To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the few works that I read more than twice, watched more than twice, read the book first and then watched the movie and still didn’t get disappointed. Harper Lee’s novel is also my default gift, the way some gift the Bible when they can’t think of anything else.

The novel is dearer to me than all the other child-protagonist novels that I’ve read, including those by Mark Twain and JK Rowling. Even though Scout, Jem and Dill all together have hardly an adventure that can compete with those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter’s. Even though their thriller isn’t as thrilling as the others’. Even though their presence to the world is seemingly inconsequential. Perhaps for those very reasons.

What Scout narrates about that summer creates in me the most intense nostalgia of a childhood that I seldom dwell in. I find it effortless to imagine walking beside those three with our hands on each other’s shoulders, to pull Scout’s hair, to grab Jem’s collar, to kick Dill’s shins, to grow up along with them. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter are great fun, but I didn’t belong to their circle as a child.

When I think of the narration, I can hear Kim Stanley whispering in my ears. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices, right there beside Joan Fontaine’s Rebecca. The movie opens with the most creative title sequence I can remember. And Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch. Not getting tired of superlatives, am I?

When I read somewhere that Pauline Kael described Atticus as “virtuously dull”, I had to agree and to face the question of why he was still one of my favorite characters. “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn’t explain.” That’s why. Atticus is seen through the eyes of Scout, his daughter. Most children below ten probably still feel that way about their dads. I hope they do. When I was ten my dad was the calmest, wisest, strongest, noblest and the most loving man there could possibly be in the whole world. He hasn’t changed much, though I have. Harper Lee through her vivid, humorous, and sensitive writing created a magnificent lens to see the world through.

Shush now. I actually wished to type a few lines from the novel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and this whole post is a tiny thin excuse for it. I may be breaking a law or two here. I consider the following scene the most powerful one I’ve ever read and watched.

———-

“Hey, Atticus?”

I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.

There was a smell of stale whisky and pig-pen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me; I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had never seen before.

Atticus got up from his chair, but he was moving slowly, like an old man. He put the newspaper down very carefully, adjusting its creases with lingering fingers. They were trembling a little.

“Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

“Go home, I said.”

Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance between them: Jem’s soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and snug-fitting ears were our mother’s, contrasting oddly with Atticus’s greying black hair and square-cut features, but they were somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.

“Son, I said go home.”

Jem shook his head.

“I’ll send him home,” a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.

“Don’t you touch him!” I kicked the man swiftly. Bare-footed, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin, but aimed too high.

“That’ll do, Scout.” Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t kick folks. No –” he said, as I was pleading justification.

“Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way,” I said.

“All right, Mr Finch, get ‘em outa here,” someone growled. “You got fifteen seconds to get ‘em outa here.”

In the midst of this strange assmebly, Atticus stood trying to make Jem mind him. “I ain’t going,” was his steady answer to Atticus’s threats, requests, and finally, “Please Jem, take them home.”

I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did get home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer’s night, but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts buttoned up the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and at the centre of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen falt.

Mr Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feel, clad in heavy worn shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham?” I’m Jean Jouise Finch. You bought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr Cunningham dispalyed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ month, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes me and he shut it.

“Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes … that you all’d ride it out together …” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

Asghar Farhadi’s Darbareye Elly opens with a small group of friends starting on a reunion vacation along with their families and a guest Elly. Even those who are not friends are friendly. But the truth is, even the close friends are only friendly acquaintances now just the way most once-close relationships transform from friendships to friendlinesses with each passing chapter of life.

They all make their way to a beach-side villa and begin having fun the giddy way grown-ups do. In a peculiar scene, the close-up of a stranger boy’s unreadable face is shown as men dance merrily. The fun ends abruptly on the next morning, when first one of their children almost drowns in the sea and then they discover the disappearance of lovely Elly. From then on they go through hell as they search for her, make some meaning of her actions based on what they know of her, and try to inform her folks.

