It is a restless moment.
She has kept her head lowered,
to give him a chance to come closer.
But he could not, for lack of courage.
She turns and walks away.

That era has passed.
Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

There’s something strange with Wong Kar Wai movies, the more I watch them the more I happen to like them. Some time ago Chungking Express was my favorite movie, and I had happened to watch it three times. Then came the second viewing of 2046 and it seemed to push Chungking Express behind. And now there’s In the Mood for Love knocking up there, as I watched it one more time.

The magic of Wong Kar Wai’s just seems like a gorgeous dream that just keeps repeating itself, making you remember it more vividly then ever.

The male protagonist, Chow Mo-Wan, once tells his friend that in his country when people want to unburden a secret, they go up a mountain and dig a hole to bury the secret there. But its not some secret that Chow Mo-Wan wants to get rid of, but several feelings and emotions that could not could not reach their rightful conclusion. That’s the end of the story, which begins with Chow Mo-Wan and his next door neighbor So Lai-zhen slowly discovering the infidelity of their spouses and then starts the playful enacting of scenarios of how their spouses could have started that very something which now has brought them together. Little they realise, or may be they fully do, about what has started brewing between them but something hold them back, keeping them form doing what their spouses did, by painting their relationship in colors that their spouses soiled. Well, that’s actually the story, which I guess was all Wong Kar wai had in mind when he would have concieved the idea or rather when he started shooting, as it’s charactersic of his style of never working with any script and developing the story with each scene, often shooting more and then carving the story while final editing.

The movie’s a veritable mood peice, fleetingly moving from one scene to another,  shifting between different hues and colors, yet always blending with the overall melancholic and at times melodramatic texture.  The colors, the music, the different directions. In one scene, titled Last Reunion, both meet in Angkorwat, then there’s another scequence titles Room 2046, where their relationship reaches the level which they always seem to shy away.  hese all threads look to be the remnants of his movie making style but then there was this comment by Wong Kar Wai himself, “the role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it’s very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters – and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, ‘This guy is really weird.’ It’s the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick“.

Here’s a video reflecting upon the music of the movie.

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain’d;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain’d!

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be—
By what distractions he would be possess’d,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity—
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t#is not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belov{‘e}d hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

- Matthew Arnold (1870)

Though, I am still a Nadal fan:)

Contemporary history’s best-known ‘fakir’ has landed his latest biographer the fattest kitty in the annals of Indian publishing. Penguin India has offered an advance of Rs 1 crore to bag historian Ram Guha’s two-volume project on Mahatma Gandhi in a quiet but stunning recession-era deal that has wowed the competition and pitched Indian book industry into the global league.

From here.

Well, what more can one say!

In August 1924, the long-suffering Stanislaus Joyce sent a letter of complaint to his brother, James, in which he mentioned his difficulties with Ulysses. “The greater part of it I like,” he wrote, before adding with characteristic bluntness: “I have no humour with episodes which are deliberately farcical… and as episodes grow longer and longer and you try to tell every damn thing you know about anybody that appears or anything that crops up, my patience oozes out.”

from here

I have been meaning to read Ulysses for quite some time now, so much so that the book has been lying on my bookself for the past year and half, but to be true the only thing that brings my enthusiasm down is that Joyce talks about anything to everything there, and often laced with puns, allusions and hidden meanings, so the fear being that I may not be able to understand and appreciate everything.
Well, let’s see, may be this summer.

The Return is a moving drama about two brothers whose father returns back after twelve long years. The brothers Ivan and Andrey, aged around twelve and fifteen respectively, live with their mother and grandmother. While Andrey, has an amiable, going with the wind attitude, younger Ivan is much more stubborn and deeply emotional. As they run back home after a fight between themselves, they are shocked to know their father is back, whom they then confirm from an old faded photograph. Slowly the strains of the long absence start becoming obvious as the father fails to show any enthusiasm towards them. Then he tells them of the fishing trip they will be doing a day after. So begins a difficult journey, which slowly becomes emotional as well as psychological in nature as, on one hand Andrey strives to please his father despite his cold demeanor, whereas on the other hand their begins a battle of sorts between Ivan and the father, with both adamant and resentful as ever towards each other. Their journey then takes them to a mysterious island, while the strain between the three almost increases even more.

The movie has a keen elliptical quality as it’s never made clear where the father had been for those years and why he went to that island. Though the father and Andrey deliver their performances very well, it’s Ivan who becomes the soul of the story, capturing the seething undercurrents of the movie. The movie is also cinematically quite accomplished but not that much to earn comparisons with Tarkovsky, as few critics had done.

Quite sadly, the kid who plays Andrey drowned in a lake shortly after the shooting was over.

The movie won, Andrey Petrovich Zvyagintsev, the director, a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

****************************************************************

At times how well a movie finally comes out to be depends entirely on its lead character, or may be it appears so because of certain performances. Vanessa Chantal Paradis, acting as Adèle, delivers one such performance in The Girl on the Bridge. Adèle is one visceral as well as unlucky girl, who hopelessly falls in love with every guy she meets and as luck has for her the meetings always end as an act of promiscuousness. The opening scene, a monologue by Adèle, addressing as it looks to some jury, almost sets the tone of the movie. Disappointed by her failed love affairs Adèle has decided to end her life, so as she’s about to jump from a bridge she’s stalled by a knifethrower, who talks her out to be his target girl in the knife throwing act. Hesitatingly she agrees and thus begins their journey of luck and adventure.

The movie’s shot in black and white, saddled with swooping camera movements, which give the movie the fleetingness it desires. With echoes of La Strada, the movie may not be that original but Vanessa portrayal of Adèle does adds freshness to it.

Here’s the opening scene.