Dismantle your gods. They do not serve you. They are imagined, facades. Smokescreens of a human is what celebrity is, their image no longer fully their own. Imagine how alone that must feel, how isolating.
The Hero’s exploration of this stripped-away humanity where a pedestal is a cage opens the door to this introspection by a series of additional confinements. Schedule, contract, persona, train cars, dinner restrictions, etc. they all get in the way of where and how characters move throughout the film, with every single subplot supporting this idea of an dual face that is worn in front of others versus what is kept withdrawn.
Seeing Ray explore the inner soul through more abstraction is entrancing. It is markedly different from his other films where the abstraction was in service of a more grounded soul, so to speak. Here, the abstraction is present in flights of fancy, dream sequences of purely visual metaphor. It’s hypnotic seeing how a master takes imagery familiar to me already and makes it his own and then contrasts that abstraction with further societal cages.
Dismantle your gods. They do not serve you. They are imagined, facades. Smokescreens of a human is what celebrity is, their image no longer fully their own. Imagine how alone that must feel, how isolating.
The Hero’s exploration of this stripped-away humanity where a pedestal is a cage opens the door to this introspection by a series of additional confinements. Schedule, contract, persona, train cars, dinner restrictions, etc. they all get in the way of where and how characters move throughout the film, with every single subplot supporting this idea of an dual face that is worn in front of others versus what is kept withdrawn.
Seeing Ray explore the inner soul through more abstraction is entrancing. It is markedly different from his other films where the abstraction was in service of a more grounded soul, so to speak. Here, the abstraction is present in flights of fancy, dream sequences of purely visual metaphor. It’s hypnotic seeing how a master takes imagery familiar to me already and makes it his own and then contrasts that abstraction with further societal cages.
