'Koozhangal': Film festivals and the simplicity trap

PS Vinothraj’s debut film ‘Koozhangal’ (Pebbles) has been chosen as India’s entry for the Oscars and one cannot but believe that it is the right choice, given its visual appeal and the fact that it won the biggest award at Rotterdam. The film is starkly shot and almost without precedent in Indian cinema for its look, but this is not a review of the film or an appraisal of its value but more an examination of film festival choices, what the reasons are for a film from any country being successful and if there is Pavlovian reinforcement at work when prizes are awarded. There have been several international directors who have learned to play the film festival system successfully and Indians seem to be catching on.

I will begin by saying that films from all countries are not judged by the same standards (say cinematic competence and originality) but that the film must, instead, echo familiar narratives with regard to the culture it is from. It must boldly speak out the ‘truths’ already held about the culture. In this regard, what people see as virtues in an American or European film will not be virtues in an Indian film. Europeans or Americans are psychologically complex but Indians or Iranians must be flatly drawn, and complexity is out of place.

Two international filmmakers who have made a mark internationally are the Iranian Asghar Farhadi (‘The Salesman’) and the Russian Andrei Zvyagintsev (‘Loveless’). Both come from what are perceived to be conservative and/or totalitarian countries. Farhadi makes films to unfailingly confirm this view of Iran and he makes mystery films in which an unfortunate event happens without our understanding why.

Enquiry into the happening is then initiated to reveal that it was because of conservative aspects of Iranian society, which are then disclosed. My observation is that these revealed aspects of Iran would be well-known to Iranians but not to audiences at Cannes, and the ‘mystery’ hence caters to these foreign audiences.

An Indian film would use a similar strategy if it created a mystery around a horrific event that is revealed to owe to caste discrimination or, as is today more favoured, religious persecution. Zvyagintsev uses a different strategy and portrays Russia as a society without love and overrun by drunken politicians. As a parallel, Bong Joon-ho’s satirical ‘Parasite’, because it is from a democracy, concludes optimistically, though everything points to its falsity.

India, it has been said, incorporates within it both sunny California and sub-Saharan Africa. If the mainstream Hindi film showcases the Californian opulence (‘Dil Dhadakane Do’, 2015) ‘Koozhangal’ showcases the sub-Saharan side, and one may be sure that it is its sub-Saharan side that represents India outside. One recollects that Satyajit Ray, in the aftermath of ‘Pather Panchali’, was accused (in parliament by Nargis) of peddling Indian poverty abroad, but those lives portrayed in Ray’s film were culturally rich compared to those in ‘Koozhangal’.

‘Koozhangal’ actually uses a visual aesthetic close to that of films from countries like Mali, a simple story in a dry landscape. As its design, all it does is to showcase extreme misery – locals smoking mice out of their burrows, breaking their legs and roasting them over a fire; people digging in the sand for a muddy trickle of water, a hungry puppy chewing on an empty water bottle.

These elements are unrelated, but the director, through the motif of a drunken man striding along an arid landscape with his son just pulled out of school, contrives to bring them together as a road movie would – as vignettes of life. The presence of a strange rock formation in a parched landscape is another motif familiar from sub-Saharan films.

This leaves us with ‘Koozhangal’s deliberate simplicity and one is left wondering at the kind of human existences portrayed in the film, whether the lives of the poor can be summed up in this fashion in a work of purportedly serious art. The only conflict in the film is the one induced by the man’s habitual drunkenness and that is simplistic rather than simple.

Educated people transact with the unlettered in the course of their everyday lives and know that the poor are as complex as the rich and understanding their impulses needs reflection since they are rarely articulated. Educated people are constructed differently and are perhaps easier to understand to others of their kind. As evidence, political parties have still not been able to figure out the electoral conduct of the poor, how they actually vote; populist measures adopted by parties in power not bearing fruit are a token of that.

The notion of Indians (like Africans) being ‘simple’ is a product of western incomprehension since the British found Indians – especially Hindus – difficult to fathom. When international film festivals reward Indian films for presenting their subjects as simple, should we jump at the bait and also do so to ourselves? More importantly, are privileged artists not sidestepping the responsibility of understanding the marginalised as individuals by presenting them as so ‘simple’?

(The writer is a well known film critic).