In 2008, a series of attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai, launched by the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, left more than a hundred and sixty people dead. The attacks began on November 26th and lasted until the 29th. Many locations were targeted around the city, including a hospital and a Jewish community center, but the most well-publicized assault—though not the most lethal—took place at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, commonly known as the Taj. Throughout the operation, the militants, numbering only ten, remained in contact with their handlers, who were based in Pakistan. One message, which two of the killers were told to read out, ran as follows: “This is just a trailer. The real film is yet to come.”
What kind of feature presentation Lashkar-e-Taiba has in mind, one shudders to think. For the moment, though, we have “Hotel Mumbai,” directed by Anthony Maras, which wastes no time in gunning the story to life. We join the young terrorists as they crouch in a rubber boat, skimming across the sea. Each of them has an earpiece, through which they hear the edicts of their leader, who is referred to as the Bull, and whom we never see. “God is with you. Paradise awaits you,” he tells the militants. As an augury of such bliss, the water around them shines like melting gold. They reach the city’s shore and split up, bound for their various objectives. In the toilets of a railroad station, two of the guys unload guns from their backpacks. As they leave the toilets and start shooting, the camera stays put, resisting the temptation to pursue them and see what havoc they wreak. The rest of the film is seldom so restrained.
With so much mayhem to choose from, why should Maras and his co-screenwriter, John Collee, focus on the Taj? Lurking below the movie is an unsavory irony: the killers and the filmmakers picked the hotel for the same reasons. First, because it is a contained space in which to shoot. Second—and there’s no getting around this—because it holds plenty of Westerners, whose value, whether as real-life hostages or as dramatis personae, is there to be exploited. Third, because the Taj is a fount of opulence, designed to woo you, whatever the purpose of your visit. The terrorists gawk at the sight of the lobby, but so does David (Armie Hammer), an American architect who comes to stay, with his wife, Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi), their baby, and their British nanny.
To be fair, Maras and Collee are all too conscious of this cultural slant, and they make a sterling effort to correct it. Hence the introduction of a Sikh waiter named Arjun (Dev Patel). He drops his daughter off with his pregnant wife, who is at work, and steers his scooter through teeming streets to the Taj. Soon afterward, just in case we’ve missed the contrast in living standards, we are offered a closeup of a thermometer being dipped into the milky water of a bath that has already been run, and strewn with rose petals, ahead of a guest’s arrival at the hotel. I was half expecting a slogan to flash onscreen: “Feeling Guilty Yet?” Later, when a horde of terrified guests seek refuge near the top of the building with the loyal Arjun as their protector, one aging white lady complains about his turban. Only a wild surmise, but I think she’s a racist.
Some of the actors play real people. Anupam Kher, for instance, who was excellent as the therapist in “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012), brings a comparable calm to his portrayal of Hemant Oberoi, the Taj’s head chef, who bore himself courageously during the siege. According to the end credits, however, some of the others who were trapped there have been “subsumed fictionally,” which sounds painful. David and Zahra are products of the subsumption, and so is Vasili (Jason Isaacs), a rich Russian misogynist for whom it is difficult to root. It transpires that he has had Special Forces training, and what’s interesting is how little that avails him—or anyone else—in his hour of need, and how exasperated you feel, as a moviegoer, by his lack of initiative. He must have seen “Die Hard” (1988), so what the hell is he waiting for?
“Hotel Mumbai” belongs to an odd postmillennial genre: the queasy and half-cathartic thriller, based on actual outrages of recent times. Other examples include Peter Berg’s “Patriots Day” (2016), which investigates the bombings at the Boston Marathon, and Paul Greengrass’s “22 July” (2018), which recounts the mass slaughter committed by Anders Behring Breivik, in Norway. In each case, the carefully managed tensions of the plot invite you to be excited, while the bleakness of the historical facts at once dares and forbids you to enjoy yourself. The characters both do and don’t behave like folks in the movies are meant to; often, the cavalry is late showing up, or doesn’t come at all. Greengrass set the tone with “United 93” (2006), about the airplane that was hijacked on 9/11 and, thanks to intrepid passengers, fell short of its target. Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that “Hotel Mumbai,” a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.
Firearms abound in “Hotel Mumbai,” and they do incalculable harm, yet none have the dramatic impact that is made by a single handgun in “Ash Is Purest White.” Aimed at nothing in particular, the gun hurts nobody. It belongs to a gangster named Bin (Fan Liao), who wields influence—though less than he believes—in the northern Chinese city of Datong. We know he’s minor league because of a scene in a night club, where he dances with Qiao (Zhao Tao), who is not his moll so much as his partner in crime. The year is 2001, although it might as well be 1978, given the cheesy lighting and the fact that everyone’s going nuts to “Y.M.C.A.” Halfway through the song, there’s a clatter, and Bin’s gun falls to the floor, amid the revellers. Qiao gives him a short, hard stare, fully loaded with scorn. Looks can kill, even when guns don’t.
“Ash Is Purest White” is directed by Jia Zhangke, who specializes in small, involved tales that somehow unscroll into broader truths, often of the most withering sort, about his native land. A century and a half ago, and thousands of miles away, the same gift was bestowed on Émile Zola; I can picture the novelist watching, with solemn approval, the start of the new film, in which the camera inspects a busload of passengers—young and old, smoking and yawning—and finally alights on Qiao. In “Still Life” (2006), Jia used a similar procedure, locating his hero only after surveying the crowded deck of a ferry. In each case, we sense an entire society both summoning and deserving the attention of the artist, who can reach out, more or less at random, and pluck a story worth telling.
Qiao, not Bin, dominates the latest film. It is her fortunes that we follow, and her deeds that set the course of the plot. When Bin is cornered by thugs and beaten up, she takes his gun—there it is again—and fires into the air to make them stop. Charged with possessing an illegal weapon, she refuses to snitch, and serves five years in jail. Upon her release, she goes hunting for him, in a distant province, only to be rejected. Later still, we find her back in Datong, clearly wielding some power in criminal circles, yet content to care for Bin, a much diminished figure, when he appears. Why? She strikes me as a free and stubborn spirit. Asked to explain her attitude, she says, “We talk about righteousness.”
Fans of Jia will feel at home in this movie, resounding as it does with echoes of its precursors. The three-part span of the narrative is as wide as that traversed by “Mountains May Depart” (2015). Nothing was more unexpected, in “Still Life,” than the glow of a passing U.F.O., which made for a charming break in Jia’s visual sobriety, and the same thing happens here, to miraculous effect. On a more concrete level, the changes that we witness in Datong, like the looming promise, or threat, of the vast Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, reflect an enduring obsession with all that fails to endure. Do not be gulled by the slow pace of Jia’s stories; they are ceaselessly alive to his country’s haste, as it rushes to erase and to construct, and his sympathies tilt to those uncertain souls who simply can’t keep up.
Above all, there is Zhao Tao. Trained as a dancer, she has been the leading lady in many of Jia’s films, starting with “Platform” (2000), and his wife since 2012. Theirs may be the most fruitful partnership between a director and a spouse (can we please abandon the rusty and constricting notion of the muse?) since Roberto Rossellini joined forces with Ingrid Bergman. All that we treasure in Jia is there in Zhao’s scrutinizing gaze, at once pointed and guarded, and in the fierce patience with which she deliberates before taking action. Near the end of the film, Qiao even smashes a teapot over someone’s head. In her world, presumably, that means war. ♦
