Deepanjana Pal's Blog, page 6

Parasite

Today’s burble is going to be about Parasite because
a) it really is that good,
b) it made history on the February 9-10 (depending upon which time zone you’re in) by becoming the only foreign language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars and the first film to win both Best Picture and Best International Feature Film,
c) I’m grumpy af, and
d) I’ve got a little more than two hours before the next bit of work lands on my desk.
So here we go.

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Parasite opens in a part of Seoul that you don’t see on Instagram or in travel sites. The four members of the Kim family are scattered across a tiny basement apartment that’s cramped and grotty. Through the business of trying to latch on to the free wi-fi of a neighbouring café, the family gather in a literal sense. Quickly, we realise the family has had a string of bad luck, but despite the reversals, there’s affection and warmth between the mother, father, sister and brother as they sit in their basement apartment and eat pizza. We’ll never see the rich Park family enjoying each other’s company the way the Kims do.

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There’s something poetic about the Kims’ bonhomie in the basement apartment because banjihas, as these basement apartments are called in South Korea, are the result of tension between North and South Korea. Worried that there may be a warlike situation with North Korea, the South Korean government in 1970 issued directives that all apartment buildings should have basements that would serve as bunkers in case of a national emergency. Today, these are homes for those who can’t afford to live in high-rises and reminders that Seoul, for all its shiny prosperity and super-fast internet, suffers from a critical shortage of affordable housing. Reading about the banjiha made me think about the optics of a city and the visual symbols we associate with progress. In Seoul, it seems the poor are virtually out of sight by virtue of this underground real estate.

In contrast, Mumbai’s poor cluster in neighbourhoods that are unmistakable, particularly because of the blue tarp on their roofs. There are some that perch precariously on the slopes of the hills you see as you fly in. It isn’t by design — in fact, there are concerted efforts to move these ‘eyesores’ — that the first thing you see when you fly in to Mumbai by air, is evidence of its urban poor. If you were coming by boat, like traders of the past and terrorists in the present, you’d see the posh buildings that form a phalanx along the city’s coastline. The BMC hopes that in a few years, you’ll see the loops of the coastal road, which is supposed to be another sign of development and progress. These symbols of prosperity are our concrete parasites.

On the street level, the city that we see in Parasite is like countless other cities all over the world. The rich live in homes that are like oases, cut off from the hunger, noise and anxieties of the city beyond. Their lives are arguably artificial and yet that is the kind of insulated cocoon that everyone aspires to, especially the poor who live in congested, grimy spaces. The expanses of the rich seem to be made possible by those who have been pushed out to the fringes or (in case of Seoul) underground.

Within the world of Parasite, the banjiha is a vulnerable, fragile place. The Kim family, particularly the patriarch Ki Taek (Song Kang Ho) and the son Ki Woo (Choi Woo Shik) are seen defending it from external threats from the very first scene, when a man almost pees and pukes into their home (we’re told it’s a regular affair). A little later, father and son chuck buckets of water to chase away a drunkard who is referred to as a pest.

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Towards the end of the film, a flood of water forces the Kims out of the basement apartment in much the same way. Yet water is very much the Kim family’s element. Whether it’s rainwater pooling around their feet or jets of water that come from the faucet or bathwater in a tub, they seem to always have water near them. Perhaps it’s because the Kim family can shapeshift to fit the vessel they find themselves in, like the way their appearances change when they’re in the Park home. In contrast, the Parks are barely touched by water.

The Kims discover the wealthy Parks right after Ki Woo’s friend Min comes by the basement apartment, to give Ki Woo something called the scholar’s rock. Min’s grandfather wants Ki Woo to have it. Director Bong Joon Ho spoke about scholar rocks and why he wanted one in Parasite in this interview (which has a lot of other interesting details too). At the risk of fulfilling the foreigner stereotype that Bong mentions in that interview, I admit that I needed the scholar’s rock to be more than just a curio.

To me, the scholar’s rock symbolises the privilege that Min belongs to and which Ki Woo desperately wants to claim as his own. Ki Woo clings to it like a limpet at one point, but its relationship with Ki Woo is decidedly antagonistic. There’s one point when the banjiha is flooded and the scholar’s rock floats to the surface, defying physics to make the point that it doesn’t belong there in the filth and detritus of the Kims’ lives. Later, towards the end of the film, Ki Woo places the scholar’s rock in a river (with sparkling, clear water) and this time, it remains submerged, finally snapping its bond with the young man.

After giving Ki Woo the scholar’s rock, Min asks Ki Woo if he wants to do the job that Min was doing: work as an English tutor for a teenage girl of a wealthy family (her dad’s a CEO; her mum is “simple”). Ki Woo isn’t sure at first. Unlike Min, he hasn’t gone to university, but Min assures Ki Woo that his English is competent enough. And so it is that the Kims discover the Parks.

The two families offer curious parallels to one another. The Kims live in a basement apartment whose only window is a slit that lets in the refuse of the world. The Parks live in a bungalow with enormous windows that look out on rich, manicured greenery even while acting as a barrier that maintains a boundary between the chaos of the outside and the sanctuary of the inside. The Kim family home fills with the toxic fumes when the municipal corporation fumigates the neighbourhood. The Park family home is filled with beautiful light and clean design, which the rich barely seem to notice, let alone savour. Both families have a son and daughter, but the Park siblings never display the camaraderie that the Kim pair do. While the Kim daughter and the Park son establish a friendship that we glimpse, the Kim son and the Park daughter have a less simple relationship, but more on that later.

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Coming back to the two homes, the banjiha is a place that can’t escape the harsh realities of the city. In contrast, the bungalow is an idyllic space. Yet, it’s in the banjiha that we see love, affection and laughter while the bungalow is mostly a site of emotional and physical violence. The only times we see the house being enjoyed is actually by the interlopers rather than the owners.

Much later in the film, there’s a brief scene in which the help — at the time, it’s Moon Gwang (Lee Jung Eun) and her husband, Geun Se (Park Myeong Hoon) — are in the living room. Sunlight streams in, filling the large space just the right balance of light and shadow. There’s Western music playing. The garden outside is lush. Inside, Moon Gwang and Geun Se dance.

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It’s a scene filled with tranquility and sweetness — until you keep in mind that all the factors that make this moment beautiful come at a hefty price tags. That sunlight, greenery, clean air, the sense of space, these do not come for free. They are all the privilege of the rich. The poor, like the Kims, get fumigation, refuse and slivers of pallid sunlight.

So Ki Woo, armed with forged degrees (thanks to his sister), shows up to interview for the position of tutor and is quickly hired. The only condition Mrs. Park imposes is that he must go by Kevin in this house. It’s a throwaway line, but there’s obviously no space for negotiation on this ground. Aside from showing the power Mrs. Park exerts over Ki Woo by virtue of being his employer, the Western name hints at a circle of power and subservience. The Parks, with their American products and English-peppered Korean, are enamoured of America much like the Kims are enamoured of the Parks (they’re “nice” people, Ki Taek reminds us on multiple occasions). Ki Woo’s new name is a statement that places him as Kevin in a position of subservience, but he quickly uses this to his advantage. When Mrs. Park mentions that her son, a little boy with a fascination for “Indians” (by which they mean Native Americans), needs an art therapist, Ki Woo innocently mentions he knows of someone who would fit the bill. Her name is Jessica, Ki Woo tells Mrs. Park. No prizes for guessing Jessica is actually his sister Ki Jung (Park So Dam).

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Which brings us to the #JessicaOnlyChild moment. The little jingle is, according to Reddit, part of a longer song, which includes hilarious details like “looks like a poor man’s Park So Dam”. The little rhyme is meant to be like a nursery rhyme, apparently. I liked that little touch — as though the whole con is child’s play to the Kims — even though with every coil of the con, Parasite becomes more and more sinister.

So, for example, you can join in with Ki Woo when he giggles at how easily Mrs. Park fell for “Jessica”, all because he mentioned a couple of American names. It seems quite innocent (incidentally, as a young man, Bong did work as a tutor for rich families). But the next step of the con is Ki Jung strategically hiding her underwear in the Parks’ car to make it seem as though the driver had sex with someone in the back seat. The Parks have no trouble imagining the worst of their driver and the Kims have no qualms about thrusting others towards the poverty they’re trying to escape.

Then, Ki Woo kisses the girl he’s supposed to be tutoring. During the first lesson he took with Mrs. Park watching, he held the teenaged girl’s wrist. Mrs. Park looks shocked, but she says nothing to Ki Woo. Next thing you know, tutor and student are tangling tongues. It’s not that Ki Woo is forcing her (he isn’t), but his actions seem calculated. Min had told Ki Woo that he trusted Ki Woo to not make a move on the girl (Min plans to date her when he’s done with his studies). Is Ki Woo kissing her because he’s competing with Min or becoming Min in his head when he ‘claims’ the girl? Is the girl’s desire a prize? Is Ki Woo trying to make sure she falls for him so that the question of how much English he knows is buried under their changed relationship? Whatever the motivation, there’s no doubt that his behaviour is manipulative.

The Kims’ next target is Moon Gwang, the housekeeper whom the Parks inherited when they bought this house. In the process of being fed a piece of an apple by his student/ girlfriend, Ki Woo is granted the knowledge not of good and evil, but that Moon Gwang is allergic to peaches. A common fruit — peaches have been cultivated in Korea for centuries, if not millenia — becomes a lethal weapon. There’s a quiet violence to how the peach is filmed, its plump fleshiness emphasised by the light. Throughout Parasite, there are scattered references to things that are considered dangerous. Yet what really causes damage in the film are common, seemingly- innocuous objects and people who have been transformed by their circumstances, much like peach fuzz.

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While in the previous cons, the script pays attention to how the Kims create their façades, this time the focus is on how Moon Gwang is forced out of the house. The shift indicates the Kims have won the Park couple’s trust and also that they’re enjoying carrying out the guerilla warfare. In the past, there were forged certificates, fake agencies and other such ruses. Now, before Moon-gwang can blink, she’s been turfed out (despite having lived in that home longer than even the Parks). The only blip in this setup, as far as I’m concerned, is that a woman would mistake “hot sauce” to be blood. Only a scriptwriter with no experience of menstruation (by which I mean a man) would think a woman doesn’t know what blood-soaked tissue looks like.

