Ray’s brahmanic suture: ‘Sadgati’ (1981)

Satyajit Ray is an internationally acclaimed master of film, the first Indian director to have attained such a distinction from quarters outside India. The Apu trilogy of films, made by him over a span of eight years from 1952 to 1959, are routinely ranked among the greatest films ever made. They are considered universal documents of human struggles against hardships, of both natural and entirely human origins. My purpose behind enumerating these facts is merely to show that they are well-known and indisputable.

What is lesser known, or rather lesser remarked upon, is that the Apu trilogy, while being a superbly rendered portrait of tragedies that befall a family in rural Bengal and the coming-of-age (physically, mentally and emotionally) of its protagonist Apurv or Apu, is not as universal as it is often proclaimed to be. Indeed, whatever pretensions of the filmmaker and the votaries and commentators of the film might have, the film itself is much more specific than that. 

The tragedy of the film is, first and foremost, the tragedy of a brahmin family. The poverty of the family in the film results from them having been duped of their property by their unscrupulous relatives, as revealed in the first 15 minutes of the film. The tragedy, then, is not about having to survive in continual want and privation, but about having to do so despite being having been prosperous and well-to-do once, not too long ago. Which, one would agree, is very different from the tragedy of having always been deprived of basic human dignity and needs, systematically since time immemorial. At a few points in the film, the behaviour of Apu’s father, the brahmin Harihar Rai, is patently casteist, scrupulous as he is in the observance of caste rules in the matter of selecting patrons to perform priestly duties for, despite desperately needing money. These facts, then, are equally indisputable.

Ray’s only other feature film set in the Bengali countryside is the 1973 film ‘Ashani Sanket’ (based, like ‘Pather Panchali’, upon a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay). Its protagonist, Gangacharan Chakraborty, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, star of ‘Apur Sansar’ (1959), is the only brahmin in a village whose social order is destroyed by the onset of the Bengal famine of 1943. An event of such cataclysmic proportions makes him regard and reflect on the ways in which social structures, untouched for centuries, collapse into anarchy. By the end, he is forced to reconsider everything he has always accepted to be ordained by the universe, most notably his own innate superiority.

The third of Ray’s films to be set entirely in the rural countryside is also his least discussed and remembered. It is 45 minute film named ‘Sadgati’ (1981) that Ray made for Doordarshan. Starring the best of actors that the realist cinema of the 70s threw up, it is also the only film that Ray made in Hindi, apart from ‘Shatranj ke Khilari’ (1977). The story, about the travails of an untouchable family in its efforts to invite a brahmin priest for their daughter’s wedding, is well known, written as it is by Premchand himself. It is in the context of Ray’s depiction of brahmin tragedy in his most celebrated films, then, that a film like ‘Sadgati’ must be seen.

The brahmin (played by Mohan Agashe), upon seeing Dukhia the father of the girl (played by Om Puri) at his doorstep, beseeching him to come to his house, casually orders him to sweep his courtyard, manually transfer sacks of sawdust from a nearby go-down to his cowshed, and finally, chop a thick tree trunk into fine pieces. The brahmin’s wife (played by Gita Siddharth) holds up her end with a barrage of slurs, ominous mutterings and as well as a few burning coals. Eventually, taunted and goaded on by the brahmin and frustrated at his own inability to appease him, Dukhia musters all his remaining strength and expends it in a frenzy of chopping that transfixes the brahmin’s young son and a sympathetic onlooker, a man who is identified in the film as a Gond. Such a paroxysm of activity proves too much for Dukhia and suddenly, in an instant, he drops to the ground, dead.

The brahmin is more flabbergasted than aghast as his death. Meanwhile, the Gond who knows of the arrangement between Dukhia and the brahmin, is overcome with rage and disgust and immediately goes to the ‘chamar’ colony in the village and announces his death, laying the blame solely on the brahmin. Among the onlookers of course is Dukhia’s wife (played by Smita Patil), who breaks down at the news.

Whereas the narrative was merely a record of occurrences until now- apart from focusing pointedly at overt symbols and marks of power and injustice such as the sacred thread, sandalwood paste, tilak, the brahmin’s “debate” with his wife over feeding the ‘chamar’- it assumes a more active role by advancing towards the resolution determinedly. Beyond the cries of Dukhia’s wife as she rails at the brahmin’s family at their doorstep, there is nothing else that she is shown to do.

