Wild trip through stunning visuals

SCI-FI ADVENTURE plus serial killer thriller, ``The Cell,'' has a single Oscar nomination: for make-up. The film is little more than stunning visual effects - surreal images, breathtaking contrasts, eerie montages, bizarre tableaus - unseen, perhaps undreamt of, on the big screen. But for that very reason, it may do well at the Indian box office, even though the noisy, predictable sound effects do not match the amazing visuals.

But this country has another interest in the film. It is the first by the Indian born Tarsem Singh, innovator of award winning commercials and music videos, some of them housed in New York's Museum of Modern Art. The film-maker knows that there is no uniform ``Indianness'' in the Indian film-makers who have hit the West in the recent past. ``Look at `Elizabeth', `The Sixth Sense' and `The Cell', it's like Shekhar Kapoor, Manoj Night Shyamalan and I are from different planets altogether!'' Singh is quick to add that Shyamalan's sensibility stands out, ``so different, so smart, so beautiful!''

The thin plot of ``The Cell'' traces the nightmare journey of child psychologist, Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), into the mind of a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) in a coma, through a new chemical-electric therapy in transcendental science, which she had been using to help a comatose child. The mission could save his last victim. But Deane has to gasp her way along the torturous routes of a diabolic psyche, hunting down the cell where the victim lies trapped, at the risk of losing her own sanity. The shocking visuals plunge the viewer into the wild, wild trip.

Singh tries to make metaphors - of everyman locked in a cell of limitation, affliction, vice and weakness. Human action - good or evil- is the effort to break free. Some try to break free by oppressing, enslaving others. Then the cell becomes claustrophobic.

Water is an obvious symbol for the unknown, menacing, unconscious, but the film makes other clever visual connections. The victims are put into water, Deane sleeps on a water bed. The killer puts collars on women's necks, Deane watches an animation film on TV which has collars around people's necks. The horse, an archetypal symbol in the dream desert, is reduced to throbbing organs encased in glass. Singh shows that tampering with another's mind is not a one-way street, you get influenced in ways beyond your control.

During an interview following the screening of his film at the Venice festival last year, Singh was all energy, excitement and disarming chutzpah. The words gushed in torrents.

``The only way I could tackle `The Cell' was to make something pop, don't look at it as profound. No, I won't apologise for it,'' he warned at the start. ``I don't think all films should have visuals dictating plot and structure. But that was the only option for this script which had no takers for five years. I thought, hey, what goes on inside the head I can come up with, but only if I could do it at a completely unrealistic level.''

His backers gave him that freedom, but not without reservations. ``They wanted me to make a `Dracula' plus `Matrix'. I said I would make an action film unlike anything seen before.'' What about ``Being John Malkovich'', which used the same idea of entering another's mind? ``But that film is so original, not Hollywood at all,'' he says disarmingly.

Not that Singh lacks originality. Instead of putting visuals to the story, he collected visuals first, thousands of them for Jennifer Lopez alone, from woman and child in Nagasaki to Virgin Mary with Christ in her arms. Then made drama out of them. As he sees it, ``The Cell'' is cast in the operatic mode of Hindi block busters, it has the lush, unrealistic pageantry of Bollywood.

Ask Singh about his family background, and how he made the journey to the West and you get scenes straight out of Hindi movies. The martinet father allowed him to go to Harvard, but the boy decided to do film studies instead. His father promptly disowned him. ``To go to college I sold cars for two years, drove a bus for a year, took up odd jobs which didn't need a green card.''

Parental reaction to his celebrityhood now? ``When I was the laziest dog alive, my mother thought the sun shone out of my bottom. But Dad... well, he'd rather I were unsuccessful and married the girl he points at than I were successful doing what I want. See, with television, his kids got exposed to a few billion years of evolution and suddenly took a quantum leap. He wasn't ready for it. For him making films is not real work, especially since I love doing it. As he sees it work is not work if you enjoy it. It's hard for him to imagine that in advertising I make more money in two days than he did in his entire life sweating it out in day and night shifts.''

Ask Singh what kind of film he would like to make next and he will surprise you. ``I love the neo-realist films coming out of Iran, more than the original Italian ones. They are more profound. I wish I could throw away everything and shoot something like that. It's hard, things are moving too fast, I'm on a treadmill. If I get off I'll get stuck in the machine.''

He may not have the time to stop and smell the flowers, but he sure has more dreams coming true than he could ever have imagined on that dizzy day when he opted to see the world through the lens.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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