Tiger feat

Wow! Just: wow! Life of Pi may be the most ravishingly beautiful film I have ever seen. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. Its visual inventiveness made me want to weep for joy. It is magical realism made magical and realistic. The palette of colours is extraordinary. You will feel you are in the sea and above the clouds and as if you are on a boat with a Bengal tiger too. Wow! Just: wow! But, weirdly, while enraptured by its look, its emotions never seemed especially pressing, and as for the spiritual journey, it didn’t exactly float my own particular boat. Is it saying a belief in God always makes life a better story than one without a God? That this is why we require faith? Is it advocating a Life of Pi-ety? I think so, but can’t say for sure, as I’m no professor of divinity or theologian although, given all the deep insights I have offered up to you over the years, I could understand if you thought I were one, the other, or possibly both. (It’s a common mistake.)

Based on Yann Martel’s Booker prize-winning novel, the one everyone said would be impossible to film, this went through several scripts and directors before it landed up in the hands of Ang Lee, who directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain (known as ‘Bareback Mounting’ in our house), The Ice Storm and the best adaptation of Sense and Sensibility ever, that one starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet before she was Kate Winslet, if you get my drift. Lee is a superb craftsman — everything in this has a glowing, otherworldly look — and has proved the book is possible to film, although whether it was wise to do so may be a different matter.

This tale is told via Pi as a young boy (Ayush Tandon), Pi as the teenage boy at sea (Suraj Sharma), and framed by Pi as an adult (Irrfan Khan) relating his story to a Canadian writer (Rafe Spall) and promising him this story ‘will make you believe in God’ (I think I will be the judge of that).