Cinefile

Patang (India) tells the perfunctory story of a transparent, dysfunctional family who bicker and hug a lot during a weekend kite festival in the kaleidoscope city of Ahmedabad. Prashant Bhargava's feature debut carefully follows an age-old outline: Introduce characters one by one (even with on-screen nametags), center the plot on a reunion of some sort (the kite festival), introduce a little tension ('Do we sell the family house or not?') and spoon-feed the audience with obvious visual metaphors (the kites in the sky serve as an analogy for life's game of soaring and falling!). There's nothing cruel about sticking to the book but in an international festival featuring groundbreaking narrative strategies (e.g. Day is Done), it's hardly a must see entry.

What does work in Patang is Bhargava's inclusion of non-professional actors. We sense that Ahmedabad is one of those cities rich in spectacle. Filmmakers like Fernando Meirelles and Alejandro González Iñárritu would have a field day here. The locals performing in the film bring an unteachable naturalism to their (mostly minor) roles. I was especially drawn to the group of young children who hustled the streets for work and scraps of food. Yet, Patang mostly follows a financially successful father (Mukkund Shukla) and his attractive young daughter (Sugandha Garg) on their much-delayed hometown visit. There is hardly a sense of urgency to their familial dilemma: Some of the relatives just don't get along and by the film's end we shrug in unison with the lead characters. Seema Biswas does an admirable job of giving her underwritten aunt character layers of unspoken sadness. I especially enjoyed her brief sections with Shukla (playing her brother-in-law) because Biswas manages to emote feelings of muted regret. Could they have been a possible marriage in an earlier scenario? Or does she see her brother-in-law as a villain?

In early scenes, we get plenty of urban vibrancy; kinetic episodes in an electronic shop or an outdoor produce market show the potency of the locale. Cinematographer Shanker Raman does some strong work with his frantically alive camera. The way certain shots bleed into the next creates a watercolor-esque collage on-screen. But since Bhargava confines his story to a familiar family drama, he ends up wasting his fertile backdrop (even with hundreds of kites in the sky). Patang is not necessarily a "bad" movie. It's just not a vital one.

Where Patang was set against an explosive location, Brian Jun's Joint Body (USA) pits its characters in the dreary, depressed setting known as "small town America." And with reason. When Joint Body starts we meet convict Nick Burke (Mark Pellegrino). During a revealing visit from his soon-to-be ex-wife, we're surprised by two things: 1) Burke is told he must give up full costudy of his teenage daughter and 2) Burke is incredibly....soft spoken?

The selling point to Jun's life-after-prison drama is Pellegrino's take on the ex-convict character. Usually characters like Nick Burke are unleashed into the world with radically slanted viewpoints and vendettas (e.g. Edward Norton in Stone, Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, etc.). In this film, ironically, Burke is very open about his past and is unusually sincere about accepting his renewed bottom feeder role in society. There must be a great deal of men who are just like Nick Burke: They did the time and all they want to do now is tiptoe back to normalcy.

Joint Body is deliberately paced. We follow Burke through the motions: AA meetings, meals at diners, job interviews and so on. When so called "action" unexpectedly occurs in a nasty episode involving a stripper (Alicia Witt) and a deranged war hero (Tom Guiry), the film falsely promises a pulsating third act. Instead, we're given scenes that are hinged on reflection, delayed-exposition and under-the-radar twists.

On paper, Joint Body probably read like made-for-TV fodder. Yet, to the film's benefit, Pellegrino really makes Nick Burke a living, believable anti-hero. It's easy to overlook how good Pellegrino is in this film. A lot of actors can play over the top, outspoken ex-convicts on the lam. It takes an unusual amount of gravitas to create a character so deeply saddened by his choices that all he can do is stoically await his inescapable fate.