Making Waves at MoMA

A short essay I wrote for India Today on a festival of contemporary Indian cinema at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2022. 

'Making Waves: A New Generation of Indian Independent Filmmakers' is the largest Indian festival at MoMA since 2009, and is intended to showcase small-budget but artistically ambitious and accomplished films 

 

 

(CLICK THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE) 

Published in India Today, 19 Sep 2022.

In Vino Veritas -- II

My Mirror column:

In Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's An Off-Day Game (2015), a drunken day unmasks a society intoxicated with its own sense of power.

Four men gather for a day of drinking in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's harrowing An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali, 2015).

Last week's column on The Mosquito Philosophy was about what truths might emerge when a group of men get together to drink. This week, too, my subject is a film about an all-male drinking session – An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali) directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. Sasidharan is best known outside Kerala for his internationally award-winning film Sexy Durga (2017); An Off-Day Game won him the 2015 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film and is currently streaming on two platforms.

and is currently streaming on two platforms.

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/in-vino-veritas-ii/articleshow/79345533.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The film is adapted from Unni R's Malayalam short story 'Holiday Fun', available in J Devika's wonderful English translation as part of the collection One Hell of a Lover (Westland 2019). Barely nine pages long, Unni's tale begins with a reference to Boccaccio's 14th century Italian classic in which seven women and three men gather in a remote villa to escape the plague-stricken city of Florence - an interesting aside in a pandemic year. “They were like refugees from the plague in The Decameron,” writes Unni. “Only, they were escaping the monotony of work, the four of them... gathered in Room No 70 of Nandavanam Lodge, that Sunday, as usual, around a bottle of liquor.”

Unlike Unni, though, Sasidharan does not launch straight into the action. Instead, as he would do two years later in Sexy Durga, he begins his film with a semi-documentary prelude: footage from a real-life by-election in Kerala, where we see red Communist flags challenged by a rising wave of saffron BJP ones. We also see a Kathakali dance performance as part of the election campaign: this is a state where art and politics are allowed to cross-fertilise each other. It is from the assembled crowd at a rally that the camera first picks out two of our protagonists, following them as they join the other two at a little bend in a stream: a picturesque spot for daytime drinking. Another man driving by is tempted to join them, and a plan is made for another drunken assignation on Election Day.

The electoral backdrop serves Sasidharan well, allowing the film to fit in both India's official dry day rules, that bar the sale of liquor on polling days, and the simultaneously ubiquitous unofficial fact that liquor changes hands during almost all Indian elections: as a bribe, or more categorically in exchange for votes. It also works beautifully as a way of working up to the conversations between his characters – and to the 'game' of the film's title, in which four players pick chits labelled 'King', “Minister', 'Police' and 'Thief', and the one who's picked 'Police' must then guess who the 'Thief' is.

But plenty happens before the game unfolds. Unni's story has an early paragraph laying out the quality of the men's weekends in Nandavanam Lodge: “The usual criticism of the government, the rant about bedroom squabbles, the description of the body of the young girl one brushed against in the street or on the bus...”. Among Sasidharan's achievements is the way he takes this bare-bones description and gives it flesh, adding dialogue, characters and subplots that make his film into the terrific, terrifying slow-burn watch that it is. There is no woman actually present in Unni's scenario, for instance -- but Geetha in An Off-Day Game is crucial. Right from the moment that the men arrive at the lodge, she is the cynosure of all eyes, and not in a good way. She tries her hardest to just do her job: preparing a meal for her boss's visitors. But being the sole woman in a remote location with an increasingly drunken group of men, as we will see, isn't quite conducive to just doing one's job.

The relationship of each character to their 'job' is, at a deeper level altogether, the subject of Sasidharan's film. Much before the 'game' plots each man into a 'professional' role, the film has begun the perspicacious process of observing how even within a circle of friends, every man is supremely conscious of social status – his own and that of the others. “The kind of places this Brahmin fellow digs out,” says one man as they approach the lodge. “He always howls when he sees the jungle,” says another. What may have felt like gentle ribbing turns darker and darker as the film proceeds, especially as everyone presses first the woman and then Dasa into unwanted tasks. “You need me to pluck a jackfruit and now kill a rooster,” says Dasa.

As befitting a film set in Kerala, politics is the matrix of all things – the idea of democracy, for instance, is the context for a sharp argument about the man-woman relationship, and an anecdotal history of Emergency for a discussion of the 'duties' of citizens: “the cops did cops' job, the scavengers did scavengers' job, the army men did army jobs...”. Caste, or its modern-day version, serves an authoritarian society perfectly: no-one is meant to challenge their socially-ordained roles.

