Of the People, By the People ....

Going by numbers, it was not a huge rally; going by ostentatiousness, it had none of the usual trappings of a noteworthy rally: no truck, no DJ-style loudspeakers, no long line of impressive cars or roaring motorcycles, no glamour quotient in the form of cricket or film stars and no security. There was no pilot car and the lone police Gypsy quietly followed the procession of a couple of small cars and a dozen of autorickshaws and hundreds of foot soldiers.

Medha Patkar sat and waved and sometimes conversed with the public on the way as the rally moved at a less than moderate pace, thanks mainly to the narrowness of the lanes and bylanes of Shivaji Nagar; a poor, crowded, dirt-covered and disintegrating neighbourhood in the far Eastern Mumbai suburb of Govandi. It was a typically hot and sultry late April afternoon and she had no shade to protect her head or her face.

It was the most spectacular rally I have seen in the current  election campaigning because it had the one ingredient such rallies yearn to stimulate : public participation. It was their rally. They showered petals on her from the squat rooftops of the makeshift shanties, they offered her cold drinks and they happily covered their heads with the Aam Adami white Gandhi caps the participants in the rally offered. I was among the onlookers whom the  volunteers approached with AAP pamphlets. I took one and declined the next one. The fellow admonished me: Ye mera hai; maine khud likha hai - this is mine, I have myself penned it. So I read it. Whereas Medha's pamphlet listed the logical reasons why one should vote for AAP, this man's personal appeal was full of emotion. It described how the dawn and the noon and the night all appealed to him to go and make common cause with a party, a movement which laboured to put the common man in the saddle.

The volunteers chanted, "Nikalo ab makanonse, Jung lado beimanonse" (Come out of your abodes and join the fight against the dishonest ones); "Chunav nahin chunauti hai, party nahin, andolan hai" {It is not an election, it is a challenge; it is not a (political) party, it is a crusade} . The crowds joined in enthusiastically. Young men and women, 'senior citizens' and the middle-aged ones, all smiled back to a tired, yet trim Medha. She was a beacon of hope to them; yet there was no hysteria, no manic extortion and no arrogance among the rallyists or among the public though there was near unanimity of support for her and her party. As she moved, they waved back to her and then turned to one another, saying, "Won't it be great if she is elected?"

This election is ostensibly being fought on the agenda of development and development is the one thing each one of the residents of Shivaji Nagar aspires. Yet, the loud proponents of development and these representatives of the great Indian masses are not talking about the same thing. Why? Why should those who are desperately in need of development be disillusioned with the prevailing model of development?

Oh, did I mention that most of them were Muslims? It escaped me then, just as it escaped them too.

Pune International Film Festival 3

The Passion of Michelangelo

A boy from a Chile village declares that he has divine vision and can speak to the virgin Mother. A local priest supports him and invites the villagers to gather on a hilltop. They do and witness the miracles performed by the boy. Very soon he has an enormous following and the performance of miracles becomes a fairly regular event. The boy even starts to speak in support of the dictator Pinochet which naturally has an influence on the villagers. There is also the atheist journalist with a devout wife. The couple's children have all died soon after birth and the disillusioned wife starts worshiping the boy passionately. The journalist's difficult financial position forces him to print and sell photographs of the miracles.

The Church sends an investigator to ascertain the truth. The investigator is inclined to reject the claim but has to contend with the faith of thousands of villagers from the area. However, before he comes to a decision, the adolescent boy starts believing in his own powers and wants to be rid of the control of the local priest. He denounces the priest and impersonates the virgin mother at the next congregation which, to his dismay, displeases the villagers. Meanwhile the investigator is able to establish that the miracles are a sham created skillfully by the Government aeroplanes and the local priest acting under the Government's instructions. The angry mob of the villagers attacks the boy who flees with the help of the investigator and the journalist.

The last shot shows a wheelchair-bound man getting up on his feet when blessed by the boy. Is it a miracle?

India abounds in godmen. Some of them claim to possess supernatural powers, most of them are con artists and all of them have a huge number of devotees. Stories of such urchins, calves and even dogs who perform miracles do crop up from time to time and the Hindi electronic media have a field day shouting about their miraculous feats. The idea of India encompasses both the material progress and the glittering city life on the one hand and the ludicrous credulity of millions of eager believers on the other. The two divisions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

There are some major dissimilarities between the Indian reality and the Latin American one. Contrary to all claims, most Indian religious systems do not have undisputed central overriding authorities. There can be no such thing here as an official spiritual investigator. It is therefore easy to defy any attempt to reign in the unruly power over the public opinion and action, being exercised by a claimant of supernatural abilities.

