Drives with a view

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Two films set in taxis -- one a 2019 documentary, the other a cult classic from thirty years ago -- offer a great ride through a bumpy world.

A still from Philipp Majer's 2019 documentary World Taxi

Films take you travelling; that has always been true. In our Coronavirus era, when real travel is hard to come by, it is even more so -- magnifying the attractions of the road movie. In the ongoing digital edition of the Urban Lens film festival, I watched a documentary called World Taxi that's like five road movie snippets rolled into one. German filmmaker Philipp Majer lets you travel to five cities in five different time zones, each one with a different taxi driver as your guide.

Each segment offers insights into a particular part of the world, but also into the world of cab drivers everywhere.

“Your taxi is like your second wife,” says Tony, who drives a cab in Bangkok, Thailand. “If you don't take care them, they not going to take care you.” Majer doesn't link Tony's metaphorical comment up with it, but Mamadiou – the taxi driver he films in Dakar, Senegal – is actually thinking of getting a second wife. In one incredible sequence, Mamadiou actually mentions this flirtatiously with a carload of female passengers, suggesting that he might be interested in marrying the younger woman present. This leads into a full-fledged discussion, with gendered home truths flying right, left and centre. “If she [the first wife] senses that I am wooing another one, she might come back to normal,” says Mamadiou. “How will she sense it, though?” says one of the older women. “Some men have a bit on the side without the woman noticing.” “Ah, then the woman lacks intuition,” says the younger woman.

Connections also emerge between unexpected countries – like the USA and Kosovo, a much smaller territory that only declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008. Despite the vast gulf in their histories of democracy and economic status, health in both places appears to be a thing that people can't afford to pay for. In recently war-torn Kosovo, cab driver Destan Mjeqiki keeps a file full of newspaper cuttings of natural home remedies as possibilities “for people who don't have money”. Meanwhile, the cab driver Sergio in El Paso, Texas, operates in an economy where middle class people have no health insurance, which means they often go across the border to Mexico to get cheaper medical treatment than they can in their own -- technically much more developed – country.

In an online conversation with Indian documentary filmmaker Shabani Hassanwalia, Majer said that he was trying to make a non-fiction version of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 cult film Night on Earth. Majer's film has plenty of energy, but it's scattered, and feels almost slight in comparison to Jarmusch's. Other than Berlin (which gives us the documentary's only female cab driver, the wonderfully steady Bambi, who must often refuse come-ons from drunken post-clubbers), Majer shoots in places where the economy and politics are on some sort of edge. Jarmusch's film is shot entirely in European and American cities, and in a very different time. Perhaps 1991 felt as unstable as our own times in some ways, but from the distance of three decades it appears marvellously stable. Even the rule-less-ness of that time feels like some quasi-mythical truth: when the New York native persuades his lost immigrant driver to let him drive the cab instead, the driver balks and says it's not allowed. “Yeah, it's allowed,” drawls the passenger. “This is New York!”

And yet this is already a universe filled with immigrants, people forced to live and work in places a world away from where they grew up. Jarmusch's approach isn't overtly political, and it's certainly not woke in any tick-the-boxes sort of way. Instead, his juxtapositions provoke thought. The Black Brooklyn man, for instance, laughs loudly and long at his East German cab driver because he hears his name – Helmut -- as Helmet. “That's like being called Lampshade,” he guffaws. When Helmut asks him his name, it turns out it's YoYo.

Helmut is a clown – he actually worked as a clown in Dresden. But bemused as he is, he has something to teach us about listening. Meanwhile the cab driver who doesn't listen – Roberto Benigni in the Rome segment, which contains the broadest comedy of the five – can literally kill off a passenger.

A still from Jim Jarmusch's 1991 film Night on Earth, with five segments set in five taxis across the world

As anyone who's taken taxis knows, there are drivers who listen, and others who talk. Sometimes, rarely, they do both, turning taxi rides into that unusual intimate thing: a conversation with a stranger.

Jarmusch's brilliantly written set of vignettes starts with sunset in Los Angeles, where a rather surprised older woman (the unmatchable Gena Rowlands) gets into a cab driven by a rather young Winona Ryder, and learns that it's possible to be perfectly, undisturbably happy with your perfectly ordinary life. In Paris, two pompous Cameroonians learn that mocking your taxi driver, even if he has the same colour of skin as you and you address him as your “little brother”, doesn't serve you well. But also in Paris, the taxi driver learns that being blind isn't the same as not seeing. Conversations with strangers always teach you things – usually about yourself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Dec 2020.

Art stops at nothing

A short feature for India Today magazine.

Displaying work created during the lockdown, a virtual initiative proves the pandemic won’t stymie art.

