The freedom of the spirit, dead or alive

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unexpected death opens up surprising new directions for life in Umesh Bist's deftly-balanced new film.

Umesh Bist's new film may ride on the suggestion of quirky lightness – even the title, Pagglait, is an affectionate UP word for madcap -- but at its heart lies an absence. At the simplest level, the absence is of a person. A young man called Aastik, sole earning member of a joint family of five, has suddenly died -- leaving his parents bereft, his young wife widowed and all of them in financial trouble. The secondary form of absence, around which Bist really builds his narrative, is the absence of love. Aastik's wife of five months (the talented Sanya Malhotra) can't seem to grieve her loss. Is she just in shock? Or did she feel nothing for her late husband? Worse, did he feel nothing for her?

To build a film around this dual vacuum is a difficult task, but Bist pulls it off. Right from the very first shot -- a cycle-rickshaw driver shifting his weight from one buttock to another as he transports a heavy load of mattresses – the film balances a gentle, languorous gaze with mild, deadpan humour. He gets perfectly right, for instance, the air of melancholia in a house where a death has occurred -- the dark room, hushed voices and sombre faces. But he also catches the whiff of absurdity that is attached to conventional mourning: Having to field calls from relatives whose names you don't even remember, or the excessive weeping on the part of people who consider themselves close. The widowed daughter-in-law is expected to have cried herself into a stupor, but all she can think of is whether she can get a Pepsi instead of chai. The obligatory forms of mourning death can make a simple desire for continued life seem oddly obscene. But is it? That train of thought culminates in a memorable sequence where the eating of golgappas is intercut with the dead man's last rites.

These tonal shifts aren't easy, and Bist adds additional plot twists that offer a window into the dead man's secret life. (I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say that they touch on both love and money.)

Pagglait is also a fine addition to the growing body of Hindi films set in the north Indian small town, with a keen sense of familial dysfunction. Endowed with a stellar ensemble cast that includes Raghuvir Yadav, Sheeba Chaddha and Ashutosh Rana, the film catches much that's dire about the middle class extended family. This is less a world of angry recriminations than petty jealousies and long-held grudges. If the men judge each other for (the lack of) monetary success, the women compete in the domain of husbands and children. And while the women might have had to kowtow to men most of their lives, their words can drip with scorn. The barbs are quietly delivered, but go straight for the jugular. “Jo cheez khud ke paas nahi hoti, woh doosre ke paas bhi acchi nahi lagti [What one doesn't have oneself doesn't look good even when someone else has it],” says a husband-adoring sister-in-law to another who appears to be separated. “Pajaame se naada nikala nahi jaata, baatein badi-badi [Can't take the drawstring out of a pair of pyjamas, but talking big anyway],” a wife scoffs at her husband.
While the older adults conduct these hoary old battles, the younger lot are forging new arenas. There are plenty of indications of Bist's optimism. The widowed Sandhya's best friend, who quietly shows up to stay for the 13 days of mourning, is a young Muslim woman; the late husband's younger brother is happy to take English lessons from his bhabhi; the feisty 14-year-old girl visiting from out of town easily lords it over her 13-year-old male cousin. Even in relationships between women, the conventional path of jealousy and competition is sought to be replaced by the potential for understanding. There are no villains and vamps here, only people doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Pagglait works interestingly as a companion piece to the 2019 film Aise Hee, the marvellous feature debut from the writer-director Kislay (he goes by a single name) which won awards at MAMI and Busan, among other festivals. Both films are about women for whom the event of widowhood comes as unexpected liberation – not something they've yearned for, perhaps, but a vista that suddenly opens up before them. Whether you've been married for 52 years or five months, it seems, the absence of a man can sometimes be the only way for women to realise who they are.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Mar 2021.

Not quite queens of all they survey

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Bombay Begums may not have top-notch storytelling, but at least it's willing to let its female characters be richly, complicatedly human.

With Bombay Begums, writer-director Alankrita Srivastava re-opens a conversation she helped kick off in 2017 with her film Lipstick Under My Burkha: A discussion about what Indian women want, and mostly don't get. If  Lipstick turned an unprecedented spotlight onto the lives and desires of four Bhopal women,  Bombay Begums features five in Mumbai, aged 14 to 49, cutting across class, educational background and (in Srivastava's usual non-sequitur) religion.

