:: Shekhar Bhatia

A season of love at the Oscars

Shekhar Bhatia

Feb.27 : Enough about Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a nice Hollywood-Bollywood movie. But I must confess A.R. Rahman’s music didn’t turn me on. I am a Rahman fan; I even have him on my iPod. But his score for Slumdog... is nowhere near what he composed, say, for Bombay or Dil Se. Close your eyes and listen to the Bombay soundtrack. It moves you; it takes you on a high — and low. Slumdog... music and songs, I am afraid, have neither the exuberance of moments of joy nor the sadness of life’s disappointments, both of which are in abundance in the movie. But then music is something very personal. Or maybe I am stuck in the past.

Anyway, this is not about Slumdog... It’s about two other movies from the Oscar list that I saw recently: The Visitor, nominated for best actor but did not make it, and The Reader, which was in the running with Slumdog... for best picture and best director and bagged an Oscar for best actress. One very understated, and the other intensely emotional.

Like Slumdog..., both are love stories: The Visitor is the story of a middle-aged man (Richard Jenkins) who is trying to cope with his loneliness, and just when he finds a sense of belonging, he loses everything. The Reader is more complicated: Set in post-World War II Germany, a young man (David Kross, a German actor), all of 15, falls in love with a woman twice his age (Kate Winslet). When you find out about her past you can’t decide whether to hate her or to empathise with her.

Richard Jenkins was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in The Visitor but lost to Sean Penn. It’s a simple story, very soft and mellow. A lonely academic walks into his rarely-used apartment in New York and finds two illegal immigrants, a player and an ethnic jewellery designer from Senegal, living in it. He doesn’t evict them; instead, he adopts them and even learns to play the drum.

Through them he finds joy, music and a new meaning to his life. He even finds romance when the drummer’s mother lands in the apartment in search of her son. But his world falls apart when the police arrest the drummer because he does not have proper papers. The events that follow make him angry and bitter.

And in an expression of anguish, the mild-mannered professor picks up the African drum, carries it to a subway station, and plays it loudly on a platform. In that angry rhythm you feel his pain and disillusionment. It’s a fantastic scene.

The Reader, however, is more complex, an uncomfortable tale of love and guilt (or lack of it) and a superb performance by Kate Winslet. She has an intensely physical affair with a teenager who does not know her past. As they lie naked in bed, she makes him read to her from his books of literature, from Homer and Chekhov.

One day she vanishes from his life without as much as a goodbye. Some years later, when he is a law student, he goes to a war crimes trial and sees here in the court as an accused. She was a Nazi guard at a concentration camp. But there was more that she had concealed from him: she was illiterate and could not read. That’s why she used to make him read to her — determined to hide her inability to read and write at any cost.

Despite her past, the young law student is still in love with her. But because of her past he cannot bring himself to admit his feelings — even when he grows up (Ralph Fiennes) and gets in touch with her 20 years later, when she is about to finish serving her sentence and age has wrinkled her face.

In the end you wonder if she really loved him. Is she emotionally empty? How can a person be so burnt out, so devoid of remorse? And how does he handle his own guilt of still loving her? Does he feel that she has redeemed herself in prison? You cannot love and be indifferent at the same time.

It’s a powerful movie, with brilliant performances by Winslet and Fiennes. It makes you ask yourself: how would you feel in his position? Would you still have compassion for her?

And while on the subject of love stories, there’s another movie from this year’s list that I really liked: Wall-E. It won the Oscar for the best animated feature film. It was also nominated for best music score and sound mixing, but didn’t have a chance against Slumdog...

It’s a sci-fi film about a cute little robot (whose name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class) who falls in love with another robot named Eve who has big, dancing eyes and can be quite coquettish. It’s their adventures in space, of his sadness when he loses her, his desperation to find her, and their joy when they are together.

Problem with a lot of adults is they think animated movies are only for kids. Watch Wall-E. It’s an endearing love story.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com