Just as Ki Woo brought Ki Jung in, and Ki Jung laid the ground for her father to get the driver’s job, Ki Taek is the one who clears the path to get his wife Chung Sook (Chang Hyae Jin) hired as the new housekeeper. In this process, he seems to become something like a support system for Mrs. Park. It’s not a sexual relationship, but a vaguely paternal one that contrasts sharply with the one between Ki Woo and his student (this moment, when Mrs. Park and Ki Taek’s hands touch is more tender than any other touch that we see Mrs. Park experience in the course of the film). Ki Taek appears to be genuinely fond of Mrs. Park, which is deeply inappropriate given their positions in the social hierarchy. Perhaps it’s this fondness for Mrs. Park that makes Ki Taek repeatedly ask Mr. Park if he loves his wife. At the end of the film, that’s the question that will drive Mr. Park to drop the mask of civility.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

With all four Kims employed by the Parks, who have no idea that their new hires are a family, the banjiha disappears from view. Instead, we spend our time in the beautiful bungalow. To drive home the point that the Kims are climbing up the social ladder, they literally climb up slopes and stairs to reach the Parks. It sounds terrible on-the-nose when I write it, but Bong Joon Ho has a gift for stuffing a frame with details that are symbolic (or “metaphorical” as Ki Woo would put it), but still feel organic.

So, for instance, when things are going well for the Kims, they’re seen climbing up staircases as they rise above the impoverished lives they were living at the start of Parasite. When things start falling apart, we see them climbing down flights of stairs. Then there’s the giant coffee table in the Parks’ living room. Look closely, and you’ll see it’s made up of many pieces — each of them with different dimensions — that have aligned together to make a single unit, much like the Kim family which takes refuge under that table at one point. The bungalow is all about illusions, with almost everyone in it adopting personas. Consequently, the Park home filmed in a way that it looks like a series of visual tricks — invisible walls, reflected surfaces, negative spaces that look flat but actually have ominous depths. The bungalow makes both the Park and Kim sons introspect and as they reflect upon things that make them question their immediate reality, we get shots like these:

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It sounds forced when I write it, but when you’re in Bong’s world, not a single point feels burdened by the symbolism or shoe-horned for the sake of plot development.

So, just to recap: Ki Woo gets a job as an English tutor and then one by one, his sister, father and mother (in that order) join the employ of the Parks, who have no idea that they’ve hired a whole family. The Kims are schemers, but the Parks are hardly victims. Empowered by money and privilege, they come across as almost impregnable. Also, at least the grown-up Parks are not what they seem. Mr. Park’s fascination for the discarded panty found in the car hints at something vaguely unpalatable in him. The “simple” Mrs. Park smoothly pays Ki Woo less than what she paid Min (we see her taking a few notes out of the envelope with Ki Woo’s pay) while claiming she’s paying Ki Woo more, which suggests she is a lot more calculating than appearances suggest. In a strange way, there seems to be an equilibrium. The luxury that the Parks want is impossible without a demographic that’s willing to be subservient and of service to them. Even if the Kims are forced into servitude by their desperate circumstances, the situation does have the appearance of stability. For a few brief minutes in Parasite, everyone on screen seems to be happy.

And then the clouds gather. I mean this literally. (I really wasn’t exaggerating about the on-the-nose-ness of Parasite.)

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For the little boy’s birthday, the Park family decides to go camping, which means the house will be empty. Or so they think. The moment they’ve left, the Kims effectively take over the house. Mirroring the opening scene, the four of them go from being scattered all over the house to gathering like they had at the start of Parasite. Instead of a pizza meal, they’re consuming the Parks’ food and alcohol (including chips that have seen a sales boom thanks to the film). The Kims are making a mess of the place (which they will have to clean up because that is their role and function in this setup), but for the first time, there’s genuine laughter and warmth in the bungalow and it feels like a home rather than a spread in an architecture magazine.

When the doorbell rings, everyone freezes. No one is supposed to visit the house when the owners aren’t home. As the rest of the family hide in shadows, Chung Sook checks the intercom. Filling the little screen is a warped image of Moon Gwang’s face. The old housekeeper says she just wants to pop in for something she needs from the basement. She knows the family isn’t home because she’s kept in touch with the boy, she tells Chung Sook.

Moon Gwang’s return to the bungalow is the scene that flips a switch in Parasite. With every word she says — her tone, wheedling and frenzied; her face stretched into a wide, desperate smile — the tension goes up a notch. Aside from how the Kims had clearly not anticipated being confronted with any of their victims, Moon Gwang looks nothing like the perfectly-put together housekeeper she used to be. The clothes are drab and ill-fitting. Her hair is unkempt. Her face is bruised. There’s a hint of mania about her. All she wants is to go down to the basement, Moon Gwang tells Chung Sook.

Very few scenes in Parasite show women talking together with no men around. The script doesn’t hesitate to get into the male characters’ heads and consequently, the men like Ki Woo and Ki Taek, have multiple scenes with other men (and no women around) and on their own. Women, on the other hand, are seen from a more removed perspective. They’re almost always in performance mode and in semi-public spaces. They’re seen from the outside. Rarely do we see events solely from a female character’s perspective in Parasite. Whereas with the men, the script strips them bare and exposes them in different ways, I can’t remember a scene in which the women of Parasite are unguarded. (This is not a criticism, but an observation.)

Chung Sook and Moon Gwang aren’t strictly alone when the new housekeeper lets her predecessor into the house. Both women know how much the house can hide. (The rest of the Kim family is hiding, where else but on the staircase; frozen like statues between going up and coming down). Still, on the face of it, it’s just the two older women and this is the only time we see Chung Sook in a position of power.

At this point, Chung Sook as the housekeeper should be the dominant one and we’ve seen Moon Gwang perform that role in the past, when she had Chung Sook’s job (often with just a look).

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But everything about Moon Gwang sets Chung Sook on edge, whether it’s Moon Gwang grovelling or her noticing that the living room is a mess. Chung Sook also seems to see how battered Moon Gwang is (though we don’t get any explanations for how Moon Gwang got the bruises on her face).

When Chung Sook decides to go down to the basement to check on Moon Gwang, she finds the ex-housekeeper suspended mid-air. It’s almost like a levitating trick: Moon Gwang’s hands are pushing against the shelf in front of her and her legs are against the wall behind her. Her body is about five feet off the ground. It’s such a fantastic moment, perfectly pitched between absurdity, dread and humour. Also, if you saw Moon Gwang and thought, “Oh yeah, there must be a hidden door that she wants to open so that she can get to the underground bunker where she’s hidden her husband,” yours is a very scary mind.

So yes, here in the fancy house, there’s a bunker, which according to Moon Gwang many rich people built under their homes and then forgot about (once again because they feared an attack from North Korea). Unlike the basement apartments, there are no windows here. The only light comes from dim bulbs. It’s a level below the banjiha.

In the bunker is Moon Gwang’s husband, Geun Se (Park Myeon Hoon), who is unwell, starving and has been hidden in here for years because loan sharks are looking for him. When Moon Gwang was fired summarily after the Kims convinced the Parks that her allergic reaction to peach fuzz was a contagious disease — all the more chilling with the ongoing coronavirus epidemic — Moon Gwang didn’t have the chance to make any arrangements for Geun Se. So she stayed in touch with the boy, waiting for a window of time when the house would be empty and she could return to attend to Geun Se. Suddenly the grudging comments the Parks had made earlier in the film, about Moon Gwang eating for two, make a lot more sense.

We learn that Geun Se used to creep out late at night, when no one would be out and about, to nick some food for himself. He stopped doing that after the Park boy spotted him. The boy had came down for a midnight snack (it was the night after his birthday and there was cake in the fridge). As he opened the fridge, he noticed something in the doorway to the basement.

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The boy thought Geun Se was a ghost and when he told his parents what he’d seen, they figured he was a little “disturbed”. Geun Se ends up haunting the little boy’s imagination (often appearing in the boy’s drawings as a dark patch).

Considering the wealth of horror that South Korean cinema boasts of, this moment probably doesn’t seem worth mentioning for its scare factor, but it is perfectly done. Apparently, no special effects were used here. It’s just calculated lighting and the actor making his eyes bug out. Through this scene and the fear that the Park boy feels, Parasite shows how the rich see the poor in societies where the divides are so unbreachable that both groups are reduced to caricaturish, exaggerated, monstrous versions of themselves. Geun Se is how the rich imagine the poor — lurking in the shadows, hungry and poised to snatch what the rich consider theirs. In reality, he is a man who a prisoner of his circumstances (yet another metaphor that’s actualised).

I don’t know if Korean has an equivalent for the phrase “secrets came tumbling out”, but that’s somewhat literally what happens over the next few minutes as the best-laid plans of the Kim family start unravelling quickly.

While Chung Sook and Moon Gwang are talking in the bunker, the rest of the Kim family tiptoes down to the basement to check on Chung Sook, only to slip on a stair and land in a painful heap in the bunker’s passageway. Moon Gwang knows no one but Chung Sook should be at home, so she whips out her phone to record them, hoping she can use this to discredit Chung Sook. She gets a lot more evidence than she’d hoped for when Ki Woo groans in pain and calls out for his father, and Ki Taek responds, forgetting they have an audience.

There follows a sharp little squabble in the bunker, with Moon Gwang threatening to send the video to Mrs. Park (of course there’s wi-fi in the bunker. This is posh Seoul, after all) and the Kims panicking. The one who is able to make everyone stop in their tracks is Ki Taek. “Why do you want to hurt them like this? They’re nice people,” he says to Moon Gwang. By “they”, he means the Parks. And so, keeping in mind how “good” the Parks are, the two families come to an uneasy agreement that neither will spill the other’s secrets.

But the power equation between the two families has changed sharply, as is obvious when we see them at ground level, in the living room. The Kims are kneeling on the floor, near the staircases that indicate their social mobility. Their arms are raised above their heads, as though they’re prisoners. Moon Gwang and her husband are lounging on the sofa. She does a hilarious version of North Korean news presenter Ri Chun Hee, dramatically recounting what the Kim family did to weasel their way into the Park household. It’s very easy to imagine a remake of Parasite in which this scene would involve Moon Gwang’s desi version mimicking one of the more ridiculous Pakistani news shows. The theatricality of the scene is very funny, but also jarring because there’s no sense of empathy. The Kims’ exhaustion is something Moon Gwang and Geun Se both enjoy, just as the Kims had rejoiced when they’d been able to turf out the existing staff from the Parks’ home.

Once again, peaches end up being Moon Gwang’s downfall and there’s an almost balletic brawl as Moon Gwang is overpowered and everyone tries to grab her phone. Just four people become a crowd when they’re in a frenzy because of how this scene is filmed (cinematographer Hong Kyung Pyo’s is absolutely fantastic across the film). The camera cuts off the bodies, leaves only a few broken pieces to act as a context that screams destruction, and shows this almost deranged grabbing, which is completely at odds with the cool, calculated way the Kims carried out their cons in the past.

