What is the definition of a good movie ? Is it about

1 . Technique ?

2 . Execution ?

3. Story ?

4. Screenplay ?

5. All this and everything I forgot to mention.

The answer according to me is none of the above ,it’s when a movie kicks you in your guts so hard that you keep thinking about it all the way to your home and even after.

The experience of watching “The Revolutionary Road “on Saturday was similar, the purposelessness of existence ,the banality of everyday chores ,the repetitiveness of routines and finally the hopelessness arising out of it has been so brilliantly captured in this movie that it sent me hurtling down into a sea of personal memories ,memories which I have kept at bay for a long long time ,images of my mother sacrificing so much and so often for the sake of raising her two kids ,in fact it is the story of every Housewife who eats after her family has finished eating. A mother whose very existence is defined by her capacity to serve her kids and husband ,an everyday struggle so selfless that tears well up in your eyes.

It doesn’t make for a spectacular suffering ,the ones that many film-makers and photographers like ,the ones that adorn the pages of a national geographic or TIME , but a prolonged and quiet one which does not interest many ,the movie had the same haunting feeling to it as the one I felt after watching “The Namesake” which brought back the memories of my Bengali father coming out of a traditional setting and struggling in an alien environment to provide for and raise his two kids and his wife ,watching his kids talk in an alien language at home and following an alien culture.

It is very hard to capture this pain of existence and this is where the genius of the director comes alive ,many overdo it by putting in too much dialogues and monologues ,while relegating the silence of suffering to the background. No wonder the most moving moments of world cinema are actually without dialogues and the most riveting description of human tragedy are actually still photographs.

The scene with Kate standing in the room after the botched attempt at self-abortion ,blood dripping onto the carpet ,staring on into the open is one of the most poignant scenes that I have watched on screen ,in terms of impact ,I rate it second only to the scene in Namesake where Gogol stands in the university room where his father died ,and spontaneously bursts into a sea of grief , it’s the depiction of pain in it’s most fragile and subtle form .

This is not an objective analysis of the movie but an emotional one because I never believed in objective deconstruction of things which are supposed to appeal to your heart and mind ,I wanted this post to be a bit longer but the I feel the profoundness of an experience cannot measured by the abundance of words by by the lack of it.