I remember watching Life of Pi back in 2013 on TV with my grandmother who was partially deaf and couldn’t hear a thing without her hearing machine. When we were watching the film, I remember her small laughs in between whenever there was a scene of the tiger, and due to her hearing disability she couldn’t get the feel of the music, and there’s no need to talk for dialogues as she had almost no connection with other languages including English and Hindi, but yet she watched the film from beginning till the end and enjoyed it like no one else could.
The point of sharing this true experience was that there are very few movies which have the capacity to grab everyone’s attention and as per what I have studied based on the research of great filmmakers if you can watch a film without hearing out its music and dialogues, and enjoy it as an art or even entertainment then that film is surely a masterpiece. This 2012 film is based on the 2001 novel with the same title. It is a story of the struggle between the two ends i.e life and death. A struggle of surviving through the most difficult and never thought of the time of your life.
Pi Patel on whose real story the novel and film is based on has a transcript through which he reveals the possibly true story within that story: that there were no animals at all, and that Pi had spent those 227 days with other human survivors who all eventually perished, leaving only himself. Pi, however, is not a liar to him, the various versions of his story each contain a different side of the truth. One version may be eventually true, but the other has an emotional approach or the truth that no one can approach. The scene where he says “Animals have souls, I have seen it in their eyes” is somewhat expresses his obsession or love towards them and also raises a question on the multiple layers of his survival story.
Directed by Ang Lee, the film featured Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Adil Hussain, and Rafe Spall.
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