Sunday, August 02, 2009

The Lars Loneliness

Just saw the movie, "Lars and the real girl" and identified with it immensely. It tells the quirky tale of a sweet, innocent guy called Lars who begins to treat a doll as his girlfriend and lives the entire life cycle of a relationship with her, imagining her side of the conversations, her choices, her life story, her preferences giving her such emotional depth that in the end when she 'dies', people in his church congregation shed a silent tear for her. It is such an amazing, unbelievable plot made so freakingly acceptable that you are compelled to empathise with the characters inspite of their seemingly lunatic behavior that borders on the extremes of ridiculousness.

Even though the premise of the story is crackling, the real beauty lies in the fact that inspite of Lars' mooniness, people around him try and adjust to his new reality, patiently accepting Bianca (his doll girlfriend) as a real person, even getting her jobs as a model (cute!!), a school story book reader (with a tape recorder) and giving her makeovers. Ofcourse there is the initial discomfort and disquiet that a few of the them experience but eventually they go along with the pretense of it and somewhere I think, most of them feel a sort of companionship with the mute doll and a comfort in her inoffensive, unassuming presence.

There are also some hilarious mini-anecdotes about grown-up co-workers and their possessiveness over little action figures and teddy bears. I guess all of us have such affections for non-living things and I think that is the writer's way of saying that Lars is a normal person, just very lonely and socially inept, probably due to supposed-problems with his upbringing by a single parent, having had lost his mother at birth and that his attachment to the doll is just a magnified, blown up version of our own quirky, little, emotional ties with our lifeless possessions. I guess all of us are lonely; if not always, atleast at some point of time in our lives and not everyone is lucky enough to find a real person to share their troubles with, so we (as in we, the absolute irrational, illogical beings that we become sometimes) seek solace in the non-judgmental company of our little toys. And that's real...

Do watch the film...it is a little slow at times, but amusing and thought-provoking for most of it.