Katte,Kotte,Techche

 In Telugu, there is a pithy way to describe Ramayana in three words. “Katte,Kotte,Techche”. ‘Katte’ literally means ‘tying’. Here it refers to the tying of knot between Rama and Sita. ‘Kotte’ literally means hitting (Rama hitting Ravana). ‘Techche’ is to bring something (I think he brought Sita to Ayodya and then left her.. I am a bit weak in mythology). I am just pointing out how a story is being broken into 3 simple acts since a long time. Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution.
Sceenwriting in movies is supposed to strictly follow this three act structure. Unlike a novel, a screenplay is not supposed to ramble and digress because of time constraints of a movie.The current post examines movies in which stories don’t follow the traditional structure.
 
No Structure
“I don't know what the hell a third act is”- Charlie Kuffman
The most allergic film maker to the traditional structure in English movies AFAIK is Charlie Kauffman. He made a film called “Being John Malkovich”. Now each movie has a premise. The one line “what if”.  For example for Godfather it would be: what if the youngest son in a Mafia family had to solve the inter Mafia rivalry problem. But in the case of Being John Malkovich there is no concrete premise. Charlie Kauffman initially started off with a premise “what if a man who falls in love with someone who is not his wife". Then he added multiple crazy twists at several points in the movie which are not at all related to what has transpired before in the story. As a result there is no concrete premise. In fact some critics say that it has so many ideas that several movies could be made from this final movie. He just threw the rule book out of the window and made the film his own way.
The reason why most of us would jump out of their seats while watching movies is because something unexpected/uncomfortable happens. There is ample scope for such instances when the story structure is not restricted to any rules. 

A Scene in Being John Malkovich

Reverse Structure
Consider Memento. The director chose reverse narration. If the movie had 10 scenes then the 10th scene is shown first and after the 10^th scene ends, the beginning of the 9^th scene is shown. So until the 9^th scene ends you don’t know why the character behaves a certain way at the beginning of 10^th scene!!  

The director chose this narration to put audience into the shoes of  Leonard(the Protagonist).Audience too struggle to make sense of what is happening and should think like detectives just like Leonard.The director is not just entertaining the audience by telling them a story albeit in reverse. He is also enabling them to solve a puzzle!!   

Circular Structure
Quentin Tarantino heavily borrows from Novel’s narrative structure. He even segments the story into chapters and jumbles up the chapters in the movie. What’s more, his movie Pulp Fiction’s narrative has a circular structure. That is because if the jumbled up chapters are arranged chronologically, the first and the last chapters appear consecutively!! Of the total 8 chapters, the movie starts with the 4^th chapter and ends with the 5^th chapter with the rest of them in between thus completing a circle!!