Oscars 2022: In search of life’s deeper meanings

With Khabar Lahariya opting to dissociate itself from Writing With Fire, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s documentary feature on three of its journalists, stating that it doesn’t capture the complexity of the organisation’s work, the fate of the film at the 94th Academy Awards now hangs in balance. This, when just the other day, the first ever Indian nominee in the category was looking like a serious contender.

However, it has tough challenge in Stanley Nelson’s documentary Attica, that captures the prison uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York back in September 1971. Or the other American frontrunner, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

Then there is an unusual India connect in another favourite in the same category—Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee about a gay man, Amin Nawabi’s journey from Afghanistan to becoming a refugee in Denmark. There is a short sequence early in the film where two young Kabul girls are shown trading playing cards with Bollywood star portraits on them; a Vivek Mushran one exchanged for a winking Anil Kapoor.

The Danish film also happens to be one of the final five in the international feature category, arguably the most well fought and featuring the most compelling works from the world over. On the face of it Flee is about making a heart-breaking but necessary getaway from the dangers at home in Afghanistan to starting from a scratch amidst several insecurities, inequities and uncertainties and building life anew in a seemingly safe European space. It’s about what all it takes for an asylum to truly become home and hearth.

However, relevant as it might be given the refugee crisis coming to fore again with the Russia-Ukraine war, Flee isn’t just about jumping international territorial boundaries. It’s also about breaking the shackles, venturing on a journey within and homing in on one’s true identity and finding happiness and peace with one’s own self.

This metaphor of an inner exploration of the spirit and the soul is what unites the other four nominees as well. Bhutan’s first-ever Oscar nominee, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom tagline is “Find what you seek, in a place you never expected.” A young teacher, Ugyen (Sherab Dorji), is sent off by the government authorities to teach at a remote, high-altitude school in Lunana, only to find himself recalibrating life. It’s about letting go of the illusory ambitions and finding hope and happiness in simplicity, togetherness, companionship and community. A message that seems to have reached out to and resonated with the world left broken and fragmented in the wake of Covid-19.

Joachim Trier’s Norwegian film, The Worst Person in the World, also has a similarly restive protagonist, Julie (Renate Reinsve) who we witness trying to seek control of herself and her relationships over the twelve chapters that the film is divided into. We see her transitioning from a medical student to pursuing psychology to discovering a passion for photography.

A similar storm brews on the personal front with her choosing to date her own professor and then deciding to live with a comic artiste, Aksel (Anders Danielsen), fifteen years her senior to eventually getting disillusioned with him as well and moving on and ahead, further with Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). There is the baggage of estranged parents and broken family that she carries within herself while negotiating the pressures from others about starting a family of her own. It’s also about learning to cope with loss and grief but carrying on living. There are no arrivals for Julie, just as there aren’t for any human being. The only certainty is that of the persistence, continuity and constancy of the wheel of evolution.

The Italian entry, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, is said to be an autobiographical record of the filmmaker’s own youth in the 80s Naples. Fabietto (Filipo Scotti) is a drifter, caught between the passion for music and Maradona and unsure of what he wants to truly pursue in life. A boundless tragedy strikes Fabietto, forcing him to grow up overnight. Fellini and filmmaking come to him, and life appears to be forming a full circle—uncertain but hopeful.

The most complex and contemplative journey would be the one portrayed in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Japanese film, Drive My Car. Based on a short story from Haruki Murakami’s collection Men Without Women, it’s about people on a road to accepting not just their own true selves but also reconciling with relationships that would have been painful but pivotal to their very existence. It’s about hurt and betrayal, regrets in the face of loss and grief and a restless quest for peace. The long and languid film uncoils life and its essential meaning, thread by thread.

Actor and theatre director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a writer of TV dramas, haven’t found closure within themselves for the death of their only daughter. It takes their relationship on an unusual ground where sex becomes a tool for fertile imagination and artistic inspiration and also a means to manipulation and deception on Oto’s part. However, her sudden death leaves Kafuko groping to make sense of the unfaithfulness even as he is unable to fill the yawning gap she has left in his life.

We find him two years later in Hiroshima in a residency to mount a multi-lingual production of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. He is still living with Oto’s memories, practising his lines of Uncle Vanya with her voice recording on the tape. It’s at the residency that Oto also comes back to him through her former collaborator and possibly a lover Koji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) who comes in for auditions and is chosen by Kafuko to play the lead. Also, much against his wishes Kafuko is saddled with a young driver for his car, Misaki Watari (Toko Miura).

Long conversations and encounters with Takatsuki are a mode to come to terms marginally with Oto’s secret life beyond Kafuko. That the two men have both been in pain because they loved her. Meanwhile, Watari’s narration of an abusive childhood helsp Kafuko strike a rare bond with the girl as old as what his daughter would have been, had she been alive.

The typical Japanese politeness and propriety in Drive My Car hides storms within. The serenity harbours the sinister. There is a togetherness shared by Kafuko, Watari and Takatsuki: they are all broken and damaged within.

Kafuko and Watari carry the guilt of contributing to the end of their wife and mother respectively. And they also hold the key to reconciliation with the indecipherable people that these two were. Perhaps we just need to accept them for what they are. In trying to understand others, it’s more important to dive deep within one’s own self, the film seems to tell us.

Alternating between the reality of Kafuko’s life and the performance of Uncle Vanya, between the many meaningful silences and pauses, Hamaguchi’s modern classic is strewn with many such life lessons. Specially the one that keeps getting repeated—about the finality of death, about not being able to reclaim, talk to or see those who mattered for you dearly.

All that’s left for those who survive is to remember the dead. That life might be hard, but we will have to endure the trials that fate sends our way. That when the last hour comes, we will go quietly. That we will find rest eventually when the time comes. But till then we have to follow the only truth that there is: “We must live our lives”.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)