"Unfinished Piece for the Piano Player" is not so much based on a play by Anton Chekov as much a play based on Chekov's short stories and hence a very Chekovian play.
A number of characters meet over a weekend at a country estate where Mikhail Platonov, a village school teacher, undergoes an emotional crisis that is summed up best in his own words:
Oh God !
Now I am know for sure, it's enough to betray just once, just once to be unfaithful to what you believed in and what you loved and you would never get rid of the succession of betrayals and lines !
... Not that, not that, I am thirty five ! Everything's ruined !
Lermontov had already been in his grave for eight years ! Napolean was a general ! And I have done nothing in this damned life of yours. Where is my true self ? I am a good for nothing cripple! Where is my strength, my mind, my talent? A wasted life!
Oh ! You are here too, the keeper of a fire that isn't even smouldering... but you have no choice, just like myself... a nobody ! And I am just like all of you here !
A fine masterpiece from the Soviet years, it brims with the intensity of character that only the Russians were (are?) capable of.
"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." - Pablo Neruda
'Il Postino' (The Postman) is a movie about a fumbling postman whose job is to deliver mail to Pablo Neruda while the latter is in exile on an island in Italy. This is partly fictitious. I don't have his autobiography with me so I cannot verify about this incident if at all it is mentioned in the book, I don't remember reading about it.
Mario watches a documentary news item in a cinema recounting the journey of Neruda to Italy. When he is asked to deliver mail to him, he gets interested in Neruda's poetry so that he too, like Neruda, can "impress the girls".
Starting with this rather innocuous motive, he begins to understand the art of writing poetry and imbibes ideas from Neruda himself. The dialogues are wonderful and the interactions between the postman and the Poet are a delight every time Mario goes to deliver mail to Neruda. The rustic intelligence of Mario is pitted against the wisdom of the Neruda and the brilliance comes through despite the translation.
There area couple of sentences that I particularly liked. Mario takes a poem from Neruda to impress a girl he likes (called Beatrice). When Neruda castigates him for doing so, he responds with the following, leaving the poet speechless:
Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, it belongs to those who need it
Later, his friendship with Neruda evolves and he starts understanding "complex" words like "metaphors" and starts writing poetry himself. Neruda also helps him in convincing Beatrice to marry him. When the priest discovers that Mario wants Neruda, a well known communist, as his best man, he is outraged:
Priest: Find yourself a person who isn't a communist. If Neruda doesn't believe in God, why should God believe in Neruda. What sort of a witness would he be?
Mario: God never said a communist can't witness at a wedding
The movie is peppered with snippets from Neruda's poetry. Here is a short (abou 9 minutes) clip available at youtube where Neruda composes a poem, and Mario begins to interpret it. At the end he makes a powerful comment:
Is it that the whole world is a metaphor for something else?
The clip:
A spoiler here, so don't proceed if you intend to watch the movie yourself), Mario is invited to attend a communist demonstration and dies there. At the end of the movie, Pablo Neruda returns and finds that Mario's son, born after he has died, is named Pablito.
Mario also records the sounds of his islands to send them on tape to Neruda. This clip captures that recording.
Needless to say, it has been one of the best movies that I have seen for a long time (not that I watch much), it is perhaps also the only movie I was able to watch without any break- and it was twice in two days.
Incidentally, the role of Mario was played by the actor- writer Massimo Troisi who died one day before the movie was released. He had deferred his heart treatment so that he could complete the movie (from Wikipedia)
'Il Postino' reminded me of a similar episode in the life of Makhdoom Mohiuddin, the communist poet from Hyderabad. It was recounted in the TV serial Kahkashan, and what I recollect is recounted here.
When the CPI was banned in 1948, Makhdoom was incarcerated in a jail where his cellmate was a young man who had been jailed in trumped up charges by the family of a girl he was in love with. Makhdoom leads him via his poetry to become politically educated. The young man is somehow released and Makhdoom as well, after a gap. Years later, while passing by a town he is informed of the sacrifice of a young man and a woman during the Telengana struggle. Makkhdoom finds the graves of the young man who had been his cellmate and beside his grave, that of that of the girl he had loved.
Makhdoom wrote a very moving nazm when he saw this.
The Kahkashan version is here, it has also been used in a Bollywood film Cha Cha Cha.
Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990) is said to be based on his own dreams, it is therefore a collection of 8 short vignettes and not a film with a well drawn plot like the Seven Samurai.
