Monday Movie Review: Fire
Fire (1996) 8/10
Sita (Nandita Das), a young Indian bride, comes to live with her husband, his brother and sister-in-law, and their mother. Soon the sisters-in-law find themselves drawn to each other.
I don’t know if writer/director Deepa Mehta, an Indian expatriate, knows country music at all, but when watching Fire I was repeatedly reminded of the song Angel From Montgomery:
If dreams were lightning
Thunder was desire
This old house would have burned down
A long time ago
The family in Fire lives in a house that would surely burn down.
Netflix has Fire categorized as “Gay and Lesbian,” and certainly it is the story of an affair between two women. But everyone in Fire is dealing with desire, repressed and expressed, and its consequences.
It is silence that rules the roost, as personified by the matriarch of the house, the elderly mother of the two husbands, who has been rendered mute by a stroke. Biji rings a bells, nods or shakes her head, but cannot speak, bearing silent witness to all that goes on in her home. And a lot is going on! Radha’s husband Ashok appears to be saintly, but his obsession with serving his guru extracts a price from his marriage. Sita’s husband Jatin has not given up the girlfriend he had before consenting to an arranged marriage. He barely looks at his frustrated bride. And the servant, Mundu, seethes with sexual frustration, and doesn’t mind expressing it in front of Biji, since she can’t complain.
Some movie fans wonder if Sita and Radha (Shabana Azmi) are lesbians, or are bisexuals, or are driven to each other simply out of loneliness. That may be beside the point, and beyond the scope of the film. Sita tells Radha that their language has no words for their love; the women are in a process of discovering their love and their identity, and are not really at the point yet of categorizing it.
More important is the constriction that runs their lives, and their efforts to free themselves of it. At one point Ashok tells Radha that his mother is ringing her bell. About to answer the call, as she always does, Radha looks at her husband and says “Why don’t you go?” “Of course!” he says, and goes to his mother. It had occurred to neither, before, that Radha was other than the servant, the one who responded, the one who fulfilled needs without expressing her own; but Sita and their affair has changed all that.
I don’t think that Fire is a brilliant movie. It introduces its family too quickly; it is rather hard to determine that Ashok and Jatin are brothers, for instance. Nandita Das is a mediocre actress, although Shabana Azmi makes up for it with a luminous performance. But the story is so powerful, with its silences so expressive, that I found myself captivated, regardless. There are still too few Indian movies that have naturalism and immediacy on their side, and the way that Fire slaps the face of tradition, both in India and in Indian film, is striking (no pun intended).
Beautiful Mornings and Lovely Days
Whenever I think to myself, “It’s a beautiful morning” (or “beautiful day” or “what a beautiful…”) I must sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Because the corn is as high as a elephant’s eye. Just is.
On the other hand, if I think “It’s a lovely day” (or any variation thereof), I must sing “Isn’t it a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?“. Must. Sing.
So, what songs must you sing?
Story of P.
While in Sao Paulo, I did a bunch of Tarot readings. I did five in a row that hit on all cylinders, just dead-on stuff: “You’re in a legal conflict with a man who has disappointed you, and you’re involved in athletics” were my first words to a woman who then revealed she was a gym teacher in the midst of a divorce.
Then P. comes in and I read the first cards.
“No” she says.
I read the next cards.
“Not at all, I just don’t relate to that.”
Next cards.
“In fact,” she says, “It’s the opposite.”
You get that fear in the pit of your stomach. Every reader knows that fear. » Read more..
Revictimization
I kind of stumbled across this amazing post on Swede & Czech. It’s about KT Mcfarland, a Republican candidate for Senator who is sharing honestly about being abused as a child and about being estranged from her brother, who died of AIDS.
Look, I’m not voting for a Republican in November. Seriously not. But I admire this woman’s candor, and I also feel for her despair at the way she’s being attacked for her candor (emphasis added):
McFarland said recent news accounts about her violent upbringing and how it may have contributed to her brother’s death constituted “another form of abuse,” making her wonder if her quest to unseat Clinton was really worth it.
Swede & Czech sums it up beautifully:
Can I see where she equates the treatment that they had as children to the life her brother was leading? Yes. Do I think she is right? Not necessarily. Did she do the right thing in abandoning her brother? Absolutely not. Is it my place to make her understand that? No. Not with the demons that she has to face about her past.
It’s called revictimization. Let’s make sure that anyone from an abusive background is forced to either lie or stay out of politics. Because that’s good for our system. » Read more..
Apparently, I’m just never done with this Pledge of Allegience thing
Per Waveflux at Shakespeare’s Sister (who got it from Atrios) I learn that the normally wonderful Senator Barak Obama is courting the Evangelical vote.
The money quote:
“It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,'” he said.
Dear Senator Obama:
You don’t know fuck-all about what children feel. Just don’t. Turns out children are sophisticated and intelligent and capable of noticing all sorts of nuance for which you are apparently unwilling to credit them.
Secondly, it’s not about feeling oppressed. We don’t determine Constitutionality or civil liberties based on feeling. Women didn’t have to feel oppressed when they lacked the right to vote in order to deserve that right. Blacks don’t have to feel disenfranchised in order to need the Voting Rights Act. Fuck you and your patronizing and purposely distracting talk about feelings. Just fuck you.
And in response to those who suggest that “under God” is not specific to a religion, and is just generic, allow me to add that “God” is specific to monotheism. I don’t worship “God,” I worship Gods and Goddesses. “Under” is also a non-generic term, locating “God” in a “heaven” or other world above. The U.S. is not one nation under Gaia, for instance, but one nation all over the top of Gaia, sort of left-breastish.
Can you tell what’s missing?
This morning, I
- Got the coffee out of the fridge
- Washed the plastic filter holder
- Put the plastic filter holder in the coffee maker
- Washed the coffee pot
- Put the coffeepot in the coffee maker
- Measured the coffee
- Put the coffee in the coffee maker
This Way Lies Madness
Okay, this has a lot to do with the way Hollywood processes faces. But Geez Pete!
Separated at Birth?
Okay, you tell me: Are you 100% sure which is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and which is Cillian Murphy?
Young Brazilians and their moms
Continuing my thinking about Brazilian Wicca.
The Pagans I met in Sao Paulo were notably young. I’d say ninety percent of them were under the age of 35, and most were in their early-to-mid-twenties.. Many were college students.
I am reminded that in the 1970s and 80s, American Paganism was very much a Baby Boomer phenomenon. I recall one year (’89? ’90?) I looked around a festival and thought, ‘If this movement just ages with us, it will die.’ The next year, not only did I see a massive influx of younger Pagans, but older ones as well, so that now, American Pagan events almost always show a full life-cycle range.
Brazil isn’t there yet, but I see no reason it won’t get there.
Another thing I noticed was, in the small group of people I spoke with (the ones who spoke English), fully three people had their moms with them, including the organizer. None of the moms, I think, were Pagan. This is a remarkable level of acceptance, not something I’ve seen in the U.S. I wonder if the prevalence of Candomblé influences tese Brazilians to be more open to a variety of religious paths.
