Breaking the Waves, starring: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge, Jean-Marc Barr, Adrian Rawlins, Udo Kier.Denmark/France, 1996.

"According to writer/director Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves is "a simple love story", but "simple" hardly begins to describe this deeply disturbing, multi-layered drama. In fact, nowhere is the picture's complexity more evident than in its study of contrasts -- it is highly spiritual yet anti-religious, triumphant yet tragic, and personal yet universal. Love forms the film's core, but rather than approaching the subject from a clichéd perspective, Breaking the Waves examines no less than six facets of the emotion: transformative love, sacrificial love, redemptive love, destructive love, romantic love, and sexual love." Movie critic, James Berardinelli .

This film, one of my all time favorites, provides some of cinema's most transcendent moments.
Chitra Parayath

Vaanaprastham (Malayalam 1999), directed by Shaji Karun, starring Mohanlal and Suhasini.

An utterly charming, thought provoking film, a deep meditation on fiction and reality. The film is centered on a Master of Kathakali, Kunhikuttan, who as a fatherless child of a poor servant girl, began to learn the art as a way of feeding his family. His art is so powerful; that a young woman falls in love with one of the characters he portrays, and bears his child. But reality is not a play, and she refuses to let Kunhikuttan see his son, whom she considers is the son of the actual character Arjun, that Kunhikuttan portrays. The young woman who bears Kunhikuttan's child, is a princess living in delusion, impassioned by mythological characters. Catch Mohanlal at his best here.
The heart-wrenching denouement makes this one of the best films ever made.

Fritz Lang (Dec. 5, 1890 - Aug. 2, 1976), Austrian-American film director, born in Vienna, and moved to the United States in 1933. Working first in Berlin during the silent-film era of the 1920's, and later in Hollywood, Lang used cinema to explore a personal fascination with, in his words, "cruelty, fear, horror and death." According to Jeffrey Scheuer “His film-making style is characterized by grandeur of scale, striking visual compositions and sound effects, suspense, and narrative economy “

Two films of Fritz Lang that tell the tale of Forbidden Love in Black and White.

THE TIGER OF BENGAL marked Fritz Lang's triumphant return to Germany after decades of exile in Hollywood, Filmed on location in Germany and India, THE TIGER OF BENGAL presents a two-part spectacle relaying the intricate saga of Harold Berger, an architect who becomes smitten with Seetha, a beautiful temple dancer while on an assignment in mysterious India. Though she returns his love, she is forbidden to leave the palace, and the two must make a daring escape, raising the ire of the Maharaja. “THE TIGER OF BENGAL is a rich and romantic pageant, filmed in ecstatic colors and encompassing Lang's lifelong motifs of eroticism and crime, exotic locales and psychological drama as well as elaborately choreographed visual effects and aesthetic sensibilities.”- Jeffrey Schuaer

THE INDIAN TOMB: Fritz Lang's THE INDIAN TOMB, the second part of the sequel to THE TIGER OF BENGAL with Berger the architect and Seetha the beautiful temple dancer, having barely escaped the wrath of the Indian Maharajah, now facing death from starvation in the desert. The two lovers are eventually dragged back to the Maharaja's temple, which is under attack from his various enemies. Enraged at Seetha's love for Berger, the foreign interloper, the Maharaja demands that she undergoes a dangerous and erotic ritual snake dance, but then intervenes at the last second and saves her life.

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