Skip to main content

Grief Colorized

 I watched Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors recently and found myself thinking about the scenes from the movie several days after. A Romeo and Juliet themed story is universally accessible and that is probably why this movie makes sense to a global audience. Beyond that it's about detail and how the director chooses to depict the state of mind of his character, draw us into their live and times. Justice is swift and final for one thing - we see that very early on in the movie. The level of infraction and the outcome would be hard to correlate for an outsider. From there tragedy begets tragedy until there is no one and nothing left to mourn over. 

The movement of the camera in many parts of the movie leaves a feeling on being on roller-coaster trying to take in the scenery the best you can. The period of grief Ivano (the main protagonist) experience is depicted in a blur of color and fast moving images, scenes go from being shot in color to being black and white. Through the haze, sometimes there is a bit of clarity where the camera pauses ever so briefly on something that the viewer can take in. 

I found this depiction of the suffering through the lost of the beloved very poignant. Even for a viewer who has no familiarity with the the language or the culture, the striking visuals resonate - you see the person trying to cope with loss best he can, losing is mind along the way and coming out the other side, transformed into something unrecognizable to those who had known him before. There is a lot beyond the visualization of intense grief a person could take away from the movie - but for me it was what made the strongest impression.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more