Dazzled to death

Having seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the classic Cold War spy tale by John Le Carre, I'm eager to see, A Most Wanted Man, a movie (release date, July 25, 2014), based on another spy novel by the maestro.

But my interest in A Most Wanted Man is mostly piqued by the fact of the actor (sadly no more) Phillip Seymour Hoffman's presence therein.

Hoffman plays the role of the central character, an ex-spy and a tortured soul who has to adapt and adjust to the new geopolitical imperatives of an era defined by 9/11. 

Hoffman is Le Carre's personal choice; the novelist plays an active role in selecting actors for films based on his novels. 

Of Hoffman, Le Carre says the following:

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors are intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came with a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect.
Phillip took vivid stock of everything all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle. He had to screw his eyes or be dazzled to death. He went seven times round the moon to your one, and everytime he set off, you were never sure he'd come back, which is what I believe somebody said of the German poet Holderin: Whenever he left the room you were afraid you'd see the last of him. And if that sounds like wisdom after the event, it isn't. Phillip was burning himself out before your eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course and in bursts of startling intimacy he needed you to know it.

"Dazzled by death" is part of a fabulous characterization of Hoffman as man and and artist, as it brings to mind the figure of the moth. The moth, as Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said, is drawn to the flame (he says "star" as in "the desire of the moth for the star/Night for the morrow"), almost by instinct. It took half a century for a Virginia Woolf to bring out the dark side of the moth's devotion: death. In The Death of a Moth, a short essay, Woolf ponders on the brief life and imminent death of a moth that veers toward a candle she has lit in her room. She looks at the moth and thinks of how the flame dazzles it to death.

A good way to go, confronted by that which bedazzles.

The Japanese Wife: A love story or a triumph of widowhood?

The title of Aparna Sen's 2010 movie, The Japanese Wife, is misleading. There is nothing uniquely "Japanese" about Miyagi, and her being the Indian Shubhomoy's wife does not disrupt the story's cultural code in any significant way because the Indian husband and his Japanese wife never meet one another in flesh and blood.

The film could have been named The Indian husband and it wouldn't have mattered a wit.

If a title, like an epigraph to a text, represents a work of art's central meaning, then Sen's movie should have been "Water 21st century", an unintended sequel to Deepa Mehta's Water (set in 19th century Bengal).

The film's major figures are widowed women: There is Shubhomoy's aunt, a widow who raised Shubhomoy single handedly after his parents die in a flood; Sandhya is a young widow who is Shubhomoy's aunt's best friend's daughter. The aunt wants Shubhomoy to marry her, but Shubhomoy is already in strong epistolary love with Miyagi and can't marry Sandhya. Sandhya returns to the aunt's fold because her in-laws mistreat their now-widowed daughter-in-law.

Shubhomoy is the lone male who is passive and quietly fulfills the role of a provider. He perpetually defers fulfilling his desires, prime among which is a burning desire to be with his Japanese wife physically. But Shubhomoy is too poor to travel to Japan or to send a ticket to Miyagi. He has sexual feelings for Sandhya, seeing her as a proxy Miyagi, but he can't act upon them because of Miyagi. Shubhomoy wants to be faithful to his Japanese wife. 

After she remains a wife for 20 years, Miyagi too becomes a widow. Upon suffering a prolonged bout of pneumonia, Shubhomoy dies and the news of his death reaches Miyagi. The movie ends under a canopy, as it were, of widowhood; we see a shaven-headed Miyagi, adorned in a spotless white cotton saree, get off a boat on the banks of the Ganges with a small suitcase in hand. She asks a villager in broken English, "Bheyar is the house of Bhyomoy, the village schoolmaster?"

There is a cut to the Indian widow Sandhya welcoming the Japanese widow to the house of the widows with a smile and a warm "esho" ("welcome"). 

We are left to imagine the life hereafter of three widows in a house in the Sundarbans, all of whom in one way or the other have been served by Shubhomoy. 

They had sucked the life out of him. I feel sorry for Shubhomoy. 

Oh, but the film would have been vastly interesting had it taken the matriarchal trajectory. The Japanese Wife is blandly bereft of all such possibilities. It's Aparna Sen's Waterloo I believe, where the focus is, as the director herself says, on the "haunting improbability" and the "beauty" of the love story which is "surreal in its innocence." 

I didn't see the adjectives materialize into anything palpable in the texture of the film's world. 

I saw a triumph of widowhood.

Lollywood's "Zero Dark Thirty"

Lollywood is the Bolly and Holly version of Pakistan.

Pakistan's film industry was launched in the 60s, but lately its production has dwindled radically.

Now Lollywood has come out of hibernation, as it were, with Waar, a film that showcases Pakistan's efforts to fight terrorism.

The story is based on the 2009 attack of the Pakistani Police Academy by The Pakistani Taliban.

