Bollywood movies are a gas. Just the small sampling of the films from India I’ve seen over the last year or two is impressive, and I hope I’m steering you towards some good ones to watch. But, like any major media culture, there is a wide variety of styles and topics for other, more independent films as well, and filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair have kept up a tradition of overtly artful, more serious-minded narrative films that seek to interact with their audiences on a different level than just entertainment (although Bollywood films are richly good at that!).
Chaitanya Tamhane knew in his youth that he wanted to be a storyteller, and figured he’d get into acting. But the more he learned, the more he was convinced that he should write and direct. While attending college, he scored a side-gig as a writing assistant at Balaji Telefilms, working on TV comedies, and was initiated into an industry writers’ club of sorts there.
His film debut is Court (India, 2014), a minimally fictionalized documentary examining the court system in Mumbai. Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) is a teacher, writer, poet and protest singer who does both arranged and impromptu performances in working-class neighborhoods and schools. But his work is frowned upon by local authorities trying to gain favor with India’s Hindu Nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) – Narendra Modi’s party. So local police have consistently started harassing Kamble, arresting him after shows on trumped-up charges, and putting him through weeks and weeks of no-bail incarceration while he waits for his court hearings. His defense attorney is Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber), whose retired father seems to have some legal experience as well. He drives a nice car, listens to western jazz, and hangs with his preppie friends in hip cocktail lounges. He’s earnest in his beliefs, but one could argue that his open-mindedness is a luxury he can afford. The prosecutor, on the other hand, Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni), is a middle-aged Mom, a middle-class civil servant who’s pragmatic about keeping her job. She’s good at it, but her approach is boilerplate: all established laws are legitimate, even if they’re 150 years old, and trial time is for convincing the judge to not spend valuable trial time on this defendant. Just throw them in jail for twenty years, she confides to her colleagues – it’s always the same faces with the same troubles anyway.
The case against Kamble (this time) is that a song he performed exhorting workers to rise against oppression convinced one particular sewer worker to commit suicide on his job. The prosecution’s witnesses aren’t all that convincing, but the judge, Sadavarte, (Pradeep Joshi) helpfully paraphrases witness testimony for the court reporter to avoid any misunderstandings – no, really – while ignoring defense arguments that there’s no requisite intent to support the charge. A group of people arrested for sitting in the handicapped commuter train car are fined 500 rupees each (around six dollars) and released, but a female plaintiff wearing a sleeveless dress won’t even be heard because the judge thinks she’s dressed inappropriately.
Tamhane documents a typical day in a typical urban Indian lower court, warts and all, but the parallels with our own legal bureaucracies – culturally and politically – are uncanny. He only uses professional actors for the lawyers and the judge – most other cast members are non-professionals, and the absence of contrivance is marked. Filmed with set shots and long takes (little if any camera movement), editor Rikhav Desai has created an admirable sense of narrative rhythm from the footage.
There are two performances by Kamble in the film (Vira Sathidar is a real-life version of the character – musician, teacher, poet, activist) and he’s riveting. It’s easy to see why the higher-ups, protecting a comfortable (for them) status quo, might not want this guy stirring things up, regardless of how seemingly small his audience may be. Tamhane knows it’s a classic dilemma – promoting change for the greater good vs. understanding how hard the establishment worked to achieve what is now there.
After his superb film debut, Tamhane spent the following year promoting and making appearances for the film. But he was also chosen for a program called the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, where veterans were paired with up-and-comers in music, architecture, literature, dance and film. This is how Chaitanya Tamhane became Alfonso Cuarón’s protégé on the filming of Roma (2018), and how Alfonso Cuarón became one of the executive producers of Tamhane’s second feature film, The Disciple (India, 2020).
If Court brought us into a municipal culture that’s being eroded by benign neglect and rank opportunism, then The Disciple brings us inside the culture of artistic and spiritual aspiration, and shows us how success and/or failure ends up being, mostly, a consequence of our own flawed humanity – the flaws inherent in institutions, the ironies inherent in individuals.
Sharad Nerulkar (Aditya Modak) has grown up with classical Indian vocal music always in his life, thanks to his devoted father (Kiran Yadnyopavit) and his own studies under his guruji, a disciple of the renowned singer and teacher Maestra Sindhubai Jadhar, affectionately known to her followers as Maai. Part of the mystique of Maai was that she sang superbly, and was an imposing teacher to many subsequently successful singers, but never allowed anyone to record her, save for eight reels of tape documenting a series of her lectures on music.
Sharad inherits his father’s aspirations, and pursues them with his own aging but seemingly vital guruji, Maestro Vinayak Pradhan (Dr. Arun Dravid). Sharad is a good singer, but struggles as any real artist would, and he’s very hard on himself. His guruji tends to berate his public performances, but always insists he should keep working, keep practicing and not be discouraged – at least until he’s around 40, which is when the guruji himself finally started to figure things out.
So the film is a chronicle of Sharad’s persistence throughout the years, participating in music competitions, gigging along with different musicians from concert to concert, explaining again to Mom and Grandma why full-time work would interfere with that to which he’s really committed. He watches pop singers on TV talent shows become famous for their Warhol-ian fifteen minutes, and supports himself by making and selling upgraded recordings of older, lesser-known classical singers.
Tamhane still predominantly films his story in long, patient takes, meticulously free of the chaos that a typical courtroom day might entail. But when the camera comes off of the tripod here, it’s for sinuously languid, crystal-clear digital tracking shots of surprising visual poetry drawn from simple background elements (the very-good cinematographer is Michal Sobocinski). Tamhane also expanded his use of sound design, taking full advantage of a cast packed to the rafters with talented working musicians for the film’s rich musical soundtrack, and trying out a thing or two he learned about Dolby Atmos from Cuarón.
These are both wonderful movies, and Chaitanya Tamhane is just now into his mid-thirties. Go find these rich and rewarding films soon soon soon – I suspect they’re both pretty accessible on Netflix. Like most terrific foreign films, you’ll be shocked and surprised how little difference there is between lawyers and musicians from there and here, and how effective cinema is in illustrating that for us.
Periscope In The Bathtub 