In the middle of the movie we hear the quote, “A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness.” We get the bitter ending, and the characters an endless bitterness.

Elly is judged throughout the movie. Whether she can make a suitable wife, during the first half; the breadth of her character, during the second half. The movie’s merit lies in engaging the audience in two ways — in getting us deeply involved with the search for Elly, and in unconsciously tempting us to judge Elly and all those characters judging her.

Elly very much wanted to go home, which her hostess wouldn’t allow. She may have abandoned the playing children and left on a whim without informing anybody. She is a kindergarten teacher who possibly loves children. She may have drowned while trying to rescue Arash.

Sepideh’s husband Amir hit his wife. As the IMDB plot keywords suggest, he may be a wife-beater as that very well suits the oppression that we associate with everything Iran. He ruefully cried that it was the first time he hit her. Given the enthusiasm with which Sepideh arranges events from reunions to matches, Amir may be a husband who gives his wife the freedom that spouses deserve.

Sepideh conspired to fix Elly with recently divorced Ahmad through the reunion, told lies beginning with the white lie to the villa caretaker that Ahmad and Elly are newlyweds. Sepideh may be a dishonest woman mindlessly playing her own immature games. She brought everybody together, knew the past of Elly. She may be a person who loves the company of others and may genuinely be trying to help both Elly and Ahmad.

Ahmad… Shohreh… Peiman… Naazi… Manoochehr… all characters lie or withhold information, for their own reasons. The movie can be used as a good case study of writing withholding information.

As the director brilliantly orchestrates each of his characters in their chaos in an apparently effortless way, he also manipulates the audience into judging, that which all the characters themselves do. The judgments are often proved wrong, as imminent in cases where all facts aren’t uncovered, and as when convenience and expedience take priority over conscience. His characters do not stand out as personalities, but as different kinds of general characters each of whom we very well know. He seems uninterested by the inanimate and allows only the people, the sea and the kite to be seen on the screen. I suspect none of this is unintentional.

Having seen only a handful of Iranian movies and read very little about Iran, I am tempted to take the movie as a portrait of the Iranian society. Through some of the themes are applicable to all mankind, I could empathize with all the characters, making me speculate that the modern Iranian society is not very different from the one I live in.

One last word. Democracy may be the dream of modern Iran. As if to highlight the fallibility of collective judgments Asghar Farhadi shows his characters democratically doing what the majority decides. “A government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it,” wrote Thoreau in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. “Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?”

Image Source: About Elly Official Site

Trivia: The movie is the last Iranian movie in which Golshifteh Farahani (Sepideh) acted, and it may remain that way. Almost half the movies she acted in have been banned in her country. Peiman Ma’adi, who played Peiman, wrote Cafe Setareh. Taraneh Alidoosti, who as Elly asks Ahmad to translate the quote from German to Iranian, speaks German fluently.

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A few decades ago every ravishing vamp was made to die, either directly killed by the villain or during her own attempt to rescue someone following her remorse and newfound respect for “our values”. When a supporting character “slipped her leg” in her blind love for the not-so-good guy, towards the end either she died too or that not-so-good guy was good-ified and made to marry her. What would Helen Schlegel of EM Forster’s Howards End (1910) have thought about it?

Yoganand’s mUganOmu (1969) is one movie I recall where the heroine gets premaritally pregnant with the hero’s child. For the heroine herself to tread in that path seemed courageous, though the poor newborn had to be eventually left outside an orphanage and the movie had more to do with class differences and sacrifices of women.

Jandhyala’s nAlugu stambhAlATa (1982) dealt with similar themes and his chanTabbAyi (1986) through a short montage of scenes impressively portrayed the strength and vulnerability of Dr. Nischala who never married after a failed love affair.

Other than such occasional nods and mentions over the decades, women who make “bold” premarital choices have often been kept at a distance, if not outright oppressed, and this treatment is subtler though still perceptible today. Men, on the other hand, appear undeserving of such questions and thus this discussion is not even possible for heroes.

