The Unforgettable Desire

Source - Indiewire On January 1, 2019, I sat down to watch Michael Curtiz's  Casablanca (1942). It had been on my to-watch list since I watched Damien Chazelle's  La La Land (2016) for the nth time in June 2018 while pausing the film to make notes. When I paid attention to Mia speaking about Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca while pointing at the studio-window in the Warner Brothers lot — and sleeping under a giant Ingrid Bergman wallpaper — I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a friend from my college theatre days. I had not taken his suggestion of watching Ingrid Bergman films seriously back in 2017 because I was busy feeling validated by “Fools who dream”. I was hooked to my laptop screen while watching Casablanca . When the film ended, all I could think was that the film doesn’t merely has a wow- factor or THE-factor, but it has the ‘What a beauty!’-factor.   Mostly, I was impressed by the idea of everything that’s happening during the second Worl...

When I read Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002) , I wondered about the falling fishes, talking cats and mysterious men and women. When I read South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992) , I wondered about the mysterious woman and how a person can seem like a figment of imagination when s/he leaves no physical proof of existing. When I read Norwegian Wood (1987) , I wondered about how there is nothing in particular to wonder about. The translator’s note in Norwegian Wood states how some readers call it ‘just’ a love story. The translator, Jay Rubin, goes on to show how it’s ‘not’ just a love story. I agree with him. I had put a lot of effort in figuring out why fishes fell from the sky when I read Kafka . I assumed that I needed to read more of Franz Kafka and Japanese culture. However, I ceased to wonder about it when in his interview with The Guardian last year Murakami stated that it was the job of the ‘intelligent people’ to figure out what fishes falling from the s...