Take Shakespeare out of "The Last Lear"

Bengali movie-makers, who make the occasional film in English, have a penchant for ending on the note of a famous Shakespearean soliloquy: "Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." The lines are spoken by King Lear in Act 4, Scene 7 of the tragedy of King Lear.

When he says thus, Lear is no longer a king; he has been stripped of his regality and power and is a mere old man, manipulated into penury by evil children.

In 36 Chowrungee Lane (1981), an old school teacher of Anglo-Indian origin, mutters these lines, when she realizes that she has been used selfishly by a ruthless young Bengali couple. The movie was directed by Aparna Sen. In The Last Lear (2007), an ageing thespian, who is a retired Shakespearean actor, repeats the same lines, this time in the booming voice (whose effects are severely undercut by a terrible accent and enunciation) of Indian superstar Amitabh Bacchan. The actor is on his deathbed, having sacrificed himself at the altar of idealism. 

The film is directed by the now-departed Rituporno Ghosh.

The actor, Harish Misra, retires, one presumes, out of disgust for the commercialization of culture and the decline of theatre in the face of the rising popularity of cinema. These are echos of the theme of Merchant-Ivory's beautiful Shakespeare Wallah. 

When the retired thespian is lured out of his seclusion into playing the role of a clown in a movie made by a successful young filmmaker, he unravels psychologically and insists on enacting his own death scene--a crucial part of the movie's climax--instead of allowing a stuntman to do it. His insistence, combined with the young director's constant wheedling of the old actor's ego, results in the tragic death of the actor.

The Last Lear is a movie about the fall of a purist in a crassly commercial culture where he is an obvious misfit.

I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and King Lear is something I could live on were I to be marooned on an island. I resent this haphazard use of this magnificent play in Indian movies. Aparna Sen merely included a few lines at the end, and in Jennifer Kendall's enunciation the Shakespearean lines sounded Shakespearean and right. But Amitabh Bacchan's incorrigible bluster, which is a perfect vehicle for the ejection of Bollywood lines, massacres the tragic sublimity of King Lear's voice. 

There is a scene in which Bacchan plays Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He is awful, and I couldn't catch a single thing he said. There are other shabby attempts to solidify Shakespeare into a subtext. The retired actor is married to a young Bengali woman who compares their mating to that of Othello and Desdemona.

The Last Lear could have been about any artist who has old world ideals of what's real art and what's sham, because the stories attraction lies, not in the life of the actor, but of the lives of three women who are brought together by their personal affections for the actor. The exchanges between the three women constitute the backbone of the movie, with or without the lousy Shakespearean subtext.

Incidentally, there is one moment that stands out in my memory as more ear-catching than all of the lines added up together in the movie. A journalist is interviewing Harish Misra about another stage artist who is no more. His name is Neeraj Patel. When the journalist requests Harish to say something about "him," the thespian rudely interjects, "him" or "her?" Neeraj, Harish says with marked aversion in his voice, was a "bloody homosexual," who "talked like a woman, walked like a woman, and even slept like a woman." The word "gay" isn't used, but a deep-seated homophobia is revealed. It's ironic that a Shakespearean actor who is enlightened in a way only a Bengali bhadrolok, a quintessence of biblio culture and biblio courtesy, can, is also repulsed by homosexuality. After all, Shakespeare like no other artist, teaches us that men could be like women, and women like men, in the wink of a Prospero's wand.

Lesbians can be cerebral

Director Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color won the 2013 Palm d'Or, at the Cannes film festival.

The story has a lesbian theme. It's about the developing relationship between two students, one of whom has her hair dyed blue. When she reverts back to the color blonde, the relationship is destroyed.

The film is based on Le Bleu est Une Couleur, a graphic novel by French artist Julie Maroh.

Maroh criticized the liberty the director took with her comic to reduce the love scenes into a spectacle of lesbian pornography.

In her blog, Maroh had to say the following of the controversial scenes:

[It was] a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling [...]The heteronormative laughed because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.

I am quite taken by the erotic quality of the scene above; the girls weave a gossamer web of eros around Sartre, Bob Marley and philosophy in general. The indication that the girl on the left is turned on by people who take a stand, is clear when she upholds Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up," as a signature song of commitment. I guess, the other girls reversion to being a blonde turns her off for that reason.

I feel like Maroh predicates lesbian love on something cerebral, so that the "heteronormative" don't get away with the notion that only grotesque sex binds same-sex relationships.

Ibsen

A scene from Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder.

Ibsen is one of my favorite playwrights, for his uncanny ability to make characters "live" on stage.

Theatre critic, Hilton Als, says the following of The Master Builder, staged currently at the BAM's Harvey Theatre:

Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the title character of Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play “The Master Builder,” is a portrait of something, but of what? To say simply that the aging, legendary, but still competitive architect embodies cold determination and raging avarice is to ignore the ways in which Solness shape-shifts in the play’s atmosphere of supernatural realism. For at least half the drama, Solness is his own most interesting idea. He wants to be more than a man, but not a god—that would mean that he wasn’t part of the action. When Solness, who is unhappily married, becomes bewitched by an uncanny young woman named Hilde Wangel, we learn something else about him: within his desire, he is a perverse, lovesick, liminal being [...] Solness is many things at once, although he tries not to be: he represses much of his character in order to become a successful brand—the master architect—in the eyes of a public that’s more fascinated by the myth of heroic male creativity than by its complicated, internal reality.