Beauty amidst death: Mr. & Mrs. Iyer
Oct. 19th, 2007 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieToday’s movie recommendation is Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, probably a movie that would make it into any hyopthetical ‘top 10 foreign movies’ I am likely to compile.
Starring Konkona Sen Sharma and Rahul Bose, Iyer is an Indian movie that released in 2002. It’s not a Bollywood movie in the least, as it is made by ‘parallel cinema’ (Indian term for art-house films, with no songs or dances, no Bollywood conventions, and rarely, if ever any Bollywood stars).
It has a short running time and a narrative so tight it coils into itself, but ultimately it is a character study and a study of both deep humanity and inhumanity that gets brought out by stress. The movie is set during out of those sporadic, mindless outbreaks of sectarian violence in India (in this case, it’s Hindu mobs looking for and killing Muslims in a remote part of a provice and vice versa. With one chilling exception, it’s not shown who is doing what to whom) but despite the horrible setting, it’s a very quiet movie, full of hope and one of the most gorgeous and most unrealized love stories I’ve seen.
Meenakshi (Konkona) is an upper class, young, and married Brahmin woman, who is travelling with her small baby to the city, to meet her husband whom she had not seen in a very long time. On the bus, she ends up sitting next to Raja (Rahul Bose), a wildlife photographer. Raja is urban, modern, almost from a different century, a different world than Konkona, with her traditionalism, her structure, her beliefs. He is, also, a Muslim, as Raja is his ‘stage’ name, which Meenakshi does not find out right away.
They get to know each other, a bit, on the journey, and he is very helpful and kind to her, which is indespensable to a lone woman travelling with a baby. And when the riots break out, sudden and horrific, and the mob gets into the bus, seeking Muslims out, almost without thinking, Meenakshi (who is very visibly Hindu and Brahmin) saves Raja’s life by lying that Raja is her husband, ‘Mr. Iyer,’ travelling with her and their baby. But of course, they must both keep it up, and escape the war zone that the place has become.
Despite all the horror shown, this is a very hopeful movie about small acts of courage. One of the giddy teenagers on the bus tries to protect an elderly Muslim couple (and gets knocked down for it). The military guy finds Meenakshi and Raja a place to sleep. And Meenakshi takes a huge risk to save Raja, by pretending he is her husband (a ploy that can easily be exposed), even though earlier she was so horrified he was a Muslim ("I drank from his water bottle.") And I loved the deep sense of pent-up anger and courage that Raja had: Meenakshi had to restrain him from going after the men who were slashing the unknown's throat in the woods.
What stays with me, from this movie, in addition to showcasing both the random acts of kindness and random acts of horror (the movie ties them to a long tradition of same, when Raja remembers a Sikh person whose arms were cut off in earlier riots, when he was young, when Sikhs were the target). What stays with me more than anything, is the quietest, most desperate development of love story since Brief Encounter.
The development of the relationship between Meenakshi and Raja is one of my favorite in any Indian movie I’ve seen. Bollywood movies usually tend to be loud, extravagant in their feelings, and I love that, but in Iyer, it is the opposite: it is in the silences, in the things unspoken where meaning lies.
From their mutual politeness, to her horror at his being a Muslim (because she has all the prejudices expected). In fact, she is so strict, she is not supposed to touch even a non-Brahmin, let alone a Muslim, to her protecting him, and then to all their interactions, when she realizes what life can be (it is made clear, though never explicitly, that there is no love in her marriage, just duty), all the possibilities (for love, for adventure, for knowing the world, she could have and does not). And it’s all about their looks at each other. The way he looks at her throughout, the way she looks while he described their fake "honeymoon" to listeners, or the way she looked at him when she
found him asleep in the woods (after being afraid he left, was killed).
I was almost sobbing at the quiet, almost invisible scene when she wanted him to hold her hand (which is a huge deal, as I said! She is not even supposed to touch him or she will get polluted) as she slept and woke up, hours later
to find that he still was holding her hand. No grand romantic in Switzerland song moved me half as much.
Or the scene where she is afraid he left her, and he comes back and she silently puts her head on his shoulder.
And then of course, they come very near declaring their feelings (the almost kiss) but nothing comes of it, of course: they are too different and she is too married. And so she walks off to the husband we never see, and he gives her the roll of film with her pictures, as the one gift he can give her: privacy, symbolically letting go of any bits of the soul captured on film and thus left in his posession. (And is the roll of film she can never develop a symbol for her life, which she can never live fully?) At the end, I kept going "Go to him, go to him!" while I knew it was impossble of course. Grrrr.....
In my mind, he husband unexpectedly keels over and she unexpectedly meets Raja again. Whatever. I like my cocoons.
(Side note: I love how throughout the movie, it is not about evils of tradition, or the horribleness of the modern world. She expects, and receives, respect to her beliefs and traditions from him. And he shows her the world of possibilities, enables her to dream.)
Ohhh, not related to anything, I find Indian movies adorable sometimes. This is a scene from Sins, a movie a couple years back that pissed off the Christians because it showed a relationship between a Priest and a Grown-Up, Married Woman. Anyway, this scene was supposed to be super-risque, but it's something that CBS would show at 3pm here:
Starring Konkona Sen Sharma and Rahul Bose, Iyer is an Indian movie that released in 2002. It’s not a Bollywood movie in the least, as it is made by ‘parallel cinema’ (Indian term for art-house films, with no songs or dances, no Bollywood conventions, and rarely, if ever any Bollywood stars).
