Three Selections from the Former Colonies (Patreon)

God Straightens Legs (Joële Walinga, Canada)

This is a potent medium-length documentary portrait of a woman named Renée, who we gradually learn is afflicted with cancer. She cannot walk, which may or may not be a side effect of the cancer -- we cannot really tell (or at least I couldn't; perhaps I missed some crucial detail). She has decided to forego chemotherapy, in part because of the awful side effects of the treatment. But mostly, she has opted for another course of action. She will pray.

Renée is devout, in the almost exclusively white, suburban manner of contemporary evangelicals. She has a prayer group that, from what we see, focuses much of its energy on her, and she has her TV tuned to a Thai televangelist most of the time. In interstitial moments, we see others doing the physical labor of taking care of Renée and her needs, which is not to say she does not exert effort on her own behalf. (We see her scoot her way down the stairs and clean the house while listening to Van Morrison.) But God Straightens Legs makes the point that prayers are frequently answered by loved ones, not by the Lord.

I had some trouble evaluating this film. On the one hand, it perfectly represents a particular religious subculture, as framed by a unique set of circumstances. But I wasn't sure that simply capturing that reality with accuracy, with minimal comment or intervention, was such a feat in itself. Then I read about the film and learned that Renée is director Walinga's mother. This obviously casts the project in a very different light, but I would not have known this without the outside research. So while my overall impression of the film is improved significantly, I remain somewhat ambivalent about the whole.

Shirkers (Sandi Tan, Singapore / U.S.)

It's not often that a story has such perfect ingredients. Shirkers intersects with the film history and culture of a nation, with gender and power relations, and with the changing face of urbanization. As SNL's Stefon would say, "this film has everything." Above all, it has high-profile backing -- the Sundance Institute and executive producer Maya Rudolph, although we shouldn't hold that against it. Nevertheless, Shirkers should probably come across more as a story of triumph or vindication than it does. 

Instead, Tan hews almost exclusively to a narrative of youth exploited and promise thwarted. This is a film about three young film students who made an experimental road movie called Shirkers, and how their mentor / director, a film teacher named Georges Cardona, ripped them off and kept all their footage in an unedited state until his death. As the documentary has it, Cardona was a jealous failure, and went out of his way to sabotage the efforts of anyone he thought might surpass him in talent. So this skeevy guy, hanging out with girls 20 years his junior, insinuated himself into their production only to destroy it.

If Shirkers fails as a documentary, it is because of the voice and identity that Tan builds for herself. She is clearly working out the trauma of having been manipulated by Cardona, but this results in an assertion of identity that at times borders on self-aggrandizement. She continually marshals experts, as well as the Shirkers crew, to assert that this was the great lost masterpiece of Singaporean cinema, and that films like Ghost World and Rushmore would have been different animals has Shirkers been out in the world. What we see of the footage does indeed look great, in a Ron Rice / Jack Smith sort of way -- formal anarchy and absolute play above all else. But one gets the sense that Tan could have channeled her resources into reconstructing the soundtrack and finishing Shirkers instead of trying to build a myth around its absence. I mean, if they can finish The Other Side of the Wind, anything's possible.

Manmarziyaan (Husband Material) (Anurag Kashyap, India)

Something of a departure for Kashyap, a straight-ahead romantic Bollywood entry, it might be fair to evaluate this in the same way we evaluate Johnnie To's romantic comedies. The "Scorsese of India" is trying for a lighter touch, and the results are mixed but positive overall. It's part of the wave of harder-edged, more sexually frank films we've been seeing out of the Hindi industry in recent years, with Kashyap even coining a neologism, "fyaar," that allows him to obliquely refer to the main couple's raunchy, no-holds-barred sex. (Pyaar means "love," and so putting an F on it, as in the song "F for Fyaar," is a clear reference to fucking.)

Part of what makes Manmarziyaan work is that the audience knows certain things that the characters don't, so there is no "twist." What we are watching is a learning curve, wherein a passionate couple discovers, painfully and at length, that their sex-driven relationship has an expiration date, and that when one grows up, one reasonably wants more from a mate. The argument could be made that Kashyap is coming down on the side of conservatism by framing all this within the context of arranged marriage, but by the time things are over and done with, the fact that Rumi (the dazzling Tapsee Pannu) and Robbie (Abhishek Bachchan) were paired by a marriage broker is virtually incidental.

If there is a major flaw here, it is in the characterization of Vicky (Vicky Kaushal), who is such an obvious clown that we know he is not right for Rumi, or anybody. Even their alleged sexual chemistry seems like something being reported on rather than shown. If Kashyap wanted to make the scales a bit more even, he should have had Kaushal hold back a bit. Also, there's a rather cavalier attitude that Vicky brings out in Rumi that is not in keeping with the rest of her character. I know Kashyap considers himself the Bad Boy of Bollywood, but Rumi's offhand reference to abortion was so glib as to be unnatural, the kind of script element a writer throws in to show censors he's not afraid of them.