Word: auteurs
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...Writer's Block, which opens off-Broadway next week. Details about the production are scarce. "I'm the wife of a dentist, living in Connecticut," says actress BEBE NEUWIRTH. "It's sort of a living-room sex farce." So what's it like working with the 67-year-old auteur? "He speaks very simply," says Neuwirth. "There's nothing very fancy going on. There's no intellectual conceptual bull____ going on." God knows, Lilith would never stand for that...
...argument. He may or may not take himself seriously but he does take his work seriously, and the difference between the two is virtually nonexistent. "You are discovering yourself as you make the films," he says. "And it's difficult to be objective." Adoor is a cinematic throwback, an auteur who controls every major aspect of his films: writing, directing, producing, editing. Before filming he shares his scripts only with his longtime cinematographer, Ravi Varma, the sole person aside from Adoor to provide genuine creative input in an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie. "The actors should be free," he says...
...probably never heard of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and for a long time that was fine with him. He's an art-film director in Bollywood-besotted India, and he makes movies not in Hindi but in Malayalam, the language of his native Kerala - two strikes against widespread recognition. A temperamental auteur whose cinematic talents - and ego - are in inverse proportion to his low-key fame, Adoor's intense, demanding films have been worshiped by Indian and foreign critics and celebrated in self-consciously sophisticated Kerala, yet they've barely been released in much of India. But with the visually generous Shadow...
...also Adoor's most accessible work, but don't dare suggest that he's compromising to expand his audience. In fact, it's best not to offer any criticism at all, especially if it's about the wind. The auteur can be awfully sensitive about the wind. After finishing Shadow Kill, Adoor and I - along with his longtime colleague and friend P.K. Nair, former director of India's National Film Archive - adjourn to Adoor's house for lunch. Over dessert in the director's spacious office Nair gently points out that one of the core images in Shadow Kill - wind...
...idea. But this droll, reticent, flawlessly filmed fable of generosity should draw a wider audience to other films (Drifting Clouds, The Match Factory Girl, Leningrad Cowboys Go America) of the astringently original auteur. Like the Man without a past, they are worth seeking out, cherishing and remembering...