criticisms have both been borne out and muted by the fact there has been no comparable film made since.

Too Many Words About a Movie Everyone’s Already Seen

It's a movie that is aware of some of the things it cannot do and either makes use of its inadequacies or exhibits them as acknowledgment. It’s an epic march of stubbornness made of a series of visually stifling prison sentences and fasts. Unprepared to become a series of ongoing arguments, it stakes out a single position and cycles events as repeated fable. The built-in episodic choppiness of biopics and historical films becomes an expression of the passing of time under a single sustained effort. When the film feels so lost in its second half, after independence is achieved, it’s naked admission of its accumulated simplifications and biased diagnostic capabilities. (And when I read lists of objected omissions, I find that aspects of many of them are at least hinted, somewhere.) It is exasperating how Attenborough always searches for white faces in this, and the relay of Western audience surrogates (Ian Charleson, to Martin Sheen, to Candice Bergen) makes it seem like Mahatma Gandhi needed a series of handlers; but they are always shown in awe of him, and if that veers into a fascination with exoticism (the religious glow the camera gives Geraldine James’ Mirabehn is gross) that can be rationalized through gritted teeth as a recognition of two layers of marketing: Gandhi’s to the Western press, and Attenborough’s to his Western investors.

Sumita S. Chakravarty wryly points out that from the at the film’s start, which marches the man’s garlanded corpse to its pyre under the narration of an American news reporter, Gandhi is being packaged and explained for Western audiences. This is fundamentally a Western film dominated by imported actors.(*) (It’s hardly of the dominant Indian filmmaking idiom.) At its most objectionable that means drastic self-absolution, soft-peddling the cruelty of colonialism, and filing Attenborough’s Gandhi within context of the Thatcher-era cinematic “Raj Revival” (A Passage to Inda, Jewel in the Crown, etc.) reinforces it as a work with a narrowed viewpoint in an ongoing story.



(*) There are many Indian-born actors in the cast. Here’s Om Puri, this year’s National Awards winner for Best Actor (for Shyam Benegal’s Arohan, see below), giving a typically intense performance in an unfortunate late scene wherein the father of the country tries to reverse King Solomon his baby back together.

But getting that sliver told was no mean feat, and an audience-friendly, arms-length heroic portrait was the practical way to take it to the globe. Settling the difference between those who thought Mohandas Gandhi so saintly he should be played by a ball of light and those who wanted a warts-and-all biopic is impossible. (Salman Rushdie starts his criticism, “Deification is an Indian disease,” then jokes the film incomplete without Gandhi’s more perverse experiments in abstinence.) Chakravarty notes Gandhi’s own persona was to be “all things to all people.” So you double-down on humility, get Ben Kingsley laughing at Martin Sheen’s jokes. Does Kingsley become Gandhi, or to the West is Gandhi now essentially Kingsley’s performance? People who argue that the movie is bad and/or wrong but Kingsley is amazing are missing that it is Kingsley’s movie. Gandhi wins the same way it purports (Rushdie, again: “A fiction,” “Its message… worse than nonsense.”) India won its independence: Through a single charismatic leader and the imposing presence of a massed people. This has a humanity at its center and authentic support behind it. Unimaginable what this would have been had it starred John Hurt or Anthony Hopkins and cut/paste CGI crowds.

And had it starred Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil?

The only other full-length feature devoted to Gandhi’s life is Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma, a 1996 Indian-South African co-production that (as per the title) focuses on Gandhi’s formative years; also filmed in English, it makes for interesting complement and comparison. Its slimmer scope allows it to make a more conflicted portrait of the man, include aspects of his character that would have been distractions to Attenborough’s epic. (Maybe you wondered during Gandhi why his children weren’t marching with him? Maybe you should have?) But in restoring a lot of incidents that Gandhi pragmatically shuffled into later events to their (presumably) proper places Benegal’s film becomes even choppier, creating new single-use scenes where Attenborough’s could multitask; and events depicted in both movies are inevitably weaker here. Benegal’s film is less well-funded, looks and sounds it. (It does not help that his usually effective composer, Vanraj Bhatia, here provides the sort of dispiriting chintzy synth orchestra score now common to History Channel reenactments.) Mahatma also struggles to leave things out, and Mohandas’ multifaceted life can make him Young Mr. Gandhi and Florence Nightingale and Benjamin Franklin, all on the way to becoming Siddhartha. He may also be in the booth, threading the projector. Mahatma’s Gandhi, Rajit Kapoor, has no way to be all that. There’s no flow to it even as there is an arc. But he can bring an exciting edge to some of the material while never losing his congeniality. Kapoor never displaces Kingsley. But then Kingsley doesn’t really become Gandhi (and vice versa) until he puts his glasses on.