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Once again, everyone is stilled into silence when there’s a ring. This time, it’s not the door, but the phone. Mrs. Park has called to tell Chung Sook to make dinner because they’ll be home in eight minutes. It’s raining too hard to camp out in the open (who’s surprised the Parks, marinated in luxurious comfort, can’t hack it in the great outdoors?). I loved it when Chung Sook hung up the phone and asked, her face frozen with flat panic, “What the hell is ram-don?” Chung Sook: former champion athlete, fond mother of two, beloved wife, woman with failed Taiwanese cake shop; not a domestic goddess, thank you very much.

We don’t know how Chung Sook figures out what to make and there’s a surreal short film in my head in which Moon Gwang, before being trussed up, runs Chung Sook through the recipe. This is particularly messed up on my part because ultimately, Chung Sook is the one who kicks Moon Gwang down the stairs when Moon Gwang is, with ferocious determination, clawing her way back up to the kitchen.

In the actual film, for the Kims, cleaning up the house (in less than eight minutes) isn’t just clearing the food and drink they’ve consumed, but also making ram-don and tying up Moon Gwang and Geung Se like they’re garbage bags. Everything moves so fast, with each gesture quick, decisive, brutal and almost mechanical in its efficiency. While the rest of her family clear the house, Chung Sook cooks the ram-don. Both actions are about preparing something for the Park family and are performed in tandem.

In the process of bundling Geun Se back into his subterranean lair, Ki Taek discovers one of the house’s secrets. There’s a light in the hallway, which we’ve seen come on each time Mr. Park climbs up the stairs to enter the house, as though responding to motion sensors. Actually, it’s turned on by a button that Geun Se presses each time he hears Mr. Park’s footfall through the ceiling of the bunker. Geun Se tells Ki Taek that he can use the light to send out messages in Morse Code. The Park boy is a Boy Scout; he’ll decode them, Geun Se tells Ki Taek, his eyes glinting with madness.

Visually, the cinematography in this part of the film uses tropes from horror films, like shadowy figures in dark corridors and blurry shots of movement. The fight that ultimately breaks out between the two poor families is choreographed in a way that makes you achingly aware of the awkward strength that people get from fear and desperation. The sounds of broken and injured bodies are not reduced to noise. You recognise each one with a sickening certainty.

As the Parks return and (re)occupy their home, there’s nowhere for the Kims to hide but under the giant coffee table (Ki Woo has a particularly daunting journey to make from first floor to ground floor, which mirrors his descent into depression). They’ll be there for a while, unable to escape because the Park couple remain in the living room and idly discuss what Mr Park calls Ki Taek’s “smell”. There’s a scene earlier in the film when the boy mentions Ki Taek has a distinctive smell. It isn’t said with any distaste (or at least I didn’t detect any) and Mrs. Park’s embarrassment seemed to come from her son making such a personal comment, that too about someone who is hardly a familiar. In all the time that she’s with Ki Taek, we don’t see Mrs. Park do anything that suggests she’s noticed any body odour. Even now, when Mr. Park says he can smell Ki Taek, Mrs. Park can’t detect anything. The couple then decides to sleep (and have sex) in the living room so that they can keep an eye on their son, who refuses to spend the night in the house. Instead, the Park boy sets up his little teepee in the garden.

While the Parks turn themselves on by thinking about the discarded panty in the car, poor drug addicts and illicit sexual acts (yes, this is somewhat literally poverty porn), they’re completely unaware of being witnessed by the demographic that they’re in the process of fetishising. Within touching distance are Ki Taek, Ki Woo and Ki Jung, under the coffee table. Somewhere in the house is Chung Sook (we’re never shown the housekeeper’s quarters). Out of sight, is the bunker where a dying, concussed Moon Gwang drags herself to Geun Se (Ki Taek bound his hands and tied him to a pipe) and tries to loosen her husband’s bindings. As she collapses by his side, a gagged and bound Geun Se howls helplessly. It’s one of the most heartbreaking moments in Parasite.

Late into the night, when the Parks have finally gone to sleep and the Kims have managed to scuttle out, the Park boy in his teepee sees the light in the hallway flicker. On his notepad, we see he’s written these letters: “h o l p m e”.

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Beyond the boundaries of the bungalow, Seoul is being battered by rain. To reach their home, the Kims have to literally descend into dark spaces, walking down slopes, travelling on the subway, scaling seemingly interminable staircases. They make it back to the banjiha only to realise their home has been flooded. The architecture of the city, with its inclines, is chucking water at them just as they had once chucked water on local drunkards. Only this water is a murky, filthy compound of rain and sewage in which the people’s dearest possessions swirl in a terrible mess. By streetlight, it turns into an orange, furious thing that’s like liquid wildfire. The violence of the outside world devastates all the homes on the Kims’ street, and everyone is focused on trying to save what they can. It’s viciously ironic that the Kims were actually cleaning up the Parks’ home when they could have been salvaging their own. The contrast between the Parks’ and Kims’ homes is brought out visually. In the down-below that is the Kims’ world, everything is saturated with not just water, but also colour. The Parks’ world, in contrast, is clean, dry and resplendent in its muted palette.

Wading into the house, the three Kims reach for objects they can save. The camera lingers on the first things for which they reach. For Ki Woo, it’s the scholar’s rock (which floats to the surface). For Ki Jung, it’s her stash of cigarettes which by a small miracle aren’t soggy (she goes on to sit on top of a leaking toilet in a flooded bathroom, and smoke). Ki Taek finds the medal Chung Sook had won when she was an athlete. Dirty water has got into its frame, but Ki Taek shakes it out. It’s a little bit of excellence and he won’t let their poverty dint it.

It seems like everything Chung Sook does has the potential to be a success but her career is cut short by circumstances beyond her control, whether it’s athletics or the Taiwanese cake trend or even being a housekeeper. In the bungalow, for a brief moment (see gif with clouds), she can delude herself that she is still an athlete with promise. In the banjiha, all that remains of Chung Sook’s past prowess is a photo and a medal, offering proof that no matter how hard you work at your plan, it can still fail you.

With their homes destroyed, the displaced people of the area spend the remains of the night in a gymnasium. The Kims are among hundreds. Ki Woo clutches the scholar’s rock and desperately turns to his father for some reassurance, but Ki Taek has nothing to give. Earlier, he’d tried to give the kids some false hope (“I have my own plan”), but now, Ki Taek is spent. The patriarch from the beginning of Parasite, who was sure that his plans that would come together as neatly as pizza boxes in a how-to YouTube video, has nothing but despair.

The idea of the plan – one of the integral elements of both the capitalist dream as well as fields like astrology – works on premise that the chaos of the world can be structured or harnessed into working in your favour. It also holds out the hope that certain things are predictable, even though they’re not yours to control. Like people and the way they react to certain circumstances and signifiers (like “Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago” etc). Usually, plans operate within a superstructure, but now as the Kims’ plans wilt and crumple, the whole world seems to fall apart as though, in some improbable way, it was held together by the Kims’ cons and optimism.

Next morning, the sun is out. Mrs. Park decides that they’re going to throw their son a birthday party at home, in the garden, to which everyone is invited including “Jessica”, since she has been a good influence, and “Kevin”, because the Park daughter wants him there. Mrs. Park goes shopping with Ki Taek, and suddenly, she notices notices his body odour while telling a friend on the phone that last night’s rain was “a blessing”. She doesn’t ask Ki Taek why he’s looking dishevelled. The gap between the Parks and Kims has never been wider.

The impromptu birthday party is so pretty and so odd that you know it’s destined to be reduced to pandemonium.

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There’s an opera singer trilling in the garden and a white man in a chef’s hat roaming around. Jessica is asked to bring what Mrs. Park describes as a “trauma recovery” cake to the garden. Mrs. Park has planned a little performance which involves Jessica and the cake being “ambushed” by “Indians”, which is reminiscent of how we first met the boy (he was the one dressed as a Native American and Moon Gwang was mock-chasing him around the house with a toy tomahawk). The innocence of that game is chipped away with steady, dreadful regularity. In the bushes, Ki Taek and Mr. Park put on Native American headdresses in preparation for the roles assigned to them. When Mr. Park says something mildly disparaging about his wife, Ki Taek asks, “But you love her, right?” Mr. Park does not take kindly to his driver assuming this level of familiarity.

Upstairs, in the Parks’ daughter’s room, a distracted and depressed Ki Woo, still clutching the scholar’s rock, disentangles himself from his (underage) girlfriend and wanders down to the kitchen. He seems to freeze at the basement doorway. The scholar’s rock slips out of his hand and falls all the way down to the bunker. Seconds later, Geun Se, his head bloody from having desperately banged it against the button that switches the hallway light on and off, emerges from the darkness. He bludgeons Ki Woo with the rock, then drops it and picks up a kitchen knife before walking towards the garden.

Just as Jessica and the trauma recovery cake are to be “ambushed”, Geun Se crashes the party and the imaginary violence of the mock ambush turns vividly real. A crazed Geun Se stabs Ki Jung. The little boy recognises Geun Se as the “ghost” he’d seen, and has a seizure. At one point, Chung Sook kills Geun Se by stabbing him with a skewer, but it’s not the end of the carnage. The Parks order Ki Taek to bring out the car so that they can take their boy to the hospital. Ki Taek can’t bring himself to move away from Ki Jung who is obviously dying.

In the middle of all this, while yelling at Ki Taek to snap out of it and get the car, Mr. Park wrinkles his nose. Ki Taek realises that even now, when he needs Ki Taek’s help, all Mr. Park registers is the body odour that marks Ki Taek as one of the working class. Even now, Ki Taek cannot be Mr. Park’s equal. Ki Taek snaps. He takes the knife that Geun Se had used to kill Ki Jung, and kills Mr. Park. It’s almost like murder is a baton that must be passed around the garden.

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The violence in Parasite lasts only a few minutes and it’s almost pristine in comparison to many South Korean films. There’s no elegance or recognisable choreography to the action. Rather it’s intentionally clumsy and ugly. Against the pastel neatness of the Parks home and their elite friends, the red blood and green grass are almost lurid. For Geun Se and Ki Taek, their murderous actions are cathartic, releasing the pent-up rage of years. Chung Sook, on the other hand, acts out of a more protective instinct and in her ferociousness, she is momentarily reminiscent of Moon Gwang, who fought the Kims tooth and claw in her efforts to protect Geun Se.

In the final scenes of Parasite, we learn that Ki Woo and Chung Sook were convicted of fraud and the police were searching for Ki Taek who had disappeared. Ki Woo finally lets go of the scholar’s rock. Instead he has a new obsession – the bungalow. The house has new owners, but that’s of no consequence to Ki Woo. He watches it from a distance, every day, like a stalker.

One evening, he notices the hallway light is flickering.

