The dark screen flickers to life with the legend, “Life is impossible in space.” It informs us that at 600 km above the earth, there is no oxygen, no water and no air to transmit sound. The blue-green Earth comes into view, and the floating specks assume the form of three astronauts on a mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) is the mission commander, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is the technical expert on her first mission and Shariff Dasari (Paul Sharma), the flight engineer. Kowalski carries on good-natured ribbing with Houston, Stone says little and Shariff hums Mera joota hai Japani. Shortly before losing all contact with them, Houston orders them to abandon mission because the flying debris of a Russian satellite has put them all in jeopardy. Shariff is hit, and the other two discover that their space station is now defunct.
They are low on oxygen and fuel in their back-pack thrusters as they try to wend their way to a Russian space station.
All this happens in a single unbroken shot of nearly 15 minutes in the Mexican director Alfonso Curaón’s magnificent new film Gravity. The shot conveys the vastness, grandeur and emptiness of space like never before. Quite simply, it is the most stunning opening of any film I have ever seen and that list includes almost all of the 100 greatest compiled by various cineastes. As Kowalski would have put it, it’s a hell of a good start! Emanuel Lubezki, the long-time collaborator of Curaón, who also shot this film, deserves as much credit for this as the director.
It might appear difficult that the rest of the film could keep up with this beginning, but the remaining 75 minutes of Gravity not only do just that but even improve on it. That covers the pair’s journey to the Russian space craft, Kowalski cutting himself off into the oblivion on realising that he is a drag on Stone’s chances of survival, and Stone’s sojourn in a Soyuz shuttle to a Chinese space station and thence to the Earth.
The film is a masterpiece of minimalism. It has two-and-a-fraction actors (one of whom disappears half-way through), no action (unless one considers beautifully choreographed tumbles through space as action), a few mesmerising close-ups and little by way of dialogue. The acting is mostly in voice, be it Kowalski’s arresting banter or Stone’s haunting monologue about her imminent end as she tries to manœuver the Chinese craft earthwards. Imagine, the unvisored face of arguably the world’s most handsome man is shown for just about a minute!
The spare style is evident in the back-stories being narrated in a matter-of-fact style in a few sentences, with no bathos, and no flashbacks. The movie cost $100 million to make, and every penny of it is evident in its visual splendour and technical wizardry, including truly awe-inspiring 3-D effects.
Gravity is as much, if not more, about exploring inner spaces as it is about the outer space. The existential conundrum about what makes life livable is at the centre of it. The title itself suggests this because its root word is “grave”. “Grave” can have two meanings: seriousness and the final destination of humans. And they are both very much in focus in the film. Stone has lost a four-year-old daughter to a random accident and has since led a phantom existence. One would imagine that she has little reason to live, as she herself admits, until pushed into doing so by the seemingly jovial and life-loving Kowalski. He tells her it is a Sunday drive in the Soyuz and then in the Chinese craft to Earth. She hangs on to the myriad sounds including dog barks coming from the one-way communication radio from the Chinese ground control, because that is better than the terrifying loneliness of space.
Curaón also delivers another important message: whether in the spacecrafts or in the space suit, Stone eventually faces suffocation and extinction. It is only when she sheds the suit after her splashdown that she is able to come to the surface. In the final scene, she steps on a sandy shore, shorn of her space-travel accoutrement, scooping up a fistful of earth, saying nothing. That, to me, is the most fitting climax to this epic of triumphant, if vulnerable, human spirit.
