Spoiler alert
It’s been more than two months since the tragic and untimely demise of Irrfan Khan. While exploring his filmography, I came across Puzzle (2018), his last film in English language which is based on an Argentinian movie ‘Rompecabezas‘ (puzzle). I only got to watch the English version, and I must say, the woman’s gaze it’s been narrated with (by Polly Mann and Oren Moverman) is overwhelming.
The story revolves around Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), a middle-class suburban homemaker living with her husband Louie (David Denman) and two grown up sons in a monotonous routine. She is religious, devotedly serves the Church and her family without any complains. In the very first few scenes, we see her baking the cake and decorating her house on her own for her own birthday party!
The transformation of her life starts when she gets a 1000-piece Jigsaw puzzle as a birthday gift from her aunt. She solves it quickly and decides to explore her intellectual capacity to solve puzzles. While buying more puzzles from a specialised store in New York, she sees an advertisement saying they need a puzzle partner for a championship tournament. Noticing the contrast between her monotonous life and the sudden excitement the puzzle brought in, she decides to go for it and meets Robert (Irrfan Khan), the person whose advert it was.
Robert is a wealthy and reclusive inventor who loves to solve puzzles and is quite serious about them (as far as participating and winning tournaments are concerned). Agnes finds him weird and very different from herself; yet she decides to participate, because this was the first time she had thought of doing something she liked. Considering her family’s conservative nature and her own fear of getting ridiculed for her ‘childish’ hobby, she lies to her family that she’d have to visit her injured aunt twice a week to take care of her.
The story revolves around Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), a middle-class suburban homemaker living with her husband Louie (David Denman) and two grown up sons in a monotonous routine. She is religious, devotedly serves the Church and her family without any complains. In the very first few scenes, we see her baking the cake and decorating her house on her own for her own birthday party!
Even for a genuine reason of ‘taking care of an injured relative’, her husband does not approve and tries to convince her that she couldn’t do it because she had her own family to take care of; a family that has grown up adults (!) who can actually take care of themselves once in a while (very typical of the ‘man of the house’). Agnes slowly gets frustrated with her life as an unacknowledged constant caregiver and becomes more certain of participating in the tournament. Puzzle portrays what happens when a woman decides to snap out of years of social conditioning of ‘living for others’ and starts defying even the tiniest of the rules enforced on her.
Her friendship with Robert grows gradually and she starts falling in love with him. But the point of the movie is not about romance, it’s about freedom. He is probably the first person that took her seriously, while her family mocked her interest in puzzles. With him she can be herself with no restrictions. He also calls her by her maiden name and tells her that’s who she was. Without expecting much in return, Robert helps her take her own spa