My Mirror piece:
Ruchika Oberoi's Island City pushes our technologised reality to its starkest logical conclusions.
No man is an island,/ Entire of itself,/ Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main," wrote the seventeenth century English poet John Donne.
Filmmaker Ruchika Oberoi's directorial debut is a thoughtful triptych of tales that suggest that we may have drifted very far from Donne's vision of humanity.
The protagonists of Oberoi's film — whether single or married, with well-defined social identities or without — are increasingly unmoored from their surroundings, and sometimes from themselves. To stay with Donne's words for a bit, each is "a clod... washed away by the sea", but the loss appears to go unnoticed. Nothing and no one is the less.
Island City's disturbing portrait of a present-day Indian city — it is Mumbai, but it could be anywhere — is made up of three segments. In the first, 'Fun Committee', an employee is sent on a forced "day off" because company research has shown that productivity is down because employees are not having enough fun.
In 'The Ghost in the Machine', a housewife and her children find their lives much lighter in the temporary absence of the head of the family. In 'Contact', the last segment, a young woman stuck in a rut finds sudden hope when she receives a letter.
The film opens with shots of the gleaming, glassy surfaces that make up so much of the contemporary city -- the city in which we ought to see ourselves reflected, but which seems strangely opaque. We bounce off its high-gloss exteriors.
The eerie dawn silence is punctured by an alarm clock, and its faux-cheery wake-up announcement is the first of the many machines in Island City that seem to have replaced human contact. The disembodied female voice in which the company speaks to its employees on the public address announcement system; the office elevator announcing the day's temperature; even the microwave in the kitchen tinnily urging you to 'Enjoy Your Meal' seems to know that there isn't a human being around to make sure you do.
While the machines are increasingly trying to get us to believe they're human, human beings are becoming more machine-like. The corporate floor in the Fun Committee segment is a bit like an updated Metropolis: everything is neat and ordered, people file into a bus, and file out of the bus into their office, swiping their cards with exactly the same gesture.
Even the yoga stretches done by the hapless Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak's sad-faced protagonist in the first segment) seem like they're being performed by an automaton. It is a short step from the physical enforcement of order to the naturalisation of a world in which we all do what we are told — no matter if our hearts or minds aren't in it. It is a deliberately excessive, tragicomic vision of late capitalist society — and yet Oberoi's deft handling makes sure we know when to stop laughing.
The film's second part, starring the always wonderful Amruta Subash, also places technology at its centre. Here, however, it appears in a much more recognisable, ordinary form: television.
The story's setting, too, is much less starkly atomised than that of Pathak in the first part: we have a fully-formed family unit: the husband and wife with two small children, and the husband's mother living with them.
But the existence of socially legitimised bonds, the filmmaker seems to suggest, is no guarantor that they mean something. The family that ought to be grief-stricken finds itself oddly liberated, and the television becomes the expression of their collective sigh of relief.
The mirroring between their lives and the TV serial they become obsessed with can seem heavy-handed. But Oberoi achieves something remarkable here — she shows us how powerfully we are formed by fiction, while simultaneously suggesting that we can use it to suppress what we feel in our real lives.
The last segment is perhaps the most chilling. There is more of the dirt and noise and clamour of the city here than in the previous two sections, and we might think of that as offering more human connection. But the young woman protagonist is oppressed by the crowd. Society seems to press in on her from all sides — she has no privacy in which to even read something, no friends with whom to share her unarticulated imaginings, and certainly not the security which men have to lay claim to the city.
The city here alienates with its masculinity, with the pressure it exerts on women to accept their fate — a milieu so thoughtless that it can blame women for not participating joyfully in our own everyday subjugation. The surrounding characters are perhaps less fully realised than in the second part, but Tannishtha Chatterjee is deeply believable as the ordinary girl holding out hope that she isn't as ordinary as everyone thinks; for one other human being to prove to her that she's worth something.
The anonymous letter-writer urges Aarti to believe: "Is machini duniya mein tumhari insaniyat salaamat hai [In this mechanical world, your humanity is still intact]". Island City wants to tell us quite the opposite.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Sep 2016.
