 "<b>J Jagannath:</b> Linguistics and philosophy")
At a time when we are getting inured to the decline of humanities at universities and sciences are getting ridiculous level of preferences, two movies talk about the need for linguistics and philosophy now more than ever.
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is my exhibit A. The Canadian-French director?s follow-up to last year's sweeping hit Sicario is this genre-smashing movie about a linguistics boffin, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), who communicates with aliens and averts a near geopolitical snafu.
Her help is sought by the US government when 12 extraterrestrial spacecraft, which seem shaped like London's The Gherkin spliced vertically into two, appear across the earth and one lands up in the sylvan surroundings of Montreal passing off as Montana.
He's like the alternative Spielberg we never knew we desperately needed. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s stirring soundtrack with experimental piano loops adds a layer of mystique to the proceedings.
The movie starts off in a dream-like situation with Adams' character caring for her daughter who dies of cancer in her childhood. The Macguffin is expertly deployed in the climax. One is tempted to think of how the movie's geopolitics would have been shaped had it been filmed after Trump's win. Would China still be the bad guy when the unfortunate mix of a brash billionaire and man-child will have to deal with such a delicate situation?
French director Mia Hansen-Løve's Things To Come (L’avenir) was one of my highlights at the recent Mumbai Film Festival. Set in modern-day Paris, this wistfully funny movie is about a high school philosophy teacher (Isabelle Huppert) who deals with a divorce, mother?s death and grandson?s birth. The typically terrific Huppert excels as the Schopenhauer- and Rousseau-quoting teacher who urges her students to think about free will.
The range of Hansen-Løve is nearly as good as Villeneuve's. After her ode to the 1990s? dance music with Eden, she came up with a story loosely based on her own mother who was a philosophy teacher.
She suffuses each scene with philosophy and references solidly rooted in a Parisien life. There are references to the 1968 student riots, Unabomber, Frankfurt school of philosophy, Jacques Chirac's sex life and, of course, the par for this course called Slavoj Žižek.
Her companions during her tumult are her former student, Fabien (Roman Kolinka), and her mother's "obese" cat, the wonderfully named Pandora. Huppert's love-hate relationship with her mother, played by the delightful Édith Scob, are the movie's most indelible and mysteriously alluring moments. Both the ladies constantly feed off each other?s bottomless talents. The scene where Huppert talks to her adolescent son about her mother?s retirement home and how it reeks of the smell of death is very well crafted.
The genius of Hansen-Løve is that she got Huppert to find her intellectual peer in Kolinka instead of her philosopher husband Heinz (Andr? Marcon). The teacher-student relationship transforms into a high voltage, albeit platonic, gabfest. The sequence where Kolinka nearly chides Huppert for being on blinkers in terms of her world view is not easy viewing. Such scenes make this movie, which is intensely interior but highly charged, a shoo in for my year-end top ten list (wait up for the next column).
Hansen-Løve knows her mise–en–scène so well that I chuckled when she had the divorced couple bicker over the proprietorship of the copies of Arthur Schopenhauer?s The World as Will and Representation and Buber. Not since The Barbarian Invasions and The Squid and the Whale have I seen such a fully formed movie about the inner workings of the human mind and the moral conflicts faced by intellectuals.
That reminds me, do read Sarah Bakewell's impressively lucid At the Existentialist Café to know about the crackling intellectual energy of 1930s? Paris. jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is my exhibit A. The Canadian-French director?s follow-up to last year's sweeping hit Sicario is this genre-smashing movie about a linguistics boffin, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), who communicates with aliens and averts a near geopolitical snafu.
Her help is sought by the US government when 12 extraterrestrial spacecraft, which seem shaped like London's The Gherkin spliced vertically into two, appear across the earth and one lands up in the sylvan surroundings of Montreal passing off as Montana.
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Using some ingenious techniques, Louise starts developing contact with two seven-limbed, squid-like aliens called "heptapods" in their own codex-like language. Assisting Banks is theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). These sequences are established beautifully by Villeneuve and are the most heady moments of this movie that was adapted from Ted Chiang's short story, Story of Your Life. The whole process, where both the scientists try out different methods of interacting, establishes Villeneuve as the most exciting director among the current crop.
He's like the alternative Spielberg we never knew we desperately needed. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s stirring soundtrack with experimental piano loops adds a layer of mystique to the proceedings.
The movie starts off in a dream-like situation with Adams' character caring for her daughter who dies of cancer in her childhood. The Macguffin is expertly deployed in the climax. One is tempted to think of how the movie's geopolitics would have been shaped had it been filmed after Trump's win. Would China still be the bad guy when the unfortunate mix of a brash billionaire and man-child will have to deal with such a delicate situation?
French director Mia Hansen-Løve's Things To Come (L’avenir) was one of my highlights at the recent Mumbai Film Festival. Set in modern-day Paris, this wistfully funny movie is about a high school philosophy teacher (Isabelle Huppert) who deals with a divorce, mother?s death and grandson?s birth. The typically terrific Huppert excels as the Schopenhauer- and Rousseau-quoting teacher who urges her students to think about free will.
The range of Hansen-Løve is nearly as good as Villeneuve's. After her ode to the 1990s? dance music with Eden, she came up with a story loosely based on her own mother who was a philosophy teacher.
She suffuses each scene with philosophy and references solidly rooted in a Parisien life. There are references to the 1968 student riots, Unabomber, Frankfurt school of philosophy, Jacques Chirac's sex life and, of course, the par for this course called Slavoj Žižek.
Her companions during her tumult are her former student, Fabien (Roman Kolinka), and her mother's "obese" cat, the wonderfully named Pandora. Huppert's love-hate relationship with her mother, played by the delightful Édith Scob, are the movie's most indelible and mysteriously alluring moments. Both the ladies constantly feed off each other?s bottomless talents. The scene where Huppert talks to her adolescent son about her mother?s retirement home and how it reeks of the smell of death is very well crafted.
The genius of Hansen-Løve is that she got Huppert to find her intellectual peer in Kolinka instead of her philosopher husband Heinz (Andr? Marcon). The teacher-student relationship transforms into a high voltage, albeit platonic, gabfest. The sequence where Kolinka nearly chides Huppert for being on blinkers in terms of her world view is not easy viewing. Such scenes make this movie, which is intensely interior but highly charged, a shoo in for my year-end top ten list (wait up for the next column).
Hansen-Løve knows her mise–en–scène so well that I chuckled when she had the divorced couple bicker over the proprietorship of the copies of Arthur Schopenhauer?s The World as Will and Representation and Buber. Not since The Barbarian Invasions and The Squid and the Whale have I seen such a fully formed movie about the inner workings of the human mind and the moral conflicts faced by intellectuals.
That reminds me, do read Sarah Bakewell's impressively lucid At the Existentialist Café to know about the crackling intellectual energy of 1930s? Paris. jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in