I sat down for prayer this morning; a daily routine for I don’t know how many years, and images of Piscine, his father and his faithful companion Richard Parker hadn’t left my mindscreen even 10 hours later. Despite the Copyright Violation Warning at the beginning of the movie to not capture still images or video shots of the movie, my senses had surreptitiously captured and brought home visual imagery and dialogues from the thrilling ocean ride with Piscine. The simple characters, powerful and poignant messages debating and deliberating secrets of nature and faith left me bewildered.
The Plot - A tale of faith
The plot is a simple struggle with faith in the middle of the ocean. The struggle with faith can happen anywhere land, air, water and to anyone between partners, within the family, between father and son or between man and nature. The latitude and longitudes of struggle in this story is the Pacific Ocean and the characters were a zookeeper, his family and his animals.
Isn’t buoyancy more a science than faith? Did their faith in science sink them? We don’t know, but we know the boy who had drank the holy water from the Church, prayed on a mat in the direction of Mecca and touched the feet of Vishnu before going to bed survives a ship wreck and leaves the rest to imagination and interpretation of the audience.
The Journey
A Japanese cargo liner filled with exotic animals of all kinds headed towards a new home for all capsizes in the middle of the ocean while encountering a thunderstorm. Piscine and a few animals find themselves on a boat, but have no clue where they are headed and what happened to the rest. With survival being the objective the wild dog hunts the injured Zebra and then kills Orangutan named Orange juice. And finally Richard Parker, the tiger, settles the scores with the wild dog leaving him and Piscine the only survivors from the wreck.
On the journey towards the shore, Piscine and Richard Parker battle their deadliest enemies – unpredictable nature, rough waves and sea full of predators, and their own hunger and fear, while faith turned out to be their life jack. During the journey they try to understand each other, the world around them and also discover an exotic (exorcist) island with Drew cats and with flora that digest human protein leaving behind bones.
The 150 min journey of Pi
Bombay Jayashree’s voice on the title track and animals walking into your life as names rolled in, and colorful Pondicherry turns the movie hall seat into a BMW/Merc seat and makes it feels like a ride on comfy and breeze ECR.
Though the life journey of Pi is much longer, but for many in the movie hall the movie this 150 minute journey seemed long, tedious, testing, and protracted, if not for the visual effects and graphics the hall would be empty midway.
Piscine’s curiosity to understand nature and love for animals, his puppy love with Anandhi, his deep belief in universal faith, to keep a journal, and lack of time to even grieve over his family’s disappearance made the audience find a piece of Pi in them or a piece of them in Pi.
Not sure if it is a coincidence, but Mr. Sharma who acts as Piscine in the movie is in the first year study of Philosophy in college. His performance in the movie will definitely take him to places across and beyond oceans and home turf, but he must be now ready for any tempest journey.
My 3 complains in the almost perfect movie
- A mother is like nature – there is so much nurturing, giving, caring, etc. to be exercised. The mother character in the movie failed to carry any individuality and was like a flotsam moving around. The character could have had more depth.
- Not sure if Tabu was the right choice. Her acting was elementary compared to Mr. Suraj Sharma in the Piscine role. Tabu has used no dubbing in the movie and has spoken a paragraph of Tamil, which sounds no music to Tamil ears. Her pronunciation, accent and diction are horrible in an almost perfect movie.
- Screen play in the first half could have been tighter and screen time used in a better way to sculpt the characters. It almost turned everyone in the theatre sea sick and check below their seats for a life jacket or sickness pill.
The final message - Life larger than a picture!
In the ocean of life, faith is a dingy to many, a paddle to some, a life jacket to few. The dingy can get full, the paddle can grow thin and tired and the life jacket can wear out, but it gets you ashore dead or alive. And we have the power of taming and turning animals (did I include humans too?) we encounter in us and in our lives. The movie leaves life to individual interpretation, while showing only the fittest and the most faithful survive.
If life is an exam, this book has to be read and this movie has to be watched! And for me the movie is a Sea hangover more than sea sickness.
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