My Day 3 at CIFF

It was my day 3 (Wednesday 24th Dec) in CIFF (Chennai International Film Festival), but it was it’s day 7!!. I was absent for the 4 days. I thought catching up to three films, but had a chance to only see two. Got to get to the office at 5:30 PM.

Already missed out my “not-to-miss” films like Leviathan, Moebius and Winter Sleep, so I did not take time to go through the options available across different venues. The best bet is to go Woodlands and play “inki-pinki-ponki” and select the films.

The first film was “The Sentimentalist”, a movie from Greece. The announcer in her sweet voice said, the movie has dialogues both in English and Greek. And so, there is no sub-titles available as it will be easily understandable. But, in the entire movie, there was only one scene which had a dialogue in English, even in that half of the wordcount were “fucking.. fucking.. fucking”, otherwise marunduku kuda English dialogues nahi. I (most of us) had experienced today, the expression “it sounds like Greek and Latin”.

The movie was stylishly shot. In spite of no sub-titles, I was able to make a story out of it, the crowd politely accepted the movie without subs (I guess this is normal in a filmfest!).

For lunch, I did not want to take chances with Royapettai briyani’s shops. I don't have a steel stomach. Found a small veg hotel in Quaid-e-Millath Road. I owe them two rupees as I didn't have change!.

The next film was from the Indian Panorama section “Munnariyippu” starring Mammootty. 

The very first scene of the movie, when the credits starts we see a dead lizard is taken\dragged by a bunch of ants. This scene sets the pace of the film and we might interpret on how the main character Raghavan (Mammootty) might be dragged or nagged by others. BTW, it is good to see Mammootty set asides his stardom and performs for the sake of the character and not for his brand (I guess this is normal for Malayalam mainstream actors, but not lately).

By 3/4th of the film, we tend to guess on how the film might unfold, as Raghavan irks the viewers and the other characters in the film. But we fail to anticipate the climax. The full story of Raghavan’ past is untold, we tend to get only bits and pieces of it. Maybe, that's why the film succeeds. 

Will see if I can catch few films in the last day.

My Previous two posts on CIFF-

www.teashoptalks.blogspot.com/2014/12/my-first-day-in-film-fest.html
www.teashoptalks.blogspot.com/2014/12/potti-maaripochi-in-ciff.html