A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

I wandered down to the Bloor Cinema a couple of nights ago to see A Streetcar Named Desire. I was by myself, and there’s no better cinema than the Bloor for solo movie watching. It’s perfect.

This film was built for the big screen. It’s one of those black and white movies that fit the genre so well you forget there’s no colour. Dark, smouldering and moody. It’s genuine.
Starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter, it’s a story about Blanche DuBois (Vivian Leigh), a southern belle who looks up her sister in the big city after years apart.
DuBois is a fragile and sensitive creature who’s hiding something, and we later discover she’s left an unsavoury trail of men behind her, along with her innocence.
Her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) is a rough around the edges, but very lovable city girl who left home and never looked back.
The lightning rod in this story though is Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, played superbly by Brando. He’s raw and intense, rough and intimidating, and completely unapologetic about it. He reminds the sisters “I’m king around here,” and from the very beginning he has it in for Blanche who has come to stay in their tiny apartment, disrupting his life.

Roger Ebert says Brando’s portrayal of this character changed the concept of the male lead in Hollywood. Before Streetcar, says Ebert, men, even villains, almost always had a gentle, polished undertone that was always just barely visible, like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (a performance that beat Brando for the Oscar that year) — he just wasn’t totally despicable, there was something refined about him that was never too far below the surface.
Brando has none of that. He’s malicious and mean, stalking around his home like he’s ready to pounce at any time. And yet, there’s something redeeming about him. You know he loves his wife desperately, and he needs her, and though there is intense friction, there’s also intense loyalty and love between them.
Some of their most tender moments come immediately after their ugliest clashes. After the most violent episode Stella runs out of the apartment, and you know she’s hurt badly and may never return. She escapes to the neighbours upstairs, seeking shelter from the storm that’s raging downstairs. In a legendary scene, Brando, desperate and empty without her, stands out in the street screaming “Stella! Stella!” in a heart wrenching show of vulnerability that underscores the codependency between them.

And in this way also, the film is real, showing that in everyday life, love, by necessity, can learn to deal with all sorts of very ugly things.

There’s no happy ending here. Blanche tries to hide what she’s left behind, but we still see traces of it. Her secrets, one by one, come out, and we learn of her mistakes and her steady descent to the final rock bottom landing.
There’s a shocking scene where she is confronted by a man who has proposed to her. He’s been told about her loose past, and he forces her into the light, exposing the imperfections she has tried so hard to hide. It’s hard to watch, but follows on this movie’s great strength – honesty.

Her secrets all come out and she comes unglued, finally facing up to her past and admitting everything boldly, almost proudly, but without trying to jstify anything.

He leaves her, and when everything seems at its bleakest, in comes Brando. And he makes things worse in the swaggering, bullying language he speaks for most of this film.
He takes her one peg lower, and in the famous scene that marks the climax of the story he assaults her – his hatred simply palpable. She never recovers from it, and the story ends with her heartbreaking departure, probably forever, from their lives.
You’re left with the feeling that all Blanche had left in the world was the hope she had hung on her sister – and when that falls apart, she does too.

There's no happy solution to tie this movie up in a nice package, but there’s something honest about this sad story that makes it beautiful, and well worth $5 at the Bloor Cinema.

The Idiot: Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’m scared to review a book of such brilliance. I read Crime and Punishment last year in Africa, and the characters came alive for me. I got so wrapped up in the story, it surrounded me and picked me up and carried me along with it. Now, almost a year later, I still find myself thinking about the characters as old friends whom I once shared something special with, but haven’t seen in a while.
The Idiot has affected me in the same way, and I know Myshkin and Nastasya and Aglaia and Kolya and the others are going to be with me for a long time.

