Bala P

A Sunday afternoon well spent to watch this fascinating movie..Only other movie in tamil, that comes closest to this in terms of landscape dominatef visual style is மேற்கு தொடர்ச்சி மலை. Ofcourse, that was told with relatively more drama. This is more like reading a few pages from the middle of a short story, where we are neither shown the beginning nor how it pans out in the end. Nothing is established and we pick up things as various characters walk through the movie.. In the end, when the boy adds the pebble that he had brought, to his existing collection of pebbles, it poignantly reminds us of how life would only unfold as an endless recurrence. It serves to reinforce the way, how life for someone who is suffering in perpetuity, would be like being stuck in a time loop. Instead of a final showdown between the husband and wife, we are shown how the man cools down after drinking some water out of a pot in his house and the mother had gone out to fetch water for the house from an empty waterhole.. An extremely well shot movie, where the scorching sun and water less landscape, dotted with boulders and rocks, becomes a metaphor for all the anger and rage within the drunken father and how the young boy is still able to find shades of happiness during that walk.

What a sure footed style of story telling and cinema..A fantastical synthesis of various genres. The seemingly absurd plot, the slow pacing, a village filled with idiosyncracies and a choice of not revealing what had happened before adds a sense of eeriness. It does not pause the narrative for all the commentary that happens, where the white man lands up to literally play a sport, by destroying the identity and the very people of a village. This allegory unfolds like a purged version of the larger story..

THE FATHER A fascinating and terrifying insight into the world of a person suffering from dementia. The scrambled narrative is an empathetic and probably the most honest choice, to potray how the mind and the self crumbles. Initially, we are lost in those timeline loops. We constantly sense that we are getting a sense of the narrative, only to be fooled a little later. The scenes where, Anthony Hopkins obsessively complains about a lost wrist-watch, inspite of the watch being kept at the same place, is quite metaphorical. It serves as a grim reminder of how we are so dependent on these preconditions such as space and time, and how the mind needs them to face reality and construct order. The movie has to be essentially recreated in our mind, based on an unreliable narrator and his struggle to handle and accept day to day reality. It is like willfully choosing to solve a jig saw puzzle after getting to know that there are pieces missing. Yet, it is brutal, non- melodramatic and a sort of hide and reveal narrative. For me, one of the best moments in the movie was when the father finds immense pleasure and giggles happily about someone's ignorance about his own state of affairs. He meets this man, and he fails to recognise him as his daughter's husband, but gleefully informs him that his daughter is about to dump him and leave to Paris to start life with another man. That is one fascinating take on how the human-self, even when deprived of a functional mind, could still summon such moments, even for a shortest period of time to express itself.