After the wedding

Just finished the movie - After the wedding. All thanks to Vivek for recommending it to me.

A good movie to watch after a long time. it was killing me to be away from cinema for such a long time. After the wedding is just one bit less than The lives of others to which it lost the oscar(BTW, the lives of others is a cult movie.) And the only place where After the wedding is left behind is in the music dept. A good solid theme and it would have taken it to the next level. But other than music, the acting is good, camera work is excellent, those closeup shots just add to the storyline.


I have this notion that all Oscar nominated foreign language movies fell into a category of "formula movies". There is something that is common to all of them. Ofcourse they are brilliant, but each one has got a different storyline but each one has got the same effect on me. The awe experience. There is a formula which some people have understood and they make movies with that formula and get oscar nominations.

I know formula movies generally come with bad examples like David Dhawan or Emraan Hashmi etc. But i can still prove my theory.

The formula that these movies follow is tension distribution. One thing that is common to all these movies is that they keep the audience engaged the whole time. Even if their pace is slow, nothing is happening on screen, but still they know how to create the tension in the story and in the viewer's mind and thats the formulae, thats the art. The beauty lies in how much to tell the viewer and how much to withhold, that thin line so that viewer knows something and wants to know more.

Consider this example: A murder happened. Now there are two ways to go about it, (1) We take the journey from detective's point of view where he (and us) are searcing for the murderer. (2)In the second case, we know who the murderer is. It has been revealed to us, but the detective doesnt know it. Now the case becomes more interesting, because we are following the story from detective's eye view but we know the end.

Movies which follow the above two cases are good movie but they are not oscar noms. The thing that makes these oscar movies special is that they start with case 1, but somewhere along the line, they will switch to case 2, and they will do so delicately that we wont notice.

Thats precisley what happens in After the wedding, when we suddenly know what the secret is. The same happens in Live of others where we know that the guy is helping them, in Counterfeiters where we know that they are delaying the mission.


Btw, i do have wathchd some good movies in the last month. I watched chariots of fire and irreversible.
The pending list is getting longer :)