Some of you might remember that I had promised to watch Guide, by Vijay Anand, the movie based on R.K. Narayan’s novel which I had reviewed here. I had been encouraged by a number of blog reviews, but I must say that I have been rather disappointed. I had already been slightly critical of the book, and suggested that the end was a little unsatisfactory, because it was ambiguous; but watching the film brought out all the strengths of the novel, and these in turn highlighted the simplified and romanticised defects of the movie. As Mohit Verma from IMDb says,  
“There are two perspectives you can have about this film: firstly if you're an R.K. Narayan buff and had read "The Guide" before watching the film just like me, you might just end up being a little disappointed. On the contrary if you have watched or the want to watch the film, only because of its face value or perhaps because of Dev Anand, then you would enjoy it considerably.”

I’m not an expert on Indian culture, so I have to say the film helped me to understand facts that I hadn’t understood in the book. For example, I hadn’t quite understood from the book that the very fact Rosie is a dancer means that she comes from that category of courtesan girls (see Philip's review on that). Respectable women were not supposed to dance in public. The story goes on to show the transformation of that popular art to a more acceptably aesthetic folkloric tradition, as intellectuals in mid XXth century India rediscovered and re-evaluated their national culture.

 
I don’t mind agreeing with the movie’s qualities that other reviewers have pointed out:  the acting, the staging and the shooting, as well as the beautiful songs by SD Burman. Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman are fine, even though I found Anand sometimes a little unsuited (his role as the swami) and Rehman occasionally bland. But then I had the fresh impression of the passionate book characters in my mind, and neither film characters are a match for those of the book, especially Rosie/Nalini, because in the film she’s has become so very conventional.

And because of the change concerning her, the story loses a great deal of its psychological interest. The novel’s fiery snake-woman has become a demure young woman, who loves dancing but also her Raju, who has been divorced by Marco who while up in the mountains philanders with a native girl (no such facilities in the novel!), and who does indeed at one point seem as if she’s fed up with Raju, but inexplicably goes back to him. In Narayan’s story, there is no concession to a return to the pre-lapsarian times when Raju saved Rosie. The writer makes him pay for his sins, and die without that rain which the film shows pouring down. In spite of the novel’s inconclusiveness, or perhaps partly because of it, the book reaches much further than the film. It speaks of a vanity, of an emptiness that is much more coherent than the extravagant film ending, with its ridiculous falsely-religious sets and speeches.

True, Dev Anand makes a good tourist guide, but his priest role is really poor. We don’t feel at all the progression that takes him from opportunistic role-playing to that half-genuine fatalism, which he understands at the end might finally be morally worthwhile. The “redeemed” Raju of the film is an orange-clad flamboyant hero which has nothing to do with the humiliated individual who feels he’s trapped himself into some silly game, and is slowly awakening to a sort of purposeful morality because he’s forced to do it.

What the film did clear up though, was the role of language, which is also one of the main points of the book. Raju’s secret to worldly success is his mastery of words. It is thanks to his glib and charming sense of humour, his clever persuasion, his rhetoric in short, that he achieves whatever he wants. Guiding means saying what people to hear.  

This skill worked with the station tourists, with Rosie of course, who was waiting for somebody to tell her that her dancing was fine, artistically and socially, and naturally with the villagers who make him into their Swami. What they needed was a soothsayer, and Raju is caught at his own trick. Simple and gullible as they are, they cannot understand the subtleties of irony and understatement. For them, evocatively-sounding sentences are symbolical and spiritual. They can’t imagine they might just be as shallow as the little stream near the temple.  

Narayan’s work is thus a meditation on the power of language, as well on its dangers. Language is the ambiguous vehicle of truth; if the listeners do not understand this ambiguity, they can easily be misled and duped. But the Indian author has masterfully imagined a situation in which the clever rhetorician is trapped by his art, and forced to confront a truth that he has been evading all his life. That truth is his own shallowness, and the novel shows what it has cost him: work and reputation, love and affection (his mother’s), and above all self-respect. Commodities which, after they are lost, Raju will not regain, contrary to what the film would like to believe. Instead he has to tread into the unknown territory of humiliation and frustration, far from the selfish satisfactions of the Guide-roles.  

