Honore de Balzac’s short story,A Passion in the Desert, begins at a menagerie viewing of a hyena where the narrator and a woman have a discussion about whether animals have passions which humans can appreciate. The narrator then relates a story of a 22-year old French soldier who finds himself alone in the desert. He falls asleep and awakens to a "vast ocean" of the desert, utterly alone. After a day adjusting to his environment, he falls asleep in a cave and awakens to find a dangerous female panther sleeping a couple of feet from him. Luckily for him she has just eaten. The two develop \a relationship and the soldier names the panther for his girl friend Mignonne. Eventually , the panther makes an innocent move which the soldier interprets as his attacking him and the man mortally wounds him with a knife. As he lays dying, the panther still looks at him without anger. As part of the moral to the story, Balzac says that the desert is God without mankind.
The novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001) and Ang Lee’s film based on the book share many similarities to Balzac's short story, but changes his desert to the Pacific Ocean and places a young man on a life boat and a make-shift raft with a ferocious Bengel tiger named Richard Parker (I'll let the film explain how he got his name). In the film, a writer who has come to interview the narrator tells the older Pi that he was told that the narrator’s story will help him see God.
Pi’s story begins in the Indian zoo where his father and mother help raise the animals. His father is a pragmatist; his mother is more spiritual. From his mother Pi develops an interest in religions of all kinds and looks for God's revelations everywhere. His father tells him that when he looks into an animal's eyes, all he is seeing is himself. He catches Pi trying to feed their man-eater Richard Parker and he teaches Pi a brutal lesson about how animals cannot be trusted.
When his father is forced to sell the zoo and transport the animals to the Americas, the family ends up on a Japanese ship with a vicious cook (Gerald Depardeau in a cameo appearance). When storm hits, Pi is saved, along with a wounded zebra, a hyena, a female organatan, and the tiger. It is at this point that story really begins.
Each of the ages of Pi are well acted, but Suraj Sharma as the "boat" Pi is amazingly nuanced in his performance.
Ang’s film is magical. According to The Making of Life of Pi: A Film, a Journey by Jean-Christophe Castelli, Lee planned from the beginning to use the 3D medium. For me, it has moments that transcend most other 3D films I’ve seen. Rather than using extreme 3D throughout, the effect is toned down until needed for special moments. For example, while Richard Parker and Pi are alone, Pi notices luminous plankton surrounding the boat and his makeshift raft. A giant whale, feeding off plankton, breeches the surface and rises majestically up into the sky. The sight is truly awe-inspiring. At another point, as elder Pi tells how he was named after the clearest swimming pool in France, we see his uncle swim across the screen in totally clear water with clouds in the distance.
The most magical thing about the film is Richard Parker, the CGI tiger based on a real tiger named King. I intentionally didn’t tell my viewing companions about the CGI effects until after the film. They were amazed since there was never a false moment when they doubted that what they were seeing was the actions of a living tiger.
It is also hard to believe that the storm which sets the plot in motion and the sinking of the ship are also CGI moments. The image of Pi underwater watching the lit boat sinking deep into the Pacific is another haunting image I won’t forget.
[SPOILER ALERT] In the film, Pi ends up telling the writer two stories. The first one is of his adventures in the boat with the animals I mentioned above. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangatan, but he is finally killed by Richard Parker. Pi is able to train King to accept him by using starvation techniques. A school of flying fish and large tuna become a major event. And the climax of Pi's story revolves around a floating island filled with meerkats and banyan trees. By the time they near Mexico, Pi is able to stroke Richard Parker's head. When they reach Mexico, Richard Parker goes into the jungle without turning around and even acknowledging Pi. Elder Pi was in tears as he described it, and so was I.
When elder Pi finishes his story, the men taking his history, sent to find out why the ship sank, find his story too unbelievable. So Pi tells a second much darker story in which another sailor with a broken leg, the cook, his mother and himself end up stranded in the boat. The cook kills the sailor and eventually his mother to use for bait to catch fish. For the second story to be true, all we saw was only metaphor. The second story, like his father’s view of the world, is cruel and unrelenting and Pi himself was Richard Parker. His father's God is an angry God. The second story is told without visual embellishments and none of the wonder and religion found in the first.
Author Martel has said that when people ask which story is to be taken as true, he refuses to answer. It is up to each person to make that decision for themselves and then live their life with that viewpoint. Which story does the film favor? One has only to look at the magical views Lee creates. The world can be filled with fantastic animals which show us the God that exists all around us.
The Life of Pi (2012) *****
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