It turns out to be a long letter from Ki Taek, who is in the bunker that had once been Geun Se’s hideout. Ki Taek says he decided the only safe place for him, after he killed Mr. Park, was the bunker, so he stayed there, surviving on pet food. When the Parks and the police left the house, Ki Taek carried Moon Gwang’s dead body to the garden and gave her a burial. Now, he sneaks around at night, since the house has new owners, and sends out this message in flickering lights, hoping it will reach Ki Woo somehow.

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Having figured out Ki Taek’s message, Ki Woo, back in the banjiha where the film began, sits down to write his father a letter. “Dad, I have a plan,” he says.

The obvious reading of Parasite‘s final chapter is that Ki Taek and Ki Woo are both alive and both of them nurse impossible dreams while living in a subterranean world. While this is reminiscent of the beginning of the film, the critical difference is that the family has been broken, and the father and son have been forced apart.

Here’s another possibility: If the birthday party marked a physical breakdown of the world of illusions that the Parks and Kims had created, then the coda that follows the party suggests a mental breakdown brought about by that symbol of privilege, the scholar’s rock, when it’s used to bludgeon Ki Woo. First, we see Ki Woo’s involuntary, inappropriate hysterical laughter. Then he exhibits paranoia when he thinks he’s being tailed by police officers. Finally, he thinks the lights in a stranger’s house contain coded messages for him. Ki Taek in the bunker; him surviving the months when the house would have been thoroughly investigated; Ki Taek giving Moon Gwang a burial – this is all a delusion that Ki Woo takes comfort in because not only does it bring his father figure back but it also lets him imagine he is one step closer to possessing the bungalow. To me, Ki Woo losing his grip on reality fits more neatly into the way the story of Parasite is told because there are so many mirrors, illusions and doubles in the script, that it seems like the physical breakdown needs its parallel for Parasite to be really complete.

In any case, while Parasite is the entire Kim family’s story, it is led by Ki Woo, from the start to finish, bracketed by a young man, the men he looks up to and his dreams. The events are set in motion by Ki Woo’s shiny-eyed fascination for Min and the world he inhabits. It ends with his heartbroken love for his father whose loss he can’t bear. Ultimately, the real parasites are not the rich or the poor, but the dreams and illusions people hold on to despite these fantasies reducing them to wasted, broken versions of themselves.

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Protest in verse

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.” ~ Bertold Brecht

For this week’s episode of our podcast The Lit Pickers, Supriya and I chatted about the poetry we’ve heard at some of the protests against the triple whammy of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register. (We’ve got another 10 episodes coming up on a weekly basis. Please fall over yourselves to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform.)

For this week’s episode of our podcast The Lit Pickers, Supriya and I chatted about the poetry we’ve heard at some of the protests against the triple whammy of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register. (We’ve got another 10 episodes coming up on a weekly basis. Please fall over yourselves to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform.)When we decided to record this particular episode, it struck me that songs of protest in Bengali were an integral part of the soundtrack of my childhood. I didn’t grow up in Calcutta, but wherever in the world we made our home, Bengali music, poetry and literature felt like the bricks that built it. I have clear memories of singing martial songs about breaking the shackles put on us my enemies as a child (while demanding Maggi because boss, independence means different things to different people. Don’t judge) and cheerfully humming under my breath lyrics about setting off to join a revolution (while waddling up to piano class). The poetry of protest was not something that got pulled out for an occasion. It was part of my childhood despite the fact that there really wasn’t much to rebel against (my parents were and still are rubbish at the autocrat routine).

My standard move when it comes to anything concerning Bengali literature is to turn to the aforementioned failed autocrats, so I gave my father some homework ahead of our podcast recording. Could he give me a quick overview of protest poetry in Bengali? Maybe include some dusty old male poets I’ve never read but have heard quoted in conversations; and quotes in writing please because the less said about my Bengali spelling, the better. “Sure,” my father said. “So you want to cover about 100 years? From 1870s to 1970s?” That, ladies and gents, is a quick overview according to my father: ONE HUNDRED YEARS.

At the end of all the remembering and rejecting, and my mother interjecting (“How can you ignore Tagore? Just because you have issues with his writing! That’s ridiculous! Also, that other guy, the old one, you know who I mean…”. The real miracle is that he did), my father thanked me for the homework. “You made me remember so many beautiful songs,” he said, and I could hear a little catch in his voice.

Here are a few of the poems and songs from Bengal that we remembered.

[image error]Rangalal Bandopadhyay, 1872

Rough translation: Who wishes to live without freedom? Who wishes to wear the chains of slavery? Those who are destroying themselves, they’re doing it to save the country.

[image error]From Hemchandra Bandopadhyay’s Bharat Sangeet

I’m not going to translate everything because it’s well beyond my skill set. But this one from Hemchandra Bandopadhyay begins with a plea to forget the differences of caste and religion, and to stand up as opposition. The poets I’m mentioning here are all men, mostly of upper caste and Hindu, which tells you a lot about who got recognition. Silver lining: at least these men used their privilege to attack prejudices and to imagine an equal society.

And now for Dwijendralal Ray.

[image error]Dwijendralal Ray

There are many renditions of the first poem, which was sung famously by his DL Ray’s son, but somehow none of them have the same kind of rousing thunderousness that I remember from when I’d hear (and sing) it as a child. DL Ray is one of the people who searched for an Indian identity in Hinduism (he imagined India as a land of Aryans, for instance) and would in later years get a lot of love from the Hindu Right. It’s worth keeping in mind that the enemy for DL Ray is always the colonial British government.

Moving on to Kazi Nazrul Islam, who was all sorts of amazing. This version of his famous song “Karar oi Louho Kopat” (“Break those prison gates”) was used in a film and while I’m not crazy about either the arrangement or the *stunning* acting, I do like the male chorus. You can hear how well Nazrul used the sound of syllables and consonants (the hard t-s, the emphasis that you can hear the strong ka and pa sounds). These were poems that were written to be spoken or sung, not just read.

Similarly, you really need to read this one by Charankabi (Mukunda Das) out loud. (No surprise that he was a folk theatre guy.)

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Then there’s Subhash Mukhopadhyay:

[image error]“Comrade, will we not usher in a new age?”

On to Dinesh Das.

[image error]Das takes the sliver of the moon that has long been a symbol of romance and sees in it the curved blade of the sickle

I’m not sure why, but there’s something about this poem that really appeals to me. I think it’s the fact that he privileges the sickle — the tool of the poorest agricultural labourer — over the bayonet and bombs that were not just signs of the establishment’s might, but also a certain brand of Western, industrial progress as well as the war machine.

In the podcast, I mentioned a poem by Sukanta Bhattacharjee. These are the lines I was referring to:

[image error]Rough translation: “Erase cadence and pretty lyricism, wield the hammer of prose instead. There’s no need for the tenderness of poems. Poetry, I give you leave. Over the hungry land … the full moon is a scorched roti.”

The poem that I refer to in the podcast that likens the full moon to the scorched roti is the one above.

And of course, Salil Chowdhury, whose “Pathe Ebar Naamo Saathi” I mentioned in the podcast. The song that practically every Bengali (of a certain age) remembers when they think of Salil Chowdhury and protest, though, is this one

Supriya spoke about Shailendra’s “Tu Zinda Hai“. The tune was composed by Salil Chowdhury and Shailendra originally wrote it for Bombay Youth Choir. Later, the same tune with different lyrics from Shailendra would be used for the opening credits of Mem Didi.

At some point, I hope my father will actually sit down and write an essay on the protest poetry that he remembers and inherited. At some point, I hope many of you will sit down with your parents and others of that generation, and ask them to remember the words that filled their hearts and gave them strength.

At some point, I hope my father will actually sit down and write an essay on the protest poetry that he remembers and inherited. At some point, I hope many of you will sit down with your parents and others of that generation, and ask them to remember the words that filled their hearts and gave them strength.

In the meanwhile, here are a few more things to hear and read alongside today’s The Lit Pickers episode.

Supriya wrote a wonderful column on protest poetry, which you can read here. She’s also written about the poetry of Subramania Bharti, or Bharathiyar, here.

For your listening pleasure, Bharathiyar’s poetry as sung by Hariharan, TM Krishna, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, and Sudha Raghunathan.

Indian Express’s Devyani Onial spoke to Rahat Indori about his poem becoming a new anthem.

Coke Studio had a lovely version of “Hum Dekhenge”, and you can read about Faiz Ahmed Faiz here.

I doubt I need to remind you of Varun Grover’s “Kaagaz Nahin Dikhayenge“, but there it is. The musical version is here.

And finally this is the poem from the gent at #OccupyGateway, who raised the slogan, “Hum tera jhooth giraenge”. If you know who the poet is, please let me know.

There are a couple more videos of the poetry and performances from the first night of #OccupyGateway here.

See you on the streets.

The Memory Police

I’ve been meaning to blog quotes from books because it’s just so much easier to search and find them later (than to scour through my notebooks etc, hunting for them). Fittingly, the first book in this project is one about forgetting.

“No, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realised. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you’ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you’ll know that you’ve lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island.”

* 

“I mean, things are disappearing more quickly than they are being created, right?” I asked him.

He nodded and furrowed his brow, like someone suffering from a headache.

“What can the people on this island create?” I went on. “A few kinds of vegetable, cars that constantly break down, heavy, bulky stoves, some half-starved stock animals, oily cosmetics, babies, the occasional simple play, books no one reads… Poor, unreliable things that will never make up for those that are disappearing – and the energy that goes along with the. It’s subtle but seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out, If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“I suppose so,” he murmured, repeatedly pushing up the sleeves of his sweater and then pulling them back down in a manner that seemed more and more agitated. “Maybe because you write novels, you come up with these extreme ideas…No, I’m sorry, that’s rude – maybe I should say grand ideas. Isn’t that what it means to be a novelist? To come up with grand stories?” [novelist and old man]

*

“When I was a child, the whole place seemed…how can I put this? … a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn’t worry.” [the old man]

*

Regardless of what happened, it was almost certainly an unfortunate event, and moreover, simply talking about it could put you in danger. If on occasion a whole household suddenly went missing with no warning at all, the neighbors would simply pass their house with a furtive glance at the windows, hoping that the former inhabitants were safe somewhere. The citizens of this island were by now quite accustomed to these losses.

*

“The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in ashes. Why would I keep them when I don’t think I will be able to recall the meaning of the word ‘photograph’ much longer, not to mention the danger if the Memory Police find them.” [novelist to editor]

*

“Our primary function here is to assure that there are no delays in the process and that useless memories disappear quickly and easily. I’m sure you’d agree that there’s no point in holding on to them. If your big toe becomes infected with gangrene, you cut it off as soon as you can. If you do nothing, you end up losing the whole leg. The principle is the same. The only difference is that you can’t touch or see memories, or get inside the hearts they’re kept in. Each one of us hides them away in secret. So, since our adversary is invisible, we are forced to use our intuition.” [Memory Police officer]

*

“You’ll forget you ever had a voice,” he continued. “You may find it annoying at first, until you get used to it. You’ll move your lips as you just did, go looking for a typewriter, a notepad. But soon enough you’ll see how pointless it is. You have no need to talk, no need to utter a single word. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. Then, at least, you’ll be all mine.” [Typing teacher in writer’s novel]

*

There, behind your heartbeat, have you stored up all my lost memories?

