GODLY SLICE OF PI

MOVIE
Life Of Pi
Suraj Sharmam, Irrfan Khan
Director Ang Lee
Review Ray Chan


It takes the pedigree of an Academy Award-winning director like Ang Lee to have the audacity to tackle what looked like a seemingly impossible literary adaption of Yann Martel's novel.
    Martel's story outlines the life-defining journey of a young man named Pi, whose zookeeping business family decide to travel to Canada from their Indian homeland — lock, stock and menagerie — to escape political problems there.    
    On the way, their cargo ship gets battered by a fierce storm and capsizes.
    Pi manages to find a life boat, which bit by bit takes on various animals from the sinking vessel — a wounded zebra, a noble orangutan, a cackling, self-serving hyena, a regal Bengal tiger — who in the ensuing days turn on each other in the quest to survive.
    Eventually it’s just Pi and the tiger left stuck on the small vessel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a predicament that would test anyone’s sanity.
    To help him endure, Pi digs deep into the recesses of his eclectic convictions that a god exists to keep him alive, and this journey is rendered impeccably by Lee's vision. The colour is electric, with iconic and stunningly sublime shots littered throughout.
    Whether it's magnificent underwater shots of the ship plunging to the watery depths, a grand whale breaching to the skies, or the infinite glacial look of an ocean, Lee's stunning composition is omnipresent, as is the technical wizardry used for the animal stars of the film, which make them wonderfully realistic.
    Veteran Irrfan Khan plays the older Pi, who narrates the tale, while the younger version is represented by Suraj Sharma, who does an impressive job of absorbing the harrowing physical torture without extinguishing his optimism, belief and hope, successfully emoting without any real creatures to play off of.
    If you haven’t read the book, you are in for a treat as you gradually realise the movie is all about symbolism and metaphors.
    As the film nears its end, a rescued Pi tells two versions of his adventures: the animal story and a human interpretation. It’s then that the realisation dawns, if it hasn’t already, that the ragtag group of animals were likely anecdotal manifestations of crew members who clambered on board with Pi.
    After recounting his experiences, Pi asks his rescuers, and indirectly the viewers, which rendition they prefer.
    Pi maintains it was his faith that got him through, and here he provokes a person to believe in the presence of a higher being.
    He is challenging the viewer to consider which version of the world they prefer — the one where we make our own way and suffer through the darkness via self-determination, or the one where we are aided by something greater than ourselves (regardless of which diety we may follow).
    Is the tiger in fact how Pi sees God, who helped him get through adversity when all seemed lost? Is the tiger Pi himself?
    Ultimately, Life of Pi is a beautiful allegory about living with acceptance in the face of the most formidable of adversities.
    The consensus from the hardened investigators interrogating Pi as he recovers is that the animal version is too fanciful to believe, but a much happier one to accept.
    “And so it goes with God,” Pi says as the movie ends.

#lifeofpi