The Pursuit of Happyness : a tribute to the never-say-die spirit !

One of the most realistic movies I have ever seen. This movie has got it all in terms of the difficulties a common man can face in this world in order to achieve a livelihood...

The story is set in 1981 at San Francisco where in Chris Gardener is a hard working salesman, who has a wife and a 5 year old kid. His real intellectual talent is best described in the scene where in he solves the Rubik's cube in matter of minutes ! But the directors are in no mood to showcase this awesome talent of Chris's...they are here to discuss quite simply ...his life!

Chris is just simply struggling to make ends meet.

His life is now at a stage where in things just don’t seem to go his way. First he is not able to find buyers for this 'unique' medical instrument that he sells for a living. As a result there is a growing economic degradation which propels his wife to finally move out to New York looking for her own independent job. He loses his car and gradually the trust of his wife who makes up her mind to leave him as he is just not able to manage the daily burgeoning expenses of the family.

Chris convinces his wife to make his son stay with him. He could have simply let go of his son with his wife who is at least assured of a job and a house to live in. This shows the determination of Chris to support his family even though he is not in a position to do so at the current moment. This is the character of Chris which will be tested right through the film.

Luck seems to go just in the opposite direction as Chris is not able to pay the rent of his house and unfortunate circumstances also force him to end up temporarily in jail. Later on, a gypsy steals one of Chris's medical instrument of which he is desperately trying to sell to make some money that can sustain him and his son. The desperation that sets on him at that stage - having no means to earn his daily bread and also the emotional trauma due to his wife leaving him and the question of how he will be able to support his kid - is depicted in great earnest by Will Smith- something a guy only of his caliber is capable of doing....

Anyways moving on, things seem to lookup when he meets a senior employee of a financial firm who offers him a job at his firm provided he clears the interview. At the interview Chris is selected but only for an internship of which he won’t be paid anything during its period and at the end they may be a chance that he may be selected to work as a broker. This is strictly based on his performance in the exam at the end of the internship in which they are a class full of hopeful candidates competing eagerly for a single position. And above it the exams requires Chris to read up a fat economic book of which he has no clue about and at the same time he is expected to get maximum clients for his firm ...A situation which can be best described as "Maximum pain with simply no guaranteed gain" ...This situation is in addition to his growing troubles where in he is thrown out of his lodge due to his inability to pay rent which in turn forces him to go for the homeless shelter which is a real hard thing to get due to the sheer number of people who are competing for it.

There are many 'golden' moments in the film so beautifully enacted by Will Smith that you just stop to wonder whether it is the celluloid you are watching or is there real life out there where in characters like Chris are a reality. I guess it is so…But kudos to the sheer acting prowess of Will Smith for making it realize on the audience...

Life is not exactly a carpet of roses for Chris as he has to fight at every step in his life - once with a defaulter to get the last room in a homeless shelter, has to give 5 dollars out of the ten dollars to his boss who doesn’t happen to have change for his taxi, that out of sheer obligation that he is the person who will decide to give him a job or not...

Amidst all this, he is studying hard during the night for the internship exam while during the day he has the hardest task of putting a smiling, assured face in front of customers of which he has to get policies from. It is no easy joke to get policies from ever-careful customers who seem to like Chris for his conversation ability but are reluctant to commit their money for policies that Chris is offering - something which will decide his livelihood - in its literal sense...! man! What a hardship !

And there is the the innocent character of Chris's son who is incapable of understanding the hardships of his father but loves him for the person he his...The directors do a very delicate job of portraying this character - of all the mental prejudices a 5 year old can develop, of the ignorance of a kid, of the simple playfulness - they show the kid as a person living in his own fantasy world in spite of the real harsh world his father is facing ....an irony of life truly!!

There is a moment in the film where in, Chris, out of chance, finds the guy who stole his medical instrument. The thief happens to believe that the instrument is a 'time machine' - which is so rightly described philosophically - as the stolen instrument is the index of the rough times that Chris faces and the recovery pf the instrument indirectly signals the good times coming ahead in Chris's life.

