Movie Mahal

* * *

A NFDC production and accomplished Marathi poet Dilip Chitre’s only directorial feature film, Godam opens with a ritual, the sacrifice of an animal, auspiciously preceding the marriage of Yesu (Trupti), a teenage bride to a mentally challenged boy. The boy’s father, a perverted manifestation of the patriarchal system in which Yesu finds herself imprisoned, tries to rape Yesu who kills the old man and runs away. The succinct opening details sexual exploitation, a thematic refrain that Yesu comes to realise is an inescapable part of her journey. In many respects, this is classic Parallel Cinema territory; the critique of tradition, the forced marriage, exploitation and the imagery of death merge into something distinctly unsettling.

Much of the narrative unfolds in a disused warehouse where we are introduced to the characters of the resentful bureaucrat Edekar (K. K Raina) and his assistant Dharma who is played by the brilliant Satyadev Dubey, another significant yet often unacknowledged figure in the story of Parallel Cinema and who collaborated as a writer with Shyam Benegal on a series of early films. As we discover the warehouse was built after the war, during the great famine in Bengal and is a rotting edifice of British rule. Edekar is not amused with his role as caretaker, denouncing the posting as a death sentence, drawing the analogy with imprisonment, repeatedly telling Dharma they will too will rot away along with the bags of wheat. Dharma tries his best to keep Edekar entertained, a faux companionship, that sees him tend to all the chores; but his subservient position is negated by Edekar who states explicitly that caste or class are irrelevant to him.

The arrival of Yesu at the warehouse and the subsequent befriending by Dharma who behaves lecherously leads to a conversation in which Dharma legitimises the sexual exploitation of Yesu, convincing Edekar that fate has brought them together, pointing to a repulsive dynamic between gender and ownership. Yesu is a teenage bride and still very young, and easily seduced by Dharma’s childish antics which includes constructing a makeshift swing in the warehouse, a moment that cruelly extenuates Yesu’s innocence. The subsequent rape of Yesu by Edekar returns to the opening, and reframes and realigns sexual exploitation as part of a historical continuum of patriarchal violence and domination. Yesu’s suicide and death emerges as a totemic act of tragedy, strangely supernatural in some respects, but unavoidable while at the same time completely inevitable in the broader universe universe of feudalistic desolation. With finely tuned cinematography by Govind Nihalani, Godam could arguably be situated as part of the sub-genre on feudalism that characterised the peak years of Parallel Cinema.