With its postbag bulging of late, cinema gets yet another love letter in Last Film Show, this one coming postmarked “India”, and telling a boy’s own tale of his first steps as a movie maker and its effects on his family.
That might sound like Bollywood redoing Steven Spielberg’s TheFabelmans, but this Gujarati-language film actually predates it.
It is also semi-auto-biographical, written and directed by Pan Nalin, whose previous feature was Beyond the Known World, a New Zealand-produced and written film about a divorced couple searching for their daughter on the hippie trail in the Himalayas.
Here though he’s nearer sea level in his Saurashtra peninsula homeland in the early 2010s following young Samay (Bhavin Rabari) in his impoverished but picturesque and well-catered – his mother’s cooking is its own fragrant subplot – life with his family at a railway junction village.
It’s a film with lovely touches, mostly in scenes of the Mowgli-haired Samay getting his undifferentiated gang of mates into movie-based mischief, especially when they find their humble railway platform is a movie distribution hub and start helping themselves to cans of celluloid for their own DIY efforts, their re-edits causing audience riots.
Samay strikes up a very Cinema Paradiso friendship with the projectionist at the nearby city’s cinema. But just as his father’s business selling tea to train passengers is about to be disrupted, so too is the need for physical reels at the picture theatre. The film’s unwavering focus on the precocious young lead and his earnest pronouncements about his artistic ambitions become a wearying factor in what is a sometimes-stilted episodic drama.
So too do Nalin’s efforts at making this cinematic love letter feel like a chain one – he offers a list of great directors at the start, then another longer one at the end, as if they were a recitation of Hindu deities. It’s a pompous touch that seems designed to appeal to Western festival programmers (it appears to have worked) and slightly self-aggrandising too.
As cinematic love letters go, it’s nice enough, and it has its own unique perfume.