As the weeks of India’s coronavirus lockdown dragged into months, many of those privileged enough to isolate started to chafe at the bit. But not artists. Almost all those involved in Art Alive Gallery’s #ArtForHope initiative confess that their working lives are less disrupted than most people’s. Virus or no virus, visual artists are so used to days spent in splendid isolation that they exhibit few signs of cabin fever.

Many of the senior names, Krishen Khanna (b. 1925), Maite Delteil (b. 1933), Sakti Burman (b. 1935), Gopi Gajwani (b. 1938) and Jogen Chowdhury (b.1939), had already retreated from the hubbub of gallery openings and art fairs. They are devoting themselves to work with enviable focus and often childlike enthusiasm. Gajwani, for instance, has been drawing after many years, describing these solitary times with impish humour. In one of his drawings, a man at his window ignores a curious crow and an expectant dog. In another, a man has tied himself into a knot: a large ball of thread that rolls on even as he tries to unravel it. In a third, a painter baulks at the sight of his own easel, like it is a mirror.

Others, too, speak of the lockdown as a time of greater reflection. “As artists, we like our solitude,” painter Jayasri Burman says on the phone. “Yes, first I was confused, I was crying. What is this coronavirus? What will happen? Artistically, I responded as I had during the tsunami and 9/11. I started making abstract drawings. They’re like my private diary. I might show that work some day, but not now.” Burman, who draws on the Indian epics and myths for her jewel-like canvases filled with dreamy women, says she settled down when the Navaratras began. “I painted Durga, who is important to me. Then I came back to my Dharitri, the universe,” she says. Like her goddesses who often shelter other creatures even as they are themselves sheltered, by the multi-headed Shesh Nag, trees filled with birds, or cornucopias of lotuses, her current work is a world map on a sea of blue, protected by mandala-like rings of ducks and fish. “Nature is now protesting. And she decides how she will clean up,” Burman says. “All we can do is maintain harmony and try to improve. Humans need to learn that you cannot take any panga with nature.”

Several artists have responded to the unseeable threat by envisioning the virus. Kolkata-based Chandra Bhattacharya, who speaks of a constant “uneasy feeling” during these months, offers up the image of a man emerging from a tunnel, a flaming blue torch in his hand, the virus blooming, or being conquered?

Debasish Mukherjee’s series of inky blobs with ragged edges seem to suggest the virus is embodied in other human beings: now faceless, now utterly real.

Jogen Chowdhury extends his distinctive visual vocabulary of men and beasts to create drawings in which the human figure cowers in the face of a demonic presence that is all claws and tongues.

But in ‘Corona Vs Man-Man Vs Corona I’, the creature who holds up the virus for examination has turned into a beast himself, ridges running down his back.

US-based Tara Sabharwal, who is recovering from (untested) pneumonia, has been doing ink drawings of “menacingly beautiful cellular creatures in armour, with jelly-like frightened interiors”.

“The way to keep hope alive is to actually feel this moment... It is so heavy, it gets one down. But to run away from it would be to not be able to go to the next step,” says Sabharwal.

SIDEBAR: "THIS IS NOT A WAR"
 

Krishen Khanna is 95 and still paints daily. “It’s like a demon inside me that wants it,” he says on the phone. “I have been through more than one migration, seen how people are forced to live in new situations. And this is not new, pushing people around: think Tughlaq. But this is probably the worst.”

Born in Faisalabad in what is now Pakistani Punjab, Khanna was a schoolboy in England during World War II and his vivid memories of war and Partition offer sobering comparison and perspective.

“The people in charge are still talking of winning the “battle” against coronavirus. As if it is a war. But it is not. This is our overreach. We are the sole generators of this. There is a need for re-examination of the human spirit.”

Published in India Today magazine, 6 June 2020.

The Krishen Khanna sidebar appeared in the same spread, in print. 

Home viewing in times of quarantine

My Mirror column:

Everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home

It’s the third week of lockdown in India, and quarantine is having an odd effect on my film viewing. I don't know if it’s me, or the universe conspiring in some strange serendipity, but almost everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home. Home is a place where you feel safe – until you don’t. The other day, on a popular streaming platform, I stumbled upon Darren Aronofsky’s much-discussed (and frequently dissed) Mother! (stylised as mother!), a film I had missed when it came out in 2017. In the talky aftermath of the film’s release, Aronofsky went to some lengths to ‘explain’ his spooky, eventually grisly film as a Biblical allegory for the rape and torment of ‘Mother Earth’ by ‘God’, while other characters stand in for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

I have to confess that the Judaeo-Christian analyses baffled me, because I found Mother! entirely intelligible (all right, not entirely!) as a film about domesticity and its dangers. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a couple living in a large and glorious old house. He spends all his time as writers often do, failing to write, while she cooks and cleans and continues the laborious process of restoring the unfinished house. Lawrence is an unbelievable combination of picture-perfect and extremely hands-on: her flowing hair piled into an artfully messy bun as she mixes new shades of wall paint, or conjures up meals that her husband pronounces “perfect” while making polite noises about how she didn’t have to make so many things. The dynamic between them is strained; her obsession with a private paradise is clearly not sparking his creativity. The more she tries to create the perfect space in which the two of them can live happily ever after, the more avidly he tries to invite the outside world in.

