You write
>Anyone seen this film? Impressions?
>
>http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/hottx/film/bottom_film
>.html?in_review_id=9231&in_review_text_id=63231
Hi Jesse,
Your post piqued my interest, so I had a peek. HERE is why no one will
see this film, *Sixth Happiness*:
The reviewer says, "It is being
shown for one week only - 2-8 October - at the National
Film Theatre. That's a shameful comment on the multiplex
cinemas up and down the country which, week in, week
out, lose money on the Hollywood dross they screen, but
won't give an offbeat British film its fair exhibition chance.
It is scandalous.
Also from the review (for those who have trouble finding it, as I did):
Brit Kotwal, born in Bombay in 1962,is not like other children. His
given name matches his brittle bones. If he hiccups, he risks cracking a
rib. . . . But his parents, Sam and Sera, love Brit dearly and rear him
to manhood. They have no choice, really. Their baby already looks 37
years old when born. .. All of which enables Firdaus Kanga, the Parsee
author and star of this semi-autobiographical story, to play himself in
it. . .as director Waris Hussein escorts him from the cradle and into
adolescence while he stays looking his off-screen age.
. . .Brit shuttle[s] around his parents' roomy apartment and Bombay's
jampacked street life in his wheelchair, using hindsight as well as
insight to comment on his fragile state and people's perceptions of him.
He has humour and not a particle of self-pity.
. . . A Persian sect that fled the Muslim invaders a millennium ago, the
Parsees in this BBC Films-British Film Institute production go with the
flow of life, miraculously surviving. Like them, Brit is always on the
move. His mind is mobile: it works wherever he is. His own quirky film
script recalls Christy Brown's memoirs in My Left Foot. He turns a
dreadful handicap into a churning tragi-comedy.
Mother (Souad Faress) is an unreconstructed imperialist. . .Dad
(Khoudis Wadia), a bank executive, is ashamed of his deformed child, but
apparently grieving stoically until he unexpectedly and fatally cracks.
. . .A deaf but jolly cousin (Nisha K Nayar) is abducted by her lover
and sold into prostitution. A rich kinswoman (Sabira Merchant), who
tutors Brit, commits suicide when her husband is killed in a Rolls-Royce
crash."
Tragedy upon tragedy! But with "jolly" and "good-humored" disabled
people--with "quirks". But wait, there's more:
"A bisexual, [Brit] bonds in flesh and spirit with a handsome young
student lodger (Ahsen Bhatti), who takes him swimming, even dancing (on
his two wheels). His lover,kind but cautious, eventually takes a
suitable girl as his partner. Brit mischievously seduces her.
"The element of sitcom is never far away. But. . .Firdaus Kanga's
performance has the battery-pack power without the fuse-blowing
temperament of that other man-child, Oskar, in Gunther Grass's The Tin
Drum. [ANYONE SEE THIS?]
"Sixth Happiness - the title is an ironic play on the virtues of the
Ingrid Bergman film - was part-financed by National Lottery cash. . .
For once, this subsidy has been spent on a film worth making and seeing,
which wouldn't have been made otherwise. But how many will see it?
© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 01 October 1998
This Is London
Thanks, Jesse; this film sounds ripe for analysis of cinematic
representations of disabled persons on the international scene.
Dona Avery
U of Bristol/AZ State U.
[log in to unmask]
www.public.asu.edu/~donam
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