But when you’re half a world away, safe and sheltered, considerations are simpler. I saw this in the theater as a child with my parents and have remained impressed by an epic film where every act of violence is seen as a failure



5. Prem Rog / Sickness of Love (Raj Kapoor)

“When she used to cry all night, the whole village was happy.”

She is the bratty, naïve daughter of a powerful landowning family in a small village. He is the orphaned nephew of the local priest, who often studied and tutored and played within the walls of the landowners’ compound. He has been sponsored by her parents to get a modern, urban education. He returns to the girl and finds their teasing and fooling has become flirting and dreaming.

Kapoor takes a traditional story and tells it in a traditional form to attack traditional values. Which may by now be the neotraditional purpose of the melodrama? It’s immediately clear how good Kapoor is at the old ways, and eventually feasible he’s too old to leave them behind.

But those first two hours! Sometimes there’s nothing more invigorating than a steady hand doing sure work; Prem Rog is so certain and perfect the sheer craft of it had me randomly tearing up. I gasped at the obvious. I felt the fiddle. Impose your weird Christmassy red-green-white outdoor palette on me, you madman. A majority of the musical sequences resound: The rousing crowd number in the village square. The goofy fantasy extravagance with the abrupt belly dancing. (“What is this thing called love? How many musical notes does it have? Let me hear all of them.”) The spectral doubt and longing in the hush of night. A buzz through the same tulip fields seen in Yash Chopra’s Silsila (“Just try laughing once. Millions of flowers will bloom and scatter.”), which ends with such a stirring whoosh that I’m tearing up again just thinking about it.

Maybe it’s the pollen. That last song boils down to “Smile More,” and though it’s hesitantly received, it points to the fault line that eventually makes the movie crack: He’s the hero, but it’s her story. The class difference that makes you sympathize and even identify with him is sly or dastardly manipulation that grants him misguided righteousness: If she’s not willing to reject social norms, the pauper can only marry the princess if she suffers tragedy and indignity; that the boy and perhaps the director cannot see past romantic love as the solution to their quest/film is a problem. The film has to punish her for choices she didn’t really get to make.

Kapoor spends the second half railing against an extreme and narrow custom – so narrow in such a big-looking film that when it’s seeded early, you’re liable to ignore it – to show women as perpetual prisoners of tradition. He tries to unite the boy’s and girl’s plights by decrying the authoritarian power of the male landowners as the source of all rules and as responsible for the prejudices of the townspeople. The climax is fiery and sloppy, with a weird overlap of affiliations violently measuring umbrages. Kapoor envisions apocalyptic implications from nudging at one odd cultural corollary, everything unravels if you tug a thread, but he can’t deliver the terrifying chaotic fury of something like Shyam Benegal’s Nishant and finally slaps a Band-Aid on a boggling level of irrational entrenchment. The aftermath runs under the credits as if the film’s trying to get away with something.

There’s a tempting take that Kapoor consciously undermines his hero’s righteousness. Though he is older and educated, the boy and the girl are pitched as impulsive children – there’s no way to ignore how adolescent the two brides are in this film – and Kapoor never shies from suggesting that people and situations are more complex than bombastic drama demands. The authority that’s railed against is hardly monolithic and all-powerful, and the landowners’ compound is filled with women who have a variety of attitudes and wield influence in different ways. But it’s a man’s world and a man’s film and most of the powerful men in this are horny fetishists, untrustworthy and recklessly assertive. The point Prem Rog starts its slide comes after the boy lectures a crowd on their biased categories of human relations; your fist is ready to pump, and then instead of embracing his own enlightened view he accepts a dare. The problem with this take is that the boy is played by Raj Kapoor’s son Rishi, and even if it makes for a better role you doubt the father wants to tarnish his boy’s shine. Literally bathes him in light at pronounced points, and though each time it’s ridiculous, it does not feel insincere.

It’s up to Padmini Kolhapure to shoulder objection to the film being made around her. She plays the girl like she’s unsure how to play a woman and it works, unsettlingly. She is awkward as an object of desire; she does not know what she herself wants and may never be allowed to find out. Events pile on confusion and trauma and she refuses to let those go as the movie moves on. She won the Filmfare Award for Best Actress, perhaps for being steadfastly unconvincing in her character’s happiness.

But those first two hours! Anyway. If a weird tradition renders someone friendless and you love them, be their friend.



6. Arohan / The Ascent (Shyam Benegal)

The exasperating story of a sharecropper’s attempt over a dozen years to wrest land that rightfully belongs to his family from the feudal landlords that have lived off their labor for generations. It’s an underdog tale with easy sympathies and familiar elements and Benegal looks to frustrate simplicity from the start.

