The Present Is Another Country

My Mirror column:

The unforgettable David Gulpilil, who won a 2014 Best Actor award at Cannes for Charlie's Country, first appeared on screen 45 years ago. 

While writing about Thithi last month, I was reminded of a film I saw at IFFI two years ago, called Charlie's Country. On the surface, the two films have little in common. Thithi's gently sardonic observational portrait of a Kannadiga universe stitches together an impressive multigenerational cast of non-actors, while Charlie's Country stays almost entirely with its principal protagonist, a grizzled Aboriginal man called Charlie. 

But at the vortex of Thithi's whirl of activity is also a wiry old man. Gadappa (literally 'Beardman') is determined not to be tied down by restrictions of religious ritual or law or property. Like Charlie, he wants to be free. The difference between them is that Gadappa has once been a householder. And that grihasthi, unhappy as it was, has left him a line of sons and grandsons. It is this family, this community, that wants to make him conform, and it is them that he defies when he wanders off with his preferred tipple instead of signing documents and lighting pyres. 

The restrictions Charlie wants to be rid of are of a wholly different kind. Though he ostensibly lives in an Aboriginal 'community', there is nothing left of the world he once knew. The old social fabric, ripped from its inherent connection to the land, is adrift. 

Rolf de Heer's film begins on a tenuously comic note. Frustrated with life on the dole and lowgrade industrially processed food, Charlie and his friend Black Pete rig up a battered Land Rover and leave the corrugated shacks they call home to set out on a hunting expedition. They manage to snag a water buffalo, but their guns, the car and the fresh meat-to-be are all confiscated by the local authorities. Down but not out, Charlie crafts himself a spear from a young tree. But this, too, is an unauthorised weapon, according to the white-fella policeman. When even the spear is taken away, Charlie decides the only way to reclaim his country is by living in it the old way. 

As you watch David Gulpilil walk into the wilderness, armed with not much except the clothes on his back, you cannot but remember the magnificent actor's first cinematic appearance — as a limber young fellow in Nicholas Roeg's haunting, hallucinogenic Walkabout, which turns 45 years old this week. The 1971 film, with Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager who saves two English children lost in the desert, remains memorable for, among other things, the quivering thread of incomprehension and fascination between Gulpilil and the white girl (British actress Jenny Agutter, then 17). 

In Roeg's film, Gulpili's character was on a walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal practice in which a boy who turns 16 must spend months learning to survive on his own in the bush, hunting and gathering food and water, essentially living without shelter. 

It is the genius of De Heer's film — and a profound source of its tragedy — to return the actor, some five decades later, to another filmic walkabout. This time, though, there is no fantasy of cross-cultural conversation. I don't know if they did even when Roeg arrived to make his film in 1969, but white people in Australia no longer live fearfully on the edges of the wilderness, attracted or frightened by its untamed beauty. Certainly they need no rescuing. 

Walkabout contains many scenes of Gulpilil spearing animals for food, from small lizards to kangaroos. A near-climactic sequence made clear the difference between Aboriginal hunting and the white man's hunting, between hunting for survival and hunting for sport. A lean, young, big-eyed Gulpilil is wrestling with a single buffalo, on foot. He has almost succeeded in bringing it down when he is swept off his feet by two white hunters in a jeep and a cloud of dust. Within minutes they have gunned down several animals, taking away only a couple and leaving the others to rot where they fell. Despite Roeg's somewhat dated zooms, jerky pauses and associative visual leaps (to a maggot-infested carcass, for instance, and later a pile of bleached buffalo skulls), it is a powerful sequence. 

Watching Gulpilil now as Charlie, heading out to hunt with a vehicle and guns, feels strangely wrong. And yet, if 'civilisation' has come to the bushman, why should the machine not be part of it? 

But the Aborigine has neither been equipped to handle Western industrial society, nor can he possibly remain the mythical being he once was. What little equipment Charlie has seems decrepit, like his surroundings. In any case, hunting even a single buffalo for food is now illegal. Having killed off animals on an industrial scale, the white man now forbids hunting. The irony is total. 

We may want to watch Gulpilil live off the land and hunt with a spear. Gulpilil may want to watch himself live off the land and hunt with a spear — for the wrenching quality of these films derives from the fact that the actor is playing a character whose predicament is not distant from his own. But people are not untouched by the histories that sweep over them. Having fractured this world into pieces, how can we now expect its members to present themselves as unharmed wholes?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3rd July 2016.

