The journey of Anand Gandhi’s masterpiece from Toronto to Indian turnstiles
By Mayank Shekhar
Earlier this year, Critics Circle, a British body comprising art, film, music and drama critics, invited some of its prominent members to select, introduce and screen “the film that changed their life” for a series named just that. The programme was part of the organisation’s centenary celebrations. It revealed an eclectic mix of American, European, lesser known and popular classics chosen by some of Britain’s top cultural commentators. Telegraph’s David Gritten did a presentation on Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle Of Algiers (1966); Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw talked about Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980); Philip French who stepped down this year after serving 50 years as the Observer’s film critic deliberated on the John Sturges Western, Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)….
As you scroll down the programme on the Critics Circle website, you realise that there is only one contemporary film in that entire list and it is a 2013 Indian film that few in India, let alone in London, would have heard about then. Derek Malcolm, formerly with the Guardian, who writes film reviews for the Evening Standard, chose to screen and speak about the “poetic” Ship Of Theseus in the series. The film is directed by a first time filmmaker from Bombay, Anand Gandhi, 33, whose best known writing credits include television soaps Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. Back home Gandhi was obviously taken aback. For almost four years, he had been piecing his debut film together with the backing of an independent producer from Rajasthan, Sohum Shah, who also plays one of the lead characters in the film. The word in matters of movies spreads fast.
While Ship Of Theseus was still under production in August 2011, Cameron Bailey, director of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), had written to Kiran Rao asking her to look out for this “deeply philosophical” movie, of which he’d only seen a 10 minute clip. Rao’s own debut Dhobi Ghat had premiered at TIFF in 2010. She and Bailey had been in touch. This is how she first heard about Ship Of Theseus. Since the film hadn’t been ready for a while, she had forgotten about it, until she learnt about its screening at the relatively low-key Enlighten Film Festival at the Russian Cultural Centre in South Bombay. She promptly went over for the show. Gandhi, the director, was quite surprised to see her there. They hadn’t met before.
By the last scene, which is her favourite–a long hallucinatory point-of-view sequence “as the camera quietly follows the protagonist into a dark cave, negotiating through the rocks, creating space, sunlight beating down”–Rao was left “gobsmacked”: “It was unlike anything I had ever seen. I was excited that it was possible to make films like this,” Rao said. The only other time she had experienced anything faintly similar in a theatre in Bombay was sitting in a packed Globus in Bandra, watching a public screening of Dibakar Bannerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha in 2011: “This feeling was that, multiplied many times over.”
Ship Of Theseus is a collection of three cleverly inter-related short films that examine the dilemmas of a blind photographer (played by Aida-el Kashif), a Jain monk (Neeraj Kabi), and a stock broker (Sohum Shah) who has just been through a kidney transplant. The film is mostly in English, partly in Hindi, with a smattering of Arabic (the blind photographer is Egyptian), and Swedish (the stockbroker travels to Stockholm).
The title refers to an ancient paradox, made popular by the 1st century biographer Plutarch, which questions whether an object is only equal to or greater than the sum of its parts. Over years, the ship that Theseus, the founding hero of Athens, had sailed in had been entirely reconstructed with new planks and fittings for upkeep and preservation. It led to the logical argument among ancient Greek philosophers if the Ship of Theseus then was a new ship, or the same ship with new parts.
This logical problem metaphorically extends to humans. Gandhi uses this Theseus’ Paradox as the starting point of his picture, ruminating on what constitutes the body and the soul, since Indian philosophy makes a clear distinction between both. He sets up thoughtful conversation between the photographer and her boyfriend, the Jain monk and a young law intern, the stockbroker and his ailing grandmother as the hugely engaging movie meditates on the nature and purpose of art, science, belief, values, and life itself. These dialogues aren’t dry or dialectic. The film works at the level of the plot as well.
