India, Aug. 25 -- There is a moment near the end of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey that the film refuses to hurry. Odysseus is home after twenty years. Penelope will not have him, so she sets a trap. She orders the marital bed carried out of the chamber. And the man who outlasted Troy, the Cyclops and ten years at sea finally breaks, because that bed cannot be carried anywhere. He built it around the trunk of a living olive tree, still rooted in the ground, and raised the room around it.

That is how she knows him. Not by the face, which 20 years have changed, and not by the plunder or the fame. He is recognised because one thing of his could not be moved. I watched that scene in a Noida multiplex on a Sunday afternoon, and found I could...