It’s
now more than a month since I was drenched,
like others, in the deluge of Chokher Bali.
I apologise for putting my response on record
somewhat belatedly; but I’ve been waiting
for the tide to recede. My concern is not
so much with the film’s fidelity to
the book (Tagore himself was one of the first
to suggest that cinema, to come into its own,
must become independent of the literary) but
with its own language.
The
venue at which I saw the film is the Priya
Cinema, that old haven for South Calcutta
outings. The morality of community is, you
feel in the darkness of the hall, a thin veneer;
and it was as absorbing to observe the old
women and daughters-in-law in the audience
as it was to watch the ones in the film. The
audience here is seldom absolutely silent;
and, for a while, I kept confusing the sounds
in the audience with the background noise
on the soundtrack. At one point, I thought
the ‘madman’ from Nandan cinema
(I use scare quotes because he is probably
sane), the one who wanders like a dervish
singing Rabindrasangeet – at one point
I thought he was in the auditorium. Then I
realised that the loud singing, heard in snatches
behind the conversation, was, like many other
noises, coming from the film; it was part
of the perpetual ‘elsewhere’ that
surrounded the characters.
The
constant presence of background noise in Chokher
Bali is, I think, one of its many instances
of homage to Satyajit Ray; and, like the other
instances, its purpose seems partly parodic.
These acts of homage, for example, are very
different from Ray’s own homage to Jean
Renoir. Ray lovingly translated the party
games played by the French haute bourgeoisie
in a country manor in La Regle du jeu into
the antics of a group of Calcutta Bengalis
in a forest officer’s bungalow in Aranyer
Din Ratri; or, more directly, reworked the
astonishing scene with a woman on a swing
in Une partie de campagne into the one in
Charulata. Ghosh’s quotations of Ray
– Binodini on a swing, or staring through
binoculars; the long verandahs of Mahendra’s
house – are not homage, really. They
are more like a domestication, a taming, of
some of Ray’s most liberating moments
in the extravagant and slightly wild palace
of Chokher Bali; here, in this palace, these
moments, like cockatoos or imported eunuchs,
are neither at home and nor do they have anywhere
else to go to; they sit around with an air
of foreignness and ostentatiousness that they
never possessed in their original habitat.
One
is never, in India, completely alone. Even
as I write this, I can hear hammering, birdcall,
and, further away, traffic. I first became
aware of the auditory dimension of our lives
on visits home from England; perhaps it takes
an outsider to hear that perennial punctuation
of sound. The first filmmaker to capture that
mysterious, irreducible noise was a Frenchman,
Renoir, in the lovely, underrated The River.
It’s there that the auditory possibilities
of elsewhere - the cry of a bird, the whistle
of a steamboat - are captured in a living
archive for the first time. It’s from
this film, I believe, that Renoir’s
Bengali acolyte (Ray attended its filming
in Bengal) inherited his ear for the semi-audible
sound in the next street, or beyond the river
or the railway tracks.
Ghosh’s soundtrack at first seems in
Ray’s lineage; but we soon discover
that its impact is quite different. It never
takes us to that ‘beyond’, or
provides that sense of fading distance; instead,
it returns us firmly to the primary site of
our experience: the cinema hall. No bird ever
chirped as unstoppably as the ones in the
film; the ‘madman’ from Nandan
keeps weaving his way back; for no clear reason,
we suddenly hear the sound of the muezzin.
The effect of this soundtrack is to abolish
distance, and to parody, rather than suggest,
the notion of ‘life’; to create
a vast interiority
During
the intermission, I decided that Chokher
Bali is a ‘Raj’ film; not
so much Charulata as The Jewel in the Crown.
This has not only to do with the mysterious
cameo played by an Englishwoman, or with the
babbling about tea, or with Binodini’s
encounters with chocolate, nuns, and the English
language. Tagore’s novel is set in the
period of the Raj, and is probably subtly
inlaid with the experience of colonialism.
But ‘Raj’, in the sense I mean
it, is a cultural temper invented in the nineteen
eighties; it is the stirrings of nostalgia,
in a newly globalising world, for Indian colonial
history as a heritage site. The first half
of the film was, I thought, suffused with
the pastel shades of that special nostalgia;
and both Tagore and 19th-century Bengal had
become, in the film, elements in a heritage
landscape that’s no more than a quarter
of a century old.