The rumor is that Waar is financed by the I.S.P.R. or the Inter Services Public Relations, the publicity wing of the Pakistani army.

I don't see any problem with the connection between state apparatus and entertainment industries. After all Hollywood specializes in reveling in these sorts of covert connections. Watch movies like Zero Dark Thirty and say no more.

A Chinese corpse bride

"The Cremator" directed by the Chinese Peng Tao 

Censorship, in some form or the other, exists in all countries, with perhaps the exception of culturally progressive nations of Europe and Scandinavia.

Chinese authorities censor films on grounds of violence, sex and nudity. However, films like Peng Tao's "The Cremator" also risk being censored and/or banned because of its subject matter.

"The Cremator" explores the real-life Chinese custom of “ghost marriages — matchmaking for the dead to ward off loneliness in the afterlife, a practice that still occurs in some parts of rural China. The movie follows an unassuming undertaker who helps facilitate ghost marriages for cash in his poor town. When he faces a terminal illness, the undertaker makes his own ghost bride from a pretty young woman’s unclaimed corpse. But real life interjects in the form of his dead bride-to-be’s living sister, and the undertaker has a strange relationship with the sister.

It's love at first sight for me personally when I read of such stories. But for Chinese authorities, the film may be foregrounding superstition that has always been a particular anathema of the Communist establishment in China.

Here is a review of the film, and here is a list of films banned over the years, for a variety of reasons, in the United States.

Unlikely teachers

Sometimes the best of observations on eras and literature are to be found in the most unlikely of places.

Here's something I read in the context of movie critic Anthony Lane's remark on the tepidness of The Dark Knight Rises: While The Dark Knight taps into the revolutionary spirit of Occupy, says Lane, the film at large "coughs politely and moves on" and its clamor for social change is positively "Victorian".

How is Batman Victorian?

In that its dread of disorder far outweighs its relish of liberty uncaged.

The observation allows me to see in a sentence the contradiction of Victorianism, celebrated as the era is for being both reformist in spirit and conservative to the core. The observation also helps make an extraordinary adjective out of "Victorian". You can call Obamacare, for instance, "Victorian".

My thought then turns to Jerry Sandusky's take on why Captain Ahab so vehemently hated the whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. According to Sandusky, the once stellar and now disgraced college football coaching legend, Moby had the advantage and privilege of "depth". Living under the sea, the whale knew, saw and understood things the mere human, Ahab, couldn't; Ahab found this truth of his own imbecility relative to that of the whale, intolerable. 

Then there is the excellent interpretation of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in the film Six Degrees of Separation. Best if one were to just listen to this one:

Friendship: a refuge

Two recent films, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Mosquita Y Mari, explore friendship as a "refuge".

Set in Los Angeles, C & J is the story of a married couple who continue live in the same house as friends after they dissolve their marriage. Their living situation presents a conundrum as it can't be classified. As Manhola Dargis describes in her excellent review of the movie, Celeste and Jesse "have split up without moving on or out." 

As I read the review, I figured that there is something crucial that keeps Celeste and Jesse together and that "something" is friendship. 

Culturally friendship is either exalted as an empty coinage--everybody uses the word with very little understanding of the fact that friendship is, like marriage and family, an altogether specific kind of institution. 

Else, friendship is seen as a poor and wobbly substitute for the real kinds of relationships--one framed within the family or marriage. Even being boy or girl "friended" to somebody is considered to be more respectable than being simply "friended". 

As Aristotle himself would vouch, compared to marriage and family, the institution of friendship is predicated on absolute parity. Two friends (ideally) share a relationship of laterality, not verticality. 

Unlike marriage and family, friendship remains un formalized as a "relationship". There are family groups and marriage groups that fight for the preservation and political rights of these two institutions, but there are no pro-friendship groups. 

"Friend" sometimes is perceived as the lowest rung on the relationship ladder. When one wants to call a more "serious" relationship off, the usual excuse is, "let's stay friends."

Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever might help rectify the notion that to be in a relationship of friendship is to be a "loser". 

Dargis compliments Celeste and Jesse Forever for daring to come out 

[...] with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

The second film Mosquita y Mari is eons apart from the class structure in which Celeste and Jesse's friendship blossom (though both are set in Los Angeles). 

It's the story of two Hispanic adolescents Yolanda and Mari:

Yolanda, an A student, is the fiercely protected only child of a hard-working immigrant couple who have invested all their hopes in her and who continuously remind her of their sacrifices. The sullen, rebellious Mari is an illegal immigrant and a failing student who lives with her single mother and younger sister; she helps support the family by handing out fliers on the street. A sultry, tempestuous beauty, she is just becoming aware of her sexual power and puts on an air of arrogant bravado.

Yolanda wants to act as a buffer between the harsh world of male-sexual predators and Mari by taking Mari under her wings and giving her free lessons in geometry. 

