I reviewed the Turkish film Wild Pear Tree for the new SouthBound magazine:
His father read the book without asking whether it deserved reading. Sinan digs without asking whether the well will fill. There may be no water, and that was never the point. The film’s grace isn’t about the fruits of our labor, but someone acknowledges our labor with complete attention, which is just another form of love.
I responded to Ajithan’s article on Odysseus’s guilt in SouthBound:
Finally, I would separate the essay’s two claims about the Trojans and the Other. That Homer gives the Trojans grief and vengeance of their own while the film flattens them into victims, yes, I agree – the film gives them no voice. The political one, that this serves imperial ambition, I could not find in the film. A studio balancing commerce and fidelity is not the same as bending a story to serve power, and an Odysseus who recognizes the Horse as his own atrocity and ends in renunciation is hard to read as someone with an appetite for conquest.
I explored the character Pothivelu Pandaram from Jeyamohan’s The Abyss for Eliot Forum:
We feel for Pandaram because his love is real. We are appalled because it stops exactly where it does. Jeyamohan’s achievement lies in fleshing out an all-too-human Pandaram who lacks serious self-awareness and is not in any danger of moral awakening. He’s not a changed man, and there’s no redemption. The novel does not ask us to forgive him. It asks us to notice what he can’t: that he has spent his life deciding who is above the line and who falls below it, and that someone he held above it has finally put him below theirs.