Dukhia’s corpse, meanwhile, has become a logistical problem for all the upper caste folk using the thoroughfare. None are worried more by it than the brahmin and his wife. Amidst panicked   arguments against each other, the brahmin and his wife come to the conclusion which forms the denouement of the film. Ray depicts the exact moment of the brahmin arriving at a solution in dramatic fashion: a telling look, straight into the camera. In the very next shot, the brahmin raises the leg of the corpse with a curved branch, lassoes it with a piece of rope and drags it along to a dumping ground littered with animal skeletons.

What emerges from the narrative, in effect, is not just the abrupt silencing of the outcaste woman and indeed the entire community, but the insinuation that it was the defiance of the outcastes themselves, provoked by the Gond man, that resulted in such a sordid disposal, the ‘sadgati’ (deliverance) of the title, at the hands of the brahmin. The Gond man, the mute outcastes in the village, even Dukhiya’s wife are never seen again. What emerges also is the treatment of the problem of disposal of Dukhiya’s corpse as merely a logistical one. One would think it’s a fitting comeuppance for the brahmin: to carry a chamar’s corpse himself. Some may even read the ending as being penitence for the brahmin, having fulfilled the rather labourious and outrightly taboo task of ferrying the dead body of a “chamar”. But what was it that enabled such an utterly despicable chain of events to come to pass? What was it that prevented the brahmin from paying heed to the chamar’s pleas of food and his daughter’s betrothal until he could plead no more? What was it that drove the brahmin to perform, against himself, such a strenuous and unsavoury task that is clearly infinitely more than just a logistical problem? This, neither the brahmin nor the narrative, as a whole, even attempts to ask.

Premchand’s story, written originally in 1931, was a short, sharp one, its language dyed in the fatal inevitability of its end. The story advances towards its end without respite, propelled by the terseness and casual cruelty of dialogue of the brahmin couple about Dukhia’s corpse, much of which has been left out of the film. The last line of the story sardonically speaks of Dukhia’s reward for his toil, in the form of his corpse in the open field with the birds of prey feasting upon it; the end, thus, resolutely stays with the corpse of Dukhia, affording the reader no closure whatsoever in its unslaked pain. With its merciless end, Premchand, no doubt, wanted to convey a fraction of the brutality of brahmanical oppression. Despite lacking rigour in his actual interrogation of the iniquities of the caste system via the story, Premchand, at least cognitively, understood its inhumanity.

In contrast, Ray ends the film with a shot of the brahmin muttering purificatory rituals and sprinkling holy water on the block of partially hewn wood, with a relieved look on his face. This shot follows that of Dukhia’s corpse lying in the dumping field. The theory of suture, an endlessly fascinating one, has been imported into film studies from Lacanian theory. It would be instructive to apply it in this context. Suture, simply put, is the process by which subject positions crystallise in a given discourse. The lack (of identification) that a reader or viewer feels with a given discourse is fulfilled by inserting a signifier, one that facilitates identification (and making meaning) for the viewer by placing him in the position of the subject in that discourse. It is important to note that in the process of suture, the viewer, by assuming a subject position in the discourse via a signifier, gains entry into the symbolic order (a semiotic term for the prevailing social order underlying the discourse), but only after subsuming his own needs and drives; which is to say, that what the viewer gains in meaning, he loses in being.

In case of films taken as discursive texts, cinematic syntax or the actual sequence of shots, is the equivalent of language. Thus Ray, in effect, employs the final shot as suture, implicating the viewer in the subject position of the brahmin in order to fulfill the lack of identification with the fate of Dukhia and the resultant discomfort, the guilt at his own complicity in such a pernicious scheme of things that the viewer feels. By implicating the viewer in the brahmanical subject position, Ray admits the viewer into the symbolic order of the discourse, which is nothing but the caste order of society with its ascendancy of the brahmana, while ensuring the viewer makes meaning at the expense of his own being. Premchand was content to let the reader feel the lack of identification, of closure at the end, to his lasting discomfort: an open, festering wound. Ray, on the other hand, simply sutures it, fester and all.       

The emotional fascism of Bala: Paradesi (2013)

It’s been four days since I saw the Tamil film director Bala’s latest feature Paradesi (Vagabond) and I’m still smarting. At the sheer impunity with which Bala does the cinematic medium an injustice. At the manner in which he throttles his own labour of love to our horror and, I suspect, his joy. At his presumptuousness in determining, for his viewers, the degree and meaning of bleakness and misery that they can endure, before their sanity and reason abandon them.

