The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter: Beautiful!!!
The American South is vividly expressed in the film - I felt all the stories from the South waking up in me as I watched the film, writes Ankur Agrawal
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter: Beautiful!!!
The world’s too busy in its own chores - messed-up lives, circumstances, and unsatisfied desires and ambitions - to notice him. At the most, thank him and forget him - after all, Arkin himself is too engaged in making himself effaced. Fiery characters cross Arkin’s path - each on his or her own path of self-discovery, whether late or early in life. Arkin, in his own way, has invaluable help for each, yet the worth is not recognized until when it’s too late.
Though Sondra Locke does a wonderful role in her debut and rightly gets an Oscar nomination, it’s cruel that Cicely Tyson didn’t get even a nomination, when she definitely deserved to win it. One of the best acting performances that I have ever seen in my life, and ironically the only reason I suspect that Tyson didn’t get there was because she was black. Ironically, for the film itself is so much against inequality of every sort - woman vs. man, handicapped man (including Locke’s father) vs. the world, black vs. white, poor vs. rich (Locke’s party theme is a brilliant thread in the film; it is the only one that I thought could have been carried up a little way up or a bit differently - probably not have Locke’s rich boyfriend as an honest fellow).
The American South is vividly expressed in the film - I felt all the stories from the South waking up in me as I watched the film. The recurring themes - music and deafness, black and white, helplessness of a man with all his faculties just because he has that feeling of being black in him against the power and resourcefulness of a man who’s deaf and mute but who really wants to help and love someone (and wants to find some love for him in return), duty (Locke’s mother) versus the ‘joy of living’ (Locke) - all are so beautifully stringed together, and presented as a whole, that I now want to read the novel as well. And what saves the film from a Dobbin’s fate is its tragic end. In many films, directors opt for a tragic end just to ‘elevate’ the film, to make it seem arthousy, to distance it a bit from ‘the masses’. But here, the tragic end served quite a different purpose - it reinforced the film’s title!
[imdb]0063050[/imdb]
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wow!
makes me reminisce about all the lovely things life has to offer.
i will make sure i watch this film sooner!
nice review!
Extremely underrated!!! Beautiful!!!! riveting film!!! Thanks Ankur for writing about it.
A must watch for each and everyone who loves cinema!!!!
Yes, and somehow, I still prefer it underrated, Gautam! It is probably injustice to such a beautiful film, but then I don’t want it to live in the “intellecutal space” that sometimes a movie creates, justly or unjustly. I want it to live in each and every heart that regards it.