*

But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, “Find your left eye,” I suppose it would be difficult to do so. [typist in the writer’s novel]

*

My degeneration was already too far advanced. If I took one step outside, my body would dissolve into a million pieces.

He was the only thing holding me together now.

*

The only sound was that of burning books.

*

“I thought I could hear the sound of my memory burning that night.”

#OccupyGateway and the Dreams of Resistance

Sunday, January 5, 2020
By 10.30pm, my head was throbbing. For more than two hours, I had been reading messages that offered terrifying glimpses of an attack on JNU in Delhi. The timeline would later show that the violence began at 3.45pm, when masked men gathered at Periyar Hostel. Most of us started getting alerts around 7.30pm when JNUSU head Aishe Ghosh was brutally assaulted. Ghosh was beaten with rods, kicked and dragged behind a car by a group of 20-30 people. A photograph of her, with blood streaming down her dirt-smeared face and someone holding a bandage to her head, seemed to be everywhere.

We’d later learn that while some of us were trying to make sense of the reports we were getting — masked men and women who were allegedly from ABVP entering JNU; acid being thrown on students; aforementioned vandals tearing hostels apart; teachers and their partners being chased by mobs; entry and exit routes to JNU blocked by Delhi Police; electricity being cut off so that vandals could go on a rampage in the dark; reporters being attacked if they tried to approach the university — while all this was happening, JNU’s administration was busy filing a complaint. Sounds prompt, right? Records show that at 8.45pm on January 5, Delhi Police registered an FIR on the basis of a complaint filed by JNU’s admin, booking Ghosh and 19 others of attacking security guards.

The armed mob that attacked JNU ran riot till 9pm at least. Their slogans included “Goli maaron saalon ko” (Shoot the bastards) and they felt no compunction yelling it out for press cameras to record. Delhi Police — 700 policemen, no less — showed up at JNU eventually, not so much to tackle the vandals as to ensure the gates remained closed so that no one could get in or out.

At 10.30pm, I shut my computer and stepped out for a walk. Outside, my shiny neighbourhood was still full of happy glitter and bright lights. No one had taken Christmas decorations off and people on the street were laughing, hailing autos and generally going about their life. At Carter Road bandstand, a group of young men with guitars were singing old Bollywood songs. Everything seemed still. It was low tide and not a leaf moved. My head was still pounding as I wondered what was it about Sundays that brought right-wing thugs to universities (the violence at Jamia Milia Islamia had erupted on a Sunday too) and whether I would have been able to show up at JNU had I been in Delhi right now. That was when I got the message about a candlelight meeting at the Gateway of India at midnight, to show solidarity with JNU and its students.

You could say Gateway, built to commemorate the arrival of George V in 1911, was an odd spot to have a postcolonial protest that is fighting against Indian identity being flattened to an undiverse, homogenous, orange splatter. But Gateway is more than a symbol of subjugation by a foreign power. It’s one of those symbols of colonial authority that postcolonial Mumbai has been able to wholly reclaim. This is where Indians from around the country gather daily, placing their wonder and joy in the foreground and the colonial monument in the background (literally. Just think of the pictures taken at Gateway). It’s also a site of multiple terror attacks, the most famous being the three-day long terror attack that began on 26th November, 2008. As someone in the crowd would say later, this is where the protest and the present generation of students are located — between the tyranny of authoritarianism inherited from colonisation and anxieties rooted in the violence of communalism and terrorism. (History students. Gotta love ’em.)

Monday January 6, 2020
By the time I reached Gateway, there was already a crowd of about 100 people. Most were sitting on the pavement, holding candles or phone torches. More and more joined in with every minute, and none of them were bystanders. It was low tide at Apollo Bunder and the air was heavy. Occasionally, a little breeze would ruffle the stillness and blow out candles that were diligently re-lit.

[image error]Gateway of India, Jan 6, 1.36am

At about 1am, all you heard was the click of a few hundred people snapping their fingers to a slow but steady beat. They were snapping because many were holding candles, which left only one hand free. They were also snapping because people were standing up to recite poetry and sing songs, but there was no microphone. Mumbai isn’t a city used to protesting and this particular protest had little by way of organisation at this point. People had simply shown up and were now straining to hear what was being said. Rather than drown out speakers with applause, the protesters snapped their fingers to the beat of the words they heard; collective rage contained and articulated in the rhythmic clicks.

Songs rose up from this swelling crowd — “Hum Honge Kaamyaab”, “Hum Dekhenge” — that admittedly couldn’t hold a tune, but damned if they weren’t going to add their voices to the cacophony. People stood up to read out poems, many of them original. “It’s like a protest-themed open mic night,” someone said, “only the stuff is good.” “And there’s no mic,” said someone else drily.

 (It’s true. I have no video skills. But look! Protests have made me a YouTuber. #FauxMillennial)

That the crowd was growing in size became obvious when those at one end could no longer hear slogans raised by a protester on the opposite side. So those in the middle became ‘repeaters’. Each line was repeated, like the passing of a baton, and finally chanted loudly by everyone. In this way, every word and every poem became an anthem. The gent above was fabulous (evidently), but I think the one who has stayed with me is this young man from Kashmir, who wrote his poem while making his way to this protest.

At the time, no one knew how long this protest would continue and few would have anticipated that there was enough rage to inspire what came to be named #OccupyGateway. Around 2.30am, a few people stood up to leave. You could tell “Monday morning” was hovering like a thought cloud over parts of the crowd and the protest seemed to have hit a lull. It sounded quiet for the first time since midnight.

At this point, former student leader Umar Khalid, who had been quietly standing at the back, stepped out of the shadows with a call to azadi, a chant that is now both famous and infamous. Khalid was greeted like a rockstar, but even before the bulk of the crowd realised who had started the chant, there was something in the call that fired everyone up. For the next few minutes, the night was filled with loud and determined calls to freedom.

No one noticed that beyond the waterfront, the tide was changing.

Now that I look back on that night, perhaps the most powerful and moving part was how we listened to each other and rallied around one another. It’s not that there weren’t any celebrities in that crowd; there were. Still, the ones who shone were those whom few recognised. We weren’t following anyone or looking up to someone higher on the social hierarchy for direction. We were all equal, attentive and collected.

Every few minutes, someone would stand up and urge those present to not speak to the media because it’s distorting what protesters say. It’s an … interesting sentiment to toss into a crowd that had at least 15 journalists (probably more) in it. Mainstream media in used to people fighting for its attention. It’s complacent in the belief that everyone wants coverage and needs the press to sustain itself and reach others. Here, however, was a protest that was saying it would rely on social media and messaging — the same platforms used with fantastic success by those who want to spread misinformation — and reject news media. As it turned out, the protest would ultimately be compromised by a biased media outlet, just as had been feared on the first night.

I left the protest with friends at around 2.45am. There were a few hundred people at the spot when we left and it didn’t look like they were going to leave anytime soon. While some of us slept, others stayed at Gateway and decided they weren’t leaving. They were going to #OccupyGateway. Organisers got organised, demands were listed (security for students; rollback of CAA and the Transgender Persons Act; no NRC; end lockdown in Kashmir, and more), messages were sent out. When Monday morning dawned on Mumbai, a bona fide protest movement was underway.

At around noon, when I returned to Gateway, it wasn’t as crowded as last night, but there were more than 100 people hanging out in horrible, humid weather. At one corner, by the barricades, there were cartons of water and students sat in a huddle, painting placards. “Do RSS types wear tikas?” someone asked, pen in hand. “Check Google,” said the person next to them, and they did. People came to drop off power banks, scarves, medicines. Bananas, vada pav and sandwiches were circulated. I noticed video journalists, armed with microphones and flanked by camerapersons, stood a short distance away from the main crowd and snagged people who were leaving or joining the protest for bytes.

Like at night, the crowd grew steadily, humming like a hive around the core that sat on the pavement. Bright dupattas, glinting sunglasses and flashes of orange from bottles of Glucon-D; people wearing everything from shorts to burqas, skull caps to floppy hats. A woman in a yellow sari more dazzling than the sun stood up to speak about how trans people face systematic violence from law enforcement and explained how the CAA-NRC combo is likely to disenfranchise them. “Some of you were fortunate enough to be born women. Some of us have truly laboured to earn the privilege of femininity. It shouldn’t cost us our nationality,” she said. An old man — peaked cap below which was a fringe of white hair; glasses that were so thick (or so scratched?) that you couldn’t really see his eyes; a striped, full-sleeved shirt; grey pants — stood up and started dancing while chants of azadi chirruped with furious joy all around him. He twirled and twirled, hands raised, not to the heavens as the dervish’s but to the crowd around him; smiling the whole time and encouraging everyone to stay loud, to not wilt, to keep beat with his defiant joy.

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Marriage Story: The Relief of Unhappy Endings

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In one of the final scenes of Marriage Story, Charlie (Adam Driver with Baumbach’s actual hairstyle) is sitting with his son, reading something that his ex-wife Nicole (Scarlet Johansson, not sporting a hairstyle reminiscent of Jennifer Jason Leigh) had written about him. When the couple began the process of dissolving their marriage at the start of the film, a therapist had suggested they write down what they love about one another. Marriage Story opens with both of them speaking these pieces while fragments from happier times flit in the foreground.

When Nicole refuses to read her piece in the therapist’s office, the audience realises that those words hadn’t been spoken out loud. Charlie’s eagerness to read the text he’s written sends out a subtle hint that this is a performance. He says twice that he’s happy with what he’s written, as though it was an homework and he’s going to be graded. Nicole, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to want to hold the remains of their relationship up to the public (i.e. the therapist in the film and the audience outside of it), so she walks out.

After approximately two hours and an unamicable divorce, Charlie is sitting with their son, reading what Nicole had written about him. When he reaches the point where Nicole had made a passing mention of Charlie’s parents (he’s estranged from them), he quickly turns her words into gibberish and moves on to the bit where Nicole described falling in love with him. It’s a live edit that serves to remind you how we construct our own identities. Charlie’s actions are also a subtle reminder that no matter how ‘balanced’ a narrative may seem, it’s been edited to suit the narrator. And with that, Marriage Story’s claim of offering both sides of a divorce feels like a beautifully-painted façade. Nuanced, careful and considerate as it may be and for all the screen time it gives Nicole, Marriage Story is really Charlie’s story. 

