Zorba the Greek – Life in a Nutshell - [Dileepa Karunarathna]

Zorba the Greek – Life in a Nutshell

I recently watched this fabulous movie for the second time after about a year or so, which was a great revitalisation, amid examinations and left me with an impetus to write down few rudiment thoughts on the movie. The movie while discussing many auxiliary themes, basically depicts two different philosophies of life or lifestyles which can be adapted by oneself. This basic distinction is illustrated by Zorba who represents the practical man who has got tempered by life itself, and Basil–the boss, who represents theoretical serious man who tries to comprehend life using knowledge rather than experience. And the film highlights lapses of latter in a subtle way. This is not some completely new way of leading one’s life and we can find characters similar to Zorba in maxim Gorki’s stories which were written almost a century ago where we find protagonists who adore this-

-same free lifestyle. But this specifically compares that with the theoretical bookworm which has been treated as the logical counterpart of it. At the beginning of the movie where zorba and basil meets for the first time and have a drink in tavern, basil says that he writes “poetry essays....” where Zorba says “no you think too much that is your trouble.... clever people and grocers, they weigh everything”. Its true that sometimes people like basil tends to ponder a great deal to decide on something while it would be much easy for somebody like zorba to decide on the same thing based on his instincts and experience.

Consequently basil makes his decision and goes to the village with zorba where the remaining part of the story elapses. On the first few days they stay at a ‘hotel’ of a ‘French widow’ whose plight, resembles Katrina Ivanovna in crime and punishment. Her nostalgia of past which might be probably a blend of reality and imagination, and her perception of revolution as people running here and there etc. leave very little for our imagination to envisage what kind of ‘serious politics’ she and her 4 admirals had in bedroom. And yet at the same time we can notice that Zorba can empathize with her rather than basil who cannot stop laughing at her whimsical nature and thoughts, which again shows us a subtle distinction between the practical man and bookworm who relatively lacks experience.

The way men treat the widow (the younger one) in village tavern is horrendous and depicts the callousness of male chauvinism which was rampant in rural communities sometime ago. Zorba: “look at the faces of all these... they all want her... and they hate her because they cannot have her.” Being a lonely widow amid such crowd is not something simple and easy. In that context she needs a man rather than a boy like the student who goes after herself, which again depicts a sensitive and yet important aspect of life that is love alone doesn’t come first because of its purity and sincerity. Social factors have to be taken into the account when making a decision concerning a relationship in such situation not because it’s right, but because of constrains and theoretical limitations of the world and the society in which we live. Even though the student might really love the widow, in a profound way which is different from what naive childish teenage love, she cannot have a life with himself and neither can he have a life with herself, because of those other social factors which come to play. Such ideal situations can only exist in pure communist (collective) societies like Pandora tribe we see in ‘avatar’. But contrary to that in almost all contemporary societies, many other artificial social factors come to play when it comes to relationships. But here it seems like she is disgusting himself or trying to repel himself by using her bitchy shield and despite disgrace, he is still after her which is quite complicated situation which one might interpret as masochism. And at the same time this is not depressive or pessimistic movie since basil and zorba who can be idealised as a practical man who has been tempered by experiences he has gained, takes reasonable stance if not correct one, in most of the cases like this.

We can see that basil fails to do any labour work in the mine and the director pokes fun at him in the scene where he attempts to carry a log to the mine, in a funny way, and Zorba asks him to go back to his papers for god’s sake. We can also see there that Zorba is more fluent and able to deal with petite bourgeois villagers than basil. When Zorba shouts at villagers for being cowards and leaving their axes inside the mine which costs a lot of money, basil is glad that nobody was hurt and ask zorba to give workmen a day off, where Zorba says, "boss you better makeup your mind, are you or are you not a gosh-darn capitalist?”

The director brings out Zorba's attitude about war or more precisely, the futility of war in subsequent dialogue between him and basil where Zorba articulates his opinion about fights and wars based on race or nationality and also the nature of war and horrendous things which take place in a war. The director compares and contrasts Zorba's matured experienced worldview which realised the futility of war, with Basils’ simplistic attitude where he asks "what is so stupid about fighting for your country?"

"i have done things for my country, i have killed, burned villages, raped women... and why?... because they were turks of bulgarians. thats the rotten damn fool i was. now i look at a man, any man... and say he is good or bad. what do i care if he is greek or turk? as i get older i wouls stopp asking that. good or bad whats the difference? they endup in the same way... food for worms...."

But we can see that Zorba’s stance regarding women is quite outdated. Here women are depicted as helpless creatures who usually have to take refuge of men and therefore it’s a sin to betray them. The essence of idea is that women are feeble set of people which is proven to be wrong in subsequent years. This idea on women is brought out using the French widow with whom Zorba falls in love. She is presented as a very delicate woman who lives in her past glamorous days and laments about the grace she has lost in the natural aging process, where we know that women cannot be simplified to such model and is capable of getting involved in social movements, and making a productive contribution to social evolution, rather than being victims of despotic men and pleading them not to forget them, and lament telling that men are leaving them which implies that without men they cannot live or it make them helpless. And at the same time she can be considered as a general example of a woman who has not saturated of love in a real way and therefore, lives in dreams trying to experience it. Her delicate feelings are nicely brought out everywhere in this movie. Especially when she comes running to Basil’s place after getting to know that Zorba has sent a letter, where basil shams reading something else rather than the real letter of Zorba.