The first to arrive is a man who claims to be a great fan of the man’s previous book. Then his wife, his squabbling sons, and then more and more strangers arrive, until the house is overrun. As the ‘guests’ go from admiring and raucous to irresponsible and downright dangerous, the film walks a brilliant tightrope between possible ways in which we might see this. Is the woman overly anxious, closed off and selfish and the man generous, open, free-flowing? Or is he the selfish one, and she the victim? A pandemic that has us all panicking at the idea of strangers in our homes seemed to me to throw Mother! into a whole new light.

Then the night before last, on another streaming platform, I watched a Japanese film called Domains, directed by Natsuka Kusano. The 2019 film is a marvellous formal experiment that likely isn’t for everyone. A mild-mannered policeman reads out the confession of a woman called Aki who has drowned her old friend’s little daughter. From there, we move on to a series of scenes in which three actors – playing the woman, her friend and her friend’s husband – repeatedly rehearse the lines for what might be the film. Except, of course, this is the film.

For some two and a half hours, we almost never leave the bare room in which the actors sit. When we do, what we see is a near-empty city: roads almost free of traffic, a strangely quiet metro.

A more uncanny resonance with our time comes from the characters’ preoccupation with creating a space in which they feel safe. “Nodoka seemed stifled to maintain the comfort of the house. Naoto, on the other hand, treasured his home so much that he seemed to be keeping everyone out except his family,” remembers Aki. The ‘domain' created by the couple and their daughter is, for Aki, a rival to the one she shared with Nodoka in childhood, a magical “kingdom of chairs and sheets” that only the two of them could enter.

The husband, Naoto, on the other hand, feels visibly threatened by Aki’s being so at home with his wife. When he tells Aki to stop coming over because his daughter has caught a fever in her excitement, Aki responds angrily: “So you think I'm some kind of virus, don’t you?”

Naoto regulates everything, from his wife’s smoking to the humidity and temperature of the house. “I do want to feel safe. I need to protect my family,” he says peevishly. And yet, safe is exactly what they are not in the end. Control can backfire, just as much as openness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Apr 2020

Social maladies

My Mirror column:

Two films about contagious infections, in the starkly different milieus of the USA and Kerala, point to the cracks in which a virus can really make a home.

 
Films about pandemics have catapulted to unprecedented fame in the last two months, as people across the globe seek out fictional material that resonates in the age of Covid-19. Two of the better films available to stream online in India are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller Contagion, where a highly infectious fictional new virus makes its way from Hong Kong to the USA, and Aashiq Abu’s 2019 Malayalam film Virus, which depicts how the state of Kerala dealt with the outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018.

In both films, one is constantly struck by the use of terms that most of us are only beginning to learn – “incubation period”, “treatment protocol”, “index patient”. Both films deal with zoonotic viruses that have entered the human body from animals, and the fear factor derives from the fact that the scientific situation we are dealing with is not just new, but unknown – and therefore extremely difficult to predict. In an early scene in Contagion, the scientist working on a vaccine seems to almost marvel at the novel virus. “It's still changing," she tells the head of the Centre for Disease Control, Dr Ellis Cheever. "It's figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out.”

“It doesn’t have anything else to do,” says Dr Cheever, looking unimpressed.

It’s a droll little moment in a relentlessly grim film, but you barely register the comment as dry humour because you’re too busy registering it as fact. Contagion makes it very clear that human beings are on the back foot here. Unlike the virus, we have a great deal to do if we’re to protect the species from the deathly microscopic foe – and from ourselves.

For there are two seemingly contradictory facts about human beings that both Virus and Contagion make visible. First, that the virus piggybacks on the existence of community: the fact that human beings live with each other, and don't seem to know quite how to do without. Second, that human beings are quick to suspect each other, and the way the virus can really conquer is if our leaders choose to divide and rule.

Contagion opens with an off-screen cough that may or may not have had the same chilling effect in 2011 that it does now. In 2020, we are more than primed to watch the film’s opening sequence of people going about their closely proximate urban lives as a series of dangerous acts – pressing elevator buttons in public places, clutching the same steel pillar on the metro that a thousand other hands have clutched, sitting next to each other on planes, in stations, at bar counters, in hotel casinos. Kate Winslet, playing an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer called Dr Mears, has the job of contact tracing – finding out who the first American casualty, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), may have met and infected in the days before her death, and thus hoping to prevent the further spread of the virus.

