Debanjan Dhar

Kamei (Naoto Shimajiri) has been silently grieving. His father’s recent death hangs over his thoughts. In Xavier Tera’s The Colour of the Sun, bereavement also turns a conduit for the inevitable exploration youthfulness catapults. There’s a lot of hurt, unprocessed emotion which has him darting in circles. Neither can he really open up to his mother. The closed line of dialogue, a stunted chance to vent, makes healing an incredibly lonely journey. Premiering in Orizzonti competition at the Venice Film Festival, Tera’s gently shaped drama zeroes in on fine emotional detail, accruing power through modest, nevertheless piercing suggestion.

Maya (Maya Mehta) was never supposed to be privy to the risky work over which her industrialist father Rohan (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub) presides. He has designed his well-settled life and sand mining work, involving day-labourers, to be separated by an inveterate distance. This breeds indifference, a stiffening up against the real dangers and worries of those having to take the plunge. In Shalini Adnani’s debut feature, Our Share of Sand, the 12-year-old British-Asian Maya returns with her mother Priti (Ellora Torchia) to stay with her father in India. Having been in the UK for years, the occasion marks Maya’s first encounter with her roots. However, it brings her up distressingly close against the deep-entrenched class inequality and densely hierarchical negotiations Indian life is riven with.

True-crime narratives trade in lurid shocks. They have this unseemly, grotesque fascination that inadvertently replaces human consideration. The rush for dramatic re-staging bleeds out any concern for the victim, what their fuller story preceding the tragedy might be. The event itself becomes the driving lens through which we view an entire life. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival, Edoardo Gabbriellini’s The City of The Living’s greatest triumph is that it wholly goes beyond this limiting approach, constantly finding the complex, fledgling humanity of the victim.

Phuttiphong Aroonpheng is among the most aesthetically committed, politically cogent filmmakers working today. The Thai filmmaker who broke out with Manta Ray (2018) is back at Venice Film Festival, competing in Orizzonti with The Burning Giants. A mysterious virus cloaks a population in fear and uncertainty. There have been forceful evacuation, disappearances and uprooting of a community from their homes. When the film opens, we are placed right in its peculiar setting. Smoke envelops. The forest is manned by officers who have cordoned off entire sections.

Leading Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain is a fascinating voice with brave, brilliant ideas. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition, her new film, The Difficult Bride, comes with massive expectations. It’s billed as a historic selection, the first-ever Bangladeshi film to land a Venice film festival competitive slot. On top of that, Hossain has repeatedly described it as a passion project, an idea that has been with her for two decades. She has honed and shaped it over many years, taking it through notable labs and grabbing prestigious grants. So, it’s a real mystery to find the eventual shape the film has resulted in as so terribly undercooked, unconvincing and painfully strained.

What does it take to plough on even in the face of overwhelming opposition? In Ben Rekhi’s Last Man In Tower, the retired schoolteacher, Yogesh Mishra/Masterji (Manoj Bajpayee), finds himself sanded into a corner. He had supporters but the small number dwindled. This adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s eponymous 2011 novel spins around Mumbai’s Vishram apartment block. It’s one of the many old buildings that real-estate hawks have their eyes on as redevelopment razes the country. Masterji is the polar opposite of the smarmy builder, Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), who insists everything in Mumbai is for sale. There are still some who fight tooth and nail to preserve those places that are receptacles of their memories, a record of their lives’ intimate tapestries.

It’s a given that Mirzapur: The Movie would be held up against the eponymous series for comparison. The judgement is inevitable. A movie foray promises scale and spectacle. Director Gurmmeet Singh, who has helmed several episodes of the show, directs with efficiency and Puneet Krishna’s screenplay keeps the action buzzing. The crime drama branches out from the Uttar Pradesh terrain, stretching into Jaisalmer’s sands. A new rival to Mirzapur’s king, Kaleen Bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi), intrudes. As Kaleen himself confesses in the opening, whoever occupies the throne gets locked into a constant relationship with death. Power operates through fear. The film is slashed open with Kaleen held captive. It then unravels to show how he got to that point. It must be noted, though, that this film is situated at a moment in the franchise far preceding the slew of major deaths.

Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups stomps to theatres with a busload of expectations and curiosity. The pairing of a distinctive filmmaker like Geetu Mohandas, who can twist and interrogate genres as she did in the wrenching Moothon (2019), and a superstar, Yash, is one of the most provocative bets to have surfaced in mainstream Indian cinema. It’s a great pity then Mohandas’ voice gets sanded under the crushing, loud antics of this blood-soaked saga around men, guns and guilt. There are stray glimpses that the filmmaker wants to say something about the nihilism of the violence that carry on from one generation to the next in a tired, self-defeating cycle. In a departure from genre staples, Mohandas also seeks to voice the intense self-loathing hidden underneath men on bloodthirsty rampages. However, Ujwal Kulkarni’s scattershot, frenzied edit constantly drains both poignance and any sustained mood.