Being a guide (the German has a chilling translation, “Führer”) is a very tempting role in society, especially if you’ve been trampled upon and humiliated during your childhood for example (as was the case for Raju in the book, hence the importance of that first part of the book, which the film doesn’t bother to adapt, not understanding its interest). Becoming a guide meant for Raju taking his revenge on his father who wanted to send him to school against his will, and against the menial social position where he came from. Having become a guide, he can now play with the rules of a society that has played a bad game with him by making him be born in that unjust position. Raju works his way through social injustice thanks to his art of manipulating others through language. Language is the civilisation Code that is supposed to reflect truth and connect all society thanks to this common reference. But language is essentially a double-sided instrument. It says the truth, but it can also say the untruth, and hide this untruth under the garments of truth. When he meets Rosie, another victim of social injustice (the film turns her into Raju’s “saviour”, something the book doesn’t do), it is a clash of two bodies without any soul-mating. Their separation is a corrupt fruit of Raju’s selfish ambitions and power-thirst. In order to save him (if he does get saved), Narayan imagines an ironical manipulation by the lowly equivalents of his own origin. Lowly he was, lowly he becomes. His ascent to glory and riches will have been but an illusion of guidance.

I’ll conclude by saying that if I enjoyed some aspects of the film, such as the dances, or the music, I regret the romanticization and the sweetening-up of the film. The book’s bitterness and nagging originality is still felt, probably, by spectators who haven’t read the novel, but one thing is sure: if you want the real thing, read The Guide.

Satyajit Ray’s 1955 “Song of the little road” is a quiet picture of little big events within a rural Bengali family, where the little happenings of childhood occur, and form that most profound event of any life: growing up. The film is part of a trilogy, the Apu trilogy; but I haven’t (yet) seen the other two films. Still, you can of course see Pather Panchali independently. I hadn’t yet seen anything like it before.
It’s a sort of haiku, those short Japanese poems famous for their purity and density. As one watches it, one is struck by the timelessness, the unfathomable simplicity and emptiness of what is shown. The impression is that the action is “so long ago”, in a time when everything was young, when life was poignant and still, like the lilies on a puddle reflecting the grey sky. The grown-ups are in their fretful world, an old aunt is stuggling in hers, and the children with their eyes wide open observe this world.

There is Durga, the startling woman-child, and Apu her wide-eyed little brother, 11 and 5, perhaps. A frequent silence surrounds their lives, which is filled with humour and games. And nature is all around, vaguely threatening, and yet familiar, and playground-like. As one inspired commentator puts it: “Pather Panchali" turns everyday childhood occurrences into wondrous events, whether it is brother and sister crossing the fields filled with white feathery rushes to see a train in the distance, a pursuit of the candy man, a Hindu feast, the wonders of the natural world, an ancient aunt telling bedtime stories to children.” (erwan_ticheler from Amsterdam, link).

This “ancient aunt” is a creation of her own. She’s played by “80-year-old Chunibala Devi, a retired theatre performer who relished coming back into the limelight after 30 years of obscurity” (Link) Physically, she’s an old blind bird, a witch, a harpy. But in fact she’s a friendly old crackpot, which can never harm anyone. Doubled-up, her hair strangely cropped short, as if punished for some ancient collaboration with the enemy, her mumblings full of humour and dignity (“can’t an old woman have her own whims?”), she is admitted at the house, and needs only the bare minimum. But even that is sometimes a strain.

As opposed to the worried mother, she’s the spirit of the poor household, the element of permanence and liberation from want.. She shares with the children an essential simplicity. Gleefully happy when she’s given stolen fruit that unlike everybody else she doesn’t scold Durga for having pilfered, she knows from lifelong experience that the poor have a right to the fruit of the Earth, wherever they are. But the household is so poor that one day she is sent away, again, and must gather her pauper’s belongings, to seek refuge in another house. We watch her shuffle away with her carpet under her arm, a wizened old hag with her holed-out eye-sockets, and we understand that her hosts have lost their god. When she comes back, it’s to die. And one of the most stunning scenes of the film is when she gently falls on the side, and her head bumps against the ground, with the sound of an empty hazelnut. And as she lies there, in front of Durga’s stare, she’s nothing more than a little bird’s corpse, ever so light, ever so free.

There is something difficult and painful in Pather Panchali; I think it’s the poverty, the stricken life that these people are forced to live and that we are forced to witness. One would like to help them, to give them something, but all we can do is receive Apu’s wide stare, and accept his mother’s anger and tired grief. We cannot change Durga’s thieving and lying habits, which poverty has ingrained in her. We cannot keep the husband and father close to his wife. If he goes away, in his carefree way, we understand that he too is the victim of forces beyond their (and our) reach. One must bear that poverty all along the film. It is there in the broken-down house, the scarce food, the angry neighbour, the gaunt faces of the dwellers, the doomed mother’s concern, the squalor of the yard, the relentless desire of children to eat, all the time. And of course, Durga’s tragedy, her death so young because she stayed out in the rain and caught a simple cold… And finally, the mother’s wail when she can no longer hide the truth from the father, who finally comes back with a little money after six months’ absence, but too late. His little family’s lives were too fragile to wait for him.

