My Mirror column (7 June 2020):
A young filmmaker's atmospheric Maithili debut refracts the
experience of his family's village home through layers of distance and
memory.
Using an old house as the central motif for a film is not a new idea. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s fine directorial debut
Musafir (1957), an under-watched film that I discussed in an earlier edition of this column, made a house and its neighbourhood the common factor in a narrative about three separate sets
of tenants. The French director Alain Resnais, better known for spare,
intense films like
Hiroshima Mon Amour and
Night and Fog, used an
outlandish 18th century chateau in the Ardennes Forest as the unifying
setting for his era-jumping tripartite 1983 film
Life Is a Bed of Roses (currently streaming online).
More recently, the Ukrainian director Dar Gai’s dubiously named
Teen
Aur Aadha (2017) built a composite narrative around a 50-year-old Mumbai
building in which there had been a school and a brothel as well as families. People leave, houses remain. Some memories don't need a house to dwell in:
it can be a car.
The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a somewhat overblown,
star-studded 1965 film with everyone from Rex Harrison to Shirley
MacLaine, had three very different lives linked only by the
eponymous car. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan, who
apparently took the idea from a post-war German film called
In Those
Days, directed by Helmut Käutner, which used the seven lives of a car
built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 to comment on the Nazi era.
But
Gamak Ghar
doesn’t really remind you of other films. It reminds you of other
houses.
Streaming on an online platform for another day, 23-year-old
Achal Mishra's debut feature is a quiet love letter to his grandparents'
village home in Madhopur, Bihar. Mishra uses a three-part structure,
beginning in 1998 and ending in 2019, and the house does allow us to see
its owners grow older, change, move away and return. But Mishra is not
interested in plot.
His set is the actual house that he visited twice a year as
a child, but whose role in even the family’s ceremonial life began to
decrease as the grandparents died. His characters – if you can call them
that – are fictionalised versions of his own extended family, played by
a mixed cast garnered from amongst existing local actors and
acquaintances who had not acted before. And his narrative interest is a
socio-economic transition that is specific to his own upper caste
Maithil Brahmin family as well as familiar to many, many migrant
families across India whose connections with the village have grown
irreversibly distant, especially in the decades since liberalisation.
What makes
Gamak Ghar
unusual is its single-minded interest in capturing a certain experience
of time and space. Mishra has, in a recent interview, mentioned the
writer Amit Chaudhuri as one of his sources of inspiration, and one can
see why. From its very first frames, the film refuses even a glimmer of
drama for stillness, displaying a conviction that art can lie in the
observation and recreation of sensory detail. So we see the piles of
Malda mangoes from the family orchard, and the curds set in an array of
flat earthen pots. We observe how people look through a mosquito net, we
watch the smoke rising from an agarbatti. We remember rooms lit at
night by a hurricane lamp, and recall how tuneless the singing can often
be during a religious ritual.
There
is almost nothing flashily cinematic here, though an occasional filmic
reference gets made – most obviously when a conversation about one of
the brothers moving to Delhi is followed by a stunningly beautiful shot
of a train viewed through a field of snowy-white kaash flowers, a la
Pather Panchali, evoking and portending Apu’s move to the city later in Ray’s Apu Trilogy. There are rapt
faces bathed in the glow of a TV screen, and the lone female cousin
who, when asked “Sunny Deol or Salman Khan”, says a categorical no to
watching a Salman film on the VCR.
And as the film traverses the last two decades, the nods to change are everywhere. We watch as the large wooden bed on which the men played cards
in the balcony is replaced by wooden chairs over the years, and then
dull brown plastic ones; we note the gradual shift from community feasts
laid out on the floor – where everyone knew exactly how much someone
was eating and could make fun of them for their appetite – to meals
served on chairs apart from each other, and finally, meals eaten by each
brother alone in a bedroom.
Evocative and nostalgia-inducing as these sights
and sounds are, I was glad that Mishra seems simultaneously able to
suggest that this world we have lost – or are in the process of losing –
was held up by all sorts of hierarchies and rigidities that we took for
granted. In the rosy remembered time of family togetherness in the
1990s, for instance, the women cooked vast meals and looked after the
children, while the men played cards and demanded to know whether the
food was ready. The daughter-in-law who covers her head with a ghoonghat all through the first segment has become a confident Delhi woman a decade later, leaving her hair open.
But she still joins her sisters-in-law to chop vegetables for the family dinner. The
links with the past aren't quite broken yet. At the end, the roof is
being dismantled -- but it is part of a house renovation, to host a new
child's initiation ceremony. Gamak Ghar isn’t meant to
be a sociological or anthropological record, and yet it is that thing
we rarely produce in India: a self-conscious cinematic document.