The White Tiger

The White Tiger

Director: Ramin Bahrani. Cast: Adarsh Gourav, Rajkummar Rao, Priyanka Chopra,

Adapted by the Man Booker Prize winner novel from 2008, this Oscar nominated film by Iraniana-American Ramin Bahrani is at its heart a rag-to-ritches story which turns to a trip to hell and then back again. It is also a gripping story about inequality, corruption, class war and contradictions of contemporary India seen through the incredibly expressive eyes of a driver working for a massively rich family.

There are similarities with Last year Oscar winner “Parasite” especially how it slowly turns something much sinister than one might think at the start and how it uses using crime and unexpected violence to expose the inequalities in modern India (in a similar way as “parasite” had done for South Korea).Adarsh Gourav is spectacularly good in the main role of Bahrani often doing so much with just a simple smile: he is sweet, naive, honest to start with, until rage and frustration born out of injustice will make him into something quite different (a white tiger, as the title suggests).

This is really not your typical Bollywood India film, nobody breaks out to dance (though somebody at some point does sing), there’s no love story and things are doing to turn pretty dark. Poverty is real, the inequalities are stark and no winning lottery will turn your life around (There’s even a very intentional poke at “Slumdog Millionaire”).

It is a slick, sharp, fast-paced satire, with an epic sweeping feel to it. I found utterly compelling and very entertaining.

On Netflix.

Rock-a-Bye-Baby

Rock-a-Bye-Baby (1958)

Director: Frank Tashlin. Cast: Jerry Lewis, Marilyn Maxwell, Reginald Gardiner,Salvatore Baccaloni

This film perfectly encapsulates the mood, the colour and the charm of the late 1950s: a time of innocence and naivety (but also, as ever, of slight misogyny and a bit of misjudged racism).The plot (if we can call it that) revolves around a Hollywood star who gets pregnant with triplets, but to avoid the scandal (and losing a part in a movie) she decides to hand over the babies to an old flame of hers (Jerry Lewis of course).

Jerry Lewis, here on his solo outing without Dean Martin, does what he usually does, but also show a sweeter side of him in the film, especially when dealing with the triplets and tries the perfect dad: there are some perfectly enjoyable scenes here and there, though the best in the film is right at the beginning and has nothing to do with babies but with a hose pipe going mad. What I found very odd about this is how the film spends an awful long time to set up all the characters and the “stakes” and then in the last 5 minutes it subverts them all and in a blink of an eyes it slaps on a happy ending which comes out of nowhere and it’s completely unearned. But hey, it’s a Jerry Lewis after all: they rarely make sense.

Overall it’s a mid-to-average one, perfectly charming, sweet and watchable, with a few sweet gags here and there but only recommendable if you are a Jerry Lewis fan… which my 8 years old son is, because every week we now have to endure one of these for his movie-night choice. We’ve seen a lot worse.

As movie buff (read: geek) I couldn’t help noticing that the exterior of the town was filmed at the Universal backlot where 30 years later they would film “Hill Valley town square” in Back to the Future: they look exactly alike!