The Pool

Beautiful movie. I am frankly really surprised at the high quality of every aspect of the filmmaking! Maybe the most 'authentic' look at people in India - and this is compared to the good (non-bollywood) movies made in India as well as movies made here about India. The sense of place is really strong. The story is completely 'real' without any tricks to make it sensational. The cinematography is really amazing, and the feel of the whole thing gentle and warm, without being hokey in any way. Using real people instead of actors is a very good idea - seeing this makes me wonder why we bother with real actors at all. :) I hope Smith paid all these people really well even though he obviously didn't make anything from it. I'm really glad that this movie is available on iTunes.

One of those movies you come across when flicking through countless pages on the internet. You read the synopsis and you feel like it sounds mildly interesting. I would have loved for the movie to be in English cause sometimes I get a little tired of subtitles, but one way or another, I did enjoy it.

It's one those ¨feels like reality¨ movies about a young man who wishes for a better life as he works selling plastic bags and as a member of staff in some cheap hotel. As he is out and about with a a friend who is also his ¨business partner¨, he discovers a luxury house where a man is cleaning up a big swimming pool. Our protagonist who comes from a very humble background, becomes fascinated and totally obsessed with it. He decides there and then that he will find a way to be invited into this villa. His obsession will lead to an unlikely and life-changing friendship

The Pool is by an American director, but takes place in India and had it's original English screenplay translated into Hindi with the end result having English subtitles. The film is a look at a couple of youth living in India and how they go about their everyday lives. The main character is Venkatesh who he says is about 18 years old and he lives alone in a bigger city and does various small jobs throughout the different days of the week to support himself and send money back home to his mother and siblings. We are also introduced to his much younger friend Jhangir who sells plastic bags on the street with him and after time the two of them have become best friends. After being fascinated by a beautiful summer house and swimming pool in a certain area of town, Venkatesh eventually gets to meet the owner and his daughter and soon gets a job cleaning up the garden and maintaining the property while they are there for the summer. The plot might sound simple enough and The Pool is definitely not a complicated film, but when you have watched the film and start to think about the different characters and their actions and decisions they have done in the film as well as their behaviours and what they said, really opens up a whole new way of looking at the film and it's characters. Everything here is analyzed and constructed very well. After awhile we feel like we have gotten to know the characters really well and at times they seem like people who we have probably known in our own lives at one point, or another because they seem so real and there is nothing exaggerated or over the top about them. The teenagers act like teenagers and the adults like adults. I know that is a very brief interpretation, but if you choose to see the film, I think you would agree that the way the characters are written are very comparable to a lot of people out there and like I said it could (depending on your age) remind you of yourself at certain time periods in your life. The film just had an authentic feel to it about it, whether with the dialogue of the characters or some of the grittier areas of town they are in to the story itself which is ultimately about one's survival in a big world and staying true to the things that matter to you and ultimately trying to better yourself for the big wide world out there. The film does have an authentic look to it, like I mentioned earlier, but it also has some scenes of great beauty and tranquility. The scenes in the garden of the summer house, or just some of the areas the teenagers go to are overgrown with beautiful plants and flowers and even though it is just a film it gives you a pleasing feeling watching it also because of the low key and slower paced parts of the film that make it seem like a very gentle and peaceful film. There are some sad elements to the film here, but overall I would not say it is a depressing one. I think for me the film offered a bit of hope to some of these characters and that some of the others may have to work on things a little more in order to achieve happiness, or what they want, but it is not unattainable. This is a film that left me thinking about it after I saw it and I really enjoyed some of the natural dialogue, the wonderfully written characters and the slower paced yet tranquil and beautiful aspects of some of the film's story, characters and scenery. If all of what I just described sounds the least bit interesting to you, then I recommend you see The Pool because it is masterfully done film with a lot of talent behind it and I am sure with the right audience it will be a hit.

Going for a swim in a swimming pool is an everyday occurrence for most young people. For eighteen-year old Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), however, it represents a life of privilege to which he has no hopes of attaining. Poor and illiterate, Venkatesh is a tall, wiry young man who works as a roomboy making beds, cleaning rooms, and scrubbing toilets in a hotel in Panjim in the Indian State of Goa, a former Portuguese colony. His spare time is taken up, not with cricket matches or sailing, but with selling plastic bags on the streets with his eleven-year-old friend Jhangir (Jhangir Badshah) who has no parents and also cannot read or write. Based on co-screenwriter Randy Russell's short story set in Iowa City, Iowa and transported to India by director Chris Smith, The Pool is thoroughly without condescension or efforting at multicultural "sensitivity".

Reminiscent of the realism of the Italian masters and the quiet humanism of Satyajit Ray, Smith, a filmmaker from Milwaukee, best known for his 1999 documentary American Movie, uses mainly non-professional actors to tell a simple story about real people simply engaged in life. Many of the stories are taken directly from the boys' life and Smith wisely avoids imposing his preconceived notions of how life is there for them. That sense of balance and proportion is what gives The Pool a special resonance. Spoken in Hindi (a language Smith does not speak) with English subtitles, The Pool is rich in detail and feels completely natural, as if it is unfolding right before our eyes with the camera merely following the characters around to see what will happen next.

On one of his walks into the more affluent suburbs, Venkatesh climbs a hillside and sees a swimming pool in the backyard of a neighbor's villa and becomes obsessed with the idea of swimming in it. What especially interests him is the fact that no one ever seems to swim in it which he longs to do. Climbing onto a mango tree near the property to get a better view, Venkatesh thinks of different ways of getting into the pool and shrugs off Jahangir who tells him "The closest you're going to get to that pool is cleaning it." Venkatesh, however, makes friends with the residents of the villa – an almost silent upper class man from Mumbai (Nana Patekar) who offers him work in their garden. Soon he becomes interested in the man's snooty daughter Ayesha (Ayesha Mohan), whose urban sophistication would make her at home in New York or Chicago.

While the social and economic divide is too much to give Venkatesh much of a chance with Ayesha, they nevertheless develop a charming friendship and go on boat rides with Jahangir and visit an abandoned fort. When the three are just relaxing and being together, they are just kids enjoying themselves and there is no consciousness of class. The gap between them surfaces, however, when Ayesha refuses his offering of a cup of chai or some papadums at a vendor's stand. When the two boys bicker at the fort, Ayesha sullenly calls them children and stomps off. Eventually, Venkatesh is hired as a gardener by the owner who takes a paternal interest in him, leading to a surprising life altering choice and a new understanding of the world.

Well-respected documentarian Chris Smith proves himself a master of narrative form with this incredibly subtle and moving Hindi-language drama, shot in India. Along with Elite Squad, Edge of Heaven, Reprise, and Let the Right One In, "The Pool" is easily one of the best films of the year.

As a New York-based Indian-American filmmaker who grew up in Wisconsin and has shot fiction films in India, I was nonetheless skeptical about a Wisconsin-based documentarian, even one of Smith's stature, working from a Midwestern-set fictional short story reset in India. Western filmmakers tend to miss the subtleties that make India unique and exciting, choosing instead to exoticize India's most superficial differences, condemn its shortcomings, or talk vaguely about its 'contradictions' (when they mean "contrasts," revealing their ignorance of the same contrasts in any big city).

Smith doesn't fall into any of these pitfalls, and has created a work of lasting honesty and beauty. Watching it, it's hard to believe Smith is not only not Indian, but does not speak Hindi. I have been recommending the film to everyone I know, even more so on second viewing (at the South Asian International Film Festival, where it won top honors), once I could worry less about what was going to happen next and focus more on the incredibly nuanced script and acting, lush sound design, delightful score, and masterful framing and camera movement.

"The Pool" has the lyricism and humanism of Satyajit Ray, the simple strength and beauty of the great Italian neo-realists, and a great documentarian's eye for telling detail and feeling of captured reality.

I hope the film wins some year-end nominations and awards, followed by a wider re-release, because everyone who loves great cinema deserves to see "The Pool."