Most filmgoers want a finite, unambiguous ending to their movies — good wins over evil, girl gets boy, all’s well that ends well, etc. They want the writer and director to do the thinking for you so that they don’t have to. After all, they are parting with their hard earned cash to sit for a couple of hours in a climate-controlled movie hall so that they can escape to Wakanda or Narnia or Kolkata. Me, on the other hand, I prefer being challenged to think a bit, and revel in ambiguity.
This preference was thrown into sharp relief a few years ago when an acquaintance complained bitterly about the ambiguous ending of Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox (2013). Either Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur get together or they don’t, he cried. I told him that if they were shown to get together, he would have dismissed it as a Bollywood ending; if they didn’t, he would have rejected it as arthouse, but with the existing finale, here he was, discussing the film six months after he’d watched it. Silence.
Political drama The Summit (2017), where the magisterial Ricardo Darin plays an Argentinean president who fights personal and public battles at a high-powered inter-governmental meet in Chile, has also drawn some criticism for its seemingly ambiguous ending. Director Santiago Mitre provides the viewer with all the answers and asks her to tie up the knots herself. If you can’t do that and be richly satisfied, then I’d suggest that you go and watch Avengers: Infinity War instead. But no, despite having an ending, albeit very unconventional for a superhero movie, the film’s conclusion merely raises several questions for the next film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Will she? Won’t he? Can they? Is it really so?
Historically, the world of cinema is littered with enigmatic conclusions. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, what does the space baby at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) really mean? What is the real truth of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950)? The fish being hauled in at the end of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), and that woman on the beach — who is she? The freeze frame closing Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) or the series of freeze frames concluding Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) — what do they signify?
These ambiguities have caused much intellectual onanisms, but they have indubitably also helped exercise the most unused part of the human body — the brain. While engaging the cranium might not be everybody’s cup of tea, these endings can be the subjects of much lively debates. I have been privileged enough to be part of several of these, at least until the art of debate fell into the sewer that is social media. Meanwhile, I leave you with the origami unicorn in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the spinning top in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) and all of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). You’re welcome.
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography, and tweets @namanrs
