Big Fish, Big Talk, Big Fun

Big Fish is a movie that I watched at the suggestion, and insistance, of a good friend. I had seen posters of this movie in a local video shop for quite sometime now, but would not have watched it if it was not suggested by someone. It's basically a story of a father and his son: the son's reconciling with his father; the main theme is an exploration by the son of the father's life and his tall tales.

The father is an interesting character. In his world, nothing happens in the ordinary way. Everything happens in a fascinating way, in a grand scale; giants, witches, werewolves and others troll in his stories. And the son, though used to his father's stories, starts developing suspicions about those stories as time passes, and this finally leads to his total disliking of his father. He even declines to accept his father's existence at one point.

It is only when the father is sick, and the son comes to spend some time with him, things start finally showing up in their real light. The son would understand the reason behind his father's story and the real events that led to the stories.

This is a very nice movie, and an entertaining at that.

Growing up in a small, remote town, I ahd around me many such storytellers. People who are complelled to tell tall tales, who in Marquez's word, "Won't tell the truth even by mistake". Those were the people who perhaps to hide their poverty, would proclaim the variety of food they had that day, or the difference places they saw or things they knew. When I started growing up, I felt that those were a bunch of liars and braggarts. But looking back now, I see that that was the fun part....to be with good storytellers, people who could conceal their frustration and could try to overcome worries in a world of fantasy.

Most of my family and relations, on the other hand, lived in a quasi-fantastic world, where ghosts and demons used to coexist with gods and humans. They even had a distinch hierarchial classification of the spirits. For example, the sound that used to come from the babo tress behind our kitchen were made by a spirit, who was exiced each time something good was being prepared; however, we had nothing to worry about, because he was the most useless ghost who could do no harm to anybody except for making some noise. The most ferosious variety of spirits were those without a head, and with their eyes on their chests. They were the deadliest. If they saw you, they would kill you.

Then there was this guy, who with his whole family perished in a car crash when I was an infant. My mothjer always used to tell us that the previous night, while smoking a cigarette in his front porch, he saw a huge, blak person waving and beckning him from the top of a big tree in a field across his house. For years later, when I would come back at late night or early morning from a friend's place or after watching some cultural programme, I would be scared to look at the tree for fear that there may be the same black guy standing there.

However, over a period of time, I would defeat the demons that lurked innthe darkness, and so do most people. I would also realise over time how great an art Storytelling is!

One of the greatest storyteller of our time is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For almost 4 decades, he has woven reality with fantasy, and in the process making himself one of the greatests in Magic Realism. However, before that he told stories in a different field, where truth was necessary. Before becoming the famous author that he is, Marquez used to work as a journalist in Baranquilla, Colombia; but his penchant for storytelling often took over him and he would end up writing fictional, magnificent stories about people and events that either had not happened, or , if happened, had very little to do with his version. And he would finally acknowledge why storytelling is so important to the present day Latin america amidst its frustration and helplessness.

I think, justice was done to all the storytellers in the world, when Dario Fo paid a glittering tribute to them in his Nobel acceptance speech.