Myshkin, who has returned to Russia after years of medical treatment in Switzerland, is ‘The Idiot.’ He’s earned this title through a combination of illness and innocent simplicity that his contemporaries in Russian society can’t understand.
His natural honesty, truth, courage and love are foreign to them, and despite their mostly warm feelings for this man, he is known behind his back, and sometimes to his face, as The Idiot.
Myshkin is a Christlike character. He always forgives the scoundrels around him who try to take advantage of him. They love him for it, but their nature still can’t allow them to truly follow his example.
He is mocked and revered equally, however. Kolya and Vera give him their unconditional dedication and love, while others respect him from a distance, and others disguise their affection with jealousy or mockery.
Upon his homecoming to Russia, Myshkin finds himself drawn irresistibly towards Nastasya Filipovna, a renowned beauty, but a fallen woman who was raised up as the mistress of a wealthy St. Petersburg man. As a result she is cruel and capricious and has trouble truly loving. She represents the prostitute Christ befriended at the well, as the prostitute represented fallen humanity not worthy to even stand before Christ, but somehow still loved by him.
Myshkin loves Nastasya for what she has suffered, and his love is based more on pity and sadness than passion. She loves him briefly then abandons him coldly.
Myshkin begins to fall in love with another woman. Aglaia is, in many ways, the opposite of Nastasya. Innocent and pure, young and beautiful, but at the same time she is also capable of great deception and cruelty.
Their love develops, and Aglaia becomes a passionate advocate of Myshkin, though she rarely speaks in his defence. But their love and pending marriage fall apart when Myshkin is forced to decide between Aglaia, and caring for someone who needs him desperately.
Though he knows the consequences will be harsh, Myshkin’s character only allows one choice, and Aglaia’s heart suffers the consequences. But even as Myshkin makes this choice, he knows what the consequences will be.
His Christlikeness is clear in this action, because he knows he is bringing ruin upon himself – the loss of love, of an adopted family that loves him as a son, of any public respect, even of his health. But as Christ sacrificed himself to fulfill his purpose, so does Myshkin.
At the climax of the story, Myshkin suffers his most public humiliation, and crowds gather around his home to enjoy the spectacle of a broken man.
Myshkin, always kind and generous and polite, opens his door even to them, offering them tea despite his grief.
Keller, a rough and tough character known for his prowess as a boxer and his willingness to fight, is astounded, and says this to a companion: “You and I would have made a row, had a fight, disgraced ourselves, have dragged in the police, but he’s made a lot of new friends – and what friends!”
The companion, Lebedyev, responds: “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, but revealed them to babes."
As the Russians around him did, I too find myself feeling great respect and compassion for Myshkin, along with a desire to follow the example he sets. But at the same time, there’s pity mixed in with my admiration for him – and the lurking knowledge that my pride would have to be crushed and broken too, before I could become like Myshkin.

A Passage to India

Title: A Passage to India
Author: E.M. Forster

This is one of those books that has been sitting on my shelf for years. Ignored. Unattended. Forgotten. Then came a day when I had nothing to read, and absently scanned my shelf until my eyes rested on it's dusty spine. I picked it up. I read it. I enjoyed it. Maybe you should read it too. Or not. Read this synopsis and decide for yourself. Like the book, my review starts out a little boring but gets interesting fast. Good luck.

A Passage to India provides a detailed look into British India in the early 1900s, focusing on a city called Chandrapore.

The story centres around Aziz, a Muslim Indian doctor and his friends, Fielding, the British school principal, Ronny, a British court official, his fiancé Adele and his mother Miss Moore.

Miss Moore and Adele are visiting India, and Ronny, as an investigation into whether or not Ronny and Adele are suited for marriage.

Ronny has been in India just long enough to have little regard for nationals or their culture. Indian characters in the book explain that new arrivals are often genuinely kind and sensitive, but that it wears off quickly. With Ronny, it has clearly worn off.

For Miss Moore and Adele the thrill hasn’t worn off. In fact, they express a desire to experience ‘the real India.’

This leads to a lame ‘bridge party,’ at the British club. For one day, Indians are allowed in and a party is staged to ‘bridge’ the gap between east and west. The result is embarrassing and insulting for the Indians invited. However, it sparks a friendship between Fielding and the two women, as well as Aziz and several other Indians.

From there the little group meets again at a small party Fielding holds. In a rash moment Aziz offers to take the women to the Marabar Caves, and they accept his invitation, though it was only meant as a gesture. He has never been there himself, and planning the event will be expensive and awkward.

Eventually, the outing to the caves is pulled off, barely. For a time, Aziz is on top of the world, having organized this successful event for the British women—although the reader understands that no one is actually having a good time—but it all comes crashing down around him when a misunderstanding occurs in one of the caves and Adele believes she has been molested.

This leads to the climax of the story. Aziz is hauled in to jail, Adele has a breakdown, Miss Moore gets fed up with everyone, Fielding turns against the Brits and stands with Aziz, believing in his innocence, the community becomes polarized and the Muslim Indians threaten to revolt.

The event provides an opportunity to see inside both camps during a time of catastrophe. The Indians become angry, violent and unforgiving, loyal to their friends and hateful to their enemies. The British become scared, hard and cold, insulated and defensive towards anything and anyone foreign.

Somehow, Forster knows these two groups intimately. His prose captures the Arab-influenced Muslim Indian perfectly—as perfectly as I can imagine, having lived among Arab Muslims. And his description of the interaction between the two groups, and especially the Indian thought process he describes, is incredible.

The book is regularly interrupted by passages, sometimes pages long, describing India and its people. Elegant prose that paints a compelling picture of an ancient land and culture and people, invaded by a foreign power that fails to understand that beauty.

“The sky settles everything—not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little—only feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon . The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily, size from the prostrate earth. No Mountains infringe on the curve, League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted. These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves.”

This book left me with a desire to see India. It also left me with a strong distaste for British influence in that country and the legacy it has left. That feeling might just overwhelm the desire to see the country.

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aj