The Last Dance

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Audience Member According to Gönül Dömez-Colin, "Shaji Karun's love story takes its inspiration from Kathakali, a dance-drama with a 500-year history, which is indigenous to the Kerala region of India." Instead of presenting this folkloric tale as a forbidden love, Karun uses human-being idolatry and the confusion between fantasy and reality as vehicles to unleash a psychological catastrophe of relationships crumbling, similar to <i>Vertigo</i> (1958) in terms of obsession and of substitution of identities (like that of Subhadra's replacement with Kunhikuttan's daughter), but simultaneously mythological and spiritual in the protagonist's search for a clarification of his past. Speaking of identities, the allegory of using masks to hide the true self behind dances and colors is brilliant and proper for the handling of the meaning of art and life, even if the final result is tears breaking the silence of the unspoken. The sinful fictional character Subhadra lives on... With a haunting musical score worth of our deepest fears and nightmares, <i>Vanaprastham</i> is yet another must-see Indian jewel of the nineties, which got screened at the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1999. Mohanlal is, indeed, a superstar. 90/100 Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/22/23 Full Review Audience Member Really its a great film... But i expected more from Shaji N Karun... Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/14/23 Full Review Audience Member such a powerful acting.... Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/22/23 Full Review Audience Member One of the best Malayalam movies I have seen. Brilliant in every aspect: direction, acting, costumes, music, cinematography, story. [Winner of three national film awards - Best Film, Best Actor, Best Editing] Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/29/23 Full Review Audience Member It is a beautifully and articulately cinematographed formalist piece of drama that does the Indian tradition of melodramatic film proud. It is a film of mirrors ..where the strict defined roles hold up a mirror to undefined, imperfect humanity with no answers...and no questions.Where formal Indian dance(kathakali) holds up a mirror to classics so perfect that humans define themselves in the melodramatic masks of epics. and formalist concepts of art, such as truth, nobility and beauty defines themselves into the drama in such a way that what is left for humans that wear the masks is only weakness, bewilderment ...duty and weariness.<br/><br/>The film is structured as a set of pure cinema (and minimal and melodramatic) events intercut with Kathakali dance performances that reflect the basic emotional drama underlying the scene. The director makes sure that we understand that this is no mere narrative device. the characters in the film don and disturb the masks and makeup of characters in the play...and in myth easily as if they have a very blurred line between present time and fictional reality.<br/><br/>We end up looking for the truth in reflected, broken mirror fragments, reflecting it off one another- one side colored with formal myth, the other with minimalist melodrama. The failing of the film is in its certainity that objective truth can be found in art (it is by no means certain...we are all,IMO, and to quote newton , just children playing in the sands of time amusing ourselves with the discovery of a colorful shell here and there...). The tension with this film is that it succeeds as the formalist art that it critiques , thus, holding a mirror unto itself. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/19/23 Full Review Audience Member Excellent depiction of plight of refugees Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/02/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Last Dance

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