New film: “Life of Pi”

叶凝云

New film: “Life of Pi”

Storytelling in a new dimension

Dec 5th 2012, 14:01 by F.S.

YANN MARTEL's fantasy novel, a life-affirming story about a shipwrecked boy in a boat with only a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker for company, was initially rejected by five publishers—yet it went on to win the Man Booker prize in 2002. Its adaptation to the screen has been similarly arduous with several directors paired to the project over the past decade before it was branded un-filmable.

But Ang Lee’s new film is a triumph. Mr Lee, the director, has already brought his sharp sense of visual balance to a diverse range of films, from the magic martial arts of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (which took the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2000) to Wyoming ranch-life in "Brokeback Mountain", which won him the best director gong in 2005. Here he offers a dazzling display of technical prowess, marrying breathtaking feline effects and sumptuous visuals with an intrinsic yet somehow invisible application of 3D. Also, Mr Lee has understood that Mr Martel's achievement was not just to make the audience believe in Richard Parker but to believe the relationship that develops between Richard Parker and Pi.

The film really finds its sea legs when the ship sinks on its journey across the Pacific from India to Canada. As Piscine "Pi" Patel later recalls this pivotal moment of his youth to a Canadian writer (a necessarily bland Rafe Spall) the journey is replayed in vivid flashbacks. Mr Lee finds emotion in the smallest gaze and movement. Pi's terror, when he realises that the ship has sunk, his family are surely dead and he is sharing a boat with a growling tiger, gives way to pity as his soaked companion paws pitifully at a raft to get back into the boat, and then to wild-eyed dominance when, in a moment of starving madness, he stares the animal down. The companionship between Pi and Richard Parker grows with such tenderness that when the two are shown ragged with hunger and nearing death, it is genuinely hard to know whether to feel more sorry for man or beast.

Although the earlier scenes of Pi and his family in Pondicherry are inevitably less exciting, they do establish the story's essential questions about God and belief. There's humanity and humour too that keeps the film grounded even at its maddest moments. Newcomer Suraj Sharma is well cast as Pi, with a lightness that offsets the big theological questions that could easily have overwhelmed the film.

Hollywood has searched high and low for the next “Avatar”—James Cameron's pioneering 3D epic that was released in 2009. But from crude eleventh-hour conversions such as "Clash of the Titans" to the stomach-churning excess of "Alice in Wonderland" and technically brilliant but lifeless efforts such as Martin Scorsese's “Hugo”, no one since Mr Cameron has made a film that was just simply better in 3D. Until now.

“Life of Pi” feels like an art-house film that has made clever use of a multimillion-dollar budget. The 3D is so subtle that it is sometimes hard to spot, until you realise that you jumped that bit higher when the tiger leapt from under the boat's canopy and cowered that bit more when Pi is hurled into waves that seem to crash right through the screen. It is a visceral epic in which special effects always serve a purpose. The colour-saturated cinematography and pink Pacific dawns where the sky melts into the sea lend a surreal look that complements the over-arching question about the limits of our belief.

Another specific reason why 3D works so well here is because the extra dimension, like this story, is about distance and the narrowing of it. The technology reinforces the physical push and pull between man and beast on the boat and the metaphysical one between man and God. But beyond the 3D technology and special effects, “Life of Pi” is, pure and simply, good storytelling. Too good to be true? As Pi says, "If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?"

“Life of Pi” is out in America now and will be in British cinemas from December 20th
来自《经济学人》