The
second half of the film, with its adulterous
love-bites and scratches (a friend said to
me that Ghosh displays, in the film, only
a dim idea of heterosexual lovemaking), its
separations and personal calamities –
the second half is another affair altogether.
After watching it, my preferred adjective
for the style of the film is ‘operatic’.
By ‘operatic’ I mean a unique
artistic practice and experience in which
both kitsch and the mythic come together.
This is probably especially true of early
opera, which the young Nietszche derided as
‘bourgeois spectacle’. But it
is still a characteristic of much opera; opera
is almost the only art-form that can make
a private sexual scandal the stuff of both
overblown entertainment and mythopoeic transport.
Something similar happens in Ghosh’s
Chokher Bali; eschewing Tagore’s
delicate and humane psychologizing, it deliberately
gives us a spectacle that is larger than life.
Those who go to it looking for light and shade,
and complexity, are looking for them in the
wrong place; light and shade are inimical
to the experience I’ve called ‘operatic’.
A
few reflections on Aishwarya Rai. People use
the word ‘beautiful’ to describe
her, but I’m not sure in which sense
they’re using a word that has a long
and contradictory history. I don’t want
to load this discussion with the moral and
non-utilitarian values the word ‘beauty’
has had; but I think we need to find a term
other than ‘beautiful’ to describe
Rai’s very contemporary, and telling,
appeal. Perhaps her most ardent admirers are
the new beneficiaries of globalisation; the
people who covet Jaguar (or is it Jaquar?)
bathroom fittings, and dream of their cars
metamorphosing into tigers; who like to discover
a bit of ancient Rome in their back garden,
and Venus de Milo busts in hotel lobbies.
She is one of the means by which Ghosh silently
transforms Tagore’s tale of liminality,
interrelationship, and social change into
a narrative and aesthetic of materialism.
Ghosh’s film, and filmmaking, tell us
about the rewards and damage that materialism
incurs upon itself.
Rai,
and the famous collection from Anjali Jewellers,
are not the only integers of materialism in
the film. There is Ghosh’s vision of
landscape and of ‘reality’ itself,
in his self-consciously superb visuals. Someone
told me who the designer of Ghosh’s
interiors is; but who, I wondered, designed
the outdoors? Here, again, the difference
between Ghosh and the Ray he pays frequent
homage to is striking: in Ray, reality –
whether it comprises a group of Gurkha bagpipers
in the distance, or a dog lifting itself up
– is provisional, sketch-like. It has
the same aura of distance, of suggestiveness,
that his soundtracks have. Actual locations,
like Darjeeling or Benaras, have, like the
sets in street-theatre, an air of being hastily
put together. Location, landscape –
in Ghosh’s film, they are gilded, finished.
The ghats look like expensive furniture; even
the sun looks more expensive than anything
to be found at Anjali Jewellers. The elusive
morning light in Kashi, which Ray went searching
for with his camera, is, in Chokher Bali,
thick with social esteem, like oil paint.
There really is no ‘outside’ in
Ghosh’s film: everything in its vast,
artificial interiority is caught up in a symbolic
play of passion, desire, and material empowerment.
Chokher
Bali has been to contemporary Bengali
cinema what the fall of the Berlin Wall was
to Europe. It has situated Bengali cinema
firmly, almost brutally, in the current of
globalisation: flirtations with art-house
cinema (as in Ghosh’s own early films)
and half-baked exhausted commercial movies
have been both rendered irrelevant by its
release. Ghosh is not an ‘international’
filmmaker, as Ray was; he is a filmmaker of
the globalised universe. The absence of a
real ‘outside’ in his new film
reflects the fact that there are no foreign
countries, no elsewheres, in the world after
globalisation. His Tagore, too, is the Tagore
of globalisation, quite different from Tagore
the ‘bishwakabi’ or ‘world-poet’.
Something like this was waiting to happen;
now that it has, it’s brought both celebration
and anxiety in its wake. Those who secretly
feel at home in the present (whatever their
political and cultural predilections are in
public) will rejoice at discovering an artist
who has understood its language so well. Others,
out of joint, might experience unease and
bewilderment.
Originally
published in The Telegraph, Calcutta