Secondly, it is not even necessary that the godman must be compassionate, must be docile, must be accessible to the public in general. There are a lot many five-star godmen whose public encounters are restricted to issuing edicts but they are always available to mediate on behalf of some industrialist or politician or some such influential personality.

Thirdly, it is not even necessary to perform any miracle or even utter pearls of wisdom once the godman is established. He/she may employ bouncers to shoo away any skeptic who dares to pose a challenge.

I could go on, but I shall just add one more point and stop. The Marathi film 'Deool' (meaning a temple) graphically shows how an insignificant village exploits such an opportunity and attracts great commerce. Nobody looks askance at the gross commercialisation of devotion! The timid attempts of the journalist and his friend in the film, to sell photographs and statues seems so pathetic when compared to the vulgar moneymaking seen at umpteen devotional institutions all over India.

Back to the film, The investigating priest carried a vexed expression throughout the film, which was mildly irritating; but there were far bigger compensating merits. The Marathi film was bolder in painting the village folk starkly in hideous hues; but 'The Passion of Michelangelo' had more implications. 'Deool' made strong comments on the corruption of the social and political fibre of interior India; whereas this film, while exposing the gullibility of the villagers, also implicated the despotic regime. The central character of Miguel Angel too is explored in some detail. The subplot of an atheist succumbing to economic and emotional pressures also catches attention. It may be said that the film asserts that the affair of an orphan boy making claims of communicating with a godlike mystical figure is important enough to involve political, psychological and of course spiritual issues.

Just one more point. I do not know if the film is supposed to be a courageous attempt to analyse the blind faith of innocent Christians. As an Indian living among mercenary godmen and their gullible prey in their millions, I am inured to the sight of such exploitation.

Pune International Film Festival -2

Home Sweet Home

This is the story of a large family consisting of an old man, his wife, two sons and their wives, another younger son, a bedridden daughter, her husband. Then there are Government officials, English and Russian agents and so on. All want the possession of the house and the old man adamantly refuses to allow that. A classic situation where a number of idiosyncratic individuals gather to create mayhem. There is a surreal air to the happenings; but there is no mayhem. In the end, evil designs are defeated, the family unites, the daughter recovers and they live happily everafter.

This is singlehandedly brought about by the Indian maid in the house. She seduces all including the old man. Her mere touch is enough to cure sickness of the body or of the mind. All men in the family have sex with her (mostly in the car!) and the women too bow to her wishes once she employs her 'healing' touch. Only the old man shows signs of jealousy but even he never wants to restrain the girl; just drives his sons out. The others fall prey to her culinary skills. 

When all is well and her special skills are no longer required, she floats away into the sky.

There were two opinions about the depiction of the Indian maid. I thought it reflected the influence of Hindi mainstream movies now being seen by the world, especially by West Asia. (This film is set in Cyprus.) And evidenced the acceptance of India as a significant nation. A friend disagreed. He felt it showed that the world still thinks of India as the land of the occult. Where tigers and elephants roam urban streets and black magic is practised. I don't know. But it felt weird to hear a sitar playing the Indian national anthem in the background when the maid was about.

The first seduction by the maid set the course and there were no hitches in her tender blitzkrieg; however, the large number of players - and their subplots - sustained the viewer's interest till the end.

Papusza

She was the first gypsy poet from Poland and the film is her biopic.

Papusza is an unusual girl and wants to learn to read and write; which is something no other 

gypsy either can or wants to do. As she grows up, she reads news to her tribe which is welcome but it does not accord any special status to her. Gypsies do not regard literacy as desirable. Then a non- gypsy young man who is a fugitive from law comes and spends two years with the clan. He learns that she not only can read but is a spontaneous and natural poet. Eventually he leaves but she continues to send her poems to him. He gets them published and the poems get her national recognition as a poet of stature. He also writes a book on gypsies on the basis of what he has learnt during his two-year exile. The gypsy community altogether resents that their 'secrets' including their language has been revealed to the rest of the world. They hold her responsible for it and ostracize her. Papusza, who is a gypsy at heart, burns her remaining poems and disowns poetry. Her family life is miserable, financially she is hard up and ultimately she dies a poor woman.

It was a longish, slow-paced film. For one who understands her poetry, knows or shares her culture; watching the film must have come as an overwhelming experience. I had problems with the pace as well as the content. The run-of-the-mill films I watch elsewhere most certainly have corrupted my sense of passage of time and now I too need a reason to stay with a slow-paced movie. In Papusza I had to struggle because after a time, the story became predictable and there were hardly any surprises to jerk me out into lively attention.

Another disturbing feature were the flashbacks. The story begins towards the end of Papusza's life and moved back and forth. Every flashback is meant to bring out the origin of some important event or a particular trait in Papusza's personality. It had two opposite effects. One, it required extra effort to link the particular scene to the flow of her life. At the same time, the infrequent flashbacks, in a way corroborated the feeling that the lengthy biopic needed some such prop to sustain the viewer's attention!