The World Is What It Is

My Mirror column:

An internationally acclaimed Kannada film offers a funny, sad, insightful take on an India we don't often see on screen.

The most colourful character in Thithi is dead within the first ten minutes of the film. When we meet Century Gowda, thus anointed for managing to live that many years upon this earth, he seems like that familiar village fixture: a gap-toothed old man, capable of nothing except sitting on his haunches and watching the world go by. But Century Gowda is not like most people at his stage of life. Age has not withered him, nor custom staled the infinite variety of taunts that flow from his ancient tongue. "You kids neither study nor graze cattle," he berates a passing posse of uniformed schoolchildren. "No men at home to graze the buffalo?" he jeers at a woman trying to steer the lumbering beasts past him. A hapless looking fellow who scurries by dressed in an incongruous black suit gets a more personalised insult: "Has your wife left you yet?" he calls out. 

But then his nonstop activity comes abruptly to a close. The film pauses for an instant, marking the moment with a shift that is both visual and perceptual. The human world carries on — it is the animals who notice. The camera suddenly gives them to us in close-up — the rooster crowing, the cow mooing, the goat bleating, as if to announce they're alive and well, and that crumpled heap on the ground is not. 

It takes barely a minute, though, to return us to a human perspective. A crowd gathers, the old man's grandson is called, and soon enough an astrologer has been sought out to offer advice on what must be done. Thithi is the word for that funereal feast he ordains. Ere Gowda and Raam Reddy take the ritual markers with which we seek to make our lives intelligible, and craft around them a film that is about the unmarked, everyday business of living. The marking of death is part of the carrying-on of life. 

Yet Thithi is not the sort of film that is about only one thing. If it outlines the generational scaffolding upon which life in the village still stands, it also shows us the cracks that individuals can create in that structure. Century's grandson Thamanna may cleave to the rules of community, but his father Gadappa — Century's son — has long refused to abide by them. 

Played by Ere Gowda's real-life uncle Chennagowda, a wiry man with a shock of wild white hair and a thoughtful gleam in his eye, Gadappa is perhaps the film's most affecting character. We start off being amused, perhaps even a little shocked by his response to the death of his father. "No big deal," he says, striding off into the fields with his usual quarter of local liquor. As Thamanna's harried existence — negotiating with his wife, disciplining his youthful son, running around for a motor mechanic to get the water back into his fields — is juxtaposed with Gadappa's free-floating, alcohol-fuelled wanderings, one wonders if the film is setting up the householder against the ascetic. Is social obligation the glue that keeps things from falling apart, or that which unnecessarily binds us? Is Gadappa the irresponsible wastrel his son treats him as, or does his lack of worldliness makes him a model worth emulating? Even much later in the film, when his 'unfeeling'-ness is partially explained, Gadappa retains an intriguing air. 

Reddy manages to combine an observational documentary style with an almost indulgent affection for every character he places on screen. Women remain largely tangential, though watch out for the marvelous Kamalakka, who accosts a drunken customer with a threat appropriate for anyone you've ever wanted to shake by the collar: "I'll pass your life through a strainer!" Yet for all its pleasurable meandering, Thithi is not plotless. Its seemingly unplanned threads do in fact come together in the end — just not in the dramatic pitch we have been schooled to expect from cinematic resolutions. 

My favourite of these narrative threads involves Gadappa's spontaneous joining-up with a group of sheep-herders. Their surprised but ready acceptance of the old man reminded me a little of another old man who finds himself taken into a nomadic community, albeit under starkly different circumstances: the Marathi film Astu, in which Amruta Subhash's Telugu-speaking nomad finds herself sheltering an aged, confused Mohan Agashe. On an altogether different plane, Chennagowda's adamant refusal to stay in one place made me think of the immortal David Gulpili in Rolf de Heer's devastating Charlie's Country. Of course, Gadappa is rebelling against his own community; while Gulpili's Charlie is rebelling against a whole modern civilisation that has swallowed up the old aboriginal way of life. But like Gulpili, Chennagowda has a twinkling, laconic way of declaring his intentions, and a dogged pursuit of life on his own terms. He may have always wanted to wander, but he will not do so at anyone else's behest. These are spirited old men laying claim to the lands of their forefathers — but doing so in a way that rejects accumulation. 

Thithi is a remarkable, unusual film. Not just because it gives us a set of memorable characters (all non-actors) and etches in almost ethnographic fashion a rural Karnataka milieu, but because it so beautifully balances the event with the non-event, the extraordinary with the ordinary, the gently comic with the deeply sorrowful. A little like life.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5th June 2016.