At NFAI

Summer afternoons are getting rather dull. And in the hope of livening up a little, on one of these particularly boring summer afternoons, I decided to pass my time watching a couple of films that were being screened at NFAI, as part of the Pune Film Treasures Festival. They had been showing films there for the last three days, but I somehow couldn’t catch up with any of them. There were two reasons, actually. First, I got to know about it pretty late. And second, I wasn’t really interested in the films they were showing. But as I said, when summer evenings get rather dull, you really want to do something. So, yesterday, I forced myself out of office and walked into a cozy nook of the NFAI auditorium quite ahead of time. The auditorium, with its rather cool interiors and dim lights, was very sleep-inducing, and I would really have dozed off had it not been some chattering ladies at my back, who kept talking till someone walked up the dais to introduce the film to be shown.

The first screening was Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, which I found rather disappointing and baffling. Well, maybe it was my inability to understand the film, but I couldn’t really grasp what the film was trying to say.

The second film, Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir The Big Heat, was much like a typical good vs. bad story, where an honest cop investigating a case goes a little too far and pays with his wife’s life. The Big Heat is a story of his vengeance. Gripping and fast-paced, it doesn’t waste a moment. Of course, I won’t call it a great film – the film feels rather simplistic and uni-dimensional – but it sure had the charm.

It was good fun.