Crime and Punishment

Fiennes,David Kross
Rating: zi zi zi zi zi zi zi zi zi zi

Running at: Inox (Forum,City Centre,Swabhumi)

As most informed movie-goers would know,Stephen Daldry’s last directorial venture,The Hours,was an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s seminal novel of the same name. A novel saturated with beauty and excesses,each paragraph of which,it seems,was meant to dazzle us with its sheer symmetry. Many felt that it was un-filmable,but Daldry’s adaptation succeeded in capturing the relentless lyricism of the novel.

The Reader too is an adaptation,but Bernhard Schlink’s novel,unlike Cunninghams’,doesn’t strive for quaint,heartbreaking images. It is all about brevity. And astuteness. A story about pain and love,told simply with honesty.

Yet,Daldry comes up trumps again. The film adaptation of The Reader inhabits a bright,quivering world of possibilty- a world where a fifteen-year-old schoolboy may end up being a lover to a 30 something lady.It also shares the arresting ambition and the psychological acuity of the book,as well as its inherent sense of melancholy.

Michael (David Kross) is a schoolboy growing up in post-WWII Heilderberg who has a chance encounter with an older woman,Hanna (Kate Winslet). They start a clandestine affair which lasts for just one summer. Their lovemaking ritual is preceded with a reading session,during which Michael reads out novels to Hanna. This affair,however,lasts only a summer after which Hanna disappears. A few years later, Michael,now a law student,witnesses the trial of a Nazi war criminal and realises that the accused in none other than Hanna. Years later,Michael (now Ralph Fiennes) tries to find some way to re-connect with Hanna to find some kind of redemption.

A major concern of The Reader is the ambivalence of love,the working out of conflicted emotions over time,even over generations. And through a very capable group of actors,Daldry manages to create an intangible tension between the players without which the film would not have been the same. It’s amazing how both the actors playing Michael,Fiennes and Kross,manage to share a persona. Winslet,attacks her role with restrain,just like Hanna. Her gestures and movements like Bernhard Schlink describes in the novel are “exercises in slow concentration”.

Like in the The Hours,Daldry breaches subjects and themes that are difficult to articulate,or even to acknowledge: the ways in which love can feel impolite,just as sex can be officious and desperate; the disturbingly thin line between liking someone enormously and loving them merely adequately,and how a specific,seemingly unimportant part of our life can shape the way we percieve life; how forgiveness is not a mere act,but a way of life and finally the ways in which people look to art,books and education .