The World Makes a Circle

“We were all born from The Overcoat. One day you will realize this …”

A crucial book, a crucial juncture and a crucial thought – all these sum up the birth of Mira Nair’s The Namesake. Why do I say Mira Nair’s and not Jhumpa Lahiri’s?

First then to clarify the hypotheses, so that the article makes sense right from the start and does not have to look for cover under anyone else’s ‘overcoat’, thereby perhaps adding an uncanny magical realistic aura around the entire Namesake phenomena.

I have not read the book. Have actually, but even that was loaned from someone else’s library and the recurring thought of returning it to its place of origin always kept a non-existent rush to reach the last page. And even this opportunity that I had to wrestle with the book came to me long time back; thus there remains a kind of scriptural amalgamation that refrains me from laying any claim to the novel. Thus I brand this article completely as an artistic representation by Mira Nair.

I saw the movie with rapt attention. I noticed the nuances that she managed to smuggle into the contours of each frame. I am a Bengali and therefore I regaled at the very ethnicity and imagery that she had attached to even the minutest of details. The accent of the lead actors Tabu and Irrfan Khan (both non-Bengalis) is worth a commendation right at the very onset. Every inscription is noticeable and worth an applause. The Namesake is an example of magical movie making, a concept that drags you into its duration and keeps you secluded from your contemporary reality. Very few movies have the power to do this and The Namesake belongs to this very elite class.

I have spoken about my source of information and have also accounted for the director’s abilities to make magic on the celluloid. Now I come to issues that deviate from the trend that made me begin my thesis. Though primary focus on the events in the film would generate from the namesake of the film, the whim to name his son after his favorite author, Nikolai Gogol, I have chosen a different perspective to gauge the reels by.

A motif that reverberates through the film is Ghosh’s (the passenger at the beginning on the accidental train, played by a charismatic Jogonath Guha) words – “Grab your pillow and blanket and set out to see the world.” That coupled with Gogol’s The Overcoat provides a view of the fact that the ‘view of the world’ could mean different aspects to different individuals.

The film begins with Ghosh asking Ashok the object of his enquiry, the book he was reading and he answers, “The Overcoat by Gogol.” Couple this with what Ashok tells Gogol later … “We were all born out of The Overcoat.” There is a double emphasis generated here out of the word “born”. Gogol’s Overcoat is the point from where the movie begins as also the story of Ashok’s life. Ashok was earlier a student at Kolkata, who would make occasional trips to his uncle at Jamshedpur or as he mentioned, “I had been to Delhi once.” Ghosh gives him a new outlook, the advice to move out and see the whole world. The train goes and rams on to another vehicle on the track, thereby killing mostly everybody. However, these final words of Ghosh also get rammed into Ashok’s head and it is there that he takes the decision to go ahead and move to a settlement outside the confines of his own country’s national borders.

So as we can see, this is the point where the movie begins, it is born and then again, from The Overcoat. Thus there is some realism attached to Ashok’s words when he tells his son that they have all been born out of The Overcoat. And does the signification end there?

No. There is something else that is also attached to this feeling. The point of origin of the movie coincides with the point of origin of Ashok’s life. It is at that juncture, lying at his house in a crippled state that he realizes the focus of Ghosh’s words of conquering the world. Bursting inside his memory, these words are all that gave him the impetus to move out of his national confines and settle abroad. So in another aspect of the word ‘born’, we see Ashok being re-born, again out of The Overcoat. Ashok’s life has a unique attachment to Ghosh’s instruction. All his life he has lived in this focus. And this is signified even in his death, dying in a far off place in America, far away from all his family members who incidentally are born with him in America. The motif of moving along places never seems to end and the only possible end that can be achieved is through death.

And then we come to Gogol, the son. Completely within the folds of an American heritage and culture, Gogol feels a sense of alienation towards India, towards Kolkata. He feels completely out of place in a land where it id dangerous to go out to jog on the roads, or even to inhumanly drive a rickshaw puller by an extra person’s weight. However, an artist by profession, bordering towards architecture, Gogol in India, witnesses the beauty and splendor of the Taj Mahal. It is looking at a structure with awe and admiration that he had never seen before, something that actually belongs to him, but is yet so far away. It is a rather crippled existence, but the intensity of its actualization is far away from Gogol’s realms.

