The Present Is Another Country

My Mirror column:

The unforgettable David Gulpilil, who won a 2014 Best Actor award at Cannes for Charlie's Country, first appeared on screen 45 years ago. 

While writing about Thithi last month, I was reminded of a film I saw at IFFI two years ago, called Charlie's Country. On the surface, the two films have little in common. Thithi's gently sardonic observational portrait of a Kannadiga universe stitches together an impressive multigenerational cast of non-actors, while Charlie's Country stays almost entirely with its principal protagonist, a grizzled Aboriginal man called Charlie. 

But at the vortex of Thithi's whirl of activity is also a wiry old man. Gadappa (literally 'Beardman') is determined not to be tied down by restrictions of religious ritual or law or property. Like Charlie, he wants to be free. The difference between them is that Gadappa has once been a householder. And that grihasthi, unhappy as it was, has left him a line of sons and grandsons. It is this family, this community, that wants to make him conform, and it is them that he defies when he wanders off with his preferred tipple instead of signing documents and lighting pyres. 

The restrictions Charlie wants to be rid of are of a wholly different kind. Though he ostensibly lives in an Aboriginal 'community', there is nothing left of the world he once knew. The old social fabric, ripped from its inherent connection to the land, is adrift. 

Rolf de Heer's film begins on a tenuously comic note. Frustrated with life on the dole and lowgrade industrially processed food, Charlie and his friend Black Pete rig up a battered Land Rover and leave the corrugated shacks they call home to set out on a hunting expedition. They manage to snag a water buffalo, but their guns, the car and the fresh meat-to-be are all confiscated by the local authorities. Down but not out, Charlie crafts himself a spear from a young tree. But this, too, is an unauthorised weapon, according to the white-fella policeman. When even the spear is taken away, Charlie decides the only way to reclaim his country is by living in it the old way. 

As you watch David Gulpilil walk into the wilderness, armed with not much except the clothes on his back, you cannot but remember the magnificent actor's first cinematic appearance — as a limber young fellow in Nicholas Roeg's haunting, hallucinogenic Walkabout, which turns 45 years old this week. The 1971 film, with Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager who saves two English children lost in the desert, remains memorable for, among other things, the quivering thread of incomprehension and fascination between Gulpilil and the white girl (British actress Jenny Agutter, then 17). 

In Roeg's film, Gulpili's character was on a walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal practice in which a boy who turns 16 must spend months learning to survive on his own in the bush, hunting and gathering food and water, essentially living without shelter. 

It is the genius of De Heer's film — and a profound source of its tragedy — to return the actor, some five decades later, to another filmic walkabout. This time, though, there is no fantasy of cross-cultural conversation. I don't know if they did even when Roeg arrived to make his film in 1969, but white people in Australia no longer live fearfully on the edges of the wilderness, attracted or frightened by its untamed beauty. Certainly they need no rescuing. 

Walkabout contains many scenes of Gulpilil spearing animals for food, from small lizards to kangaroos. A near-climactic sequence made clear the difference between Aboriginal hunting and the white man's hunting, between hunting for survival and hunting for sport. A lean, young, big-eyed Gulpilil is wrestling with a single buffalo, on foot. He has almost succeeded in bringing it down when he is swept off his feet by two white hunters in a jeep and a cloud of dust. Within minutes they have gunned down several animals, taking away only a couple and leaving the others to rot where they fell. Despite Roeg's somewhat dated zooms, jerky pauses and associative visual leaps (to a maggot-infested carcass, for instance, and later a pile of bleached buffalo skulls), it is a powerful sequence. 

Watching Gulpilil now as Charlie, heading out to hunt with a vehicle and guns, feels strangely wrong. And yet, if 'civilisation' has come to the bushman, why should the machine not be part of it? 

But the Aborigine has neither been equipped to handle Western industrial society, nor can he possibly remain the mythical being he once was. What little equipment Charlie has seems decrepit, like his surroundings. In any case, hunting even a single buffalo for food is now illegal. Having killed off animals on an industrial scale, the white man now forbids hunting. The irony is total. 

We may want to watch Gulpilil live off the land and hunt with a spear. Gulpilil may want to watch himself live off the land and hunt with a spear — for the wrenching quality of these films derives from the fact that the actor is playing a character whose predicament is not distant from his own. But people are not untouched by the histories that sweep over them. Having fractured this world into pieces, how can we now expect its members to present themselves as unharmed wholes?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3rd July 2016.

Taking the shine off India

My Mumbai Mirror column this morning:

Does revisiting Raj Kapoor’s 1950s classic Boot Polish in light of Kaaka Muttai, the superb new Tamil film about two slum children, show us how little distance we have really travelled?

Boot Polish is on my mind for two reasons. One, because I only recently discovered, amid all of this year's Cannes excitement, that exactly 60 years ago, in the summer of 1955, we sent Boot Polish to Cannes to compete for the Palm d'Or. (No, it didn't win. But it did come home with a Special Distinction for the sparkling performance of one of its two child actors: Baby Naaz.) And two, because watching the lovely Kaaka Muttai (The Crow's Egg), which released across India last week with English subtitles, made me think of this much older film, also about a pair of siblings who live in a slum.

