*screencap from online sources

Most people I know have the tendency to loop songs when it comes to those they take a liking to. Looping excessively spoils it for me, so I hardly want to kill my favourite Jap tunes. Classical music is different though – a case in point is Gustav Mahler’s Quartet for Piano and Strings in A Minor – yes that’s the ominous melody you majorly hear in the Civil War room scenes of good ol’ Shutter Island, my new favourite film. The piece is good because it’s sticky, the heavy notes tend to strike so vividly like a gunshot on a winter day, and unforgettable, the way it’s succumbing to the endless spins on the record player, as in the film, in my head.

The tune, a blend of piano and soulful strings, has been playing over the laptop speakers for two days now, while I did my art and things, such that at a point of time I thought it began to not sound like Shutter Island; I don’t know for sure if that’s a good thing or not. Surfing for the sheet music which I found and had printed, all of 18 pages, I unwittingly (albeit excitedly; was in the mood for something new) sat at the piano and attempted to decipher that distant language now so foreign, transcribed in black and white forms, barely got past the first page and thought the move was quite silly considering I can’t really read notes.

Well, if you insist, I can but count them note by note by the lines, using my knowledge of what’s left of what little I had learned during the music lessons when I was much younger. Actually, I still can’t figure which octave the bass clef is in. Often I imagine how awesome it would be if I could also play by reading scores, instead of playing by ear. It’s not a bad thing, but after a while there’s not much variations, and your own set of skills and piano techniques get old.

Oh, I’ve digressed haven’t I. Having watched twice within a span of three days, Shutter Island is a film that I consider a little less mainstream; apart from disturbing concepts that haunt you mentally, you won’t find more true horror and action than you would find sanity on the entire island. Set where normal is defined as erratic, the story seeks to screw with your head like how the protagonist is challenged with a cloud of reality and delusions woven together seamlessly as he comes to terms with himself, sending you on a roundabout until the pieces fall back together and looms at you in a more than subtle way. But then you realise they’ve been dropping clues since the opening scene.

Post WWII, a handful of scenes let us relive fragments of the war, very distant and cold, through the protagonist’s eyes. If you are not up for some mind boggling mess at an isolated island holding three psychiatric wards, at the very least I believe you would applaud the efforts put into the amazing cinematography. The Civil War room scenes, damn. Scenes of the protagonist’s illusions, sometimes vivid memories, are morbidly saturated like the 1950s, yet in contrast with reality – largely with regards to the truth – these appear more as monochromatic. And just when you thought the story can’t get any more perplexing, the tiny filming incongruities which were most probably meant for bugs you; that you simply have to do a double take and that leaves you wondering. I miss watching fine movies like this..

The use of classical music is extremely befitting – can’t you see how I’m already addicted to Mahler’s piece? I think I’m gonna try out the score again tomorrow.

Movie aside, I don’t know why this is so coincidental; the melodramatic and gloomy vibes from the quartet complements what we are going through in this period of time. Timings can’t be any worse it seems, and there’s no purpose in spelling out anything. This.. spate of events revolving around us, however, as I see, has spawned the blitz of much needed change, though not exactly wanted. I’ve been learning new things but not in that hard a way like some others. Yes, I think its high time.

Are we nearly at the end of April already?

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Check out the Shutter Island wiki
If you’ve watched Shutter Island, what did you think of it?
Did the ending throw you off?