One of the reasons Bailey may have sounded Rao off on Ship Of Theseus is that like Dhobi Ghat, this remarkably picturised film, with gorgeous still images and long interrupted sequences, is set in present day Bombay. Each person in the picture, who would otherwise remain unknown to each other in a crowd, connects with the lives of others. This was also the premise of Dhobi Ghat where the stories of a young Bihari dhobi (Prateek Babbar), a non-resident Indian banker (Monica Dogra), a middle-aged artist (Aamir Khan), and a housewife from Uttar Pradesh (Kriti Malhotra) somehow intersect in a vast metropolis: “In a tangential sort of way, I was trying to untangle the meaning of life through the characters’ pursuits, journeys… That our lives in different worlds overlap is metaphorically and philosophically more at the core of Ship Of Theseus,” Rao said when we met on a wet weekday afternoon at her office in Khar, a couple of minutes’ drive from her Pali Hill apartment where she lives with her husband Aamir Khan and their one-and-half year old son Azad.
Eight months after that Russian Cultural Centre screening and her “fan girl moment” with the debutant director Gandhi, the newly reworked poster behind her couch is that of Ship Of Theseus with her name above the title. Clearly she’s moved a mountain of sorts since, or so most in the film business spoken to fittingly suggest. As the film’s presenter, she’s roped in UTV-Disney to bear the cost of prints and publicity and give the unusually minimalistic Ship Of Theseus a nationwide commercial release. Her team has been working on cutting fresh promos for the film. Employees of Aamir Khan Productions meanwhile are in an adjacent room sifting through possible stories for the second series of the actor’s social reality TV show Satyamev Jayate. I am Rao’s ninth interviewer for the day, before she heads back to take her little son out to a “kids’ gym”. She is a full-time mom.
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Rao started her film career as an assistant on Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan. It was produced by Aamir Khan. This is how the two met. Reema Kagti, who later directed Honeymoon Travels Private Ltd. and Talaash, is Rao’s senior from Sophia College in Bombay. She was already working on Lagaan. Kagti checked with Rao if she might be interested in joining the crew in Kutchh. This is in 2000. Rao had returned to Bombay after finishing her master’s course in mass communications from Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia. She took up the job of the “second second AD (assistant director)”, in charge of the film’s costume department, which given the wide array of characters involved (in a village, a palace, a British cantonment, and a cricket team) was a “scheduling nightmare.”
She then hung out on the sets of Dil Chahta Hai (DCH) because her friends were working on the film (hawk-eyed viewers can spot her in a Goa hotel lobby scene in DCH). “This was a new world of films. The one where actors wouldn’t land up on sets was something I had only heard of,” she said. Both Lagaan and DCH were the first mainstream films to adopt sync-sound, wrap up shoots over a single schedule, professionalise the army of ADs… “They changed filmmaking in Bombay altogether,” Rao recalled.
She had been slightly anxious before stepping into Bollywood because she didn’t know what to expect. She had had a soft landing. Thereafter she assisted on Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Shaad Ali’s Saathiya, Gowariker’s Swades, before turning into a “professional first AD” for advertising films that would afford her a comfortable lifestyle. Bombay is her adopted home. She grew up in Calcutta. Her parents later moved to Bangalore. Since her marriage, she has been involved in all of Aamir Khan’s productions, credited as producer (Delhi Belly, Peepli Live, TV series Satyamev Jayate, besides Dhobi Ghat), or as associate producer (Taare Zameen Par, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na). Ship Of Theseus is her first independent project.
For a reference point, the film bears stronger parallels to European or world cinema than anything made in India so far. Gandhi rightly listed to me among his influences, Krzystoff Kieslowski (Three Colours trilogy, The Decalogue) for “his ambition, empathy and humility of philosophy,” Ingmar Bergman (Autumn Sonata, Wild Strawberries) for “his choice of subjects,” Michael Heneke (Funny Games, Amour) for his “craftsmanship, editing patterns”… The voice that finally emerges is truly original, mining a lot from Indian philosophy for narrative influences. You can still tell what Gandhi may have meant while mentioning traces in his film of Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Russian Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror), Danish Lars von Trier (Dancers In The Dark), and the Hungarian Bela Tarr from whom he borrowed the sound designer Gabor Erdelyi for his film.
