Walks on a tight rope
One of those typical art movies where you’d know how its going to be and that’s how it ended out to be. It had the marks of Satyajit Ray and felt as such in few scenes but the complete film couldn’t be as good as a Ray film. Nevertheless, it’s a decent watch, at least for the beautiful frames.
The film follows a story of an eccentric aristocrat, a tightrope walking nomad and not so sane postman. At some point they all mingle together. The aristocrat’s story has a group who are interested in shooting a documentary of him shooting a tiger. One amongst them has an affair with the aristocrat’s wife. The wife is a lonely frustrated woman because of the aristocrat’s antics. We don’t really know why she’s frustrated till the climax, where we could assume it somewhat. Anyways she was brilliant in her role. True femme fatale. Plump, sexy and horny, all together.
The second story involving the tightrope walking girl and her parents were the saddest of all and was most human. That alone could have been a great emotional story. The fantasy of the little kid about her future fortunes plus the hopelessness of their parents were so tragic especially when we come to know that they have no respite. On one side we think about parents not letting their children study and here we see parents who are willing to take an orphan child so that they could make her work and live out of it. But the point to be noted here is they’re only trying to exist not live life. And that’s how hard it is when you see from their angle.
The third is the most philosophical one which involves the postman who’s fed up with life and lives on trees. The shots of monkeys reminded me of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ but its something which could have been as great as the monk story of ‘Ship of Theseus’ but fails really to kick off. May be the director wanted it to be as primitive as the primitive beings.
There are various junctures at which all three stories collaborate but we can’t really define why do they do so, maybe there are much deeper prospects but on the outline wasn’t very interesting. Finally, the aristocrat uses the little girl as per the title but that looked all of a sudden.
I couldn’t really savor ‘Tope’ with whole heart but bits and pieces of it were nice, especially the frames.
constantscribbles 