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Reviews
Court (2014)
The Everyday Violence of the Court
Chaitanya Tamhane's directorial debut, Court, is a multilingual, award- winning film on the "quiet violence" of the judicial system and how the State uses it to suppress political activists. Financed by the Hubert- Bals Fund and private equity, it opened to rave reviews and won Best Director and Best Film in the International Competition section of the 16th Mumbai Film Festival. It also premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier in the year, where it won the Lion of the Future Award for the best first feature. Court successfully invokes the mood of a trial based on patently ridiculous charges, conducted with no intent other than disciplining and harassment of an activist. A phenomenon that is all too common in India. The theme is very timely given the increasingly intolerant nature of the Indian State and the large number of political prisoners languishing in jail all across the country.
The film follows the trial of Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar), a Dalit political activist and lokshahir (people's poet) who is arrested on stage during a performance in Bombay on charges of "abetment of suicide." The police claim that Kamble has penned and performed "incendiary" lyrics calling on Dalits to "drown themselves in sewage" provoking a municipal sanitation worker to actually take his own life by drowning in the very sewer it is his duty to clean. The absurdity of the charge is matched by the (mock?) seriousness with which it is pursued but the police and the officials of the Sessions court. While the politics of false charges and suppression of activists via legal means is an important theme in the film, Tamhane also uses the context of the trial to explore the everyday lives of the principal actors in the courtroom; especially the lawyers for defense (producer Vivek Gomber) and prosecution (played by Geetanjali Kulkarni), and the judge (Pradeep Joshi). What emerges is how extraordinary injustice is embedded in quotidian affairs. The prosecution lawyer argues against bail, ensures that an honest man of advanced years rots in police custody for no reason at all and then goes home to cook dinner and watch TV with her family.
The ponderous legal system is certainly the main protagonist, as is evident in the name of the film. And as a useful counterpoint to the brilliant and satirical Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho, Court forces us confront the fact that the byzantine alleyways of justice and the proverbial tarikh pe tarikh, are not merely the unintended result of an uncaring and bureaucratic system but rather used deliberately by the State to remove its more inconvenient citizens for some time, say three or four years. At which time it is the headache of the next set of rulers.
See the full review at: http://sanhati.com/excerpted/11761/
Haider (2014)
Demystefying Haider: Whose Tragedy is it?
As a subtle philosophical tinge that cinema is a powerful tool for political mobilization and mass persuasion, Slavoj Zizek notes beautifully that, "It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire." Haider is the adaptation of Shakespeare's famous Tragedy Hamlet; and the latest Bollywood movie about Kashmir. Question is whose tragedy is Haider? Why many people waited for Haider to release, and see the latest take of Bollywood on Kashmir?
There are two reasons why Haider had generated some curiosity among Kashmiri movie lovers: One, it was the adaptation of a play, the story and plot of which was already known to many literature lovers and Shakespeare fanes. Two, its script was co-written by Basharat Peer and directed by Vishal Bhardawaj; Peer known as pioneering English fiction writer amongst Muslims of J&K, and Vishal a successful director for adapting Othello and Macbeth as Omkara and Maqbool respectively. Basharat Peer––whose memoir Novel Curfewed Night gave him unprecedented popularity as a writer of the 'ordeal' of Kashmir Conflict. More than Bhardwaj's credentials it was Basharat's involvement in the script writing that many envisaged a change in the routine Bollywood rhetoric.
Haider is a typical Bollywood feature film, no different from: Gangster, Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns or Gangs of Wasseypur. It doesn't offer anything on the reality of 'what' is happening inside (or with) Kashmir. Rather, it makes a serious attempt to showcase how a real struggle can be reduced to a family feud under the garb of (mis-informed) adaptation of a Shakespearean classic. In the midst of its mis-informed adaptation it lets the Zizekian tinge (of how to desire) creep in. Film adaption as a derivative work needs to be creative so that the "thin red lines" between the original and its adaptation are respected. An adaptation needs to take care of the background, which forms its foundation–––more so when the background is highly political and sensitive setting like Kashmir. In a new backdrop and setting it needs to take note of minute details such as culture, historicity, contemporariness, traditions, dialect and so on. The question is how far has Haider been successful in adaptation of Hamlet in a highly political backdrop of Kashmir? Is the attempt artistic or political? If it is political, whose politics does its serve? And why do we need to ask these questions at all?