Ruchika Oberoi's Island City pushes our technologised reality to its starkest logical conclusions.
No man is an island,/ Entire of itself,/ Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main," wrote the seventeenth century English poet John Donne.
Filmmaker Ruchika Oberoi's directorial debut is a thoughtful triptych of tales that suggest that we may have drifted very far from Donne's vision of humanity.
The protagonists of Oberoi's film — whether single or married, with well-defined social identities or without — are increasingly unmoored from their surroundings, and sometimes from themselves. To stay with Donne's words for a bit, each is "a clod... washed away by the sea", but the loss appears to go unnoticed. Nothing and no one is the less.
Island City's disturbing portrait of a present-day Indian city — it is Mumbai, but it could be anywhere — is made up of three segments. In the first, 'Fun Committee', an employee is sent on a forced "day off" because company research has shown that productivity is down because employees are not having enough fun.
In 'The Ghost in the Machine', a housewife and her children find their lives much lighter in the temporary absence of the head of the family. In 'Contact', the last segment, a young woman stuck in a rut finds sudden hope when she receives a letter.
The film opens with shots of the gleaming, glassy surfaces that make up so much of the contemporary city -- the city in which we ought to see ourselves reflected, but which seems strangely opaque. We bounce off its high-gloss exteriors.
The eerie dawn silence is punctured by an alarm clock, and its faux-cheery wake-up announcement is the first of the many machines in Island City that seem to have replaced human contact. The disembodied female voice in which the company speaks to its employees on the public address announcement system; the office elevator announcing the day's temperature; even the microwave in the kitchen tinnily urging you to 'Enjoy Your Meal' seems to know that there isn't a human being around to make sure you do.
While the machines are increasingly trying to get us to believe they're human, human beings are becoming more machine-like. The corporate floor in the Fun Committee segment is a bit like an updated Metropolis: everything is neat and ordered, people file into a bus, and file out of the bus into their office, swiping their cards with exactly the same gesture.
Even the yoga stretches done by the hapless Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak's sad-faced protagonist in the first segment) seem like they're being performed by an automaton. It is a short step from the physical enforcement of order to the naturalisation of a world in which we all do what we are told — no matter if our hearts or minds aren't in it. It is a deliberately excessive, tragicomic vision of late capitalist society — and yet Oberoi's deft handling makes sure we know when to stop laughing.
The film's second part, starring the always wonderful Amruta Subash, also places technology at its centre. Here, however, it appears in a much more recognisable, ordinary form: television.
The story's setting, too, is much less starkly atomised than that of Pathak in the first part: we have a fully-formed family unit: the husband and wife with two small children, and the husband's mother living with them.
But the existence of socially legitimised bonds, the filmmaker seems to suggest, is no guarantor that they mean something. The family that ought to be grief-stricken finds itself oddly liberated, and the television becomes the expression of their collective sigh of relief.
The mirroring between their lives and the TV serial they become obsessed with can seem heavy-handed. But Oberoi achieves something remarkable here — she shows us how powerfully we are formed by fiction, while simultaneously suggesting that we can use it to suppress what we feel in our real lives.
The last segment is perhaps the most chilling. There is more of the dirt and noise and clamour of the city here than in the previous two sections, and we might think of that as offering more human connection. But the young woman protagonist is oppressed by the crowd. Society seems to press in on her from all sides — she has no privacy in which to even read something, no friends with whom to share her unarticulated imaginings, and certainly not the security which men have to lay claim to the city.
The city here alienates with its masculinity, with the pressure it exerts on women to accept their fate — a milieu so thoughtless that it can blame women for not participating joyfully in our own everyday subjugation. The surrounding characters are perhaps less fully realised than in the second part, but Tannishtha Chatterjee is deeply believable as the ordinary girl holding out hope that she isn't as ordinary as everyone thinks; for one other human being to prove to her that she's worth something.
The anonymous letter-writer urges Aarti to believe: "Is machini duniya mein tumhari insaniyat salaamat hai [In this mechanical world, your humanity is still intact]". Island City wants to tell us quite the opposite.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Sep 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment