The Forgotten Virtue of Compassion
People are strange: and I am probably one of the strangest.
Monday was a day when I wanted to be alone, among strangers, so I headed off to the neighbourhood theatre, after my morning lectures.
‘1917' had a wonderful review in the Hindustan Times on Sunday. That’s where I was headed.
There were exactly five people in the theatre and two of them were the ushers.
1917 is an epic war film directed, co-written and produced by Sam Mendes. The film stars George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Claire Duburcq, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch. It is based in part on an account told to Mendes by his paternal grandfather, Alfred Mendes, and relates the story of two young British soldiers during World War I.
The mission they were given was to get a message to the second battalion of the Devonshire regiment, so that they would abort their planned follow-up attack on the Germans who they believed, have retreated. One of the officers who would have been killed if the attack, which was actually a trap, would have gone through, would have been Blake’s brother.
These are the facts.
But what the viewer feels during the 90 minutes of the movie, is something else altogether. The extreme youth of the two corporals, the vignettes of the blossoming cherry trees, chopped down by the retreating German army, and the blossoms falling on Schofeld like a silent benediction as he reaches, finally, his destination, climbing over the bodies of dead, putrefying bodies, after was caught by the swift current of the river, when he was shot at. The sense of pointlessness of so many wasted lives, the brightness of the summer countryside, contrasted with the darkness and despair of war. The simple, sublime hymn sung by one of the soldiers, as his battle-hardened comrades sit around him, listening in silence, is one of the most poignant scenes I have ever seen in a movie.
The sitting on the edge of your seat, the flinching at the sound of gun shots, the trying to hold back tears, when we hear this conversation : Is the baby a girl? Yes. what’s her name? I don’t know. Who is her mother? I don’t know. I found her…The enormity strikes you then, of the sheer number of orphans the carnage left behind.
And the feeling that the entire movie was captured in one shot, was the icing on the cake.
No, the movie is not jingoistic. Does it convey a message? Perhaps. But the message varies with every viewer.
Watch the movie, if you can. It is both technically and aesthetically brilliant.
We have allowed ourselves and our children to be so indifferent and immunised to human suffering, that we forget the value of a single life. Sadly, we have even begun measuring the enormity of a tragedy, by the number of lives lost, not by the fact that it happened at all.
This might refresh in our minds, the forgotten virtue of compassion.
(This is a Review I wrote at the beginning of last year)
