Reel-ing

I'm typing this right to left, for no other reason than the fact that it's quite cool. And new. Obviously. There was  this one time when I owned a diary that had the dates and names of months in English and Urdu, and I actually traced those in Urdu and learnt how to write the names of the days of the week and months in Urdu. 

Anyway, so yesterday I saw this Japanese movie called love Letter. Utv WorldMovies is quite cool, yes. It was, a very, very beautiful movie. It was about this woman in one town of Japan whose fiance dies while mountaineering. His name was Fujii Itsuki. Now while going through his junior high yearbook she sees his address in another part of Japan and just out of impulse, mails a letter there. What she doesn't expect, however, is a reply. So continuing the correspondence, she finds out that that Fujii Itsuki is a classmate of her fiance. Curious, she asks the other Fujii, who's a girl, to share all her memories of junior high with her. Fujii does that, and the memories turn out to be a little unpleasant as the boy Fujii was quite unfriendly and queer. Hiroko, the fiancee asks Fujii if there ever was a romantic relationship between them. Fujii denies it saying that the same names actually caused them a lot of problems, making them the centre of a lot of jokes by their classmates.

Eventually, Fujii starts remembering more and more about her junior high years and starts seeing her classmate in a new light. Ultimately a lot of incidents and discoveries make it apparent to her that Fujii actually liked her. This gives Hiroko the impression that Fujii proposed to her because she physically resembled his classmate. She thinks that the love at first sight wasn't really love at 'first sight' for him. She doesn't get upset though. What happens is that both the women, through the correspondence, fall in love with Fujii Itsuki, a dead man. 

In the end, Hiroko pretty much rejects a friend of Fujii's, who's interested in her. And the movie ends with nothing definite. It was a really gorgeous, abstract, artsy film, with a lot of places where the viewer's interpretation fills the gaps. This reminds me of a lot of people's reactions to Dhobi Ghat; the whole unclear, vague thing. I find it quite interesting how different people, based on their personalities, experiences and temperaments can attribute wholly different meanings to simple incidents. It's the true meaning of art to be able to be interpreted in diverse ways; poetry, paintings, instrumental music, there are so many examples. Let's hope Indian cinema also becomes more like that, and less rigid in its story-telling. 

Lastly, I can't WAIT for Kiran Rao to make a movie on Delhi. Lol.