Of all the things that could be said in praise of the Punjab’s new Farm Tourism Scheme, the most important is also the simplest: You don’t have to lift a finger.

Farm Tourism, you see, can be a two-faced little creature. In its good visage, it welcomes you into rural idylls where R&R comes as naturally as the wind that cools the air. Catch Farm Tourism in its Mr. Hyde incarnation, however, and you’re faced with an entirely different beast – one that adds your hands to the workforce, thrusts them pump-wards, and then, once they’re worn and calloused, tells you to muck out the pigs. Which is all very good in a Puritan sort of way. But where, I ask, is the fun?

So I can be forgiven, I think, for approaching a seven-day tour of farmstays in the Punjab with more than a hint of shuddering trepidation. I simply wasn’t aware what side these farmstays fell on – would I be relaxing contentedly, or toiling as I earned my keep?

Fortunately, any fears were assuaged on the first morning of my trip. I’d arrived at Mickey’s Fish Farm in Rupnagar late the night before. Mickey had greeted me with a firm handshake and a broad smile before showing me around his home. Too tired to inquire what my stay held in store, I’d retired almost immediately for deep, countryside sleep.

The next morning I was woken by rays from a red rising sun that turned golden as they glinted off a carp lake and into my cozy guestroom (one of three on the farm). The sun was strong but the air still carried the night’s mist. Through my window I could just make out the shapes of farmhands starting their day’s work. I watched the scene for a while, allowing the sun to burn away my mind’s sleep.

Outside on the veranda, Mickey was shouting down the errant cormorants that swoop upon his fish with early morning regularity. I stumbled out to join him and mumbled something about whether there was anything I should do. Mickey looked at me blankly.

“You can have a coffee if you want. Or go back to sleep.”

Exuding gratitude, I accepted the coffee and sat down on the veranda to survey the scene. All around, large lakes backed by sprouting rice paddies glittered in the sun, while in between tall sugarcanes and strands of wheat swayed in time. Clearly, I was in some kind of Eden.
Mickey began pointing out crops invisible to my amateur’s eye. “There we have cabbage, carrots, onion, garlic and turmeric. Over there you can see mangoes, papayas, guavas…” Sensing he could go on, I interjected:

“Maybe you should list what you don’t grow?”

Mickey turned to me slowly, beaming. “It wouldn’t take long”, he affirmed.

Farm tourism in the Punjab is certainly built on fecund foundations. Known as the Bread Basket of India, the Punjab accounts for 60 per cent of India’s annual wheat yield. It also produces 40 per cent of the country’s rice, and a fair chunk of her dairy – not bad, for a state that only holds four per cent of the overall population. But then, Punjabis are known for their work ethic, both at home and abroad. Today, a constant stream of cash from the far-reaching Punjabi Diaspora enriches the state’s naturally prosperous land. There’s money here, and it shows.

Mickey is a good example. A fish farmer for 30 years, he works the ancestral land while his kids earn Australian and American dollars overseas. The result is his farmstay, a family home that’s perfectly geared to accommodate weekend-breakers from Delhi (only a few hours drive away). You don’t have to do anything while staying here – just take long, tranquil walks, enjoy the charming company of Mickey and his wife Rimpy, and eat their wonderful, homegrown, organic food.

It was at Mickey’s where I underwent my first Paratha Test. The Paratha Test, I would come to find over the following days as I hopped from farmstay to farmstay, is the Punjab’s version of the Litmus Test. Here’s how it works: For breakfast, your host serves you up a round, plump, not too greasy, sweet smelling, hot-off-the-plate paratha. Then he or she hands you a bowl of farm-fresh butter. Your challenge is to coat enough of the latter onto the former. I failed twice or thrice before Mickey showed me how it was done, selecting a rock of butter the size of my palm and smearing it on my bread. Well, I’m on holiday, I thought, as I rammed the paratha into my mouth, gorgeous dripping butter and all.

Only towards the end of my stay in the Punjab, while spending two days of repose at Citrus County, did I truly pass the Paratha Test.

