Life of Pi: An Appreciation
Care
I love seeing
places I know in film. They feel like a secret shared between me and the movie,
a whispered "We know this place, you and I." Here, Ang Lee uses
recognizable locations in Pondicherry and Montreal in a way that maintains the
integrity of the local geography alongside the imaginary geography of the
story. He announces: Space matters and will be treated with care and attention
to detail.
Depth
3D is a spectacle
of depth attempting to deny the flatness of the screen. Objects are close or
far. They are in front of or behind. In moments of frenzied action, Life of Pi uses 3D in this way. More
often however, 3D is used to make empty spaces deep: air over flat water, light
on rippled water. Space expands quietly offering room for thought.
Unexpectedly, during
its most spectacular moments, the film arranges objects in the frame so as to flatten the image. A boat floats on a
black pool of brilliant stars; or it floats in a field of buttery light, sky
and sea indistinguishable except for the thin horizon drawn through the center
of the frame. These moments of flatness are announced as a compositional
strategy in the animal montage rolling under the opening credits, most
memorably in the picture of a bird and the flowering branches of a tree. The 3D
technology cuts the image’s foreground from its background, creating an
illusion of depth, but the photography cancels that illusion by composing its
subject in the manner of a silk painting.
The shallowness
of objects pitted against the depth of emptiness. This strategy is thematic. It
is also the only intellectual use of 3D technology that I have seen.
Love
The action of the
story is both constrained and enabled by the geography of the lifeboat and
raft. Distances between the raft and the lifeboat, between the front of the
lifeboat and its back are crucial here. The 3D underscores the distinction, and
here too, it is thematic. What after all is a dance between too close and too far
if not a love story? And this film is about nothing if not love.
Two images
capture that story for me. In the first, a tiger hangs to the edge of a
boat by a claw, desperate and lost. A young man, ax in hand and desperate too
to live, looks down from above and recognizes the tiger as real and alive and
worthy of care. In the second image, a tiger sits in a boat as night falls waiting
for the young man (who looks on from afar) to come back to their home.
Between these moments is a story of generosity and kindness given freely
until the giving becomes a habit and the habit a joy. That feels like a
definition of love to me.
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