Misery Loves Company: Isolation in Film
Suraj Sharma in Life of Pi
For COUPAR'S third posting on Quarantine Culture, we look at films about isolation, physical, psychological, or both. While we struggle to stay sane in lockdown with family and friends, imagine drifting in a lifeboat across the vast Pacific Ocean with a massive Bengal Tiger for 227 days. That was the fate of the Indian Tamil teenage hero played by Suraj Sharma in Ang Lee's 2012 adventure drama Life of Pi. After a disaster at sea destroys everything, the spiritual Pi knows he forms an unlikely bond with a deadly tiger named Richard Parker.
Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens
Felines also play a prominent role in the classic 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens. The eccentric and reclusive owners, mother Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and daughter Edith Bouvier Beale kept stray cats in their decaying East Hampton mansion. A flea infestation ensued, necessitating the filmmakers, brothers Albert and David Maysles, to wear flea collars around their ankles during takes. That Big Edie was the aunt of former US First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and Little Edie, her first cousin, made the tragedy of their fall from privilege to poverty all the more poignant.
James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window
In Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 American Technicolor mystery thriller film Rear Window, a wheelchair, confines news photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) after he breaks his leg in an accident. Unable to physically leave his small hot Chelsea flat, he turns to voyeurism, looking out through a telephoto lens and binoculars at the shared courtyard's neighboring apartment windows. Not even his beautiful fiancée, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), an elegant model and dress designer, can distract him. The other tenants amuse him until Jeffries suspects he witnesses a murder.
Matt Damon in The Martian
Space the final frontier, especially if you are accidentally left behind during a crewed mission to Mars. Astronaut and botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) becomes lost in a dust storm on the Martian Acidalia Planitia and presumed dead in the 2015 science fiction film The Martian directed by Ridley Scott. Alone, Watney struggles to survive on Mars and signal to Earth millions of miles away that he is alive. Once alerted, NASA works to bring "the Martian" home while his crewmates plot a daring, rescue mission.