“Based on source material that is essentially true,” the opening title card reads. Om Puri then introduces himself to camera as the star of the film, says that the director said, “a close relationship should be established with the audience… As the audience expects something from the film, the director also wants… co-operation from the audience.” (According to Sangeeta Datta, the government-funded film was never released to cinemas.) Before going into a backlot introduction of the cast and rattling off dense chunks of context, Puri says, “This film is about land.”

But events often keep us away from the piece of land in question (“Lot 144,” as we come to know it through innumerable courtroom scenes) and the camera generally hangs back from the action – the same way Puri’s protagonist stands on the sidelines of the various political factions marching to and fro. If the audience has any automatic populist sympathies, they may find those challenged early by a bloodthirsty Naxalite mob. Benegal even limits his usual attempts at community building, choosing to follow dead-end legal actions and stray elements that spin off into subroutines until this film about land doesn’t seem to be about land at all, anymore.

It’s tempting given its title and pathway to say Arohan is a film about political involvement, and in a strange way, though it takes place in a different region and time, it covers much the same ground as Goutam Ghose’s recent first features, Maa Bhoomi and Dakhal. But Ghose’s techniques (Soviet-inspired agitprop, stylized theatricality) are a lot more distancing and pronounced than anything Benegal does after teasing that intro. Arohan doesn’t always fit together smoothly, and its city-set pieces veer toward cautionary sensationalism, but by the end Benegal matches his best early works in capturing and expressing the deep ineffable entanglement of the personal, the communal, and the historical. Here that involves discovering a larger place than your lot, whether that’s through tragic rootless disconnect, the helpless feeling of getting lost in the sway of shifting political currents, or a sense of purposeful interconnection with people and systems and time and country.



7. Shakti / Power (Ramesh Sippy)

Sippy’s genre-defining Sholay had everything, most everything worked. His follow-up Shaan worked when it was a light con caper, and again later when it was also a James Bond goof, but its emotional backbone was mishmash rehash and bummed out the party. Shakti is all bummer for the better. A basic story about a cop (Dilip Kumar) whose commitment to the law comes between him and his son (Amitabh Bachchan), its worst parts either fall away or blend to good effect, and somehow its three hours come off focused and spare. This was this year’s Filmfare Best Picture winner.

There are worst parts! The central relationship is launched by a clumsy contrivance. All the plotting feels like motions, gone through; the romance, perfunctory. I’d forgotten there were songs in this, and though "Jane Kaise Kab Kahan" is a fine tune, until its smoldering end the footage under it is anonymous. That’s a numbing amount of time-fill, white noise into which Kumar buries his self-sabotage and regret and through which Bachchan’s aging angry young man seethes and wails. So many Bollywood films choreograph elaborate fractured family dynamics (orphans, separated brothers, etc.) in service of reveal and reunion, but Sippy restores the pared-down father/son schism its primal power.

Also refreshing: The evident care in Sippy’s craft(*). It cuts great. Fight scenes are coherent(!) and the director gets to bring his Leone love to an early showdown. (The showdown is silly, as is a scene of forklift-fu, but both come before fun is unwelcome.) He has enough visual control that you feel the color drain from the picture as it goes, enough confidence that he is unafraid to go silent. Each actor gets his devastating Shakespearean monologue, but then Shakti goes wordless for almost five minutes. Sippy’ll give you a gushy emotional climax but is willing to end on a note of startling ambiguity.

(*) There is one chase through a difficult location that is completely out-of-focus. You feel the film’s pain and hope someone got fired for that.
Shakti is available for rent on Amazon Prime.



8. Vidhaata / Creator (Subhash Ghai)

“I know what God’s will is. But I won’t let Him do as He pleases!”

Dilip Kumar, so affecting in Shakti as he let his principles pry apart his family, here readily abandons his principles to pry apart his family. As train conductor Shamsher Singh he asserts that more than anything in life, a man loves his child. Then watches his son die in his arms, watches his daughter-in-law die in childbirth, gives his grandson away to a holy stranger. To repay an act of kindness and a hospital bill he devotes himself to becoming the biggest crime lord in the region.

The top-grossing Bollywood film of 1982, a Filmfare Best Picture nominee, and this can’t even get to five reviews on Letterboxd? Not even one that says, “This is cinema?”

