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Discovering the magic
"I saw A Canterbury Tale again this morning for the third time, and I was astonished. It
never was my favorite. I think the second time I saw it, I found parts slow
and sometimes boring. Blimp and AMOLAD have always been my all-time
favorites. But something changed this morning. It manages to balance a
loving evocation of a bucolic life while hinting at the small-mindedness of
such worlds. It presents a gripping mystery which, on the surface, seems to
be about nothing more than a nutter pouring glue onto women's hair, yet that
mystery grows into something much larger and grander. It tells the history
of a single, newly excavated turn in the old pilgrim's road and manages to
relate that to Britain and how it has changed over 600 years. It has that
wonderful battle scene of the children in the boat. And it has that
extraordinary closing sequence in Canterbury, about which no doubt books
could be written. And throughout all this, nothing really happens. There is
no on-screen romance, no one fights, no one gets killed, no one gets
arrested, no great battles happens, there's not even an air-raid! The movie
takes place over a couple of accidental days in the lives of a few people
where minor rivers converge, and somehow, the sum of their parts is so much
greater. No doubt in the lives these people live from here on out, they will
always look back to this odd and unexpected excursion as something special
but will not quite know why. That's what's so moving about this picture. It
takes a few unheralded lives, over a few seemingly insignificant days, and
shows us what is really grand in them. It really does defy catergorization."
Ranbir Sidhu, July, 2010
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