Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Life of Pi
2012 · Ang Lee · Life of Pi on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where Lee puts the horizon line in the ocean shots. (camera)
Miranda treats the horizon as a pivot, the lifeboat a small dark mass in an enveloping field. On the flat nights sea and sky merge and the line disappears entirely.
Payoff: The composition keeps telling you how small the boy is and how little of his situation he controls.
Listen for the tiger's breathing and water lapping wood at night. (sound)
The sound design swings between the crushing noise of the sinking ship and long exposed quiet. In the quiet stretches, breath and water carry the whole scene.
Payoff: Whole passages have no event except that a body is still alive, and the sound makes that enough. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. These are what the reading calls pure optical and sound situations: nothing to do but look, listen, and endure.
Track who holds the boat and who is pushed onto the raft. (staging)
Lee stages the truce between Pi and Richard Parker as territory. Proximity gets negotiated inch by inch, the tether shortening and lengthening as the days pass.
Payoff: The relationship is told in space rather than dialogue, so you read it the way animals do.
Watch Suraj Sharma's eyes when he looks at the tiger. (performance)
Sharma had never acted and had no animal in front of him in the Taichung tank. His fear, then his wariness, then his attention are aimed at empty air.
Payoff: Everything you believe about Richard Parker arrives through a first-time actor looking at nothing.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice the room in Montreal each time the film returns to it while you watch the ocean.