Some [non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)
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26 October
Some [non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)
As one can perceive, Pyre (2024) needs to be seen on the biggest screen available, and it is, one suspects, a film that would bear watching again, even if one knows 'where it is going', because one would follow the journey differently, with a different attention, and would see or understand things afresh along the way.
We were told, when the film was introduced, that its principals, Padam Singh and Hira Devi, are not professional actors (and not a couple), but local to where the film is set, yet, without its very location, it would not simply be a chamber-play (even if some patterns of behaviour have become relational tics, which might remind, say, of dialogue in Beckettt's, Fin de partie (Endgame) or En attendant Godot (Waiting for G.).)
The film would not exist without its setting*, which is part and parcel of Bubu / Padam and Aama / Tulsi and of their (way of) life* : living where they do is part of them, and the scope of the film - even though it is not wholly linear - is, partly, a consideration of what that comes to mean. (Partly also, which it shows or presents (and does not seek to explain), are the connections in terms of daily practice, family and its norms, belief, topography and humanity.)
The principals and their tensions may feign some things, but they do not, and cannot, pretend about what has underpinned their life and what living where they do encompasses, involves and means. Taking us as we are, and where it does, each of the film's scenes builds on what preceded it. It may have one puzzling and guessing, yet its messages are true to our shared nature, even though it is in the world of another continent and culture.
Pyre shocks, and yet it does not shock, and is gentle in showing a marriage into its seventh decade where there are nonetheless warring, but loving tensions, and without lying about the harshnesses of living and of unsought change.
End-notes
* If so, it would not be so different from Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), although that tells – or attempts to tell ? – a tale of people alongside national politics (or, at any rate, a different kind of such politics).)
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
