LIFE OF PI - QUEERGURU

Academy Winner Director Ang Lee is a masterful storyteller from ‘The Ice Storm’ to ‘Brokeback Mountain’ he never fails to totally engage our imagination with the magnificent and moving films he make. This time out he has taken the award-winning global best-selling novel by Yann Martel and turned into a phenomenal visual delight.

The story begins in 1977 in Pondichery a small town in India settled by French Colonists where Pi’s family run a small zoo. The young boy had been named Piscine after a famous French Swimming Pool but all his schoolmates mercilessly teased him by calling him ‘pee’ so he adopts Pi as his name after demonstrating to his class the mathematical constant of the same name. It later seems the perfect name for a boy who refuses to accept no limitations. As a highly inquisitive 14 year old he investigates different religions with such zeal that this young Hindu boy decides to be a Muslim and a Christian too.

The zoo went broke after the political situation in the country deteriorated and his father decides that they and the animals should set sail for a new life in Canada. The ship they travel on sinks but Pi manages to escape in a lifeboat with just an zebra for company. They pick up a floating orangutan next day as well as a hyena, but they don’t make naturally good companions and the hyena makes bloody work of the other two animals as Pi manages to struggle for safety. That is far from the worse of his problems as all this time an adult Bengal tiger has been lurking under the covers of the boat and he soon appears to stake his claim as the master of that small craft.

For the next 227 days the teenage boy and the tiger named Richard Parker (after the Hunter who captured him) are reluctant travelling companions. Pi strings together a makeshift raft that he attaches to the lifeboat as safe haven for himself whilst the hungry and petrified tiger prowls the boat. With the aid of the lifeboat’s rations and supplies an ingenious Pi learns to survive most of the elements but it his calm lateral thinking that helps him most as he thinks through a risky plan to ‘tame’ Richard Parker so that they can both survive together.

The most significant part is that there is no attempt by Lee to sentimentalize the tiger at all, and the relationship between it and the boy never ever ceases to be anything other than an unnatural fragile peace that may break at any time. Even though we may know the truth is that Richard Parker is the creation of some amazing backroom CGI whizz kids, trust me he, and the danger he posed, looked scarily real every single second. Lee and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda in fact deserve very high praise indeed for ensuring that the technological wizardry they used to tell their tale really enlivened and truly enhanced it without just being the whole focus of the movie as it probably would have done in a less safe pair of hands. And for once, 3D seemed a perfect fit for the telling of this magical tale rather than just another add-on marketing tool.

Lee has framed the story of the journey at the beginning and at the end with Pi, now a grown man and settled in Canada, relating it all to an inquisitive English writer. He warns that this is a story which he guarantees will help him find God. When he finishes the narrative, Pi then relates another very short but totally different version of him being castaway that he had offered the sceptical Inspectors investigating the Shipwreck. In the end they chose the first version because as Pi said, that is how it goes with God.

Aside from the part that Pi’s faith was major factor in his survival which doesn’t sit completely easy with me on a personal level, it is undoubtedly a fantastical achievement that one wishes was really true. The young unknown actor who played Pi was wonderfully convincing (just like Richard Parker) but credit where it is due, and it is to the genius of Mr Lee who made this miraculous fantasy the most perfect delight and such a sheer joy to be drawn into.

★★★★★★★★★