My situation as a viewer vis-a-vis Bala’s as a director can best be explained by drawing an analogy with a situation that Clarice Starling, the feisty heroine of the Hannibal series, finds herself in. On the way to visit Hannibal for the first time, she meets Dr. Chilton, in charge of the section of the asylum that contains Hannibal. Chilton hands Clarice a bunch of photographs of Hannibal’s victims, post-facto. Clarice, while looking at them, feels Chilton’s unblinking gaze upon her. She doesn’t know which is worse: the photographs or his gaze.

Except that in this case, the actual perpetrator is the very same one who gazes at us, waiting for us to flinch, squirm, curl up in disgust and ultimately plead for mercy.

At this stage I ought to make a disclaimer: I’m hardly a stranger to brutality and misery on screen. John Hillcoat’s ‘The Proposition’ is a thing of lacerating, surpassing beauty, oozing poetry alongside blood, one of my eternal favourites. I’ve found myself transformed into someone who regards, with horrified fascination, the twisted, gruesome fates that befall characters in Pankaj Advani’s films, so textured and vigorous are his narratives. Despite my ample reservations about Mel Gibson’s cinematic sensibilities, I’m still in awe of his craft as a filmmaker and as an innovative manufacturer of dread. And it is totally to his credit that Shekhar Kapur succeeds in making the rugged landscapes of central India as impressionistically harsh and brutal as the characters in ‘Bandit Queen’.

The disclaimer has a twofold purpose: firstly, to establish, for the sake of this discussion, a reasonable standard for onscreen brutality. Secondly, to undercut Bala’s claim (or reputation) of creating harsh narratives about people on the fringes of society, apropos this film. Its purpose is not, by any means, to make a judgment upon the mental hardiness of an individual based upon the degree and extent of onscreen brutality he or she can endure. 

The particulars of the story can be summed up in a couple of sentences: the whole lot of able-bodied men, women and children in a drought-stricken village in the Tamil hinterland is duped into indentured labour on a colonial tea plantation, by a middleman who is a native. The protagonist, Rasa (Atharva), the village drummer, falls in love with the feisty Angamma (Vedhicka) from the same village and impregnates her, before being whisked away to work on the tea plantation, leaving her behind with child. Once these are out of the way, the film becomes a chronicle of the brutalisation of hapless village folk at the hands of nature (unsystematically) and at the hands of colonial rulers and overseers (systematically). Rasa has the misfortune of being a (male) Bala protagonist, which entitles him, in particular, to exceptional cruelty.

Indeed, Bala uses his protagonist to establish a hierarchy of exploitation: before half the village is sold into slavery, Rasa is ill-treated, marginalised and discriminated against by the village folk themselves. Though never explicitly stated in the film, Rasa is obviously a Paraiyar. In the opening scene of the film, the fact of his untouchability is insidiously established: he approaches the home of a village elder while cheerfully addressing her as his aunt and squats outside her home, in the courtyard, while she rummages inside for some food for him. She finally brings him some nearly spoilt leftovers, which he regards bemusedly for a moment, before gobbling them up. The manner of the lady towards him is perfectly cordial, even warm. The undercurrent of condescension, however, is distinct and well-worn. Rasa has the added disadvantage of being unbelievably cheerful and naive, a child trapped in a tall, strapping body, with the result that he’s almost always taken for granted by everyone he meets. When he bashfully passes off his fatherhood as being the result of Angamma’s decision, it is not a flaky, roguish refusal to shoulder responsibility, but a genuine statement, something we can understand, but Maragamma (Dhansika), a female co-worker on the plantation to whom it is addressed, cannot quite.

Given that Bala’s animalistic heroes are the rage among his fans and detractors alike, this kind of a gentle, submissive protagonist is a complete surprise (though his eating habits are woefully in line with those of his mates from the Bala pantheon). His intransigence in portraying the more unsavoury (but never far from honourable) aspects of his protagonists counterbalanced against their relatively wholesome, likeable ones always lends an interesting dynamic to the arcs of these characters, playing up the question of their ultimate redeemability almost to the point of suspense. Rasa is a character designed to milk our sympathy, a babe in the woods who is exploited even by those who love him. With teeth-gnashing perversity, then, Bala has subverted the very trope of the animalistic hero, by making Rasa arrive at the film’s only piece of insight: no animal enslaves its own kind; human beings do.