But there, it would seem, any similarity ends. Kaaka Muttai has a neat, well-defined premise that seems almost cheerful – the kids want to eat pizza. The film is witty and subtle and wants to keep things light, even as it slices sharply though the zeitgeist – while my memory of Boot Polish was of a song-filled tearjerker about the cruelty of a world in which children had to fend for themselves.

But what emerged from re-watching Boot Polish surprised me. Of course the tone is very different, but like Kaaka Muttai, the 1954 film constantly leavens pathos with humour. In a tragic opening scene, the orphaned brother and sister Bhola and Belu are abandoned at the doorstep of their vengeful aunt Kamla, who proceeds to force the hapless boy and his baby sister almost immediately into beggary. But in the next scene, we see the children, slightly older and cannier, begging on a bus, and the song they sing is impossible not to smile at:

“Dhela hi dila de baba, dhela hi dila de.

Dhela na dega, teri chori ho jayegi.

Chori jo hogi thane tu jaega,

Thane tu jaake rapat likhayega,

Itna jo karega, baba, dhela hi dila de...

Dhela na dega, teri nani mar jayegi.

Nani jo maregi Hardwar jayega...

Hardwar jaake pandon ko khilayega,

Itna jo karega, humein dhela hi dila de”.

A dhela was half a paisa, the very smallest denomination at the time. The begging song combines an appeal for “just a dhela” with a hilarious set of curses predicting the fate that will befall the person if they don't pay up, all of which would mean more money lost. So, goes the chorus, “you might as well give us a dhela”.

Later, as the wicked aunt slaps Belu around to make her perfect her “blind” beggar's chant, the little girl gets confused. She's meant to say, “Subah se bhookhi, janam se andhi”. You can't help but giggle as she says, “Subah se andhi hoon” (I've been blind since morning) and bites her tongue.

Some of the humour shines blacker than black. Such as when a nasty astrologer gleefully proclaims to Bhola (Rattan), “Tu jootiyan ragdega saari zindagi” (You'll polish shoes all your life), only to have the boy leap up in joy saying “Ab toh dhanda khoob chalega!” (Now the business is sure to run!) That polishing shoes for a living can seem like freedom is further underlined by the children's spontaneous declaration when they manage to buy a brush and polish to set up their “business”: “Aaj se Hindustan aazaad hua. Bheekh maangna bandh!” (Hindustan is now free. No more begging!)

It's not as if the film isn't melodramatic. The deeply principled Bhola might have been an inspiration for the khuddaar street urchin that most of us recognise from countless 80s and 90s films, best encapsulated by Amitabh Bachchan's “Main phenke huye paise nahi uthata” (I don't pick up money thrown at me). In Boot Polish, it is the children's one adult sympathiser, John Chacha (David), who strengthens Belu and Bhola's resolve to reject a life of beggary for one of labour: “Bheekh maangne ke liye yeh mutthi kabhi mat kholna, chahe kuchh bhi ho jaye.” (Don’t ever unclose your fist to beg, come what may.)

But as in most class-focused Hindi melodrama, the film's personalised solution for its protagonists belies the socialist optimism of its crowd scenes and anthems, like the famous “Nanhe munhe bachhe”, (Little child) which goes: “Na bhookhon ki bheed hogi, na dukhon ka raj hoga/ Badlega zamana yeh sitaron pe likha hai” (There will be no hungry throngs, nor will sorrow rule/ The tide will turn; it’s written in the stars). Writer-director Prakash Arora decides to save Belu from the fate of her companions like every popular writer before and after Dickens: via a kind, rich benefactor. And then he squeezes every ounce of tears out of the temporary contrast between the fates of Belu and Bhola: think visual matches between Belu asleep on a soft bed amid marble pillars and Bhola on the footpath. Later, as Bhola is failing to lift his coolie's load, we cut to the adult servant in Belu's new home lifting luggage: the film's turnaround even on the dignity of labour is complete (though the child-adult contrast makes it possibly justifiable).

By the end of Kaaka Muttai, much has happened, but all that has changed is that the kids have eaten a pizza – and learnt that the image has more punch than the real thing. The media fracas set off by their filmed encounter with a nasty pizza parlour manager leads us to the same conclusion. Boot Polish's epic arc, in contrast, leads its protagonists from extreme deprivation to an almost mythical new start.

And yet, there are moments when we see glimpses of suppressed complexity. “Ba se ber,” (B for ber, a small fruit) says Belu, reading the alphabet to her adoring new mother. “Mujhe ber bahot pasand hai. Chocolate nahi. Papa roz chocolate laate hain, ber kyon nahi laate?” (I like ber very much, not chocolate. Papa brings me chocolate every day, but why doesn’t he bring me ber?) She is already in the position of the two well-off children in Kaaka Muttai, who willingly trade their mall-bought new clothes for panipuri. But when the Kaaka Muttai kids decide dosa tastes better than pizza after all, the film’s end feels a little bit wishful.