Charlie, our tragic hero who must fall from a height. The director who emerges a fully-formed genius out of a blurry, obscure background with hints of trauma. He’s the toast of New York City, he’s the knight in shining armour, he’s the man whom you fall in love with in two seconds. And then, life cuts him down to size. He becomes the invisible man, held together and made visible by bandages; the living ghost who is shrouded under a bedsheet. His tragedy, it seems, is that there is only one person who really sees him – Nicole. Nicole, who brought the lawyers into what was going to be an amicable separation. Nicole, who rises from actress to director while Charlie falls to the ground, wounded. Nicole, who moved on even as Charlie moved closer to her – for their son, presumably – despite the divorce and bitterness.

This, it seems, is as much balance as we can hope for in a story about divorce when the storyteller is a divorcé.

In Marriage Story, all the mess of marital breakdown has been arranged to look neat and organised. As a story of two people who were once in love, Marriage Story feels unconvincing, but as a story about two people who are implacably apart, it works. It offers the viewer an anti-Mills and Boon – a story in which a relationship falls apart without the people in it falling apart. Here’s a marriage that was turned toxic by lawyers. That the husband was unfaithful is almost a throwaway detail (in any case, he did it because he wasn’t getting enough from her, so really, if there is a bad guy…). Marriage Story holds out the ultimate hope for an unhappy couple: That broken marriages can cauterise into friendships and that in hindsight, you’ll be able to forgive without forgetting.

There’s an equanimity to Charlie and Nicole even when they are at their most hostile that is fascinating because it’s possible that this isn’t the actors failing at their job. Perhaps Baumbach wanted the couple to be this chemistry-less to indicate their marriage is beyond repair. From the cinematography that emphasises neat geometries and a pale, clean palette; to the production design that shows neatly-arranged homes and the comfortable sadness between Charlie and Nicole,  everything about Marriage Story makes the point that a failed marriage may push you into awkward, cruelly-absurd circumstances, but it need not be messy.  

Charlie and Nicole discover one has cheated on the other, they shed a few tears and then, taking a deep breath, they move on – to the next person, the next challenge, the next lawyer’s appointment. One wishes the other was dead and lets those words sit on one another’s skin, but they’re easily washed away by tears and muttered apologies. When they have a shouting match, it’s with the fluid precision of the perfectly-wrought wheels and cogs in a designer watch. Their voices rise to crescendo in cacophonous harmony; the fight goes out of both of them in tandem. Their eyes are on the future, looking ahead to the next melancholic yet content stage of their relationship when a new equilibrium may be established.

In one scene, Charlie inadvertently slices his arm. It’s the most bloodless scene about blood-letting, but the mask of composure does finally slip (though only for Charlie). “I must have forgotten to retract the blade,” he says to the improbably blank, court-appointed evaluator (brilliantly played by Martha Kelly) who is there to observe Charlie in order to figure out if he’s a suitable father for his son. She watches Charlie bleed after he cuts himself using the little knife on a keychain that was a gift from Nicole. Even as I felt a little twinge of empathetic pain on my forearm, something inside me hissed angrily. Really? The blame for this stupid wound is on the gift she gave him? As though the subtle knife was Nicole’s weapon and Charlie’s only fault was inattentiveness? Then I laughed at his inept attempts at holding on to the catharsis that physical pain affords even while trying to nurse the wound. That’s not how you do it, I found myself thinking, while wondering what was up with Charlie and Nicole’s son who can’t read “iron” and thinks it’s normal to have a parent lolling on the kitchen floor. How ironic that the director of The Squid And the Whale, which did such a brilliant job of showing how children are impacted by divorce, would reduce the child in Marriage Story to a prop with about as much personality as a ventriloquist’s dummy, for Charlie.

Broken relationships have been the mainstay of Baumbach’s filmography and as a director, Baumbach came into his own with The Squid and the Whale, which almost felt like a roundabout apology from a son who had hero-worshipped his bitter, broken father and elder brother. Just as it was tempting to imagine The Squid and the Whale as Baumbach sifting through the strands of his own story as a child of divorce, the idea that Marriage Story draws upon the collapse of Baumbach and actor Jennifer Jason Leigh’s eight-year marriage is tantalising.

Perhaps we’re missing the point though when we try to map the fiction of Marriage Story to the fact of Baumbach’s life. Maybe the controlled sadness of Marriage Story is the fantasy fiction of collapsed relationships. In a world where these incidents can and do scar, leaving people hurting and traumatised, perhaps Marriage Story is the divorce you wish you had. An elegant, neat and cordial affair that wounds you enough to be inspired, but not so much as to paralyse you.  

It’s ironic that Marriage Story actually crackles with life when the lawyers enter the scene. Laura Dern, Ray Liotta and Alan Alda are electric as the lawyers representing Charlie and Nicole (though the fact that Dern’s Nora Fanshaw has to be the particularly ruthless one is worth an eye roll). Even at their gentlest, the lawyers glint like polished blades and they urge their clients to be the worst versions of themselves – as though the vitriol that explodes out of Charlie and Nicole is because of what the lawyers have done, rather than something that’s been gestating inside the married couple.

Fittingly for a film about a separated couple, both Driver and Johansson shine in their solo scenes, like when Nicole meets Nora for the first time or when Charlie steps into the spotlight of self-pity in a New York bar, singing a Stephen Sondheim song. It begins as a performance, much like the opening monologue of the film in which he describes Nicole, before turning into something far more intimate, heartbroken and heartfelt. (One of the many examples of the film’s subtle bias towards Charlie is that this scene acts as a parallel to the other song Sondheim song in Marriage Story. Nicole sings it, full of good cheer, with her mother and sister. While Charlie is brooding and alone, Nicole has her family and shines with genuine happiness.)

Unusually for a love story, you don’t wish Nicole and Charlie would find their way back to one another. The truth that Baumbach does seem to have kept firmly in his sight while writing and directing Marriage Story is that once a marriage has ended, the two people who were a couple are much better at a distance. Those in love are good together; divorcées are good apart.    

The City and Its Crowded Soul

Considering how Sudhir Patwardhan has been painting Mumbai and its suburban areas for decades, a retrospective of his works would have felt relevant to the city no matter when it showed, but that Walking Through Soul City is on now feels piercingly timely. Because the Mumbai/ Bombay scenes that have been created during the last week of protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposal to have a nationwide survey to compile a National Register of Citizens (NRC) are unlike any of the images we have of the city. And yet, the people at those protests are familiars of the people in Patwardhan’s paintings.

I wrote about this in my column, but there’s a whole lot going on in Walking Through Soul City, so here are the notes I made. (New Year resolution after losing my MAMI 2019 notebook: Copy notes out on blog without bothering about whether or not they’re adding up to a coherent bit of writing. Sniff) I’ll put the text of the column at the end of my notes.

[image error]People at NGMA in front of Another Day in the Old City (2017)

Caveat: All the photos, terrible as they are, are taken by me unless specified. More than taken, they’re smuggled by me because NGMA has a ridiculous anti-photo stance. Some guards don’t bother, but a lot of them are not forgiving.

There are arguments to be made for Walking Through Soul City being crowded with artworks. Patwardhan’s muse is, after all, an overcrowded city. Also, given our museum culture leaves a lot to be desired, retrospectives like this are rare opportunities to see an artist’s oeuvre. So I understand the decision of cramming in every damn thing you can into a show, right down to reproductions of paintings (doing my best to not eye roll though, because those were really not the best reproductions).

Except the show feels like an onslaught rather than an overview. There’s no breathing room and too few of the paintings get the space they need. A lot of Patwardhan’s paintings are large and even when they’re not, the best of them feel like portals. For that though, they need to be hanging in the middle of an otherwise empty wall. The effect is just not the same when other works are cosying up to the painting. Another consequence of the overcrowding is that it falls upon the viewers to notice resonances between different works. This is not easy to do, especially if you’re discovering an artist. It helps to have a curation that points out the stories that lie beneath the obvious one of Patwardhan’s Marxist leanings contributing to making him something of a visual bard for Mumbai.

Notes:

Family portraits section includes Marx.

Torso (1973)
Almost an odalisque-like pose — stretched body, one knee raised, other leg outstretched — but the impression of the body is male (loincloth). The way P paints skin over time is interesting. It becomes more and more realistic and detailed (shadows, folds, textures). Also compare to the nudes (first floor?). Feels a bit like an attempt to see the body as everyday, strip it of the sexual/ exotic, but at the same time, it is a nude and it does retain hints of sexuality.

[image error]Another day in the Old City

Another Day in the Old City (2017)
Pune (?). It’s like a paper city — almost two-dimensional, as though flattened by nostalgia. Colourful, crowded and peopled. Little details like the man sipping tea from saucer, visible through an open window.
Everyone stops in front of it and stares. It’s as though the cityscape is a space they recognise, a piece of their own memories made real.

Marchers (2017)

[image error]Detail

It’s almost like they’re copper statues, oxidized in parts. This cyan colour is so hard to capture in photos. It’s the colour of the skyscraper in The Emergent, which the camera turns into a flatter blue. Reminder of how much of a difference light makes to the viewing of a painting. The light it’s painted in and the light it’s viewed in — if these aren’t the same then you’re not really seeing the work that the artist intended you to see.

Street Corner (1985)
Jhola-carrying man on divider; couple on scooter (her sari, a glorious shade of purple); girl’s music lesson (we see the stern-faced male teacher and the back of her head; couple at balcony; people inside the home; people on buses. Where would you see this today? Interesting to think of the homes you can peek into while on JJ Flyover, except you rush past them. This scene is one born of lingering, of being stuck in a place (like when you’re in traffic).
The colours, the individual expressions of faces. Crowded, but each colour and each person has a place and plays a role in creating a fine balance.

Woman in Crowd (2011)

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Mumbai Proverbs (2014)
Seven panels, commissioned by Anand and Anuradha Mahindra.
The panels take you from old, historic Mumbai to the modern city of office cubicles, freeways and slums. As you move from left to right, it’s almost like the people disappear and the cityscape is flattened. No figure in the painting makes eye contact with the viewer. Head down, at work. Progress is a weirdly lifeless business.

Riot (1996)
SP’s response to riots and communal violence. In terms of placement, it’s on the wall parallel to the one with Street Corner (the two pillars kept apart by staircase and connected by the people who see both paintings) and faces Mumbai Proverbs. Tucked into a corner.
1996 paintings — this one and Station Road — show expressions that are harsher, more furrowed with suffering and sadness.
In comparison to paintings like Street Corner and Lower Parel, it feels weirdly static. Doesn’t have the same kind of energy that makes you feel like the moment you turn your gaze, the figures and scenery will move.

So much on the second floor. The three women connected by colour and the fact that they’re out in the city. Reminiscent of of Mexican murals. The solidity of the bodies, the blue and red connecting the three works. Also the fact that they’re all women at work, out and about.

