Movie Review

Tom Michell does not want to be here.

From the moment Michell arrives in Buenos Aires, Argentina—right at the outset of a military coup in the late 1970s–he makes this clear to anyone that will listen.

Hired to teach English at a male boarding school through a tenuous connection to the current headmaster, Michell spends more time with newspaper crosswords than teaching comma rules to his class.

After a few days, the military dictatorship claims control of the city, forcing the boys home. With their impromptu holiday, Michell and the school’s physics teacher travel to Uruguay looking for, in Michell’s words, a chance to “dance, drink, and meet a couple of nice ladies.”

Michell finds just what he was looking for. An evening of flirtation and dancing turns to a nice morning walk on the beach with a woman. But that lovely walk is marred when, in the sunrise, they encounter an oil slick covering the beach. And in that slick are the penguins. Dead, oil-soaked penguins.  

Only one penguin seems to have survived the catastrophe, and it’s barely alive, wiggling its beak and wings in the grime of the oil spill.

Michell’s curmudgeonly reply is to leave the penguin to die. “There’s nothing we can do…You can’t interfere with nature.”

But the woman’s not so inclined to walk on by. She demands they do something, and Tom (who is certainly interested in the woman, if not the penguin) finally agrees. They pick up the oiled penguin and sneak him into their hotel to clean him up.

But romance and oily penguins don’t mix well. Tom’s attempt at seduction quickly fails and the woman leaves him alone with the penguin.

Michell and the penguin stare at each other. They both seem to know he has a choice: One, Michell could try to dump the penguin back on the beach in Uruguay, leaving the bird to its fate. Or two, the teacher could somehow smuggle his new penguin friend through customs back to Argentina and onto campus and evade the strict “no pets” policy at the school.

For fans of animal-centered dramedies, it is not hard to guess what happens next.

But Michell and his penguin (whom he later affectionately names Juan Salvador), are both about to learn how much you really can change when nature interferes with you.

There have been countless movies about people heading back home after some time away and getting a less-than-friendly reception. Some of these characters are just searching for a little peace and quiet, like the ex-boxer, played by John Wayne, who returns to his Irish roots in John Ford’s classic The Quiet Man. And then there are those like Charlize Theron’s misanthropic writer in Young Adult, who blows back into her suburban hometown looking to stir up trouble.

One of the pleasures of Alain Guiraudie’s thriller Misericordia is that you’re never quite sure which camp its protagonist falls into. Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl, is a man of about 30, and he’s hard to figure out — raffishly handsome, but with something cold and inscrutable in his blue-eyed gaze.

As the movie begins, he’s driving to a tiny French village called Saint-Martial, nestled in a hilly, densely wooded countryside where residents go on long walks and forage for mushrooms. Jérémie has come back for the funeral of his former employer, a baker, who’s just died at the age of 62.

Jérémie stays with the baker’s widow, Martine — she’s played by the great French actor Catherine Frot, and she’s open-hearted and welcoming, allowing Jérémie to stay on for a bit after the funeral. Rather less hospitable is her son, Vincent, who lives nearby with his wife and son, but drops by his mom’s house often, each time making it clear that Jérémie is overstaying his welcome. The two men have some unfinished business; they used to be friends, and there’s a homoerotic undercurrent to their thinly disguised hostility.

Whatever might have happened between Jérémie and Vincent is never spelled out. But what makes Misericordia so unsettling — and also so darkly funny — is its belief that we all walk around carrying our share of latent, inconvenient desires.

Guiraudie is a leading figure in European queer cinema who’s best known for his 2013 gay-cruising thriller, Stranger by the Lake. That movie was a tightly honed exercise in suspense; for all the sun-drenched nudity, it threw off an icy Hitchcockian chill. Since then, though, Guiraudie’s work has gotten looser, weirder and more brazenly out-there, cutting across boundaries in terms of tone, genre and sexuality. His films are full of gay, straight and often cross-generational romantic pairings — indeed, his fascination with May-December encounters may be the most taboo thing about his work.

In Misericordia, Jérémie has no shortage of potential lust objects; he flits from one erotic possibility to another with a callous lack of investment. He seems to have had a thing for his former boss. He hits on a burly older friend who violently rebuffs him — at least initially. There’s also a village priest skulking about, played by a hilarious Jacques Develay, who seems to know all Jérémie’s secrets — and harbors a few of his own.

