Thursday began with the third and probably least well-known of the four Arthur Penn films in the festival, but it is a fascinating film.  Night Moves was a vehicle for Gene Hackman as a former professional football player and private investigator.  This is a character-driven film.  Hackman’s Harry Moseby is hired by a former actress Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to chase down her wild 16 year-old runaway daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith).  Apparently, the acorn hasn’t fallen far from the tree as both mother and daughter seem to have overheated libidos.  Mom might not have been terribly interested in having her daughter return home except that her primary income is what the girl’s father—a film producer—had set up in his will for Arlene to care for Delly.  The film industry serves as a backdrop for the film, but the characters are the regular folks who do the behind-the-scenes work like doing stunts that help movies get made.   Moseby has his own personal problems to work through as his wife (Susan Clark) is having an affair and he is dealing with misgivings about his post-football career choice.  The film is rich with outstanding character actors including Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, John Crawford, and Kenneth Mars.  In addition to introducing Melanie Griffith, the film also has an early screen appearance by James Woods.  Jennifer Warren gives a terrific performance that looks like it should have propelled her to stardom, but didn’t.  Moseby eventually tracks down Delly at her step-father’s home in Florida and the film seems to have reached its comic denouement with Moseby leaving Delly with her mother’s home as every one there—including one of Delly’s old boyfriends (Woods)—verbally opens fire.  There is, however, a little loose end of a crashed plane at the bottom of the Gulf piloted by another of Delly’s boyfriends that begins to start nagging at Harry when Delly is killed doing stunt work on a film.  Moseby decides to reinitiate his investigation and then things get really interesting.  The heart of darkness in the film’s plot sneaks up on both Moseby and the audience and Moseby is less brilliant sleuth than someone for whom the evidence—in his own words—“fell on me.”  There’s quite a lot going on with lots of fine performances in this engagingly meandering film.

The middle film for Thursday was the Bollywood hit Ghajini.  This is basically two relatively lame examples of genre films melded together.  The film is named for the villain and he is so unredeemably evil that he almost literally reeks of the sulfurs of Hell.  This makes seeking revenge against this blackest of blackguard the primary story being told although the film also contains a most airy airheaded romantic comedy.  Kalpana Shetty (Asin) is a very beautiful actress-model who works for a struggling film company that makes commercials.  A series of misunderstandings has her maintaining a charade of having a romance with Sanjay Singhania (Aamir Khan), the young hotshot chief executive of the cell phone company Air Voice.  When Sanjay goes to confront her about the misappropriation of his affection, she thinks he is another aspiring actor-model and she then seeks to help his career.  Before you can say the director’s name A. R. Murugadoss, Sanjay is thoroughly enchanted and has a new identity as Sachin.  Even more than the typical romantic comedy, logic takes a holiday.  For instance, Sanjay is shown in an opening montage as the up-and-coming new leader of Indian business whose name everyone knows, but absolutely no one in the film seems to know what he looks like.  The improbabilities start there and just keep adding up.  OK, Kalpana and Sanjay are absolutely gorgeous people and who wouldn’t understand how they could fall in love with each other.  There are some wonderful Bollywood song-and-dance production numbers so who but a Grinch should complain about the romance being very silly.  The film begins with an explanation of the condition that interferes with storing short-term memory that afflicts Sanjay though its not onscreen long enough for anyone to fully read it.  After Kalpana is killed (we know this from the film’s outset, but don’t actually learn what happened until well into the film), Sanjay lives a solitary life maintaining an intense regimen of note-taking, picture-taking, and tattoos just like in Memento in order to make sense of the world around him and to further his obsession to track down Ghajini to avenge Kalpana’s murder and the head injury that has caused his memory problems.  Of course, it’s not exactly like Ghajini has been in hiding.  He has his own pharmaceutical business, a mansion, and makes public appearances when it suits his business interests.  Aamir Khan’s post-Kalpana Sanjay is a relentlessly single-minded brutal fighter made to appear all the more superhumanly crazed by a skinhead haircut that reveals a roadmap of surgical scars, a bug-eyed frothing visage, and hyperkinetic fighting skills courtesy of frequent recourse to camera tricks to fast-forward the action.  