Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped that releases this Friday is based on a question that goes beyond its premise of Rajkummar Rao’s character being stuck in an isolated Mumbai high-rise.
The question is about urban isolation and the highly unlikely possibility of being alone in the city of Mumbai that boasts a population of 20.7 million at last count. But Trapped won’t be the first to ask this question but rather will become a part of the film genre that has not been oblivious to the urban phenomenon of loneliness: both the physical as well as the mental kind.
Somewhat similar in premise to Trapped is Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Forouzesh’s Kelid or The Key (1987) that was written by Abbas Kiarostami. But unlike Motwane’s serious, terse, claustrophobic narrative (as seen in the trailer), Kelid is a lighthearted movie, often bordering on satire, about the adventures of a four-year-old kid locked inside an apartment. But not all movies can be as cheerful as Kelid in face of adversity, something that the Iranians have learned to master post-Islamic revolution and their devastating war with Iraq for eight long years.
Difficult freedoms
A number of movies have placed their protagonists where they are either trapped or caught in an urban set-up with no help in sight. This confinement is more of an existentialist crisis with no way out. Once caged, the protagonist irrespective of his or her situation sometimes tries and makes peace with the situation. The ultimate understanding is that freedom might come at a cost or the freedom itself is meaningless.
Like Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Mathilukal (1990), based on a novel of the same name by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, where the protagonist Basheer (played by Mammootty) imprisoned for anti-government activities falls in love with a female inmate. They are separated by a wall but they manage to be in touch without alerting the authorities, and when the time comes for Basheer to be released, he is reluctant to leave because this freedom comes at the cost of being separated from his love the unseen Narayani. It is not merely about the physical confinement, but about the protagonists who have come to terms with their immediate surroundings, a situation that well brought out in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Here the characters of Brooks Halten (James Whitmore) and Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman) find it difficult to adjust once they have been released from prison and long to return to the safety of the prison.
Similarly, in the Czech classic Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1959), a young man gives shelter to a young Jewish woman who is trying to evade the Nazi authorities. They fall in love with each other, which is actually her freedom because she is captured by the Nazis as soon as she leaves.
Against all odds
Films like 127 Hours (2010), Buried (2010), or the Korean blockbuster The Tunnel (2016) have explored catastrophic accidents that have the protagonist trapped from which he has to be rescued. In Trapped, Rao’s character has to fight a lonely battle, similar to the protagonist of 127 Hours . Another notable example of being is the thriller Phone Booth (2003) where a sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) holds Colin Farrell hostage, forcing him confess to marital transgressions.
While the Home Alone series had a rather funny take on a child being left behind his parents in their home, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows (2004) is about the notorious Sugamo child abandonment case of 1988 where a mother abandons her kids and they have to fend for themselves. Such is their predicament that they can’t leave their home, while trying to evade the landlord and other prying eyes while waiting for their mother to return. A similar premise unfolds in the 1987 film, Flowers in the Attic (1987) where children born of an incestuous union are hidden by their mother and grandmother under tortuous circumstances.
The enfant terrible of Korean cinema Kim Ki-duk’s The Bow (2005) is about an old man who kidnaps a young girl when she is six with the intention of marrying her once she matures. Slowly a rapport develops between them with the girl somewhat comfortable in her surroundings till their life is disturbed by the arrival of a young man who wants to rescue the captive. The Bow creates a happy picture between the old man and the young girl. They are content and the girl is possibly not even aware that she’s been kidnapped. In Misery (1990), a famous writer is imprisoned by his fan. His desperate attempts to escape are more or less are futile.
The entertainment trap
In Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show (1998), Truman who is abandoned since birth becomes the star of a TV show based on his life. An easy, ready-to-made television world is created around him, complete with blistering TV ratings that make him a star, without his knowledge until one day he discovers the truth. Sci-fi movies too have attempted to understand the psychology of being trapped and confined in the vast space. Cult film Moon (2009) follows the trials and tribulations of a lone miner (Sam Rockwell) working on the moon but soon learns a terrible truth, similar to what Carrey’s character experiences in The Truman Show .
In the 1972 film Silent Running , a botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is desperate to save the last remaining plants from the greedy corporate world. He rebels and with his robot assistants tries to make a doomed journey across the solar system to save his beloved plants. Alone in his cause, Lowell knows the impracticality of his endeavour and yet he strives, all lonely and trapped in the freighter moving towards his doom.
The loneliness of the sole survivor in a post-apocalyptic earth part of several cinematic narratives has been well delineated in Richard Matheson’s 1954 book I am Legend and forms the basis of three movies — The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I am Legend (2007) — where a lone human wages a war against vampires, now the dominant species on earth while he has become an anomaly. The Noah (made in 1968 and released in 1975) is a movie where the sole human survivor of a nuclear holocaust has to rely on his imagination to deal with his loneliness.
In the recent Tamil cyber-crime thriller Pagadi Aattam (2017), the perpetrator of a number of crimes against women is held captive in a wooden coffin. The premise borrows from both Phone Booth and Buried but remains somewhat ineffectual in addressing the social cause that the film espouses.