Picture This: Remembering Rififi

My column for BL Ink this month:

Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) might or might not be the best film noir I have ever seen, but it’s likely the most subversive.

Exactly 60 years ago, on May 10, 1955, the eighth Cannes Film Festival awarded Best Director to Jules Dassin for the festival’s opening film Du Rififi Chez les Hommes, known in English as simply Rififi. Released in France in April 1955, Rififi had already snagged Dassin a two-part interview at the iconic magazine Cahiers du Cinema. The interviewers were Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, future giants of the French New Wave, both then in their early twenties. Truffaut, then forging a reputation as a notoriously unforgiving film critic, also gave Rififi a rave review: “[O]ut of the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen.”

The novel was by popular French writer Auguste le Breton, an orphan who frequented the low-life bars and gambling dens of Montmartre, that form Rififi’s atmospheric setting. Dassin wasn’t a fan; among other things, he thought it was racist (his screenplay did away with the dark-skinned Arab and North African rival gangsters). But he would have been a fool to refuse: despite having tasted success in Hollywood with Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves’ Highway (1949), he had been blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) while making Night and the City (1950) and hadn’t managed to make a film in five years despite a move to France.

So the Cannes award wasn’t just good for Dassin’s career, but also a French slap in the face of Hollywood. The jury that year had five Frenchmen, plus one man each from Spain, USA, UK, Italy, Switzerland and the USSR (no women, naturally), and despite his French-sounding name, Dassin was very much an American, born in Connecticut to Russian Jewish immigrants. Interestingly, Dassin shared his prize with Soviet director Sergei Vasilyev, for Heroes of Shipka, about the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

I haven’t seen Shipka, but I imagine it shares little with Rififi, which is a supremely stylish film about a gang of thieves. But then Cannes wasn’t awarding Dassin for subject; the cutting edge of the French film establishment was excited about a certain Expressionistically-lit, dark, urban cinema coming out of Hollywood, and this film was a sophisticated example of it — in French. A few months after Rififi, two French critics, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, came out with the first book-length attempt to define the style: A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-53.

The characteristics of noir remain legendarily hard to agree upon, though critic Roger Ebert made a rather fun list of criteria in 1995, including “#2 A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending” and “#4 Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, ‘On top of everything else, I’ve been assigned to get through three packs today.’” Rififi certainly ticks those boxes. At the film’s nervous, throbbing centre is a hood called Tony, whom we first meet losing the last of his money in a poker game, coughing as he lights yet another cigarette. The room is so dark that when Tony makes a phone call and we cut to the home of his protege Jo, it comes as a shock that it’s actually morning. The casting is perfect: Jean Servais, who plays Tony, has a pale, drawn face that makes perfect sense when you learn that he was a recovering alcoholic.

When Dassin’s characters aren’t huddled indoors in some basement or bar, they’re walking the wet Paris streets. The occasional neon-lit advertising is all for liquor brands: Cognac Martell, Haig Scotch Whiskey, Dubonnet. Only the final sequence swaps shadowy silences for a crazy, careening drive beyond the city, brilliantly juxtaposing a man’s desperate speeding with a child’s blithe enjoyment of it.

Rififi is a superb example of why films noir are often the best city flicks: to plan on rupturing the urban order, you need to know it inside-out first. The gang’s prep involves noting what time of morning the salesgirl arrives at work, when the florist makes his deliveries, when the policeman does his rounds. In one great scene, Tony walks Jo along the avenue on which their targeted jewellery store stands — it’s Mappin & Webb — making him recite the details of the shop fronts they pass, without looking up.

But if this is noir, it subverts its own rules. The women may look like femme fatales (one of them, Mado, even gets involved with a rival gangster while Tony is in prison), but they aren’t scheming or duplicitous. The men come off much worse. They beat up their girlfriends and infantilise their wives. Tony’s violence towards Mado is extreme, another gang member Mario keeps shutting the door on his smiling partner, calling her ‘pet’ and telling her to ‘run along’ and go to bed, and the film’s denouement reiterates how the women suffer the consequences of something they had no part in planning.

The ubiquitous machismo of this noirish world is also, to my eyes, undercut by the manner in which Dassin presents the half-hour heist at the film’s centre. I have rarely seen a group of men on screen conduct themselves in so wonderfully silent, unobtrusive a fashion, for so long. Wordless, invisibilised labour is something that women are traditionally socialised into; men, only if they are servants or slaves.

Which leads us to the last thing that makes Rififi’s heist so remarkable. The delicate, unspoken synchronisation makes the heist feel performative, akin to a dance, or a circus act. But Dassin’s two aesthetic decisions, of silence and of slowness, making it feel like real time (of course, it isn’t really) changes what we know to be a theft, an undeserving short-cut to riches, into something profoundly like work. Rififi was banned in many places because the police said it was a demonstration to potential criminals. But it is this that makes it truly subversive.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.