Sad love stories: The Wind Victor Sjostrom 1928.  When I was at the Great Sand Dunes National Park after the festival, I climbed on a dune one morning, turned my face to the southwest into a strong wind and I saw the face of Lillian Gish. It was imprinted on my memory, and flew to me through the sensuality of the wind. The Wind is the story of a young woman who travels alone to the west, to a homestead on a windy plain.  Some quasi-relative thinks she can help his wife and take care of his children, but the wife becomes jealous so she is told to marry one of the lonesome cowboys at hand. She picks the pretty one but when the night comes she rejects him and his simple gift of a cup of coffee. The moment where the Lillian Gish character rejects the conjugal overtures from the cowboy whom she has married for a place to stay might be one of the most emotionally searing in all of cinema. He is profoundly injured and disappointed, but he nobly turns these feeling around and promises to find the money to send her back East. All the while, the wind is blowing. It frightens the Gish character when she is left alone; she has hallucinations. There is a rape and a death but in the end she discerns the nobility of the cowboy’s character and accepts the wind itself.
Has any other film tried to portray the wind in the same way? Mixing the literal and figurative sense of the forces of nature? The wind seemed to mirror, not just accompany the characters’ lonely sexuality. The melodrama and setting of this film made the love story and the violence seem even more powerful, sensual and sexual than all the naked gymnastics in the Lightness of Being.  Sjostrom directs his characters in a wonderful range of emotions in the film and the tumult of pianist Don Sosin's music captures all the terrible sadness of love and rejection in the west of the imagination.  A famous Roland Barthes essay attempts to describe the strange intimacy and Romanticism—Gish’s character’s close-ups are similar to a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph—of The Face of Garbo. I think it pertains as well to Gish in The Wind.
“Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.” (Roland Barthes, Mythologies).
 
 
Another love story brought to the festival by Pico Iyer with a lightness of touch he claimed came from the woman director had a plot beautifully crafted to reveal the flourishing of empathy in the political tensions, and even violence in India.
Mr. and Mrs. Iyer takes the cinematic tropes of love and casts them into their larger meanings. So the tropes of Eros, so beautiful and endlessly the subject of film are transformed through the story and setting, into agape or love of community. Here love, and this may be the feminine perspective is about care, although transcending boundaries is crucial. A Brahmin woman with a baby must make a journey on a bus and then on a train, without her husband, so her relatives ask a (drop-dead handsome) Muslim man who they seem to know to look after her. He is diffident at first, but helps her (and she is likewise beautiful) with her baby on the crowded noisy bus. Like Les Blank, the director Aparna Sen known for her roles in Satyajit Ray films, of Mr. and Mrs Iyer was a master or shall we say mistress of the details of culture. Gathering her characters on a long bus ride through the mountains of India she was able to offer a theater of the diversity of the south Asian sub continent. I ride the bus in Chicago, and I have never been to India, a terrible omission, but I love the strange community that can arise on an ordinary trip. The director gives us vignettes of each person and group, singing teenagers, an anxious older Afghan refugee couple, card-playing, booze swilling men, a grumpy lady. Then the bus encounters an obstacle, a detour leading them into a rural sectarian conflict zone in which Muslims are being killed in some sort of retaliatory violence. Meenakshi Iyer who as a Brahmin who does not touch a water bottle with their lips, was appalled that she had to share a water bottle with a Muslim who does, must make the choice to protect him when the vigilantes terrorize the passengers. She pretends he is her husband. He has been sitting next to her, helping her with the baby, in any case. There is more to it, she saves his life, there is an uneasy attraction but then when they arrive in Calcutta, they must part. Raja Chowdhury was asked to protect her during her travels. No one can be protected from the realities of war or sectarian violence, but was able to accompany her as she had to face the realities of the situation in India. It is significant that he is a photographer.
Another film in which the music is a surging fluid mixture of east and west: Zakir Hussain, an Indian tabla maestro, composed the background score and music for the film.