A Cat in the Temple of Bast

I come to bury 2008, not to praise it…

Although, we must say, friends, web surfers and Infinity-ites, that the famous and famously ironic funeral speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar may not quite fit, we are reminded of it for the reason outlined below.

Having recently acquired two kittens, Achilles and Odysseus – names that will probably continue to translate around here to “the black one” and “the gray one,” respectively - we got a cat movie from Netflix, a movie both Mrs. Shears and I remember seeing in our long-lost youths, The Three Lives of Thomasina. 

The image that stuck with me all these years was the near-death experience where the cat heroine dreams of falling into the afterlife in the Egyptian Temple of Bast…

Thomasina enters the Temple of Bast

Cooincidentally we called Mother Shears for New Years and asked if she remembered where we first saw the movie as a child. Of course she immediately remembered making the birthday trip to New York and seeing it at Radio City. I also have a vivid memory from that trip of the famous Camel smoke ring billboard out a restaurant window.  The trip would have been January 1965 and the billboard would be gone sometime the next year.

Anyway, this memorable scene in the film rang familiar…when the boy conducting the funeral paraphrases Shakespeare’s speech from Marc Antony. “We have come to bury Thomasina, and to praise her…”

Here’s the whole scene from youtube, including both the near-death dream and, Mrs. Shears’ favorite scene, the funeral and its beautiful setting (overlooking Loch Fyne in Inverary, Scotland):

Mrs. Shears has her own fashion-oriented post about Thomasina over at allchic.com.

The Three Lives of Thomasina, though promoted as a movie for and about little girls (human and feline) – is, if you stick with it longer than the 15 minutes, which son Leo apparently could not manage -  well worth a more mature look. Patrick McGoohan gives a strong performance as the single father, a reluctant veterinarian - he wanted to be a doctor – who is forced to make primal choices dealing with grief at his own loss and the seemingly willful loss he imposes on his headstrong daughter.

The film’s outer story of a little girl’s love for a cat rides thinly over a much more interesting theme that mixes multiple religion types and points them at the question of what constitutes helping, what is the moral basis for Earthly charity…and who exactly is being helped. The old-religion is represented by a Celtic “witch” – and note that the kids mark the grave with a cairn not a cross; there’s the formalized pagan Egyptian imagery in the near-death dream;  and the modern, establishment Christianity, personified by the stolid and wise town vicar, who stands at one point before his Earthly edifice with a “Church of Scotland’ sign rooted prominently behind him.

All of these theologies get equal and even-handed treatment up to a point. The witch has an empathy with the animals, the image of Thomasina rising to merge with the golden idol of Bast is hard to shake for the rest of the film after the dream sequence, and the vicar dispenses his brand of standardized wisdom and heartfelt kindness freely. But in a surprising reversal we get Lori the witch woven in with a plot turn that brings on the expected Disney ending. What we learn about what Lori actually believes is quite obviously intentionally emphasized by the makers. See it for yourself and you’ll know what we mean.