Run by the ever-affable Harkirat Ahluwalia and his wife Jasveen, Citrus County is a luxury farmstay in Hoshiarpur that features plush, tented rooms, a pool, an on-call masseuse, and other such enjoyably indulgent facilities. The farmstay takes its name from the surrounding 150 acres of kinnow orange groves. During my first day there, I’d spent hours exploring them with the farm’s loyal Labrador, Rufus, in tow. The sun having disappeared, it was now time to warm my day-worn feet by the open fire in the farmstay’s large, green garden. Harkirat and his father Bhagwant joined me, and we all nursed golden glasses of scotch.

For a luxury hotel, Citrus County is remarkably homely and unpretentious – it has all the sumptuous splendour of a top-notch retreat, but none of the annoying, cosseting obsequiousness that often comes part of the parcel. Harkirat and Bhagwant chatted openly by the fire. Noting the hunger in my stomach, I figured there could be no harm in breaking protocol by asking for a paratha well after breakfast time.

The two men looked at me proudly – I don’t think I could have impressed them more had I consumed a full bottle of whiskey and then recited a verse by Ghalib without error. Soon enough one of those platonically perfect pieces of dough was upon me, and it was time I adorned it with butter. Now knowing the game, I chose the biggest clump.

“Ah ha” cried Bhagwant, “there’s a man who knows how to live off the fat of the land!”. Finally, I had passed.

The Paratha Test is emblematic of example of how the Punjab welcomes you with its bounty. Relaxed and bucolic, the land here is as good a site for farm tourism as you’ll find across the vast breadth of India.

The Punjab Tourist Board’s Farm Tourism Scheme lists 23 certified farmstays, of which Mickey’s and Citrus County are two. Each is unique, although they all share a commitment to act as both host and guide to their guests. As the farmstays differ in size, shape, and form, they also cover a wide range of prices. Some farmstays are available for as little as Rs 1,000 a night (two people, all-in), while, at the other end, Citrus County caters for high-flying Delhiites and the like.

However you like your bread buttered, then, there should be something here to suit your palette. And you won’t have to lift a finger to get it, either.

Noted horror director Hideo Nakata (The Ring), goes British with Chatroom, which will prove to be one of the last films you see funded by the UK Film Council. Nostalgia aside, Chatroom basically crashes on startup: More gosh-horror than shock-horror, the film concentrates on the social disquiet that visits five Chelsea Teens, who run around pouting and touting and generally looking for attention in a chatroom named… ahem… Chelsea Teens.

Nakata doesn’t seem to have pegged that no-one uses chatrooms anymore. Still, some thought has clearly gone into filming (making ‘real’) the virtual chatroom, and the film is initially enjoyable if mainly for watching just how Nakata does it. The chatrooms are represented along a great corridor in a sleazy hotel; inside, they are each different, as designed by their ‘owner’. These rooms are either free to all, or locked down to some. Makes sense, I think.

Conversation in the chatrooms is uninhibited, to the point, and frequently clichéd. You’d hope exchanges like “you can do whatever you want” / “I know isn’t it great?” purposefully mirror the stilted and rapid-fire way people converse online. But then it could just be shoddy scriptwriting – it’s hard to tell. Whatever the case, it seems to work. For the first half an hour, at least.

In that first half an hour, Chatroom exhausts all it has to say – that, given the chance, we’d all create a better looking, more confident version of ourselves; that the internet can help loners find solace; that the internet can also give a false sense of community to a handful of deviants on the trail of perversity. Thereafter, it just becomes an itinerary of teenage angst, a la Skins, filtered through the strong jaw lines of teenagers living in Chelsea.

There’s Eva (Imogen Poots), the self-conscious model, Emily (Hannah Murray), the prissy conservative, Jim (Matthew Beard), the fatherless loner, and William (Kick Ass’ Aaron Johnson), the son of a famous novelist. William is the ringleader, a young man (or aging kid) who likes to live out his obsession with suicide by proxy. A model, a conservative, a depressive and a spoilt suicide-minded brat: it’s easy to see why Chatroom fosters a dearth of empathy from its audience. (I found myself rather hoping they’d all top themselves – an ending sensitive of humanity, I think, though admittedly far-fetched.)