Yet there is something immensely joyful and serene in Ray’s film. I think it’s because of the children, the world of childhood, its innocence, its charm, its connection with nature. I enjoyed especially those scenes where the children in the woods, in the fields, on the country roads, with nature so much part of them, a nature that they know intimately, immediately. Another reviewer on Imdb writes:

“The film's structure seems to embody this duality between realism and the figurative. The first half is nearer to social realism, setting out the social hierarchies, introducing characters and their social or family role, defining them against other people, their home and nature. It is full of rich characterisation, even comedy, and full of set-pieces that reveal character and society.

The second half, however, becomes more abstract, even mystical. There is less reliance on words as characters go through strange rites where the emphasis is on observation or action. The nature that had been encroaching on civilisation spills over in these sequences, with stunning montages that recall Dovzhenko. The whole film feels slower, more meaningful and monumental (and sometimes duller). My favourite sequences are in this half, the discovery of the road and railway, the possibility of another life; the silent roaming through a beautiful, dwarfing landscape that recalls the mysticism of the Archers' 'A Canterbury Tale'. (Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from Dublin, link)

Indeed the delicate (and at the same time powerful) portrayal of childhood, and the feeling of timelessness, of natural eternity which it evokes, the fact that this eternity is nevertheless steeped in death and loss, the mystery of pain and poverty, all this so powerfully (yet simply) brought to our observation that one wonders: where has Ray “seen” all of it? How has he guessed at all that? All the more so as the film was his first! He has painted childhood, the way Sri Aurobindo evokes it: “After all, what is God? An eternal Child playing an eternal game in the eternal garden.” (link). Those of you who have seen the film, wouldn’t you say that we witness that mystical activity of an invisible godhead, present in the various characters, the fretful mother, the wily children, the old aunt, the dreaming father? I love the title of the film: Pather Panchali, Song of the little road: even if I don’t know why Bibhutibhushan Banerjee (who wrote the book that Ray has used) has chosen this title, for me it is full of the lightness, the gravity and the grace that the film and its music (Ravi Shankar) contain. In Apu’s eyes, I see that little song, in Durga’s revolt and sensuality, in the old aunt’s empty eyes and humourous remarks, and in the simple games of life shown as on the first day of Creation.
  

3 Dewaarein by Nagesh Kukunoor is a very good entertainer. Its construction is very clever, its rhythm flawless, the actors are truly first class, the suspense is exciting, the photography is excellent… One spends a very rewarding 120 minutes. But…it’s only entertainment. Now you’re going to tell me, what more do you expect from films? That’s what they’re for! Yes, but I have been used, at that level of excellence, to find a little bit more than entertainment. Let’s say, a certain amount of moral or social reflection, or a political statement, the director’s commitment to something else, precisely, than pure virtuosity and emotionality. Instead, I have that strange (even if enjoyable!) feeling of having watched a package which Bollywood is rather alien to, it seems to me: a psychologically brilliant entertainer but without any profound commitment. Like a good many Hollywood products, in fact. You leave the film almost unable to find anything to say about M. Kukunoor’s position concerning the problems of prisons, of justice, of the death penalty, of women, of violence in couples, etc. all of which are alluded to, but would have called for much more position-taking, especially in today’s India. 

Let’s take the example of the pressure Chandrika (Juhi Chawla, very lovely and pleasant) undergoes from the Minister of Justice, whose daughter was allegedly killed by Nagya (nice job from Nagesh Kukunoor, both actor and director here), who is her low-class boyfriend, and one of the three death-row prisoners which she comes to interview for a documentary. The minister comes to see her to ask for her footage of the prisoners, hoping to get an avowal which the court would need. In return, she’ll have an easy divorce, he says. His blackmail could have been the basis of an interesting criticism of the way justice works in India. It is, of course, but the episode doesn’t play a big role in the film; I’d say it’s a way to side-track the spectator, and prepare him for the surprise at the end.

Another (connected) sub-plot is the one that deals with the relations between Chandrika and her ruthless and machistic husband. There again, one could have expected a better treatment of this important question. She’s bullied by this man, and we understand that because of her long talks with Ishaan [1] (who is accused of having killed a bank-clerk pregnant with twins, and who theorises about the necessary respect a man owes his wife), that he has been inspirational when she finds the strength to stand up against her husband. Her empowerment grows with her understanding of Ishaan’s philosophy of life. Yet the end of the film seems to contradict this (rather scandalous, but in fact realistic) rapprochement. And we don’t know whether she has succeeded as far as her divorce is concerned. I have the feeling this is all done to create a complex psychological situation where what is important for the film-maker is this sheen of complexity, where his plot is steeped, and not the real social issue of violence in Indian couples (or elsewhere).

