The Life of Pi

It's been quite a while since I saw a film. Yesterday I did. T'was an unusual film, certainly not the kind that you see, got your senses bombarded for some 90-110 minutes and then have a coffee and croissant and forget. It was a film based on a novel called "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel, produced and directed by Ang Lee (Broken Back Hill).

As the film opens, we see in 3-D first one kind of animal or bird or reptile after another in a tropical zoo and finally Charlie Parker, a 450 pound Bengal Tiger which got its name because the registration official made a mistake and filled in the name of the seller of the beast in the docket for the name of the beast itself!  We see young Pi (who himself got his name because one of his father's relatives (a business associate in the novel) who is a swimming champion helped the infant Pi get the water out of his lungs by grabbing him by his feet and dangling him in the air upside down as a result of which his father Santosh Patel (Adil Hussan), a cultured Indian who speaks fluent French, was so impressed that he named him after the "Piscine (Swimming Pool) Molitor" in Paris, which his relative thought the most beautiful swimming pool in the world because its waters was so crystal clear). Young Pi himself was later taught to be an excellent swimmer. Then we were shown a scene in which young Pi, out of childish curiosity, tried, with his brother Pavi Patel (Ayan Khan) to place a chunk of meat in front of Charlie Parker's cage to see him feeding but was stopped in the nick of time when his father stepped in to warn him that beasts are not like human and we should never treat them the same way as we treat people and proceeded to teach young Pi a lesson he would never forget: a goat was tied to the front of cage and in no time, it was attacked and torn to pieces by Charlie Parker and dragged away to devour behind the walls. 

The story is that of the adventures of the teenage Pi with Charlie Parker. When the Indian government announced that they would cease to subsidise his father's zoo, Pi's father decided to sell it, bring all the animals to Canada which he planned to sell and then settle down with his mother Gita Patel (Tabu) and his brother Ravi. They boarded a Japanese cargo vessel Tsimtsum and were on the way to Canada but met a terrible storm in mid-Pacific during which the ship sunk and young Pi lost all his family. At the last moment amidst huge ocean swells, young Pi, the only survivor, got on to a 26 foot lifeboat, on to which jumped first a zebra, then a hyena, then an orang utan and finally Charlie Parker. In the course of the drifting of the life-boat on to the shores of Mexico, where his lifeboat eventually landed, we see how Pi learned to survive, on canned water and filtered seawater, emergency rations, and freshly caught sea life, using the survival guide he found on the life boat which gave him various tips on how to do so, stressing above all, one should persists and never to lose hope and how he co-exists with the beast Charlie Parker, alternatively in fear and affection, how Charlie Parker depended on Pi, how Pi learned to tame it, how keeping Charlie Parker alive became the principal motive for his own will to survive, how when they landed on shore, Charlie Parker stepped ashore, walked from the beach into the forest without turning his head around even once to look back at the completely exhausted Pi, lying on the sand beside the lifeboat which he managed to pull ashore with the last ounce of his strength: something which broke his heart. In the course of his drifting across the Pacific, Pi discovers a floating island without any soil in which trees grow directly out from other trees and where there is a huge colony of meerkats upon which Charlie Parker could feast himself at will. Pi sleeps on a make shift bed on a tree besides a freshwater pond in which dead fishes would mysteriously appear in the morning. One day, Pi finds human teeth in a fruit. He learns that even the trees on that island can be cannibals.In fact this is only one version of the story.

We learned that when he recounted this story in the Mexican hospital to two Japanese insurance investigators ( officers from the Japanese Ministry of Transport in the novel) to find out the cause of the sinking of the vessel, they refused to believe Pi because they thought there could not be an island full of meerkats in the middle of nowhere floating on banana-like plants and not appearing in any map. So Pi gave them another version: a version in which 4 people got on to the life boat, the animal like French cook instead of a hyena, a Buddhist sailor instead of a zebra, and his mother Gita instead of the orangutan in addition to himself. In both versions, the hyena attacked first the zebra, then the oran utan and but there's no Charlie Parker who emerged from under a canvas cover at the back of the boat and disposed of the hyena. Is the Bengal tiger another side of Pi himself? In the second version, after having nothing to eat, the French cook ate the Buddhist sailor and then attacked his mother who was pushed on to the sea where she was devoured by sharks and then apparently felt so bad after seeing the carnage that he allowed Pi to kill him without resistance. All this came out when Pi was sought by a Canadian writer back in Canada who whilst having a holiday in Ponticherry, a former French and then a British colony and now Indian, to relieve himself of the gloom after having written a second novel which he decided was so bad that he did not want it published and there came to know of Pi's existence through a Mamaji (in India the word "ji" is an honorific title attached to the end of a person's name added on to the name of someone whom one has great respect) whom he met at a café . He was told that Pi , who from a very young age, decided to follow all gods: first the god Vishnu of Hinduism, then Allah the God of Islam, then the Catholic God and who then decided to worship all three at the same time, finally managed to find the ultimate God right in the middle of the Pacific.  After recounting the tale of his survival to the Canadian writer, Pi asked him, which version he liked better. The writer mumbled something indistinct but merely asked if he could write Pi's story, a permission which Pi freely gave. At that point, we hear the sound of Pi's wife calling for Pi, who told the Canadian writer that he was now married with two children and a "cat"! ,

The story itself falls into the genre of tales of survival but it does raise interesting questions that bear reflection, questions like "what is civilization? how strong are our civilized values in the face of death in the struggle to stay alive? what is the difference between a human being and a beast? what is good? what is evil? what or who is God and if he exists, how does he treat us? Under what circumstances are we permitted to kill? What is truth? What is illusion? Can we survive without some kind of religious illusions?" . To me, this is a not just a tale of survival. It's a moral allegory. And with what spectacular photography and computer generated effects this allegory film is made ! I love Claudio Miranda's magical camera work and the music by Mychael Danna.

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