My favorite movie: Life of Pi
Movie plot :
The story begins in
Canada, a writer visits the Indian storyteller Pi Patel and asks him to tell
his life story. Pi tells the story of his childhood in Pondicherry, India, and
the origin of his nickname.
Pi's father named him
"Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in France. By the time he reached
secondary school, he changed his name to "Pi" (the Greek letter, π)
because he was tired of being called "Pissing Patel" (due to the pronunciation
of his name). One day, his father, a zoo
owner, explains that the municipality is no longer supporting the zoo and he
has hence decided to move to Canada, where the animals the family owns would
also be sold. They board on a Japanese cargo ship with the animals and out of
the blue, there is a storm, followed by a shipwrecking. Pi survives in a
lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a male Bengal tiger nicknamed
Richard Parker. They are adrift in the Pacific Ocean, with aggressive hyena and
Rickard Parker getting hungry.
Hyena ate a zebra,and
after ate the orangutan, the tiger ate the hyena.
Pi needs to find a
way to survive with tiger.
Some time later, the
lifeboat reaches the coast of Mexico. Pi is crushed emotionally that Richard
Parker does not acknowledge him before disappearing into the jungle. Pi is
rescued and brought to a hospital. Insurance agents for the Japanese company
that owned the freighter interview him, but do not believe his story and ask
what "really" happened. Pi tells a different story, in which he
shares the lifeboat not with animals, but with his mother, a Buddhist sailor
with a broken leg, and the cook. In this story, Pi says that the cook killed
the sailor in order to eat him and use him as bait. In a later struggle, Pi's
mother pushed her son to safety on a smaller raft before the cook murdered her
and threw her body overboard. Pi then took the knife and killed the cook, and
managed to survive on the cook's flesh until reaching Mexico. The insurance
agents are not satisfied with this story either, but they leave without
questioning Pi any further.
Characters:
Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) – The
novel’s protagonist, Pi is born in Pondicherry, India and raised among wild
animals, as his father is a zookeeper. Pi gets his unusual name from a famous
swimming pool in Paris. He has a deep affinity with religion from a young age,
and practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Pi is the narrator for most of
the novel, as he tells the story of his 227 days stranded in the Pacific Ocean.
During his ordeal Pi finds an incredible resourcefulness and survival instinct
within himself, but he also stoops to gruesome acts in his desperation. After
his rescue in Mexico, Pi attends the University of Toronto, where he studies
zoology and religion. He marries and has two children, and the author declares
that Pi’s story “has a happy ending.”
Richard Parker – A three-year-old male royal Bengal tiger who is Pi’s companion on the lifeboat.
Richard Parker was captured as a cub by a hunter named Richard Parker, but in
the accompanying paperwork the tiger’s name was switched with the hunter’s. The
tiger is the epitome of beauty, power, and danger, and he and Pi live in
respective territories on the lifeboat. When they reach Mexico, Richard Parker
disappears into the jungle without looking back. This “botched goodbye” pains
Pi for the rest of his life. In Pi’s second account of his ordeal Richard
Parker is actually a part of Pi himself, and a representation of the violent
things Pi had to do in order to survive.