This is cinema? Vidhaata is a masala that makes a lot of unnecessary choices, many of them terrible, most of them welcome. It is a lot worse than some of the movies further down this list and is the better for that. It is ostensibly about the foolishness of fronting free will over destiny and occasionally remembers to pronounce a few things to that effect, but what it’s really about is getting from Point A to Point K without ever observing the alphabet. (Though one villain is forced at gunpoint to recite the entire English alphabet. His henchmen are very excited when he knows it.) The plot is a bull and logic its china shop. When it freezes frames, they are inevitably blurry.

The best way to describe its m.o. is with this .gif, which I’ve not sped or chopped up:

No Spoiler, Just GIF

And these are its ideas of using frames within frames:



As slapdash as it is, Vidhaata is reluctant to let go. Too willing to stop and let old men argue at length, often under the cover of terrible wigs. There comes a point where, as with some of these things, the action’s set to be handed off to its younger stars. But Shamsher Singh’s grandson is a drooling man-baby who resembles a sleepy-eyed Scott Baio; he is good at the Evel Knievelling and the punch-throwing but terminally bad at plan-making and shirt buttons. The movie lets him let loose this humdinger about his dead nanny…

“Uncle, I know that grandpa is the master of my fate. I also know that he’s the father of my father. But that poor man, Abu Baba, was my mother! Despite his poverty, he raised me like his own for 17 years! He was my mother! He was my mother in the real sense of the term! Whosoever has murdered my mother, I won’t spare him at any cost! Even if he happens to be my father!”

…and then throws him in a cage.

The best two musical numbers feature similar-sounding drastically catchy staccato disco goulash and are as flush with nonsense as the rest of the runtime: "Udi Baba", “Pyar Ka Imtihaan.” The latter clip includes blackface, but when your movie has everything it can’t have taste.

I have never seen a film by Subhash Ghai before so do not know if his work is typically this clumsy; I kind of needed this one, am filled with excitement and dread at the prospect of more. If you have 99 cents, 2½ hours, and too many brain cells, Vidhaata is available for rent on Amazon Prime.



9. Angoor / Grape (Gulzar)

This adaptation of The Comedy of Errors is technically a remake of a different-languaged film based on a novel based on The Comedy of Errors. That lineage and a fun credits sequence promise more complications than we get. Which is basically The Comedy of Errors.

Gulzar is a poet who worked in the film industry as a lyricist before also screenwriting and directing. (He never stopped writing lyrics, has an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire’s “Jai Ho.”) Even though music doesn’t feature heavily into Angoor, I suspect Hindi speakers are getting a lot more out of it than I am. I’ve only seen one other film directed by him so far, and while I appreciate that in both he leans away from melodrama, this can feel caszh where it should get giddy. The second set of twins here are a paranoiac and his stoner servant and the film doesn’t favor either of their directions hard enough. Both leads are amiable and the film winds up a pleasant bit of confusion.

The best bit concerns the purchase of a rope, with the extracurricular chuckle that of course Indian cinema would make Shakespeare’s “rope’s end” full-lengthed.



To come: More strains of mental illness, both symbolic and sadly real. Squirm-inducing head trauma. Infidelities and shocking divorce rituals. The second-highest grossing film in the history of the Soviet Union. An unexpected tribute to Peter Sellers.

1978 - 1980 - 1981

The Indian films I’ve seen from this year, ranked, part two of two. Some musical highlights in the links.



10. Arth / The Meaning (Mahesh Bhatt)

Want to feel terrible? Consider the treatment of Parveen Babi, the doe-eyed Bollywood actress often cast as a headstrong, independent modern woman. (She won me over when she breaks during “My Name is Anthony Gonsalves” in Amar Akbar Anthony.) Behind the scenes she had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and moved between a series of volatile, well-publicized relationships (some confirmed, some rumored) with sometimes married colleagues. One of those was with Mahesh Bhatt, a struggling director who initially saw Babi as a social climbing opportunity, but then fell in love and left his wife and child to enter a three-year affair with the actress. When Babi’s state started deteriorating in the midst of an exhausting schedule filming several concurrent high-profile projects (including Ramesh Sippy’s Shaan) and Bhatt heard suggestions of electro-shock therapy to accelerate her treatment and get her back to work, he ran away with her so she could take the time she needed. (One director whose films waited on her recovery publicly called her mental illness “a hoax” and alerted government tax authorities in case she tried to leave the country.) When, decades later, her body was found after having starved to death and went unclaimed in the morgue, Bhatt paid for her internment and last rites.

