Coorabell Hall Film Club
Wednesday 7 May

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

THE LIFE OF PI (2012)

''I had to tame him,'' Pi realises. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat."

Life of Pi, whose conceit of an Indian boy stranded with a Bengal Tiger in a lifeboat amid the Pacific Ocean, is fantastical yet real in its metaphoric implications. While the framing device of a story told by an older Pi to a stranger uses flashbacks, the lonely lifeboat is as significant as any story told in the last century.

The film begs interpretation from the multiplicity of religions to the place of humans in a hostile world. Ultimately the benign camaraderie of beasts and humans is affirmed not so much by lofty philosophy but by the necessity of humans and beasts working together to survive.

The digital rendering of the animals, especially ‘Richard Parker’, the Bengal Tiger, is beautiful to behold. The opening scene in Pi's family zoo is a montage of nature, gorgeous in its simplicity. The shots of the boat at night are worthy of the best lighting in the best aquariums in the world. Director Ang Lee has visually taken us from the opulence of Crouching Tiger and the minimalism of Brokeback Mountain into a fusion world of fantasy and reality. The images are stunning.

In the end, Lee is interested in the individual's place in the universe as they struggle to harness nature and yet live in harmony with these elements. The conflict with the gross cook aboard the Japanese cargo ship taking Pi's family and animals to Canada is emblematic of the challenges facing the gifted with the groundlings. Pi's relationship with Richard Parker represents all humankind's struggle to live in harmony with the forces it cannot control.

"Believing in everything is the same as believing in nothing," says Pi's father as Pi samples religions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Catholicism and Judaism and wants them all. Although it is not given to us to have them all, Pi's piety practically makes us believers in universal kinship.