Show Biz Movie ‘Last Film Show’ is India’s Oscar Entry

India’s official Oscar entry Chhello Show, or Last Film Show, is yet another of this year’s autobiographical “movies about movies.” It’s also the most frustrating of the bunch. Which is not to say it’s worst of them; it has much more in common with Steven Spielberg’s wistful, masterful The Fabelmans than it does Alejandro González Iñárritu’s self-important Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths, or Sam Mendes’ lifeless Empire of Light. However, writer-director Pan Nalin has much more to say about the death of celluloid film than its life, in his tale of a young boy in a remote village who falls in love with moving images—which Nalin tells with little by way of impactful or original imagery of its own, until the movie decides to bloom into a haunted lament late into its runtime.

With opening on-screen text that pays homage to great filmmakers and pioneers—among them, Eadweard Muybridge, the Lumière brothers, and Andrei Tarkovsky—the Gujarati-language drama sets a high bar for both sentimentality and historicity. It features the former in spades, beginning with a 2010-set tale of 9-year-old Samay (Bhavin Rabari) watching his first movie in a remote, rundown cinema hall—what movie theaters are usually called in India—known as Galaxy Cinema. But the movie’s perspective on the past proves frequently limited, both in terms of what it depicts, as well as the artistry employed in those depictions.

With plainly staged, mechanically edited scenes, which feel more concerned with narrating ideas than imbuing them with meaning, the film quickly introduces Samay’s curiosities about the world, as well as his strict father (Dipen Raval)—a tea seller, like Nalin’s—his diligent homemaker mother (Richa Meena), and his younger sister, Sili (Vidita). His parents, who are dead set against the vulgarity of movie-watching, make an exception for a religious film, but the experience sparks Samay’s imagination. So, he begins skipping school and sneaks back into the theater on several occasions, finally laying eyes on Bollywood productions new and old. He can’t afford to buy tickets, so he begins bartering his mother’s carefully prepared school lunches, for the chance to watch films from the projection booth alongside Galaxy’s kindly, middle-aged projectionist, Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali), who takes Samay under his wing and teaches him about celluloid. Yes, Last Film Show involves Nalin working the plot of Cinema Paradiso into his imagined origin story as well.

It’s sweet at first, especially since Rabari and Shrimali have such a lively dynamic, but Nalin’s proclivity for homage slowly begins to overwhelm his visual and aural landscape. Portraits of Samay being enraptured by light are practically ripped wholesale from films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (right down to the music, editing and framing), but in ways that rarely lead to transposition of context from past to present. They’re like memories half-recalled, re-staged and re-scored with no consideration for their original meanings, or what their meanings might become when applied, in microcosm, to this particular story. It’s not like Samay watches Kubrick or Lean—he’s more enraptured by modern studio action and broad comedies, the way a child of his age would be—therefore, a significant chunk of this imagery plays only like external paratext, introduced by Nalin as a means to thread the needle of his own influences along the way, but without consideration for why his touchstones may have been influential in the first place. Samay watches Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2008 historical Bollywood epic Jodhaa Akbar several times, but Last Film Show is rarely able to match its visual splendor.

They’re like memories half-recalled, re-staged and re-scored with no consideration for their original meanings, or what their meanings might become when applied, in microcosm, to this particular story.

When Nalin isn’t aping better films, his own moving pictures prove dull in their construction, and glum in their photography. Frequent overhead closeups of his mother’s cooking fly by far too quickly to resonate. They’re assembled sans consideration for what this preparation means, as an act of love, and what it might further mean for Samay to secretly pass this love on to another person. Similarly, the projection booth itself—while intimately detailed in its crumbling production design—has a flat, washed-out look for what is, essentially, Samay’s replacement for religion, a temple to cinema itself. Scenes of Samay and several of his friends experimenting with light do manage to spark visual curiosity, but these characters are only innovative or effective as a collective. Not a single one of them, apart from Samay, stands out as an individual for whom these acts of technological rebellion might hold significance.

There is a literal-ness—and perhaps a requisite one at that—to Samay’s interactions with Fazal, as the projectionist explains the way film projection works. The duo even has a conversation explaining the significance behind Samay’s name (it means “time”). However, after elucidating these concepts in words, Nalin seldom lets the film’s subtext or its metaphors speak for themselves through his aesthetics. As a part period-piece set on the precipice of the digital revolution, and part time-displaced memory (Nalin came of age well before 2010), temporality is of little importance to Last Film Show. It rarely lingers on moments that may be life-changing for Samay; it rarely takes the time to let his sense of inspiration radiate outwards, as the light from Fazal’s projector reflects in his eyes.

However, after lengthy stretches that are more told than felt, Last Film Show finally arrives at the point of finality implied by its title (well over an hour into its 110-minute runtime). Suddenly, a truly haunting movie emerges from behind Nalin’s slight musings. When the projector and film reels Samay fell in love with are summarily disposed of—to make room for cheaper, more convenient digital projection—he follows what becomes of these items, and witnesses a kind of cruelty that only a child could perceive as such. It momentarily becomes a ghost story, as Samay shuffles through the remains of his beloved medium, and Nalin transforms his nostalgic vignettes into silent, overwhelming tableaus that feel both textured and tangible—and yet, like they exit outside of space and time.

The Academy has a proclivity for awarding movies about show-business, and though it takes a while to get there, Last Film Show is ultimately an ode and epitaph to all the things Nalin holds dear as a filmmaker.

India’s Academy Award selection committee was criticized for picking Last Film Show over the bombastic Telugu-language epic “RRR,” and while the latter arguably makes more effective use of its images, it’s clear why Nalin’s film was the sentimental pick. The Academy has a proclivity for awarding movies about show-business (its voters work in the industry, after all), and though it takes a while to get there, Last Film Show is ultimately an ode and epitaph to all the things Nalin holds dear as a filmmaker. This includes the struggles and sacrifices made by his loved ones as the world changes around them, progressing at the cost of leaving them behind.

However, what might prevent the film from garnering India’s first Best International Film nomination in two decades is that these more human concerns often take a backseat to the ethereal, intangible idea that light—when projected in the right permutations—can be a force as affecting as love. That Nalin seldom succeeds at convincingly depicting this idea is unfortunate, especially since young Rabari engenders moving sympathy as the director’s self-insert. But rather than framing his cinematic influences as powerful landmarks in Samay’s present, Nalin is instead so focused on history’s impermanence that he limits cinema to the past, as something that has already happened, rather than something that still exists, and may outlive us all.