That last part’s according to Bhatt (and contradicted by her biographer). He never rose to prominence while dating Babi, but turned the affair into an industry after it was over. (“I am the first to admit that I am like a roadside leper selling his wounds,” Bhatt told a journalist. “I make money from my humiliations.”) He has directed two films, produced another, and produced a web series all based to some extent on the relationship. 2006’s Woh Lamhe..., made a year after Babi’s death and directed by Bhatt’s nephew, makes everything look like a perfume ad, including the Babi character’s suicide attempt; as she dies of complications from that, she implies she’s sacrificed herself for his career, calls herself “a poisonous woman,” and glowingly tells him, “My baby is a star.”

Arth was Bhatt’s breakthrough and it concerns guess what. A struggling director (Kulbhushan Kharbanda – the villain in Shaan!) leaves his wife (Shabana Azmi) to have an affair with a famous and unstable actress (Smita Patil.) It launches like it’s going to be the portrait of a man agonizing between a needy, nagging spouse and a needy, crazed mistress, but before you can say, “Ciao, Federico!” the film realigns and rightly pitches him as the destabilizing element. It becomes a story of a wronged woman rebuilding her life. If the Babi affair was good marketing, Arth promotes itself as an act of contrition.

Not an act of understanding. One of the reasons for all the dish above is that I’m unsure Arth can exist away from its support. It’s fine. It is a solid parallel cinema drama. It has enough raggedy visual style to set it apart from Bollywood product, though it cannot wholly escape melodrama and dramatic soap opera stingers. Its songs are diegetic performances by a teddy bear troubadour. It may have represented an important cultural step forward in the woman’s picture in India; many of its heroine’s choices still satisfy. It’s a well-regarded movie, won some awards, was a surprise box office hit. But for a work purportedly personal it is thin. I don’t think Bhatt (or Azmi) ever tried to find out how his wife spent her days. Going by what’s on screen, most people spend their lives waiting in lobbies for other people to show up. The most dramatic lives are lived away from the central triangle.

Arth also works as an act of beatification and beautification. On screen, at least, Bhatt holds his wife on high. (Not incidentally, does not allow her to dirty herself there.) By the end she’s laying hands on people. Azmi looks resplendent in her suffering, radiant in forgiveness. She won both the National Film Award (the first of three consecutive wins) and Filmfare Award (ridiculously beating herself out three times over) for this performance; she can find vulnerability and resilience in a character who has always feared instability and look great doing it. Her two scenes with Patil – who has little time to fill out her complicated character, goes a bit Lady Macbeth – are electric, but then the two actresses (both Shyam Benegal discoveries) were already professional rivals.

Which again brings up Parveen Babi and Mahesh Bhatt and matters of respect. Babi was very much alive when Arth was released, and still working in a very public industry that had a small stable of name stars. So this same year, Smita Patil, who plays a character based on Parveen Babi, appeared with Babi in Namak Halaal (see below); they are only in two shots together, in one are kept on opposite sides of a room. And Shabana Azmi, who plays a wife whose husband leaves her for by a character based on Parveen Babi, appeared with Babi in two films. Here they are sharing a dance number in a Charlie’s Angels-inspired action film. And in Yeh Nazdeekiyan (below) she plays a wife whose husband leaves her for by a character played by Parveen Babi.

Bhatt says he told Babi not to see Arth (“It’s not good for you.”) and no one is sure if she ever did. But after its release she suffered another breakdown and left the industry for good.



11. Namak Halaal / Loyal Servant (Prakash Mehra)

Mehra’s previous film was solemn and dire, so this lighter masala comes as some relief. It’s bogged by a strenuous melodramatic set-up and plot mechanics about which no one could care; could lose an hour, easy. And Mehra's so unconcerned with consistency or clarity or focus that it may be an accident when everyone on screen is on the same page. But when it triples down on not taking things seriously there’s fun to be found.

Plot’s basically small-town Amitabh Bachchan buffooning. Here he is repatriating Peter Sellers’ Party gag (with some blackface instead of the brownface). Eventually he buffoons in service of big city hotel magnate (and long lost childhood friend, natch) Shashi Kapoor. I think it’s their last outing as co-stars and they have a blast being silly. The set designers do as well.

You should find something to enjoy among the musical numbers. Do you like things wet? Spiky, shiny, and awkward? Or crave the feeling of having an “I Feel Love”-shaped earworm carved into your brain?

The full movie’s on YouTube with optional English subs.





12. Pokkuveyil / Twilight (Govindan Aravindan)

After the death of his father, a young man wanders (or perhaps only his mind does) as friends (who may or may not exist) representing physical life and career, political involvement, and art and love fall away. His loneliness echoes through the natural world to the sound of an endless jam session, livened by the occasional memory or hallucination, leadened by aimlessness. Aravindan's abstract meditation on isolation and madness is typically gorgeous (Shaji is again his DP) and slow cinema devotees should dive in; it has its fans and won its awards. I often felt united with the character and the creators in waiting for something to happen while alone in my impatience. Easily the least of the four Aravindan films I’ve seen.