In the midst of all this upper-class urban-youth jeopardy-frolicking, one character stands out. Mo (Daniel Kaluuya) is 15, cool, well-intended, and hot for his friend’s 11 year old sister. Concerned about his inclinations, he tells his friend about the crush. And receives a beating in reply. The genuine horror of pedophilia deserves no place in a film that mines such limited quandaries as teenage angst, and yet the judgement-free depiction of Mo’s position is impressive.

Daniel Kaluuya (Posh Kenneth in Skins) is outstanding in the role, exhibiting an underplayed style and perfect tragi-comic sensibility. Sadly, Mo is always on the periphery of the group, and Chatroom is too in thrall to its more glitzy, gobby characters to recognize its diamond in the rough. By the end of the film, Mo is largely forgotten.

One last thing to say. Chatroom reminds me not of The Ring, but of another rectally referential title: The Hole. Like The Hole, Chatroom ‘traps’ a group of well-off youngsters in a small space. Like The Hole, the main narrative conceit is that one of the characters is a massive bastard. Like The Hole, the rest of the characters are just unlikable. And, like The Hole, there’s a young English actress, more pretty than good, who may just end up on an alarming amount of screens, billboards, and minds. In this case, the actress if Imogen Poots.

Remember the name. And the pout.

Read JB Cooper’s review of the Henry Reichold Nokia N86 Exhibition over at the TravelIntelligence Blog.

Read JB Cooper’s review of Shank over at OrsonsWell.

Most will know Bernard Rose for the urban slasher Candyman (Candyman Candyman Candyman Candyman). That was back in ’92. Since then, Rose has made a successful second career piggybacking off the two classic masters The Kreutzer Sonata draws upon. He directed Immortal Beloved, a biopic of-sorts about Beethoven, before turning his camera upon Tolstoy. First up was Anna Karenina, a bore-draw featuring Sophie Marceau, then Ivans XTC, a vigorous modern day interpretation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Somewhere in between those Rose found the need to make Snuff Movie, but we’ll leave that well alone.)

And so to The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy’s novella decries the ability of sex and music to move us to foreign states of being through the story of a man who jealously kills his wife after she plays Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 (also called The Kreutzer Sonata) with a dashing and brio-istic violinist. Yes, that’s a spoiler; no, it doesn’t matter. Rose opens his adaptation with the ending, so you’d have found out soon enough anyway.

The film transplants 19th Century Russia to modern-day L.A., a formula Rose tested with success in Ivans XTC. Into mansions and winebars step moody-brooding Edgar (Danny Huston), and Abby (Elisabeth Rohm), his Beverly Hills wife. Their onscreen connection is remarkable, with Rose clearly allowing great freedom in his scene-to-scene direction.

Rohm, in particular, is magnificent as the has-she-hasn’t-she spouse subjected to spiraling suspicions of adultery. The Kreutzer Sonata is Edgar’s story; he narrates the film and commands the camera. When Edgar flees to Colorado, the film follows. When Edgar wakes in a random hotel room, the camera is waiting. Abby only gets one scene to herself in the entire movie, so for The Kreutzer Sonata to work, the audience has to share Edgar’s sense of being teased and tormented by her. Like Edgar, we have to suspect her and want her; be willing to attack her fidelity and jump to its defense. Rohm accordingly manages to appear both flighty and entrapped, and her suggestive (and not so suggestive) onscreen sexuality exhibits a faultless awareness of how far she can push the role.

The bristling animalism between Edgar and Abby makes for palm-rubbing watching; their sexuality and sexual distrust is captivating and knowingly real. It works perfectly in the dramatic structure of Russian classic literature, which is nothing if not an interrogation of heightened emotions set to a soaring sense of narrative.

Rose’s imagination isn’t always up to the task of converting the novella, however. The film’s sense of time flails about without control, which makes it hard to know just how important any one scene is supposed to be at any one moment. And then there is Edgar’s voice-over, which is the scriptwriting equivalent of gaffer tape. Well, ok, I take that back: it’s too easy to rail against voice-overs. But they must at least be done carefully. Edgar’s isn’t. Early on, he finds himself in an unmarked hotel room. “I shuddered with rage and terror”, he rumbles, before turning on some cringe-porn and botching a wank. It’s a thoroughly obvious way of portraying Edgar’s propensity to slip from the terrifying to the ridiculous, and it’s completely inadequate in comparison to Abby’s sexual articulation. It also means that every time Edgar says something ominous thereafter, you expect him to reach down his pants.

