PC Translations

I recently read the novel The Book Thief, a story narrated by Death, and this brought the Japanese film to mind again.  Death gets a different representation in each of these three pieces, Meet Joe Black, Accuracy of Death, and The Book Thief, and it might be interesting to consider the three in connection and contrast.

Either way, Accuracy of Death is a nice film, with some interesting things to think about.  It might be better to watch it a little earlier than I did, though, because its slow pace is harder to follow the further you go into the wee hours of the morning.

And... 

I still haven't even finished posting the articles I wrote from my previous stay!  

Uh-oh.

I'll try to get busy and have that done before I really get started in my new course load.

The violence of the relationship between Omkara and Dolly is a nice mirroring of Othello's odd behavior in the play.  In the setting of the film, his jealousy seems somewhat less irrational than it sometimes does in the written version that we have of Shakespeare's play.  Perhaps that is a good reminder that it is helpful to always think of these texts as performance-oriented.  When enacted, it doesn't seem quite as crazy as it appears on the page.  This really serves to heighten the sense of tragedy — the pattern of a great man fallen because of his tragic flaw.

Langsda, the Iago character, is also depicted as having some motivation for his own evil schemes.  This has long puzzled critics of the play, but again, the film makes his motivation a bit clearer.  While his actions are still overblown, very out of proportion to the motivating factors, at least one can see why he has some ill will toward Omkara.  The depiction of Kesu being made the general, and his subsequent foolishness, casts the Iago character into a mode of revenge and ambition.  This is something available in the text on the page, and the film does a nice job of taking that material and running with it.

Omkara is a good adaptation of Othello, reminding me to some extent of The Banquet as a retelling of Hamlet or Ran as a retelling of King Lear.  These movies are not strictly speaking performances of these plays, but rather resituating the tales into different settings and models.  In one sense, this is very much like Shakespeare's plays' relationship with the original source materials from which they were drawn.

All in all, Omkara is a good movie, and should be of interest to anyone who is into Asian film, or into adaptations of Shakespeare's works into modern forms.  It is especially interesting since it came from the former jewel of the British Empire.  That whole dynamic always adds an interesting twist on Shakespeare-related films coming out of India.