All he needs is to be pointed in the right direction and for that he needs—a girl.  The beautiful Sunita (Jiah Khan) is a medical student who learns about his unique memory problems and wants to study him.  When she first becomes aware of his obsession with destroying Ghajini, she is so concerned that she feels it is her duty to warn him.  Then she and her two roommates (and we, the film audience) learn the back story that we need about Kalpana, Sanjay, and Ghajini courtesy of Sanjay’s personal diaries.  Exactly how the final entry about Kalpana’s murder and Sanjay’s head injury—which occurred at the same time—got recorded in the diary is just a minor plot detail that only a Grinch would be concerned about.  Learning that someone has targeted him unhinges Ghajini.  He decides to kill all his possible crime rivals in a pre-emptive action reminiscent of the Biblical story of King Herod killing all the male children under two years of age in the hope of eliminating Jesus, the foretold rival King and Messiah.  See, I told you Ghajini was one supremely bad—reeally BAAADD dude!  So the stage is set for a final showdown between Good and Evil and it is some showdown.  The revenge action thriller movie appeals to our most visceral and primitive emotions and this film does so in spades.  Sanjay brawls his way into a final face-to-face, hand-to-hand fight-to-the-death with Ghajini.  Strangely, no one in Ghajini’s army of bad guys has a gun—something only a Grinch would consider.  About every cliché for these types of films are used and no heartstring is untugged.  Bollywood films are not known for their reputation of cinematic restraint as I was reminded by my editor in post-film discussions and Ghajini certainly won’t start any rumors of a new less florid approach to Bollywood filmmaking.

The final film of the day was Alexander Berberich’s Bonne Année.  This film had been made employing a number of unique stylistic techniques.  The film has been made using a series of approximately 10 minute takes from a single camera.  Considering that the first and the truncated last scene are both the same scene, this 105 minute film consists of about ten scenes.  The film opens with two men in a car waiting for the right time to do a job.  They decide it is the right time and head off to do what they had come to do.  Guns are fired and eventually the two men return to the vehicle wounded and still under fire.  They appear to be killed.  Then we learn the rest of the story leading up to the fatal shoot-out.  It doesn’t look like there’s a lot that is happening.  The two gunman—an American (Benjamin Banks) and a Frenchman (Thibaut Landier)—are longtime partners and have a comfortable working relationship that seems to require relatively little dialogue between them.  Both have history with Ellen (Karen Young)—an American expatriate running a bar in some unnamed Latin American country where everything is set.  The dialogue between the characters is delivered as the very model for civilized discourse.  The characters speak without histrionics using a relatively narrow emotional amplitude for what they say.  Even more important is how the characters—unlike my wife who frequently interrupts when I’m talking because she’s trying to anticipate what I’m going to say—patiently wait for the other speaker to finish what he or she is saying and then thoughtfully consider their words before speaking in reply.  The conversations might not be very exciting, but they are extremely civil.   The camera during the long takes sometimes does 360 degree pans focusing on things away from the actors—not that there’s usually much of special interest in the surrounding environment.  This is a very challenging film in part because of the stylistic techniques that cause the film to bask in its own lethargy and partly due to the ambiguities within what the film audience sees and hears.  The film is more interested in letting the audience reach its own conclusions about the characters in the film than giving us straight-forward plot details about the job the hitmen are on. I must confess that I was not equal to this challenge and found that the film’s sluggishness had a synergistic effect on the lassitude that came with it being my last film of the evening.  My most accurate assessment of the film would be that this is not a very good film to see when one is somewhat tired even before the film begins.  The film itself provides little to keep filmgoers alert except for the opening and closing gunplay and a rather prolonged and discomfiting sex scene.  Although I must admit that the film did not work for me based on my screening experience, I would have to reserve my final judgment of the film until I can see it again when I am fresher.  I look forward to that opportunity.