Nadia Cheung

creative portfolio & blog

  • Delhi in a Day

    Delhi in a Day is a film which supposedly portrays an authentic aspect of Indian culture. The film begins and revolves around a wealthy Indian family who lives in a large house and has a number of servants who are treated like, well, like servants. They prepare for the visit of a friend’s son who plans to travel India, Jasper (Lee Williams). He idealises India, seeking the country for its infamous spirituality and to discover something about himself in some way. He draws what he sees, daydreams, and a young maid, Rohini (Anjali Patil), catches his eye. Everything goes well until his money disappears. The money being a particularly large sum, he consults the wife (Lilete Dubey), and the blame is all shifted to the servants at once and they are given a time limit to return the money. Here, the class division is clear, but the film does not make any commentary on this. Instead, it shows the livelihood in the household with the rich family in luxury alongside poverty-stricken servants being treated badly as the norm.

    Having won a number of awards since its original release, director Prashant Nair successfully tells this unfulfilling story of idealism and reality. If you have the time to watch this film, then great, but there isn’t really much beyond this general indie Hindi drama when it tries to comment on its own society. Perhaps what is best of this film is the scenery of Delhi, the fact that it is filmed on location and highlights an increasingly modernised city with such a drastic class divide of its people.

    I call this film unfulfilling because it doesn’t seem to accomplish much. Everything, in the end, is sort of okay, and the wrongdoings are never put right. Perhaps this is the film’s intention. Delhi in a Day certainly does succeed as a drama, and in some ways, a comedy too. All in all, for a film made in 2011, it succeeds in telling a story, but its opportunity of being more socio-economically conscious escapes the viewer.

  • Film Review: Dheepan (2015)

    If you know anything about the Sri Lankan Civil War, you probably might feel that it was a war, derived from a conflict between the Singhalese and Tamil people of Sri Lanka, that was not reported on as much as it could or should have been. Described as a “war without witnesses”, a lot protests happened over the years, but many probably didn’t know why or what they were about other than that “it’s probably something to do about Sri Lanka and politics, maybe.”

    Dheepan is a drama following a family of strangers headed by a former Tamil Tiger militant taking on the identity and passport of a dead man named Dheepan (FYI: the Tamil Tigers were a guerrilla organisation who wanted to gain Eelam as an independent Tamil state, and employed militant tactics to do so, but lost to the government). They leave behind a post-war Sri Lanka to settle down and seek refuge in a housing project somewhere in France with undesirable residents, where violence and crime is just as apparent and is just as much of an everyday occurrence.

    Dheepan takes on a job as as housekeeper of the building, sorting out the cleaning, mail and maintenance—all the while manoeuvring around French self-made criminals and gangsters hoisting guns and swaggering around the residence ready to point, shoot and kill at any given moment. Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), Dheepan’s faux wife takes on the simple task of cooking and cleaning for a nearby resident, all the while resenting that she is France and not in the England where she could have been with her cousins and familiars. She gets caught between trying to make peace.  She lacks any maternal instincts and has a tumultuous relationship with 9-year-old Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) who equally has just as much as a hard time connecting with two random grown-ups who pose as her parents, as well as a new school, and learning French.

    The ending was pretty disappointing to say the least, but that’s because I’m not a fan of predictable romance. And the romance was predictable. But it’s okay, because the whole story overshadows that and you won’t have to think about the shabby ending montage anyway. The acting performances in this film were pretty great, and this was probably the most gripping part of what made the film so intense and dramatic for a crime drama film. The cinematography was probably best of all, with a fitting soundtrack that didn’t overcompensate and abuse the subject matter to near-exploitation.

    Overall, writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet) brings us into another drama about love, family and humanity. The script is great and the dialogue wasn’t too shabby for a French film that was mostly in Tamil. Dheepan won the Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival 2015, and brought widespread attention to the Sri Lankan Civil War. Though still today, there still isn’t the media attention that there could be, and that makes me really question about where popular media stands about these kind of things, but I guess that sadly not many people think it’s worth knowing about.

    Original article can be found here.

  • Film Review: Barbarella (1968)

    Jane Fonda stars as Barbarella, the highly sexual heroine of a distant future. Adapting Jean Claude Forest’s erotic sci-fi comics from the early 1960s, Barbarella is sent to outer space by the President of Planet Earth to find and stop Doctor Durand Durand (Milo O’Shea) from unleashing his secret weapon, the Positronic Ray, and potentially starting a war. On her journey, Barbarella encounters a number of strange and wacky characters that either want to kill her, or have sex with her—and eventually, nearly dies of pleasure.

