Starring: Choudhury Bikash Das, Sudharsri Madhusmita An abstract satire on today’s audience Rating: 3.5/5 Adieu Godard is Amartya Bhat...
Starring: Choudhury Bikash Das, Sudharsri Madhusmita
An abstract satire on today’s audience
Rating: 3.5/5
Adieu Godard is Amartya Bhattacharyya’s least
abstract film, but for the normal non-arthouse film-watching audience, it may appear
a bit pointless and a little too abstract.
It follows a man addicted to watching
pornography, Ananda who lives in a conservative village and one day happens to
stumble upon the DVD of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
Bhattacharyya has directed, written, shot,
and edited the film and is also the lyricist for the song heard during the
final shot of the film as the credits roll.
An indie film, looking at the quality of
the shots, it resembles Q’s films, especially Gandu with its handheld low
contrast black-and-white cinematography. This is a film that nobody in India
expected would be made, since the vast majority of the audience is the masala movie-loving
audience that doesn’t care about logic and are there to just have a good time
and not have to think about it, which is exactly what this film satirizes as
one hears the reactions of the villagers to Godard’s Breathless, calling it
pointless, boring and trash, which any mainstream movie watching viewer would.
This film appears to be made especially for
arthouse fans. The cinematography is excellent and has some great shots –the
upside-down ultra-wide shot of Shilpa and Pablo lying on the beach. The
performances are surprisingly good, with Choudhury Bikash Das as Ananda being
the highlight who portrays his character extremely well. Sudharsri Madhusmita
is also good as Shilpa.
The film has a chain of conversations about
what is the use of thinking, which again, is a
satire about mainstream cinema audiences – obviously referring to them
as mindless audiences who can even watch trash if it looks entertaining rather
than watching a film that forces them to think.
The tribute to Godard, though a minor issue throughout the second and third acts of the film, is the film’s biggest selling point and is the only thing that attracts most of the audience it has to it. It’s surprising then, why Bhattacharyya decided to pay homage to Godard through a film with such a plot. Adieu Godard is an ambitious film that does more than it should in its short runtime. It deserves to be seen even if you know very little of Godard.
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