I have the urge to put this down before the details slip away, and I feel like Jonathan when he stored away bits and pieces of his memory carefully in Ziploc bags. It was a good-for-nothing afternoon, perfectly useless after a late lunch, which progressed to give me a mild headache and an aching sensibility. Everything is Illuminated, is, as I learned, a book first and a film much later. It opens with WWII photo collections- old, tattered photos pinned on to some wall, and I was apt to dismiss the film for the baggage that such films normally bring. After Maus, I was very, very wary: I rarely touched any WWII material, no matter how delightfully packaged it was. However, I was lured into it initially because of a black ballpoint pen that wrote beautifully. Large unseemly scrawls in bold letters, marking out chapters like ‘The Commencement of a Very Rigid Search’ broke into pristine interiors and Elijah Wood’s giant, insect-like eyes magnified by his antiquated spectacles. Stark, whitewashed walls and old skin that wrinkled like paper, covered to the chin by a paper white sheet. Jonathan stares; at first, it is possible to mistake the austerity of his oiled and parted hair and severe spectacles for lack of compassion. But it is heartwarming to note the beginnings of a smile soften his pallid face when his grandmother motions towards him, and it is then that I realized that I shouldn’t read too much into his appearance, or anyone else’s, for that matter. The neat orderliness of Jonathan’s world is contrasted by the life led by a family in Odessa, Ukraine, who give heritage tours to Americans inclined on tracing their ancestor’s roots, and where, incidentally, Jonathan is expected in a short while. The chaos at the family dinner set off by the seemingly eccentric members- the narrator, a young Ukrainian who is suitably impressed by American pop culture, his parents, an irritable grandfather who thinks he’s blind and a demented collie called Samuel Jr. Jr.- spills over to the journey itself. What seems to be a sharp comedy, accented by lovely camera-work and a fitting score, soon turns into something entirely different.
Exactly where the story morphs into a journey of meaningfulness is uncertain, but I remember that I had to gasp when the sunflower fields parted and the shrine-like appearance of the cottage loomed into view, with the flapping white clothes on the lines all around it. Jonathan’s search for the woman who saved his grandfather’s life acquires meaning when the normally irascible grandfather broods behind the wheel, and observes his face when Jonathan isn’t looking. The narrator, whose English seems curiously perverted, offers Jonathan slight solace, but soon, he sets aside his translator’s duties to remark on the changed behaviour of his grandfather. Trachimbrod, the hamlet they were in search of, was wiped out by Nazis, and that it exists in a woman’s imagination and small, well-marked boxes seems incredible. But the poignancy of the late night walk to the river bank, and the stone plaque that remembers the dead somehow paves the way for the grandfather’s death in a tub by slitting his wrists. As Alex put it, he seemed to be more in his life in the last hours of that journey. When it is time for Jonathan to leave, and he hugs the collie, who had grown attached to him, it is a sort of beginning, rather than the end, for it is where both of them begin to realize that ‘everything is illuminated by their past’.
The story is undoubtedly, touching, but it was made remarkable by certain moments in the film, like the scene at the beginning, chronicling his grandparents’ deaths, and the scene where the odd party orders dinner. That Jonathan is a vegetarian complicates matters, and his wish to be served a potato is rendered wryly humourous by Alex, the grandfather and his dog. Each individual scene seemed complete in itself. That anybody could watch a few scenes from the film and not feel cheated or frustrated if it was necessary to walk away is a good thing, I suppose. And the fact that in spite of the minute details of time and place, both worlds- Jonathan’s American one and Alex’s mixed culture- seemed to be vague, unreal, yet frightfully universal, is worth noting.
Everything is Illuminated left me with dreams, and quite a few moments, and that was more than what I sat for.
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