Movie Review

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CRITICAL ANALYSIS The three movies taken up for this Analysis are as follows:

A BEAUTIFUL MIND Written by: Akiva Goldsman Directed by: Ron Howard (English) ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST Written by: Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman Directed by: Milos Foreman (English) SURAJ KA SATVAN GHODA Written by: Dharamveer Bharati Directed by: Shyam Benegal (Hindi)

PREMISE of the movie A beautiful Mind: Based loosely on a true story, A Beautiful Mind tells of a brilliant young mathematician named John Nash (Russell Crowe) who lived a life of genius tainted by mental breakdown. Married to his everfaithful sweetheart Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) Nash lived a secret life as a Government agent, deciphering codes for the mysterious William Parcher (Ed Harris) in order to help the United States win the Cold War. The story begins in the early years of Nash's life at Princeton University as he develops his "original idea" that will revolutionize the world of mathematics. Early in the movie, Nash begins developing paranoid schizophrenia and endures delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss and burden his condition brings on his wife and friends.

Suraj ka satvan ghoda: In this movie, the narrator, Manek Mullah (Rajit Kapur) tells three stories of the three women, Neena Gupta (the poor), Pallavi Joshi (the intellectual) and Rajeshwari Sachdev (middle class), he had met in his life at different times. These three stories are nothing but a single story seen from stands of different characters of the film. The lowest, slowest or the weakest in a group or society determines the speed or progress of the whole. The title of the movie, a metaphor as the movie itself, draws this analogy with the seventh horse pulling the chariot of the sun. As a director of abstract meaningful cinema, Shyam Benegal pulls off another masterpiece that makes you think. Lightly laced with extremely subtle humor, this is a story of love that is markedly different from the many love stories on screen.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest: Randle Patrick McMurphy (Nicholson), a criminal who has been sentenced to a fairly short prison term, decides to have himself declared insane so he'll be transferred to a mental institution, where he expects to serve the rest of his term in (comparative) comfort and luxury.

His ward in the mental institution is run by an unyielding tyrant, Nurse Ratched (Fletcher), who has cowed the patients most of whom are there by choice into dejected institutionalized submission. McMurphy becomes ensnared in a number of power games with Nurse Ratched for the hearts and minds of the patients. All the time, however, the question is just how sane any of the players in the ward actually are.

STYLE of story telling A beautiful Mind: To heighten the feeling of realism and maximise the truth of A beautiful Mind, the film makers have shot the entire movie in continuity; filming each scene in the actual order of the story. It is sheer rarity to find an organised shooting approach as this. Logistically it is extremely difficult and challenging, but of immense help to the actors. The actors can seep into the characters without having to detach themselves and lose connection with the setting. The entire movie was shot in three months where in the protagonist ages more than forty years. Russell’s journey as John Nash is complex and emotionally charged with profound psychological shifts from one scene to another. The film shifts stylistically from era to era and phase to phase of Nash’s life. The tone, lighting and composition shifted with Nash’s psychological and emotional states, his level of duress, and the emotional connection he felt or didn’t feel with Alicia, his colleagues or his own ideas. A lot of research went into this film as the writer and the director went in deep into the core of Nash’s life. They were honoured to have John Nash himself on the sets to give a real feel to the film; especially Russell who picked up nuances to improvise during acting. The director has tried to orient the audience at the same level as John Nash, telling the story from his point of view making mental illness more understandable. Right from make up to costumes, every single detail was thought about. Suraj ka satvan ghoda: It is only Benegal's brilliance that such complex characterisation has been given shape on celluloid in a seemingly simple way.

Characters don't tell you to form any notion about them, but still in each story you make some notion just to find out in the next story that there was something missing in your interpretation. All three stories unfold, and you are still not sure whether you have fathomed even one character fully. And then comes the best part, the ending. End scene will leave you spellbound, in awe of the sheer brilliance of Benegal's direction. This scene makes it one of those movies which haunt you for days. An interesting narrative approach adds to the abstractness - as the film is presented as a flashback of a contemporary artist (Raghuvir Yadav). He remembers the many stories of a born-raconteur (Rajit Kapur) during the gossip sessions of four young men with no better way to pass time. The neo-realism in the stories and the starkness of human character brings life to the narrative. The film is narrated in a series of independent short stories. The brilliance of the director lies in tying these short stories with the same characters creating a complex matrix of humans and relations. The movie comes alive when the same events are depicted in the different stories. This is captured beautifully by showing the same scenes from different angles, emphasizing different personalities on screen, but the same dialogues.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest: One of the things that makes this film so fantastic, is that the story reveals itself little by little, so that when it begins, it all seems quite straight-forward, and you don't see what's coming next until it arrives. It's not that the story contains many twists, though; the storytelling technique is not structured so as to have a surprise around every corner. It's more that each occurrence is a logical flow-on from the last, but the film is put together very cleverly, and it is like turning the pages of a book to find out what happens next, rather than skipping ahead to the last page. Yet another wonderful element to this film is the complexity of the characters. Mac is a bad guy - he's done some bad things in his time, and he doesn't try to make things easy for himself or for those around him. But you love the rascal anyway; he's just taking a chance and seeing where things take him. And Nurse Ratched, well, she's evil. Or is she? One’s opinion shall probably change numerous times while watching the film. And, of course, you can't have complex characters without great actors to play them. Nicholson won his first Oscar for this role, and you can see why. He embodies this character and does such a terrific job with it: try picturing any other actor as Mac. You just

couldn't imagine anyone doing it better. Likewise, the restrained fire of Ratched (which earned Fletcher the Oscar also) is a thing to behold. What she manages to convey with simply the nod of a head, or the positioning of that stupid nurse's hat, is amazing.

METAPHORS- a sign of Cinematic excellence A beautiful Mind: Pure Mathematics studies a universe of the imagination, in which the objects and truths can only rarely be depicted. A vast array of visual, psychological, and linguistic metaphors have been developed to deal with this. Mathematicians will use phrases amongst themselves like `a big group', `a neat argument', ‘a scary method', `a direct attack', `a nasty lemma', even `a sexy result', projecting familiar ways of describing things onto this universe of the imagination. The most positive things that can be said of a piece of Mathematics are that it is `deep' (indicating that it is a very profound fact or method, only arrived at after much effort) and that it is `beautiful'. These all are metaphors for what is being seen in the universe of the imagination, and one of the most powerful of these metaphors is beauty. Suraj ka satvan ghoda: The Chariot of Sun is drawn by seven horses. Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda title comes from the story of the seventh horse of the Sun's chariot, which is the weakest and youngest of the horses but goes on to become the driving horse of the chariot. The movie is about love seen from men's perspective at different situations. In the film 7 stories are narrated and the seventh one reflects how the lower-middle class isn’t able to break free of the pseudo values they believe in, which inhibit them from following their dreams and aspirations. He associates the stories to the six horses of the sun’s chariot, saying that they have grown old and bent, and don’t pull the chariot as well as they used to. And the seventh horse is the embodiment of Hope- young, vibrant and enthusiastic who will pull the sun towards a new dawn, a better day.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest: The mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest serves as a metaphor for American society, the point being that citizens are

inmates of that society. They are expected to conform, by fitting in as members of a status quo. Even more specifically, as a mirror of post-World War II America, the scenario depicts a specific point in history where conformity was encouraged and free-thinking was a perilous endeavour. During the late 1940s and 50s, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was allowed to strip citizens of their constitutional rights, throw them in jail, blacklist them from their jobs.

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