Mothering desires

My Mirror column:

At this year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the desire for children emerged as a preoccupying theme for directors from China to Turkey

 In Kantemir Balagov’s memorable second feature Beanpole (2019), which won the Un Certain Regard Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, a young woman called Iya undertakes motherhood as a favour for her friend. It is the half-starved world of post-war Leningrad, and the friend, Masha, has had and lost a child. She has also had so many abortions that she can no longer get pregnant.

For a while, Masha seems unable to grasp this fact, leading her to seek out sex in the vain hope that a man might yet successfully impregnate her. “I want to have another human being inside me,” she tells Iya. Finally, giving up on that possibility, she persuades Iya to subject herself to sex with a man and carry the child to full term on her behalf.

The man that Iya requests to be her biological aid in this pursuit wants to know why she so badly wants to have a baby. “I want to be the master of her,” says Iya, talking of Masha. Having a baby may seem purely functional here, not something that Iya is invested in, except as a route to preserving her relationship with another woman. Yet, when she discovers she is not actually pregnant, the words Iya uses have an all-encompassing devastation. She is “empty”, she tells the doctor. Later she tells Masha that she feels “meaningless inside”. “There is no one inside me,” she continues.

The expressions I quote are the English subtitles, translated from the film’s original Russian dialogue. But that feeling of emptiness, the gnawing desire for a child, the all-consuming aspiration of motherhood, spanned across several films at this year’s edition of IFFI, which ended last Friday in Goa.

In Anthony Chen’s Singapore-set Wet Season, his much-awaited second feature after 2013’s Camera D'Or winner Ilo Ilo, a middle-aged teacher of middle school Mandarin is quietly distraught because she hasn’t conceived a child despite eight years of trying. Chen’s gentle, melancholy film is full of sharply observed moments that make her husband’s absentee status clear: her solo attempts to keep up with his side of the family and her increasingly lonely visits to the fertility clinic, where the extent of his potential contribution is frozen sperm – a perfect metaphor. When a newborn she is holding bursts into tears, a callous female relative is quick on the draw: “Why would she know? She hasn’t had one.” Between these draining medical and familial contexts, childlessness seems to have become the only relevant thing about her.

If Balagov took it into the past, director Gabriel Mascaro projects the desperation for a child into an imagined dystopic future, where a state-sponsored evangelical religiosity has made itself at home not just within the family, but within the sexual bond of coupledom. Divine Love is Mascaro’s vision of Brazil in 2027, where scanners on all public buildings reveal women’s pregnant status as they walk through the doors. Mascaro’s narrative centres on a bureaucrat called Joana, who deeply enjoys her work as the first port of call for potentially divorcing couples, but whose own marital life is under great stress from her inability to conceive. When she does, the husband – whose first reaction to the pregnancy news is to yell “I did it!” – is devastated to find out that he might not actually be the child’s biological father.

That almost total preoccupation with the biological role emerges, in the Turkish slow-burn thriller Chronology, as a primary symptom of male insecurity and self-absorption. In the very first scene, a woman tells her husband that the doctor has finally said they can’t have a child. She seems terribly weighed down. But the husband’s only question is: “On whose account is it not working?” He can only express sympathy or consolation with his partner once he has established that the situation is somehow her fault. As the film progresses, we see that that is a pattern. Paternity, it seems, is only something to be displayed as proof of one’s masculinity – and the needle of suspicion can easily pierce right through a marriage.

Perhaps the saddest film about the loss of and desire for a child at this year’s IFFI was the magisterial Chinese film So Long, My Son, in which the lives of a childless couple are revealed as inextricably entwined with the history of the country. Wang Xiaoshuai’s three-hour drama uses a long-range view of one family to impugn the one-child policy, while telling a compelling story.

In all these films, across time and space, pregnancy emerges as a tragic contest at which people either win or lose. The less control we have over our circumstances, it seems, the more we are willing and able to blame ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Dec 2019.

Picture This: Top of the World

My BLink column, published 15 Dec 2014: 

'Tis the season to be jolly for world-cinema buffs. A pick of five best films at the International Film Festival of India this year.

A film festival is about drowning your sorrows in cinema — and coming up with something like joy. Ever since we lost the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) to the bracing seaside air of Goa, and then witnessed the sad, stuttering demise of our locally grown Osian’s Cinefan, Delhi’s world-cinema buffs have been robbed of their annual rite of submergence. I’m part of this large, deprived population (and if you’re one of the snooty lot, reading this column in what you think is a more cultured city, you’d be surprised at just how many of us there are). I suffered silently for a bit, and then, as someone who makes a living by writing about cinema, decided it was legitimate to allow myself an annual winter pilgrimage.