He discovers that the instrument is broken and needs some components to repair for which he has no money. He has to donate blood to make some money out of which he buys the necessary spare parts for the instrument. The directors then depict one beautiful moment when Chris fixes the instrument and the light from the working instrument falls on the innocent, sleeping kid of Chris's who Chris has been struggling to support ! what a moment !

Chris then manages to sell the instrument and then moves to a proper lodge from the cramped, inhabitable homeless shelters.

Then comes "the moment" in the film ...Chris is called to meet directors of the firm he was working on his last day of internship. This meeting is supposed about informing Chris whether he earned a job in the firm or lost out to some other candidate in which case he is back to old, unemployed, struggling days.. a thought which is simply nightmarish to think of ! ...In the meeting, the Director tells Chris that it is not the last day for him and tomorrow would be the first day for Chris - as an employee of the firm he was an intern so far !

The state of feeling that Chris goes through at that exact moment is the essence of the whole movie! Man! I just love to see that part again and again! What a beautiful expression on Will Smith's face! Hats off to him for such a brilliant performance!

In other words, the feeling of "happyness" sets on the never-give-up Chris which is an indication of the end of all the hardships he had to face to earn a simple livelihood....a truly apt title indeed !

Delicatessen - Noir comedy with horror or dystopia with comedy?

Delicatessen (1991)
Language:French
Director: Jean Paul Jeunet, Marc Caro
Actors:Jean Claude Dreyfus, Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac,Karin Viard

A dark(both in theme and setting) comedy set in a post-apocalytic France with rampant food, water and housing shortages. The hero(Pinon) is an out-of-work joker [ mainly because his partner, a chimp, was eaten up by hungry hordes] looking both for work and a place to stay. Answering an ad placed in the papers, he arrives at the hotel/hostel owned and run by the butcher(Dreyfus). Accepted on arrival and given a room and board, with the condition that he work as an odd-job man for the building, he takes up residence. Little does he realise that his predecessor in the same position was fattened up and then killed to be fed, as meat, to the apartment building's residents. For food shortages and the climate are so bad that no vegetables grow and even if they do, are too exorbtantly priced for common consumption.

The directors don't dwell on what caused the catastrophe, teasing us instead with glimpses of how totally society has collapsed: the cannibalism of the apartment seems like an accepted practice and very few, if any, have serious qualms about it; the atmosphere is smoky and dark, with only shaded glimpses of the sun; there is a revolution underway in opposition to the Government, lead by the Frogmen who live in the sewers of the city this is set in( mostly Paris).

The residents of the building are also character studies in themsleves - the family with their two rascally kids and a grandmother; the couple with the neurotic wife supposedly imagining voices instructing her to commit suicide and the husband in love with her; the butcher's daughter(Dougnac) who is disgusted by but powerless to stop the cannibalism; the two tradesmen- one of whom is secretly in love with the neurotic woman; and the sultry vixen( Karin Viard in a sumptuous performance) who pays for her rent and food by granting the butcher/owner sexual favours.

The clown enters this milieu and soon, through his charm and manners, as also the sympathy she feels for his intended fate, has won over the butcher's daughter. [There are episodes in between furhter fleshing out the building's characters, especially the butcher's and the quasi-moral dilemmas he faces and his justifications when his daughter confronts him with how horrible his policy is. His meditations on his options and motives are true enough and might drive most of us when faced with as big a crisis of survival as in the movie -food for thought here] This is where the movie gets interesting - Dougnac devises a plot to save the clown but, watching him get friendly with Viard, calls it off. However, the plan, set in motion with the Frogmen's help, is too far advanced to be called off but goes awry. :)

The extended denouement, totally harebrained and thrilling at the same time, ties up most loose ends and saves Pinon for his heroine and from the butcher's cleaver. The movie ends on a positive note with Pinon and Dougnac playing the cello on the rooftop as the air finally begins to clear, a sign of chaging winds and times.

