I am in pain - sheer mental pain - the kind of pain that makes your heart feel nothing but your mind explode. So what do I do to fix that? I go ahead and watch 3-Iron. Oh yes! Apparently surrealism alleviates my pain, or so I think. It aggravates and alleviates pain at the same time perhaps. So anyway, after a good afternoon's sleep I watched it in a calm temperament, took a shower to calm myself further, and then decided to write - as if my thoughts and feelings after watching/hearing something that affects me are important enough to record, but there we are - we are all self-important little beings.
The story is rather simple if you think about it. He hits her, she gets bruised, she meets drifter, they drift together, things go wrong, things are put right, and you are left to imagine if they stay right. I always feel for the "him" in question. I know some equivalent people who do not hit or abuse, and yet fall short in some way or the other, but that is just one of the sad realities of life. We contemplate, we cry, we move on. So what is so special about yet another affair-based film that is not even in a language that I know! Oh WAIT! It IS in a language that I know - it is in Silence, mostly. Makes you realize, once again (assuming silent films have not totally been forgotten yet), how emotions do not need voices, and how a film can do without words that are spoken, as long as the pictures speak to you. When I think about her, I sense a lot of helplessness. I do not see myself in her, though at times I feel I am expected to. She gets hurt and takes the best escape route - she gets love and affection in the process, and also experiences some much-needed thrill that comes with the risky choice (not that I think she ever had a choice. When you move from good to better, you are making a choice. When you move from non-existence to thrill, it is plain survival).
The drifter...how I love him. I am not even sure if he is human. He sets things right, fixes homes, and stays as long as he is needed. He works as an invisible God of some kind, and she makes him lose his invisibility. She compels him to come out into the open, and she ruins his world for sometime. He gets discovered time and again, with the final blow delivered by her choice to enter the apartment of a dead man. At this point I had begun to wonder whether I was moving from surreal to crime, as far as genres go. The arrival of policemen, pressing of charges, serving of jail-time - everything brings it down/back/up to normalcy as far as real life goes. Not surprisingly, the amount of dialogue increases considerably. But things get better...and the invisibility returns. He comes back to her, almost like a part of her imagination, as no one else can see him. Though I know that pain and suffering are intrinsic requirements in a film as this, I cannot but have a juvenile mental tantrum. Why oh why did she not begin by telling her husband she loved him, and let her invisible guardian angel stay with her in the unexplored realms of the world? Why bring in all the pain - physical and otherwise? I suppose one needs thrill before settling for calm.
It is difficult to conclude this post without mentioning two very touching , even exciting, sequences - I do not think I will re-watch the whole film, but these two I may watch again. The first one is where the jail-cell becomes his little block of invisibility and illusion - be it scientific (where one can stay away from another's range of vision, at least in theory) or otherwise. The second one is the final scene, where she is alone with him, and joins him...for real or in the mind...and in apparent weightlessness.
Finally (I begin the final paragraph with this emphatic word, because years of essay-writing practice prevented me from knowing better), I do recommend this film. Watch it for the sheer brilliance of silence and art, if not for the dream-versus-reality theme that one often seeks, if only to derive pleasure out of pain.
The story is rather simple if you think about it. He hits her, she gets bruised, she meets drifter, they drift together, things go wrong, things are put right, and you are left to imagine if they stay right. I always feel for the "him" in question. I know some equivalent people who do not hit or abuse, and yet fall short in some way or the other, but that is just one of the sad realities of life. We contemplate, we cry, we move on. So what is so special about yet another affair-based film that is not even in a language that I know! Oh WAIT! It IS in a language that I know - it is in Silence, mostly. Makes you realize, once again (assuming silent films have not totally been forgotten yet), how emotions do not need voices, and how a film can do without words that are spoken, as long as the pictures speak to you. When I think about her, I sense a lot of helplessness. I do not see myself in her, though at times I feel I am expected to. She gets hurt and takes the best escape route - she gets love and affection in the process, and also experiences some much-needed thrill that comes with the risky choice (not that I think she ever had a choice. When you move from good to better, you are making a choice. When you move from non-existence to thrill, it is plain survival).
The drifter...how I love him. I am not even sure if he is human. He sets things right, fixes homes, and stays as long as he is needed. He works as an invisible God of some kind, and she makes him lose his invisibility. She compels him to come out into the open, and she ruins his world for sometime. He gets discovered time and again, with the final blow delivered by her choice to enter the apartment of a dead man. At this point I had begun to wonder whether I was moving from surreal to crime, as far as genres go. The arrival of policemen, pressing of charges, serving of jail-time - everything brings it down/back/up to normalcy as far as real life goes. Not surprisingly, the amount of dialogue increases considerably. But things get better...and the invisibility returns. He comes back to her, almost like a part of her imagination, as no one else can see him. Though I know that pain and suffering are intrinsic requirements in a film as this, I cannot but have a juvenile mental tantrum. Why oh why did she not begin by telling her husband she loved him, and let her invisible guardian angel stay with her in the unexplored realms of the world? Why bring in all the pain - physical and otherwise? I suppose one needs thrill before settling for calm.
It is difficult to conclude this post without mentioning two very touching , even exciting, sequences - I do not think I will re-watch the whole film, but these two I may watch again. The first one is where the jail-cell becomes his little block of invisibility and illusion - be it scientific (where one can stay away from another's range of vision, at least in theory) or otherwise. The second one is the final scene, where she is alone with him, and joins him...for real or in the mind...and in apparent weightlessness.
Finally (I begin the final paragraph with this emphatic word, because years of essay-writing practice prevented me from knowing better), I do recommend this film. Watch it for the sheer brilliance of silence and art, if not for the dream-versus-reality theme that one often seeks, if only to derive pleasure out of pain.
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