‘The Reader’: Emancipation through reading

The 33-year old Hannah (Kate Winslet) chances upon the 15-year old Michael (David Cross), sick with symptoms of scarlet fever, on her doorsteps one rainy afternoon and the foundation stone of a breezy love affair is set. A love affair set in motion by carnal desires, a young boy’s ecstatic initiation into the world of sex, his sudden realization of his own manliness, takes a ‘literary’ turn as Hannah lays the condition that he has to read to her first before he could bed her. An extraordinary condition indeed, which, Michael does not find difficult to comply with! Their prelude to passionate love-making becomes emotional journeys through literary texts of Homer, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, and many others. Constantly referred to as ‘kid’ both lovingly and condescendingly by the woman, Michael soon realizes that this affair is solely and rather dominantly steered by Hannah’s own will, sometimes whimsical and incomprehensible. His male ego is profoundly hurt by Hannah’s quirky behaviour, her shifting moods, and her maturity. And one fine day, Hannah abandons the apartment without even leaving a note for him. The entire story is told in flashback, when a middle-aged Michael (Ralph Finesse) is now a well-established lawyer in Germany.
The narrative moves to and fro in time, covering several decades, especially the years of the Holocaust. The tagline of the film “How far would you go to protect a secret?” is complemented by a class lecture in which the professor says that most literatures are about keeping a secret really well and he cites the example of Odysseus. Hannah who laughs and cries through the reading sessions also has a deep secret, which she protects with an unimaginable zeal, stretching to an unthinkable extent. Accused of having deliberately locked six hundred Jews in a church on fire, she could have escaped life sentence had she told the court that she could not read or write. Ashamed of her illiteracy, she embraces the punishment with a stoical calm.
The film takes an unusually lovely turn, when Michael who had really fallen in love with Hannah starts sending her recorded books of literary classics, realizing that she cannot read or write. Hannah’s inflated ego had prevented her from telling the court that she was illiterate. The same indomitable ego sees her turning her days behind the bars into the fruitful activity of learning to read and write. She borrows books from the prison library and learns to read by matching the sound (of the recorded text) and the written word. Michael’s love for her comes across as the sustaining quality of the human community which has already seen something as monstrous as the Holocaust. Set against the background of the Holocaust that was inhumanly exclusionary in nature, an irremovable blot on human history, Michael’s pure love for Hannah gathers especial significance. Imprisoned by illiteracy, Hannah’s real emancipation comes, ironically, in the prison where through reading literary classics she emerges as a better human being. She commits suicide in the end, for she has nothing to go back to in the world outside. The freedom she got in the fictional world of literature within the four walls of the prison perhaps seems to her to be marred by her recourse to the real world. She leaves behind all her money to the little girl (now a grown-up woman) who had by a stroke of luck survived the church incident.
Based on a book by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader leaves you mesmerised. Kate Winslet effortless performance, David Cross’ freshness, and Ralph Finesse’s dignified demeanour would stay with you for long. A must watch!

N.B: I have not written a review, really! I only felt like sharing the story with you…it has moved me immensely.

Tagore Woes!

Who’s the biggest Bengali celebrity? No prizes for guessing. It’s Goddess Durga. Who comes next to her? Of course, our very own property - the Kobiguru! Bengalis are melodramatically sentimental about the poet, most of the time, not realizing who they are worshipping and why is he worthy of being worshipped. This year, I was awfully perturbed on my visit to Jorasanko Thakurbari. The place was mindlessly populated (this happens every year) mostly by people who were there to habitually join the bandwagon of Bengali euphoria for Tagore, people who are euphoric about anything on earth, from a lucrative discount at a shopping mall to Aishwarya Rai’s shooting spree on the ghats of the Ganges! There’s nothing wrong in being zestful about everything; but my point is that this overwhelming zest should have some purpose. For instance, there is an understandable purpose in running after a discount, say, at Zodiac or Westside! There is also a purpose behind making a beeline around the shooting spot of an Abhishek-Aishwarya starrer! What is the purpose, you may ask. The purpose is as simple and as unostentatious as taking a look at the stars. Sounds ridiculous? It does! But, that’s the truth, and there’s nothing beyond it. But the purpose of visiting Jorasanko or Rabindra Sadan on ‘25 Baisakh’ (and that too in a red-bordered white sari or designer dhoti-kurta) should have some deeper purpose than just ‘for the sake of remembering Tagore’.
Ironically, and very very unfortunately, most of these Jorasanko and Rabindra Sadan crowd is highly conservative about Tagore. But of course, all of them can at least sing a few lines of “Hare re re amaye chhere de re de re” or “Purano shei diner kotha”! That does not of course make them qualified enough to celebrate Tagore’s birthday. For, most of them do not know that the man they revere or worship as God is someone who has been the most carefree of conservative norms, someone who has always tried to break free of the conventional! Closely read, Tagore is capable of shaking the Bengali middle class out of their traditionalist Elysium (read Pandemonium) of fixed notions of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, of ‘black’ and ‘white’, of ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’. Whether a novel or a poem, a play or a song, an average Bengali has mostly enjoyed it at the surface level, without understanding its real import (of course, there are exceptions; or else, this article would not be written at all). Tagore has time and again questioned norms, problematized conventional notions of the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’, and in a way, he is one of the first postmodernists to give voice to all the concerns that occupy today’s thinkers. His Ghare Baire voices the anxiety of the hypermasculine discourse of nationalism, while his Chokher Bali unleashes unabashedly the socially forbidden passions of a widow. How many Tagore fans know that the novelist was compelled to change the ending of Chokher Bali where his Binodini was not apologetic at all? And hello! How many of us go gaga over Chandalika? Most remembers it for its awesome songs, right? But isn’t this dance-drama one of the very first truly ‘subaltern’ stuffs? Chandalika’s woes have a lot to do with her subaltern position, and her painful realization that how her personal emotions are regulated by an overarching caste system. Chitrangada is a marvel! Everybody agrees to it! Because it has spectacular songs: ‘Bandhu kon alo laglo chokhe’, ‘Rodon bhara e basanta’, and many more! But isn’t the play dealing with the anxieties regarding sexuality? Chintrangada’s transformation from ‘kurupa’ to ‘surupa’ has lot to do with the construction of feminine sexuality as petite, delicate and soft! Does not the play remind us of the endlessly irritating beauty cream ads that promote physical beauty as the only powerful weapon? Tagore’s play problematizes brilliantly the set notions of female sexuality. Though it does not digress from its main source (i.e. The Mahabharata), it was, in a way, ahead of its time. I was in fact reminded of Chitrangada’s discomfiture while watching Kajol in Karan Johar’s postmodern candy-floss romance Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

