New Indian Cinema – Movie Mahal

PEHLA ADHYAY / THE FIRST CHAPTER (Dir. Vishnu Mathur, 1981, India) – The Bombay Flâneur

When something is anomalous it often means a deviation from what we consider to be habitual, natural or conventional. The filmic entirety of director Vishnu Mathur’s 1981 debut feature Pehla Adhyay is uncontroversial in its anomalous status. And when situated in the indexical parameters of the avant-garde strand of filmmaking from the foundational years of Indian Parallel Cinema one can recognise an aesthetic solidarity. Pehla Adhyay was forged in a recurrent stylistic pattern in which tableau, ellipsis, long takes and the open frame are deployed with a recumbent reflexivity that complement the story of Ravi (Dinesh Shakul), a student and researcher at the University of Bombay, who is gradually weighed down by the unbearable alienation of a new city.

What Mathur details with painstaking agony is the sense of displacement, ennui and disconnect that alienation produces. In some respects, Ravi carries with him all the classic tropes that conjure the image of the modern day flâneur – weaving his way through the campus corridors and occupying empty cafes while observing life around him with an indiscriminate like gaze. There is a purity to Mathur’s open symmetrical framing and many of the sequences are staged with an academic like rigour in which the rhythms of urban alienation unfold and take place with a disconcerting ordinariness. Mathur assisted both Mrinal Sen and Mani Kaul (Duvidha, 73). And the guiding hand of Kaul is prevalent and identifiable in the formalist avant-garde approach which in turn is articulated through the cinematographic precision of DOP Navroze Contractor’s scrupulous camerawork and elegant tableau framing. Whoever Ravi seems to meet, be it distant relatives, fellow students or university professors, there is an emotional detachment representative of a much greater residual emptiness that lingers like a festering wound and that ultimately boils over into misplaced irritation.

In a key sequence and as a way of extrapolating Ravi’s urban discombobulation Mathur magnifies the irregular tempos of Bombay city life when Ravi sits in a café drinking tea as he looks on at the peculiar recesses in the traffic on the streets – in an instance the transient city spaces of Bombay are transformed into something ghostlike, deserted and completely silent. The juxtaposition is jarring to the say least and signifies the stark bewilderment Ravi experiences in trying but failing to situate himself within the city as a grounded being. You could argue Ravi belongs in the company of disobediently chaotic figures like Ranjit in Interview (71) or Siddhartha in Pratidwandi (70). However, whereas Ravi and Ranjit are connected to a broader leftist political agitation that was borne out of the late 1960s, Ravi’s alienation seems symptomatic of a neo-modernity in which the emergence of an apolitical identity in the public sphere was gaining traction. Perhaps what Mathur seems to capture so effortlessly is the existential quality of the urban migrant who has failed to make the transition into adulthood, and fortuitously takes up the persona of the flâneur, the Bombay flâneur to be more specific, a riposte to the Tapori, and which projects masculinity in crisis as unremarkably faux.

Mathur’s under-seen debut feature reiterates once again the avant-garde experiments were a significant part of the evolution of Parallel Cinema and which remains in a perpetual cycle of revisionism, reclamation and rediscovery while underlining the urgency to examine film style and aesthetics as central to the way we write and think about the history of alternative cinema in India and beyond.

KADAKH (Dir. RAJAT KAPOOR, 2019, India) [spoilers]

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There is a dead body in your apartment but you have a plethora of guests arriving for a party to celebrate Diwali very shortly. So what exactly do you do? It is a sinister dilemma faced by somewhat ordinary people going through a tinderbox of emotions. In other words, the perfect Hitchcockian predicament since the extraordinary is often critical to the notion of building suspense, sustaining dramatic tension and reeling in your audience. The first thing that sprung to my mind when watching Rajat Kapoor’s Kadakh, a devilishly scripted black comedy about middle class hypocrisy, was the visual design of the apartment including the costumes and décor, refracted and unified through differing shades of violet (sometimes symbolically associated with reincarnation in terms of Indian culture), infusing the film with an unconventional aesthetic tone. The use of violet also stretches to the autumnal colours which undoubtedly creates a muted colour scheme very much in line with the macabre undertones of Sunil’s (Ranvir Shorey) infidelities. With much of the narrative unfolding within one confined space, the piercing claustrophobic ambience amplifies the atrocious secret that Sunil and Maalti (Mansi Multani) have to conceal while the real time Diwali festivities which are organised around a series of impromptu short conversations between friends and family captures the banal small talk rituals of middle class India with their shallow, stunted aspirations.

As more people arrive at the Diwali party, tensions and rivalries come to the fore, culminating in the gut wrenching moment when the trunk holding the dead body (a certain nod to Hitchcock’s Rope) is dragged into the living room to act as a makeshift table for a game of cards, all of this juxtaposed to the aghast Sunil and Maalti. Both Shorey and Multani are excellent, conveying dread and unease as they precariously navigate the party, trying their best to placate the prickly house guests who in turn have brought their own complicated psychological baggage. When Sunil’s infidelity is finally unmasked by Maalti and openly scolded by his friends for such a betrayal, the admission of the dead body that has been with them the whole time provokes an outcry of revulsion. And although Sunil’s unforgivable crimes are roundly critiqued by his friends, the consensus forged at the end to essentially stage a conspiracy and save face amounts to a discordant analysis of middle class pretence; reputation, privilege and friendship are the values that take precedent. In a masterstroke at the end of the film Rajat succeeds in condensing and staging the emotional landscape of the wounded characters into an audacious single master shot, part tableaux, evoking the Epic cinema of Shahani.