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Nostalgia (2010)

[image error]Detail from Nostalgia

The rest of the painting shows parts of the apartment (person sleeping inside etc) and the stretch of an expanding city, full of new buildings. I keep coming back to the way the hands/ forearms touch, and the care with which he’s painted the older woman’s hands particularly — every dip, ever shadow. To think this is painted by a self-taught artist. Also, there’s an old-world tenderness in how the older woman is holding the younger woman’s arm.

Round the corner from Nostalgia is The Emergent (2012), with the cyan tower coming out of the city crusted with slums. The colours are stunning. Small painting, like a little window.

[image error]The Emergent

Note: this is not representative of the cyan. In the painting at NGMA, it looked like it had more green in it.

A number of paintings that show the human body, nudes, on this floor.

Second floor: Ulhasnagar (2001), Lower Parel (2001) and The Clearing (2007). The first two feel like snapshots from another time. Ulhasnagar is almost idyllic, but for the second panel with the toxic water, factory and dead cow. Chilling how this darkness is at the heart of an otherwise unremarkable, semi-urban landscape.
Interesting to note Lower Parel doesn’t have any women in non-Indian clothing (barring the two schoolgirls in their uniform). It looks so different now in terms of the clothes people wear, particularly women and girls.

[image error]The Clearing

Stairway to top: Night Bite (2018) and Window V (2010). Rush of the first countering the stillness of the second. Night in first; day in second. Only one face in Night Bite is precisely drawn — man in blue shirt, looking back at the stall with longing.

Aside from paintings, cupola also has projection on the interior of the dome and photographs. The colours feel a little harsher in the post-2015 paintings?

Quwwal (2005)
Small painting, green background, close-up of a man’s face. It’s like you’ll hear his voice at any moment.

A slightly-edited version of this column was published in today’s Hindustan Times.

Considering how the people and architecture of Mumbai and Thane have inspired artist Sudhir Patwardhan for decades, it is fitting that his retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) is overpopulated to a fault. Usually, art shows offer viewers a sense of expanse. Not this one. Curated by Nancy Adajania, Walking Through Soul City, is crammed with paintings, making NGMA’s cavernous interiors seem as densely-packed with objects as a two-BHK apartment shared between six flatmates.

Overcrowded as it may be, that the exhibition has such a wide selection of Patwardhan’s works makes it a treat. A curiously beautiful fact about Patwardhan’s older paintings is that the city in them still feels familiar. For instance, the specifics of Street Corner (1985) – like the open windows and doors that let you practically enter the lives of strangers – may have changed, but when you look up at the BEST bus standing next to you in a traffic jam, you’ll see napping commuters, just like in Patwardhan’s painting. The streets are still full of pillion riders who hold on to helmet-wearing scooter drivers the way the embracing couple does in Street Corner.

In contrast, some paintings, like Lower Parel and Ulhasnagar (both painted in 2001), feel like the opposite of timeless. The four-panelled Ulhasnagar shows a landscape that’s almost unrecognisably idyllic, with its canal of water winding past the width of the painting in the foreground. Disrupting the scenery is the second panel, which has a factory-like structure squatting front and centre. A dead, bloated corpse of a cow lies nearby and the water is a swirling, toxic bruise of reds and purples.

Even as progress has turned the city unnervingly lifeless in works like The Emergent (2012) and Mumbai Proverbs (2014), Patwardhan has managed to find inspiration in it. His paintings show aspects of Mumbai’s shape-shifting urbanity that have remained constant, like the struggle for space in The Clearing (2007), where everything but a barren little patch of earth is crammed with buildings. Or Night Bite (2018), which shows a snack stall as an oasis of neon, battling both darkness and munchies.

In the crush of paintings on display, there’s one from 2019 titled Marchers. It shows a featureless crowd of people walking ahead, unperturbed by the fact that two among them have fallen. Despite the bright yellow used for the figures and the cyan accents that make the bodies seem like they’re made of oxidized copper, it’s a gloomy painting. This is a crowd that cares nothing of its trampled brethren, as long as it moves ahead. The painting is worlds apart from the monochromatic strength of Woman in Crowd (2011), in which a woman weaves her way through a group of pedestrians, cyclists, and scooter-riders. The group moves in one direction while she disrupts their flow by cutting across them.

Mumbai’s crowds have been the subject of some conversation this past week as thousands have thronged to register their objection to the idea that the definition of Indian citizenship requires amendments. In different parts of the city, at different times of day, people have taken to the street in protest. Celebrities have stood next to nobodies, all of them broken by the same despair, and glued together awkwardly by a similar rage. Together, they’ve raised slogans and sang songs tunelessly (for tuneful protests, you’ll have to look up videos of protests in Assam and Manipur). They’ve carried placards, they’ve turned on the flashlights of their phones, they’ve waved flags, and they’ve made sure no one was trampled.

This is a Mumbai you won’t find in Patwardhan’s paintings. It’s a city no one remembers because this is Mumbai in a still-evolving present, being documented frenetically and compulsively by a massive group of people who have photographs of everything. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be Instagrammed, and thank heavens for that because if not for the capitalist hunger that led to these sharing platforms becoming the networks that they are today, so many of us would have been in the dark. Many of these photographs will disappear and perhaps even be forgotten, but not all of them. There are some that will persist in memory and whenever you see them, for a brief moment, you’ll be transported back to the angry, messy heart of these protests, whether or not you were actually at the scene in the photograph.

[image error]December 18, 2019/ Carter Road, Mumbai. Photograph by Hashim Badani, from his Instagram account. It’s my favourite photo of the Mumbai protests so far.

There’s no telling if the city will continue to surprise everyone – including itself – and keep taking to the streets; or if it will retreat to the windows, balconies and refuge areas that Patwardhan has documented over decades. Yet, despite the newness of the protests, if you look closely at the crowd of Patwardhan’s paintings – peopled with figures characterised by strong lines and unwavering humanity – it’s easy to imagine these old residents belligerently stepping out of the canvas of the past to stand shoulder to shoulder with those shaping Mumbai’s future.

On turning 40

[image error][image error]Reality vs Aspiration

(Kaliman was an adventurer superhero who was created by Rafael Cutberto Navarro and Modesto Vazquez Gonzalez for Mexican radio in 1963. It later became a comic book series and there were also movie adaptations. Kaliman’s origins are shrouded in mystery, but we do know he was a blue-eyed Indian orphan. None of this is relevant to me, but somehow the adventures of this incredible man involved the half-woman, half-gorilla being who — but for the blonde hair — is me.)

(Muttubby, mistress of Ashraf Ali Khan by Dip Chand, 1764, from the British Library and one of the paintings showcased in Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company at the Wallace Collection. As much as I would like to dream of possessing the elegance and poise this woman adds to the simple act of sitting on a chair, I fear my only connect with her at this moment is the unwitting “tubby” in her name.)

Dave McKean and Black Dog

Dave McKean’s multimedia performance of Black Dog was not top of my list things to see at this year’s Tata Literature Live!, but my ears did perk up when Bijal, the patron saint of children’s literature, said he’d illustrated Coraline. The blurb said that Black Dog was about the artist Paul Nash. I vaguely remembered Nash’s “Battle for Germany” (primarily because it was so unlike what I associate with either battles or Germany) and thought why the hell not.

Looking vaguely like a wizard who has gone undercover as a friendly neighbourhood uncle, McKean told the gathered audience at Prithvi Theatre that Nash was an artist who was known to everyone in Britain and to no one outside Britain. He also shrugged a little apologetically and said that Black Dog was not a biography, but a journey through some of Nash’s dreams. Oh, and while in psychological terms, ‘black dog’ is often used to describe depression, Nash mentioned that he saw a black dog in his dreams.

In short: an experimental show about an artist who suffered from depression. How’s that for a wild Saturday night?

Black Dog is actually a graphic novel and from this slideshow, it looks stunning. The performance used images from the graphic novel and had McKean on the keyboard, accompanied by a cellist who doubles up as a vocalist and a violinist providing live background score to the projected images. A few scenes were dramatised and the cellist sang a few songs about the dreams. Mostly, it was instrumental music and projected images from the graphic novel.

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The art is the highlight of the show and if you know Nash’s work — which I’m in the process of looking up. Thank the gods for museums who put their collections up online — then it’s fascinating to see how ideas and elements from Nash’s artistic world are filtered through McKean’s imagination to create the works in Black Dog. I’m guessing the lyrics of the songs use Nash’s own descriptions of his dreams, but I couldn’t follow them very well and the melodies were pretty much the opposite of earworms.

The black dog showed up repeatedly in the art, transforming in shape and nature. Sometimes, it was purely animal; sometimes it was a human-canine hybrid. At one point, someone (Nash’s father, I think) analyses Nash’s dream and tells him the black dog is Nash himself. At another point, the black dog appears wearing a doctor’s coat. There’s a sequence in which Nash emerges out of the black dog that is visually very powerful. The image of the dog’s teeth being vaguely mirrored by Nash’s hands as they force the jaws open is going to haunt me for its surreal violence.

[image error]From Black Dog by Dave McKean

The performance — and I assume, the graphic novel — has 15 chapters and goes on for an hour. McKean plays the keyboard and reads some text. Each chapter opened with a photograph. The art in the chapters was a vibrant medley of styles, ranging from sketches, to watercolours to collages. I think my favourite section was when McKean plunges Nash into a forest of blood-red, capillary-esque branches that slash at his monochrome hands, leaving thin, red lines on them. The images are sometimes chaotic, sometimes neat. Most of the human figures are warped and disproportionate, pulled out of shape by the violence of war. It’s not often that I find myself thinking the words were unnecessary, but they really did feel irrelevant to Black Dog. The study of war, isolation and depression that the images offer don’t need commentary. Also, even though I didn’t know Nash’s biography, the narrative seemed familiar as it followed the rhythm of much-repeated wartime stories.

At the end of the performance, Bijal wanted to get the Dave McKean books she had signed and so, we made our way round to the door to the backstage. There’s barely any light in that little corner of Prithvi theatre. On one side is the dark, black-painted solid, wooden door of the theatre and a dark-grey stucco wall. There was also some random junk piled up nearby and there stood a small cluster of fans around McKean and the violinist. One gentleman was carrying literally a backpack full of books. Bijal had three she wanted signed. There was also a young couple — a man and woman — waiting for a moment of his attention. They finally stepped up and asked for a few books to be signed. Then they pulled out an A4 sheet of paper and asked for a signature. We want to frame it and put it up, the woman said softly.

