Searing Cinema

Of late I watched two hauntingly morbid films and both left a deep impact on me like nothing else in the recent past. First was Blindness starring Mark Ruffalo and Julienne Moore. This film is about a catastrophe engulfing the world where everyone succumbs to blindness. Everyone turns blind and there is no cure for blindness. How a civilised man turns into a wild savage animal in face of the nightmare is depicted with great degree of sensitivity. The morbid scene when women are being gang raped and people are fighting like ferocious species for food tug at your hearts. These scenes just go to prove that man is nothing without the basic requirements of life and it doesn't take long in turning him into a beast.
The gloom and depression gives way to hope when all of the sufferers unite and put a brave front. Slowly they are bonded with the human feeling of survival.



Another film which moved me was "Changeling" starring Angelina Jolie. Based on a true incident, the film underscores the trauma and agony felt by a single mother who is looking for her minor son in 1920's LA. In the face of the corrupt Police department of LA and sheers apathy and negligence, she is driven round the bend. But she doesn't lose hope and her will power and resilience gets even stronger with each impediments she encounters. Angelina was brilliant as a tormented mother and she evokes a sense of empathy with a restrained performance. I really hope she'll get Oscar nomination for the commendable portrayal. All in all the relationship between a mother and the child is above all the other relationships. It is a self less love and purely unmitigated. And this spirit makes the film all the more endearing.