But what of the specifics of such enslavement, its terms and conditions? What of all the groundwork of establishing that Rasa is an untouchable? By depicting the exploitation of Rasa at the hands of the British as being in a continuum with his exploitation at the hands of his village folk, the film is robbed of any authentic context. It simply becomes a dreary, unending chronicle of oppression. And I’m not even going into issues of sociological or historical accuracy. There is no distinct characterisation of the oppressors or of the oppressed. The dialogues studiedly turn away from conveying anything about the inner states of the characters under such extreme conditions. We have no way of knowing what the slaves feel about their perpetual servitude: they are not granted the luxury of catharsis, let alone any rational assessment of their conditions that might engender resistance to such exploitation. To what end is such rudimentary expression used in the film? None apparently.   

The scene of the unscrupulous middleman wheedling the men-folk of the village to take loans and repay them by working on the tea plantations is shot, cut and scored with all the subtlety of a public service announcement against railway ticket touts. This is a crying shame for it is the fulcrum on which the film and the fates of its principal characters rest.

The villagers seem to be working in shifts alternate to the colonialists and the Indian overseers to ensure Rasa does not experience a moment of happiness. The photography by Chezhiyan, employs a filter that casts a leaden, sepulchral pall on the locations and people, making them look as though they’ve survived a volcanic eruption. There are sweeping crane and track shots of the parched, barren landscape as a human stream wends its way across it, on the way to a putative Eden. At least here, Bala is at his most effective, conveying the interminability of the journey through umpteen shots of the endless landscape. GV Prakash Kumar’s dirge plays on the soundtrack doughtily; the singer’s voice a sustained wail of lament, soldiering on. The human beings are always framed in wide or mid-shots, underlining their frailty, their insignificance in a universe conspiring to tear them apart.

As the film wears on, the peculiar tendency of Bala to pile on misery upon his characters while continually denying them a release, reaches alarming levels. Several years after the arrival of Rasa and his co-habitants at the plantation, a serious outbreak of the 'flu in the labourers’ camp forces the masters to summon a visiting doctor, when the (literally) home-grown doctor is out of his depth. This visiting doctor is Tamil, with an Englishwoman for a wife. Upon arriving at the camp they are appalled to see the living conditions there, not to mention the healthcare facilities. What they proceed to do makes us nearly as horrified as them. They turn out to be shameless proselytes, rounding up all the emaciated, sick and dying slaves into an enormous circle and dancing at its centre, as though it were the wedding of their child. All in praise of the Lord. The slaves chant, sway, leap and rejoice at their deliverance with a collectively deadened look on their faces, like a choir of kids tonelessly reciting a prayer they are untouched by. The look on the faces of the proselytes, meanwhile, is ecstatic. Once this macabre farce is over and the flu has served its purpose of felling an important character, it is simply cast aside to make way for a sucker punch of a climax.

A particular scene is quite revealing about the attitude Bala has towards his material and, dare I say, towards his viewers. When the primary British overlord of the plantation attempts to molest a female worker, her husband tries to resist him. Rasa, who is working nearby, jumps in to help. Before long, of course, they are overpowered and roundly thrashed by the guards and the overseer, all of whom are natives. Leaving them cowing and whimpering, the overseer, a bearded pehelwan, stands atop a huge boulder in the centre of the static whirlpool that the tea gardens resemble, and casts a dire warning. Bala cannot bring himself to be concerned with the specifics of the warning beyond the first couple of lines: he chooses, instead, to frame the overseer making grotesque facial contortions while brandishing a stick, as if scaring away eight year olds, while the background score reaches its most foreboding yet, drowning out his voice entirely.

For that is precisely how Bala views his characters and his viewers: as eight year olds he can pummel into a howling, blubbering mass of tears, with his supposedly devastating stories and heart-rending, thunderous scores, with actors that bawl and growl and flail their limbs like wounded animals, playing characters condemned to burn in a hell of despair forevermore. Within these parameters, the climax of this film is remarkably effective. It is to the credit of Bala and his actors- playing at such keening levels of melodrama- that they never fall prey to hamming. The final line of dialogue torn out from Rasa amidst his wails, the camera as it swoops up from his broken, prone body to circle over the verdant hell, his blasted sentiments put into song and the pathetic, wretched cries of him and his family on the soundtrack as the camera returns to them again; these are indelible images and sounds, seething with nihilistic despair.

