Experiencing live performance on film might seem like a misnomer, whether it’s a play or choreographed dance or a musical gig, but one need look no further than Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (2002) to discover stirring set-pieces that appear to wonderfully preserve real-time ephemeral energies. Whether it’s the ‘almost live’ bullfighting sequence in which the matador Lydia González (Rosario Flores) is gored by a bull; or the party scene where Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso (as himself) croons a heart-breaking ode to lovesickness, ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma’, to a transfixed audience; or the long unedited excerpt from Pina Bausch’s Café Müller (featuring Bausch herself) that the film opens with. When the character of Marco (Darío Grandinetti) tears up while watching the performance, we unhesitatingly buy into the moment because Almodóvar has chosen an interlude that very effectively signals, even to those who’ve never watched the performance in the flesh, the raw visceral power of the complete work.
Shifting worlds
Arguably, any sequence from the masterpiece might have convinced us similarly, because Almodóvar does not tamper with its gravitas and native rhythm in any way. This is also the case with scenes from Tennessee Williams’A Streetcar Named Desire in Almodóvar’s other classic, All About My Mother (1999), in which the smoky diva Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) in devastating Bette Davis mode, gives us a deeply affecting account of Blanche DuBois’ splintered anand unsound psyche, through only scattered fragments of performance, that place in grand communion the actors, the stage and the audience.
Shifting from the world of Almodóvar to that of Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha (2015), an ode to a storyteller’s actualisation, one is immediately confronted with the challenges of representing live performance as a cinematic idea (even if, for the purposes of the narrative, it might be entirely metaphorical). In the film, Ved Sahni (Ranbir Kapoor) is a born raconteur who discovers his métier only after a soul-crushing stint in corporatedom. In sequences where he discovers audiences who respond to his work, quick edits, soulful close-ups and a swirling score attempt to convince us of his hypnotic effect Ved has on bystanders.
Meta elements
However, the snatches of writing allowed an airing seem too pat to be truly masterful, and even if the overriding cinematic style is that of emotional manipulation, it is difficult to truly suspend disbelief and buy into this blatantly signalled journey. In those set-pieces where Ved’s Chicken Soup-style parables are now mounted as Broadwayesque spectaculars, the on-stage shenanigans, despite glitzy production values, seem amateurish and over-simplified in the metaphors they employ. Ved’s prodigious talent, which we are reminded of almost incessantly, are certainly not showcased well at all, even if one were convinced that he is a master of a popular idiom and his words play out to indiscriminating folk. It calls to mind Mera Naam Joker (1970), where Raj Kapoor’s clown lives out self-fulfilling prophecies by lathering on the pathos to such an extent, that his circus acts are rendered patently unfunny.
In films like CRD (2017), the stage sequences are recorded in documentary fashion, without attempting to immerse us into the form, or convince us of the potency of the works exhibited. It neither spoofs nor celebrates non-professional youth theatre. However, the amateur stage masquerading as high art makes an appearance in the recent film, Judgementall Hai Kya , an otherwise engaging psychological thriller. In the film’s second half, a desi theatre company in London is mounting a futuristic Ramayana, with screenwriter Kanika Dhillon standing in as Sita, and the ever-dependable Jimmy Shergill playing director. Whatever we can glean from the rehearsal sequences, is that the play-within-the-film appears to be a colossal misfire in the making, which might either be a comment on real-world theatre by the film’s makers — that theatre is mostly mediocre — or it might be that, once again, they are trying to represent a live form without truly understanding it.
Of course, the sub-plot is not so much about the performance of Ramayana, as much as it is about the creaking and sinister backdrop of a play’s production, a la Birdman . The actor who plays Ram (Shreyas Shah) is kitted out in an outfit reminiscent of Michael Keaton’s superhero alter-ego, and when Shah and other denizens of this other-worldly epic ‘enter’ Kangana Ranaut’s head, they become her posse of invisible friends. These meta-elements go a long way in making the film an engrossing watch, notwithstanding its tryst with amateur theatre.