Misericordia becomes a small-town murder mystery of sorts, complete with dead body, cover-up and police investigation. But this isn’t one of those puzzles where the truth comes tumbling out in a sudden flurry of flashbacks and revelations. Guiraudie doesn’t have much use for the past; he’s interested in how his characters respond in the here and now. Misericordia knows exactly what it’s doing and also seems to be making itself up as it goes along. It’s meticulous and smart, but it’s also spontaneous and alive.

The title is the Latin word for “mercy,” and as with so much here, it’s shrouded in ambiguity. Jérémie receives more than his share of compassion from others, like Martine, who is ludicrously patient with him, and the priest, who, in one example of the movie’s topsy-turvy moral logic, insists on confessing his sins to Jérémie.

Guiraudie himself grew up in a small town in southern France, and he clearly loves telling stories set against wild and evocative landscapes, where anything can happen. Jérémie is clearly drawn to this place, too. For all its impish humor, Misericordia turns out to be an entirely sincere portrait of a small town where bakeries, farms and a whole way of life are on the verge of disappearing. Perhaps making this movie was Guiraudie’s own small act of mercy — a reminder for Jérémie, and the rest of us, that sometimes, maybe you can go home again.

Veera Dheera Sooran – Part 2 Movie Review: SU Arun Kumar’s Veera Dheera Sooran begins in a most intriguing manner. The filmmaker drops us in the middle of a developing situation with hardly any setup to give us an idea of why things are happening. This instantly makes us get involved with the film — even though we hardly know anything about its plot or character.

A woman lands up at the door of Periyavar/Ravi (Prudhvi Raj, cast against type in a serious role), a local big shot with criminal links, of doing away with her husband. Her husband, meanwhile, complains to SP Arunagiri (SJ Suryah, fine balancing the greyness of the character to keep us guessing) that his wife and daughter are missing. This provides the cop with the ammo that he’s been looking for to take down Periyavar and his son Kannan (Suraj Venjaramoodu, making an impressive debut in Tamil), who had played dirty with him a decade ago. Arunagiri plots an encounter killing prompting Periyavar to reach out to his erstwhile viswasi Kaali (a robust Vikram who offers a peek into the mass avatar of his Dhool and Saamy days), who has given up his violent ways and is now leading a peaceful life with his wife Kalai (a competent Dushara Vijayan even makes us overlook the huge age gap between her and the male lead) and their two children.

Arun Kumar keeps the tension alive by making Kaali vulnerable as he pits him against three individuals who he cannot trust and yet do their bidding as they slyly use his family as a threat in their own ways. At least until the intermission, the director holds back from giving us any peek into their shared history. All we get are mere mentions of events and names from their past — especially an incident that they refer to as ‘Sudhakar sambavam’ — which has led them all to this powder keg of a situation. This actually forces us, the audience, to individually imagine what might have happened, and pick characters to root for as well as hate.

And tense action keeps unfolding as there are cat-and-mouse-game-like scenarios and near-miss episodes that keep us hooked. One particular scene, involving landmines (or “kezhangu”, as the characters call it) delivers edge-of-the-seat thrill, and another, which marks the meeting of Kaali and Arunagiri gives us a whistle-worthy mass masala moment.

The film would have remained unique and engaging (and also justifying the Part 2 in the title) if Arun Kumar had trusted his audience and chosen to show us only the events that unfold during this one night. Perhaps he felt breaking the convention of providing a flashback would be too risky a move, but the director decides to give us the back story (at least the portions that matter), including the ‘Sudhakar sambavam’. This is where the film begins to lose its individuality as the back story that we eventually get doesn’t match with what we have all built up in our heads all through the first half; rather, it just feels so routine!

The film does recover from this minor setback when it gets back to the present with an ambitious one-shot set piece (shot with dynamism by Theni Eswar, whose night-time cinematography is one of the film’s strong points) that begins with a group of characters discussing who among them could be the black sheep and moves on to a shootout between cops and gangsters, and then to a heroic moment.

But then, just when we expect it to soar higher, it helplessly remains stuck on the ground. Like someone painstakingly building a house of cards and finally making a move that brings most of the structure down, Arun Kumar undoes all the earlier good work with a weakly written third act (despite its title, this is not the film where we can willingly suspend disbelief when its hero gets back up after being thrashed and even shot at by over a dozen men) that leaves us with a slightly bitter aftertaste. And the director himself seems to have realised this and decides to bank on nostalgia (yes, with THAT Vikram song!) to inject some energy into his limp climax.