For Bala, bleakness and misery are both journey and destination. If the overwhelming emotional state of the film were to be charted in dimensional terms, then, against a temporal scale, the film is forced to be static until the climax. There is nothing to indicate that the slaves (or at least Rasa) possess an emotional graph that changes over time. Spatially too, the film is a dream narrative masquerading as a realist one: the feeling of dread and despair is all-pervading, negating the urge to really be anywhere. The final tragedy and the enduring misery do not feel arrived at; there is no trajectory, no sense of the characters traversing different psychological terrains to meet their doom. There is no room for any other emotion than abject, helpless sorrow. The film courses along a kymographic plateau, as it were, the cinematic equivalent of muscle fatigue, where whatever the changes in the load, the tonal response of the muscle to it remains the same: a constantly straight line. We are past caring, observing from a disembodied point of view as our nerve endings and sensory responses become palsied, and finally, leprous.

Which, I suspect, is exactly the opposite of what Bala intends. I don’t think that having our senses deadened to such terrible occurrences on screen is an intended consequence of his quest. No, Bala wants to keep wounds amply raw, fresh and wet. So that when he fires his next salvo to cause his creations mortal anguish, they can only howl and writhe in pain. To our inarticulate horror and sympathy. It is the paralytic acceptance of suffering, a mute, subhuman, bestial mode of existence that he is enamoured by. And he will do anything to make us, his viewers, experience it, the emotional sadist and voyeur to boot that he is. The dignity of narrative arcs and well-defined characters, of nuance, of gay laughter amidst darkness, of unitary defiance and resistance in the face of institutionalised oppression, of a cathartic denunciation of such monstrous villainy, those be damned. In his universe of ineffable pain, he is kadavul. Naan Kadavul, he seems to continue to proclaim with every frame of this film. With that very proclamation, he has unwittingly provoked me to articulate. After a very long time. Personally speaking, this is rather an achievement on his part. To him, then, I say: Enna kadavule? Appadi oru kadavulmela enakku nambikkai illa.

The 14th MFF: A Retrospective

The 14^th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) organised by Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) was my first full-blown film festival experience. Here, I revisit some of the highlights of the festival in the futile hope of continuing to live it.

Stories we tell: Dir. Sarah Polley (Canada)

This one was a devastating start to the film festival. All the stellar reviews and repeated allusions to its shattering impact could not prepare me for what I saw in those 110 minutes. Sarah Polley, an actress herself, directs this documentary about her parents and family, using interviews with them, her siblings, their friends, old photographs and Super-8 footage, reconstructions simulating Super-8 footage of her parents’ youth. Memory, love, desire, art, laughter, freedom, loneliness, regret, fear, bitterness, rage coalesce to form one of the most human stories I’ve seen on screen. Amazingly, in addition to all this, the film works like a mystery, in so far as pulling the audience along in the search of an elusive truth. In the process, it re-examines the very nature of truth and its uneasy relationship with us. No one is spared, no one is judged. Polley even chooses to include footage of herself, in the act of experiencing, what we, the audience do. It is as much a journey of painful, honest revelation as it is of self-discovery. The narrative form Polley chooses is so synergetic with the subject matter at hand, it is what lends the film its quietly catastrophic, heartbreaking beauty.  

Miss Lovely: Dir. Ashim Ahluwalia (India, Hindi)

One of the most eagerly awaited films at the festival owing to its selection in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, the premiere was a bit too well attended, leaving the film’s cast and crew (who’d turned up fashionably late) struggling to find seats at their own premiere. Thankfully, the director and the great Nawazuddin Siddiqui were spared this minor ignominy as they were absent.

Set in the world of the C-grade sex-horror film industry in Mumbai of the mid-80’s (Pyaasa Shaitan, Hawas Bhari Chudail and the like), the story follows two brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin) who make such films and a mysterious girl Pinky (Niharika Singh) between them. This film is a rarity in that it does not have much of a plot, (whatever it does can easily be predicted), but depends almost entirely on the creation of an atmosphere to create an impact. The use of this approach is a masterstroke, for it does not quite concretely confirm our worst assumptive fears about such a world, yet greatly magnifies every such fear that is realised. For instance, elsewhere, the sight of a man, hands bound with blood flowing from a cut lip, would not make our skin crawl as much as it would in this film.

