Element that links opposite ends

REMEMBER THE poem by Robert Frost about two roads diverging in the woods? Lines that can provoke life-long speculation on the ``road not taken''?

Intriguingly, two Oscar-nominated films for best (original and adapted) screenplays this year, deal with the pains, problems, paradoxes and puzzles, scattered across the road taken. ``You Can Count On Me'' (Kenneth Lonergan) and ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' (Wang Hui Ling, James Schamus, Tsai Kuo Jung) focus on how our ends are shaped by the choices we make. In both films, the act of choosing a course of action over another, determines character and destiny. As different from each other as mural and miniature, both have screenplays which are incomplete without their visual tracks. (Though the American cameo would convince you much more in the reading than the Asian pageant, an action thriller rammed into the morality play-medieval romance grid.)

``You Can Count on Me'' is a small budget independent film. The text of this first feature of acclaimed playwright and screenplay writer, now collaborating on a script with Martin Scorsese (executive producer of Lonergan's debut film), was developed from a one-act play. Not surprisingly, it has more resonances and tenuous glints than the simpler verbal grooves of the latter for flamboyant duels.

This quiet venture has brought Laura Linney an Oscar nomination for playing Sammy, a single working parent in small town, Upstate New York. Mark Ruffalo gives a heart breaking and heart warming performance as her ne'er-do-well brother Terry. There is realism here, and emotional charge, but no trace of sentimentality. It is with an astute empathy that the playwright examines the relationship between brother and sister, not a common theme in the West. Sammy adores Terry, and is thrilled that he has come to visit her in the home left to them by their parents. Happy to see him bond easily with her son, she is nevertheless afraid that he is a bad influence on him.

The siblings are both preyed by guilt and confusions. Sammy cannot make up her mind about her steady boyfriend. She tumbles into an unthinking affair with her married boss. Terry cannot straighten his life out, his genuine attachment to sister and nephew cannot change him from drifter to responsible citizen. The acid split occurs when Terry takes his nephew to visit his biological father, which Sammy sees as an act of betrayal.

The frame stays deliberately, even pathetically narrow. The little town is not only the backdrop, but a deciding force and compelling character in the tale. Going away from it has given Terry a wider perspective and understanding. Staying has imposed limitations on Sammy's life. The exercise of the will does not guarantee happiness, success or achievement. Not even satisfaction with the choices made, or with the self for making them.

Mega budget ``Crouching Tiger'' by the celebrated film-maker Ang Lee, plunges you into some indeterminate era of fabulous cities, fabled deserts, and forest-strewn wildernesses in ancient China. This spectacular panorama is as vital to the narrative (as is the micro reality of small town white America for Lonergan). This is the story of the famous sword Green Destiny, owned at this time by Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) who hands it over for safe keeping to the grave warrior woman Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh).

Lien takes it to Beijing where it is stolen by young noblewoman Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who has taken secret lessons in the the martial arts, and opts for uncertain adventure rather than safe marriage into the nobility. That's when the explosions (unimagined and unimaginable) catapult you into a series of flights and fights. You hold your breath on the edge of your seat as you watch the lyrically choreographed movements of people running vertically up the stone walls, soaring above rooftops, vanishing into the shadows in spins and spirals. Grand passion, secret adversaries, chance encounters and mortal combats tangle their lives. At every step the characters find they have to make disturbing choices, to act or not to act, to speak or not to speak, to stifle or not to stifle their inmost desires.

Ang Lee, a film-maker of the widest ranging vision today (just contrast the pace and narrative methods in ``Sense and Sensibility'' with ``The Ice Storm'' or ``Ride With the Devil'') has managed here to make a meditative film on the martial arts, reducing the likes of John Woo to banality in comparison. Here the tensions - more than the actions - make you reel. It doesn't matter that the characters (though well realised) are archetypes and stereotypes. Crouching and concealment are as much their strategy as that of the director's technique and narrative mode.

The film stirs our oldest fantasies of levitation, of flying like birds, lightly and effortlessly, without the clunky aids of technology. It induces dreams of defying gravity which chains us to terrestrial constraints.

No one who sees the film will fail to succumb to the magic of a fight orchestrated on swaying bamboos. No wonder ``Crouching Tiger'' has broken all records as the first genuine crossover film. So gripping that it has made people forget they are watching a movie made in Mandarin and Cantonese! Easily has it made it to the top ten in the U.K and U.S.

``You Can Count on Me'' will not bust the charts, but eastern viewers do not have to cross over anything to apprehend the perennial, if homelier, problems it deals with.

At the opposite ends of the spectrum in time, space, form, pace and visual sweep, ``Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon'' and ``You Can Count On Me'' succeed in winning our attention because they don't under-estimate the viewer. They challenge our imagination. They also remind you that whether you live in some legendary past or lacklustre present, the very fact of being human compels you to exercise your will.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Entertainment
Previous : Second venture of a success team
Next     : Abhinaya in right ambience