At times, life resembles a multiple narrative movie: several stories play out independently of each other and are yet united by a thread. A superstar called >Shah Rukh Khan speaks his mind on the growing intolerance in the nation, faces the ire of Sadhvi Prachi, Yogi Adityanath and Baba Ramdev, and finds himself loaded with extra police protection. Another actor, Anupam Kher, invites all Indians to march with him to the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi to protest the voices being raised against the so-called intolerance in the country. India is tolerant, he asserts. Filmmakers Dibakar Banerjee and Anand Patwardhan follow eminent writers and historians in returning their national awards in protest against government interference in academic and cultural institutions. They are soon joined by others, including writer-activist Arundhati Roy and directors Kundan Shah and Saeed Mirza, even as actor > Kamal Haasan, while sympathising with the cause, says that nothing can quite be gained by ‘awards vapsi ’.
Namrata Joshi In the backdrop of this pandemonium, at the >opening of the 17th Mumbai Film Festival (Jio Mami ), arguably the biggest celebration of cinema in the country, iconic Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai’s brief talk on the essential politics underlying the arts acquires an immense immediacy. He speaks of how he would often disagree with his country’s policies and still love it. For him, this dissent and questioning define a true filmmaker. “A filmmaker cannot be a PR instrument but someone who engages with the culture and politics of his land,” he says. The cinema fraternity that has assembled in the shadow of the majestic Gateway of India has a lot to ponder on.
As if on cue, we have the opening film, Hansal Mehta's Aligarh, which fittingly touches on the bigotry and prejudices entrenched in our society and addresses the contentious issue of criminalisation of homosexuality in India through the retelling of a real incident. It is based on the life of Dr. Shrinivas Ramachandra Siras, who was ousted from Aligarh Muslim University for homosexuality and was later found dead under mysterious circumstances. It is quiet, sincere, humane and heartfelt, if not entirely hard-hitting, and an emotionally searing recreation of a shameful incident. What holds well is the evocation of small-town morality, the questioning of how a warped public moral compass can blatantly intrude into an individual’s privacy. Can a man's right to his sexuality be more horrifying than a homophobic society? The film is a fine character study of a man who is gay, but dislikes the reduction of his passion for another man into a three-letter word. “It can’t quite capture the depth of my feelings,” he says.
Manoj Bajpayee’s interpretation of Siras is like a class in method acting. What adds poignancy to the character is Siras’s loneliness, his advancing age, and the humiliation in the winter of his life. There are some moments that linger. Like Siras’s quirk of signing with his own pen, the blush that creeps up when he is told that he is handsome, how he talks about searching for true poetry in the silences and pauses between words, or when he reads a book or sleeps through the court proceedings claiming to be a reluctant activist. All he wants is to be left alone, with his dignity restored. Some details get exhausting — the subplots involving other characters, especially journalist Deepu, the gay party sequence and the move back and forth in time. For a film that’s so genuine and has its heart in the right place, Aligarh is somehow not able to strike a deep chord. Despite ticking all the right boxes, why doesn’t it pack the emotional wallop of Mehta’s earlier film Shahid? I am still wondering.
Picking and watching films in a sprawling festival may not always be in your control. Far-flung venues and time clashes ensure that you catch some films but miss some. Also, at times, quite unwittingly, thematic patterns emerge. I watch Youth and Anomalisa immediately after seeing the humiliation of an aging man in Aligarh and wonder if senior citizen cinema is what I am going to be anchored in.
Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa is a beautiful stop-motion animation about middle-aged loneliness, anxiety and the need to connect. It’s about an inspirational speaker wanting to talk and yet finding it incredibly difficult to have conversations and connect with people. It’s about lost love, a renewed search for it, and realising that true love is fleeting. At the core of the film is a sex scene (with nude puppets but throbbing with an incredible human force and tenderness). It's a scene that's funny yet heart-tugging, awkward but passionate. A film about depression and existential crisis could never have been as uplifting as Anomalisa.
Paulo Sorrentino’s Youth is an intense look at the passing of time and of lives flowing by, seen through the eyes of its two protagonists, Fred (Michael Caine) and Mick (Harvey Keitel), a composer and film director, respectively, holidaying together in the Alps. While Queen Elizabeth II's emissary coaxes Fred to get back to music, Mick is struggling to put the screenplay of his next film together with the help of his young assistants. And both reminisce about their love for the same girl even as Mick’s son leaves Fred’s daughter for another woman. It's in the midst of the business of youth around them that their own age hits them. There is the apathy that comes with age; as Fred says “getting in shape is a waste of time”. Sorrentino captures the wrinkles and the lines in tight close-ups, not just of the faces but of the aging hands as well. He dwells not just on the quirks and eccentricities of age but also the wisdom that comes with it. When everything feels close, it means that you are young and looking ahead at the future, says Fred. And when everything looks distant, then it signifies that you're old, ruminating over your past.
They say the cinema hall is a space where you can escape from life and lose yourself in an alternative reality. It can also be a space that makes you engage with and confront the real much more intensely. Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan is one such understated but powerful film. About three Tamils escaping to France from the civil war -torn Sri Lanka, the film has Audiard looking at the human repercussions of political games. It’s about how strangers find themselves reconstituted as families and grow to believe in their roles and relationships within it. It's about trying to get a fresh start in life yet not quite being able to let go of the turbulent past and the fears of an insecure future. Sivadasan, former LTTE member, gets political asylum in France with a supposed wife and daughter in tow. Gradually they find comfort and love in each other. But conflict and bloodshed follows them in their rough, aggressive French neighbourhood too. Can they escape their past and its violence? Will the dreams of stability, normalcy and happiness become mere delusions? The reel intermingles with the real. Antonythasan Jesuthasan, who plays Dheepan, is himself a former member of LTTE, now living in France.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