Some of Sasidharan's long scenes are pure genius, and the long takes and the stunning forest soundscape create an atmosphere of menace that is unerring in both its sense of beauty and danger.

The 'game' may feel a little contrived, but the conversational fluidity the film achieves is astounding. Under the influence of alcohol, everything is laid bare. In vino veritas.

This is the second part of a two-part column. The first part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Nov 2020.

 

A Patriarchal Narrative

My Mirror column:

Films S Durga and Nude show a reality where Indian women can be either sexual individuals or mothers and sisters — not both. The second of a two-part column.

S Durga opens with a religious procession. The sequence is fairly long and shot in an observational documentary style. Men in flaming vermilion mundus are fastening each other’s garments tightly around their waists. Their brown torsos are bare but for several necklaces around their necks. As the drum beat rises to a crescendo, some of the younger men start to go into a trance. We watch as they suspend themselves from heavy iron hooks. The hooks are attached to orange metal frames, so that these young men now dangle before the goddess, like carcasses from cranes.


The Garudan Thookkam procession is an annual ritual recreation of a myth in which the insatiable Goddess Kali/Durga was placated by the blood of a wounded Garuda. From the sacrificial fervour of these spread-eagled young ‘garudas’, the film cuts to an empty highway at night. A few cars zip by. A woman in a salwar-kameez waits by the roadside, nervously examining her phone for messages. A pair of men draw up on a motorbike. One gets off and urges the other, Kabeer, not to waste any time. Then he and the bike are gone, and Kabeer and the young woman, as yet unnamed, set off. They try to flag down a bus, but fail. The dark road stretches out endlessly before them.


Two drunken men in a car see the couple walking, slow down and ask them where they want to go. The railway station, says Kabeer. The men offer them a ride. The couple hesitate for an instant, but their choices are limited. They get in the back seat.


Almost instantly, the man in the front seat turns the spotlight on them — literally — with a torch and a suggestive question: “What’s the plan for tonight?” Then, getting no answer, a second question — brasher, more direct: “What’s this girl to you?” “Friend,” says Kabeer quickly. “Oh, friend, aa? Some people say ‘sister’ at night,” says the man, continuing to look the woman up and down. “What’s your name, Chechi?” he demands of her. Durga starts to cough. “Drink, sister,” the man insists, trying to thrust a bottle upon her.

Director Sanal Sasidharan has taken a profoundly simple idea and turned it into a full-length film that keeps you on tenterhooks for much of its running time. Every word, every gesture made by the men in the car (and the other men who join them as the film progresses) is couched as protection but feels like a sexual threat. Their repeated use of the word ‘Chechi’ — ‘elder sister’ in Malayalam — to address the cowering, increasingly weepy woman at their mercy is thus painfully ironic. But it is no surprise.

The inability of so many Indian men to see a woman simply as a human being is something that constantly assails us, in films as in life. What makes the Hindi-speaking Durga the target of so much unwelcome attention is not just her momentary vulnerability. It is that she has stepped out of her home, her community, and that leaves her — in the eyes of these men — unprotected. Yes, she is with a man, but a man who has not been chosen for her by society. By exercising free choice in the sex-and-romance department, as in the ‘Nirbhaya’ case and so many others, the woman has apparently lost her right to be respected.
Because in this entrenched patriarchal narrative, women can either be sexual individuals or they can be mothers and sisters — not both.

Last week, in the first part of this column, I tried to show how Ravi Jadhav’s Nude also works with this impossible binary that women are forced into. The only way Yamuna’s son feels able to respect his mother is through some notion of her sexual chastity. Her courage in leaving an abusive marriage and her lifelong focus on fulfilling his desires at the cost of her own mean nothing to him, as soon as he can tar her as being sexual. If this were a radicalism test, I might say that Jadhav takes the easy way out by making Yamuna so deeply invested in her own chastity, even as she works as a nude model for art students. But that is also what makes Yamuna so believably tragic — she has internalised patriarchy’s lessons accurately: she knows that to be respected as a mother, she must never be seen as a sexual subject.

Some might find Nude’s final scene unnecessary or distasteful, but it is the culmination — and converse — of this double bind. Years after Yamuna’s passing, her estranged son enters an exhibition. The huge nude painting before him has an instantaneous effect on him — that of arousal. And then, with a sickening thud, he realises that it is a painting of his mother.

