Unleash the vitriol....
There are films I dislike on an aesthetic level while appreciating their effort to be socially relevant. There are films I dislike for being totally frivolous while appreciating their aesthetics. And there are films that I dislike both for their handling of subject matter and their aesthetic choices. The films I dislike most are those that are nauseously self-important made by self-styled "art" directors. Antar Mahal, in my opinion, exemplifies this kind of film.
Antar Mahal, set in colonial Bengal, revolves around the life of Bhoobaneshwar Chowdhury, a wealthy zamindar desperate for a male heir, and equally desperate to win the favour of the British in the form of a knighthood. To fulfil these yearnings, he takes a child bride to bear him a much-coveted son, and commissions a sculptor to make a figure of the goddess Durga with the face of Queen Victoria. Using this backdrop, Rituparno Ghosh attempts to bring a number of issues to the forefront - the inferior status of women, corruption of the Hindu clergy, female sexual desire, bigamy, the insidious nature of colonialism, marital rape and so on. The mark of a good director while dealing with such subjects is sensitivity - sometimes this comes with appropriate context and subtlety, other times with three-dimensional characters, but the best directors combine all three elements to side-step mawkishness.
Unfortunately Ghosh isn't one of these directors. The entire film - the acting, script, screenplay, background music, cinematography - reeks of melodrama and sensationalism. In fact, the film is so caught up in manipulating its audience's emotions that it fails to realise that all its characters have the depth of a coffee table. While it can be argued that Ghosh is trying to realistically depict the atrocities of a patriarchal society, it seems more like he's assailing the audience with shock after shock to gain some credibility as a "serious, arty, realistic" director. The structures the film is supposedly critiquing - caste, class, ethnicity, patriarchy - overshadow the individual characters, none of whom seems to have any agency. All the men, with the notable exception of the sculptor, are portrayed as ruthless misogynists, and all the women as helpless victims. The sculptor's character however is never completely fleshed out, and he becomes little more than a foil to the upper-caste crazies.
To be fair, the film does have some genuinely compelling moments, but they're obscured by the abundance of sub-plots running into dead-ends that belabour an already tired point. For instance, the scene where the child wife is forced to have sex with her husband in the presence of a Brahmin is genuinely horrifying. However the repeated scenes of rape are completely gratuitous, worsened by some terribly histrionic dialogues and directorial choices.
Overall, the film seems to be made for Western audiences as it greatly exoticisises 18th century Bengali culture as being dogmatic, blood-thirsty and immutably cruel. Its failure to provide a socio-cultural context reinforces a ton of Orientalist myths which in turn reinforce the internalization of colonial perspectives on "Indian" culture by Indians. None of this is to exonerate the horrific practices of upper-caste Hindus but rather to point out the politics of representation in a post-colonial society. This problematic portrayal is compounded by the recounting of the story by an Englishman, a character, and hence narrative device that has no relevance to the main script whatsoever.
In case it isn't clear, I HATED the film, but my biggest gripe doesn't lie with the film itself. I am more disturbed by the fact that it has gained and will continue to gain critical acclaim for being heart-wrenching and shocking and revelatory and insightful and what have you. It will makes its rounds on the Festival circuit, and probably get the National Award and all of this will encourage Rituparno Ghosh to make another piece of pseudo-intellectual, self-congratulatory, exploitative tripe.
Antar Mahal, set in colonial Bengal, revolves around the life of Bhoobaneshwar Chowdhury, a wealthy zamindar desperate for a male heir, and equally desperate to win the favour of the British in the form of a knighthood. To fulfil these yearnings, he takes a child bride to bear him a much-coveted son, and commissions a sculptor to make a figure of the goddess Durga with the face of Queen Victoria. Using this backdrop, Rituparno Ghosh attempts to bring a number of issues to the forefront - the inferior status of women, corruption of the Hindu clergy, female sexual desire, bigamy, the insidious nature of colonialism, marital rape and so on. The mark of a good director while dealing with such subjects is sensitivity - sometimes this comes with appropriate context and subtlety, other times with three-dimensional characters, but the best directors combine all three elements to side-step mawkishness.
Unfortunately Ghosh isn't one of these directors. The entire film - the acting, script, screenplay, background music, cinematography - reeks of melodrama and sensationalism. In fact, the film is so caught up in manipulating its audience's emotions that it fails to realise that all its characters have the depth of a coffee table. While it can be argued that Ghosh is trying to realistically depict the atrocities of a patriarchal society, it seems more like he's assailing the audience with shock after shock to gain some credibility as a "serious, arty, realistic" director. The structures the film is supposedly critiquing - caste, class, ethnicity, patriarchy - overshadow the individual characters, none of whom seems to have any agency. All the men, with the notable exception of the sculptor, are portrayed as ruthless misogynists, and all the women as helpless victims. The sculptor's character however is never completely fleshed out, and he becomes little more than a foil to the upper-caste crazies.
To be fair, the film does have some genuinely compelling moments, but they're obscured by the abundance of sub-plots running into dead-ends that belabour an already tired point. For instance, the scene where the child wife is forced to have sex with her husband in the presence of a Brahmin is genuinely horrifying. However the repeated scenes of rape are completely gratuitous, worsened by some terribly histrionic dialogues and directorial choices.
Overall, the film seems to be made for Western audiences as it greatly exoticisises 18th century Bengali culture as being dogmatic, blood-thirsty and immutably cruel. Its failure to provide a socio-cultural context reinforces a ton of Orientalist myths which in turn reinforce the internalization of colonial perspectives on "Indian" culture by Indians. None of this is to exonerate the horrific practices of upper-caste Hindus but rather to point out the politics of representation in a post-colonial society. This problematic portrayal is compounded by the recounting of the story by an Englishman, a character, and hence narrative device that has no relevance to the main script whatsoever.
In case it isn't clear, I HATED the film, but my biggest gripe doesn't lie with the film itself. I am more disturbed by the fact that it has gained and will continue to gain critical acclaim for being heart-wrenching and shocking and revelatory and insightful and what have you. It will makes its rounds on the Festival circuit, and probably get the National Award and all of this will encourage Rituparno Ghosh to make another piece of pseudo-intellectual, self-congratulatory, exploitative tripe.
posted by Auri @ 6:01 PM
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