Elaine! Elaine!

Hmm, where to begin on this? I’m not sure I can summarize this brilliant piece of art in this post, but I can assume the role of a fan-boy, I guess. I didn’t know much before about The Graduate than that the Dustin Hoffman was in it. The plot line was interesting- a guy getting in relationship with the mother and then attracted to her daughter- it was funny, so I thought I’d give it a try. Honestly, it blew me away from the first minute. And I watched it twice, thrice.

Maybe the thing that struck was that everything about the movie, acting, camera work  (including lighting), screenplay and the dialogue had this dichotomy of simplicity and deception/depth. Everything had a simple superficial layer which was outright funny and had this grand meaning too, which is a little dark and depressive and which didn’t take too much reading between the lines. You would’ve experienced it without knowing it. That’s purity. It had this gay laziness about it, reminiscent of American Beauty.

Hoffman as Benjamin, lost in this world, plays his role to perfection as he does in Rain Man or Kramer. He is the fun part, he is the sad part in the movie. The last scene in the movie, where his expression turns from jubilation to being lost, in a short while, pays tribute to this great actor. Anne Bancroft is delicious. I can’t see how anyone can play her role better. The score is melancholic, esp The Sound of Silence is the soul of the movie. In the same last scene, when his expression changes, this song picks up and you feel funnily betrayed. Beautiful cinematic moment.

The story is about a guy who’s lost, scared of future after completing his college. Mrs.Robinson turns out to be his only respite in his sick life. And then when he meets her daughter he realises he had wasted his whole life, and falls in love with her, eventually elopes with her. The camera work follows this story line so gracefully, without jarring cuts, infact with not many cuts( lot of shots extend to more than 5 minutes), and does so much justice to the script that I’ve seen no more adept camera work than this. Its beauty lies in its simplicity and its meaning.

I’ll give an example. The beginning of the movie, Hoffman’s on this moving sidewalk, but the camera moves too, keeping him at rest wrt to the screen, he’s quite at edge of the screen threatening to move out of it. It says so much about his existential crises. Then there’s scene where he and Mrs.Robinson talk in absolute darkness for about five minutes. All through the first part of the movie, you see the scene set still, so is the camera, that you barely see any movement in Benjamin’s life. It’s dull, and as he wittily says when his father asks him what he’s doing, ” Well..I would say I’m just drifting.. here in the pool..”! In the second part when he’s ‘realised’ his love for Elaine, are all moving shots- either he’s driving a car, running down a staircase or racing through to stop Elaine’s marriage. They portray his realization, his waking up in life. but the deceiving beauty is that he was always still in the screen- in one particular scene, he starts far off from the camera and just runs towards it, for like two minutes but going nowhere out of the frame. The cunning thing is that we get this in retrospective when we’re hinted in the end at the elusiveness of his ‘romantic love’ and how he’s still lost.

Even the dialogue that builds up to the climax deludes us. It’ll seem a touch too dramatic in retro(Elaine! Elaine!). But when we’re watching it, we’re in same feel-good-love mood of Ben. That’s the thing i love most about this movie. Both Ben and we experience the ‘sound of silence’ at the same time at the end. We don’t foresee anything more than the character does. Essentially, we’re as lost an Benjamin Braddock.

Though there are some spoilers in here, there is lot more the movie can do to you. So, watch it, then again and again( as I will too!) because here’s something you don’t get to see often nowadays. If nothing, you still  can have lots of laughs at Ben’s situation.

Moral Goodies!

Culture plays a huge role in art. Not just when art’s trying to portray it, also while it’s trying to influence it. Especially in the Indian context, where there’s a huge divide between “tradition” and  “modern thinking” there’s much more scope. In such a situation, Indian writers/film-makers would be expected to have some clarity in cultural conflicts and some clear thinking without any medieval prejudices. The context is mostly Tollywood and Bollywood anyway. But all that is often found largely wanting.

Their ideas are half cooked, they are western educated but brought up according to Indian customs, so while trying to find “solutions” to these conflicts, while trying to give “messages” in their movies, they fall flat on their face. Instead of doing any social good, they end up confusing the viewer more. All this is about the guys who think they’ve something important to tell.

Lots of ‘em have nothing to say, for them the “message” is just another ingredient in the movie. Not that it is necessary to say anything, but they arbitrarily add a “tip of the day” at the end(practically, every other movie). They are certain others who make “feel good” movies. They of course serve  nothing else but commercial gain( The super good hero kind of, you know, Venki’s) . And rarely, we find gems who, in an deliberate attempt to say something profound, give us a muddle which is supposed to be vague( The example, Vedam) . Sometimes I end up thinking those slapstick comedies(a.l.a. Allari Naresh’s) or “mass-oriented” movies(of Ravi Teja or Rajamouli) make better sense, which is not to try make any sense.

The interesting ones are the well made ones, praised by the public and the critics alike but which are in fact very douche, phony at their very core( Happy Days, 3 Idiots, Eeram) or are morally degrading( RDB, A Wednesday, Tagore). These are beautiful to dissect, I’ll tell you, with a smack of my lips. Sometimes it becomes very tough to argue that these movies are bad or wrong( Mind you, both are different) given their huge commercial success and appeal. If love is to be equated to good cinema, I think the above movies correspond to costly prostitution, only not resorting to cheap tactics like the others but all the while and ultimately appealing to the demands of the user. The cheap ones are okay because the public will reject their ideas right away, but these are pernicious making them think they’ve figured it all out.

Amidst all this rubble rabble, with very less breathing space commercially, and not necessarily meeting the demands of the “market” is good cinema. Rarely do we see a Anukokunda Oka Roju , Naa Autograph, Aithe or a Gamyam.. These movies, and other good ones as a general rule, while implicitly having “content” don’t keep harping it in your face. They generally aren’t very chaste and rigid, but are real, appealing and suggestive. Another common thread is that they tell one story; they don’t make it the biggest story on earth to ever happen, and that it is only because of them we’ve come to know of it. In short, they don’t over-evaluate themselves; they are humble. That is what makes them special.. they work on you from the inside.