A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME AND SPACES- THE CINEMATIC WORKS

A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME AND SPACE- THE CINEMATIC WORKS

TIGER(2024)

Among the principal joys of watching this documentary from Disney+ is the patient and miraculous manner in which it skilfully distills its journey of many years within an hour and a half.

By now those of us whose familial legacy entails a visual and narrative affiliation with wildlife, big cats and decades of documentaries on Discovery, Animal Planet and of course National Geographic may find the idea of a work titled TIGER to be past its prime. But that love for the natural world’s most graceful, tactical custodians will prove exactly why this is meant for us.

It’s a journey through time and space as three generations of the titular big cats- mother Ambar, her offsprings Ravi, Charm, Ivy and Golu and the elusive yet omnipotent male figure Shankar- come to symbolise family ties through a physical Indian terrain that is breathtakingly beautiful and expansive. The challenge to survive within an unforgiving food chain and learning to branch out as individuals dependent on instinct and acumen is sometimes a mirror of human endeavours. But this is a solitary journey of forbearance and extraordinary courage that belongs quintessentially in the wild and is timeless.

The miracle of having a camera observe through days, weeks, months and years produces moments of cinematic magic where tiger cubs grow at double the rate even as infants. Yet the bond among siblings, parents and the ubiquity of seasons affect a trajectory of lifetimes, condensed in limited years on this piece of earth.

A young cub bravely combats a voluptuous python, frogs jump on the drenched body of a tiger while in the lake, creating a joyous mosaic, a hiccup interrupts an imposing tigress’ noontime nap, fireflies produce one of the most stunning nocturnal images I’ve ever seen while a ferocious and feared male shares his hunt- a sloth bear- with the mother of his children. These are some of the most extraordinary images that make TIGER a cut above the rest.

By the climactic moments, as Charm approaches our vision with her own two babies, we marvel at the continuity of nature, bookended by the splendid realisation that these big cats have indeed seen an upsurge in survival and births over the last many years in India.

Narrated in the soothing voice of Priyanka Chopra Jonas, TIGER makes this Indian unit reach out to the world.

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PERFECT DAYS(2023)

Cinema has a predisposition to make us feel seen and heard. But to be seen on a broader wavelength and realise that our innocent musings, our habits and artistic inclinations can actually be someone else’s point of convergence, even similitude, encompasses a feeling so rare that its mere existence can produce happy tears.

The soft, nurturing nature produced by Wim Wenders’ PERFECT DAYS is a testament to the kind of male representation our societal and cinematic canon had been hungering for, reaching towards but never had the chance to fully develop or achieve with utmost sincerity.

Here is an independent filmmaker who has already given the male form and personality undying reserves of empathy in two world-class features PARIS, TEXAS and WINGS OF DESIRE, at the height of confusing, metastasizing cultural machismo in the early ’80s, obliterating those dominant narratives entirely from his worldview. That poetic lens has evolved to not only transcend locations in his inimitable visual style but accommodate, with almost sacred profundity, the sense of an individual life that moves with the frequency of verses being prepared by a discerning writer of the form.

I feel seen in PERFECT DAYS like I’ve never been before because universal as it is, the protagonist Hirayama( Koji Yakusho) feels like a very particular and intimate extension of who I am. His abiding nature and habits so closely align with mine that it’s a miracle of simultaneity. His habit of reading profusely especially before he goes to sleep, having whole shelves of diverse titles in his room, listening to music during commutes to work, watering his plants, taking photographs of trees and nature around him, exhaling during the day at the sight of Nature that reassures him of his meaningful existence, reveling in his ablutions as the water offers a release and a refusal to let his reticence and solitude be seen or felt as an emotional handicap- these are all traits intrinsic to me, inherent in who I am and what I preserve in myself with each moment.

That is what makes me a writer, a poet. Hirayama is a poet too even though we never see him put pen to paper to express his thoughts. It’s because he is a visual poet as are Mr. Koji, who multiplies his impact and his rich inner life without words like a silent film star, and Mr. Wenders himself. Hence, the mundane amasses the currency of survival, decency,
poignancy. The art of living is in being immune to corruptions of the flesh or human routine. This cinematic masterpiece lives that credo.

So that a reunion with his sister that reveals years of internalised pain, the often comic but joyous interactions with his high-spirited young colleague, playing shadow- tag with an unlikely stranger, completing a game of crosses and knots on a piece of paper left in a hidden cranny of his workspace, possibly by a child, or his warmth accorded to an estranged niece he shelters in his modest home open up Hirayama’s many layers.

His contentment reigns supreme, offset by hard work and the aesthetics of having a poetic mind that listens, his inner eye always full with the vision of love.

Thank you Mr. Wenders, Mr. Koji for making me feel seen. For making this journey from the heart and soul. For the belief that males like Hirayama can spring from the parallels we share with several decent people around the globe.

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THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942)

Humans are social beings. In Orson Welles’ underrated THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, the second word in the title takes on an ironic and often plangent tone.

