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Movie Review - "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"


Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is a rare piece of cinematic excellence where wonder and power of imagination meet at the gates of fantasy. If you have seen “Brazil” and have since then, ensconced it up on your all time best charts, then you will acknowledge thismovie’s authoritative step into the wilderness.

If Monty python’s Holy Grail is lying somewhere in your DVD collection, and instead of plugging in Scifi metadata on reviews of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, you have plugged in Terry Gilliam, then you would cherish this movie for a long time. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a movie that even the Gonzo journalists passed contentions, that the movie was virtually undoable, but somehow Gilliam and Depp made it possible. Then perhaps, Imaginarium is a frighteningly undoable project and has been, I believe given due credit for the accomplishment.

Coming in 4 years after the vertiginous Tideland, Imaginarium sweeps the carpet under your floor, chair under your lugubrious arse right from the start. But contrary to leaving you clueless, the movie grows under your skin, creeps across your spine and fatally wounds your mind. You are now stung by Gilliam’s powerful venom; it’s like nothing that’s out there in the mainstream. The movie is definitely not for everyone. But those that do watch and relish the fantasy, those that have had the Gilliam potion before will pour out the mind space and let the director fill in vacuous parts hitherto you never knew existed.

Imagniraium shows you a grumpy old man dreaming and letting in people into his dreams through a silver door. Once inside, the protagonist fills it with his imagination and the old man envelops it with a story. He is the supporter of stories, and apparently, belongs to the monk set, who chanted stories so the world could operate smoothly. Without stories, the world would come to a stand still. This old man is enticed into betting by a black hooded lean charmer. The old man looses his wife and the daughter to this charmer, but regains eventually at the price of his immortality.

The scintillating discovery of a dreamscape, where one’s imagination collides with another while the white beard old man supports with the enveloping story, is puzzling, invigorating and greatly satisfying to watch. You almost figure out everything by yourself. The setting of the movie is a bit oldish, like the seventies. Although not much can be said about the actors, for the movie was mostly driven by the director from behind the screen. Its visually appealing, strokes the outer skin of your senses so long that you might develop goose bumps in your eyes. So many dreams are interplayed so well, and so many characters are let into the dream scape, it is an enchanting tale of dreams, more than the story chanting of monks, which it is made out to be.

I think, Gilliam here is trying to envelope the audience dreams with a story of his, just as the curmudgeon in the movie does.

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