LOVE SHOVE AND PAPERMAN PART II

Including a love story in the narrative of a film is no great achievement. I don't mean this derogatorily  but in a sense that even films which have the most experimental of plots and filming techniques very often feature love stories as a main or sub-plot. Take for example films like Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) - extremely experimental in its story-telling, but it is essentially a love story. Even a film like the recent Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) - a film whose main theme is violence and racial discrimination - is basically the love quest of Django to find Broomhilda, his lady love. And what of all those suspense-type 70s Hindi films in which  nail-biting climax is often interrupted by a love song with the hero and heroine running around in the Alps? Love, actually, is everywhere.

The genre of films to make the most cash out of this filmy trope is, of course, the romantic comedy. This is one of my favourite genres of films. There's nothing that can be a better mood-lifter than a romantic comedy and a tub of chocolate chip ice-cream. But the romantic comedy is not without its problems. The first of these problems is that it is unfortunately characterized as a "chick-flick" type genre, with the assumption that it could only be of interest to women. This means that lesser films of this type (such as 13 Going on 30, The Wedding Planner, The Proposal, Sweet Home Alabama etc.) will take this a bit too seriously and focus their attention only on the story of a girl looking for the right kind of love and the right kind of man. So there will be no witty banter (like in When Harry Met Sally or You've Got Mail), no crackling chemistry (like in Notting Hill or You've Got Mail again) and no laugh-out-loud sequences (like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones' Diary Part 1 & 2). 

The romantic comedy (especially in recent times) is comfortable with taking the all too familiar route and drawing attention only to the story part in the phrase "love story"; and not saying anything much about the love part. 

But then there are other films which make us think more deeply about this mysterious creature called love. They ask us complex questions like: What is love? Is it an isolated emotion or is it sometimes mixed with other feelings like jealousy, a desire to destroy, friendship, sacrifice and sorrow? How much is society part of our love story and does its attitude count?

 The French film Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012), which also won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, has a heartbreaking take on it. Love here becomes entwined with the idea of death and mercy. I don't want to give away any plot points, but this film tries to imagine what it's like for someone to watch a long-term partner suffer and slowly become a shadow of themselves. It poses a difficult question when it asks to what extent one could go in order to reduce a loved one's pain, and also one's own pain in watching them suffer and inch towards death. 

In another film, As Good As Gets (James L. Brooks, 1997), love is as eccentric and whimsical as it characters. But it is also about acceptance of this craziness and imperfection. Closer home, a film like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 1999) tells us that the love that lasts is the one where you are willing to do things for your partner, for their happiness, even if sometimes this doesn't involve your own happiness and comfort. William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet (and its various interpretations on film) complicates things for us when he suggests that love and death may be intricately linked, and somehow love is complete and fulfilling and ideal only in death. Love is unearthly - never to be attained in life, but only in death. Another complex form of love - obsession - can be seen in Darr (Yash Chopra, 1994). Love is not innocent, beautiful or magical here, but destructive and neurotic. In a film like Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) love is transgressive and reaches far beyond any societal conventions.

Granted that such films cannot be as charming and as easy to digest as romantic comedies, but then if love itself can sometimes be incomprehensible, difficult, amusing and vague, can't films about love be so too?

LOVE-SHOVE AND PAPERMAN

So, the dust has settled on the golden statuettes, and the designer dresses have been stored away, never to be worn again. All that could be written about the Oscar 2013 has already been written, so I will not dwell upon how good or bad, or entertaining or boring the ceremony was. Though, I must say that host Seth McFarlane and the scriptwriters made sure that the whole world got to know how sexist Hollywood can be. Alongside meaty and diverse roles for women in films such as Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook and the French film, Amour; McFarlane, no doubt in a moment of very bad judgement, felt that it would be fun to do a musical number featuring actresses'...ahem, boobs. And he mentioned Jodie Foster's name on the list of women who have undressed on film as well, which I feel was his biggest mistake. The film that he referred to is The Accused (Jonathan Kaplan, 1988), in which Foster is nude because she had just been gang-raped. Not only is this an extremely courageous role, it is also a brave, brave film that depicts a serious and sensitive issue with great skill and brings the point home. So, although I found most of the Oscars blah, this, according to me was Oscar 2013's lowest moment.

But this blog entry is not about Oscar's low moments, but a high point in the ceremony as well as for film. The Oscar for the Best Animated Short Film this year went to a film called Paperman directed by John Kahrs and produced by Disney. This film has been trending on Facebook for quite a while, so if you haven't watched it, you can catch it on YouTube.

The film tells a simple love story set in the America of the 1950s - a man who meets a woman by chance, loses her and then dedicates all his energies to finding her again. Much has already been written about the film's superior animation technique, which combines traditional hand drawn images and modern animation technology. But the film is not just that. It takes you beyond the images, characters and events on the screen into a larger world of ideas, and makes you think about the nature of love. And this is where the strength of the film lies. 

Many stories, especially on film are love stories, but very few are about love - that speculate on what love might be and how it could be defined. Along with a plotline that depicts a love story, very few films really feature a sub-text on the mechanisms (if there is such a thing) of love. In Hindi cinema, especially, most of the films are essentially love stories. A boy and a girl meet at the beginning, then go through life's many tribulations and finally end up together at the end (happily ever after, of course). In such a case, love becomes a precursor to marriage and social stability; the sustenance of the family unit - a means to an end. Which is why films like Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (Shakun Batra, 2012) come as a breath of fresh air, where the two protagonists reject any traditional happy endings. Which is why it is nearly impossible to see any love story in which the protagonists are homosexual.

Such films also presume that the process and psychology of falling in love is the same for everyone. You meet, you woo, and bam, you're "in a relationship". But is this how it happens for everyone? No matter how universal the emotion, is this how we all fall in love? 

In Paperman, love is magic. Something that destiny ordains and guides us towards, even if this might be against our best efforts. The paper planes in this film, then, become signs, that won't leave the man alone until he finds the woman that he so helplessly has fallen in love with at first sight. Even the title "Paperman" reminds us of superhero films with similar titles like "Spiderman", "Superman" and "Batman". So, love also becomes heroic - something that makes superheroes and superheroines out of all of us. 'Cause sometimes that's what love feels like, doesn't it? That if we have it, we could conquer the world and catch bullets in our teeth.

Love is such a major preoccupation for most of us that it is impossible to dedicate only one blog to it. There's more about films and love, then, on the other side of this blog... .