Dispatch from Dharamshala – 2

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Films about animals at this year's edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival had powerful things to say about the state of our humanity 

The monkey as metaphor: a still from Prateek Vats's film Eeb Allay Ooo

You can never watch all the films at a film festival. What you can do is to make your choices, whether based on frontbencher commitment (read high-intensity googling of film titles) or a more backbencher attitude (what the lady in the loo queue seems excited about) and hope that the darkness of the auditorium will end up illuminating something you haven't quite seen before.
 

One of the things this year's DIFF threw into focus for me was age and ageing. There's no single model of the good life, but observing old people throws up possibilities to aspire to – or guard against. Archana Phadke's stunning documentary portrait of her grandparents and her parents, About Love, is as brutal as it is affectionate, letting us see these long-term relationships as the simultaneous safety nets and shackles they are. The bent, ancient fisherman of Kazuhiro Soda's Inland Sea smiles wryly about how the years can sneak up on you: “I thought I was still 50 or 60, turned out I had turned 90.” 

The other theme that seemed to me to emerge serendipitously from DIFF 2019 was animals. Zooming in on the non-human seemed, in film after film, to be a way of opening up the human condition. Sometimes the association felt subtle, like the gleaming night hauls of fish in Inland Sea that the old man disentangles from his net and tosses into the boat's watery hold, so they might live a little longer. The persistent slippery toughness of their bodies, leaping for life even at death's door, struck me as akin to their captor. 

Elsewhere, the weight of the beastly allegory seemed too much for the narrative to bear. The acclaimed Malayali director Lijo Jose Pelissery was at DIFF with his latest, Jallikattu, in which a buffalo due for slaughter runs amok, destroying plantations and shops in its wake. As the village men set off in pursuit, armed with nothing but ropes and their egos, it becomes clear that the film is only ostensibly about the buffalo.  

Pelissery's last two films, Angamaly Diaries and Ee Ma Yau,  demonstrated a talent for richly orchestrated set pieces, but Jallikattu feels more like a runaway display of that ability than a controlled experiment. For most of the film's running time, we watch men with flaming torches tramp through acres of hilly woodland and splash through streams, yelling, leaping, tearing at each other, with increasingly less rational cause. The buffalo seems almost forgotten as long-held internecine rivalries bubble up. The energy of the crowd is both majoritarian and masculine – “We will take it! There are more of us!” The thrill of the hunt, the performative frenzy of competition, the adrenaline and the testosterone – these, Jallikattu drills into us, are what drive humanity at its basest. And somehow, humanity at its most primitive is signified by animality. 

“Even now, with us here, this place belongs to animals,” says a goggle-eyed old man in Jallikattu. The sentiment is echoed at one point in Prateek Vats's stellar feature debut, Eeb Allay Ooo!, when Mahinder the monkey repeller of seven generations declares to the befuddled new recruit Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj) that he has been asked to help train: “This is the neighbourhood of Raisina, traditionally ruled by monkeys.”  

But neither Pellisery nor Vats seem actually interested in our relationship with the animal world. What Vats's film does brilliantly is to use the monkey as metaphor, creating a multifarious web of associations that traverse the distance between animal and god – but elude the human. The bonnet macaque monkeys of Lutyens' Delhi, as elsewhere in India, have exploded as a population partly because they are worshipped and fed as a form of Hanuman – and as a bit of video footage in the films repeats, “The gods become pests.” 

Combining real locations and non-actors with a sharp script and a core of trained actors, Eeb Allay Ooo! follows the travails of a Bihari migrant who is hired to shoo away monkeys from the national capital's most grandly symbolic architectural corridor. There are several interwoven strands that combine to make this such a scathing indictment of the state of the nation: the humour of a young man's masculinity seemingly pitted against monkeys, the deeply unfair conditions of contractual labour, the absurdity of bureaucratic rules that defeat all of Anjani's innovations on the job. Meanwhile, the performative masculinity of the state at both the lowest level: Anjani's security guard brother-in-law being forced to wield a rifle that he can barely carry – and the highest: the Republic Day parade – emerge as equally farcical. 

It is only when the man pretends to be an animal – in a man-sized monkey costume, in blackface imitation of the lion-tailed macaques of Karnataka's R-Day tableau – that he manages to scatter the monkeys. We watch him wander through the streets, a modern-day Hanuman in his own sad Ramleela. 

His success is because the monkeys cannot tell the difference between a real langur and a fake one. Mahinder's real death at a mob's hands goes unmourned. Meanwhile, towards the film's end, the real rifle ends up in a costume tailor's shop, its value as limited to the performative as the fake costume. When, in the last scene, the jobless Anjani joins the parade of Hanuman impersonators, we know acche din has made monkeys of us all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Nov 2019. 

In the Family Way

My Mirror column:

Films about parental figures — real and imagined — made revealing viewing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Actor Manoj Bajpayee occupies the front row at the 2018 edition of DIFF, which took place in November at the Tibetan Children's Village school in McLeodganj

The seventh edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), which ran from November 1 to 4, was full of films about parent-child relationships. It wasn’t a consciously chosen theme. “As in previous editions, a pattern emerged organically from the choices we made,” wrote DIFF’s directors Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in their festival brochure.

