Responsibilities, renewal, and all that’s in-between

Responsibilities, renewal, and all that’s in-between

Today’s Gudi Padwa. And it stands for auspicious new beginnings, a time of renewal. Which might be very welcome, in the current climate, given the gloomy environment around, both at home (mixed reactions to the budget) and globally (Europe’s financial woes have got other countries edgy too). The weather’s not helping spread cheer either, now that summer’s sweltering has finally gripped us, late March. Traditionally, March has not exactly been a spread-the-cheer month, what with exams and year-ender finances to be looked into. It’s more a face-upto-grim-reality kinda’ month, where checks (or cheques!) and balances and a squaring upto responsibilities comes into play. T S Eliot’s iconic The Wasteland speaks of April being the cruellest month but it could well apply to March. Which is even more reason to welcome a time of renewal, possible cheer, in the festive calendar. The entertainment world is trying its best to do both — welcome a time of renewal (hopes resting on biggie Agent Vinod, the last of the big movies this quarter, which releases today, here, if not across the border) and square upto responsibilities — cricket season in April has ensured that much of big-ticket entertainment is pushed back, well into mid-year, to avert any possibility of a BO vs bat/ball face-off. The message is clear —We wouldn’t want to miss out on any manner of precious paisa especially in today’s austere times now, would we? Squaring upto responsibilities is also what was required in one of the most devastating movies I’ve seen in a while — the foreign language film A Separation, which also appeared on the Oscar roll-call for Best Foreign Language film this year, and won. You would use ‘devastating’ as a description whilst watching desperation come through in a real-time documentary or perhaps a war drama most times, but what is gripping about this Iranian film is its portrayal of everyday desperation. Thoreau wrote, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ and this movie manages somehow to eke out every minutiae in that truism. Operating on several levels — a man’s desperation in trying to care for his Alzheimer-stricken father on a daily basis whilst managing a job and child, a wife’s desperation at her being thwarted from a better life by circumstances, a poor family’s desperation at losing a child and frustration at class paradigms, as well as several subtexts inbetween — the film is a searing watch. Not to mention how Dreiser might be proud of the way people become puppets to situations that may not entirely be of their own making in this film (as in life). And to divert from that heaviness, Hollywood offering My Week with Marilyn, based on a real life incident, also shows some squaring upto responsibilities, as a London teen production assistant awakens to the ways of the real world after his brief, fairytale exposure to movie icon Marilyn Monroe. The rites-of-passage movie was also at the Oscars for the diminutive Michelle Williams’ performance, but who really held my attention, despite her blink-and-you-miss-it appearance was the luminous Julia Ormond, playing an aging, fragile Vivian Leigh. You might remember her from Legends of the Fall, the epic multistarrer that included Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt and Aidan Quinn.