Marathi cinema’s obsession with ‘ruthless realism’ (term used by film scholar Gayatri Chatterjee) has its roots in Marathi theatre. It refers to a tradition of ‘realistic’ films with flat storytelling devoid of cinematic moments. Would Lathe Joshi be another addition to this already exploding category? Will this be another diatribe against capitalism, caste etc.?
When an invitation to a special screening of Lathe Joshi arrived my way, I was grossly unsure. The trailer seemed promising and I perhaps relented because it was organised at an old single screen theatre in Pune, where I had bunked college to see an afternoon show of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge many years after its release.Cheap popcorn and other munchies were added attraction for us sophomores. This theatre thus is a site of personal memory. The trip would renew my ties I thought. The film Lathe Joshi revolves around lathe worker Vijay Joshi (Chittaranjan Giri) who loses his job to automation. How does he then figure out his place at home and in the world outside (Tagore comes to mind) and deal with his immediate joblessness form the crux of the story. Does the family suffer? Will I be besieged with tear-jerking scenes with grotesque melodrama and a particularly sagging background score? I prepared for the inevitable to happen.
Remember those numerous 1970s Hindi films where the factory worker was reduced to a trope for the hard working, honest man invariably wronged by the capitalist, industry owing class? But Lathe Joshi is different. It indeed is and I saw the film captivated for its running time of close to two hours. Even the five-minute interval seemed as a unnecessary distraction. Lathe Joshi It soars because of its treatment.
There are no emotional outbursts for the ‘injustice.’ The family is largely indifferent to the event. The wife’s (Ashwini Giri) catering business picks up and their son (Om Bhutkar) also manages his own.
‘Lathe’ Joshi is replaced by machines at his workplace and soon by his wife and son at home as wage earners for the family. He is a spectator to this live theatre in his house where a blind mother (Seva Chouhan) is obsessed with serials and his wife cooks Chinese for a Maharashtrian pre-wedding party. He doesn’t resist his wife’s progress and offers assistance as and when needed. This normalisation of the predicament is the strength of the film coupled with consummate performances and rich cinematic moments.Joshi is a silent onlooker determined to have his lathe machine back. Is that feasible anymore? Will it offer any returns? He doesn’t seem to care but his conviction is unwavering.
My conversation with director Mangesh Joshi revealed that he wasn’t trying to make a film about the lathe worker per se . Instead it is about change, free economy and globalisation.
“Lathe work is skill-based but the skill has now been transferred to the machine. We are relying more on artificial intelligence than human intelligence,” says Joshi.
He spoke to several workshop owners while researching for the film and almost everyone told him how lathe workers thought of themselves as artists. This manifests in the protagonist of the film who has little dialogue. It is his silence of conviction and faith in his craft [that speak].
Special awards
Produced by Mangesh Joshi and his microbiologist wife, Sonali, Lathe Joshi has been the toast of various film festivals. It premièred at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and then travelled to Cine Pobre (Mexico), Dharamshala International Film Festival, Johannesburg International Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image (New York) and European Film Festival (Russia). It was adjudged the Best Marathi Film by a foreign jury at the Pune International Film Festival and also received a special jury award at the recent Bengaluru International Film Festival.
Several awards and favourable reviews later, Lathe Joshi is still waiting for an investor/distributor to release the film in theatres. But why is it so difficult to release Lathe Joshi amidst all this buzz of resurgent Marathi cinema? Mangesh laughs.
“Resurgence? Says who? Where is this resurgence? It is a myth. It makes for good news time perhaps. At a film festival recently, somebody compared Marathi cinema with Korean films. I laughed. For every two hundred films made, there are hardly a couple of them that recover money and that too every alternate year.
“Priyanka Chopra and John Abraham are producing Marathi films but their interests are very different. Marathi film industry was almost dead for a long time. Shwaas (2004) was the game changer. It introduced a new possibility.
Before Shwaas , we had ugly comedies or family dramas. Marathi cinema today is trying to attract the youth by producing films that look like Bollywood potboilers. Some of our best films in the recent past such as Court and Killa were produced by non-Marathi producers.
“Though our audience understands only dialogue, my interest is in the image,” says Joshi, who owes his love for the ‘image’ to Satyajit Ray and Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos.
Talking about images, the film abounds with many — workers huddled in silence, father and son smoking on the terrace, the blind grandmother permanently perched on her bed, Joshi trying to mend his cycle (which looks like a charkha), Joshi staring at new construction in the city and many others.
Lathe Joshi is a reaffirmation that realism cannot be completely discarded provided the treatment is cinematic and that shall be the beginning of discourse!
