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While Asian films were in the minority, Indian films were a majority amongst them. The best of these was
Mr & Mrs Iyer, an astute story about a orthodox Hindu woman on the way to be reunited with her husband, who finds herself coupled with a worldly Muslim photographer on a bus trip. When the bus journey is disrupted by a racial riot and military curfew, the pair are forced to pose as husband and wife. Slowly the duo unravel their identities and the prejudices of the other (though it is somewhat biased in favour of the photographer), and fall gently in love - to no advantage. In a festival full of films about refugees and civil war, this seemed the most considered of the lot and the greatest exploration of the ancient tensions that exist in India. A moving, and revealing portrait of the intricacies of modern India, this is a film that is well worth chasing up, even if cinematically it was not as lush as those accustomed to Bollywood.
Rather less compelling, but also worthy of attention was Peck On The
Cheek. Two stories that fed into one, this Tamil language movie told the life story of a young Tamil girl who was adopted by a well known writer and his wife on the subcontinent. This was set up by a sizeable prologue about the girl's birth mother and how civil war in Sri Lanka lead to her relinquishing of her child. When the girl Amudha insists on meeting her birth mother, her foster parents who had kept the adoption secret, guiltily relent and take the daughter to Sri Lanka. It's an odd picture in many ways because while it flirts with the conventions of Bollywood, it does so in a way that is both joyous and restrained. The musical sequences rarely venture outside of the spirit of the film or so boisterously break with the narrative that they seem extreme. Regardless the music is engaging and captures the appropriate exuberance of their chosen moments. Most of the film, has the feel of a "serious" live action Disney picture, and yet it manages to include a civil war, substantial guerilla warfare and a stunning section with a suicide bomber. The problem here is that the film never fully maintains its adult momentum once it establishes that it really is the search of a child for her mother . Director Mani Ratnam has a substantial track record, which includes two best foreign film Oscar nominations, and so his work is obviously one that bears further examination.
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