Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is a love story of two cowboys who meet in the Brokeback Mountains of the state of Wyoming and then keep visiting the mountains, nurturing and nourishing their relationship.

Directed by acclaimed Taiwanese director Ang Lee, who deals with the subject with sensitivity, Brokeback Mountain more than deserves all the accolades it has been awarded. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal render the gay cowboys, who discover their sexuality in the loneliness of the mountains and whose love runs through their otherwise regular married lives, with a sense of practiced ease. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto captures the expansive, serene landscapes in wide, sunny angles, which surprisingly seem to reflect the mood of the lovers.

Director Lee skirts the usual melodrama that would be typical in the rendition of a gay love story in rural United States and focuses only on the development of the relationship and the affects it has on the personal lives of the two men.

The one singular aspect which could have done with much more attention than it was awarded was the first time that the men make love. It comes across as abrupt and so short that it seems the director just wanted to avoid the entire scene totally.

See the movie, one of the finest to come out from Hollywood in recent times. But give the DVD a miss and soak in the mountains on a wide screen.

August 1914 - A novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I recently read August 1914, which I had bought quite some while ago. Written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia greatest living writers, the book is a magnificent account of one battle during the First World War, but captures the entire canvas of Russian politics, ideology and church morality.

Traipsing across the gigantic war machinery, the book looks insightfully into the fabric of the Russian monarchy, its strong catholic way of life and the patriotism of its masses, which is often clouded by the very miserable lives they lead.

Using a modern form of the novel, with no strict chronological or narrative order, Solzhenitsyn writes about the common struggle of good and evil and the strong role of the individual in this struggle. His records of true society led to his persecution and eventual exile from Russia. His belief of the spiritual advancement of the Russian people owing to the hard life they lived, compared to the western materialism, runs through the novel binding the spatially fragmented novel.

Reading the novel was like looking into the shaping of society. The book shall feature amongst the finest I have read, and I shall eagerly look forward to reading his other books.

Amu - A movie by Shonali Bose

The other day I went and saw Amu at a local Multiplex. The film written, produced and directed by Shonali Bose is a story of a girl finding her roots.

Konkana Sen Sharma, who plays the main lead, Kaju, is a recent graduate from LA; coming to visit her cousin in Delhi, post 9/11. She visits the village where she was born, according to her adopted mother, played by Brinda Karat. The entire village migrated to Delhi after a severe malarial breakout.

But something doesn't seem right; Kaju has no memories of her time in the village. Coming back to city she explores the shanties with a friend of her cousin and stumbles across painful flashes of memory. Piecing together a shattered story she discovers her true origins to be a Sikh family, which was one of the thousands, which was methodically targeted during the 1984 Delhi riots.

Shonali Bose, who post beginning work on the film, also wrote a book by the same name, has with remarkable sensitivity created this film with an extremely poignant, but forgotten, background of the 1984 riots. The subject matter was subtly molded, without slipping into natural and obvious dramatics, and yet told a moving account. Konkana Sen Sharma's talents do unequivocal justice to her role. The sync sound and the camera seem to envelope you as the story unfolds across the elite and poor landscapes of Delhi.

Shonali met the small audience post the screening and talked about the difficulties in making the film and the censor board's audio cuts, which inadvertently increase the horror of the injustices.

What is encouraging and yet seems like a tiny, frail trickle is the struggle of artists like Shonali, who strive against the life sapping Indian system, to bring out an honest message. Her spirit is so uniquely Indian, which has immense patience to bear injustice, but which is raging under the surface, waiting, waiting, waiting for one triggering moment to let loose, hit back, and wash out all the grime which we have collected over the last few decades.

What India surely needs is a revolution; a revolution of social change, which will set right all the wrongs that we have willed and witnessed, a change which will create a society which is fair, free and just, a society of billion plus people, and not that of a few thousands living in the confines of expensive pigeon-holes, passing judgment on people, who are more indigenous than they will ever be.