Life of Pi: Multi-level stunner

Starrimg: Irrfan Khan, Suraj Sharma, Tabu, Adil Hussain, Gerard Depardieu

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is a stunning masterpiece on many levels, an unusual story told in a manner defying known standards of imagination.

First and foremost, it is an unprecedented visual treat, the likes of which will be rarest of rare in Hollywood’s future too. Second, though no less importantly, it stuns you with a compelling screenplay on a book that most bigwigs in Hollywood, including Lee himself, flicked aside saying it was a subject impossible to put on screen. It is an adventure story with so many thrilling twists and turns that the slowness of the proceedings does not even once makes its presence felt, not even when most of the film pans out on a boat with a boy and tiger in the middle of an ocean. And just when you settle down thinking it is an adventure fantasy, the filmmaker forces you to introspect on many a profound question. While he is doing so, he also gives you a new look of 3D and computer generated imagery which makes the animals look more real than reality.

So, will you say this one is a philosophical take on life — yes it is. But it is also a fantastic take on the religious journey of a child who experiments with religion as much as he wants to experiment with the tiger and its human instincts.

Lee does well to throw these serious life-altering questions at you in between flying fish, blue whales passing by in a neonlit night in the middle of a placid ocean, floating islands, a tiger, zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a boy who struggles for survival as no other castaway has done so far on Hollywood footage. Tom Hanks was another kind of castaway too focussed on survival to think of religion or philosophy.

Suraj Sharma, the Stephanian who plays Piscine Molitor Patel, often confused as ‘Pissing’ by his schoolmates till he confounds them even further to win the name Pi from them, is chiselled to perfection by Lee as a pugnacious kid who grows up in Pondicherry to honour his father’s tenets as much as he gains adulthood on his own groping of life in all its hues and questions which he throws at you gently while ship-wrecked. By general standards, this shipwreck is an unending one and should, thus, have been vulnerable to ennui and tediousness. Nothing of the sort here. Lee’s shipwreck story, adapted from Booker winner Yann Martel’s book, is aggressively compelling and forces you to be on the edge of your seat till the very last frame.

The humour that floats around is just the marination you would have been looking for, propelled with subtlety by Irrfan Khan’s delightful brand of poker-faced histrionics. The only thing more gentle than humour is the background score which comes with a captivating folk Indianness. On the whole, this one is for the Oscars on all counts, the grandest imagination soiree ever to take your heart.

Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 25 November, 2012