And towards the end, Gogol recounts what his father had told him when he took him to the edge of the sea. Due to the lack of a camera, he asked Gogol to remember it by realizing that they had gone to a place from where they could go no further. And that pseudo hypocritical statement, a harmless paradox, firms Gogol’s mind much later, when he realizes in the New York underground that maybe he should move towards India, to “see the world”.

It is at this moment that Lahiri (I cannot comment on the storyline, but the literary aspect of the same has to be attributed to the author and not to the filmmaker) stumbles the viewers and readers upon a post colonial influx that boils down to a West fixation. There is, as Ghosh points out, a kind of “dream” that draws Indians towards the West, somewhere where people do not spit on the roads, where everything is kept clean and tidy, on the verge of making it a very idyllic setting. Yet there is a lot more to it than just “opportunities” for the youth (which the very reason why Ashok wants Gogol to be brought up in America). Even the mysticism that is generally attributed to the East can stand as a marching order for people from the West, both foreigners and Indians who had long back migrated to the West and their families. This is why we see Ashok take Gogol to the edge of the sea and then tell him “remember that we came to a place from where we could go no further”. He was trying to justify to himself that he can seen the world. He was trying to tell himself that he had seen it all. He had indeed taken in all that Ghosh had told him but obviously he never did really believe in it. And he never wanted his son to believe in it, though it remained such an inextricable part of him.

The Namesake deals primarily with the thought of exploring the other and thereby being complete in vision. The difference remains also in the very realms of difference that actually defines the two hemispheres. The west enthralls the Easterners for its development in modern times, while the East draws people from the West because of its development in ancient times. And thereby they complete the world; because the world is round and as you start from one end, you come back to where you begun from. Thus we can see that The Namesake remains a post-colonial book, a post-colonial West centric phenomenon and a brilliant movie.

The Postman Delivers

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,no they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names,my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, purenonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I sawthe heavens

unfastenedand open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

felt myself a pure partof the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.

Poetry - Pablo Neruda

I never knew who needed the poem? Or who was in greater need of poetry? The person who wrote it, or the person who "needed" it. And then like Poetry arrived for Neruda himself, searching him out, Il Postino came in search of me and I wrote my first faint line. A film is an art form and no where has the intermediacy of the modes of films and poetry been so beautifully intermeshed, as in Il Postino. Truly remarkable, truly unbelievable.

The simple story of a fishing community in rural Italy. There are no educated people here. All that they need is provided to them through the fishing business. Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi) is just a poor guy, who knows how to read a little, that too at a very slow pace and all that he has read, belong to the poems of a certain Pablo Neruda. He is a bad fisherman and therefore he applies for the job of a postman in the village. But what good is that job, because no one there knows how to read and therefore, who would send them letters?

But Pablo Neruda (Phillepe Noiret) has just been exiled from Chile and has sought refuge in Italy. Under severe politcal pressure, Italy conscents to let him have his own little space in a non-descript Italian village, where he could stay for as long as he wanted. Since no one else in the village can read or write, the letters then end up being delivered to only one person - Pablo Neruda.

Therein begins the movie. Letters, parcels, all in bulks of a few hundreds, start arriving. From a mere government postman, Mario becomes something like a personal secretary of the great poet himself. And he brings him all his messages, all his communication from the outside world, a dictaphone from Chile and eventually, he also brings him a message from the Nobel foundation of Sweden that they were seriously considering awarding the Nobel Prize to the Chilean for his unparalleled contribution to poetry.

And the friendship grows. When you see a face for everyday, when you exchange words with that face everyday, even if it be for a few seconds, you do develop a certain bonhomy with that person, don't you? And this is just what happens between the poet and the postman. Their meetings signify a convergence between the internal world and the external world; carrying the news of millions of strangers, receiving letters from millions of strangers, they develop their own personal space, their own personal communication. And that is where Mario asks for help.

He is madly in love with the namesake of Dante's beloved, Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta). She is an absolute beauty, and there is no way that Mario can make any inroads into her heart. But now things are far different. He has the help of the greatest exponent of the romantic verse, Pablo Neruda. Neruda inspires, Mario writes. And together, a Marxist, an aethiest, brings two individuals before the alter. Love can make you do many things.