In today's India, though, wherever there's conversation, there's also controversy. Soon after Bombay Begums released on March 8, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights threatened to go to court against the OTT platform broadcasting the six-part series for the “inappropriate portrayal” of minors. The statutory body was referring to the 14-year-old protagonist, Shai – played by Aadhya Anand, whose precociously verbose voiceover almost makes the series impossible to watch – who is shown once smoking a cigarette, and once snorting coke and kissing an older boy at a party. We could discuss the ethics of that depiction till kingdom come, although the show makes it clear that the coke-addled making out was dangerous, while treating the one-time cigarette with the lightness it deserves, and incorporating a sharp criticism of the critics (a housing society that uses smoking as the 'moral' ground to turn away a single, female tenant).

What's more interesting -- though not unexpected – is that Bombay Begums has polarised audiences far beyond this 'official' controversy. What people are debating on social media is whether these women are complex, identifiable victims of a patriarchal world -- or selfish, oversexed and immoral.

The latter viewpoint isn't surprising, because these women are complicated and desirous in a way that female protagonists on the Hindi film screen rarely are, even in 2021. Three of them operate in a cutthroat corporate universe, and Srivastava and co-writer Bornila Chatterjee do a good job of setting up the possibilities for friction between these characters. Rani Irani (Pooja Bhatt) plays the powerhouse CEO of the fictitious Royal Bank of Bombay. Once a Kanpur bank teller, her rough edges and raw hunger still make her a study in contrast to her urbane, somewhat inscrutable IIM-educated deputy Fatima Warsi (Shahana Goswami, delivering a layered performance that lifts her sections of the show out of choppy mediocrity). Far below them both in the hierarchy is the overconfident but often stupid Ayesha Agarwal, a 23-year-old trying to break away from her smalltown middle-class background (Plabita Borthakur, talented enough to make us believe in her character's confusions). The fourth is the aforementioned Shai, Rani's sulky stepdaughter, pining for her dead mother while grappling with puberty problems: Periods that won't start, breasts that won't grow, secret crushes that don't reciprocate. The fifth is the class outlier -- a bar dancer who had to turn to sex work when the city's dance bars were shut down 14 years ago. Lily (the superb Amruta Subhash) yearns for a good education for her son.

What unites these women is that they want many things, and desire can slip them up – or make them ruthless. Rani wants to be a spectacular CEO, and a great mother and Karwa Chauth-observing wife, but can she? Fatima wants the skyrocketing career alongside the happy marriage and the baby, but it isn't easy with a husband whose priorities are different (Vivek Gomber, whose character gets more interesting as the series progresses). Ayesha thinks she knows what she wants – but opportunities turn out to have costs. Lily's ambitions for her son can make her turn to blackmail. Shai is willing to fake it till she makes it, pretending she's grown-up – but it's a risky game. And all five want love, which makes them wind up in the messiest situations.

The series is well-plotted, and many of the actors are talented. But it often feels rushed, and the situations seem contrived to achieve certain results. Characters arrive with one-line backstories that don't translate onto the screen – like Rani's Kanpur past, or Ayesha's being from Indore but already having an ex-boyfriend in Mumbai who she's been 'hooking up' with post-break-up, or Fatima's being Muslim, a fact which is literally used only to give us one shot of her performing namaaz in a moment of tragedy. The dialogue is often clunky -- “You're not developed enough for us to take your picture,” says Shai's annoying classmate -- and always ridiculously expository. “Survival is a battle for every woman,” says Rani. “Women can have it all, no?” says Fatima. "I'm not untouchable. I want respect," says Lily.

As for the ludicrous voiceover, the less said the better. Sample sentence: “Sometimes it seems like the stars are within reach... and my body is full of delight and anticipation”. Or “I think women who love are more lonely than those who don't love”.

Yet there is greater honesty and complexity here than most Hindi cinema and OTT work have given us, especially with regard to women's relationship with sex and love, and with each other in the context of #MeToo. Women can be selfish, oversexed and immoral, because they're human – while also being victims of patriarchy. Good women can find themselves on the wrong side, believing the wrong men. Smart, powerful women can find themselves sold into silence. The greater the stake you own, the more the system binds you. These are all crucial lessons. But let's hope the next season will be more show, less tell.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Mar 2021.

When silent films speak of a lost past

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early 1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool -- emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.

Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove -- known as the Dawson City Film Find -- offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.

And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.

The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.

Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse -- the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.

But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.

Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images -- including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery -- as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like “The years and decades passed Dawson by” is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Mar 2021

Filming the forest and why our relationship with it is complicated

My Mirror column:

The jungle still sustains millions in India. What does indie cinema make of the conflict that takes place when modernity vies for their minds and hearts?