Kadakh continues a consistent and richly diverse series of director-actor collaborations between Rajat Kapoor and Ranvir Shorey beginning with Mixed Doubles in 2006, and is a work that holds its own against brilliant films like Mithya (2008), arguably a key work in the development of Indian independent cinema, and which for some reason is never really talked about enough. In some respects, Rajat manages to get the best out of Shorey in many of the films they have worked on together, nurturing and coercing a darkly comedic vein that in turn demonstrates Rajat’s exceptional capacity to work in the comedy form with an understated elegance that tips into the grotesque with often surreal results.

AUTOHEAD (Dir. Rohit Mittal, 2016, India)

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Rohit Mittal’s macabre slice of docufiction plunges the depths of Mumbai’s underclass. The concept of Autohead involves a documentary crew observing a rickshaw driver, Narayan (Deepak Sampat), who gradually reveals a murderous defect in his unpleasantly compelling disposition. Mittal’s docufiction recalls most readily Belvaux and Bonzel’s magnificently twisted Man Bites Dog (1992). Analogously, the crew become embroiled in the dubious actions of Narayan, recording his homicidal designs with a hesitant yet droll voyeuristic gaze. Deepak Sampat who plays Narayan is brilliantly cast in the main lead and delivers a chilling performance. Since the majority of the narrative is spent in Narayan’s unsavoury company, his deliciously warped direct camera address becomes the film’s signatory formal device, deployed with an amusingly unreliable postmodern affectation. Indian cinema has repeatedly depicted the auto rickshawallah as the noble and submissive sub-proletariat, and Mittal has fun subverting this conventional imagining. Narayan is a social misfit, derided by his mother, friends and the prostitute he longs for her, and while he emerges as a disturbed sociopath, his skewed view of the world is filtered through the prism of popular Indian cinema permeating the nocturnal milieu of Mumbai. It all leads to a lurid ending in which the ethics of the crew are brought into question that seem suitably appropriate for those typically involved in the observational, participatory documentary form. Mittal’s assured directorial debut is a bleak, self-reflexive rendering of film as an illusory accessory and morally dubious instrument that in some instances can augment and mask reality to a worrying degree.

THE BATTLE FOR BANARAS (Dir. Kamal Swaroop, 2015, India) – The Crowd

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There is a spectacular political trice at the end of Swaroop’s participatory documentary. At night, on the banks of the river Ganges, which is teeming with euphoric revellers and a swathe of India’s police, Modi emerges victorious, returning to Banaras, where he had stood for election as a BJP candidate. As he makes his way down to the banks, the crowd parting restlessly, Modi continually raises his hands in reverence to the electorate and to the people of India. The crowd, a metonymic focus of Swaroop’s documentary, now markedly acquiescent than ever before, is no longer the impulsive, unpredictable and incensed mass. The insipid demagogy of the BJP and Modi have won out, the crowd is now benign, overwhelmed by political spectacle. And the declaration of Modi’s victory, unfolding on the banks of the Ganges, a sacred site for Hindus, reconnects the modern to the ancient in a grand democratic totem. Modi’s speech, narrating an anecdote about Neil Armstrong, and referring to himself as a ‘son of the land’ invokes a cosmic nationalist dogma, displacing the memories and history of secularism with an insincere centrist appeasement. Swaroop’s plural and largely unbiased account of the electioneering in Banaras in 2014 is an ideologically prescient encounter between cinema and history, but it is one the BJP have suppressed (the film has not past the censor board) since Swaroop’s work does not fit a polarising, nationalist agenda.

Swaroop does exceptionally well to detail the contesting political parties in Banaras, positing a deeply complex yet richly connected and inclusive democratic process, in which the Indian electorate is shown in dialogue with contesting ideological voices. On so many occasions, Swaroop sutures the contradictory voice of the electorate into the narrative, whereby ordinary people of Banaras speaking candidly about the dubious electioneering gives the work a distinctly communicative, inclusive legitimacy. However, when political leaders speak, they do so at a distant and through the apparatus of the mainstream corporate media. By denying the politicians an authentic voice and subsequently a privileged position, which is often facilitated by a wider institutional infrastructure, Swaroop’s semi-observational approach catches those details, which are often edited out by the media, so to construct democracy and politics as a kind of theatre. It is the extraneous minutiae particularly the body language of the politicians, notably Modi, who is shown desperately trying to project an underdeveloped image of the statesman that Swaroop exposes as a false yet uninterrupted performance. Swaroop’s vatic documentary is an intellectual enquiry, probing the image of the crowd and its many avatars, notably the concept of hysteria, in this case ‘Modi hysteria’, which once amplified, completely takes over the crowd and creates an unsettling doubling in the people, as exemplified in the visually ubiquitous ‘Modi mask’ the electorate naively don as both a worrying form of submission and idolisation.