Dancing Figurines, Desire and Paper Flowers

Day 2 -

The Dancing Figurine(T�ncalak)[2003]

Imagine this - a phantom like figure of a women wrapped in nothing but cellophane dancing to some strange music. Some people call that an art film as for me I really don't know what to think.
This exactly what the 79 minute Hungarian film, The Dancing Figurine(T�ncalak) was all about.
The movie had a real documentary feel and to be honest I really did not understand it the dancing figurine jumped right over my head so to speak.
DISCLAIMER-

Watching the first five minutes of this movie has long lasting after effects. The images flash before your eyes scaring the bejesus out of you.

I'm not saying it was a bad movie probably I'm not mature enough to understand the meaning behind it. A little too Avant Garde for my taste.

I've decided not to rate this movie.

The Pune International Festival runs simultaneously at E-square (as already mentioned) , Inox and the NFAI (National Film Archive of India).

For the next movie I see I retreat to the cool shady backdrop of the NFAI located conveniently on Law College road near the FTII (film and television institute of India).

As you enter the large atrium you are first made to remove your shoes. There is something special in sitting in a room all upholstered in read and watching a movie barefooted

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire is based on a play from Pulitzer winning dramatist Tennessee Williams, describing the conflict between Blanche DuBois - pretentious fading relic of the Old South-and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, inner-city immigrant class and Blanche's brother in law. Marlon Brando played Stanley and Vivian Leigh (read Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind) plays Blanche and Kim Hunter played Blanche's younger sister Stella and Karl Malden played Harold 'Mitch' Mitchell Stanley's best friend.
Brando's magnetic performance tricks the audience into rooting for Stanley in the opening scenes of the movie, effectively implicating them in Stanley's eventual brutality towards Blanche.

Blanche DuBois is a fading southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her vices. After her ancestral southern estate is "lost", Blanche arrives at her sister's house in the French Quarter of New Orleans where the multicultural setting is a shock to her nerves.

Stella, the sister, is just as addicted to sex as Blanche and is willing to put up with Stanley's crudity and lack of culture because he is great in bed

The reference to the streetcar (tram) called Desire is ironic, as well as an accurate piece of New Orleans geography. Blanche has to travel on it to reach Stella's home, the idea being that she has already indulged in desire before she arrives. Her sorrow is that the pleasure brought from desire is only short, just like the streetcar journey. It does not give her security. Still, she cannot return on the streetcar named Desire because she has only a one-way ticket.