It is a dread-heavy film, one whose opening shots, in a mocking, spoofing way, portend the imminent doom. The darkness that pervades the film goes beyond the sleaze, bloodshed or the wretched lives of the characters. It just is. We look at the characters laughing and making merry and wonder how they do it in such a world. We look at them suffer and wonder how they survive in it. The dialogue is so everyday and muttered, it is as if one were eavesdropping on the characters. Yet the sound-design is layered, hypnotic and sonorous creating a closed world in tandem with the claustrophobic locations and the extremely tight photography (Mohanan). The swirling, eddying background score and the garish, baroque set-design and makeup provide a weird beauty to the decaying, noisome world of the film.

A really unique experience, but one you would immediately want to wash off your skin. You can’t.

Ship of Theseus: Dir. Anand Gandhi (India, English/Hindi)

To watch this film is to gulp down breath after breath of pristine, mountainous air, heady with the scent of pines. You feel so alive and enriched after watching it, you almost feel it has healed you in some way. The title refers to an ancient Greek conundrum that asks if a ship may remain the same one after a few or all of its planks have been replaced by new ones or those from another ship? In the latter case, which one, if either, would be the original ship? The film uses this as a springboard to jump into three stories, each one uniquely moving and stimulating. Along the way it asks, posits, debates, philosophical questions and struggles with answers. In spite of these, the film is not weighed down by them and remains ethereal, luminous, humorous and completely in the here and now of things.  Fantastic performances by an international cast most of which is little-known. The cinematography by Pankaj Kumar (in his debut feature) is jaw-dropping, consisting of visually stunning compositions, lyrical lighting and long, continuous takes. It sets a new bench-mark in the field. After hearing a lot of the rave reviews both at home and at the Toronto Int’l Film Festival, this is one film I feel lucky to have watched along with the cast and crew. It received a standing ovation at the Jamshed Bhabha Hall, NCPA where it was screened. Now my only hope is that it gains a commercial release as soon as possible.       

De Martes a Martes (From Tuesday to Tuesday): Dir. Gustavo Trivino (Argentina)

A tightly wound film, it is the story of a man during a period of (as the title suggests) 8 days of his life. It’s a debut feature with a tight budget that contributes to the overall tautness of the film. It would be a crime to give anything away, except that the man is an absolutely regular guy with a blue-collar job and a family. But he secretly nurses a desire and, over the course of the week, is an invisible witness to something that may change his life forever, depending on what he does about it. Or does not. The director masterfully turns up the screws in little touches, subtly supplies clues and creates a generally disquieting atmosphere through everyday interactions and dialogue. Reminded me of ‘The Machinist’, oddly. A crackerjack thriller.  Oh, and with a bloody good central performance.

Antiviral: Dir. Brandon Cronenberg (Canada)

While most kids of great directors struggle to break free out of their parents’ shadow, Brandon son-of-David Cronenberg goes the other way. After watching this film, one would be forgiven for thinking David Cronenberg made the film. The apple clings tightly to the tree.

But that is only so far as the subject matter is concerned. The treatment, while reminiscent of the master, is amped-up with a heavy, electronic score and sustained slow-motion hallucinatory sequences. Celebrity obsession has reached such a peak as to warrant the existence of legitimate companies that patent and sell celebrity diseases to fans who want to feel a visceral connection with their idols. Not only that, there also exists a celebrity meat market, where slabs of meat containing cells of celebrities are sold to customers to provide them the satisfaction of literally eating their idols. This piece of speculative fiction is based smartly on fact. The HeLa cell line, one of the most famous malignant cell lines of all, is invoked to ground this madness in a reality that is chillingly plausible.

This is only the set-up. The film accepts it to be as normal as, probably, the sun rising in the east. The protagonist Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works at just such a celebrity disease firm, and all hell breaks loose when he breaks the one cardinal rule: he carries a celebrity disease outside the premises of his company to sell it on the black market. And, as in ‘Videodrome’, rival corporations jump into the fray too, with sides being changed, double-crossed, people being hunted and punished in really uncomfortable ways.  

This is one of the coldest films I’ve seen: watching it is like swimming in waves of ice. Most of the film has been shot indoors, yet the locations are all sterile, blindingly white, drained of all warmth. The human beings are pale, seen through extremely tight close-ups, so that we can see every throbbing vein, every freckle clearly. There is a purpose for all this and it is revealed in the graphic displays of veins being pierced by hypodermic needles and copious amounts of dark-red, warm, thick blood flowing over those sterile surfaces and out of those bodies, making even hardened horror fans queasy. Cronenberg Jr. has his father’s gift for icy atmosphere, icy females and warm blood-letting down to boot.  

