Touch of class

A look at the films that were on offer at the international film festival of the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images, underlines the importance of the script. Unless, of course, one happens to be Jean-Luc Godard, says GOWRIRAM NARAYAN.

DO you know that the cult film "Breathless" (1960) was made without a storyboard? Jean-Luc Godard has his own working method which "exalts the inspiration of the moment." This simply means improvising as he goes along, suspending the shoot for days if he cannot come up with ideas. And no script, sir!

The ancient Indian aesthetician theorised that only genius can convert dosha (flaw) into guna (virtue). At the international film festival of the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI, November 23-30), I realised that if you are not Godard, you can't do without a good script. Film makers may vary in their school and style, but without a good screenplay, chances of precision and sharp focus are slim. And experimental fare requires much more clarity than routine box office stuff, which can take a lot for granted in the viewer.

Look at the early Shantaram films. What bold scripts they had! What thought, content and emotional charge! You saw the same attributes in a different context and format in the initial Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani films. More recently, and despite the whizzbangs of technology, sensitive film makers have known that the screenplay is the backbone of every production, traditional or avant garde.

You note that in the straightforward narrative of "Bread and Roses" (Dir: Ken Loach, U.K) depicting the plight of janitors in the highrise corporate blocks in downtown Los Angeles. You see the siblings Rosa and Maya, who have left Mexico to work as cleaners in the glossy city, at the mercy of heartless employers, along with other poor, semi-literate immigrants. The younger lot have dreams for the future but not the old, who inhale despair and fear with every breath.

Maya is all fired up by white, college-educated activist Sam, and his promise of changing their lives with trade union benefits, but not before some of the workers pay a bitter price. She is shocked to learn exactly what demeaning battles of survival prompted Rosa to turn traitor to the cause. She indulges in theft to pay her colleague's college fees on time, so that his future may not be irreparably damaged due to the lay off. While co- workers celebrate their victory in the "Justice for Janitors" campaign, Maya is deported as a criminal.

The title is from a banner of a 1912 struggle in Massachusetts. But, instead of the clatter of slogans, writer Paul Laverty goes for the right word at the right moment, bristling with the resonance of the subtext, with ample scope for visual expressiveness. Nothing is overstated, drama never becomes melodrama. Rage, anguish and humiliation are alternated with humour, hope and tender love. In the process, they gain authenticity. Individuality is not sacrificed in a collective lumping of workers. Each emerges with voice and shape intact, buckling down, or incredibly heroic under pressure.

Some scripts allow the visual and the aural imagination to explore far beyond what is actually seen and heard. Below the tip, the iceberg looms vast, dense, menacing. At the MAMI open forum, Israeli director/screenwriter Yitzakh Rubin regretted that strong scripts and good acting, so vital to film making, had been lost in aping the West. But not in his own "White Lies", a hushed, gut-wrenching document of our fragmented, befuddled, guilt-torn age. Narration seems to come in fits and starts, but it has a continuity of its own, which you can overlook if you are not careful.

And if you thought you have seen all there is to the holocaust movie, "White Lies" will surprise you by its unsentimental, ruthless honesty in showing how the children of the holocaust sufferers are fed up and resentful about being expected to give special treatment to their elders, how they would like to forget that history, and get on with their own present day traumas. (The daughter's very stance before the row of family pictures proclaims her revulsion for the past).

The holocaust-surviving mother immigrates to Israel because "Who knows when another Hitler may rise in the land of the gentiles?"

But her children run away - son Yesuda to fail in playwrighting and a love affair in France; daughter Zilla to the U.S. from where, when she learns that her mother is terminally ill with cancer, she launches into a diatribe against Israeli doctors for unprofessionalism and inefficiency, ending with "Tell me just before and I'll come." And Yesuda asks quietly, "Before what?"

The son conceals his own problems, and nurses his mother with devotion, pretending that she is suffering from nothing more than mild tuberculosis. The director is not afraid of long silences and inconsequential talk, which mount in intensity as do the lies. Rarely have I watched a more chilling scene than when the crotchetting mother recollects Auschwitz, its hair raising horror summed up in wispy, slivered phrases. "The best went, the worst survived."

The music haunts you, so do the characters, none minor even in brief appearance. The mother dies with her son's name on her lips, and the son seeks asylum in a mental institute. Zilla visits him to say seemingly carelessly, "Did mother mention me?" As the brother replies, "Her last words were Zilliska and Yesudale" the credit titles begin to roll with a flash of "White Lies". And you think, this film has been made with instinct, not craft.

It was instructive to compare the two films by Rituparno Ghosh, often hailed as Satyajit Ray's successor. "Utsab" depicts frictions, overt and covert, simmering in a family reunion of three generations during Durga Puja. As always, Ghosh draws heavily from Bengali cult figures, Tagore and Ray. There is self- reflexivity as well, with a grandson video-recording the get together, his frolicsome humour at variance with the tone of the main film. Despite some striking, touching, disturbing moments, "Utsab" fails to satisfy. The script has uneven, flaccid and self-conscious patches, especially in dealing with the troubled relationship between daughter Keya and her husband.

What makes "Bariwali" a work of art is the greater maturity of perception, plus the flash of intuition which illuminates the whole. Kiron Kher gives a bravura performance as the middle-aged protagonist Banalata, who has not entirely lost her allure, despite having been run down and reclusive for decades. She suddenly confronts the outside world in the director who persuades her to let him use her crumbling mansion for his film based on a Tagore novel. But once the task is finished, maker and crew move on, leaving her forgotten, "used" advantageously in their selfish pursuit of creativity. Only the art director remembers to send her photographs of the small scene in which she was persuaded to act, and which has been cut in the final version.

The brilliant script (Rituparno Ghosh) leaves nothing hanging. Every situation and character is in place, significant in itself, contributing to the texture of the entire film. The same motifs - a camera within the camera, both recording different stories, and there's lots of warm self deprecatory humour in dealing with the art film director, as of Bengali icons Ray and Tagore.

The nuances are natural, fine-tuned, and quite amazing in their variability. For example, Banalata's jealousy of the director's wife, and of the film star with whom he had a relationship in the past, are subtly differentiated by Kher, only because the script guides her to find those distinctions. The script also makes the derelict mansion a visual extension of the protagonist's persona in ways straightforward and devious. In short, the screenplay imbues the visual expression with depth, density and echoic resonance.

Finally, a word about acclaimed Malayalam writer M. T. Vasudevan Nair's "Oru Cheru Punchiri" (A Slender Smile). This depicts a couple who have managed to retain their zest for life and to stay deeply in love through 50 years of marriage. Nair disarmingly explained that since his own work is invariably darksome, he had to resort to somebody else's story to evoke the humour he wanted in the film, in this case "Mithunam" from Telugu. The film keeps everything simple - location, characters, relationships and life perspectives. Certain aspects are simplistic as well, such as the solution to the grand daughter's desire for an inter religious marriage. The visualisation is no more than what is pleasing. But this does not preclude genuineness.

Why? Because the script has the fine detailing of a short story. The characters breathe, speak and act with an uncontrived naturalness. "Oru Cheri Punchiri" carries conviction. It is a writer's film.

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Section  : Entertainment