In Anand (2004), Shekar Kammula wrote a cute dialogue in his signature style of fragmented sentences. The scene was to establish Rupa’s openness and expectations from her relationship with Anand. In it she tells him that she had never kissed Rahul the way she kissed him. Sweet. Previously I never considered the dialogue to be anything more than what it seemed to be, but the last time I came across the dialogue I realized that the writer was carefully marking the heroine’s territory.

Rupa continues to be hailed as the true independent Telugu heroine after a long time. The movie starts with her breaking off a marriage with her boyfriend minutes before tying the knot, on seeing one side of her future husband and mother-in-law. Then why was she not allowed to cuddle up with him during their courting before that marriage that never happened? Would that have degraded her character from independent to “loose”? Clearly everybody seemed to accept her making out with the hero before anybody mentioned marriage.

I wonder if this is the implicit non-stand that the Telugu film industry takes. Anywhere else one couldn’t be sure whether a character marries another, but in Telugu movies there is rarely such a risk. So this stand appears bold enough for the younger generations to like the heroine going all the way with the hero, and restrained enough for the older generations to prefer the heroine not going all the way with her boyfriend who wouldn’t become her husband. An old newspaper editor once called something like this “peeing down both the legs”.

Among recent movies Chandrasekhar Yeleti’s anukOkunDA oka rOju (2005) appeared to accept the reality without judging either way. Tsunami Swetha’s was a character comfortable with her life style that occasionally involved sex. Her unplanned pregnancy and planned abortion get reprimanded by her friend Sahasra and respectfully treated by the doctor.

This line of thought accidentally reminded me of Mouli’s manasu mamata (1990), a rare movie which dealt with premarital choices of women and their consequences (as deemed appropriate for those times) with the sensitivity it deserves. I watched it very long ago and cannot recall to my satisfaction. The heroine (Sitara) gets pregnant with her first child (Tarun, in his first Telugu movie) and then marries the hero (Naresh) without telling him the truth. The hero loves the son as his own, and the heroine doesn’t because he is a living reminder of her guilt. They are mostly happy, maybe bittersweet, until a family friend (“Subhalekha” Sudhakar) asks their suggestion in marrying a “cheDipOyina” woman (Sudha Rani) who confessed to him about her past. DV Narasa Raju wrote both mUganOmu and manasu mamata. I tip my hat.

Times have changed and reality with it. The directors and writers, the actresses and their dubbing artistes, all know it well. I hope to watch a movie on what they know more than what they think the audience will prefer. Once in a while.

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Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire starts with a confidence, maybe certainty, that the readers of his previous book will hold on no matter what. Lisbeth Salander gets a lot of pages. This is her book. She travels the world; reads Principia Mathematica; tries proving Little Fermat’s theorem; and gets her breasts enlarged, which is possibly as gratifying as it could get in her life.

Although Salander occasionally thinks aloud about “All The Evil” and we eventually find out everything worth knowing about her past, for more than the first quarter of the novel, nothing more sinister than the vignettes in a dull crime beat section of a newspaper takes place. I felt the writing even getting sloppier in a few corners. Nevertheless, old readers will have stayed, are duly rewarded, and will in all likelihood like this more than the first book once they reach the end.

A double murder and another seemingly unconnected murder in which Salander becomes the prime suspect, a manhunt (more like a modern witch hunt), and three parallel investigations suddenly swallow the reader in a storm much like Matilda in the Caribbean. Larsson does something brilliant at this point: he hides Salander for more than another quarter of the book, essentially conveying the exasperation of Mikael Blomkvist (whom Salander has ignored for more than a year now) and of the Swedish Police to the reader.