Some Kashmiri friends feel highly obliged that Haider has depicted some fractions of conflict. In a Kafila blog, Suhas Munshi writes that "for faithfully adapting the violence done to Kashmiris," Basharat would have to "script a pornographic narrative for screen." The point is not whether Haider succeeds or fails in faithfully portraying the victimhood of Kashmiris from all angles of conflict (structural, political, torture-al etc). This can be a one vantage point to see how far Haider has successfully been able to portray the ordeal of Kashmir that falls within the limits of its frame. And how Basharat ventured to associate the limited frame that forms Haider with its outside–––the power relation(s) that are so central to the familial relations of Haider's characters and yet so distant (and mysteriously absent) from its frame. For the relations between Haider (Shahid) and his uncle Khurram (K. K. Menon), Arshia (Sharddaa Kapoor) and her father Pervez lone (Lalit Parimoo) are not mere personal relations. They have a deep political nature, which Haider has not endeavored to look into. The invisible hand of sovereign amidst these relations is absent in the frames of Haider. Instead the film attempts to cut a slice from these deeply political relations and present it to the audience in an altogether different avatar–––an avatar which reduces a struggle for aspirations and a fundamental right (Right to Self-determination) to a revenge saga.
See the full review at http://sanhati.com/articles/12422/
Daybreakers (2009)
How Capital Turns People into 'Consuming' Vampires: An Essay on Daybreakers
Every once in a while there comes a commercial pot-boiler of a film that knocks you cold with its understanding of contemporary politics. It reminds you that filmmaking is not only about camera angles and cinematography and script and direction and acting and special effects and edge-of-the-seat thrills. It reminds you that cinema is also, nay, essentially, about something that camera-enslaved filmmakers tend to forget: thought, and politics.
On the one hand, you have Hurt Locker, a film based on the US occupation of Iraq that deliberately ignores why the US is in Iraq and what it is doing there: zero politics, and all cinema, we're told. We all know (but won't admit it) what kind of politics 'no politics' means. And on the other hand you have a film, a sci-fi Vampire film, Daybreakers, which stays true to the genre of vampire thrillers and is yet a scathing commentary on the world we are living in. A world where the value attached to the life of a human being is by no means absolute, and is contingent on and directly proportional to the said human being's ability to act as a consumer.
Daybreakers, which was released in India last week, is set in 2019. By then, the world has been taken over by vampires, or rather, by humans who have been 'turned' into vampires. In this vampire-dominated world, humans are captured and farmed for their blood in giant industrial labs run by biotech MNCs. Human blood, like coffee, is a commodity served in vending machines in kiosks. But humans have been hunted to the point of extinction, and the companies that supply blood to the global vampire population are running out of human stock. So R&D is summoned to come up with a solution: a blood substitute.
Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a vampire haematologist working with Bromley Marks Laboratories, a Monsanto-like giant biotech MNC. His brief is to come up with a blood substitute. Now, coming up with a blood substitute can mean two things: one, it will enable the entire vampire population (ex-humans) to survive. But it will also mean that, since human blood will no longer be needed, it wouldn't matter if humans became extinct.
The philosophical, existential and political potentialities of this plot's premise are too diverse and rich to be explored in full here, but the directors, Michael and Peter Spierig, unlike Kathryn Bigelow, do not disappoint. The film, shot beautifully, with haunting doomsday atmospherics, surpasses your expectations of a regular vampire flick and soars into a sublime allegory of what it means to be human in a post- industrial capitalist society.
The most widely needed commodity in vampire society, a fundamental vampire right, if you like, is human blood. And it is increasingly in short supply. Substitute your favourite resource instead of blood — Oil? Water? Food? Human-friendly climate? — and every piece of the parallelism fits into place. Speculators make a killing on blood futures. Rich investors withdraw their private blood deposits from human blood farms. And when the situation becomes so bad that blood prices soar and the country is left with less than a month's supply of blood, it is the poorest vampires who are most affected.
Blood riots ensue and starving vampires who 'subside' into suppurating bat-like mutants and terrorise peaceable middle-class vampires are killed off in the way 'terrorists' should be. Soon, the army is called out into the streets to wage (what else?) the war against terror, and control (kill) the working class vampires, even as the richer vampires, whose own blood stocks are dwindling, watch in horror from behind glass windows.
The film is a brilliant thought experiment that poses a simple question: what happens when we indiscriminately attempt to replace nature or natural products with man-made ones. For the vampire, that most basic element of nature, sunlight, is fatal. And for us non-vampires living in 2010, that most basic element of nature, air, is fatal too, in our cities. So is most of the food that we get in malls, supermarkets and restaurants — super-rich in pesticides and processed carcinogens.
We live in an age whose biggest affliction is technophilia. For any human problem, we don't look for the obvious, human answers. We look to technology for the answer, which always brings with it another set of problems, whose solutions will then fund another cycle of GDP growth. But what if there are answers to our problems that will not, by definition, yield returns on investment or generate wealth or add to the GDP? Do we then summarily dismiss all such solutions?
See the full review at: http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2447/