The first film of Shyam Benegal's that I didn't outright adore, and by and large I really struggled to get into this one beyond its formal merits. The Seventh Horse of the Sun could be described in part as a formal exercise, an ode to storytelling, and the abstract nature of objective truth when levied by subjective experience. A complex story structure examines the interplay between memory and experience and the social-economic externalities versus the interiority of affect. I don't know, I just struggled to connect to this film at all on an emotional level, despite the rather pointed critique of how certain social and economic constructs quantify love in ways that repress its true nature. Commonality, social harmony, progress, and individual growth are all congruent with the tangible qualities we define as love yet divisions among class and gender subservience, restrict this realization. Benegal's film is a complex exercise and one that certainly has many merits. I just struggled to draw much of a connection to the underlying story, finding it to be ultimately an interesting formal exercise about storytelling and its intrinsic amalgamation of truth and invention that becomes too unwieldy to deliver a compelling experience for me on an emotional or character level.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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