What an ask/task! Damned if you do and damned if you don't. How to programme the opening night for the 50th New York Film Festival. There will be detractors claiming that Life of Pi is insubstantial fare compared to many other films in this year's festival. And indeed, Lucien Castaing-Taylor at the press conference the same afternoon for Leviathan (a much more close up and personal cine-look at fishy things), made clear that films with an 'agenda' -whatever- just weren't as powerful. Nay- meaningless. Ang Lee is a rare breed of director that doesn't harbour an agenda. God knows how difficult that must have been to keep faith to that throughout his career. He is interested in life. The way life always betrays itself because the truth is always too painful to bear. The very reason cinema exists. Arguably;) His adaption of Yann Martel's bestseller book is so quintessentially Ang Lee. Everyone in life has a shipwreck. Everyone finds themselves afloat. Everyone finds that nobody wants to believe their story. Life of Pi is all about cinema i.e life. What dreams may come. What shadows may fall. What beliefs dare to state they exist. The still from the film is the poster for this year's New York Film Festival. Making and believing. One has to smile broadly about the minute detail Ang Lee gives every one of his films. Whether it be the director himself experiencing The Incredible Hulk and getting the microscope DNA believable. Or whether it be the meercats on Pi's island that almost drop off their perch as they doze off (Ang Lee avoided comedy when in fact there is a documentary that clearly shows a meercat literally plummeting off its sleepy daylight perch). As many viewers do in the cinema. Not for a moment forensically proving they don't care. So far is the truth from such logic.
There's a wondrous documentary in the New York Film Festival Celluloid Man about P.K. Nair, the founder and patron saint of the National Film Archive of India. The saddest thing is (in a country obsessed with film, Bollywood, etc etc ) that there is no one to follow in his footsteps. And moreover, though he may be a 'fuddy-duddy' - how dare they ban him from the archive that he created! To use a very hackneyed quote from Picasso: "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies." Picasso, his life, his women, his art, his politics was no exception to his dictum.
I keep being asked if I am a CRITIC? And my only ever response is that I want to enjoy going to the movies. In that very strange thing is a healing. Like nothing else on this earth. And if one can't be constructive in writing then really what is the point in destroying someone else's creativity when you have very, very little to offer in exchange. Which in itself is somewhat blasphemous because one ought to assume that ALL people are creative. But going to the movies can most probably make them so. At least GREAT cinema. Somewhat. More. And Life of Pi achieves exactly. Reading for many is torturous. But I challenge anyone not to seek the last pages of Martel's book after seeing Ang Lee's movie and then to begin reading from Page 1: "My suffering left me sad and gloomy." One will read and watch. And seek, perhaps, again. The tiger inside could never be your friend: but such an animal could never either be one's enemy. We are all in the same boat. Now.
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