Qaushiq Mukherjee, better known as Q, is angry — with people, society, social media, religion, misogyny, patriarchy and politics. The pent-up rage screams out loud in the frames of his new film, aptly titled Garbage , against the collective rot we are trapped in. Q thinks that the indignation was boiling over in his controversial debut feature Gandu as well: “There, the protagonist was angry while the filmmaker in me was having fun. It was the angst of the marginalised, while in Garbage , the rage gets more universal and concentrated.”
Like Gandu back in 2011 , Garbage too has been selected for the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). The only Indian feature to have made the cut this year, it will premiere in the Panorama section next week.
The seal of Q’s brand of cinema is imprinted forcefully on Garbage. About an online troll who is a taxi driver in real life and a woman whose sex clip has been leaked online, it is provocative, explicit and shocking even as it is incisive and contemplative. It takes potshots at all things sacred and is bound to elicit extreme reactions from audiences.
Garbage started off as a personal journey for Q, prompted by a terrible personal situation. Later, it was also driven by the loss of a couple of dear friends. “Two deaths informed the film,” he says. But he ended up giving a larger context to the “highly depressive feeling” and the “joyless exercise” that filmmaking had become then.
Growing dissent
Q has consistently used cinema to protest and question. While it was middle-class morality or sexual mores that he zoomed in on earlier, the dissent gets broader, more amplified, in Garbage. “The world is going through the age of the stupid. We are rushing into an abyss, living a demeaning cultural existence,” he says. Berlinale’s South Asia consultant Meenakshi Shedde thinks the film reflects a distanced engagement and a profound perspective on larger, national issues. “Q has always engaged with the marginalised but now addresses more mainstream issues. He is right in the middle of society (in Garbage ) than on its fringes. It’s an extremely political, daring film; a powerful comment on what is happening around us,” she says.
Q’s critique here gets more direct, literal, and often shrill — the overarching metaphor of chains, the looming image of the garbage heap and the tumour, obviously standing for urban wastelands and maladies. Was the agitprop style, elements of street theatre, used deliberately? Q calls it his return to “pedestrian filmmaking” — going back to the streets, inhabiting and embracing the reality of the spaces around him.
Convenient distance
The film was shot within a three-kilometre radius of his Goa home. The shoot was organic and improvisational, taking off after a short workshop. “It was all about the actors finding their characters,” he says. And about Q himself finding his script, and the film, along the way. For Film and Television Institute of India (FTII-Pune) student Payal Kapadia, making her documentary And What Is The Summer Saying was just as fortuitous. She was researching for another film in Kondval village in Bhimashankar, Maharashtra, in 2016, when she decided to make a portrait of the place instead. “It became about my personal experience of being in that space,” says Payal of the 20-minute Marathi film that plays in the Berlinale Shorts section this year.
However, she didn’t want it to be an ethnological study but more about universal truths that everybody could relate to. She found them in her conversations with the village women; in their tales about gods, thieves, tigers, vermillion, marriage, and most of all about love, longing and desire, stealthy love letters and male bees who die once they have mated, as though that was their only purpose of existence.
It’s the soundscape that the film has grown from; the beautiful static visuals of the place, like still-life paintings, become almost secondary. The film became audio-driven not out of choice but because there was no other option. The otherwise voluble women were tongue-tied when Payal’s all-male crew started filming them. “They became stiff and controlled. That freedom in chatting with me while cooking the bhakris (bread) was lost,” she recollects. So she took their testimonies down on a recorder and strung the images together later. It gives the film a unique form, making viewers create their own visual associations.
Ere Gowda’s cinema stems from association of another kind — with people, often total strangers. The young filmmaker, from Node Koppalu village in Karnataka’s Mandya district, had to discontinue high school and move to Mysuru, and later Bengaluru, to work and support his family and help fund his mother’s cancer treatment. He did odd jobs as security guard, gardener, driver and office assistant.
“A new education started for me while at work,” he says. Different jobs meant meeting varied sets of people. That has now become a character pool for Gowda to constantly dip into: “Through my films, I want to share with the world the many people I have met, the vital things I took back and absorbed from them.”
Subtle exploration
The first film that Gowda co-scripted — Raam Reddy’s much-celebrated Thithi — was character-centric. So is his debut as a director with Balekempa (The Bangle Seller , Kannada) that won the Fipresci award at the just-concluded Rotterdam festival. It’s a subtle exploration of the relationship between a couple — Kempana and Sowbhagya — in a small village in Karnataka.
A scene from Balekempa.
While Thithi was shot in his village, with family members and villagers, Balekempa has been shot in Dodda Byadarahalli, his wife’s village. The film has only one professional actor, Bhagyashree; the rest face the camera for the first time. Speaking to us from the Netherlands, Gowda recalls how Raam Reddy’s social-worker mother, Anita Reddy, gave him a camera upon learning of his interest in cinema. “Fiddling with it, I used to dream of being featured in the Friday supplements of newspapers,” he says. Some dreams do come true.
At times, films also emerge from dreams, unpleasant ones. Filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta used to have crushing nightmares after his grandmother’s death. He would wake up wondering if he hadn’t mourned her enough. “It was a strong feeling, a melancholia that is difficult to articulate,” he recollects. His second Bengali film Jonaki, which premiered in the Bright Future section at Rotterdam, is a deeply personal attempt at recreating those feelings. The 80-year-old protagonist is based on his grandmother, who had an affluent childhood and then saw it all fall apart after her father’s early death, about her love for a Christian boy nipped in the bud, and her forced marriage at 16. The film imagines what her thoughts could have been as she lay in a coma before her death.
For someone who doesn’t see cinema as a career but an obsession, every film is about learning to express oneself in more effective ways.
A still from Jonaki.
Like his debut Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love, Bengali), Jonaki is also visually striking but in a dreamlike, painterly way. “It is about creating an introspective space,” he says.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
Published - February 10, 2018 04:45 pm IST