Fortunately, these aberrations are not terminal. The basic story is tremendous – well, it would be. Huston and Rohm make a sexually captivating couple. And Rose’s digital camera does a good job of catching their improvisations. Ok, visually The Kreutzer Sonata is nowhere near as inventive as other digital projects (Inland Empire and Festen immediately spring to mind), but the camerawork here is effective and affective enough to further the argument for the distribution of more low-fi films.

But first, The Kreutzer Sonata needs to be picked up by more than just the Apollo…

Click here to read JB Cooper’s article on being fed opium at Rohet Garh, a luxury hotel in Rajasthan, India.

The nice people at Axiom Films recently sent me a copy of Goodbye Solo (it’s just come out on DVD), so I’m armed with a handy excuse to revisit one of last year’s most acclaimed films.

On its release, Goodbye Solo was received with that gushing sincerity critics reserve for non-obnoxious indie cinema. Ben Walters of Time Out found the film to be “shot through with beauty and humility”; Neil Smith wrote in Total Film that Goodbye Solo was made of “humour, grace and compassion”; Roger Ebert enthused it was “the best film in town“. All very nicey nicey.

Then someone mentioned Realism and a small blogging war broke out. That someone was A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Grouping Goodbye Solo with its contemporary releases Ballast, Wendy and Lucy, and Treeless Mountain, Scott came to the conclusion that director Ramin Bahrami was leading a Stateside return to Neorealism (yes, that’s right: post-war, black and white, car-headlamp lit, lefty Italian cinema). It was all a gush too far for The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who felt compelled to write an eight-point rebuttal two days before Scott’s piece was even published in print. Scott quickly retreated behind a wall of critical hooey, suggested he and Brody agree to disagree, and everyone went on living as before. Ho-de-hum.

To cut a long introduction short: Goodbye Solo was widely accepted to be a good film, but, save for a few wishywashy adjectives and a self-serving storm-in-a-teablog, no-one could really say why.

Watching the film now with a year’s worth of retrospect, I can’t help but feel the problem (if it is a problem) begins and ends in the ease with which Bahrami’s film watches. Goodbye Solo is set in a disenfranchised, isolated, lonely sphere of America. It hunches its shoulders to ticket-for-one late-night movie screenings, rubs its eyes through graveyard shifts in immigrant-driven taxis, and rests its head on clapped-out motel sofas. It tells the story of a man named William who wants to kill himself though won’t say why. It paces its narrative with all the drive of an inmate on death row. Everything about this film suggests its viewer should either be humbled, harrowed, or bored. And yet Goodbye Solo is a distinctly feel-good movie to watch.

Part of this undoubtedly stems from Solo, the taxi driver who realises William’s deathly intent and eventually acquiesces to ferrying him along the River Styx. A Senegalese-American, Solo is warm, affectionate, magnetic, and sensitive: a scriptwriter’s dream. He is also fluid. No-one changes or compromises in Goodbye Solo apart from Solo, who has to come to terms with William’s silent determination to die. The water in the wilting flower’s vase, Solo continues to supply William nutrients while himself being altered in hue. It makes him very human, very real.

But Realism (capital R), that will-o-the-wisp of modern film criticism, isn’t really at stake in Goodbye Solo. Certainly not Neorealism, which was socially minded posturing dressed up in filmmaking politik. If anything, Goodbye Solo shares more in common with what came after Neorealism – Fellini’s apocryphal tales of the early 50’s, where society was only interesting insofar as it was a part of the alienated individual. Even that assertion is dubious, though: To talk earnestly of Goodbye Solo in terms of Realism is to open a can of hogwash that isn’t on the shelf in the first place.

Unlike the high-falutin’ debate Goodbye Solo engendered (one keen blogger found it to be a study in dialectics), the film sets its horizons very low. This is a love story, pure and simple. Bahrami isn’t really interested in the wider socio-political implications of his characters. Solo doesn’t drive others around enough, William doesn’t shut down enough, and there’s too little outside context (no one else in the film gets more than five minutes screen time) to suggest otherwise. Instead, like the best love stories, Goodbye Solo is interested in its characters as characters; not as frameworks burdened with theory.