In the last five years, I’ve been twice to Thiruvananthapuram, where Beena Paul Venugopal oversaw the most fabulously curated international festival in India until she resigned earlier this year (it would have been her 13th as the artistic director of International Film Festival of Kerala or IFFK) — and twice to Panjim for IFFI. This year was an IFFI year. And while the retrospectives weren’t as exciting as IFFK’s, Goa in November is a glorious thing, and even committed types like me who don’t wander too far from the stretch of road between Kala Academy and INOX can get our fill of prawn curry, sanna idlis and homemade coconut-jaggery sweets, thanks to the wonderful women’s cooperative stalls at the venue. Also, in Goa — where the state policy on alcohol is the happy opposite of Kerala’s ridiculous current one — Kingfisher gets to run a practically cost-price stall in the INOX complex, holding IFFI visitors in its warm, captive embrace. (Couldn’t get into the film you just queued up for? A beer is the answer. Insanely jolted by the film you just came out of? A beer is the answer.)

But the main thing about a film festival, of course, is the films. So without further ado, here are the best five films I saw at IFFI this year — in no particular order.

A still from Winter Sleep.

The Turks won the day, as they have often done at film festivals in the last decade, with two superb films. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with his penchant for putting an increasingly complicated cast of characters under his dispassionate lens, served up the three-hour-long Winter Sleep, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. Partially inspired by three Chekhov stories, the film uses the eerie, striking landscape of Cappadocia for Ceylan’s leisurely unpacking of his signature concerns: the tension between age and youth, rural and urban, men and women, and of course, between the classes. A minor incident pushes the upper-class protagonists — an ageing ex-actor-turned-hotel owner, his youthful wife and his bitter, divorced sister — to examine the cocoon they inhabit, and each other. But as they squirm under Ceylan’s unforgiving lens, it becomes clear that the lives of others, to which they are ordinarily so oblivious, are not within easy reach of their charity. 

The other Turkish film, Silsile (translated as ‘consequences’, but I think of it as ‘a chain of happenings’, based on Hindi/Urdu), also catapults its oblivious rich characters into a series of events. Set in the mixed Istanbul neighbourhood of Karaköy, Silsile is more tightly focused on class. Compared to Ceylan’s slow deliberation and endless talk, Ozan Açiktan’s film might seem all thrilling set pieces and beautiful people, but it is razor-sharp. Neither film lets anyone off. 

I also loved writer-director Yi’nan Diao’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, a laconic murder mystery set in a cold, bleak Chinese industrial town. An alcoholic ex-cop gets interested in a woman who is a suspect in an unsolved case. The plot is gripping, and the mystery both gory and strange (the limbs of victims show up on conveyor belts in coal mines across the country). But what keeps the film running in your head long after are the haunting visuals — dimly lit, snow-packed tunnels, groups of ice skaters in a bleak silent outdoor rink, neon-lit bar signs. 

A still from Black Coal Thin Ice.

Continuing the winter theme (an unplanned effect of this year’s IFFI), my fourth pick is Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund’s brilliantly discomfiting take on masculinity and marriage. A Swedish family — husband, wife and two kids — on holiday at a French ski resort find the happy family veneer peeling off as the after-effect of a split-second moment of danger. It’s full of incisively observed moments of conversation that are often acutely, guiltily funny — but this is no filmed play. Östlund makes masterful use of his sheer white skiing locales, interspersing pin-drop silence with almost operatic moments without seeming gimmicky.*

Finally, there was Narges Abyar’s Track 143, an unexpectedly understated, moving portrait of a mother waiting for her son to come home from a war that has long ended. This is a film about a woman whose tenuous connection with the outside world, and with hope, is kept alive by a radio she ties around her waist. It is a film that does what no Iranian films had done for me before — gave me a sense of growing old with its protagonist, realising how the world can change while you cling to the past.

*Force Majeure is one of 9 films just placed on the Oscar shortlist in the Foreign Film category, in the company of another exquisite film from 2014, the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida. 