The first sequence "Sunshine through the rain"is what Kurosawa is supposed to have had as a child and indeed, this and the second one "The Peach Orchard" are most poignant.
And "The Tunnel" where the ghosts of the men that the army commander has sent out to die haunt him. "You may think you were heroes, but you died like dogs", he tells the still obedient ghosts.
He is chased by a barking dog with bombs strapped around it towards the end of the sequence. One wonders what personal aspect from Kurosawa's life comes in in this sequence. I personally liked the one based on Van Gogh's painting "The Crows"- a self- portrait of the artist underlining his commitment to art. This one has some of the most ravishing moments in the movie- as the young man wades through some of Van Gogh's paintings, I understand that this is where Spielberg's special effects were used- to a most dramatic effect.
The opening scene is also reminiscent of the writer in Shyam Benegal's Sooraj Ka Saatvaan Ghoda whose memory of his younger days is revived while looking at a painting .
In "Blizzard" it is the super human effort of a team of mountaineers who finally reach their camp after surviving a blizzard- again something that brings out the tenacity of purpose.
Mt Fuji in Red and The Weeping Demon bring out the horrors of a nuclear holocaust- it has to be remembered Kurosawa came from the only country that has experienced the devastation caused by two atomic bombs but also that the peace movement was a major involvement for many before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
"Village of the Watermills" is both a requiem to himself as well as a most enigmatic work in the film. If this is a dream that Kurasawa had when he was very old and approaching the end of his life, it is understandable since the sequence shows a blissful village untrampled by technology and where cows and horses are used in place of tractors and candles in place of electricity- "for people grow used to convenience"- an old, 103 year old man lectures to the young man who is passing by the village.
The work is engimatic because no such idyllic, self- contained village has ever existed, a village too has its social classes and its constant struggle with nature. Indeed, Kurasawa must have been aware of this contradiction- for the old man mentions in passing that no one actually lived in the village.
Before watching the movie, I was unsure how Kurosawa would handle a film in color, having been familiar with his work in black and white- and the least one can say is that he has handled it with the aplomb of the genius that he demonstrated in his black and white films. The painting- like frames rescue even the most dreary of the sequences from banality.
If more people had dreams like Akira Kurosawa- and made movies like he did, I would be glued to the cinema.
The Village of the Watermills Part I (from Youtube)
The Village of the Watermills Part II (from Youtube)
Thanks to Rajesh for having prodded me into watching Dreams Van Gogh's Painting "The Crows" Source Akira Kurosawa's image Source
Yesteryear actress Nadira was hospitalised in Mumbai's Bhatia Hospital, five days ago, following a mild stroke.
One is surprised to find that little attention has been paid to Nadira, the actress of Bagdadi Jewish origin who was immortalised in the song "mud mud ke na dekh" in the movie Shree 420, certainly the most powerful of Raj Kapoor's early cinema that bore the mark of not only Raj Kapoor, but many others among them Khawaja Ahmad Abbas.
The song is picturised tantalizingly on Nadira as the hero (Raj Kappor) struggles to decide between Maya (Nadira) and Vidya (Nargis), between the bourgeios ("Maya") and the plebian ("Vidya"). His choice falls on Maya. Few moments in Indian cinema have been as poignant and stark as this particular song.
It stuck me that she is 74, that means that she must have been little over 25 when she acted in that movie.
One wishes Nadira a speedy recovery and a long life.
I have never been able to watch a movie for more than 15 minutes, except for a few years in college when the parallel cinema held me in awe for some time before I returned to my first love- books. It still remains for me an adjunct to literature and the written word. And I have been able to supplement some of my reading via this medium.
My current stay in the US is not without its advantages and I have been able to watch at least half a dozen movies that I always heard or read about. Among them is The Bicycle Thief (or Thieves as it probably is titled in the original). I find the movie fascinating, and no wonder it is held as the harbinger of neo- realist cinema.
Besides the technical finesse- usage of real locations and non- real actors and hence real people, De Cica manages to make even the most unreal character in the movie- the fortune teller- a real, an almost mundane person. Much better has been written about the movie than perhaps I can write and hence would refer the interested reader to other sites.
I have watched a few others in the last couple of months- some of the works of Akira Kurasawa and a number of movies starring Anthony Hopkins. About them, perhaps later.
Mexico City in Christmas Time
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- Christmas Tree at the Zocalo
- “White” Christmas with artificial ice
- “White Christmas” trees
- An industrial scale Christmas Tree
- ...
