UNIT 10 "MY FAVORITE MOVIE"

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.

Next, Yann notes the parallels between the two stories: the orangutan was Pi's mother, the zebra was the sailor, the hyena was the cook, and Richard Parker was Pi. Pi asks which story the writer prefers, and Yann chooses "the one with the tiger" because it is "the better story", to which Pi responds, "Thank you. And so it goes with God". Glancing at a copy of the insurance report, Yann sees that the agents wrote that Pi survived 227 days at sea with an adult Bengal tiger, meaning they had also chosen to record the more fantastic story.

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.