Now, such a list is endless. I am not writing a eulogy of Tagore. What I wish to point out is that let’s not be sentimental about this great poet. It’s high time we recognized that his greatness lies in breaking rules, not in constructing them. His works are sublime by the virtue of their aesthetic quality; but all of these works are also open to political reading. I’m saying nothing new. At least, some elitists would think so. But my target audience is the pitifully downmarket crowd at Rabindra Sadan and Jorasanko Thakurbari who celebrate Ponchishe Boishakh without knowing why they are doing so. They barely know that they are almost sinfully tying up the poet who has been iconoclastic in myriad ways in thousands of meaninglessly conservative knots. Tagore has been given a godly status; I have no objection to that. But I’m sure the poet would have himself objected to such a rendition of his image, as one who is out there, at a Height, the Other, who needs to be posited always against the Self. Even if we believe in the ‘death of the author’, the works that are available to us are enough evidence to break-free from any orthodoxy. True, by celebrating Tagore’s birthday, we do pay homage to that great creative principle that keeps the world going; but, there’s no need to associate notions of pseudo-sanctity with that.

'Milk': Democracy versus the Gay ‘Other’

Gus Van Sant’s Milk is another life-affirming film, and comes just in time when it is absolutely necessary to recall the heroic struggle of a community of men and women who are denied human rights, and are treated as if non-existent.
In fact, the film by recalling incidents of gay bashing, through video clips and newspaper cuttings, seems to retell another story of savages versus civilians. The methods of repression applied by the whites in treating the so-called savages are applied to put down gay people as well. The word ‘savage’ here has nothing to do with barbarians; rather, in postmodern discourse of otherness, the word ‘savage’ may well apply to all those who do not belong to the centre. In fact, the western notion of the savage as other, as belonging to some place else, (say, aboriginals, wolfboys, cannibals, etc.) is subverted by Milk, which shows that one need not look at the fringes or periphery (please note that these words are used with a nagging awareness of what these denote in postmodern academic parlance) to seek out the other, but otherness exists at the very centre, a centre like San Francisco, that threatens the very roots of American democracy. In other words, the 1970s Gay Movement that ceremoniously opens up the closet and encourages gay people to ‘come out’, unravels the brittleness of the very foundations of democracy so far celebrated as avowing the rights of the individual.
Harvey Milk (played by the incredibly brilliant Sean Penn), the unputdownable leader of the 1970s Gay Movement, very often connected with the straight crowd by the now famous opening line: “My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you.” This is a highly significant line, for Harvey’s mission was to recruit gay people into the democratic politics, by releasing them from the tortuous prison of a dominantly heterosexual society. It was extremely important to recognize and situate the cause of the gay people within the realm of democratic politics. And ironically enough, the vanguards of democracy claim that gayness is a sickness that can be medically cured, and if they cannot be cured of their strangeness, they have no right to come out, for they would have a negative effect on children and their very existence would threaten the very base of American economy, for a gay couple can never have children. Milk keeps on linking the trauma of the gay community with those of the immigrants in America, the ethnic minorities, thus calling into question the very notion of the melting pot. Milk is no melodrama, but an important politico-historical document which deals with a sensitive cause without sentimentalizing it. The film exhibits the right kind of emotions, always on the alert of not going over the top.
The most memorable moment is perhaps the one when a terribly tensed Milk gets a call from a gay teenager from Minnesota who tells him that ‘they’ are taking him away to fix him up next morning, for ‘they’ believe he is sick. Milk assures him that nothing is wrong with him, he is perfectly ‘normal’, and asks him to take a bus to San Francisco immediately. The camera zooms out gradually to reveal that the caller is actually sitting on a wheel chair; he can’t walk. The line gets disconnected. Months later, it is the same boy who calls up Milk to inform him of his triumph: proposition 6 has been repealed. He is now in Los Angeles, self-assured, and away from those who thought he needed treatment. That one phone call had changed his life forever…perhaps in this moment of glory, it is this boy who spells out for Milk in concrete terms the meaning of victory.
It deserves to be pointed out that the film does not get into the complexities of queer identities; such plethora of identities, designated in the acronym LGBTQ…, is beyond the scope of the film; for, it narrates the initial stages of the Gay Movement, its main concern being establishing the gay identity as ‘natural’. From there, the movement has come a long way today. Sean Penn’s Oscar-winning performance is one of its kinds; to say the least, it’s brilliant. Subtle, confident, and effortless, Penn could not have made Milk more believable. Emile Hirsch is loveable; so is James Franco. Unfortunately, in India, at least, Milk would be open to a niche audience only. Actually, the film should have been accessible to all and sundry to dismantle the Dostana joke. It’s a pity that our mainstream cinema has not yet matured enough to move beyond it.