The Crown Season 6: A Long & Hearty Goodbye To Television Royalty |
This is #CineFile, where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news. |
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| MIDWAY through the final season of The Crown, one of the many impossibly eloquent characters of the British monarchy uses the term “deja vu”. It’s happening all over again. He could very well be describing our relationship with the long-running Netflix series itself — which has spanned six seasons, seven real-time years, six decades of a Queen’s reign, three generations of royals, and three formidable lead actresses and ensembles. When the first season streamed in 2016, it altered the DNA of a historical television drama — cinematic, stylish, elegant, regal, specific, mercurial, all at once. The bar had been raised. A dramatised account of the royal family as it was, it still felt like a privileged peek into the inner workings of a notoriously private institution. It transcended front-page gossip and controversies, and acquired an artistic life of its own. (Stream top-rated movies and shows across platforms and languages, using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack, for just Rs 199/month.) Over time, however, the series has come to be defined by a sense of repetition and familiarity. A narrative deja vu. The odd show-stopping episode or character aside, there has been an inbreeding of themes. The self-conscious metaphors have ranged from rats to birds to hunting to moon-walking to the gravitational force of the moon. The closer the series has gotten to the 21st century, the harder it has gotten to process the individualism of its setting. Every season is steeped in the same conflicts: Tradition vs modernity, insider vs outsider, death, succession, royal existentialism. The generational trauma comes like old wine in newer bottles: Stubborn fathers, resentful siblings, fragile sons, rueful lovers, tragic outliers. |
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Priscilla: Sofia Coppola’s Best Film In 20 Years Is A Tale Of Lost Girlhood |
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| | Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi |
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PRISCILLA is defined by the dichotomy between life and mythmaking. The film is at once beautiful and ugly, hollow and loaded, tender and tough, dreamy and nightmarish. It is a fairytale about a girl who goes on to marry the most eligible bachelor in the world; it is a tragedy about a child who is groomed by a gifted man-child. It is a sweeping love story that’s too good to be true; it is a twisted marriage story that’s too true to be good. It is a 1960s composition of celebrity, privilege and power; it is a 2023 deconstruction of patriarchy, abuse and isolation. It is a spare biographical drama of Priscilla Presley; it is the background of an unseen Elvis Presley biopic. It alludes to the music that shaped a culture; it is rooted in the silence that shaped a home. Priscilla belongs to the Sofia Coppola multiverse of romantic custody. She is the lonely young wife of a celebrity photographer at a Tokyo hotel. She is the teen-aged and sexually repressed archduchess stifled by her husband’s courtiers at the court of Versailles. She is the still 12-year-old girl accompanying her Hollywood-star dad on a publicity trip to Europe and a gambling dash to Las Vegas. The film opens with a shot that brings to mind Greta Gerwig’s pedicured subversion of Barbie — an expensive rug absorbs Priscilla’s soon-to-be-high-heeled feet. Her eyeliner extends the depth of her gaze. She, too, becomes a utopian doll that wakes up to the whims of real-world existentialism. There are also shades of a young Diana’s seclusion in The Crown: She marries (older) Prince Charming only to realise that his palace is her birdcage. Marital bliss is an illusion that starts crumbling, and all that’s left are the decorated walls of history and royalty. — RAHUL DESAI |
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Trite Club: Vijay Kumar's Fight Club Is No Uriyadi |
Not everybody is Lokesh Kanagaraj, writes Aditya Shrikrishna. |
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| FIGHT CLUB, written and directed by Abbas A Rahmath with a story by Sasi is an excuse for the filmmaker and cinematographer Leon Britto to go crazy with the split diopter. The film is teeming with scenes where we have a close-up of a character’s face on one side of the frame and the opposing character on the other side sharply in focus. Fight Club is essentially about manipulation (which is too much talk and hardly done well) so for a couple of scenes the form might have made sense. But just one after another? This is a potent style that works best when used sparingly — a special favorite of masters like Brian De Palma — but this film gravitates towards it almost as blatantly as it does towards violence. With a title like that, what did you expect is probably the question, but it is violence for the sake of it. It is artistically composed and executed violence that has no real skin in the screenplay. The film begins almost shockingly — we have a long shot of an empty college ground, and the camera stays static. It remains so till three characters climb a wall and walk towards more intimate quarters of the camera. A few more static, silent shots follow. It makes one think that maybe this is a different film, a different approach towards the stories of youth in anguish in North Chennai. But no, once it bursts it never stops and everything is empty banishments at nothing and no one. |
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The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT. |
| Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over. |
| In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this. |
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