All in all, though a bit long, the movie's characters are all finely sketched - no one-dimensional characters here. And each character, from the neurotic woman to the butcher, is given enough space to develop and, if not convince, at least evince sympathy from us for their characters. The directors also pose and raise profound questions on how present-day society would function, if at all, in a post-apocalyptic world and how most of what we do now is dependent on such a frail foundation. Food for thought, certainly. The masterstroke of the directors, though, is that they blend all this seamlessly with comedy - from Dougnac's shortsighted fumblings when she tries to win Pinon over( and his attempts to help her) and the Frogmen's absolute ineptness and adherence to near-schoolboyish ideas of how to conduct operations in secret. lol moments abound , side by side with sit-up-straight-and- think-what-you'd-do-in-this-situation-before-judging moments. Food for thought and ammo for laughter, with a yummy Karin Viard thrown in for good measure - me likey! Go watch this movie, people!

P.S: Random trivia - Jeunet, one of the directors, is also the director of Amelie - another awesome French movie that blends comedy, romance and philosophy.

Stark reality tempered by humour!

Afghanistan '76- a nation of orchards, peaceful vistas and strong mountain people. Or Afghanistan '06 - a nation of warlords, extremist Islam, deserts and widespread suffering. Are they two visions of a single country that, to quote Kipling, "the twain shall never meet"? While we may never,sadly, know the answer, the movie "Kabul Express" is a great way to look into contemporary Afghanistan, its people's suffering and courage and the twin ravages of war and famine inflicted on this once-beautiful and peaceful country.[ Though, I hasten to add, our vision of 'peace' might be tempered by merely two centuries of peace - warlords and war were a way of life for long before that there]

The story is simplicity itself - two journos(Warsi and Abraham) who visit Afghanistan to film a documentary and are waylaid / kidnapped by an escaping Taliban along the way. The Taliban warrior, initially portrayed one-dimensionally as pure evil, gradually acquires depth and, towards the end, one feels for the man.

So, too, are the Afghan police - initially overwhelmingly the good guys - whose later behaviour begs the question of whether black and white are ever clearly drawn in the world.The American journalist is just eye candy and has no real role to play escept as the trigger for the Taliban's outbursts and his eventual softening, as he sees his daughter in her.

The Paki border post , manned by two up-from-the-ranks subedars and one lieutenant, depicts the realities , or falsehoods, we are forced to live with every day. Having receved orders to seal the border, the lieutenant refuses to even accept, at his subedars' suggestion, that there might be Paki soldiers left behind in Afghanistan who might be making their way home after assisting the Taliban. This portrays the attitude of officialdom in Pakistan who refuse to accept their tacit and implicit support of the Taliban while the subedars' concern for their fellow-soldiers reflects ground realities and the truths that we blind ourselves to.

Without giving too much of the story away, let it suffice to say that the Talib commandeers the Indians' transport and tries to cross the border back into Pakistan. This journey is punctuated by oft-humourous exchanges between the Indians and the Talib - the one with Warsi insisting that Kapil was the greatest allrounder and the Talib refusing to accept any other than Imran was priceless and some moving exchanges between the Talib and the native driver regarding the Taliban's contribution, or lack thereof, to Afghnistan's state today.

Throughout, we are treated to glorious vistas of bleak landscapes, windswept and barren mountains, arid plains - in short, glorious scenery. I almost want to go there just to hike there.

Simultaneously, there are some really moving shots of crippled children( the victims of the 1000s of landmines sown during the wars) and begging widows ( forced to beg as they are not allowed to work in any other profession). As a tourism brochure / ground realities documentary, this takes the cake.

Warsi's comic timing is brilliant, Abraham looks and acts like excess baggage brought on to lure women to watch, the native driver and the Talib perform stellar renderings of their characters while the scenery, social situations and ground realities are spot on, at least from an Indian point of view.

My rating : 3.5 out of 5. A definite worth-a-watch.

Watch out for the road-blocking donkey!!! :)