Ang Lee directs the film (2012) of the book by Yann Martel, Life of Pi. As is well known, it is a story about an Indian boy in a boat with a fully grown Bengal tiger.
Orientalist and exotic, most of the critical reviews call it a film about a spiritual search for religious truth. But I did not find it so, I think it is a simple story about waiting: two shipwreck survivors are waiting to find landfall in a lifeboat alone in the middle of a vast ocean, food is running short and each must decide in their different ways if they will kill and eat the other.
As a reader I did not succeed in reading the original book by Martel which was published in 2001 and went on to win the Mann Booker prize in 2002. It is another example of the Bartleby Effect “I would prefer not to”, not least because, so I am told, the author chose to end the book with the phrase “and so it goes with God”, rather than sticking with the unadorned story about waiting, which is also a story about finding a time and place for storytelling.
That is the essence of orientalist and exotic waiting. In the film the CGI and 3D effects bring the story of Piscine Molotov the Indian boy and Richard Parker the tiger alive, and all the other oceanic elements of Pacific sea and sky, fish and fowl, and magical sea creatures which live in the depths and impact and effect the waiting story and that food is running short. It remains to be seen whether over time the film will grow into a classic.
*”An Elegant Proof of God”
…President Obama’s above comment on the Life of Pi film is queer. The film is nothing of the sort, although its over tidy narrator opening and ending also makes more of the make-believe than is there in the real story of waiting. Of course we know it really happened – that is the essence of the orientalist and exotic – and you don’t have to tell us or prove anything.