shirt off to display his shining, tattooed, vital young torso, and women lean in, as if he
were a glistening sweet.
The dance, thus, clearly associates Shekhar with the gangster world though he
feigns loyalty to Surya, who does not dance, but brood. As the deception around the
aged warrior shows, he has reason.
The Narrative Path
In essence, the film adaptations of Quinnell’s story offer three versions of the
personal/public poise of revenge plots. Their dissonant norms lay bare how adaptation
always is re-seeing. What is more, critical reactions reveal the tensions born as each
film reaches for its appropriate audience, while dragging through immediately local
values motifs that run back centuries. The first adaptation accepts the world as flawed,
saves the girl, redeems the revenger through a faked death, presumably assisted by
way of Creasy’s past connections in government-sponsored violence. The revenger is a
dangerous, though in extreme moments, useful bit of Cold-War debris, and for US
viewers of a certain age the film no doubt conjures memories of conspiracies from
Tonquin Gulf to Dealey Plaza, to Nicaragua and Iran-Contra. But remembering is not
always a comfort. Critics bristle at the film’s sullen energy. The second film accepts the
world’s flaws, saves the girl, but allows escape for Creasy only through dying, in the
kidnappers’ car, volcano as backdrop, Creasy draped with a St. Christopher medal
given him by Pita. Wherever Blue Bayou might be, viewers probably hope he’s gone
there. Creasy becomes expendable as the film celebrates sacrifice and becomes more
about gangs and fear than about any ghosts of foreign policy past. Though thanked in
the credits for being a “special place,” Mexico here evokes an understanding that, in
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