For as portrayed here and as estimably pronounced through the years of experience we mortals have on earth, wealth can lead us to create a cult of personality that is cruelly bereft of emotional resonance. Moth-balled mansions had already shown their decay, like lichens overgrowing on the soul, in Welles’ finest moment as a creator of melancholic images in CITIZEN KANE.

Here, a spiritual sequel of sorts to that previous haunted saga about the forces that keep us from grasping true happiness, Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costella, Anne Baxter and especially Agnes Moorehead grope for a shining beacon of light in the darkness when the curse of keeping up with appearances affects two generations in an Indiana small town.

There are acutely observed and poignantly enacted scenes here that are worth pairing with the likes of Macbeth and Touch of Evil in Welles’ filmography. I say that because the melodrama is very much part of the text but the emotional truths prevail.

There’s a way Mr. Welles composes his shots and situates the drama of unfulfilled love with intimate angles, such as a smoky close-up of an old man and the precipitous heights in the upper storey from which an aunt addresses her nephew below. The shadow of melancholy touches every curtain, staircase, room and door in this stirring cinematic gem.

When the humbler hour does arrive, the damage of repressing and curating desires according to a petulant younger member of the clan becomes soul-shifting. For we claim to recover from the slights of human nature. But we being social creatures, the injury and the insult sting with equal effect.

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A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE(1951)

What happens when repressed pain and the artifice of genteel charms cast a wider net over societal oppression?

Never in my years have I encountered something as darkly truthful and truthfully affecting the soul than Tennessee Williams’ A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and then Elia Kazan’s classic, faithful cinematic take.

Never have I or perhaps ever will encounter the mental protrusions so beautifully and emphatically brought to urgent life by Vivien Leigh’s Blanche Dubois.

Her Blanche is walking on eggshells and broken glass, has learnt that the hard knocks of depleting wealth and the company of men are just more grist to the mill where a woman’s dignity is bound to unravel for the world to witness.

The other performers give their heart and soul, not least of all a beastly and petulant Marlon Brando as alpha male Stanley Kowalski, one of  pop culture’s most incorrigible aggressors. But there’s something emotionally bare in Ms. Leigh’s realistic stakes that kickstart the discourse around mental health each time you watch her battle with her deeper well of insecurities.

She is the Southern rose whose outer flesh has the appearance of petals. On the inside she knows she has been plucked out of her phase of innocence when she could have protected herself from the marauders and social scandal. By leaving so much of her past history concealed and open to conjecture, the ‘horror’ of her current station in the screenplay always becomes a contemporary reality check, for the way gender relations leave her vulnerable and raving with mania as society fails to understand the root of all her pain and subsequent traumas. She is the first person perspective grappling with the many voices in her head, the many splintered selves she has rescued, abandoned, adapted and then shed again like second skin.

There are multiple scenes which leave us aghast at the accuracy with which Blanche is made to unravel in front of our eyes. Her cries, her trembling body, her laughter, her eyes, the face a mask over a singed soul and her verbal history- they all chart the human toll and the brutality of a gendered world where everybody puts her in a corner to fend for herself. By universalising the terror of mental disintegration, she makes her woman’s perspectives go above gender, class and geography.

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THE GREEN MILE(1999)

The divergence presented by a face, a body and a presence larger than our diminutive worldview is something humanity has moulded to suit its misogyny, racism and berate perfectly decent people, labelling them as “The Others” because the principal rule of mortal survival lives and dies by a community of conformists.

In THE GREEN MILE, Frank Darabont, the mind and eyes behind genre-defying THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, puts us at an even level with the gaze that observes from a distance but is more or less forced to confront, intimately, forces of good and evil that have no ordinary precedents.

This is an epic saga where that very term- EPIC- harnesses the warmer gales with the lighter, more even winds that steer the ark of human civility in a prison complex ensconced in Depression era America.

I love how patiently and with vigilance it holds the mundane on the same berth as fantastical happenings, filling these poles with empathy even as the curse of mortal life amasses a dimensionality beyond binaries.

There are so many flashpoints in its body of storytelling- race, white supremacy, homophobia, government sanction, capital punishment, bodily pain and the burden of one’s past- winding down a road that dares to present an alternative to all these with the power of healing by dint of actions.

I believe in my bones that John Coffey( Michael Clarke Duncan) is not just a mystical presence- here, he is a stand-in for God manifesting on Earth as a man of colour who witnesses a ruthless world and helps to ease mortal pain for those on the mend or  intrinsically pure and innocent in the image of the one invisible power we call by different names. He is the gentle force of nature while Paul Edgecomb( Tom Hanks) is the embodiment of Godliness who makes others around him pivot away from prescribed rules of segregation and fight for a condemned man’s dignity. It’s a Second Coming narrated with meticulous details invested in the relationships.

It’s a Second Coming that heals, observes, sacrifices and opens hearts and minds.

Kudos to this extraordinary fable that builds worlds without flinching from the brutal ways in which virtue often gets penalized for simply existing in a Godless world. Nature is God here by way of John Coffey.

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All clips are courtesy YouTube.