13. Bazaar (Sagar Sarhadi)

“To hide his sins and crimes, [man] has made customs and rituals.”

In the historic trading city Hyderabad, once-regal families sell their daughters into surreptitious prostitution to avoid the indignity of work (“In our family, we keep servants. Lowly people do jobs.”), poor families sell their young daughters in marriage to wealthy visitors so they can afford to pay for someone to marry their older daughters. Najma (Smita Patil, her last appearance on this year’s list, I promise) escaped to become the kept woman of a man with a well-off father, but has returned to facilitate a purchase that will provide him the funds to start a business and marry her.

Sarhadi is a credited writer on Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie and Silsila, two romances I love, and though Bazaar is a different beast at least on the level of conception it includes complicit and tragic cycles and echoes. Yet it gets thinner instead of deeper, repeating rants, hinging on a silly misunderstanding. This is Sarhadi’s first film as a director and it can be a stilted mess. The coverage doesn’t cut, there’s lots of Editing Aargh.

Here’s a scene with a fine song and set-up: Najma’s brother has asked the girl he wants to someday marry to entertain his sister’s party; she sings a song about impossible love for him, but of course draws the attention of Najima’s lecherous client; meanwhile everyone else is contemplating their own histories of missed connections with each other. Sarhadi stages it in a dull static circle, sometimes follows the flow of feelings around and across it, zooming in and out, but will also crassly cut to close-ups – sometimes to the same face you’ve just zoomed out of, sometimes to an abstract series of faces. (I also like "Karoge Yaad To Har Baat", but the visuals are scenery.)

Mid-film he interjects shots of women “up for auction” and you wonder at their provenance; feels both bracing and in bad taste.

Naseeruddin Shah plays a poet long infatuated with Najma, and both the character and the actor are out of control. The poet’s allowed to tag along and comment on the action to the point of insufferability; when he lectures her on ethics, he carries the umbrage of the jilted lover. It always feels like this film is yelling at the wrong people.

Bazaar is available for streaming with optional English subtitles on YouTube.



14. Grihajuddha / Crossroads (Buddhadeb Dasgupta)

Giant corporations with lots of money may be up to bad things! Bengali parallel cinema would-be thriller (which competed this year in Venice) about a steel company’s debilitating reach into a community it now commands righteously mourns ideals smothered by self-interest and bought-and-paid-for nihilism. But the backbone of the obvious story is feeble investigative journalism and the heart is a Woman Who Has to Make a Moral Choice Between Two Men and this movie’s too clumsily conceived to distinguish itself. Dasgupta tries to keep things crisp – film’s under 90 minutes – but there’s plenty of dead air. Dasgupta shows some visual sense early, crushing figures into narrow alleys and hallways; but he also does a lot of things senselessly. There are numerous abrupt, random dolly moves. A 360-degree pan fills screen space while someone reads a letter. Goutam Ghose pops in to provide some energy as a football goalie/thug.

Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro would cover some of the same ground as this (including the deployment of “We Shall Overcome”) in a more winning satirical way the next year.

Grihajuddha is available for streaming with optional English subtitles (and a lot of annoying on-screen advertising) on YouTube.



15. Nikaah / Marriage Contract (B.R. Chopra)

Until 2017(!), Shariat law in India allowed Muslims to divorce their wives by screaming, "Talaq!" at them three times.

This is what that felt like, according to this film:

.gif WARNING: Flashing images, may affect photosensitive viewers.

A man and woman divorced in such a way could be re-married, but not until the woman fist married a different man, consummated that marriage, then got divorced again. The object of this, as explained in this movie, was to keep men from taking "the venom of divorce" lightly and rattling off the triple talaq during every fight. (Perhaps they should have looked to Candyman, not Beetlejuice.) The practice is called Nikah halala and seems like it should be worked into ridiculously plotted movies as often as amnesia and evil twins.

B.R. Chopra wants to make a point about a woman's powerlessness at being kept married only by man's whim. There's a ponderous three-minute narrated opening over artwork of (sometimes naked) women about how they shape our lives and how they're seen and how they need to be remembered as human beings, but I'm not sure he's the one to make this point.

For instance: The relative hero of this movie is someone who saves the heroine from being assaulted at her workplace by her boss. He then tells her to smile more, hires her away, and on her first day of employment takes her to his house. There, he introduces her to the sitar he has named after her.

