Lakshmi and Me
If you and I were liberal, educated, middle-class urbanites living in Mumbai, we'd have domestic servants, just like filmmaker Nishtha Jain does. The poor are so poor, and so plentiful, that basically anyone in the social strata above can afford someone to cook and clean for them. So, like any good liberal with a guilty conscience, Jain made a documentary about her part-time maid, Lakshmi, who's apparently from a much lower caste. (Is she a Dalit, or untouchable? A Tamil? Jain doesn't explain these things for non-Indian viewers.) But Jain is curious, a self-professed feminist—like the other educated women who employ Lakshmi—who follows the young woman through her arduous day and back home to a slum. There, her father is passed out drunk on the floor. Diseases like tuberculosis and chicken pox are common. At a labor rally for domestic workers, Lakshmi is asked about politics. "We're illiterate," she replies, "so we don't know." When Jain tries to seat her maid among friends for lunch, Lakshmi protests, "I'm like this one black person amongst them." As Jain discovers, and without any kind of forced resolution, she and her servant are both bound into a system that no documentary could possibly change. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit: 4 p.m. (Also: 11 a.m. Sun., June 15.)
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Vice
Finally! Crime and depravity we can care about! Some of SIFF's best titles this year have been from Russia, and Vice is tops among the festival's gangster flicks, too. In a provincial rust-belt city, Denis has the ideal life—spinning records as a DJ, a beautiful girlfriend, and some kind of funky garage-apartment. Only he's poor, and everyone around him is poor, and there seem to be zero prospects for reaching Moscow. Also, Denis is loyal to his two shit-for-brains best friends, which leads him indirectly into the obligation/employment of the local drug lord, who's being pursued by a psycho cop...and you can kind of see where this is going. Vice—i.e., Denis is caught in a vice between his employer and the law—is a traditional, cautionary crime tale, but one that's extremely well-made (by Valery Todorovsky) and shot (cinematographer Roman Vasyanov is expected to attend the fest). As the camera prowls the ghetto-fabulousness of the New Russia, all NBA jerseys and designer drugs, you can't help being sucked in along with wide-eyed Denis. (Actor Maxim Matveev looks like the Slavic Orlando Bloom.) Whether it's pushing drugs or orchestrating the dance floor with his turntable, he's told by his boss (the scary-charismatic Fyodor Bondarchuk), "You give them life." But death comes just as fast in Vice, like flipping over a record. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Uptown: 9:30 p.m. (Also: 11 a.m. Sun., June 15.)
