I posted this review of `The Journey (Yatra` on Monday 30 October 2006 on the A/O forum:
FILM REVIEW: The Journey (Yatra)
This was one of the many offerings of the London Film Festival, currently in its second week (having opened with `The Last King of Scotland" the one about Idi Amin). We saw it on Thursday at the National Film Theatre on its first showing (each exhibit has two). Written and directed (in Hindi, with English sub-titles) by Goutam Ghose, it is described in its own self-publicity as "(a) superb must-see film, in which .... Ghose elicits powerful performances from an acclaimed cast including Nana Patekar, Deepti Naval and the ageless Rekha"; and so it is and so he does, though I have to admit that I didn`t think so at first!
I was, alas, less than impressed when the film ended and so didn`t feel inclined to participate in the Q&A session that followed with Ghose, who had come from India for the presentation and who stood just 10 metres from where we were sitting. So why did I feel that way and why have I changed my mind? To begin with, maybe I was subconsciously put off by his introductory remarks about the film, before it began, in which he spoke of it as a product of his own upper middle-class environment. He certainly did not lack in modesty; but then considering his 30+ year record of film-making, with some notable successes and awards, even though he may not be so well known outside India, such confidence was perhaps understandable. I thought there was a touch of pretentiousness about it, but on reflection maybe it was just the way many `desi` Indians do rather unself-consciously think of themselves! Then being ensconced in the second row from the front made it a little uncomfortable viewing for me, and thirdly, I could not, as an outsider, relate to its purely Indian social nuances and local reference points - but then that is me, whose intellectual and cultural orientation is Western.
Well, the film sort of grows on you; at least for me it acquired a meaning and fell into place more in retrospect than there and then. The `journey` is a yatra on a multipliticy of levels where, as the blurb tells us, "fact and fiction tensely scillate". Ostensibly there is an elaborate facade of a writer constructing a story that assumes the garb of an imagined past but one which soon dissolves into both a living reality and paradoxically, at the same time, an enigma of surreal, if tragic eternity. If that sounds too vague and poetic then that is exactly the intended effect. The artificial constructs of the structure notwithstanding, the essence of the plot is simple enough: Dashrath (played by Nana Patekar), a respected village schoolmaster, with a wife and two growing children and an elderly mother to look after, has his tranquil existence turned upside down when he comes a woman (Lajvanti, played by Rekha) in a most distraught state lying in the bushy widerness of the surrounding countryside. She used to be a `nautch` girl but had become the resident mistress of a local `raja` or landlord who was not averse to exploiting and abusing her when it suited him (here is our first song and dance routine, beautifully peformed, with the usual horde of hissing middle-aged men squatting on the floor, deliriously drunk and doddering about excitedly). She has been serially and violently raped and abandoned. He takes her home, gives her shelter and his wife and family gently nurture her back to some sort of normality when her `owner` and protector sends his henchmen to claim her back and to threaten him with dire consequences if he does not `deliver` her. So they all leave the village and trek to the big city where he finds her a secure place. So far so good, and there is no hint of any impropriety or emotional entanglement. But it is after Lajvanti leaves his protection that he falls for her and from there on, it is reminiscent of Dr Zhivago, the idealistic doctor`s passionate affair with Lara, whose life goes through a series of twists and turns of epic proportions before it ends in a tragic denouement.
When the film opens however, the transformation of the village schoolteacher into a successful author, his embracing of the `nouveau riche` lifestyle of contemporary upper middle class Indian society, with all the standard comforts that go with it, has already taken place. And so from there on, it takes on an episodic quality, with all kinds of flashbacks and flashforwards as well as the unfolding of the sequences that provide continuity and cohesion to the composition as a whole. This is interwoven with the underlying ambiguity about the essence of the film: is it Dashrath`s tale or one that he has created, with a large dose of self or wish-fulfilment?
In his opening, pre-show remarks, Ghose had referred to the new India, its vibrant economy and consciousness being part of the cross-cultural ways of our post-modern global era. He demonstrates this in telling ways: Dashrath`s (by Indian standars) ultra-mod-cons of domesticity - the hi-fi, the cable tv, the fridge/freezer, the telephone and other gadgets - and outside, in the city (Hyderabad) the shopping mall, the car and the mobile phone - all this is the changing face of the country, no doubt. This is not all. We see early scenes of marital affection between Dashrath and his wife, involving lip-kissing, and later on casual and graphic sex between peripheral characters (a `Sex in the City` style young business executive and a budding film maker to whom Dashrath has confided his whole life story, which is the outer casing of the film, as it were, during a train journey to Delhi to receive a literary award). So the picture we get here is indeed of an India that is on the move, in more than one sense. But there are incongruities too. For example, the two grown up children (son and daughter) of the family are too goody goody and all their internal dynamics are too tame, for those of us who are used to a much less sentimental approach to human interactions. Even so, when the wife and the mistress meet (in circumstances) which had best be left unsaid here) the lack of any empathy between them while understandable in one sense is too stark as a dramatic conclusion. The stiffness of their encounter is too jarring a note on which to end the film.
I have touched only on the basic elements of the film, which has a layered complexity in terms of narrative, characterisation and peformance. The brevity of the publicity blurb is indeed true in its core message. All the acting is superb, and so is the music. Rekha does surprise us with the sheer virtuousity and physicality of her dance numbers, both traditional and modern. A google search will reveal Ghose`s impressive credentials. He is a Bengali, born in Uttar Pradesh, and clearly at home in both Hindi and Bengali. `The Journey` is his own creation, not based on or adapted from someone else`s, but he comes from a long line of distinguished Bengali and Hindi film makers (a la Satyajit Ray and Aparna Sen) and so their influences must inform his works too. The theme of sexuality and adultery, was most recently explored in "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna", albeit from a diasporan Indian perspective. Here it is in a home-grown context, but even so deep down one can sense a resonance with great Russian literature where personal pleasure is tempered with feelings of guilt and remorse and notions of crime and punishment play such a decisive part in family sagas.
But at the other end of the world, the film is bound to come to America (and Australasia and E Africa) too (it may already have?). The new Bostonians there may find in it an echo of the old - a kind of Merchant-Ivory treatment, in reverse, as it were, of morals and manners, and mere mortals. If it should happen that some of our members have a chance to see it (and meet the director) maybe they could ask him this question: why is it that the film - set in Hyderabad of all places, which otherwise makes a point of portraying a 21st century India with all its technological advances and is about a successful writer who consciously writes in long hand - does not showing us a computer screen anywhere, either in his study-cum-sitting room, or anywhere outside, whether in the bookshop where he is signing copies of his book for his admiring readers, at the hotel in Delhi where he is guest of honour at the award ceremony, in the call-centre for an outsourced American corporate client where his daughter chucks her job in disgust, or in any of the other public places that we are taken to? He is clearly making a point about it, but what?
That said, do go and see the film: it is a cinematic experience par excellence.
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey England
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