Thursday, April 2, 2009

Failuer of 'The Reader'

It’s not the viewer, but actually the ‘Reader’ himself who fails to understand Hanna Schmitz.

It’s quite natural that in his teen age Michael will not care to understand Hanna completely. But after becoming a quite matured-adult law student Michael is hardly interested to investigate into Hanna’s life. Instead he quite satisfied with his epiphany in the court that Hanna cant really read, but he barely goes further to understand her involvement in the holocaust.
If Michael, ‘The Reader’ himself is not interested in understanding his teenage affair, it’s absolutely not justifiable to expect it from the viewer. In this context actually, The Reader fails to hold viewer’s interest in the story.
Reading aloud the stories to teenage love is justifiable, but continuing the same activity in 40s is not at all matured. That’s why the script is completely at mess in later half of the film.
Merely strolling through the lanes of concentration camps is actually misled investigation that Michael carries into Hanna’s life.
In other words Michael reads Hanna but fails to read between the lines!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Why 'Dev D' and not 'Devdas'?

The first question arose in mind when I heard that Dev D is based on Sharatchandra’s Devdas was why the film is titled as ‘Dev D’. Well if the director might have thought that the title would be creative enough to attract audience to the theatres, let me clarify, personally for me the only compulsion to watch Dev D was Anurag Kashyap being its director and not the title of the film.

But the ‘title mystery’ got solved once I watched the movie. Anurag’s protagonist ‘Dev’ doesn’t become ‘complete’ Devdas as in the end, he decides to lead his life in positive manner with the help of ‘Chanda’ (In the final scene Dev wears Chanda’s helmet for protection while driving and heads towards court to confess his misdeed).

Anurag’s Dev who almost treads the path of Sharatchandra’s Devdas, finally chooses not lead it further and evades himself from becoming the ‘Devdas, ’the classic tragic hero. Thus he remains just Dev D.