The Hindu : Karnataka News : What big issues you have, Catherine!

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Karnataka

What big issues you have, Catherine!

IT'S COMPLICATED:A simple cautionary tale about the dangers of talking to strangers has been imbued with all sorts of Significance.

Red Riding Hood (English)

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Shiloh Fernandez, Billy Burke

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

When the girl — a big girl; hence the loss of the diminutive in the film title — with the red riding hood comes face-to-face with a talking wolf, she is amazed. The wolf calls her Valerie. “You know my name,” she gasps, the way we did earlier in the film when we learnt the name that the Brothers Grimm omitted to supply their heroine, lazily referring to her simply by the colour of her costume.

Whatever the other faults with this overwrought tale, the director Catherine Hardwicke at least enriches us with that minor detail. We know now. The girl with the brightly coloured cowl has a name.

Red Riding Hood is a strange mishmash of the medieval and the modern. The template of the old fairytale is updated with newfangled revisionist flourishes that include nods to witch trials, star-crossed, werewolf-infested, teen-love triangles.

The film opens with the white expanse of snow on a mountainside. We then get the greens of coniferous trees, the browns of wooden cottages in a village at the edge of a dark forest, the yellow of flames that illuminate this old world, even the pink of a squealing piglet facing the prospect of slaughter. But where, apart from the brief flash of the title, is the red?

Gradually, we realise it's in the herrings.

Hardwicke has shaped her source material into one of those closed-chamber murder mysteries where everyone around is painted in guilty colours in order to keep you from guessing who really dunit.

No who sooner than Valerie (Amanda Seyfried, with the face of a younger, riper Michelle Pfeiffer) decides to elope with Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), a woodcutter, the church bells erupt in ominous peals.

As she races to the spot where everyone has gathered and learns that the wolf has struck again, we steel ourselves for the sight of mutilated faces and mangled limbs. But the victim lies in serene repose. But for the congealed blood beneath her head, she could be sleeping. What kind of self-respecting carnivore would eschew consuming its prey?

But it's no mere wolf. It's a werewolf — and the film wants us to hold our breath about who, in this village, swaps his (or her) human skin for black fur upon the appearance of a full moon.

A simple cautionary tale about the dangers of talking to strangers has been imbued with all sorts of Significance. The colour in the title alone could mean anything from the red scare of communism (which resulted in witch hunts of its own) to the spilling of virginal blood.

If a reasonably gripping whodunit is what you're after, why reach for a fairy tale and burden it with so much psychological and political weight? Whatever next? Humpty Dumpty sat on the Berlin Wall?

BARADWAJ RANGAN

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