A couple of years ago
I saw Asif Kapadia’s graduation film The Sheep Thief in the ICA.
A beautifully shot short film, made with great care and attention
for detail. Now director Asif Kapadia (29) makes his strong debut
with his feature The Warrior shot in the Rajasthan desert in North
West India, under difficult circumstances. It’s a magic realistic epic
made with a French producer(Bertrand Faivre), an English co-writer(Tim
Miller), a half German-Nigerian DOP (Roman Osin) and an Italian composer(
Dario Marianelli).
The
film is a very visual spectacle which tells the story in a very focused
and confident way. Film references for Kapadia include movies by Sergio
Leone, Mizoguchi and Zhang Yimou. Very influential was also the Vietnamese
film Cyclo by Tran Anh Hung.
The story is about Lafcadia,
a veteran warrior, played by the charismatic Indian actor Irfan Khan, who
is ordered by his Chieftain to destroy a village, because it hasn’t delivered
it’s crops. During the killing and burning of the village, he encounters
a young girl wearing a medallion belonging to his own son Katiba. This
is a decisive moment in Lafcadia’s life, then and there he decides to give
up his violent life. He radically changes in to a searcher for inner peace.
On his journey to achieve this, he meets Riaz, a thief who has escaped
from a labour camp. Riaz is played by Noor Mani, a street boy from New
Delhi. He travels along with Lafcadia; on their journey they encounter
a blind old woman , who is looking for a sacred lake in the mountains.
Big
parts of the film are told with hardly any dialogue, Lafcadia conveys much
of his emotions with intense looks and simple gestures.
You don’t get to know
much about the motives of his behaviour, but this is not a psychological
drama. For those grand style Panavision epics different criteria count,
but at the same time it makes it harder for the viewer to empathy with
the characters.
The shooting circumstances
were extremely harsh. Kapadia said: “Temperatures were sometimes 47 degrees,
too hot to think. People were dropping in the heat, scorpions were wandering
around the set and somebody got bitten by a rabid dog.”
It’s interesting to wonder
which direction Asif Kapadia’s career will go from here, but whatever path
he will follow, more cinematically epics like The Warrior or more
small scale intimate films like The Sheep Thief, he will be definitely
a new young filmmaker to watch.
Jaap
Mees
The
Warrior is released by Film Four/ VCI on DVD (r.r.p. £19.99) on 16
September 2002, Certificate 12 (TBC)
DVD Extras: Director’s
Commentary, Making Of documentary, Cast and Crew Interviews, Deleted Scenes,
On Location, Feature and Theatrical Trailer.
