![]() ![]() As the zoo business dries up, the Patel family decide to move to Canada, flog their animals and start a new life. The story starts in Pondicherry, India, where Piscine Patel, named after a French swimming pool and compelled to change his name to a mathematical constant in order to staunch persistent bullying (it’s not nearly so twee as it sounds), lives in a zoo with his family. That time has clearly been used well to create something that as a spectacle seems unlike anything previously seen in cinema (technically, it could not have been made ten years ago) and as a piece of storytelling unfolds just about perfectly. Even Lee has been working on the film since 2009, with writer David Magee, whose script untangles Martel’s story with enormous elegance and gentle humour. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet have all dipped their feet in its treacherous waters before deciding it wasn’t for them. ![]() It’s been almost a decade since Fox first acquired the rights to adapt Martel’s book, back in 2003, and since then M. Actually, what it needs is Ang Lee, who makes this enormously complicated film look like the simplest thing in the world.Īs with almost anything that looks simple, it’s taken a lot of work to get here. ![]() There are several things about Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi that suggest it couldn’t be realised on screen: it’s largely set on a small boat adrift in the ocean, inhabited only by a young man and a tiger.well, really, do you need further reasons? It requires a tiger that will follow direction and a way of making bobbing about in water interesting for close to two hours, with only one person speaking. From now on, let’s just trust that a sufficiently and necessarily peculiar mind can draw a visual story out of any novel. All the big ones that seemed impossible are toppling: The English Patient, Naked Lunch, Cloud Atlas, Watchmen, The Lord Of The Rings. We should probably stop deeming any book ‘unfilmable’. ![]()
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