Although Larsson made it look convincing, I could not help noticing the incompetence of the Police during their investigation. It is understandable for them to chase in the direction shown by the most apparent circumstantial evidence, but their negligence in following up some crucial matters like the works of the dead “conscientious couple” and the interrogation of Salander’s previous guardian Palmgren made them “lose face” once again. Perhaps I was expecting more from Inspector Bubble and his team – which I can’t be blamed for – but they mostly failed me.

Larsson created even more characters than he did for his previous book, and these are livelier, possibly because these are mostly alive. The underlying debate between blaming the society and blaming the individual for a misdeed is fiercer, and it is clear where Larsson’s own feelings lie. He highlights the failure of social welfare systems through their appalling treatment of Salander herself. Continuing pointing at the atrocities against women, this time he chooses human trafficking as the background, ironically calling it From Russia With Love, and suggests the government’s apathy for underage illegal immigrants. I was amused by Larsson’s caricature of the Swedish media, which to some extent provides good company to the Indian media. Homophobia is an additional theme, and having occasionally heard and read about the Swedish comfort with sexuality and having watched Fucking Åmål, I was surprised.

In The Girl Who Played with Fire Salander arouses more pity than before, especially during her grief about Mirriam Wu towards the end (she cries!), and of course in the devastating final scene, while Larsson has fun by getting explicit about Salander being based on the legendary Pippi Longstocking. While reading this book I was suddenly reminded of my math teacher in school, who was similarly diminutive and quick.

At the end it is clear that Berger may be sidetracked, advokat Annika (Blomkvist’s sister) will play a major role, and Salander will spend more of her time in you-will-know-where in the next book. I could stomach that, I am preparing for the worst, but I am completely unprepared for the unavailability of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest in Indian bookstores.

P.S. I discovered that I don’t like “Jesus Christ” being used exclamatorily more than once in a book.

Image Source: Euro Crime

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Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic is an inequation with four very capable actors on one side and a whole that doesn’t add up on the other. Nobody can be blamed of over-expecting when Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow and Susan Sarandon star not in a grand epic but a gentle drama. They play such beautifully broken characters.

Jakob Bronski survived the Drancy internment camp, the gulag, and shock therapy. He must have suffered unfathomable cruelty, and yet I think he became the strongest, the happiest, cheering up with the tiniest act of humanity and beauty of nature. He has an aura of peace and his poetry I suspect is the opposite of depressing.

Melanie Lansing was an orphan girl he had helped in the camp. A part of her remained there even as she grew old and married and had a son and a grandson. She almost cherishes the memories of her survival, remembers everyone and everything, and is otherwise suicidal. I wonder how many of those memories were touched up by her.

Christopher Lewis, sent to Drancy by mistake, was another orphan Jakob had helped, and Christopher and Melanie had been thick friends. He chose a solitary life, preferring insects to people. Perhaps he blames the world for sending him to Drancy, especially because he is not Jewish.

I was equally fascinated by the other two characters: the grouchy husband and the detached son who were unintentionally made to share Melanie’s trauma.

When the three concentration camp survivors get to meet again, it is fantasy time for Melanie.

There is something amiss. A story. To me the movie suffered from acute subtlety becoming a mere assembly of a few interesting characters, a silent memorial of an important event. Drancy unlike Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau is less known. The French State played a major role in opening and conducting this camp where 63,000 were murdered.

Updated on 30th May, 2010: I recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s faith trilogy and noticed a couple of things. Max von Sydow plays an important character in both Through a Glass, Darkly and Winter Light. In the former, an important scene is set outside the house, while all four characters (there are only four in the movie) are dining. Karin, the woman has a mental illness, much like Melanie here. Max von Sydow plays the character appearing most sensitive to the woman in both cases. In the latter movie, Max von Sydow plays a fisherman who shoots himself with a rifle, and here he is shown coveting (and later acquiring) a rifle and we are always concerned that he might be trying to commit suicide. Though it appears to be trivia in both cases, a viewer who previously watched both those movies is likely to refer more (and experience more) from Emotional Arithmetic.

Image Source: IMP Awards

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