Deliberate or not, even just the names of the films on this year’s schedule made for a recurring motif. In many conversations at the fest, the multi-generational, multi-linear Taiwanese drama Father to Son was mistaken for Of Fathers and Sons, a documentary based on exiled Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki’s two years shooting with a radical Islamist family in a north Syrian village. The Sri Lankan debut feature House of My Fathers added to the confusion.

Beyond the films whose titles declared themselves, however, there was Ee.Ma.Yau, Lijo Pellissery’s brilliant satirical drama about a Malayali Catholic man trying to arrange the grand funeral he promised his fisherman father, and the spare, rather too studied The Red Phallus, Tashi Gyeltshen’s symbolic unpacking of patriarchy in rural Bhutan through the tale of an atsara (a traditional clown) and his unhappy teenaged daughter. Dominic Sangma’s debut feature Ma.Ama, which I didn’t get to watch, ‘resurrects’ the filmmaker’s late mother (and casts his real-life father as the 85-year-old Philip Sangma, who has waited 30 years to be reunited with his dead wife).

The non-fiction films, too, gravitated towards this filial theme: Avni Rai’s documentary about her father, Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait, is as much about his photography as their relationship, while the fascinating, blackly funny The Beksinskis: A Sound and Picture Album (2017) reconstructs the complicated relationship between a famous Polish painter Zdzislaw and his radio journalist son Tomek, drawing on 300 hours of private video footage that extends from the period before Tomek’s birth till after his death. (The Beksinskis were also the subject of a more traditional biopic in 2016: Jan P Matuszynski’s feature The Last Family, which I saw at IFFI last year, didn’t have the advantage of ironic self-examination made for more harrowing viewing.)

Stills from Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence & Hamid, respectively the opening and closing films at DIFF 2018.

What was uncanny to me, though, was something else: the fact that in so many of the other films, child protagonists created a cross-generational bond with an older adult — often in lieu of a parent. In the Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai’s road movie Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence, the festival’s opening film, a Mumbai chauffeur frustrated with the cacophony of the city sets out a solo trip to Ladakh’s Silent Valley, only to find himself in the insistent company of a twelve-year-old boy travelling mysteriously alone in Ladakh. The boy’s ceaseless confident chatter contrasts starkly with the silences of Devashish Makhija’s Bhonsle, in which a retired Marathi constable takes a fearful Bihari child under his wing.



Makhija’s Mumbai, all shadowy corridors and low-lit, barely-furnished rooms, couldn’t be more different from Dar Gai’s picture-postcard mountain vistas. Even when the locale is comparable, the effects are far apart. Namdev Bhau’s chawl always looks bright, the sunlight as inescapable as the chatter of Namdev’s family and neighbours, while Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhonsle occupies what must be the most silent chawl ever seen on the Hindi film screen: a place where even make-or-break fights about chauvinistic community claims on the city don’t spill over beyond the few carefully chosen protagonists. Stagey as that often felt, and despite the predictable turning of its sole female character into fodder for competing masculinities, I was far more moved by the connection between Virat Vaibhav’s petrified Lalu and the taciturn but fair Bhonsle than by Dar Gai’s too-neat, emotionally manipulative conclusion.

Child actor Virat Vaibhav in a still from Devashish Makhija's disturbing Bhonsle (2018)

Emotional manipulation and tidy coincidences also reigned in DIFF’s closing film, Aijaz Khan’s drama Hamid, set in Kashmir. An eight-year-old boy whose father has joined the state’s growing list of ‘‘disappeared persons” tries to phone Allah to send his father back, and ends up calling a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) man called Abhay stationed in Kashmir. Abhay’s initial dismissal of it a prank is jettisoned by Hamid’s touching faith. The angry, aggressive Abhay is quite far from being God. But, as the film cloyingly suggests, the goodness of adults might be a function of children’s faith in them.

A still from the sassy, satisfying 'children's film' Cross My Heart (2017, dir. Luc Picard). 

I was more wholehearted charmed by the Canadian film Cross My Heart, in which a girl threatened with the prospect of herself and her beloved little brother being split up into different foster homes abducts an old lady. Director Luc Picard cleverly makes twelve-year-old Manon’s act unfold against the 1970 October crisis, when political kidnappings by the Quebec Liberation Front had won some victories for Quebecois autonomy. But what makes the film moving is the imminent breakdown of the family and Manon’s heartfelt, if childish, desire to create a replacement for it — complete with a surrogate grandmother. What the children require of their baffled abductee is to read aloud bedtime stories — and make them a Mickey Mouse costume.

Fictive kinship, in most of these films, serves as a bridge across social and political barriers: the Bhaiyya-Marathi divide in Mumbai, the Kashmiris and the Indian state, and the English-French division in Canada. Perhaps the family — even in the imagination — does still have the power to summon our best selves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Nov 2018.