Fugitive pieces, Moonlight Sonata & Pather Panchali

15 years ago I first heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata…..the slow adagio sostuneto is an all time romantic tune on earth…yet I did not like it for its romanticism…but its brooding sadness….a slow ache of un explained nostalgia that it always evoked….The bars stayed with me. I never knew why….recently after I saw ‘Fugitive Pieces’ (2007, directed by Jeremy Podeswa based on a eponymous novel by Canadian writer Anne Micheals) in IIT Bombay film club, a movie about Jacob Beer a holocaust survivor trying to coming to terms with his own loss I rediscovered the haunting melody of Beethoven….I realized why they say Beethoven is a timeless classic. Jacob’s sister used to play piano and Jacob remembers moonlight sonata from his past when they were a happy family of four until the Nazis hounded them in Poland, killed his parents in front of his own eyes and abducted his sister. Jacob survived miraculously with the kind help of a Greek archeologist. But the trauma that incident left behind is difficult to hide. He grows up in Canada, becomes a successful teacher and writer but never away from his past. He is consumed with the obsession of finding holocaust stories and writing them…..his wife Alexi deserts him once she gets to know from his diary how the shameless vitality of her is a distraction for Jacob’s endless pursuit of the past. In these moments and others when Jacob’s sister comes back in his dreams and memories I could identify with Jacob’s sense of loss. Though my history of difficulties are far more different and culturally irrelevant to Jacob’s yet the universal sense of loss evoked in me that unexplained nostalgia for my lost possessions, time , opportunities and losing on life as a whole. These feelings of loss occur in every society. When Jacob remembers her sister and moonlight sonata comes in the backdrop, I identify him with young Apu remembering his dead sister Durga from Ray classic Pather Panchali…..you got to see it to know my feelings…..