This is a brilliant, world class film, one of the new Indian wave of independent art movies on offer during the second London Indian Film Festival - 30 June to 11 July 2001 - currently in full swing.
In the opening scenes, we see Ruth, of mixed British-Indian heritage, arrive in Mumbai from England. She goes through the rites of passage that lone foreigners setting foot in India for the first time have to negotiate, with patience and bemusement. In her dealings with minor bureaucrats and others, her Hindi helps - they all comment on it. She is looking for her long lost father who had abandoned her and her mother and a sibling when she was quite small. This metaphorical search for her inner self and identity soon engulfs her in the maelstrom of life of the city that never sleeps - a la Vikram Chandra`s `Sacred Games`!. She soon becomes a masseur in an upmarket kind of parlour, giving expert hand jobs to a motley collection of punters, some of whom do not even know that what she is offering is a `happy ending`! One however, played by the veteran Naseeruddin Shah, forms an avancular attachment to her, which she for her part appreciates.
Her private life is however complicated by Prashant, her rather feckless boyfriend, a petty criminal whose drug-dealing lands him in trouble with Chittiapa, a gangster who, aided by a bunch of side-kicks, robs her of her savings and uses sexual violence to get at Prashant. She eventually does find and make contact with her father, but it is a bizarre denouement, with an unusual twist that should shock Indian audiences into confronting the taboo subject of incest in a modern setting. The Naseeruddin character`s emotional ouburst towards the end is also an expression of despair at the moral degradation inherent in the situation.
Throughout the narrative moves along seamlessly. We get an intimate insight into both the humdrum detail of both Ruth`s domestic as her professional life. A key supporting role is that of Maya, the parlour`s receptionist, who provides light relief through her interminable one-sided phone conversations with her numerous wannabe suitors. All character performances are rendered with the right mixture of authenticity and make-believe. Above all, it is Ruth who shines, single-handedly dominating the movie from beginning to end. Her lack of sentimentality and determination to succeed in her mission sustain the essence of the plot. She proves to be tough cookie when things turn nasty.
Ruth is played by Kalki Koechlin, born to French parents in India, who is a fluent Hindi speaker in real life, which lends a natural credibility to her performance. The dual Hindi-English language of all the characters is so unobtrusively woven into the film that the English sub-titles seem to be part of its fabric. The street life and mega-cosmopolitanism generally of Mumbai is beautifully captured as an integral backdrop. This also underlines the universality of the theme, of an estranged child seeking to connect with a lost parent. Such a scenario could be transplanted to any other metropolitan setting across the globe. The director, Anurag Kashyap, who has an established pedigree in film-making in India, was present at the NFT showing that I went to, but I couldn`t, alas, stay for the Q&A. I would certainly have congratulated and complimented him for giving us a truly world-class movie. It is a pity that our mainstream cinema critics still largely continue to ignore such quality products coming from India, and when they do review them there are the inevitable references to Bollywood and a certain amount of confusion as to where to draw the line.
The only other festival film I have seen this time is "Rang Rasiya: Colours of Passion", about the life of the great 19th century Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma, another masterpiece, which I hope to write about separately later.
RAMNIK SHAH
Copyright
Surrey England
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