Skip to main content

Indochine

Watched Indochine for the first time recently. Had heard of the movie back in the day but never got around to watching it. Read the reviews after I was done and thought it was interesting how most reviews were middling and the gripes reviewers had with the movie made sense. There was an expectation it seems, of a great war story told with intelligence and nuance. Indochine does not quite deliver that and to that extent the disappointment is justified. It has been compared to the French take on Gone with the Wind but that does not define this movie either. 

I happened to see it as a very different story - that of motherhood and sacrifices that often go with the territory. The locale, the defining events and historical context were the backdrop against which the story of this mother was told. The articulation of a grand sacrifice is far more difficult in a mundane setting - it does not make for cinematic epic. Yet each day, everywhere in the world there are ordinary mothers who are helping their progeny achieve their dreams at an unthinkable cost to themselves. They know of no other way to be. The character of Catherine Denevue is perhaps one such mother. On the scale of maternal sacrifice, she reaches the high watermark. The irony in her story is shared with that of real mothers who also make grand sacrifices like her - posterity may not treat them kindly, even the child may feel wronged in ways that were impossible to foresee. So it only makes sense that the movie ends with such a whimper. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...