These master filmmakers, once a rarity on VHS and DVDs, seen at film festival retrospectives and film schools, are instantly downloadable directors now, creating a web of unprecedented access for aspiring filmmakers to learn from and discuss about, Rao said. She has been arguing with Gandhi for a while if Bela Tarr’s Turin Horse (2011), for instance, shot in 30 long takes, portraying almost in real time the relationship between a horse and its owner qualifies as installation art or feature film. Gandhi told me he often enjoys cosily dozing off in a theatre, mentally parked in a surreal state as he lets in a film such as Bela Tarr’s. Ship Of Theseus, both funny and profound, mercifully isn’t a sleep inducing bore.
When Rao entered movies, she was certain that within a year or two she would be the “next Tarkovsky—that’s my job, to give good cinema, people had no idea what they were watching.” Her well paying job in advertising instead kept her from finding the right headspace to script the sort of film she would have liked to make. She wrote a full length screenplay as an exercise for herself but discarded it, being unhappy with the outcome.
It was in a hotel room in the interiors of Punjab, holed up for days while Aamir was shooting for Rang De Basanti that she managed to get the first draft of Dhobi Ghat out of her system. Aamir liked the script. He wanted to act in it. She wasn’t keen on carrying the burden of a super-star in her film, or shooting with a popular face in the intensely crowded Mohamed Ali Road where a fair portion of the picture is set. He auditioned for the part. The film was 100 minutes long, with a very low-key background score, without songs or an interval, starring a top Bollywood actor and playing at a theatre near you.
Multiplexes have made this possible, Rao believes, though there is a long way to go so far as content is concerned: The equation isn’t quite as simple as low budget equals good, and mainstream signifies merely song, action and dance. While the lines are visibly blurring, there is quite often rubbish produced in the name of both. What excites Rao are the number of cinematic voices coming out from outside the “culture of big names and huge production houses, mushrooming from unlikely places… Filmmakers with guts and gumption, gaining entry into film festivals…” For example she cited Amit Dutta’s Nainsukh (a 90-minute experimental film that recreates miniature paintings of the 18th Century Mughal artist on whom the film is named); Aamir Bashir’s Harud (on Kashmir’s youth in the wake of terrorism); Celluloid Man (biopic of PK Nair, founder of the National Film Archives of India).
The latter two got a limited release as part of Director’s Rare, a section introduced by the multiplex chain PVR that screens independent films for one or two shows a week at some of their metropolitan outlets. It’s the first viable distribution option for offbeat films in India. Financial gains for producers are minimal. But the filmmakers are only too happy see their works screened before a paying public. Rao’s dream is to start an art-house theatre in Bombay.
No new wave, she said, can start in isolation of an audience. The Hindi parallel cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s, popularly called the Indian New Wave, with star directors like Shyam Benegal, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Mani Kaul, was to a large extent government funded. It fizzled out by the ‘90s. The French New Wave in the ’50s and ‘60s famously originated with critics of the magazine Cashiers du Cinema–Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard etc.–who went on to make films.
Rao argument is that the artistic community has done little to support each other in India; and the government, next to nothing: “You can’t blame a bunch of producers—with no safety net, salaries to pay, shareholders to answer to, looking for their next hit—to think about the future of Indian cinema. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there,” she said. This is why she was automatically drawn towards Ship Of Theseus when she first saw it: “There are few lone survivors on this island who live by our own rules. It’s important for a growing number of us to stick together.” After several meetings with Gandhi, chiefly discussing physics and philosophy, she asked if he needed any help with the release. There is clearly no money in it for her. She is mostly busy with her little son. She loved the movie enough to make time for both. …contd.