Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Peepli Live
Peepli Live
It is to the credit of Anusha Rizvi, that she chose to make a realistic film set in rural India, and got Aamir Khan’s Bollywood clout behind it. Farmer suicides in Indian villages is an issue that doesn’t even create a buzz in the media anymore, except maybe adding a number to the statistics. Two excellent Marathi films—Gabhricha Paus and Jhing Chik Jhing have been made and a really powerful documentary, Nero’s Guests. After these, Peepli Live, with all its merits tends to leave one a bit underwhelmed.
Rizvi’s point is not so much rural poverty as it is media insensitivity and venality —and this has been dealt with in films like Front Page, Network, Ace In The Hole, and many others. Anyone who watches the news, knows how sensational and superficial television news can be, there is no great revelation here. In so many films, elections and caste politics are used as triggers, that’s no big deal either.
What Rizvi does, is make people laugh at poverty and death, instead of evoking compassion for the poor who are forced to die because they cannot repay loans of tiny amounts that urban rich probably blow up in one evening at a pub. When a film with mainstream backing had the opportunity to wring the conscience of people, all it does it entertain them with satire and some black humour. The young urban rich for whom poverty is as alien as ET, will see the film, enjoy it, and come out feeling nothing for Natha (Omkar Das) and his desperately poor family. He and his brother Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav) are cutely dopey, his wife is a dragon—how cute—and that foul-mouthed old mother, is a laugh riot. Haha, how funny! Those media people—especially the one who analyses Natha’s excrement--- are so weird!
Nobody expected a feature film to go deep into socio-economic conditions in villages, or political opportunism, bureaucratic corruption, government indifference and all that. But still, superficiality is always excused when it comes to entertainment.
Rizvi’s dialogue is sharp, Shankar Raman’s visuals adequately shorn of glamour, the characters look and speak like the people they play, whether it is an elitist English TV journalist (Malaika Shenoy) or a small town Hindi reporter (Nawazuddin).
Under the haha, the real story is that of the poor, starving man who dies while a media circus gathers outside the home of Natha, who only threatened suicide. Rizvi accuses the media in the film of not being sufficiently interested in that man, but she doesn’t care either. People actually dying of hunger don’t interest anybody—because you can’t laugh at them. And if you can, then it says more about you than about the objects of the film’s satire.
Still, the film is to be commended for at least trying to do something other than making ‘it’ stars parade in designer clothes at foreign locations. Peepli-like villages are where the other half lives, and thanks to Anusha Rizvi and Aamir Khan for reminding us of it.
It is to the credit of Anusha Rizvi, that she chose to make a realistic film set in rural India, and got Aamir Khan’s Bollywood clout behind it. Farmer suicides in Indian villages is an issue that doesn’t even create a buzz in the media anymore, except maybe adding a number to the statistics. Two excellent Marathi films—Gabhricha Paus and Jhing Chik Jhing have been made and a really powerful documentary, Nero’s Guests. After these, Peepli Live, with all its merits tends to leave one a bit underwhelmed.
Rizvi’s point is not so much rural poverty as it is media insensitivity and venality —and this has been dealt with in films like Front Page, Network, Ace In The Hole, and many others. Anyone who watches the news, knows how sensational and superficial television news can be, there is no great revelation here. In so many films, elections and caste politics are used as triggers, that’s no big deal either.
What Rizvi does, is make people laugh at poverty and death, instead of evoking compassion for the poor who are forced to die because they cannot repay loans of tiny amounts that urban rich probably blow up in one evening at a pub. When a film with mainstream backing had the opportunity to wring the conscience of people, all it does it entertain them with satire and some black humour. The young urban rich for whom poverty is as alien as ET, will see the film, enjoy it, and come out feeling nothing for Natha (Omkar Das) and his desperately poor family. He and his brother Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav) are cutely dopey, his wife is a dragon—how cute—and that foul-mouthed old mother, is a laugh riot. Haha, how funny! Those media people—especially the one who analyses Natha’s excrement--- are so weird!
Nobody expected a feature film to go deep into socio-economic conditions in villages, or political opportunism, bureaucratic corruption, government indifference and all that. But still, superficiality is always excused when it comes to entertainment.
Rizvi’s dialogue is sharp, Shankar Raman’s visuals adequately shorn of glamour, the characters look and speak like the people they play, whether it is an elitist English TV journalist (Malaika Shenoy) or a small town Hindi reporter (Nawazuddin).
Under the haha, the real story is that of the poor, starving man who dies while a media circus gathers outside the home of Natha, who only threatened suicide. Rizvi accuses the media in the film of not being sufficiently interested in that man, but she doesn’t care either. People actually dying of hunger don’t interest anybody—because you can’t laugh at them. And if you can, then it says more about you than about the objects of the film’s satire.
Still, the film is to be commended for at least trying to do something other than making ‘it’ stars parade in designer clothes at foreign locations. Peepli-like villages are where the other half lives, and thanks to Anusha Rizvi and Aamir Khan for reminding us of it.
Labels: Cinemaah
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