I haven’t watched TV or read newspapers or magazines for more than a year now, with one exception — twice a month, I stop by at the roadside magazine stall opposite my house and hand over thirty rupees for a copy of Time Out Mumbai.
However, even though I have been buying the magazine for almost two years now, I only started to think of it as a necessity when I started my experiment.
Undeterred by my earlier escapade with ‘The French Touch’ festival, I returned to the Alliance Francaise auditorium on Thursday evening to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film ‘Le Petit Soldat’ (’The Little Soldier’).
Set against the backdrop of the Algerian War, the film narrates the tragic love story of Michel Subord and Anna Karina who fall in love in spite of belonging to warring terrorist groups. The film pulsates with the same restless energy as ‘Breathless’, my favorite Godard movie, which was screened at the festival earlier on Tuesday. So, in spite of the little anti-climax at the end, when the DVD stuck and wouldn’t play, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, or at least the part of the movie I did watch.
On Saturday evening, I walked over to Alliance Francaise to watch Rimbaud’s ‘Enfer et Illumination’, a French play that is part of the month long ‘The French Touch’ festival.
The play basically involved a man (Rimbaud) and a woman (his muse?) reciting Rimbaud’s poetry in French, and enacting it in the Kuchipudi tradition (painted faces et al), while English subtitles were projected onto the screen.
I hardly know any French, haven’t ever read Rimbaud, and have no interest in Kuchipudi. The only reason I went for the play was because it was free and therefore allowed.