It is not so much about an affair but rather about believing in God. This 1999 version is a remake of the 1955 version starring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson; based on a bestseller of 1951 novel by Graham Greene.
Thursday, 19 December 2024
This is not a love story!
It is not so much about an affair but rather about believing in God. This 1999 version is a remake of the 1955 version starring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson; based on a bestseller of 1951 novel by Graham Greene.
Tuesday, 17 September 2024
Finding the Fulcrum
https://borderlessjournal.com/2024/09/16/finding-the-fulcrum/
I decided to care for my ailing octogenarian mother, not because she willed me a great fortune or because I have a great liking to care for the sick. Neither do I want to gaslight her for all the not-so-nice things she said about me and my family in better health all through her healthy life.Monday, 2 September 2024
A problem many would like to have...
After working all their lives engaging with various businesses to pull themselves out of the shackles of poverty, they can say they have arrived. No, thanks to the governmental racially discriminatory policies, and despite this, they had managed to give their three children an overseas education. Again, the children had opted to settle overseas because of the national social re-engineering policies. The roots are so deeply embedded elsewhere that they find it pointless to return to the roost. Their occasional summer vacation and digital connections would suffice for family bonding.
The couples are left to fend for the coop and the empty nest. To complement that, there are multiple landed properties, real estate assets, various incomes, and a stash of moolah to lubricate their silver years.
None of the children are keen to take over the legacy the parents will soon leave. In the minds of the foreign-educated liberty thinking, socialistic minds of the offspring, they do not want anything with their capitalistic parents' money, which they would be thinking was earned through the blood and sweat toiled by the bodies of the working class. And they want none the part of it.
So, the elders are left with a dilemma. How will they will off their legacy when none of their kids want to inherit it. In a world where siblings and relatives clobber and murder each other to get a piece of the meat, here they have to deal with no one wanting their hard-earned.
Many individuals with apparently noble intentions (?really) have no dearth of suggestions and avenues on how to dispose of their wealth to the world. There is no shortage of NGOs willing to put their money to good use, more than a hundred orphanages and homes that are always short of contributions, the house of worship with their bottomless pit of donation kits and private entities that could set up trusts to aid the needy. Yet, they decided to spend it all with close friends, fine dining, rewarding their palate and seeing all the things that they could see in this lifetime. Who knows what holds for them in the future when this life is through? An abyss? A new beginning with no recollection of what transpired here and now? Or…
Monday, 19 August 2024
The undercurrents beneath the surface
Director: Christo Tomy
An old Tamil proverb goes, ‘Tell a thousand lies to make one marriage happen.’ In Indian society and most Eastern cultures, a person is highly encouraged to get married once he or she is of marriageable age.
Monday, 13 May 2024
Our past controls the present?
Bhoothakaalam (The Past / Ghost Time, Malayalam; 2022)
Director: Rahul Sadasivan
No one will take kindly to others’ advice on how one’s life should be lived. No one will be flattered when told his head should be checked. That is what it is. Individuals should take a step back, access their mental health occasionally, and take preventive measures or make amends. Be the change. Change comes with realisation and from the inside. No one can make the horse drink water. The horse must first feel thirsty. The need to change comes from within.
Viewers wonder whether it is a horror film or if there is a more prosaic explanation for all the weird happenings around the house.
Is the recently departed grandmother’s soul returning with a vengeance to express her dissatisfaction? Is the house displaying poltergeist activities? Why do tenants after tenants die in the same house? Is the mother’s overt depression or the son’s indulgence in intoxicants the culprit?
The family had gone a lot. The son lost his father at a young age. He grew up without a father figure. The mother had to struggle with her unsatisfying teaching job at a nursery and later caring for her stroke-stricken paraplegic mother.
The son carries a heavy cloud of resentment after being forced to do medicine, which he had to quit and failing to secure a job with his pharmacy degree. He smokes heavily and drinks himself drunk frequently. His relationship with his girlfriend could be much better. When funny things start happening in the house, he flips. Soon enough, even his mother sees the abnormal activities in the house.
In a very clever manner of storytelling and filmmaking, the director takes us through a roller coaster ride to keep us guessing whether the whole point of the movie is to impress the viewers on the need to treat mental illness correctly or whether there is such a thing as ghosts?!
Monday, 4 March 2024
Till death do us part?
One year after her demise, at 60, he introduced his new other half to the world. Conversations and felicitations on his plunge revealed that it was a necessary indulgence for him. Even though his children were married and he was a grandfather three times over, he felt the need for intimate touch and passion. He is a happy man. The memory of his old wife is very much alive, and he will cherish them till the end of time.
Another friend with a couple of late teenage, young adult daughters, lost his wife after a long tiring battle with ovarian malignancy. Still reeling from the loss, he was still not out of the woods yet when I spoke to him six months after her demise. He still felt her presence around the house, and his mind kept playing, reminiscing the good times, playing back obscure events in their wedded bliss to miss her more.
I slowly introduced the idea of finding a replacement to fill the void; he asserted that he was pretty sure. At that juncture, he only wanted to spend the rest of his years living in dear memory of his duly departed. He feels complete without a need to build a new one.
