Comments on: Guru musings- on a third viewing

By: zero

zero — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:01:07 +0000

I’ve to mention here that I am not entirely qualified to comment on this because I missed the film’s beginning (and the Mayya Mayya song) completely; till Abhishek starts from Turkey. (And, I’ve not watched it another time.)
Such a shame, I know.

By: zero

zero — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:56:56 +0000

Abzee, your reading reminds me of the denouement of Taxi Driver!

For me, Guru’s ending is just straightforward, more straightforward than what we’re used to, in which the film grandly signals the victory of the hero, the protagonist, for what he has become over the years.

By: satyam

satyam — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:43:32 +0000

I agree with Qalandar, I am not sure I can entirely agree with this reading though (I think for example that he simply overcomes his paralysis with time) it is so marvellous that it scarcely matters. And I might add that your awesome reading Abzee is very much analogous to the reading of Once Upon a Time in America that would have one believe the entire film is De Niro’s opium dream. That reading again does not have any sort of literal evidence within the film except for those De Niro framings at the beginning and the end. But certainly I would have to think more about your reading because I do think that Abhishek beginning the film that way and ending it in the same way with those significant differences should call attention to the stability of the fiction being presented to us. And I must confess that I hadn’t thought about it in these terms before. Much as Citizen kane depends on the reporting of witnesses thereby calling into question what we see in the film. So as I said I am not entirely persuaded on literal grounds, yours is definitely a very interesting reading in the ‘meta’ sense.

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:34:18 +0000

Very suggestive reading abzee, even if I am not persuaded that the speech is Guru hallucinating.

Where I do agree is that the strobe lights show that the scene is from Guru’s perspective, capturing his post-stroke disorientation (recall that there are TWO such scenes with strobe lights, an earlier one before the commission and then the speech before the commission), and in those scenes, I remember thinking while watching the film, the omniscient “third person” narrator of the rest of the film (and of most films) is replaced by Guru’s subkective reality — and in this reality, Guru is a messiah, a visionary, and can even invoke Gandhi. I still consider this a great problem in the film, although I do agree that this falls into the category of “problematic” rather than “fatal flaw” (i.e. not “Ratnam sold out” or “didn’t think this through” but more “What WAS he thinking?!”)…