Skip to main content

The Criterion Channel Presents: The Hero (1966)


      A few days ago was the 100th birthday of one of the twentieth century’s great cinematic masters, Satyajit Ray. Fittingly, the Criterion Channel added a bunch of his movies on that day, many of which from Charulta and The Big City to The Music Room and of course the Apu Trilogy are well worth your time to watch if you haven’t already. One that I haven’t but have been curious about was The Hero, a 1966 film in which Ray employs some magical realism, which he hadn’t in his more down-to-earth films preceding it.
     It’s the story of a Bengali actor Arindam Mukherjee (Uttam Kumar), quite famous with a lot of young people, travelling by train to New Delhi where he is to receive an award. A feminist reporter who dislikes him, Aditi (Sharmila Tagore) decides to interview him for her magazine while on the journey, during which Arindams’ history and insecurities come out, and Aditi comes to know the man more than the matinee idol.
     Both actors are terrific and work incredibly well off each other. Tagore is a semi-regular of Rays’, having made her film debut as a teenager in Apur Sansar, but has fully come into her own by this point, as the principled clever journalist with a knowing smirk and sexy librarian glasses. And Kumar fits his role perfectly, quite believably embodying this film star in perhaps the waning days of his mass appeal. Yet in spite of Aditi’s resentment of the kind of fame Arindam has, she can’t ever come to dislike him in any of their exchanges, he’s too charming. He too is clearly fascinated by her and it makes it easier for him to open up.
     Ray is very interested in exploring the image of celebrity here, introducing Arindam coming off of a minor scandal in which he was involved in a fight, and the other passengers he interacts with on the train express their own opinions to him; including an elderly man disapproving of the kinds of films Arindam chooses to act in. The film makes regular use of flashback in the revelation of his backstory, including the conflict he ran into with his acting mentor who was inherently dismissive of film as an art form. It runs through a series of episodes in his early career, including how he became the star he is. One particularly fascinating story revolves around a close friend he had as a student who was very involved in political activism, got arrested, and then reunited with Arindam years later only as an attempt to use him to drum up support for a cause. Alongside all of this is a theme about Arindams’ self-worth outside of his onscreen persona, his struggles with the lack of power he seems to have in his own life, and a particular loneliness.
     This is illustrated in the most striking sequence of the movie and one of the most interesting of Ray’s entire filmography: a dream in which Arindam is surrounded by piles of money that soon produce skeleton hands with ringing telephones and turn to quicksand, the corpse of his mentor standing by as he sinks into their depths. It’s a very ominous scene, the imagery suitably unsettling, and communicates a lot of his anxieties and fears before the film even delves into his history.
     This sadness and regret and guilt gradually comes more viscerally to the surface, and while it’s Aditi who is doing the questioning, it’s Ray who is interrogating her, and the people like her with certain judgments of celebrities. He challenges them to empathize with the emotional and psychological drawbacks of fame, rather than just focus on the perks. And in their casual conversation we see clearly just how unusual and bizarre it is when, for example, crowds of adoring fans are gathered at their window ready to make any presumption about this young woman Arindam Mukherjee is entertaining. Glamour and fame can be tiring, wealth unfulfilling, and Satyajit Ray illustrates that like few others.
 
Criterion Recommendation: The English Patient (1997)
     If The Last Emperor could get into the Criterion Collection, so should this. For years I heard that The English Patient was the bad or the most boring movie of the 90s to sweep the Oscars (a reputation probably exacerbated by that Seinfeld episode), but when I finally saw it this year I found it to be actually really good. It’s kinda like Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun in that it feels like a throwback to David Lean epics (especially Doctor Zhivago), worthy enough though on its own merits. The place and the story structure is engrossing, Anthony Minghella’s direction is really good, and the cast is amazing -especially Juliet Binoche and a stunning Kirstin Scott Thomas in maybe her best performance. That romance, for as melodramatic as it is, is really rather affecting too. And of course the patches of Canadian identity to it are endearing to me. Like The Last Emperor it’s faded from populism just enough to meet Criterions’ standards I think, so go on and put it in there!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more