Still Life is a tale of a lower-rung British civil servant John May (his name could well have been John Doe in the US or Joe Bloggs in the UK ), unmarried and yet married to his job with a diligence that makes our own attitudes to work in offices (and homes) look a tad unprofessional in comparison. The name John May sounds as colorless as is the individual that the director and original screenplay writer Uberto Pasolini gets actor Eddie Marsan to play. The incredible character is a lonely chap working in a small office in UK all alone with files all neatly stacked just as neat and orderly is his small desk with a phone. And Marsan and Pasolini gets around to develop such a colorless individual that some unsuspecting viewers of the movie assumed that the film would be as drab as the character and were seen walking out of the film halfway misled by its quiet beginning. And what a lovely film they missed out on!
Marsan is able to slip into the role of the loner, who ensures that all lonely individuals who die in his jurisdiction get a proper burial after taking great pains to locate any possible kith and kin to attend the funeral, by either calling up people on the phone or ever visiting addresses he finds in the deceased’s residence. (Marsan had earlier played minor but important roles in Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York and Malick’s The New World.). Marsan, who never smiles in the film, does smile once in the film and what an occasion to smile.
Eddie Marsan as John May: Discovering color in "colorless" lives
When May returns to his apartment, the viewer is presented a neat and orderly place with the bare essentials, and one even gets to see him eating a meager meal of toast and canned fish. And we also learn that he has been doing this for the past 20 odd years and believe it or not enjoying the work.
However, the director Pasolini leaves a crumb trail for perceptive viewers.That trail which looks innocuous is only building up to something unusual. And that Pasolini does deliver at the end of the film, and its a finale that would make you revisit the earlier scenes with your mind’s eye afresh and enjoy it all over again.
The existential query of a diligent bureaucrat
Who is Pasolini? He is no relation of the famous filmmaker PIer Paolo Pasolini. Interestingly he is a descendant of famous Italian director Luchino Visconti and is a Count, if Wikipedia, is to be believed, and he worked his way up the movie ladder after being the third Assistant Director for Rolland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), the producer of The Full Monty (1997) and director of Machan (2008) his debut film that picked up a few minor awards worldwide.
Pasolini in Still Lifemakes visual statements that border on the comical but is never funny in the conventional sense of fun. These statements are thought provoking and real. Early in the film, the viewer sees empty churches of various Christian denominations where the priest solemnly conducts a brief funeral service and even reads out a few words of praise about the deceased. We subsequently learn that those words spoken by the priest are actually provided by May after painstakingly going through the deceased’s living quarters like a detective and speaking to people who knew the person when he or she was alive. May is often the only individual present at each of these funerals. But May ensures the dead do get a fitting funeral at the cost of the town.
The person sitting behind me in the movie hall was heard commenting: “Look at the empty churches.” But Still Lifeis not a film about religion but about old age and the lack of friends and family in the evening of your lives. Even when John May contacts the deceased's relatives and friends they rarely bother to attend the funeral. It is a film that looks at relationships in life and upon death. It is a film about the uncertainty of jobs, of being served the pink slip even when you are the ideal worker. It is a film that reminds you that you cannot take tomorrow for granted.
A glimmer of color in the life of John May
Still Life is also a film about essentially good people who remain unmarried and without friends who matter. Director Pasolini has proven one fact: you can make great cinema if you have a great script and a wonderful performance by Eddie Marsan. And Pasolini has a talented composer of music to make the movie even more delectable, his wife Rachel Portman, who had earlier regaled our ears while watching Swedish film director Lasse Halstrom’s two notable works Chocolat (2000) and The Cider House Rules (1999). The power of Ms Portman’s music in Still Life keeps pace with e development of the film’s story and if the viewer pays attention to the music one can anticipate an extraordinary end—the film’s end and the final chords of Ms Portman’s music are truly memorable.
Now Still Life could appear to be a very simple film to many viewers but is it? Still Life captures visual details that can be considered humorous, sofa chairs propped up by books (shown twice in the film), what the elderly consider a great meal on two occasions in the film is toast and canned fish, and when a young man in the mortuary is searching for a four letter world combining death and animal, John May is quick with the correct answer “dodo.” Visuals in the film are brilliant and evocative: closed curtains of apartment buildings so that no one knows what is happening in another neighbor’s house, old people looking out of balconies day after day in a vacant manner, streets that seem to empty without children or couples. It is indeed a Still Lifethat Pasolini picks to project of a slice of England. It is a life where people don’t care about the other. It is a life officials are quick to spot jobs that are redundant in modern society, oblivious of how well someone is executing that job and the larger value of the job that make a drab life colorful, even if it is in death, of many unsung individuals who fade out without a song. It is a tale that reinforces the fact that the most unimpressive persons can change lives of others if they care to do so–a subject that British director Stephen Frears tried to grapple with limited success in Hero (1992) with Dustin Hoffman playing the lead. It is a British film to the core as it looks at its staid bureaucracy, but with a difference, and it is a European film because Pasolini injects a typical European way to film British subjects, with love and a twinkle in the eye. It has propped up the dwindling British cinema recalling the finer examples of the late Joseph Losey's cinema.
A touch of "Pier Paolo" in Uberto Pasolini's cinema
Pasolini’s Still Lifeis a remarkable film bolstered by an amazing screenplay, direction, acting and music. It is the finest film of 2013 that entertains and uplifts the mind of the viewer and it is great to know that there is yet another Pasolini in the world of cinema that matters! It is also a film that shows a director can grow in expertise from film to film as in the case of the Polish maestro Kieslowski who bloomed towards the end of his career. However, it is essential that the viewer watches the film right up to the end to grasp and relish the film’s quiet strength.
P.S. Still Life is the best film of 2013 for this critic. It won several minor awards at the 2013 Venice film festival and the award for the best film at the Reykjavik film festival.
<a href="http://feedjit.com/">Feedjit Live Website Statistics</a>