This does not mean that the award winning film did not deserve the praise it has received. It was through and through a 'festival film'. Papusza is a real historical character and the makers of the film had to do considerable research to build her life story from meagre resources. The film is in black & white because it helped to add computer effects to bring about the desired 'period' look. 

However, it is my firm belief that a viewer should not be swayed by such considerations.

Photoshopped or not; the landscapes were breathtaking. The film had hardly any sharp cuts and scenes mostly faded out. Many-a-time there was a long shot of short duration (short in the context of this biopic, not in the context of the fast cuts in the mainstream Hindi cinema today) of the gypsy camp which dissolved into darkness and a new scene began. It was as if a series of landscapes were presented to the viewer. As if it was the intention of the director to impress the viewer with the nature, the weather, the silence and the complete segregation of the gypsy life. As if the character of Papusza would remain two-dimensional without the supporting detail.

Yet it is extremely important to underline the gypsy way of life. Papusza's perspective is that of a wandering gypsy. The life of a gypsy has a vast canvas because of their nomadic existence and at the same time the life of a gypsy is also constricted to the beliefs and customs of the tribe and to the small number of tribe members and to what is shared among them. It is a challenge to project both at the same time.

The film did succeed in conveying the sense of an epic.

The Pleasure of Watching Films 1

There is a film festival - Pune International Film Festival - going on at Pune. It is co-sponsored by the Maharashtra Government and so the ambience is respectable and the selection committee appears to be quite fastidious. As with all international festivals, this one too has films from Europe, Hollywood, West Asia and the East. There are great masters and modern innovators and new local - which means Marathi - films and so on. As always, the principal attribute is not unanimously acknowledged quality but is the variety. The canvas, by being so wide, makes for a great perspective to judge any film one sees.

So, how do the individual films seem? Here is a sampling:

Maunrag (Marathi)

This was an audio-visual experience which definitely was not a feature film. It is impossible to narrate sequentially what it presented. It began with a man - an actor - apparently narrating his recurrent dream to a boy. The narration was broken when he failed to remember the crucial words he was expected to deliver. The defining feature of this monologue was anguish. Then a woman in white said her part to the camera. Then a man and then another woman came and said their parts. They said the same words with different inflexions. Twice. Mostly thrice. Then again thrice at another point. The monologues were from different literary works of the renowned Marathi writer Mahesh Elkunchwar and their sequence made no sense. It may safely be said that the 'film' as a whole is not supposed to 'mean' anything. Just as instrumental music or an abstract painting is not expected to mean something which can be put into intelligible words, this piece of art too is an audio-visual presentation and it would be an injustice to impose 'meaning' onto it.

Once this is made clear, one may proceed. It had extraordinary sound; so much so, that a case can be made to say that Sound was THE Presentation and the camera and the words were accompaniments. There were extraordinary sound effects (of a storm, a howling wind, lightening and so on) in the background, the pieces of paper (and they were plentiful) crackled, the floor creaked, the chalk squeaked on the blackboard, the feet grated like a saw or a pair of new leather boots. However, the shadows too were quite eye-catching. The property scattered all over was exotic - it loudly accented a bygone era. There was no dialogue and the two men and the two women delivered monologues and the young boy was always there as a mute witness. His mostly expressionless countenance made quite a contrast with the highly accentuated emotions of the four speakers.

Don't ask what was it all about. Overheard a comment: "Serves Elkunchwar right." Must have come out of a deep grudge.

Sunset Boulevard (English- Hollywood)

Iconic 1950 Hollywood movie by Billy Wilder. A struggling storywriter finds himself completely without an assignment and reluctantly accepts the offer of a has-been star from the silent era, to 'touch up' the movie script penned by her. Fully aware that what she has written is beyond redemption, he keeps going because of the 'add-ons' and is gradually sucked into her web through costly gifts and cosy, comfortable living. Aiding her in her designs is the mysterious chauffeur who appears to act also as her guardian. But another pretty young writer acts as the counter attraction and in the inevitable conflict, the hero loses all including his life.

The plot appears hackneyed today in 2014, but must have been quite a sensation 64 years ago. The script is carefully crafted to satisfy demands of credibility but the feature that stands out is the contrasting, yet complementary acting styles of the principal characters. The hero is cynical, the young girl is full of energy, the faded star is over-the-top melodramatic and her guardian the chauffeur (who turns out to be her discoverer as well as the first husband) is underplayed with constraint. And no viewer is ever going to envisage that the narrator is a dead man; a ruse that considerably adds to the hold the film commands.

A pleasant experience. As one would expect from an old Hollywood fare.

To be continued ...