In some ways things shake out okay at the end. There's a tirade of self-recrimination on the part of the two male leads, both of whom have you longing for a third option from the start. An "I choose me" moment is abandoned on its cusp, and you wonder what happened to this woman's inner life after she graduated college. The best thing about the movie is how glum Salma Agha looks when presented with her supposed second chance, and there is a delicious stretch while that second chance rings aptly (and amusingly) hollow; but then of course Chopra tasks Agha with smiling more. The men, of course, get the last word.



16. Yeh Nazdeekiyan (Vinod Pande)

Marc Zuber is a flirty, married ad exec with a history of short, meaningless affairs… until he meets model Parveen Babi, for whom he leaves wife Shabana Azmi. This is not a terrible infidelity drama, and It gets right things Arth gets wrong. Zuber and Azmi’s marriage feels lived-in, complicated, like Pande and the actors put work into it. People have lives. And senses of humor. The film has slight fun playing images of the affair against images of the cornball ads Zuber oversees.

But it also feels cookie-cutter in ways Arth avoids. It is not afraid to lean into a trite moment. It leers where Arth gawked. Everyone somehow becomes less a person as this goes on. Babi’s character does a 180 into desperation early. Azmi’s is magically selfless, and her new life involves music so the film can work some songs in. (Nothing of note, and we have to weather renditions of “Evergreen” and “Feelings.”) The movie looks flat. And while Arth gets you to nod along righteously at its end, Yeh Nazdeekiyan stubs its toe badly gout the door. I mostly included it to compare with Arth and was surprised how many similarities there were; a better movie than both these lies somewhere between them.

This was Vinod Pande’s second film in an infidelity trilogy, I’ve no intention of chasing down the others. But I wonder if the clustering of those, Arth, and Silsila is a reflection of anything larger. When talking of Basu Chatterjee’s early ‘70s work, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy posed that to generations that were starting to find ways to connect outside traditional arranged marriages, indie romantic comedies “represented a romantic avant-garde… constituted a how-to genre.” These particular infidelity dramas all take place to some extent within film/media environs and feature financially comfortable characters (Arth does make a point to contrast class situations and move between those worlds), so they may be purely self-interested and their appeal lurid. But perhaps a decade after the exhilaration of independent romance, an audience also needed affirmation when things didn’t work out.



17. Moondram Pirai(Balu Mahendra)

A young woman (Sridevi) suffers head trauma that erases all but her earliest memories and makes her think she’s seven years old. Her parents send her to an institution for treatment, but of course she gets diverted to a brothel. There, a virginal schoolteacher (Kamal Haasan) is drawn to her. He “rescues” her, but instead of taking her to the police or a hospital or trying to find out anything about her, he takes her home. He raises her as his child and dreams of marrying her, all while her parents are out looking for her.

It’s a little like Poor Things, if Poor Things was all about the Ramy Youssef character, and Bella was stuck alone with him the whole film, and her brain maxed out at seven years old and she spoke with a babydoll voice, and instead of fantastical production design you got some nice scenic photography. So maybe it’s more like 50 First Dates meets Spider Baby.

And it played best for me as an Adam Sandler comedy about male infantilism. The teacher lives next door to his mother, who babysits while he’s at work. He fends off the advances of his elderly employer’s much younger wife. (Her wet dream is one of the movie’s best musical sequences.) Much time is devoted to watching the teacher and the woman play like they’re both seven-year-olds and that’s catnip to the actors. But Sridevi’s convincing enough that whenever Haasan puts his Daddy Cap back on it gets gross. The film’s mix of innocence and perversion never stopped erring toward the latter, especially when it insisted on the former.

(Did not help matters that whenever he said something along the lines of, “I’ve got to go,” the subtitles instead read, “I’ll make a move.”)

Sounds the sort of intriguing curio you’d discover through the Psychotronic Video Guide, but it is instead a much beloved, award-winning “romantic drama” that ran for almost a full year in one of the largest Tamil-speaking cities. Either there is an entire region in India that needs to register on a watch list or I need to be less easily appalled. It’ll get a second chance soon, unfortunately; the same director and cast remade this in Hindi as Sadma and that was already in my 1983 pile.
The songs can have a pleasant ‘70s soft rock vibe: ”Vaanengum Thanga”, ” Kanne Kalaimaane“, "Poongaatru Puthithaanathu".

A fuzzy version of Moondram Pirai is available for rent on Amazon Prime.





18. Disco Dancer (Babbar Subhash)

While Ridgemont High freshman Stacy Hamilton was staring up at graffiti that read, “DISCO SUCKS,” half a world away Subhash and writer Dr. Rahi Masoom Reza were manufacturing evidence. Disco Dancer is the story of Jimmy (Mithun Chakraborty), a street performer whose childhood was marred by an injustice. Now tapped for stardom, his heart is filled with song… and vengeance! And the desire to have his mother’s fingers in his mouth! Stock footage crowds love him! After an angry field hockey team slightly bruises Jimmy’s legs, will he be able to perform at the local International Disco Festival?