Radhika Apte and Girish Kulkarni in the fine short film The Kill (2016), dir. Anay Tarnekar

I have spent the last week in a village near Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. Living with a local Gond family in a rural homestay that abuts the forest, I've had some occasion to contemplate not just the differences between city and village, but between village and jungle. The human move from hunting and gathering to cultivation, ie, from the nomadic life to the settled, agricultural one, is usually seen as an advancement for the species, and urban life is perceived as a step up from the rural. In this view of the world, the index of human development is the extent of our conquest of nature.

The idea that human beings could live in sync with the natural world, could choose to depend on the wilderness, seems either romantic or revolutionary. Of course, you might say that the key word here is 'choose' -- when humans are forced to live at nature's mercy, it can often mean fear and suffering.

That sense of mystery and majesty is what still makes the forest such a powerful place. For thousands who live on the forest's edge, or in tiny parcels of land carved out of the wilderness through the labour of generations, the jungle can simultaneously be worthy of worship – and something they are trying to separate themselves from. Being 'jungli' has never been respectable in the eyes of mainstream society, but most such communities' lives are still tied to the forest, not just economically but culturally as well.

Given how strong the jungle's hold is over large numbers of Indians, IT has featured rather minimally in our cinema. Pradip Krishen's under-watched Electric Moon (1992), written in collaboration with Krishen's then-partner Arundhati Roy, took a swipe at the entire Indian wildlife set-up. Set in a fictitious Indian national park, it featured a family of Anglicised ex-royals who successfully sell foreign tourists a package of Oriental tradition and ferocious wildlife, both half-fiction. 

A still from Pradip Krishen's acerbic comedy Electric Moon (1992), set in a wildlife resort

 
The next Indian indie I can recall that was set in a wildlife reserve is Ashvin Kumar's stilted 2009 feature The Forest. Despite its grave flaws, I mention it here because it unconsciously mirrors modern urban civilisation's deeply-conflicted relationship with the jungle. An urban couple (Nandana Dev Sen and Ankur Vikal) arrive in a jungle for some quality time, only to encounter the wife's belligerent ex-boyfriend (Javed Jaffery, playing a cop) -- and a vengeful, man-eating leopard. Kumar's direction hinges on portraying the jungle as a place of menace: Spiders preying on insects, haunted temples, a weird saadhvi, and a leopard that really has it in for humans. But this jungli B-grade horror movie comes with a 'Save the Leopard' postscript: The leopard in question turned maneater when injured by a poacher.

I didn't mind Kumar's idea of the jungle as bringing out the city men's masculine competitiveness, testing their testosterone, as it were. “We can go out tonight, if you want, hunting-shunting, yaar,” proposes Jaffery to his ex-rival Vikal. “Centuries of instinct right here, in your balls.” More interesting is Vikal's opening voiceover, suggesting something supernatural about the forest: “I have come to believe we were summoned. That we answered some primeval call. And that nothing that happened that night was either chance or coincidence.”

Kumar's film doesn't deliver on that promise of enchantment. But entering the jungle can often suspend one's sense of modern-day reality, a feeling most clearly embodied in animals whose raw physical presence can still reduce human beings to our most elemental fears. Anay Tarnekar's taut short fiction, The Kill (2016) captures it spectacularly.

Currently available on a streaming platform for curated arthouse and classic cinema, The Kill casts the adept Marathi actor Girish Kulkarni as a poor adivasi man called Gopal who spends his nights gambling away his wife's meagre earnings -- and his days following a tiger. Tarnekar successfully captures not just the feel of the jungle and the great beast's leisurely, loping gait, but the grave, hushed awe with which Gopal treats him. And yet there is also an intimacy there. “Balasaheb,” scoffs his wife (Radhika Apte), referring to her husband's name for the tiger. “What is he, your uncle?” But a statue of a tiger finds place in the family shrine.

The film does not mention it, but the tiger (and sometimes also the leopard) has long been revered as a deity by communities that share a landscape with it. The people of the Sunderbans, the mangrove-covered islands that are home to the largest population of tigers in South Asia, believe in a greedy, man-eating deity called Dokkhin Rai, who is half-Brahmin sage, half tiger-demon. In the North East, the Garos wear a necklace of tiger claws for protection, while the Mishmis see the tiger as their brother. In the forests of western India (where Tarnekar's film is set), the tiger is worshipped by many adivasi communities under the name Waghoba or Waghjai or Wagheshwar, with many beliefs and rituals believed to protect both humans and their livestock. In the Gond home from which I write this column, the domestic shrine has no tiger god – but the man of the house, an ex-forest guard, keeps the tiger as a totem on his motorbike.

But as modernity beckons, it often asks people to sacrifice their old gods. Tarnekar's film ends in tragedy. The death of one's gods is a kind of death, too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Mar 2021.