In praise of excess: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Padmaavat, related thoughts

(Wrote this for my Economic Times column, combining thoughts from a recent screening and an unrelated book launch)
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A Ukrainian film from 1965, a riverside scene by the Carpathian mountains. A young man, learning that his lover may have drowned, joins the search party looking for the body, stumbling about wildly – while the camera seems to teeter too, sometimes following him, sometimes going past him in delirious, looping, disorganised movements. There are similar compositions elsewhere in the film too, along with bold colours and the haunting use of music and reflections in otherworldly scenes such as the one where the man is visited by his lost love.

Watching Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors for the first time recently – on a big screen, at the Habitat film festival – I was thrilled by its showiness. (An old review which noted that the film was a one-of-its kind – “as if its director had simply discovered the camera, and how best to use it, by himself” – summed it up well.) The screening was preceded by a live piano performance that seemed to invite us to contemplate the horrors unfolding in present-day Ukraine; but poignant as this prelude was, when the film itself began we were immersed in its unusual, inventive telling of a tragic romance – the political lens, or the terrain’s broader history, was secondary.

Many people I know, always more preoccupied by plot or theme than by form, would call Parajanov’s film excessive. “Style over substance.” “Visuals drawing attention to themselves, at the expense of story.” These are banal allegations often directed at a certain type of flamboyant creative work. And they often come from viewers who have trouble opening themselves fully to the intense emotional palette of such a film – while being very keen to discuss it in the restricting terms of its ideological position or “message”. A few weeks ago I watched the controversial Emilia Perez, much-reviled (for, among other things, its depiction of Mexicans and trans-people) by those who look at cinema largely through an identity-politics lens. But watching it in the company of a friend who is, like me, fond of melodramatic forms of expression, it was entirely possible to be stirred and moved by the film’s splashy, emotionally demonstrative telling of a specific human story.

Despite loving plenty of quiet or minimalist films, I often find myself more stimulated by “excess” – by things that are labelled over the top (including, but not restricted to, popular Hindi cinema). Sometimes this serves cathartic functions: growing up, I preferred Dharmendra’s loud Veeru in Sholay to Bachchan’s reticent Jai, even though I shared more personality traits (and a name) with the latter. But perhaps there was a closet extrovert in me, knocking desperately from within at the shell of the inhibited boy?

I thought about this again during a recent discussion where Prathyush Parasuraman – author of a book about Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema – was asked about how much excess in cinema was “excessive” (the context being the dazzling opulence of Bhansali’s cinema, which can sometimes be too much to take even for his fans). Parasuraman’s answer touched on what the “baseline” is for each viewer – if kitchen-sink realism is your baseline, then Bhansali would of course seem painfully excessive. But for someone who has grown up with a view of cinema predicated on larger-then-life-ness, the baseline would be different.

Some of the most interesting things at the session were said by the academic-writer Madhavi Menon, who (sadly but predictably) was one of the few people in the room who was a serious Bhansali fan, and spoke eloquently about her love for the climactic sequence of Padmaavat – much criticised in “liberal” discussions for its supposed glorification of the idea that women must sacrifice themselves for honour; but analysed by Menon in terms of the recurring Sufi motifs in Bhansali’s cinema, including the idea of burning in desire, and of desire never ending in fulfilment. “The film does include commentary on how a certain type of Hinduism treats women, about the spurious notions of honour, about women’s bodies,” she pointed out, “All that politically is ingrained in the narrative. But the beauty of it is its treatment of desire unfulfilled.”

Speaking about how the politics of excess in Bhansali’s work, she said “He refuses to give us containment. And we are living in a world where everything is about containment and separation, about putting up walls. Everything needs to be in its own category, you cannot mix religion or food. Compare this injunction against mingling, which is the dominant political injunction in the world today, with his films, and tell me which is more politically brave.”

“Objecting to excess is an act of conservatism.”

She also amusingly remarked on the contrast between Bhansali’s work and strait-laced social-issue films such as the ones starring Ayushmaan Khurana – noting that such a film, even when it deals with a provocative subject like queerness, is “very heterosexual, straight, judgemental in its telling”. There is little to argue about.

Though I nodded along happily to most of what Menon said at the session, I’m not one to insist that a film should only operate in this or that mode – I have time for all sorts of films, including many that have easily digested takeaways. But I agree with Menon that some celebrated “restrained” films can be quite conservative in style and idiom, even when they espouse progressive politics (that they are “less than meets the eye”, to use an Andrew Sarris term). While the best work of a director like Parajanov or Bhansali can be fresh and provocative, full of conflicting energies, opening doors to new arguments and counter-arguments. 

[Two old posts about Padmaavat here and here]