Terri: You're a big boy now

Terri’s eponymous hero is a rotund teen living in some warm, semi-rural place with only an uncle who tends to wander around in a medicinal fog for a guardian. With his wavy locks and formidable neck, Terri cuts something of a Wildean profile, but whatever air of sophistication such qualities might generate is undercut by his calm refusal to engage in social or academic life. He wears Crocs and socks and old school pajamas everywhere—less out of resignation, he claims, than for sheer comfort. He’s exiled from the school gymnasium for declining to participate. He observes other teens going about their activities with the same anthropological distance and wonder he brings to his new habit of murdering mice so as to witness the feeding habits of local birds of prey. He’s also regularly late or absent for class, a casual transgression that inadvertently becomes a route out of his troublesome solitude, because cutting class means going to the principal’s office, and Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, takes a special interest in Terri.

Fitzgerald is a middle-aged married man, but both his stagey manner of asserting authority and his calculated attempts to “reach out”—by aiding and abetting Terri’s class cutting through regular appointments; by offering snacks and high-fives and peppering their consultations with an earnestly intoned “Dude...”—render him less a teacher or father figure than an overgrown peer or passive-aggressively needy big brother. Fitzgerald is played by John C. Reilly, and if you start watching Terri and find yourself feeling unsure whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy, Reilly doesn’t seem to have any such doubts. He’s understatedly goofy, unflatteringly lit and very funny, as well as oddly sweet and lived-in. Reilly is often cast in the supporting bit as that guy that the central character slowly becomes friends with. It’s because it’s hard not to want to become friends with John C. Reilly.

Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, a young actor with obvious talent but, equally important in a character study such as this, he simply has a marvelously expressive face and body that, however outsized, conveys inner depths even when doing almost nothing. Walking through the woods in his PJs, Wysocki’s Terri could almost be walking through a dream, and there are moments where director Azazel Jacobs’ keen eye for low-key, ordinary strangeness pleasingly heightens that feeling. But as it goes along it becomes clear that Terri, scripted by Patrick Dewitt from a story by Dewitt and Jacobs, is firmly grounded in reality, its depiction of idiotic bullying, misguided cries for help, exploratory sadism, peculiar alliances between unlikely friends, horny fumblings in home economics, and nights spent in the shed getting wasted on stolen whiskey and uncle’s meds and making awkward attempts as sexual posturing all resonate deeply with my experience of high school at least. This is a film that’s attuned to the pains of alienation without wallowing in despair—yet neither does it offer bullshit uplift. It merely suggests that, if we stay alert, there is almost always some chance for each and every one of us to connect.

The Music Room: palatial trance

Satyajit Ray made The Music Room (1958) between the second and third instalments of his beloved Apu Trilogy (1955, 56, 59), the films that launched the great Bengali director’s career and convinced the world—if not quite the Indian public—that Indian movies could occasionally stray from the dictates of the flamboyant song and dance cinema that we instantly associate with “Bollywood” to this day. With The Music Room, Ray in fact did incorporate musical performance into his work, but rather than doing so in the old stop-everything-and-sing fashion, he made the music integral to the story and texture of the film, which turns out to be the very opposite of baroque-bombastic melodrama. This is a sombre, meditative, crepuscular film, about pleasure, devastation, and aristocracy in slow decline. Its gorgeous musical performances are given plenty of space to luxuriate, but they entrance rather than excite the listener. I’m not sure I’ve seen—or heard—anything quite like The Music Room, and once it was over I’d felt like I’d woken from a dream. The film is now available on blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Opening credits appear over an image of a hovering chandelier which looms closer and closer, until we cut to an arresting close-up of Biswambhar Roy (the great Chhabi Biswas), a middle-aged zamindar, or land-owning nobleman, who sits in a big chair on the roof of his crumbling palace, which stands isolated in a vast, hazy landscape that feels like it’s a world away from anyplace. Its flat surroundings reveal vestiges of a regal past: a lone elephant, a starved horse, traces of a road now seldom used, the skeleton of a ship. The Music Room takes place entirely within this landscape; you get to feeling like Roy is somehow sequestered here, in this place where tragedy befalls him during the film’s extensive flashback; and when he attempts to leave it, it’s as though some force buried in the earth has determined to keep him there. Throughout, Ray’s camera explores this landscape, the palace, and everything in it with steady, mesmerizing grace. This is a film founded in music, but also in magisterial spaces, from a sky full of lightning to the immense high ceilings of the titular room to the surface of a glass of tea from which an insect portentously struggles to escape.

It’s no slight on The Music Room to say that it might lull you asleep if you watch it when you’re tired—it’s literally spellbinding. The musical sections, in which gifted musicians perform in Roy’s music room (even when the expense of having them perform threatens to exhaust his dwindling funds) are deliciously drowsy: dudes lying around in their pyjamas on carpets and big pillows, smoking hookah pipes while sitars and tablas vibrate and patter, singers sing of love and desire, and dancers, their legs strewn with bells, move in seductive rhythms that only add to the warm complexity of the music. And it’s a good thing too, that the music and atmospheres of The Music Room so effortlessly carry the picture, because (and here’s my only complaint about the disc) with the white subtitles on the black-and-white images I couldn’t read half of the dialogue. Movies have been around for over a century now; they’ve seen advances in sound, colour and depth that the mediums forefathers could never have imagined. But we still haven’t figured out how to make subtitles legible.