Film Review: Harud shows us a Kashmir we rarely see on the big screen

In the last three decades, Kashmir in popular Hindi cinema has meant films about terror and militancy, almost always filtered through an Indian nationalist lens: Roja, Mission Kashmir, Fanaa. Before that, from the 1960s technicolour moment of Junglee and Kashmir ki Kali, up until as late as 1982 when Amitabh Bachchan and Rakhee sang “Kitni khoobsurat yeh tasveer hai, mausam bemisal benazir hai, yeh Kashmir hai” in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bemisaal, Kashmir was the ultimate Hindi movie cliché for beauty.

Aamir Bashir’s 2010 Harud (literally, autumn) which releases in several Indian cities today under the PVR Director’s Rare Initiative, is quite aware of this strange cinematic history. As someone who grew up being an Amitabh Bachchan fan (until a screening of Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief in Delhi “thankfully severed [his] relationship with ‘Bollywood’” ), Bashir knows the subconscious expectations with which a Hindi-movie-goer enters a film about Kashmir – and sets out very consciously to dismantle them.

First of all, Harud refuses us the luxurious otherness of a beauteous landscape in which we might comfortably immerse ourselves. Shot entirely in Srinagar, the film captures an everyday Kashmiri urbanity rarely seen on the Indian screen. The one exception I can think of is Onir’s I Am, where the Srinagar segment, with Juhi Chawla and Manisha Koirala as childhood friends divided by history, was strikingly shot by Arvind Kannabiran, creating a vivid sense of a city beleaguered in time. Here, Bashir’s direction and Shankar Raman’s surefooted camerawork (he also shot Peepli Live) create a world that is more languorous, dreamier—and yet somehow waiting to erupt.

The sense of a dreamscape is created primarily through Rafiq (Shahnawaz Bhat), the adolescent boy at the film’s centre. We often see him actually sleeping: eyeballs rolling beneath closed lids, dreaming unsavoury dreams. Even the rest of the time, despite his wide-open eyes, one wonders if he is quite awake. He seems to inhabit a world of his own—and it is not a pleasant one. The seething anger he clearly feels—about his ‘disappeared’ elder brother, his father’s ineffectual slide into mental illness, his mother’s refusal to grieve—remains almost entirely suppressed.

That sense of feelings tightly wound up – of things simmering beneath the surface and not being allowed to come up – is integral to the film. Be it the low-key performances with their refusal of drama, the minimal dialogue, or its very colours, Harud feels deliberately muted. The film’s palette sticks close to the chilly half-light of an autumn evening—the buses, the interiors of houses, even the jackets and phirans never stray far from dull blues and grays, only interrupting them occasionally with the rich gold of fallen leaves.

At one level, Harud documents the unremarkable ordinariness of life in Srinagar: there are autos, there are red Marutis with PRESS signs, there are hawks in the sky at twilight, and young men who loll about in parks talking about imaginary football teams and dreaming of making it big. But it also shows you the walls with ‘Azadi’ scrawled in ink on every pillar, the slow-motion violence of identification parades, the guns pointing at you in frame after frame that thread the slowness of the everyday with menace. And yet, when this violence erupts—when the stone is thrown, when the grenade bursts, when the restaurant is bombed—it is absorbed back into the everyday, almost as unremarkable as the stifled fear that preceded it.

The film gestures constantly to the crisscrossing registers in which ‘Kashmir’ is pictured, saying a great deal about the politics of images, without spelling it out. A photo studio plays ‘Tareef karoon kya uski’ in the background, but the pretty girl whose pictures have been developed is mourning a lost lover. Rafiq’s friend posing like a hero elicits an angry remark about ‘tourist photos’ from a news photographer whom we have earlier seen haggling for a better price for his pictures. The famous 1948 Cartier-Bresson photograph of veiled Kashmiri women has someone ask if it is Afghanistan. A Delhi journalist’s smiling P2C about the arrival of mobile phones in Kashmir is just patronising enough to echo the Central government ‘gift’ she is documenting.

Bashir has made a film of great restraint, in which many things crying out to be said are left deliberately unspoken. In its slowed narration, its often silent contemplation of landscape and faces, its reduced dialogues and its use of symbols (the short-circuiting wire, the falling leaf, the lamb readied for slaughter), Harud seems inspired not so much by Iranian cinema as by the melancholy minimalism of the new Turkish cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (I was especially reminded of Distant) and Semih Kaplanoğlu.

It is not an easy film to watch, especially for the unaccustomed viewer—regardless of dialogues dubbed into Urdu/Hindi—but it is often a rewarding one.

First published on Firstpost.