Awake the fighting spirit in us!

 Alive! (1993)

I remember watching the trailer of this dubbed (Mexican) film named 'Survive!'. My sister and I were fascinated by the cinematography and the desperation of the passengers to survive in the freezing temperatures of the Andes. We never watched it till now. After the MH370 mystery, I thought of giving it a go.

This survival film shows the fighting spirit of humans to live in the treacherous, freezing, barren mountainous terrain of the Andes over two months. A group of young boys and relatives were travelling from Uruguay to Chile. As they descended, misjudgement caused the plane to lose a wing, part of her fuselage and the other wing and finally crash in the middle of nowhere, making it impossible for anyone to search and rescue. With no telecommunications and a limited food supply, staying alive in the cold was a Herculean task. If that was not enough, an avalanche hit the unfortunate victims, killing more passengers who were not killed earlier.

The dilemma that the survivors had to endure to stay alive in a freezing mountain with no vegetation is the conundrum of resorting to cannibalism, feeding on the flesh of the dead. The question of God and retribution was constantly argued. Most of them relented to severe hunger pangs. One succumbed to starvation.

I quite enjoyed the movie, as the events were real, and the screenplay kept to the origin story. All five crew members perished, and 29 of the 45 passengers met their maker.

Obstacles aplenty in life!

Stromboli (1950)

This neo-realistic Italian film sparked the affair between one of my favourite actresses and Italian director, Roberto Rossellini. This union ended with an out of wedlock baby, which ostracised Ingrid Bergman for years at the Hollywood level. A neo-realistic movie (Neorealismo) would be one where the location of the set is amongst the poor and its use of non-professional actors.

Here, in Stromboli, the setting is among a fishing community living on an island with a volcano. Coincidentally, it actually erupted during the shooting.

Even though it tells a story of a Lithuanian refugee who gets herself in a marriage of convenience to escape internment camp, it questions life and God at a deeper level. It narrates the harsh reality of getting hitched to someone totally different in values, beliefs, way of life, and how he lives.
Karin (Ingrid Bergman) finds herself living in a depilated house on an island with active volcanic activity. Her neighbours are unfriendly judgemental conservative old ladies. The youngsters have all left the scene. The only person she thought she could relate to is a parish priest whom she later discovers is not forthcoming with help as he is worried about what the rest of the community would think about him. Karin's husband, who promised to work hard to keep her happy, still abuses her after hearing bad-mouthing by some old ladies. She finds herself practically imprisoned on the island. She was 3 months pregnant by the time a volcanic eruption occurred.

After exhausting all other possible ways to escape, she does a treacherous climb over the volcanic hill which had just purged magma. This is where the highlight of the movie, with its questioning of the silence of God, albeit for a short time, happens. Karin cannot understand why after going through so much in her life, running from place to place displayed by the war, losing her loved ones in her family, enduring sexual assaults in the war, she still found no freedom! The usually strong Karin symbolically loses one by one her luggage, referring to her self values, stripping her down to the bare minimum till she cries her heart, and the film ends with the outcome hanging in the air; whether she abandons her journey and returns to her husband or escapes to her freedom...

Between a rock and a hard place!

The Householder (English, Made in India; 1963)

Ivory-Merchant Collaboration

This must be the greatest nightmare that many a goody two shoe Indian new husband must feel early in their matrimonial life. Two women demanding more attention than the other from the husband who is trying his best to be in everybody's good books.

Prem Sagar is a lowly paid lecturer in a private college. He is newly married to a girl whom he cannot stand. He is unhappy with his students whom he cannot control and his principal who refuses to give him a raise, or rather he cannot raise the courage to ask for one! He has a landlord who is not too busy or drunk to listen to his pleas to reduce the rent. And he does not like his new wife's cooking. In midst of all these uncertainties, his wife, Indu becomes pregnant.

A desperate Prem thought getting his mother to stay with him would reduce his burden. On the contrary, his mother becomes a domineering attention seeking female who likes to run down the inefficiencies of Indu and glorifies her role as a mother, wife and daughter in law in her younger days. Indu, after some time, packs her stuff and leaves for her parent's home.

A distraught Prem tries to understand the aim of life by discussing his plight with his colleague, his childhood friend and a new American friend. This American friend left his home in USA, and together with his other friends are mesmerised with India and what it has to offer. They are into yoga and to immerse themselves in Indian culture.

Prem find them not giving him the answer he is seeking for. 

By then, another friend introduces him to a swami (holy man) who knocked some sense into him when Prem wanted to renounce everything and go into religion full time. He was told that he had certain duties as a husband and a father before head on into religion.

By then, Indu had returned. Prem arranged with his sister to take his mother away in the pretext of using the mother's services for some ceremony. Prem's mother goes off happily thinking that she is so indispensable. 

Sanity prevails. Prem and Indu are happy together.

Through this movie, I came to know of an actress, Leela Naidu, who was Miss India in 1954 and was voted as the 10 most beautiful women for that year. She is of Indo-Franco-Swiss parentage and is the daughter of an Indian nuclear physicist who worked with Marie Curie. She is her mother's only surviving child of her mother's 7 pregnancies.