Neruda eventually serves out his asylum in Italy. Pinochet wins over the political mess that had led to Neruda's exile originally and therefore it is time for the master poet to return. There are a few tears shed, as an unspeakable friendship comes to an end. Neruda promises to write, but then once back, he must have been engulfed in the Chilean power mess and therefore all that Mario receives are mails from his secretary, asking Mario to send along items that the poet had left behind in Italy.

Mario continues the Communist dream and gets killed in a stampede operated by Italy's fascist nexus. Mario is dead and gone and he is survived by his wife Beatrice and son, Pablito. And then it happens ... Neruda returns to the village to meet his long lost friend, only to find that he is lost forever.

A truly remarkable piece of film-making, Il Postino is a tribute to the world of cinema. A film where verses rule supreme as the primary lyric, the music is completely breathtaking and awe-inspiring. The camerawork rules the roster, complementing the theme sequnce of the film, poetry. And so are the performances - simply poetic. The film is a metaphor of poetry and vice-versa. What is a metaphor? Go watch the movie ...

Man has no business with the simplicity or the complexity of thigs - Pablo Neruda (Il Postino)

Welcome to Rockyland!

"Its not how hard you can hit … It's about how hard you can get hit and still keep moving ahead!"

It is inspirational stuff like these which made Rocky a cult amongst all the fighting tigers of the world and now that he is back, in perhaps the last part of the entire series, Rocky Balboa doesn't disappoint.

Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) is back, this time, a sixty-year old man, a legendary boxer, who owns a small restaurant, making in the small bucks. He has put his boxing career way behind him. He's not the same old Rocky anymore. He's far more subdued, albeit a little old. He's retired. His days go by running this shop, plus visiting Adrian Balboa's grave and sitting there for hours on end. Rocky now is any other man, in any other place, leading a normal citizen's life.

On the boxing scene, Mason 'the flying' Dixon (Antonio Tarver) is having a similar bad time. He is the reigning undisputed champion of the world, but his popularity is on the downslide. His managers are getting rather anxious about his public relations. It's not about winning, it's about remaining a demigod in the eyes of your fans, like Rocky has remained till today. Plus there is this virtual reality thing, where the organizers go about tallying Mason's prowess against the all-time greats, with the temporal passages taking hold on the latters' abilities as boxers. First up for this comparison, is the legendary, two-time champion of the world, Rocky Balboa. The results are more defaming for the current champion, as they hold the result of Rocky beating him.

The comparisons spark off newer controversies over the champion’s fanfare. His managers get more nervous about the developing situation. There is perhaps only one salvo in the whole affair – a fight with Rocky, where not only does he beat the legend, but does it, leaving the veteran with his respect, his dignity – the outcome; not only does he consolidate his position as the undisputed boxer of the world, but also gains public support for “taking care of Rocky” through the ring.

Rocky, in the meantime, is having his own share of ideas. The virtual match provides him with the idea that he can actually return to the ring and take on a few people. Even at this age. Obviously he’s trying for the local level boxing matches just do realize some dreams of his. So he tries for a license and eve gets it, clearing all the scheduled tests. So Mason’s managers get in touch with him and Rocky consents to the fight. His son, Robert (Milo Ventimiglia) is furious. He claims that all he got in life was because of his last name. And now, when his father makes himself to be a laughing stock, he’s going to be included in that. What you then get, is vintage Rocky – “You gotta do, what you gotta do! The world is not sunshine and rainbows. It’s a mean world out there and no matter how hard you try, its gonna beat you to your knees and keep you there, no matter how tough you are. It’s not about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit … and keep moving on! I’m a fighter … that’s the way I am! You can’t change what we are!” Rocky goes into training. All muscle and heat, Rocky-style!

The stage is set. Rocky takes on Mason. Commentators are absolutely sure that Rocky won’t be able to last even two rounds - A straight K.O. for Mason. The bell for the first round rings. Rocky is pushed around; beaten up. Predictions seem to be running according to their words. Will Rocky be disgraced? But even before the bell for the second round’s termination could ring, Rocky turns on the heat. It’s a kind of pounding that Mason perhaps had never got at the hands of any of his current opponents.

