Response to a column (and more thoughts on Ship of Theseus)

Mihir Sharma wrote this piece about Ship of Theseus – and by extension, about Hindi cinema – in today’s Business Standard. To say everything I want to say in response would take up several thousand words (and it would entail regurgitating many things I have written about popular cinema in the past), but here are some condensed – and, apologies for this, hurriedly put together – thoughts.

First, as will immediately be obvious to most readers (including many readers who aren’t particularly fond of Hindi films), Mihir makes a few sweeping assertions. Any piece that begins with the sentence “As is widely known but rarely articulated, most Indian films are terrible” is either 1) a deliberate, tongue-in-cheek attempt at being a devil's advocate, or 2) reflective of a sensibility that has a basic contempt for – or an inability to relate to – the language of regular Hindi cinema.

Now of course no one is under any obligation to understand or relate to this language (I’d feel a bit hypocritical making such a suggestion, given that I spent 10-12 vital years of my own movie education at a remove from Hindi films). And there is no denying that there IS a large amount of crud in our cinema, and that many filmmakers approach their work with the assumption that viewers have single-digit IQs. But I would tentatively say that if you’re writing professionally about film, you might at some point want to recognize that Good Cinema is not required to follow a specific, restricted model (say, the model of psychological realism as established by the European avant-garde or the American indie movement).

In this context, the question that ends the piece – “if it's a movie that comes out of the Mumbai film industry, but every part in it is different, is it really a Mumbai movie at all?” – is similarly reductive. The term “Mumbai movie” is a very wide one, encompassing not just the many (often misleading) categories that were once used to differentiate cinema types – “commercial”, “art” and “middle” – but also very different directorial sensibilities within each of those categories. Though this is not something you will grasp if you look at all Hindi cinema (especially popular Hindi cinema) though a lens indicating that here is a single, amorphous blob made up of “escapist” or “silly” things like songs and dances, plot simplifications and hyper-exaggerated emotions.

Possibly I’m now making assumptions about what Mihir considers good cinema, and putting words in his mouth. But this paragraph is revealing:

I definitely felt, while watching it, that it was very, very different from - and better than - anything else that has come out of Mumbai so far. It was subtle and restrained; it did not flatten its characters; it addressed big ethical issues, but avoided easy clichés...

“Better than anything else that has come out of Mumbai so far”? Really? Off the top of my head I can name dozens of works from Bombay film history (and I’m not talking only about the obviously respectable, “socially conscious” ones made by directors like Benegal) that are every bit as good even as they operate within well-established mainstream tropes.

At which point, I suppose I should say something about my own benchmarks for a good film. Being necessarily “subtle or restrained” is not one of them. This is a vast subject and should be explored at greater length than I can manage just now, but to address a very basic aspect of it: many people reflexively use “melodrama” as a pejorative, the same way they use “realistic” as a blanket endorsement. But melodrama is a mode of artistic expression that is as valid as any other, and fulfills a purpose very different from that served by spare realism. In assessing a film, the far more relevant question is whether it has succeeded in realizing an integrated, internally consistent world – irrespective of whether that world is founded on hyper-drama or kitchen-sink realism or one of the many, many things in between.

Which brings me to my own feelings about Ship of Theseus. I thought very highly of it: my column about the film is here. And I agree with most of the specific points Mihir makes about it (the 4th, 5th and 6th paragraphs of his column are excellent – he is much better at examining the minutiae of a single film than at making macro-statements about cinema), such as how it gives the Marwari stockbroker a credible inner life. (This sort of thing is not “revolutionary” by any means, it has been effectively done in other recent Indian films ranging from Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! to Vicky Donor – but it certainly is one of Ship of Theseus’s biggest strengths.) Thinking about it again, I find that my appreciation for the film was tied mostly to how well it did small things, and accumulated them to the service of the whole. More than once while watching it, I had this odd, difficult-to-articulate sense that here was a really good termite-art film (to use Manny Farber’s famous formulation) that had dressed itself up as an elephant-art film.

It worked for me at the level of worm's-eye storytelling, at the level where a movie can achieve great things through attention to detail, by being a near-perfect synthesis of its many parts. (One might say the planks that made up this film were of a uniformly high quality.) But then again, in my view a superbly put together popular/fantasist film like Amar Akbar Anthony (to take one example) meets that criterion just as well. (Better, actually, if I stick with this particular example. But now we’re steering too close to the realm of subjective response, where discussion becomes pointless after a while.)

By the way,

“This movie has such faith in its viewers that the classical paradox that gives the movie its title isn't explained till the very end.”

Nope. The film explicitly spells out the paradox at the very beginning, in the form of a sentence that appears on the screen for a few seconds, then gradually fades away, leaving only the words “Ship of Theseus” (which becomes the opening title) behind. And if we are really discussing whether this film has faith in its viewers, one might point out that the meaning of the title has been carefully explained in every major press release (including the informal one I received inviting me to a preview screening) and on promotional websites. I’m happy to give the filmmakers and publicists the benefit of doubt (perhaps they wanted to ensure that viewers weren’t misled into thinking it was an adventure film set on the high seas, or something such), but I think it’s at least equally probable that they were trying, from the start, to promote Ship of Theseus as a film of Big Ideas (hence presumably more “important” than your “average” movie) and to spoonfeed the central “philosophical enquiry” to viewers. 

And if that was the case, it seems to have worked: as I have mentioned elsewhere, before the film’s general release I was puzzled by how many people were gushing about it on Facebook and Twitter feeds, and then disclosing shortly afterwards that they hadn’t yet seen it. (On Twitter, I remember someone congratulating Anand Gandhi for having made such a beautiful, relevant film. Quite reasonably, Gandhi asked where and when the tweeter had seen it, only to be told “Haven’t seen it yet, but saw the trailer”.)

Something that makes me uncomfortable about many of the responses I’ve seen (including the ones by people who “admire” a film without having watched it – much like Hartosh Singh Bal once dismissed a cartload of Indian novels without feeling the need to read any of them) is that those responses are to the elephant-art shell of the movie. It has become increasingly common to hear Ship of Theseus being described in terms like “It is not just a film, it is an experience / it is like reading a great book.” Maybe I’m nitpicking here (it’s an old character flaw) but as someone who has been a movie nut for years – and is constantly making new discoveries about how many different kinds of great films there can be, both “popular” and “arty” – I can’t help wondering what the phrase “just a film” might indicate; it sets off alarm bells in my head. Could it be applied to the many dozens of high-quality Hindi films made over the decades, which operate within a very different artistic idiom than Ship of Theseus? Are we dealing here with a modified version of the snobbery that pronounces non-fiction books to be inherently superior to – or more “real” than – fiction (or fantasy/science-fiction novels to be inherently less relevant than novels set in the real world)?

To sum up (and I know this has been a rambling post): I have limited patience with the way Ship of Theseus is being held up as a shining, single-dose cure for everything that is wrong with Hindi cinema. I can understand being fed up with just one idiom of filmmaking (i.e. the dominant, mainstream one) and looking forward to alternate storytelling modes that get the right backing from influential producers such as Kiran Rao: that trend certainly is to be encouraged (and it HAS been underway for a long time now - even producers like Ekta Kapoor, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar, who are soft targets for snobbery, have been backing such "new" cinema). But it’s another matter altogether to dismiss any film built on commercial tropes such as the song and dance or the theatrical expression of emotions. In themselves, such things certainly don't make a film inferior to Ship of Theseus.