Entertainers which entertain and do nothing more are in general popular movies where the level of psychological realism is rather low. Countless love-stories and comedies have no other aim than to supply the spectator with the emotions he’s paid to be supplied with. But the conventionality of these movies is a signal that you aren’t to expect anything more. The goodies are good, the baddies bad, the plot is more or less clever, the humour, or the violence, more or less adapted. It’s escapism. If you can top it with a pleasantly-looking actress and/or hero, well, all the better. You know what you’re in for: and you’re not going to ask any commitment from such films.

What is surprising here is that Nagesh Kukunoor’s movie (and I wonder whether the same couldn’t be said for Dor, the other one by him I’ve seen) is narratively and psychologically very challenging, but one wonders what one will retain of it: sheer cinematographic quality (by which I mean plot, acting, and filming) is not enough. With such films, one would need to be fed at other levels too. I know it isn’t the case in many Western films, but I’ve been accustomed that Indian films do not separate the aesthetic stance and the moral/social one. And anyway, for me the artist should accept to have a social and a moral role. I think the best entertainers are those which succeed in joining a gripping story with an important teaching or an interesting message. Films by Ashutosh Gowariker, for instance, or Mani Ratnam, do that (to name two among the present directors). Of course I would respect artists that don’t share my point of view, but I can’t help regretting it!

I wonder if 3 Dewaarein doesn’t in fact use its own references to social and moral problems in order to give more weight to its cinematographic ambitions. Perhaps I shouldn’t go as far as to say that Kukunoor hasn’t any moral or social concerns. But these concerns are secondary compared to his cinematographic purposes. He is using an environment, a “reformation” prison, and a problem, that of innocent people condemned to the death penalty, but they are only ingredients of his plot: they don’t rise to the level of issues which he could have dealt with in a committed way (not necessarily forgetting the story-telling, of course). He does his films in order to entertain, and hardly to educate or to question the system.

One last example to illustrate my point: during his talks with Chandrika, Ishaan the charmer makes clever allusions to the fact that he is being filmed and that everybody is always more or less acting in life; this resonates with his pragmatic attitude towards honesty and responsibility: it sounds more profound than Nagya’s attitude that “truth will prevail”, or the third death-row’s inmate, Jaggu (Jackie Shroff, quite convincing), who has a romantic poet’s perspective on everything and is a fatalist. But I can’t really connect this clever simile to any message that the film would offer me. I have to be content with this cleverness, and accept not to put it to any practical purpose.

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[1] A mesmerizing – as always – Naseeruddin Shah, fantastic job.

To inattentive spectators this 1956 film starring Raj Kapoor will probably seem a little naïve and perhaps shoddy, for it has enough imperfections to justify a less than perfect opinion about it. Some inconsistencies here, some lengthy bits there, a humour that sometimes annoys, and a rather surprising ending, halfway between reality and fantasy. I must say that I was, and still am, determined to explore films with and by Raj Kapoor, and this one (not directed by him, but by Amit and Sombhu Mitra) did strain my patience at first. Even if Raj Kapoor does a hell of a job.

The storyline is very simple: one night, Mohan, a villager, arrives in town in search of work, and he’s thirsty. Bending down to drink from a public fountain, he gets chased away by a policeman, and has to try elsewhere. This time the tap is behind the gate of a block of buildings. The policeman spots him again, and the peasant, terrorised, runs in instead of out. He’s seen, and mistaken for a thief. From then on, he goes from flat to flat, trying to escape the angry inmates who are bent on finding him, and what starts out as a respectable civilian’s duty turns into a crazed manhunt.
 
First the initiatives are scattered, but soon they institute a local surveillance squad, much like what happened in Maoist China (or any collectivist state in the mid-XXth century), and give themselves the right even to trespass into people’s homes in order to find the felon – one might as well say: the anti-revolutionary.