And we can see a very good example of the dignity of a man and the way he behaves or is supposed to behave as a layman, in zorba's visit to the city and getting insulted by a young harlot waitress as grandpa, telling that she is only doing her job and later getting attracted to zorba's money. and here we cannot with mathematical certainty or exactness, say what is the correct or incorrect way of behaving and judge zorba, but just can say that its purely realistic and natural and therefore can be justified as an attempt to show a certain aspect of reality to the reader, rather than judging and giving interpretations about deeds of character whether those are right or wrong, which is the essence of any form of artistic expression.

Basil’s inner conflict is quite nicely shown in that night when he finally decides to go to the young widow who is living in the village. He tries to dance like Zorba to get relaxed and decide on what he is going to do next. And there also we can see how women have been shown in conventional delicate and emotionally vulnerable way. Her behaviour in that night implies all this in a subtle way. We can see the callousness of raw primitive conservative ideology about women which prevailed there, and the scale of oppression and discrimination they have undergone, in subsequent scenes. All the villagers who failed to conquer her as a woman, taunt the student who is in love with her when they got a glimpse of Basil entering to widow’s house, which finally provokes the student to get drowned himself in sea. And the same people who espoused this calamity by provoking the student, ridicule and insult her by throwing stones at her house on their way to village from sea carrying the corpse of student.

The ruthless disgusting way they kill the widow for no reason at all, is hard to explain using words. The murder taking place while the funeral mass is going on in the church, the killer marking cross before assassination, all show how religion has been shrewdly associated with atrocious discriminations and horrendous customs. And we can see that Zorba again questions the use of books and knowledge which cannot provide answers (give solutions in more profound sense since its those so called educated and knowledgeable elite clique is supposed to find solutions for all kinds of social issues discriminations in a scholarly way which is repeatedly proven to be unsuccessful) for these questions and explain things happen in the society with reasons.

Zorba is the protagonist and idol around whom the story evolves and basil depicts the imperfect ordinary man who has books but yet constrained by social conditioning and various other things and therefore is different from the free-spirited Zorba who learnt things and has comprehended realities by his own experience.

The way villagers rob everything of the French widow when she is in deathbed, is quiet lousy. And we are further informed that there will be no funeral for the foreigner and the priests won’t bury her like anybody else.

The last misfortune which happens in the movie where their plan to ferry logs down the hill using cables fails displacing entire mechanism, again brings the main theme back to the play. Throughout the whole movie, we can see that zorba and basil has been compared and contrasted with each other, by pointing out traits of each of them throughout various scenes all where Zorba's free-spirited nature has been contrasted with basil who is disciplined, well ordered and tamed by social norms etc... , though he is a good man of justice and moral values with pure heart. Zorba correctly state all these in the end as, “boss you have got everything except, madness... a man need a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free..." which is true to a great extent. The culmination of whole story is when basil realise zorba's point and acknowledge it which might had been a gradual process which was happening since they met each other and it has ultimately made him able to laugh at the crash (destruction of their apparatus) which he might have considered as a personal catastrophe which ruined all his plans, from practical man's point of view. Yet the moral of the theme is that those incidents and catastrophes are unavoidable, which is also a core tenet in Buddhism and other similar philosophies, and therefore what we can do is to laugh and live the life without enduring it by artificial agony created by mind, with the help of the idea of possession, ownership, and unrealised expectations. It is indeed a very high status any layman can achieve that is being able to dance in the rain despite circumstances which are more than enough to lead him to misery, despair and depression.

Martin Wickramasinghe also presented similar ideas which idolises practical man in village rather than educated man. But he was not clear about, if he wasn’t unaware of, the petite bourgeois nature of the villagers and things like hypocrisy associated in such society. Contrary to the villagers, Zorba is a bohemian worker who has travelled all over the world, been to America, has participated in battles in war, same as characters we find in Gorki’s stories.

The movie as a whole, questions the established paradigm of success where relentless pursuit of ‘success’ is adored and considered a must to survive in this rat race of life and adherence to the established criteria against which we measure success. We can see that a free-sprited person like Zorba can be happier and therefore can be considered more successful than conventional (or established) model of success. But again the personal objectives and obligations bestowed on a person from a social background like that of basil, all results in him being this kind of prudent sensible person contrary to free sprited Zorba. In other hand Zorba enjoys simple pleasures like dolphins, dancing etc... he cannot understand why Basil doesn’t like dolphins(at the beginning of the movie) which implies that Basil has become a person who is not capable of enjoying such simple things in life because of books and his conventional practical lifestyle.

The movie as a whole carries a simple yet profound insight on life while discussing a variety of themes and provides a novel way of looking at life for those who are lost in the mayhem of contemporary society and is searching for harmony and happiness.

Dileepa Karunarathna
13.02.2010
Torrents