Bahrami’s filmmaking never loses sight of that fact. His camera serves his story, not vice versa. Its frame offers easy-on-the-eye, unclouded compositions; its editing rhythm is gentle, never overt. Not once does Goodbye Solo step outside its remit to suggest things are afoot that are not. Instead, Bahrami tells an engaging story about two interesting men with taste and simplicity. Goodbye Solo is fantastically easy and fun to watch as a result.

Sometimes you just have to kick back and enjoy a film for what it is. Pure and simple.

Neo-classical avant-gardist Peter Greenaway returns to indie cinemas near you with Nightwatching, a boisterous and beguiling film straight out of cinema’s academic leftfield. Cut from the same canvas as The Draughtsman’s Contract, Nightwatching sees Greenaway again throw himself into artsy period restoration, this time in chase of answers to the legend that is Rembrandt. The themes of painter as outsider and of cinema as artifice are never far from the camera’s lens, and while onscreen events fail to reprise the full pomp of Greenaway’s yore, Nightwatching certainly proves an edifying spectacle in the current atmosphere of Avatars and Wolfmen.

The film’s beating heart is Rembrandt himself, a painter as technically brilliant as he is historically elusive. For all the acclaim this famed Dutch Master continues to receive in art schools, little is known about his life. Of the three women he took during his lifetime, for example, where the second two came from is anybody’s guess. And then there’s his finances. Rembrandt famously died destitute having once lived handsomely, though just where all the money went remains a mystery.

Nightwatching tries to playfully plug these holes by spinning off from the many strange events detailed in ‘The Night Watch’, one of Rembrandt’s most famous, enigmatic, and downright peculiar pieces of work. Classically stunning yet brimming with caricature, Greenaway postulates that the painting accuses its own characters of murder. His conclusion? The men sent up on canvas got their revenge in real life by socially crippling Rembrandt, and then taking his sight. So Nightwatching is a kind of CSI for the Renaissance.

Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office – these brackets will plague his career) is the slightly odd choice to play the painter. You sense someone in a suit was behind his casting, but they got it wrong. For the first hour – the hour that matters to people in suits – it’s almost impossible to give Freeman credence in the role. A small man who jumps around a lot, Freeman comes across as a perennially frustrated Jack Russell; you’re always half expecting his Rembrandt to either turn to the camera and decry everything as “a bit gay” or hump a nearby pillow. Yet as the film passes into its second hour, an unexpected dignity attaches itself to the portrayal, not least because Freeman unflinchingly plays his Dutch Master more fetid than fêted. (And frequently without any clothes on, too.)

That second hour turns out to be far more captivating than the first. To begin with, Nightwatching is disappointingly stolid. There are simply too many characters to grapple with here, and Rembrandt is shown as too ferocious a negotiator, for it to be otherwise. Sure, Greenaway’s artfully composed, slow-moving frames are enough to hook your attention for a while, but the airy poise that made The Draughtsman’s Contract so enjoyable is palpably lacking. That all changes once the master painter is seen to actually pick up a brush in anger – though it must be said the men in suits have long left the cinema by the time he does.

Nightwatching is, ultimately, an extended lecture on the ontology of art dressed up in the plumes and ruffles of a Renaissance narrative. Like all good lectures, it flirts with tedium while loyally covering its ground before providing the payoff in terms of answers: pure, simple and unexpected. Stick with Nightwatching to the end and you get to enjoy both an imaginative retelling of one of the most important paintings in art history and a repositioning of the art of painting itself. Way back in the 17th Century, you see, Rembrandt was not just painting a picture; he was using all the tricks he knew to realistically present a moment of captured life, watermarked with meaning. The master painter with brush in hand, was, in effect, predating theatre and the cinema as he worked.

An interesting thought, given the giant blue smurfs currently assailing our screens.

Click here to read JB Cooper’s review of The Eugenia in Bangkok, Thailand, for TravelIntelligence.com.

Click here to read JB Cooper’s ‘5 Minute Guide to Kolkata’ for the Travel Intelligence blog.