avatar. beaches of agnes. man on wire. the return

decidedly under whelmed by the pull-out-all-the-stops spectacle of avatar, i am not sure as to why some of the mega-budget did not go into writing a tighter script- or even imagining an alternate world a little more creatively. after all aren’t pandora’s strange blue people merely another version of hollywood’s neo-colonial obsession with the purity of untouched nature and those tribals who have this supposedly intimate connection with it. weirdly (and typically) this romanticism against technology is played out through a cinematic shock and awe juggernaut like you haven’t seen before. if only the imagining of the ‘other’ world went beyond the 'saawariya' blue and the floating mountains with some jurassic park creatures thrown in for thrills.

in ‘beaches of agnes’, agnes varda looks back on her life through the beaches that she knew growing up. often moving in the beginning, the film traced her history thorugh the people she knew, anecdotes about people she knew and staged installations thorugh which she wanders on the beaches. unashamedly sentimental, especially when it comes ot speaking about her late husband, some parts, i must admit made me cringe. but isn’t that going to be so when someone speaks straight ot the camera about the obsessions that have driven them so far. two images stand out from the film. the first, right at the beginning when a complex mirror game si set up on a beach; and the other at the end when she takes us to a pavilion completely made of film strips.

the build up to the tightrope walk between the two towers of the world trade center is described way too long- interspersed with stories of and from the team of madmen who planned it. thankfully in ‘man on wire’ 9/11 is not mentioned, except elliptically. the whole film is a straightforward talking heads documentary with a few staged historical shots hrown in for good measure. but everything does not seem to matter when he steps out into the sky and hangs suspended over new york, or between the towers at notre dame or from the sydney bridge. this is a strange kind of terrorism that makes beauty awe inspiring. i don’t mean to make too harebrained a parallel but was it a similar kind of feeling when we sat and looked at the wtc collapse? disbelief at the obsessions that leads ordinary men to such extremes to challenge the status quo?

the ‘return’ seemed to be an allegory. from the authoritarian father who has disappeared from the lives of the two boys and returns to teach them to be men, to the journey across the water to a deserted island where more tests of manhood are waiting, to the fear that leads to the tragedy at the end and the water beneath which everything is buried. maybe these were over-readings prompted by the few tarkovsky references thrown i at the beginning; maybe not.