Aqui y Alla (Here and There): Dir. Antonio Esparza (Mexico)

This film reinforces the fact that just watching human beings be themselves through a camera they are unconscious of is still the most fascinating sight on screen. No, it is not a documentary and neither does it feel like one. The camera is steady and, in most cases, static. But we see lives, deep and rich in their everyday detail unfold before us, people who we can almost touch and talk to and we are hooked, sucked in from one scene to another.

It tells the story of one of the many Mexicans who work legally in the United States. After spending several years in the States, Pedro returns to his native village in Mexico to his wife and two daughters and begins life anew. Through them, it simply shows us the mundane life of a Mexican village with love, laughter and music. There is minimal drama; no one even so much as raises their voice.  Perhaps, this is a movie that defies complete description; it simply has to be experienced.

I have said before that it is not a documentary. It would scarcely have worked as one for it does not speak about any issue as such. When the film ends, you just want to go up to Senor Pedro, shake his hand and tell him, ‘You are a good man’.  

Kurmavatara (The Tortoise, An Incarnation): Dir. Girish Kasaravalli (India, Kannada)

Amidst all the new-age cinema endorsing value systems that are more globalised (if at all they do endorse), it is refreshing to see a film that speaks of Gandhian ideals in today’s times. The setting is a lower-middle class household in Bengaluru, presumably, consisting of Ananda Rao, an ageing government employee and his son, daughter-in-law and their son. Ananda is a gruff workaholic who is approached to play the role of Mahatma Gandhi in a TV production by its director. Initially turning him down, he eventually accepts it at his family’s insistence and the continuing efforts of the director. Being an untrained, inexperienced actor has its pitfalls, however, and performance anxiety is the least of them. He is profoundly affected by Gandhian ideals to his family’s delight, at first, but then to their chagrin. His popularity is taken advantage of by several friends and acquaintances for their own vested interests. One naively expects such a simple, old-fashioned, gently humorous film to merely highlight the paradox of how we see Gandhi today and the contrast between reel and real life. But the film doesn’t stop at that. Ananda does not become more like Gandhi nor does he bring about a sea-change in others around him by resorting to satyagraha. He does try fasting once, but to no avail. The film betrays no such romantic illusions about Gandhi’s methods and thus, reveals a wisdom seemingly at odds with its old-world charm. Ananda does get in touch with his emotions more after being required to emote for the camera. On the other hand, we see several instances of Ananda questioning Gandhi’s own behaviour while being well in character. This is the strength of the film: that it challenges and breaks assumptions about itself even as we watch it. In a sequence in the film, a situation has the potential to become a communally charged one. It is defused, not by appealing to the common sense of the people, or their sense of communal amity, but by giving in to the demands of the fanatics. In that sense, it is a clear-eyed look at the paradox of Gandhian ideals not only in today’s day and age, but also the very ideals themselves. This film provided me with a lot of food for thought, and most of the conclusions drawn above, are in hindsight.

Xingu: Dir. Cao Hamburger (Brazil)

To be honest, I chanced upon this film only because the screening of ‘Amour’, one of the biggest draws of the festival, was cancelled at the eleventh hour. I went in disgruntled, without expecting anything from it, given its title and the synopsis I’d read of it. I hadn’t heard of the director too which was another minus. Yes, my hurt ego had ballooned to an unimaginable size. This film not only pricked the air out of it, but healed it too, restoring it to its erstwhile good humour. A classic case of serendipity, this remains one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen at the festival. It tells the real-life tale of three brothers in the 1940’s who sign up on a whim to partake of the civilisation drive of central Brazil, hitherto unreached. The brothers are of the family Villas Boas, Claudio, Orlando and Leonardo. They are well-educated but pass themselves off as manual labour so that they may live life in the great outdoors at the mercy of Nature alone. While exploring the jungles of Central Brazil they chance upon an ancient, indigenous tribe with whom they successfully manage to interact peacefully. After this first success, they are repeatedly called upon by the National Government to aid the civilisation drives and make contact with other tribes. In most cases, the brothers serve as a velvet glove for the iron fist of the Govt. in displacing the tribals. The film documents the assiduous efforts of the brothers to soften the inevitable blow- of contact between the white man and the tribals- as much as possible.  In the course of their work, we also see their personal struggles, relationships with the tribals and relationship with their own folk, the white men.