It has a short running time and a narrative so tight it coils into itself, but ultimately it is a character study and a study of both deep humanity and inhumanity that gets brought out by stress. The movie is set during out of those sporadic, mindless outbreaks of sectarian violence in India (in this case, it’s Hindu mobs looking for and killing Muslims in a remote part of a provice and vice versa. With one chilling exception, it’s not shown who is doing what to whom) but despite the horrible setting, it’s a very quiet movie, full of hope and one of the most gorgeous and most unrealized love stories I’ve seen.
Meenakshi (Konkona) is an upper class, young, and married Brahmin woman, who is travelling with her small baby to the city, to meet her husband whom she had not seen in a very long time. On the bus, she ends up sitting next to Raja (Rahul Bose), a wildlife photographer. Raja is urban, modern, almost from a different century, a different world than Konkona, with her traditionalism, her structure, her beliefs. He is, also, a Muslim, as Raja is his ‘stage’ name, which Meenakshi does not find out right away.
They get to know each other, a bit, on the journey, and he is very helpful and kind to her, which is indespensable to a lone woman travelling with a baby. And when the riots break out, sudden and horrific, and the mob gets into the bus, seeking Muslims out, almost without thinking, Meenakshi (who is very visibly Hindu and Brahmin) saves Raja’s life by lying that Raja is her husband, ‘Mr. Iyer,’ travelling with her and their baby. But of course, they must both keep it up, and escape the war zone that the place has become.
Despite all the horror shown, this is a very hopeful movie about small acts of courage. One of the giddy teenagers on the bus tries to protect an elderly Muslim couple (and gets knocked down for it). The military guy finds Meenakshi and Raja a place to sleep. And Meenakshi takes a huge risk to save Raja, by pretending he is her husband (a ploy that can easily be exposed), even though earlier she was so horrified he was a Muslim ("I drank from his water bottle.") And I loved the deep sense of pent-up anger and courage that Raja had: Meenakshi had to restrain him from going after the men who were slashing the unknown's throat in the woods.
What stays with me, from this movie, in addition to showcasing both the random acts of kindness and random acts of horror (the movie ties them to a long tradition of same, when Raja remembers a Sikh person whose arms were cut off in earlier riots, when he was young, when Sikhs were the target). What stays with me more than anything, is the quietest, most desperate development of love story since Brief Encounter.
The development of the relationship between Meenakshi and Raja is one of my favorite in any Indian movie I’ve seen. Bollywood movies usually tend to be loud, extravagant in their feelings, and I love that, but in Iyer, it is the opposite: it is in the silences, in the things unspoken where meaning lies.
From their mutual politeness, to her horror at his being a Muslim (because she has all the prejudices expected). In fact, she is so strict, she is not supposed to touch even a non-Brahmin, let alone a Muslim, to her protecting him, and then to all their interactions, when she realizes what life can be (it is made clear, though never explicitly, that there is no love in her marriage, just duty), all the possibilities (for love, for adventure, for knowing the world, she could have and does not). And it’s all about their looks at each other. The way he looks at her throughout, the way she looks while he described their fake "honeymoon" to listeners, or the way she looked at him when she
found him asleep in the woods (after being afraid he left, was killed).
I was almost sobbing at the quiet, almost invisible scene when she wanted him to hold her hand (which is a huge deal, as I said! She is not even supposed to touch him or she will get polluted) as she slept and woke up, hours later
to find that he still was holding her hand. No grand romantic in Switzerland song moved me half as much.
Or the scene where she is afraid he left her, and he comes back and she silently puts her head on his shoulder.
And then of course, they come very near declaring their feelings (the almost kiss) but nothing comes of it, of course: they are too different and she is too married. And so she walks off to the husband we never see, and he gives her the roll of film with her pictures, as the one gift he can give her: privacy, symbolically letting go of any bits of the soul captured on film and thus left in his posession. (And is the roll of film she can never develop a symbol for her life, which she can never live fully?) At the end, I kept going "Go to him, go to him!" while I knew it was impossble of course. Grrrr.....
In my mind, he husband unexpectedly keels over and she unexpectedly meets Raja again. Whatever. I like my cocoons.
(Side note: I love how throughout the movie, it is not about evils of tradition, or the horribleness of the modern world. She expects, and receives, respect to her beliefs and traditions from him. And he shows her the world of possibilities, enables her to dream.)
Ohhh, not related to anything, I find Indian movies adorable sometimes. This is a scene from Sins, a movie a couple years back that pissed off the Christians because it showed a relationship between a Priest and a Grown-Up, Married Woman. Anyway, this scene was supposed to be super-risque, but it's something that CBS would show at 3pm here:
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 03:26 pm (UTC)Rahul Bhose and Konkona Sen Sharma did a wonderful job as leads. I also liked her in Page 3 (another example of parallel cinema, about a young journalist who wants to move out from reporting on just the celebrity pages) and Omkara.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:53 pm (UTC)But yes, they were both amazing.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 06:03 pm (UTC)Ok...that kissing scene did not look hot or sexy or naughty. It actually looked quite painful. :P
no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-19 10:40 pm (UTC)PS Do you want to see Bhool Bhulaiya this Sunday?
no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:52 pm (UTC)