BAFTA Awards - What a fine show!

• Bafta Awards was short, stylish and elegant - done with in two hours. No frills, no elaborate song-and-dance ballads, no dreary drags on stage - just an unbridled celebration of the best talent in Cinema with under-statedness. Stephen Fry was sheer class, sophisticated, positive without being too pointy and dignified. He made jokes on all the five films but the best was a mathematical one - sequel to "life of pi" is "life of pi.r^2". Good to see the right awards go to "Argo" (best film and best director)' "Lincoln" (best actor). Worth getting up in wee hours on Monday to watch jokes and puns by Stephen Cry ("I want to see "Lincoln" but I got spammed by invitations for "linked-in"!). Now, over to Oscars.

The Artist - Movie Review

"The Artist" directed by Michael Hazanavicius (Oscar winner), produced by Thomas Langman (Oscar winner) and starring Jean Dujardin (again Oscar Best Actor) is a visual silent treat in the era of noisy films. Its a story of two characters - George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and Pepppy Miller (Bernice Bejo) in the era of silent films before "talkie" technology took the charm away. George is the ruling superstar of silent era films and he encourages Peppy to get introduced as a Fred and Ginger foot-tapping dancer in his movie. George has all the opulence that stardom can buy and the vanity that he doesn't need to ever "talk" ; even when the studio which catapults him to fame demands they should now make movies with "spoken" dialogues.

By contrast, Peppy Miller is fast on the update, she starts getting meaty roles and eventually stars in talkie films and becomes a superstar. George, meanwhile sulks into a manic depression as both his wife and stardom both desert him. He sells his car, his bungalow, his wares and even destroys his movies in a fit of rage. His dog (feted at the Oscars for a stunning performance) remains the sole companion.

There are other quirky twists in this tale of reversal of fortunes of two different stars besides the subtle romance thats always in the air. A thoroughly enchanting movie with so many first-time experiments that have not only won the top honours at the BAFTA and the Oscars (five in all) that you wonder why they stoppped making silent films since the times of Charlie Chaplin. Of course, Chaplin's movies had a slapstick comedy and uneasy pathos with less intrusions by layers of characterisations that underpin this film. In flat 98 minutes, the movie is a feast of unbridled exhibition of cinematic genius sans dialogues (except for moments in the end). Will we see more movies of this kind? Will we see silent movies (last attempted by Kamal Hasan in "Pushpak")? Time will tell.

There is a scene where the Artist (sorry for the pun) wakes up to a nightmare where everything around him - the dog, the microphone, the phone all produce Bose-quality sounds and yet when he tries to speak and shout and yell, there's uneasy silence. A highlight scene in which the director shows how the hero's silence has turned against him. For most of the movie, Ludovic Bource scores loud and orchestral soundtrack that defines the emotional undercurrents in the story. Even though the director uses the same format of the old B&W films with the motions, the interludes and the mega font exclamationary quotes circling the dialogues between the characters, there is no noise in the film except the music.

But the pace of the movie never slackens and the atttention to detail doesn't show signs of laziness. Because this is the only movie that celebrates the struggle of an actor on the brink of sunset by sunrise technologies since whatever must have come in the 50s, and because the audience is not color-blind anymore - the director takes close and comfortable shots that get you glimpse the emotional highs and lows more effectively than the old movies made with a constrained technology. So you see the greenback, the speck of a black dot planted by George on Peppy's face to give her a star-turn, the dog's sudden energy burst to save his master from getting incinerated - all these are captured in ensnaring detail.

Just before the End, when the stars get re-aligned to shoot for another foot-tapping dance, and the camera rolls on, the director plays out his last trick - the music syncronises with the couple in their moves but you hear the words - "Cut" and still the magic of the dance continues and you doubt still that the silent march is over - you are yet to get out of that stupor of charmed silence. Its a memorable movie thats worth all the honors that greeted. The magic of movies will continue even if you make silent movies that don't talk or movies that silence you. "The Artist" has been a moving experience and suddenly my count of better movies has gotten the better of my love for mediocre dishum-and-dance movies in 2012. You will not come out of the movie hall with just one feeling.