This movie was a phenomenon. It is the second-highest-grossing film in the history of the Soviet Union. Suck it, Tarkovsky. M.I.A. reworked one of its songs onto her best album. It may have inspired a Devo track.

It is often plainly terrible, as formulaic as some people think disco. I like disco (Nana Love 4vs) and was sad to have both my high and low hopes dashed by work from the They Just Didn’t Care school of filmmaking. Enjoyably silly things happen, but they are often borne from laziness. Witness Jimmy’s breakthrough performance wherein he manhandles a heckler (whom he will later find out is a figure from him childhood and then marry, of course) and enthralls a quarter-filled room with such legendary dance moves as rolling around on the floor, falling to the floor and letting people poke you, grabbing your earlobes while doing squats. Saturday Matinee Fever at best. (The reaction shots from the club manager are priceless.) Chakraborty’s single impressive dance move involves swinging his hips and crossing his legs in such exaggerated fashion that you feel fight scenes were added to butch him up.

You’ll note the heckler in that clip defends herself by just standing there. There’s a lot of just standing there in Disco Dancer, including a bizarre, uncomfortable climax in which a traumatized Jimmy just stands there on stage while concerned figures from his life try to coax him out of his trauma and affirm his titular role. It’s akin to “The Trial” from Pink Floyd – The Wall or a condensed journey to enlightenment from Tommy, only it goes on forever and stays resolutely static and internal.

The real tragedy of Disco Dancer is that there is not more SAM. SAM is the disco dance king Jimmy unseats and also of course the son of the film’s archvillain. (The archvillain’s death is magnificently dumb.) SAM is loud and arrogant in gesture and word, SAM speaks about himself in the third person. Here is SAM (and his crew, who of course do most of the work) performing "Koi Yahan Nache Nache," which you’ll recognize as The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” They almost completely forget the chorus until SAM reminds them.

Disco Dancer is on YouTube with optional English subtitles. You probably shouldn’t, but you know you will.



Unranked:

“Tobacco Embers” (Yugantar Collective)

Did not have any narrative films by female directors on this list, a good reminder that the documentaries by the feminist Yugantar Film Collective and the subsequent work of member Deepa Dhanraj are streaming on The Criterion Channel. This documentary short covers the first strikes by female workers in the hundred-year history of the Nipani tobacco factories. While union meeting particulars aren’t captivating, the growing sense of confidence and solidarity through the short are. (1981’s ”Maid Servant” was more impressive to me as the strike's logistics seem daunting.)

“Chakkar Chanduka Chameliwala” (Niranjan Thade, as N. C. Thade )

The winner of this year’s National Film Award for Best Experimental Film was a film student’s thesis project and.. it feels very much like a student film, down to the We Know One Girl of it all. It’s an initially cute piece about a picked-on boy slipping in and out of fantasies that finds time to dip into a musical number and a soft drink ad parody. Fine soundtrack, locations. The version on YouTube does not have subtitles for its spare dialogue, but it’s a shock it’s on YouTube at all. The director would write and direct his first feature thirty years later.

1978 - 1980 - 1981 - 1982 (1,2)

Jean Yanne's Deux heures moins le quart avant Jésus-Christ is a huge disappointment after the brilliance of Les Chinois a Paris. That film had a clear and clever comic idea driving the entire film (What if France was occupied again, this time by the Chinese), but the only thing keeping this Roman farce together is bad sub-Mel Brooks jokes surrounding Cleopatra's visit to Julius Caesar (and imagine the bad timing when Mel Brooks himself made his own awful version of this kind of stuff right before Yanne's film came out). What's worse, the film derails midway through for an extended series of painful gay jokes (when the best gag is a throwaway shot of a bartender at a Roman gay disco wearing a t-shirt reading "Ecce Homo", you know you're in trouble). There is, however, exactly one funny idea in the entire film: a parody of Mankiewicz's Cleopatra wherein the elaborate ornaments of Cleopatra's arrival keep getting destroyed by the low hanging Roman architecture, and even that can only do so much with a budget far below what Fox ponied up.

One thing is abundantly clear, though: Alain Chabat clearly loves this film, since he more or less copied it in spirit and style for his Asterix film, which means this kind of thing (rando pop culture references, adding antiquated suffixes to words for comic effect, an inconsistent modern veneer on ancient times, &c) is just somehow funny to multiple generations of the French (and certainly not to me)