In the process of spending long hours together--Yolanda and Mari become roommates--Yolanda finds herself falling in love with Mari. Or, at least she experiences strong feelings but isn't sure that Mari would or could return them. 

Yolanda keeps her feelings to herself.

The film doesn't get inside lesbian-love territories, nor is it a "coming out" narrative. It's a story of friendship as a genuine refuge from the onslaughts of an unpredictable and antagonistic world.

Intertextual humor

In The Amazing Spider-Man there is this moment. Spider-Man Peter warns the city mayor that the city is threatened by a predatory lizard (the villain in the movie is half human and half lizard).

The mayor looks at Peter incredulously, and says, "Who do you think I am? The mayor of Tokyo?"

A moment of intertextual humor; the joke is lost on those who aren't familiar with the Japanese monster movie mania. 

However there is more: I am familiar with Japanese monster movies, but I wouldn't be aware of the humor if I didn't catch a glimpse of the same in a scene from Persepolis.

In Persepolis, young Marjane and her grandmother go to a movie theater in Tehran to see Godzilla. Tehran at this time is being bombed by Iraqi warplanes. There is mayhem on screen and real mayhem off screen, outside.

When they walk out of the movie, the grandmother, unimpressed by the celluloid mayhem tells her granddaughter about the "Japanese" and their "crazy" love for mindless monstrosities."

That's when I caught on to the joke--a joke at the expense of a part of Japanese cultural preferences.

Korean Pig Sty

The King of Pigs (2011) is a South Korean animated drama film, directed by Yeun Sang-Ho.

The film is about violence in South Korean schools and about ways in which the male victims of middle school violence and humiliation grow up to become damaged/dysfunctional adults.

The plot revolves around two young Korean men. One is a disappointed writer and the other is a failed businessman who has murdered his wife out of anger and despair. The two meet and trace the seeds of their dysfunctionality to their days in middle school.

While the film has been compared to The Lord of the Flies, I was reminded of George Orwell's description of brutality and the prevalence of totalitarian authority in English boarding schools. Orwell makes interesting connections between the violence boys were subjected to in the name of discipline (bordering on the sadistic), and the violence the very same boys later inflicted as grown up officers of the British Empire serving abroad in British colonies.

Fairy tales become grimmer

The trend--to recast old (timeless, rather) fairy tales into a contemporary mold--fascinates me.

In recent years, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and now, Snow White has been remade into three unique, and going by my personal experience of having seeing Red Riding Hood (she is "little" no more), eminently watchable films.

Snow White and the Huntsman reverses the assassin into the protector as the evil queen's hit man ends up becoming Snow's bodyguard. In Red Riding, the woodsman is also Red's lover and undergoes significant personal sacrifice, including giving up his human identity (he becomes the wolf he is appointed to slay) just so he can be her life-long lover during the day and protector at night.

The 21st century Sleeping Beauty undertakes to participate in a game of self-induced sleep, just so she can eke out a living and pay for college tuition. Beauty is bored with life and offers to put up her young body, if not for sale, then at least for voyeuristic pleasure of her clientele of ageing, wealthy males, who as the saying goes, cannot "get it up" anymore.

What binds the films together is the fact that none of the fairy tales are "fairy-like." They take us back to the older, bleaker moral and physical landscape of the original Grimms Brothers' tales. As A.O. Scott observes in his review of Snow White, these tales were told to scare children into sleep and/or submission, whereas Disney converted them into vehicles of consolation. The chocolate-velvet textures were Disney re-inventions.  

The darker sides of fairy tales have been suppressed by the lightening-up Disney machinery. Now its time for the darker side to come into full-fledged light.

Sons and Fathers

I am now wondering which one of these two films I should see first: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Clear, based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, or The Kid With a Bike, a French film directed by the Dardenne brothers.

Both seem to be about a similar quest--a boy's search for his father. In Extremely Loud, the boy's pursuit is that of a figment of a paternal figure who has been blown away by the 9/11 explosion. The son takes time for the truth of the father's sudden demise to sink in, and the movie, I hear, is about his frantic movements through Manhattan, aboard his skateboard. 

The Kid is about a boy whose father is living but refuses to take care of him and so he puts him in the hands of kind strangers. The boy does not believe this; he thinks his father is momentarily away on business and one day will come to collect him and father and son would live happily ever after. He rides frantically on his bike, as though he is trying to run away from something into something else--better. During one of his helter skelter movements through the town he collides with a young woman in a hospital. As he collides, he clings to her, perhaps to steady himself. Hospital wardens try to peel off the boy from the woman, but, surprisingly the woman says to the boy, "You can hold me [...] but not so tight." Thus begins a saga of an interweaving of the boy's and the woman's lives.

The interweaving is complex and according to some reviews I've read, unsentimentally rendered. I am almost certain that the American film is loaded with juicy sentimentality. I think, I'd like to see the French film first.