by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear reader,
“This is so cool, like a Guy Ritchie film,” the boy told me.
“You sure? The whole movie?” I asked.
“Yeah, look at how it begins; the long shots, camera movements, the story with many ‘sides’, the many perspectives; it’s so Ritchie.” The 15-year-old was trying to explain a film he watched that week, and it was an unusual film for his age. It was Amma Ariyan, Malayalam cinema’s cult avant-garde film that had reminded him of modern pop cinema.
This was last year. The boy, an anime addict and Netflix native, fluent in Marvel timelines and Percy Jackson arcs, was decoding a black-and-white film made four decades ago by a director who despised categories. He saw in John Abraham’s restless, orderless frames the same energy he found in Ritchie’s slick narratives. That was a surprise for me. And what he said next stayed with me: “Everyone assumes we won’t like it.”
That sentence told me something about how we treat what’s often dismissed as “award cinema”, “art cinema”, or, in the Indian pejorative, budhijeevi cinema. Many assume it belongs to the elite, to scholars and festival audiences. But “difficult” cinema isn’t an indulgence of the few; it’s a cultural necessity. It moulds imagination in ways that commercial cinema later inherits, distils, and distributes.
November 4 ?is the centenary of Ritwik Ghatak, one of cinema’s most intense visionaries. His work—tragic, rough, political, lyrical—was never made for comfort. It was meant to puncture the complacency of viewing itself. Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha turned personal grief and the trauma of Partition into poetic fury. John Abraham, his student, translated that spiritinto a South Indianidiom where collective anguish met existential playfulness. These films rejected smoothness. They demanded time, silence, thought, and patience. They were difficult because they were honest, raw.
To mark Ghatak’s centenary, Frontline released a beautifully curated e-book—essays and reflections from critics and filmmakers revisiting the master through today’s lens. While preparing its promotion, a younger friend asked, genuinely, “Do people care these days about such ‘difficult’ cinema? Why do they even exist anymore?” It’s a fair question in an age splintered by platforms, when we scroll faster than we breathe. Why care about slow, ambiguous films that refuse instant gratification?
The phrase “difficult cinema” hides an irony. What makes such films difficult is confrontation, not comprehension. They ask viewers to pause, to think and feel without tidy resolution. Bergman’s Persona, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, Adoor’s Elippathayam—all unfold like long meditations. They invite you to wrestle with your own interiority. Their beauty lies in what they withhold.
Take Tarkovsky. His films are long and abstract, not for difficulty’s sake, but because they demand moral patience. In Solaris, when the planet reflects the buried guilt of scientists, we watch the fall of rational man before memory and time. In Kiarostami’s Close-Up, a man impersonates a filmmaker to find meaning in a world that ignores him—a blend of documentary, fiction, and plea for recognition. These works slow us to the pace of consciousness itself.
Frontline for more