I can’t remember who it was that recommended I should see the movie Pi, but it was on TV the other night and I thought it was fantastic! This is not necessarily a recommendation as it is not a particularly easy movie to watch, but it does an amazing job of making number theory sexy and really drew me in anyway. The whole thing is shot in black & white, with stylish use of overexposure and hectic camerawork. The soundtrack gives you the heebie jeebies as motifs rather than melodies are repeated. The hero’s friend and mentor is a loveable old mathematician who seemingly once ‘got burned’ while looking for patterns in the digits of Pi, but brought himself back from the brink. The hero, meantime, is working on patterns in the stock market and we see him drive himself to the brink of insanity while his mentor tries to talk him down. The woman next door extends a hand of friendship and normality by bringing round samosas or performing other acts of nurture, but the hero symbolically rejects her. There is much that is unexplained in the middle of the film, I have a feeling there is a good deal of symbolism that was lost on me, but it held its own on the surrealism alone. I can’t really talk about what I thought of the end without giving it away so I won’t.
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