The commentator’s words resonate through the arena – “welcome to Rockyland!” From there onwards, it’s Rocky all the way. Mason too gets to throw in his blows, Rocky also receives sufficient damage, but it’s not one-way traffic as expected. Mason is carried on through all the scheduled ten rounds of the match, Rocky style!
At the end, it’s not about winning or losing anymore. It’s about Rocky, the legend, the veteran, the larger-than-life figure. Rocky Balboa, the heavyweight champion. Rocky Balboa.

It must have been a very emotional moment for Sylvester Stallone, the last walk back from the arena. What started out as dream in 1976 has finally come to an end. Rocky will never fight again. It’s the story of Rocky, seen through the eyes of Stallone. But then again, “if I can change, you can change – everybody can change!” Rocky is transcendental, the center of the structure – both inside and out. Rocky is Stallone, the sixty-year old man, who can give a sixteen-year old man a run for his money. The determination, the will, the power – it’s just all Rockyland.
The cinematography and the music of the film (Bill Conti) deserve special mention. The camera was never handled better in any Rocky movie. The angles and the lighting, make it the magnum-opus and the ultimate swan-song of Stallone. Conti uses tracks from the old Rocky movies and the situations, in which they are added, make the scenes more stimulating.

The verdict – Rocky is the best! Be it the man, or the movie!

Pratidwandi

The sequel to his critics' entitled 'Calcutta Trilogy', Pratidwandi marks Satyajit Ray's legitimate entry into the world of politics. Perhaps his only clearly defined political film, The Adversary uses the "through-the-eyes-of-one-man" theory to expound typical Communist ideals of the late 1980s in Kolkata. And the elan in which the entire composition has been structured, amplifies Ray's mastery over the lens.

Deeply indebted to the French New Wave, in photography and montage to be precise, Ray uses to the metaphor of a crowded bus to align a class basis for his protagonist Siddharth Chowdhury (Dhritiman Chatterjee). He is on his way for an interview in a Government organisation. The questions are all placed thoroughly in clipped-British English and it ranges from the definition of the mitochondria, right up to what the applicant reserves as the most important milestone of the last decade. Instead of their wish of hearing about man's landing on the moon, Chowdhury speaks of the war in Vietnam, of which we were "completely unprepared. It is remarkable, because it showed us about the courage of the people of Vietnam." The bosses break into a thin line of sweat and stammer, "Are you a communist?"

Ray even uses Fellinisque dream sequences to break into the subconsciousness of the protagonist. From seeing his best friend, a revolutionary being shot by the police, to even himself coming before a guillotine - Chowdhury's mind is a complete mess. He can't land up a job, though his attractive younger sister works 'overtime'. Her boss' wife complains to her mother as to how she was having an affair with her husband. Chowdhury's troubled state wants him to kill the boss. But what can he do in the end? There is a an entire episode of his going to her boss' house to sort out the matter and yet he can do nothing. Its the money game, ostensibly the youth's take on capitalism. He returns from the boss' house and sees a driver of a limousine crash into a young girl. The people drive him out and beat him up. Even Siddharth tries to break in through the crowds, but his anger is not vented out on the poor proletariat, but at the Mercedez-Benz logo. Another take on capitalist tendencies in the naxalite injected state.

So where does his fervour end up? How does he fight this? He goes for another job and there too the crowd is enormous. People are waiting for their term to come, its summer and the interviewers have not only put in lesser number of chairs for the people coming for the job, but have also made available the use of only one fan. Siddharth leads a retinue into the office, rasing their demands. But they are subdued and just made to sit out and 'adjust'. The proletariat again adjust to the capitalists' tune. But then one of them faints. Siddharth is furious. Enough is enough. he breaks down the door and tramples over everything that comes into his sight. The table is wrecked, the people are pushed out of their chairs, a complete upheaval! The metaphor of a revolution. Siddharth has begun it.

But where does it end? How does he survive? How does he start working? Does he change in the system, or does he fall prey to it? He leaves the system, goes back to the pastoral, into the other line, where he starts work again. He may not have achieved anything, but he does not stay in there!