The problem, Jadhav’s film suggests, is not in Yamuna’s quiet claiming of sexual agency by being painted. The problem, as in S Durga, is in the gaze. If a woman shows any sign of sexual-ness, it is assumed she is there to turn men on. And suffer the consequences.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jun 2018.

Worship, motherhood, lust

My Mirror column:

A close look at two of last year’s most ‘controversial’ films – S Durga and Nude – reveals the same demons in the mirror. The first of a two-part column.

At first glance, there seems little in common between S Durga and Nude. The first, a Malayalam film directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, is a surreal, often chilling road movie, featuring a couple who’re forced to hitch a ride with a carful of men somewhere in Kerala. The second, a Marathi film directed by Ravi Jadhav, is about a poor, illiterate woman who takes up a job as a nude model at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai.

When both films were barred at the last minute from the Indian Panorama screenings at last year’s International Film Festival of India in Goa, I hadn’t seen either. What seemed to unify them, then, was the mere fact that their titles – S Durga had been called Sexy Durga until the CBFC insisted on tweaking the name – spoke of the body. This May, though, both films were screened at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi. And as I watched them, in close proximity to each other, some similarities swam to the surface.

One should start with the disclaimer that in terms of treatment, the two films couldn’t be more different. Sexy Durga had no bound script. The film was improvised during a 20-day low-budget shoot, from an idea that had been with Sasidharan from after the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi. “We did not have high-end equipment and we used to tie the cameraman [Prathap Joseph] to the vehicle,” he told The Week. Jadhav, meanwhile, worked from a screenplay by Sachin Kundalkar, a novelist and filmmaker himself. Nude is carefully plotted -- although it seems to me to fluctuate between a preexisting set of emotional/cinematic cliches and a desire to confront the certainties of our gaze. But of that, more later.

Jadhav’s film opens in a village, where Yamuna (Kalyanee Mulay) is suffering both insult and injury in her marriage. Her husband is carrying on a full-fledged affair with another woman. When his assault and public humiliation reach unbearable limits and he starts to rob her of even the meagre income she earns from rolling bidis, Yamuna decides to take her young son and run away. She arrives in Mumbai, seeking shelter under the roof of a woman she calls Chandra Akka (Chhaya Kadam).

Yamuna’s early days in the city are finely etched – the initial timidity with which she approaches the feisty Chandra as well as strangers, the exhaustion of walking the streets asking for work and the slow, dramatic uncovering of the secret of Chandra’s job. Mulay’s mobile, expressive face is put to marvellous use as she transitions from shock to moral censure to acceptance -- and eventually, the courage to follow Chandra into the art classroom and shed her clothes for money.

Rather than starting with a dogged ideological defence of nudity – couched either as personal freedom or as aesthetic choice – the film offers the potentially resistant viewer a way in, through empathy with Yamuna. The film’s portrayal of her -- first as blameless battered wife and then as self-sacrificing mother –makes it impossible to cast moral aspersions on her choice.

The really interesting metamorphosis is still to come. Slowly, Yamuna transitions -- from the hapless woman who is only doing this job to educate her son to someone who now treats herself and her body with the same dignity with which this new world of artists treat her.

But dignified distance is one thing and sensual self-control another. It is only as Mulay’s Yamuna begins to acquire a quiet new confidence, sometimes sneaking admiring glances at the students’ depictions of her body, that we remember that Kundalkar’s screenplay has thoughtfully provided us an early glimpse of her potential sensuality: the film’s first scene, where she leaves the clothes she is washing by the riverside and leaps into the water, watching from the sidelines in frank yearning as another woman revelled in her husband’s attentions.

Whatever her inner desires, though, Yamuna in her public persona allows herself no pleasures. She guards her chastity fiercely, as she assumes she must. Her primary sense of self remains tied to motherhood. As her son acquires more expensive tastes -- for cigarettes, the cinema and art school -- she takes up private modelling assignments to cater to his growing monetary demands.

The aching gulf between Yamuna’s fluid, ever more sensual presence on canvas and her tightly wound-up persona in daily life is something the film suggests visually, but does not push enough. But this, I want to suggest, is the crux of the problem both Nude and S Durga are trying to grapple with: when might we accept women as sexual beings without tarring them as “available”? Can Indian women ever escape the stifling double-bind of worship and lust?

(The second part of this column is here.)