I wallowed in a state of ennui. Life was very insipid that Tuesday afternoon until I switched on the TV for some mindless white noise, and HBO was playing Inception. Leonardo jolts awake in the plane and is surprised to see his teammates around him. Did they succeed? Are they still dreaming? Hans Zimmer’s Time starts to play in the background as Leo walks down the airport and we feel happy for some reason. He enters home and sees his children playing on the porch. He spins the top on the table and rushes to hug them. The camera zooms on the top. It wobbles slightly. You pray for it to fall. The screen blanks out. I gasped.
This flitting sojourn in Nolan’s classic sent my brain tizzy with excitement, as it started writing its own screenplay on dreams, reality and life in between. The curse of the ennui had finally been lifted.
The other day, I asked my mother about my first movie at the theatre, as a baby. Had I asked her what colour frock I wore on my first birthday or if I bawled or behaved on my first day of school, she wouldn’t have been too shocked nor would she have jogged her memory so much. I was hoping she would name a Kamal Haasan blockbuster of the 1980s, reaffirming my belief that I was always a film connoisseur. What she did name is irrelevant now, but I grew on a staple of regional and English movies from childhood and cinema was my greatest therapy.
Our family is a bunch of devout Kamal Haasan fans. So much that he is like a member of our kin. Every avatar of his reminds my mom of someone in the house. Demented lover, poor communist, choreographer with suicidal tendencies, we have them all. The tryst with cinema had only one aberration though; my grandfather who supposedly sat beside Rajinikanth in a flight and failed to recognise him even after the superstar introduced himself. Earliest memories of watching movies date back to summer holidays squandered away rolling on mattresses in front of Doordarshan’s Saturday-night specials or at a cousin’s community open-air theatre with packed tiffin dhabbas. We watched robots come alive, kids getting locked in their houses and the great escapade of prisoners in awe. One month of jaundice and missing school went by without much complaint, thanks to the re-runs of old movies, which I devoured lying sprawled on the hall sofa.
Adolescence is best remembered by the A R Rahman phase. Road trips meant marathon singing-along sessions till the tapes screeched out of agony. Then came the Titanic craze. We stuck posters of the legendary ship pose, and shed copious tears when Jack died. I admit I am embarrassed about it today but I’m sure Di Caprio is more. Deploring romance in books, I feasted on mind numbing rom-coms, smitten by bumping onto a cute stranger, realising the love for an old school friend, the climax at the airport. You know the works. Luckily, with age came sanity and the ability to discern the good from the bad, the realistic from the fantasy and define pure cinema. And when I did, a whole new beautiful world opened up, giving me a peek into the fascinating lives of Iran, Germany, Korea and Argentina.
The good thing about great cinema is that inspires you to watch more. The last 10 minutes of Inception set the right mood to watch Court, India’s entry for the upcoming Oscars. With its lingering camera work, this extremely deft and subtle satirical take on the Indian legal system is the kind of movie that runs in your head as an afterthought long after the credits roll. The more you mull lover it, the more you remember the nuances and deeper it caves in releasing all the pent up remorse. Films graduated from being entertainment, escapism or wish fulfilment into catharsis.
I’ve learnt more about cinema from teaching it to an enthusiastic bunch of college students than studying and understood life better from Woody Allen, The Motorcycle Diaries and the friendship of Andy
Dufresne and Red then I can ever hope to.