Very dreamlike, almost mesmerizing in its effect. Would love to watch this film again, on a big screen.
*edit: actually I did see it on a big-screen TV, but I meant to say I would like to see it on the big screen of a movie theater.
Yeah, a pretty incredible film, altho a few takeaways I had from it were troubling ones. The only real female "voices" in the film are a monkey and a fairly horrible nag. How much was this Rossellini, how much of this was India?
The elephants were utterly beautiful, majestic, but I couldn't help but wish they were free of people and just out in the wild being themselves, untouched.
Still, really, this was a pretty glorious film.
Matthew
The elephant scenes were amazing. I never thought I'd say this about elephants, but they looked so "cute" lifting those big heavy logs, clamped between their tusks and trunk, and carefully setting them on the flatbed trucks. They were like front-end loaders. Wow, such docile beasts of burden! And they only had to work a three-hour day, before calling it quits due to the heat. Then they got a nice sit-down bath and rub down. lol
I also liked the scenes of the hundreds and hundreds of manual laborers building the dam. The images looked compatible with what it must have looked like when the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. Very timeless, dreamlike images, to be sure.
Elephants are amazingly beautiful animals. If the film was telling the truth, I'm glad those elephants were only worked three hours a day, at least.
Matthew