The Pool

“The Pool” is a magical and wry cinematic meditation by director Chris Smith on the differences between the Western notion of transformation and the Eastern idea of destiny. Based on a story by his long-time collaborator Randy Russell, “The Pool” was relocated by Smith to Goa, in southern India, from its original setting in the American Midwest. The transposition not only ornaments this tale externally with the imagery and customs of a fabled place half a world away, but also reshapes the story’s internal dimensions by juxtaposing and interweaving Western and Eastern cultural sensibilities.

In the overgrown garden of a seemingly uninhabited house, the pool is the potent center of the film to which each character relates in his or her own way.

Venkatesh seeks out the pool in the moments when he is not on duty cleaning rooms at a small hotel. Every day he climbs a tree outside the property wall that overlooks the tranquil water of the pool, wondering if anyone ever swims in it and what it would be like to go in. He knows what he is looking at, but not what he is looking for.

Jhangir is an 11 year old orphan street urchin who does menial work in a café near the hotel where Venkatesh works. Though Venkatesh necessarily functions as an older brother figure to Jhangir, theirs is a bond of circumstance more than love. The two have become sidekicks and share a side-business reselling plastic bags at the local market.

Jhangir’s aim in the world is being constantly aware of how each moment might yield him an advantage. Sentiment and sentimentality are luxuries he cannot afford. To him, the pool is just one other place in the world, whatever stories or imaginings may accompany it offer no help with the needs of the moment; he is amused by his friend’s wasted time spent staring at the pool.

Eventually a man appears in the garden. Pretending to work, he mostly wanders, moving chairs and picking at dead leaves, always circling back to sit for long hours gazing into the pool. His sullen and bristling late-teenage daughter, Ayesha, spends long hours poolside, reading.

For the father, owner and occasional resident of the property, the pool is an accusatory center for self-recrimination, the constant reminder of a moment a decade earlier when his young son drowned. Frozen at this window into the past, he has neglected and abused his living family.

Ayesha has dutifully, if resentfully, accompanied her father to this property. However improbable, she was, as a 7 year old, briefly responsible for her 4 year old brother in the water the day he died. Unable to prevent the tragedy, the girl’s fault was to survive. Her father has nothing to offer her beside financial support; they barely tolerate each others’ existence.

For her, the pool is a place to while away the boring hours. Once she is interrupted there, she goes off to the anonymity of a small public park. The pool offers her neither magic nor memory, only the certainty that she can never matter enough to her father to be loved or even to be seen apart from the obliterating specter of her dead sibling. She exists but cannot live.

Venkatesh is as fascinated by the new arrivals as he is by the pool itself and soon insinuates himself into the garden, gradually becoming a de-facto assistant to the father in his labors to rejuvenate the long-abandoned garden.

Meanwhile, impervious to the girl’s rebuffs and always with Jhangir in tow, Venkatesh goes to great effort to befriend Ayesha. Any idea that the young man is operating from a sly scheme toward worldly gain is finally and utterly dashed when he tells Ayesha that he is betrothed to a girl now only 10 years old in a marriage arranged by his mother. Ayesha coyly suggests that he may not like her once she is old enough to marry and he eclipses her suggestion and viewpoint by explaining that their romance will begin after the marriage.

In realizing that she is of no interest to Venkatesh as an imagined or potential mate or conquest, Ayesha slowly warms to the odd pair, basking in, if not truly understanding, the glow of being seen for herself, neither as a means to an end, a blank screen or the insignificant part of a bad memory.

In the course of their work together in the garden, the father tests Venkatesh in various ways and gradually comes to see him as a potential replacement son. One day the father tells a parable about generosity as prelude to his offer for the young man to accompany him back to Bombay where he will receive an education. Suddenly, Venkatesh has a completely unanticipated opportunity: choice- he can stay where he is, return to his village, or go to Bombay. In confronting the question of what he actually wants for himself, he discovers his true relationship to the pool, that of gaining perspective.

At first he decides to accept the unexpected offer of Bombay, but later alters his choice into an amalgam that is both all and none of the above; he will stay behind, go to a local school and continue as caretaker of the garden, house and pool. The father regrets but accepts his final decision, asking what made him change his mind? It was the story about generosity. Then I should not have told it, the father laments, thinking his lesson had gone misunderstood.

The difference between West and East is beautifully described in a simple scene between Ayesha and Venkatesh in the small park where he first befriended the lonely girl. He offers her the parting gift of a kitten. Surprised and dismayed, Ayesha rejects the offer, seeing only the unwanted burden of a needy, vulnerable creature. Alright; he casually pushes the animal aside. You can’t just leave it here, she accuses, though she has no intention of changing her mind. He disagrees; it is life. He found the kitten alone in a dark and filthy alley- at least here it is better off than before.

She does not understand that his friendship to her was a free, generous and genuine response to her neediness- nothing she deserved or was owed- and that in offering her the kitten, he offers her herself. In rejecting the cat she rejects life, unable to feel or see that first she needs someplace to begin the slow movement toward connection. Life, like the kitten, is always the opportunity at hand, not necessarily the one imagined or desired, and it must always be paid for in some kind of coin. Here, now, is the only place to live; how she responds to the moment is her choice.

Father and daughter depart and, surprisingly, Venkatesh returns to working at the hotel. He takes the father’s offer to subsidize his education and passes it on to Jhangir, whom he sends to the local school in his own place, even with his own name. Jhangir, who carries no familial identity, can go on with the ruse of the name change to ultimately enter society as someone. The trick has every chance of working in the world. Even the father, once he finds out, will not only be amused, but will come to see that he was the one who did not fully understand his own parable and that Venkatesh has rightly chosen the better vessel in which to plant the father’s generosity.

Venkatesh never approaches the moment from a place of desire. He knows that he will go through with his long-ago arranged marriage. He takes for granted his performance of all traditional duties toward his mother. He has seen from what has just transpired that, simply by being alive, experiences occur and that following them where they lead is his task. When he extends himself outward, as with the father, Ayesha and Jhangir, it is neither for reward nor gratification of desire, but entirely in the service of being on the ground which he is overlooking. For him, every encounter in the world is a way of deepening the feeling of being alive. It is thus no surprise that the end of the film finds him sitting alone beside the pool, looking deep into its depth, searching the mirror of its surface. He is on a spiritual journey and carries on his slender frame the ancient wisdom that life is about understanding, the soul’s journey, not the ego’s.