With Eyes Wide Open

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2013)

Taiwanese-born Ang Lee is one of the world's most most celebrated filmmakers – and one of its most innovative and influential ones. He is also the creator of an oeuvre as various and multi-faceted as that of no other filmmaker alive. Lee revolutionized martial arts film with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he pushed the doors wide open for gay topics in Hollywood with Brokeback Mountain, he did blockbuster action cinema (Hulk) and atmospherically dense family drama (The Ice Storm). Lee is a filmmaker who can create imagery that sticks with everyone who has seen and experienced it. He creates worlds as unique as they are credible and true. If cinema is a place for the imagination to roam, Lee is the master guide. Who else could take on the seemingly hopeless task of turning Yann Martel's world bestseller Life of Pi, about an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a tiger, into a film? Ang Lee could and he did and again he created something that will have a lasting effect on film.
Life of Pi was shot in state-of-the art 3D technology but even for those who view it in 2D, it will open their eyes, showing things never seen before. Life of Pi is a miracle, a film in which the majority of its story happens on a drifting boat in the middle of the ocean with only a teenage boy and a Bengal tiger present. The film is at its heart a very intimate story confined to the narrowest of settings. Yet again Ang Lee proves to be a master of story-telling who narrates in the language he speaks best: that of film. Lee speaks of joy and grief, of hope and desperation and, not unimportantly, of the search for a truth larger than the individual.
This Pi is a seeker of spiritual truths. As a child, he is a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim, all at the same time. When the storm hits the ship he is travelling on, he embraces it as a message from God. He will again and again call God and keep believing that there is a higher power watching him. For him, it might well have been this power that sent him a tiger as travelling companion, the tiger he will credit with saving his life for if he did not have to be constantly alert he might never have made it. His God, no doubt, moves in mysterious ways and isn't this what wise men say about life?
19-year-old first-time actor Suraj Sharma plays Pi and he does so with a truly unforgettable mixture of wide-eyed wonder, relentless will of survival and this questioning look in his eyes that wants to know what make this world continue. His is a hopeful story of one who has lost everything but his sense of wonder at this world.
And yet, there is so much more to this visually stunning masterpiece. Because Pi, hungry for life and knowledge, is no match for the viewer who cannot keep their eyes off for even a second, who stare wide-eyed at this world which they never have seen this way. At times the limits between sky and sea seem to disappear, the boat to float on thin air, water, land, sea all become one. we look at the sky from under water or see the sunken ship and all the ocean looking in. When Pi, diving, watches the brightly lighted ship sink, he seems suspended in a vacuum- like state, time stops, past, present, future become one.
It is a sense of time we know from fairy-tales – and from dreams. And after all, aren't we all dreaming, isn't Pi? For what is real? The tiger in the boat next to his makeshift raft? The fluorescent whale who almost turns the boat over? The carnivorous floating island full of meerkats? Like Alice in Wonderland we follow Pi from one miracle to the next, floating along as if in a dream. Suspending belief and time and logic.
Life of Pi is so many things at once: a growing-up story and a tale of perseverance, a survivor's story with an unlikely hero whose will to live paired with a natural resourcefulness of the imagination makes him continue. And it is the story of the unlikeliest of friendships which, of course, is nothing more (or less) than the bond of two creatures understanding that they need the other for survival. It is a quest for truth, a truth which resides in the human heart as well as in his brain, which requires reason and the ability to believe. But Life of Pi is also a film about the power of images – to educate, to amaze, to scare but also to question. For what is real, what is a dream and is there even a difference?
And perhaps above all, it is about the power of story-telling. In the end, we will be asked to doubt what we have been told and seen and be left with the option to just believe. When we are young, we first encounter the world and its ways through fairy-tales, incredible stories which we believe and don't believe at the same time but which make us grow and learn and wonder. Life of Pi is such a story and, at the same time, it shows us how such stories work. It is, in one word, nothing but a miracle.
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