In doing so, it raises fundamental questions about the conquest of nature, the neo-colonisation of the tribals and its globalised nature, whether tribals should be brought into contact with white men at all, and the wherewithal to do so. The herculean efforts of the brothers bore fruit when, in the late 1960’s. the Government allowed them permission to build a reserve park where different indigenous tribes might reside in peaceful coexistence away from the sight of white men. The park bore the name of the great river of the region: Xingu. The film benefits enormously from the expert photography on location and extremely accurate recreation of those pages of history that are often overlooked. The end credits showed the great Fernando Meirelles as one of the producers. My day was made.      

BMW: Aditya Bhattacharya (India, Hindi/English)

It is a return of sorts for the director whose last film Dubai Return (2005) with Irfan Khan and Divya Dutta never released. To most people (which is not many) he is still known as the guy who made Raakh way back in 1988, which pulled off a casting coup by getting a very young Aamir Khan, Pankaj Kapur and Supriya Pathak together. And then disappeared. I haven’t seen those movies, so I went in for this screening more out of curiosity than anything else.

It tells the story of a New York based journalist of Indian origin, Nivedita (Sarita Choudhury) who is in Mumbai to shoot a documentary on encounter specialist Dilawar Khan (Javed Jaffri). The titular BMW refers to the car Khan drives, as well as becomes an acronym for Bombay’s Most Wanted. For the film, she also interviews his informer Inayat (Chandan Roy Sanyal) and, later, a former bar dancer Vanilla (Tannishtha Chatterjee). The three subjects share a close bond from an earlier time. The journalist’s arrival coincides with several synchronous changes in the city: encounter specialists are now hunted and harassed by the new political establishment, bar dancers have been rendered jobless due to RR Patil’s landmark decision and the informer is on the run, hunted by both the sides he played and betrayed. Nivedita’s attempt to delve into the encounter killing of the feared Pote Bhau (Vijay Raaz) shifts the delicate balance between the three subjects, in addition to drawing the ire of Khan’s former boss (Adil Hussain) now hell-bent on capturing him to please his superiors. Amid this dynamically changing landscape, Nivedita struggles to piece together the jigsaw of Pote’s killing.

The narrative is rather convoluted with different versions of the same event seen through different eyes, certain events are fractured and intercut with other events, characters and their motivations subtly change with every retelling and fact and fiction intermingle freely to create the uneasy matrix of life. Along the way, the movie doffs its hat to masterpieces in this tradition such as Rashomon, The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, even Ab Tak Chhappan. But at its heart, it is a whimsical film, with a uniquely bittersweet taste, finely, though sometimes, unevenly, textured. The performances are uniformly good, the humour is quite off-beat, the musical influences eclectic, ranging from Italian opera and American jazz to Indian folk and Hindi film music. The director has called it his blood-speckled love-letter to his growing-up city, Bombay. In the list of worthy cinematic tributes to the city, it surely occupies its own distinct niche.  

Reality: Dir. Matteo Garrone (Italy)

It is said that the name of the director (given his last work, ‘Gomorrah’ which I haven’t seen yet) was enough to draw audiences to this film. Turns out it is far, far removed from the world of organised crime explored in ‘Gomorrah’ and tackles the appeal of the reality show ‘Big Brother’ (its Italian version) to a fish-seller in Naples. This one, named Luciano, is happily married with three daughters and a large extended family of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles who live together in a huge, crumbling mansion that might have once belonged to a fairy tale. As the movie begins, we see him to be infatuated with the reigning Big Brother winner and an ardent aspirant to the show. He is a cheerful, forever optimistic family man, rather like Roberto Benigni’s character from ‘Life is Beautiful’. However, as the film progresses he becomes more like Robert de Niro’s character from ‘The King of Comedy’, a man so naively optimistic that you worry for him, who smiles so hard and so long, you feel uncomfortable and unpleasant, afraid when the smile might slip to be reveal the inevitable ugliness beneath. In his obsession with the show, he slowly descends into insanity, despite repeated attempts by his family members, especially his wife, to break his fall. Stunningly directed, with marvellously long Steadicam-held takes, during which the camera manages to watch the actors so closely we can tell what the characters are thinking inside their heads, the film is a technical tour-de-force. The ending is debatable and seems abrupt. But this is a film that is more about the journey, which itself rushes by with such headlong passion, that we may be forgiven for anticipating a fittingly grand destination.