 

Meanwhile, Mohan, who is always powerless and speechless (more about this in a minute) is a witness to the lives of the people whose flats he visits as hiding-places, and he is our guide to these superficially “normal” people’s lives. For under this respectable surface are hidden not just what he himself is wrongly accused of, i.e. stealing, but also deceiving, brutalising, bullying, all kinds of morally condemnable and even criminal behaviour, that go on without no one knowing or caring. Here a drunken husband blackmails his own wife into unclean attitudes to satisfy his lust, there a man tries to rob his wife to get money with which to bet on horses, and of course the biggest crime of all, an underground joint busy printing counterfeit money is revealed, in which false doctors are ready to kill any involuntary spies. From his hideouts, Mohan does what he can to stop the evil, but it’s stronger than him. Humour and fooling doesn’t always win!

What’s interesting is that, as the story moves on, there is more and more focus and suspense. Mohan is finding it more and more difficult to hide, and even if funny episodes light up the search (Raj Kapoor hobbling along in the barrel… A distant forerunner of R2D2!), the general tone is one of anguish: he is trapped anyway; it’s just a matter of time before they get him. He can run, climb, hide: they know he’s in the building, and he’s overtaken by the sheer numbers. That’s frightening, by the way: the way a crowd can be brainstormed into believing they’re still doing the same morally good thing, as if they were one or two people. They don’t realise that when you are a crowd, the nature of the accusation changes. The supposedly guilty person’s defence shrinks in function of the numbers of his accusers. The more people are convinced of a man’s guilt, the harder it is for that man to defend himself, or even to believe he’s innocent, if he is innocent.

I’ve read that the film should be looked upon as an allegory, “where the darkness is the cloak of respectability under which a city supposedly sleeps but thrashes around in the throes of crime and evil.” (back of my Yashraj films DVD box) Yes, all this is true. But better than an allegory, I’d say you have to look at the movie as a filmed dream, or a nightmare, rather. Then it all makes sense. The lengthy and naïve passages are the exasperating moments of childish powerlessness which dreamers experience; Mohan’s speechlessness and lack of understanding; his constant panicky attitudes are the typical dreamer’s quandary. Shut up in a story which he cannot modify, he tries to escape, only to fall into another trap. Sometimes there is a lull, and then a new twist projects him deeper into the nightmare. Everybody looks the same, are dressed the same, the corridors of this huge block of flats are all the same, as are the doors, windows, staircases. The maze of which he a prisoner is in his head, and all he can do is wrench his hands to beg somebody, anybody, to stop the infernal machine. The film’s title “Jagte raho”, which means “Stay awake” is clearly a call not only to the morally asleep who have forgotten the clear light of virtue, but also to us spectators who should be jolted into realising that Mohan’s nightmare is happening because of our sleep. Mohan is our conscience, struggling from the layers of our Unconscious to emerge in the daylight and free us from our shackles. Our lives are often full of subtle lies, of delicate arrangements with our conscience, of elaborate constructions to hide to ourselves the hypocrisy of our double-standards! Who has never been tempted to trick his own conscience?  

Mohan is speechless throughout the film, so when he does speak, it’s a shock. He does so when cornered on the roof, between the bloodthirsty crowd armed with the sticks of rightful punishment, their eyes injected with the desire of a victim, and the void, ten or so floors below. This recovered voice is a sign that here the dream ends, that the sleeper wakes up, and when he shouts his anguished cry to all of us, he is at that moment revealing to us the recesses of our own souls. It’s a sort of psychoanalytical process, healthily violent, which is taking place: the springing forth of speech shows that there has been a shock in the mind, and that a watershed has been passed. The dawn is that of exposure, of truth. What was hidden now comes to light: beneath the respectable surface of citizenship and worthiness, there is gaping hole, full of vermin; instead of the righteous solidarity against all evil, there is the tyrannical enrolment of mimesis and prejudice; and Jesus’ words resonate in the bright and empty morning: “do not judge, and ye shall be judged”; “why do you see the speck of dust in your fellow man’s eye, and never notice the plank that is in yours?” (I mention Jesus here because at one stage Mohan is stuck on a Cross-like pipe up in the air, and being lapidated from below, and one stone breaks a nearby window, revealing a crucifix). 

The end is mysterious, but in its mystery, it has the simplicity of vision. The child who wipes the blood and dirt off his face, the swooning, the magic door that opens on to a garden (editor's clever work), the walk through the crowd of his former enemies, as if he was now invisible, and at the temple, the virgin fountain-bearer who recognises him,  and quenches his thirst: the symbolical allegory is clear of course, and I won’t reduce its charm by interpreting it further. Let me just suggest that it is bathed in the gospel light which shone on Easter morning, and can still shine on the souls that wish never to be thirsty again, “for the water which I will give them will become a spring of water inside them, always welling up to give them eternal life” (John 4,14)


And it's Nargis (absent from the film otherwise), who is in charge of pouring that water of life on the vagabond.