Out of curiosity, I enquired from another dear childhood buddy whose wife is hearty, healthy, and kicking. Heaven forbids, if his partner were to die, what would he do? Is remarriage on the plate? Without batting an eyelid, he said he would envisage himself taking a new partner. It is not as much for physical gratification but for social interaction and communication. He felt that was necessary for healthy mental health.Yet, when posed with a similar question, another pessimistic realist friend viewed his one stint in matrimony as enough to last his whole lifetime. Gone are the days when intimacy and husband-wife interaction played a pivotal role in his daily life. He had started enjoying the company of he and himself, exploring new frontiers to expand his knowledge and experience. He guesses that his wife is in the same boat, too. Over the years, embroiled in the hard knocks of life, they grew apart, from being co-dependent to interdependent to independent, sometimes contradictory just for the kick of it, able to stand alone to face the music.
Friday, 2 June 2023
Mortality grounds us
Living 2022
Director: Oliver Hermanus
You remember a time when you were looking at the world that passed on by. You see the stream of people all grown up, handsome, poised, brimming with confidence. You tell yourself that you want to be like them with lots of friends and be likeable. You just could not wait to grow up. In your inner circle, you have friends who think highly of you. You consider yourself the life and soul of a party.
And poof! You find yourself to be an old fool. You are a party pooper, a bore, a high-strung individual and a killjoy. People shun you. The younger ones would rather stay away from you to have a good time. They look at you as Scrooge and find excuses to stay away with a six-foot pole.
You wonder whatever happened to the bubbly youngster that you once were. Have you become that lone child in the playground with a perpetual sourpuss face who does not want to share his toys?
We sometimes lock ourselves in a comfort zone. We think we are all mighty and immortal and that there is no need to conform to the needs of others. Everything changes when death stares you in the face. Suddenly you realise the futility of it all - the pride, the Ego and the meaningless self-aggrandisement. You want to leave your legacy, nevertheless. You become one-minded, wishing to leave behind something for people to remember you by. The mind is willing, but the body is not. You become jealous of all the young people with such a positive outlook on life and with one thing they have, but you do not - time.
Mortality grounds us. It gives a purpose in life. It questions the meaning of all life and, in its way, tries to justify the reason for our existence.
In a purely artistic way, this message is conveyed in this film. It is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1953 masterpiece 'Ikiru'. 'Ikiru', in turn, was based on Leo Tolstoy's short story. Read here about Ikiru.
Set in 1953, in the office of the City Council of London, where stiff upper lip and haughty British class consciousness rules, the head of the Department, Mr Middleton, is diagnosed as having terminal cancer. He is a lonely man, having lost his wife earlier in life. He is not exactly close to his son and daughter-in-law. They see him as a necessary burden they must tolerate before they can lay their hands on his retirement money to improve their living conditions. Mr Middleton is not exactly pally with his subordinates, either. He believes in maintaining his distance from them as the hierarchical order dictates.
Middleton dies, leaving everyone talking about his dedication. His workers vow to strive to improve the system. After the wake, as everyone returns to their daily routine, it is business as usual, back to its usual snail's pace. Nothing actually changed. All the resolutions to change are just small talks in the passing.
Without the fear of death, or if the thought of death is far away, people become complacent.
Sunday, 21 May 2023
Loneliness, death and loss...
The Eternal Daughter (2022)
Director: Joanna Hogg
In the formative when the rebel in us tries to surface, we tend to look at our parents as the worse examples of how parents should bring up their kids. We look at other people's parents and yearn for lost childhood. We blame them for all our not-so-fancy physical attributes and life failures. We could not wait to grow up and get the hell out of their supervision.
Fast forward in time and space. The hard dents of life knock us back to realisation. We look at our parents through a different lens. We realise that life as adults are neither a walk in the park nor a pleasure cruise. Every corner has a brick wall to give us concussions as we rush through life's journey.
We look at our parents and see that the springiness of youth and headiness of being young has passed them by. We try to recreate the happy moments of the era that we all shared. We fail to realise that our minds only preserve the pleasant ones. Stirring nostalgic memories is like opening the proverbial Pandora's Box. Intertwined within its webs are a dark forgotten, painful cache of bitter moments, death and pain. Invoking one evokes another spontaneously.
We look at our parents, and for a moment, it hit us. They are no spring chickens anymore. They are old. With old age comes the question of mortality. Are you ready to let them go? If there were a time when we hated the sight of their shadow, we now want to know all about them. We long to understand how they steered adulthood in one piece. The same journey that they had traversed was easier than we did many years ago. Why is it so complicated now?
We see their old photos. Hold behold, we see our images as adults as carbon copies of theirs. Have we grown to morph as spitting images of them, and their present appearances will be the prototype of our old age? A scary thought! And our demeanour and mannerism, is that why they say the apple does not fall far from the tree?
This movie is a melancholic one. It tells about the life of a middle-aged filmmaker who decided to spend time with her elderly mother in a hotel that was the mother's childhood home. There is a suspicion that their whole hotel stay could be a fragment of the filmmaker's imagination. The hotel is deserted and dark. Nobody other tenants are seen, save for the receptionist and a caretaker. Slowly we realise that both mother and daughter are painfully not different from each other. Each feels irritated and sometimes empathises with the other. Incidentally, both characters are acted by the same actor. This film's recurring themes are loneliness, loss of relationships, and fear of death.
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