Virus unfolds in a less transnational context, but contact tracing is very much at the centre of the narrative. A medical volunteer called Annu (Parvathy) conducts a painstaking investigation, following up with patients and their friends and family members to try and establish the links between seemingly unconnected cases. She is aided in her task by Kerala’s fairly well-organised administration – the fact that there are tickets given out at government hospital, for instance – and by increasingly ubiquitous technology – the presence of time-stamps on mobile phone photos, for instance. But what is really striking about the film’s depiction of the process is not just Parvathy’s sharp instincts, but her sensitivity.

In fact, sensitivity is what distinguishes the actions of almost all those who populate Aashiq Abu’s film: doctors and nurses most of all, but drivers and attendants, and because this is Kerala, even ministers and bureaucrats.

If Contagion maps all the ways in which an infectious disease can bring out our worst selves as a society – people profiteering off potential fake cures, panicked hoarding of goods that creates grocery store shortages, stampedes and food riots – Virus suggests that it is also possible to combat our fears. The mother of a young man who has died is surprised that Annu is willing to have tea in her house. The ration delivery for her place is now dropped off on the road, with the driver honking before leaving. When a crematorium is chosen for the last rites of Nipah patients, villagers in the vicinity block the road in fear. But a set of volunteers is found to conduct the rites elsewhere. In a revealing conversation, the district magistrate says that enforcing the cremation through the use of police force would have been the easiest thing to do – but the point is to try and do it without. Even the debate about whether it is unsafe to bury the bodies of virus-affected patients is conducted without rancour or religious fervour, and resolved with the scientifically approved solution of deep burial.

As an ill-prepared India waits for whatever is to come in the next few weeks and months, we have a socio-political climate that tragically encourages the well-off to turn away from the poor, while turning Muslims into scapegoats by testing the participants of one ill-advised religious gathering rather than all those that have taken place. Watching Virus makes it clear that we will sink or swim based on our ability to allay each others' fears and suspicions, not stoke them.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 April 2020

The Viewfinder: Shyam Benegal

A short profile for Tehelka's 'Elixir of Life' issue in 2009.

SHYAM BENEGAL

Age: 75

Profession: Award-winning filmmaker credited with introducing ‘middle cinema’ in India

Secret worry: A young well-to-do generation that functions without a sense of history

SHYAM BENEGAL’s model old person is a contemporary of his mother-in-law’s. “She’s wonderful. She’s 93 and she travels entirely by herself, flying to California to see her son and then Europe to visit friends. She can discuss the latest movie, she loves gossip,” he says with genuine admiration. “You don’t have to make a special effort to include her in the conversation. That is how one would want to be.” But Benegal, who turns 75 this December, is realistic. “It’s not something given to everyone. So many things are not in your hands, just physically. But we human beings are blessed with one thing – optimism.”

“When you’re young, you certainly don’t see older people and think of yourself as them. Intimations of mortality are constantly there – it’s romantic and dramatic [to think of death]. But ageing is something people block their minds against,” he smiles. “Even now, I don’t see myself as ageing – only as adding years to my life. It’s only when one attempts to leap across a puddle that one suddenly feels, uh-oh, it’s not happening like it used to.” He blames his ulcers on a cavalier attitude when he was younger (“you know, who needs breakfast, and so on”), one he has since abandoned for a practical understanding of what he needs to avoid to stay healthy. Within limits, of course. “I still enjoy my drink and savour my food. I want to try out a new restaurant as much as the next person.”

A champion swimmer in his days at Hyderabad’s Nizam College, Benegal once captained his state team. Nowadays, he’s rueful about not exercising as much as he thinks he should. He tries to go for a walk daily, at the Mahalaxmi Race Course when he’s in Mumbai and in Lodhi Gardens when he’s in Delhi to attend the Rajya Sabha (he’s a nominated MP). But what really keeps Benegal fighting fit is cinema. After the success of last year’s superb Welcome to Sajjanpur, he’s now ready with Well Done Abba, “a political satire” inspired by two short stories (‘Narsaiyyan Ki Bavdi’ by Jeelani Bano and ‘Phulwa Ka Pul’ by Sanjeev). Well Done Abba has just travelled to the Montreal Film Festival, and releases in October. More than that, he’s excited about new filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj, and young writers like Ali Sethi.

“There are still so many books to read, movies to see,” he says. “Where’s the time to think about time?”

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 37, Dated September 19, 2009