    Not surprisingly, a lot of actresses, before the film went into production, had turned down the role. Amongst them were Raquel Welch, Brigitte Bardot, and Sophia Loren, all asked to play Barbarella. Even Jane Fonda didn’t want to take the part but married to the director at the time, Roger Vadim, she was somehow convinced. Fonda’s Barbarella is aloof, cheerful, and determined, and for a central female role, she even managed to get a Laurel Award nomination for Top Female Comedy Performance.

    The script is pretty simple and at times, absurd at best, managing to bag a few laughs. Not a great deal happens in this film but it is an easy watch—enjoyable too, especially if you’re nostalgic. Vadim seemed to be more concerned with how the film would look, putting a psychedelic spin on the tropes of erotica and sci-fi similar to those of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. And it goes with these two genres quite literally with its constant reminders of whacked-out space weapons and sex methods—did I mention the Positronic Ray is actually a sexual torture machine?

    The film didn’t do very well when it was first released in 1968, but a couple of years down the line it had quite the cult following and still resonates in pop culture today. The iconic space-age costumes, designed by Paco Rabanne, were particularly influential in ‘60s fashion and even inspired Jean Paul Gaultier’s costumes 30 years later in The Fifth Element. Duran Duran also got their band name from this film, too.

    Though the special effects aren’t really impressive (looking cheap, tacky, and almost laughable), I don’t think there’s any film out there that’s like it. And if there is, it was probably influenced in some sort of way by Barbarella. Coming from a time where attitudes towards sex and relationships started to change for both genders and different sexualities, paralleling with the sexual revolution that took place for the next few decades up to where we are now in the 21st century, I think Barbarella does best as a cult classic without being read into too much. But it certainly does well look-wise.

    Original article can be found here.

  • Trumbo

    In this biopic, we’re taken back in time to 1947—where a rich and successful Hollywood screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) faces scrutiny for his involvement with the Communist Party of the USA before the 1940s as The Red Scare in the United States had begun to work its way up into a what could be compared to as a sort of witch hunt hysteria. During this height of fear in America, there was a fear of communist influence over Hollywood pictures infiltrating its American audience. Dalton Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of high-profile Hollywood screenwriters and directors who were accused and later received prison sentences and had been banned from working in Hollywood up until the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1975.

    The film centres on Trumbo—his fight, his downfall, and his rise again as the successful Academy Award-winning screenwriter he was (Roman Holiday, The Brave One). Bryan Cranston portrays Trumbo with great presence, embodying a booze and Benzedrine-induced workaholic who sticks to his guns and writes obsessively as a way of fighting and overthrowing the power of the blacklist. The film focuses on about two main things throughout the film—Trumbo’s life, his relationships with his work, family and friends, and the devastation of The Red Scare and the blacklist that ruined reputations which lead Trumbo to continue work as a screenwriter under multiple pseudonyms and names of other people. Aside from all of this, Dalton Trumbo becomes a sort of rebellious figure for Hollywood’s famous employees and perhaps even a martyr for screenwriters overthrowing a government committee. I’m not sure how accurate this film is to Dalton Trumbo’s real life, but it sure is a well-plotted out story for the Hollywood Golden Age daydreamers.

    Costume design and cinematography in this film was especially great for the portrayed time period, this gave a post-war film noir feel that was not convoluted or dry, but actually quite believable and mesmerising. Keeping in the biographical film direction, Trumbo features several characters based on real people at the time. Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo who keeps the family together and Elle Fanning draws in unlikely attention playing Nikola, the eldest Trumbo who has the spirit of social justice and activism, involving herself with the Civil Rights Movement. Helen Mirren plays Hedda Hopper, a pesky gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and Louis C.K. also stars as composite character, Arlen Hird, portraying Trumbo’s trustworthy friend and ally.

    Even though this film does touch on the devastating aftermaths of being blacklisted in a McCarthy era of fear and paranoia, I think in several ways this film can be looked at as not just a hyped up biopic about a famous screenwriter, but also as a film with a message about truth, perseverance, and fight. There’s still an element of fear and paranoia in a society that is not so different to how it was back then.

    Original article can be found here.