“Just a signature? You don’t want a drawing?” McKean asked.
“Anything you want to do,” the woman replied. “I mean, a drawing would obviously be amazing…”
McKean unfurled the paper. “Right,” he murmured and looked around. He moved towards the wall and touched it. “That won’t work,” he said, feeling the raised stucco surface. He ran his fingers quickly over the door. “Better,” he said and flattened the paper against the door. Someone in a striped shirt shirt — if he wasn’t a fan at that point, I’m pretty certain he ended up being one by the end of this episode — held the top and bottom right-hand corners. The young woman shone the torch of her phone on the door so that McKean had light.

And then McKean started drawing. Swift, bold, neat strokes that turned from abstract lines into an eye, the bridge of a nose, a face. At one point, someone from backstage opened one half of the door to step out and had a small heart attack because facing her was a small crowd of 10-odd people, all staring with big, shining eyes in her direction. Except of course we weren’t staring at her. We were marvelling at McKean.
“Don’t worry, I’m not painting on the wall,” McKean told her, without lifting his eyes from the drawing he was making. When the brush pen ran out of ink, he didn’t stop. Instead, he ransacked his bag to find a refill and then he returned to the paper.
It was like watching magic.

In fact, what we saw is perhaps rarer than magic. McKean had performed for an hour. He must have been exhausted, but there he was, making either a little drawing in every book that was held out to him or a big one, like the one for the couple.

At least in a few of the books, McKean drew the faces of smaller black dogs, which was such a wonderful move from a storyteller. Because sure, black dog may be how depression is conventionally depicted, but at least to a few people, the black dog will forever be associated with McKean’s warmth and generosity of spirit. They’ll remember being transfixed by the drawing they saw him make. McKean may have helped changed the story for a few people. If that isn’t real magic, I don’t know what is.

When we finally walked away, spellbound and hearts suddenly so utterly full, Bijal released a long, happy breath and said, “I keep telling you, children’s books authors are the best people.”

Cloud castles

One must dare to be happy. ~ Gertrude Stein

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MAMI 2019: Tremors

TL;DR: Very, very good; and dear god, how gorgeous is that Juan Pablo Olyslager.

The first thing that strikes you about Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager) and his family is how good they look. The home, with its imposing gates and scurrying staff, is grand. The people are immaculately turned out. Even with Pablo’s mother howling, Pablo curling up as though he can’t bear to show his face, and everyone else looking thunderstruck, this family and its home looks picture-perfect. By the end of the film, this same photogenic quality feels tautly stretched and suffocatingly mask-like because, as Tremors reveals, this façade is maintained at great cost.

When Pablo is outed, the revelation hits his family hard. That same evening, in what is seen by some as a sign of divine disapproval, the ground beneath their feet literally shakes as Guatemala City is struck by a tremor. Everything rattles and fear is writ large on everyone’s faces as they rush out of the house. A ”crisis” followed by an almost-earthquake – it’s melodramatic enough to be a scene from a telenovela except this is director Jayro Bustamente at work and if there’s one thing he exercises masterfully, it is restraint. So everything is muted, from the light to the volume. Instead of offering catharsis, every frame is filled with tension and silence. It’s only later that the performative quality of this first melodramatic scene hits home. Because if all these people – mother, father, brother, sister, wife – truly loved Pablo, would they make the choices they do, knowing what the effect would be on him?

Pablo is a middle-aged man; husband to Isa (Diane Bathen); father to their cute-as-buttons son and daughter; brother and son to the rest of his family, which is a prominent one in Guatemela City. No one in his society – other than his partner, the out-and-proud Francisco – can wrap their heads around the idea that Pablo wants to come out as a gay man, rather than deny it. When Francisco asks Pablo how it felt to face his family after he was outed, Pablo says he felt relieved (that’s when you realise everyone around Pablo was weeping and/ or sad; Pablo just hid himself so that his family and the audience can project their reactions on to him).

For a brief spell, it seems like a painful and awkward equilibrium may be possible. Pablo moves out of his home into a grungy little apartment. Francisco stays over now and then. And then, when it becomes clear that Pablo isn’t acting out or ‘going through a phase’, it all goes to hell.

In a matter of what seems like weeks, Pablo loses access to his children after Isa, in her divorce application, says he’s a pedophile. Better the wife of a pedophile than a gay man apparently. (It takes a moment for the toxic homophobia of this decision to really sink in.) This in turn leads to Pablo losing his job. (Suddenly, Francisco’s ostensibly carefree life seems weighed down. Is he forced to be the jack of all trades because no one will give him a regular job?) Pablo’s mother begs him to reconsider his decision to leave his marriage and is horrified when he says that being with Francisco feels to him like a divine miracle.

While Pablo is isolated for being gay, we see his brother in-law sleazily eye Isa, but without even the lightest rap on his knuckles. Being predatory is manly, after all. No need to censure that. Pablo’s daughter remains fiercely loyal to her father even as she and her brother are kept in the dark about what has ruptured their family. Aside from the little girl, the only one who shows Pablo any kindness is the indigenous maid Rosa (played by María Telón, who played the mother in director Jayro Bustamente’s exquisite first film, Ixcanul). It’s a tiny little role, but Telón is wonderful as the only one who is sympathetic to both Isa and Pablo. There is definitely a lot of social commentary layering the indigenous maid’s character since she is more open-minded (and just generally a better human being) than the privileged, white people who are higher up in the social pyramid.

Ultimately, a desperately sad Pablo agrees to Isa’s demand that he undergo a church-backed conversion therapy because he can’t bear to be separated from his children. Bustamente devotes a significant chunk of Tremors to the program that the church runs for errant men of the community. They’re made to stay in prison-like conditions: drab uniforms, bunk beds, grilled balconies, no phones, communal showers, exercise sessions in which the men are made to wrestle with each other. The men answer questions in unison, they chant prayers and after signing a form that waives their rights to redressal, they let themselves be injected with mysterious substances that promise to control their sexual urges. That this process of systematically emasculating these men is supposed to restore them to a state of ‘manliness’ is darkly ironic.

Even though there isn’t one obvious word against religion, if there is a villain in Tremors, it’s the church and its interpretation of the Christian faith. At first, the congregation seems like any other gathering, but it quickly reveals its menacing side. In Isa, it cultivates anxiety and rather than foster a sense of community, it inculcates herd mentality in the congregation. In later scenes, we see prayers that are launched like attacks and at one point, Pablo is surrounded by scores of hands seeking to channel divine ‘blessing’ onto him so that he becomes the man that the church wants him to be. It’s almost like he’s being smothered. Mirroring the movement and music of church are the salsa sessions at the hospice where Francisco works. In contrast to the church, the hospice is a place of healing, tenderness and freedom. It brings people together. In short, the hospice is everything that the house of god was supposed to be.

Soon after Pablo signs up for conversion therapy, the pastor’s wife arranges a meeting with Francisco. The scene shimmers with menace. She’s come to warn him to stay away from Pablo and in her perfectly-done hair and form-fitting clothes, she embodies power and the establishment. “I didn’t come here to talk about God,” she tells Francisco, who lives off the kindness of others and wears only ragged vests. “I came here to make sure you understand the rules.”

[image error]Sabrina De La Hoz is brilliant as the hateful pastor’s wife in Tremors.

The program that Pablo enrols in is run by the pastor’s wife (Sabrina De La Hoz), who has the steady glint and unyielding cruelty of a guillotine blade. Tremors makes the audience witness how subjects are isolated, stripped of every inch of self-esteem and essentially broken down in the course of the program. It’s torture and every step slams home how its viciousness is rooted in patriarchy. During their prayers, the men intone, “Thank you for not making me a pagan, a slave , a woman.” While Pablo is being subjected to ‘treatments’, the pastor’s wife picks at the scab of Isa’s insecurity by telling her that men turn to other men because their wives aren’t doing enough for their husbands sexually.

The structure of patriarchy is held up by women in Tremors. In comparison to the desperation of Pablo’s mother and wife, or the chilling cruelty of the pastor’s wife, the straight men in Tremors are vapid. They don’t need to do anything to enjoy the privileges this system offers. They’re ‘normal’ and that’s enough. The system is perpetuated by those who are marginalised by patriarchy, like these women who are desperate to feel they belong and will do whatever it takes to be part of an establishment rather than pariah. Their sense of worth is attached to conforming to the definitions of femininity laid out by the patriarchal system. The women of Tremors are a reminder that patriarchy is a worldview and that you don’t need to have a dick to be a dick.

As an aside, Tremors‘s women, reeking as they do of privilege, are a far cry from the mother-daughter duo of Ixcanul. In Ixcanul, the young Maria yearned to be more than what tradition and circumstances allowed her. Like Pablo, she defied the norms of her society and fell in love. Like Pablo’s mother, Maria’s mother insisted Maria submit, but there’s a sharp difference in how Bustamente shows these two older women. Maria and her mother’s stories are told with such empathy and elegance that you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bustamente was Mayan himself (he’s mixed and was brought up by his Mayan grandmother). There’s no hint of that kindness in his depiction of Pablo’s mother, which highlights instead her privilege, lack of empathy and blinkered worldview.  

I also remembered Pain and Glory while watching Tremors. Not just because here again was a ridiculously good-looking, bearded man speaking Spanish, but more for the contrast between the roles played by women characters in the two films. Almodovar’s women support his protagonist, not the norms of the society in which they operate. For example, Mercedes, his agent, is aware of Salvador’s drug habit, but her concern for him never tips into judgement. Even when the role is slight, Almodovar writes women characters who are not passive. They don’t often have much agency, but they are dynamic and determined. They make it possible for Salvador to become the celebrated rebel that he is as a filmmaker. While there’s no missing his mother’s discomfort with his homosexuality, she’s still the first person to have seen his potential. She fights to ensure he is not constrained by his circumstances, even if that means losing him to the seminary for instance. In Tremors, the women characters do the opposite. Pablo is held down by the women in his life because they need him to conform to ensure they haven’t failed in their roles as mother and wife. They will only let him be the version of himself that patriarchal norms permit and they’re determinedly blind to his feelings.

The film ends with Pablo having completed the program successfully (including a lacerating scene in which he has to end his relationship with Francisco with his entire family present as witnesses to this amputation). Back in the blessed fold, he’s in church, flanked by his mother and wife, and surrounded by the congregation that is ostensibly praying for him. The next thing we see is Pablo hunched over a basin, washing himself (it feels vaguely like a desperate, reversed baptism). He looks at himself in the mirror and there is anguished on his face. Outside, everyone is celebrating. He notices his daughter, his one champion, standing at the doorway. She’s neither inside the bathroom with him nor outside with the others. In that no-man’s land, the little girl truly sees him and she gives him a small smile. And your heart breaks – not just because you know what a terrible price Pablo has paid for this kinship and how couched in deceit this new life of his is; but also because who knows where this little girl will be forced to stand when she has to leave the in-between space she occupies now.