Movie : The Meeting, the interpreter (Don Junior)
Director : Catherine Gropper
” …is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?”
– Jean-François Lyotard
The title itself suggests a double occurrence of sorts. The first occurrence gyrates around a meeting. A precocious or a foolish glance at the world around oneself. The meeting can also a suggest a certain form of epiphany, a realization too severe for one to endure or be bemused by its multiplicity. One could look at anything , similar or unique and still feel that he is seeing it for the first time or he has always seen it. The meeting can also suggest a meeting of perspectives. Something that I shall discuss subsequently. For example, we can see a couple of giraffes in a certain scene, looking at the camera as if they are meeting us as well.
The second part of the title suggests an interpretation. An interpretation free from the shackles of power. A deconstruction not based on any rules. One could almost instinctively write a story by looking at certain frames and pictures in the movie. For example, one can find Heisenberg interacting with a number of people in a scene where there is effectively no Bryan Cranston.
The juxtaposition of the brutal and ruthless nature with an obscure and often beguiling sense of order has been impeccably executed. We see a number of wild animals that add colour to chaos. We find a rhythm in that wilderness, a kind of synchronization visibly absent from the lives of the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘polished’ individuals around us.
We encounter a number of faces in the movie. Some appear happy, some excited and the others quite stoic. These faces remind us of the ones we encounter every day, sharing a smile with them or at best exchanging a word or two.
We also see people performing on the stage. We see some performers dance. These dancers look colorful. They are wearing bright coloured clothes (red) , perpetually adding colour to certain scenes in the movie.
We also see certain quotes that appear briefly in the movie indicating the lack of belief among the individuals on these words of wisdom, being plagued eternally in the postmodern condition.
The tale is one about the plethora of faces, scenes, pictures or things we encounter in our daily lives. It is also about how we create our own stories from them and at times with them. It is about how we find a new meaning of something trivial everyday. The fast cars , the ignorant zebras, politicians, celebrities – they all come together in order to form a world so similar yet different from the one we inhabit. Every meeting must meet an interpretation , the palm trees must appear to send ‘ an incessant shower of innumerable of atoms ‘ as Virginia Woolf would have believed. We see the world as it is but we also see much more as they immediately find refuge in our heads.
Like Deepak Chopra discusses (in one of the scenes) the transience that surrounds us today and the significance of memory. Every past thought word or action resides nowhere but in the stories told a countless number of times that lay hidden in the timid blinks of mankind.
