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.
3 comments:
The story I feel is itself performative, it disseminates certain ideas which come into existance with the utterance. The act of reading is immensely important as it is intricately linked with the idea of truth and authenticity. As Derrida has shown in western metaphysics speech is considered more authentic than writing due to the presence of the speaker. This logocentric obsession with truth and presence undergoes disruption the moment we see Hannah's education moving from listening to reading vis-a-vis speech to writing. Language is inscribed from outside into inside - the inside which however remains unseen. The very act of decoding might not correspond the encoding and might generate myriad possibilities owing to the inclusion of the subjectivity which simultaneously creates and gets created by this very act of decoding. A dialectic between the act of cognition and the subject is always at work unendingly and inconclusively. Hannah knows how to read only through listening. In fact nobody teaches her how to read or write - she learns it herself by corresponding the letters of the written text with the voice tapes of those texts she used to receive from Michael in the prison. This process of 'knowing' ironically undercomments on our learning and knowledge systems - perhaps we also like Hannah need to read what is written, the very act of reading or misreading (for as Derrida suggests the right way of reading is always misreading) transforming thereby what is written. However like Hannah we mostly depend on a reader. This reader might be the philosophers, historians, creative writers or law-givers. We just listen to them and do not try to read into them - we reduce the infinite possibilities of utterances into a handful number of axioms and binaries. Instead of looking for a truth that is always already there but is always incompletely present and is charecterized by a possibility, a two-comeness. This reductionism and axiomatic thinking is evident when the law givers identify Hannah as the chief offender of setting the church full of people into fire. That happens because of her hiding of the fact that she could not read or write and her illiteracy reflects back on our own illiteracy which doesn't allow to read through silences. The society just listens to what she says when she was asked whether she was the one who signed the order of not letting the people inside the church free. In order to hide her illiteracy she in order to avoid putting signature to be verified by the judge accepts that she did sign the alleged order. The verdict of law just imprisons her showing the fallacy of the entire system of evidence, witness and arriving at justice. Justice located at the other pole of Auswitz seems equally blind and preceded by an originary violence - the violence which stands before reason, the former helping the latter come into existance rather than the other way round which is generally believed in legal procedure. Hannah learns to read and write in her own way of finding correspondences between sounds and written images inside the prison. Are we free outside? Do we really need to start to learn from the scratch like Hannah? We are still caught up in the sea of literatures from Homer to Mark Twain that shapes our subjectivity through production of certain 'reality effect' surrounded by which we live. The closed moral universe is dictated by a reader whose voice is only to be listened and not read. How long still we shall remain so phallago centric in our understanding looking for a phallus instead of an abscense of it?
Hey, well written...Now i wanna see this film right away! :)
There is no gainsaying the fact that Stephen Daldry's ‘The Reader’ (2008) is a brilliant cinematic experience when seen in terms of direction, screenplay, music, cinematography and editing. But I have to admit that Daldry’s earlier celluloid venture ‘The Hours’ (2002), based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, was a much better directed movie: better not because it was nominated for five more Academy Awards than ‘The Reader’ but because of the wide emotional spectrum the film succeeds to capture. Even though all the three leading female actors -- Meryl Streep (as Clarissa Vaughan), Julianne Moore (as Laura Brown) and Nicole Kidman (as Virginia Woolf) -- gave stellar performances, it was Kidman’s gutsy portrayal as the psychosomatic Virginia Woolf that left an unforgettable impression on the minds of the audience. With a prosthetic nose and long clumsy wig, Kidman fully justified her complex character and deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar in 2003.
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