Category: Film Reviews

Tumbbad is certainly an unusual film, an atmospheric fantasy thriller that makes one sit up and take notice although most of its success is in its art department. It has been described as ‘horror’ but is perhaps closer to a fairy tale for adults, revolving around invented myths. There have been other films from the genre in world cinema and one would be the Russian fairy-tale horror classic Viy (1967), based on a Gogol story. There are three people credited with directing Tumbbad: a debutante Rahi Anil Barve who has, earlier, made a visually striking if rather gruesome short film Manjha, Anand Gandhi, the creative director, who made the unusual Ship of Theseus (2012) and a co-director Adesh Prasad. Ship of Theseus tried to deal with philosophical issues and, while its success here was doubtful, it was nonetheless visually impressive. Tumbbad’s striking visual qualities perhaps owe most to Anand Gandhi.

Tumbbad begins with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi decrying greed, a strange ploy for a film intending to send a shiver down the spectator’s spine; but it is focused on a legend about a deity Hastar who was the firstborn of the Earth Goddess but abandoned when he turned out evil and greedy, cursed with being denied all forms of worship. This secret is with a Brahmin family in western India when the story begins, in the village of Tumbbad in 1918, the protagonist still a boy. The beginning is mysterious because there is a monstrously deformed great-grandmother cared for by the mother and we are not told much except that she is somehow connected to the secret. Also brought in is the motif of rice being ground into flour, and it is only later that we come to learn of its significance.

In the second part of the film, which takes place 15 years later, the protagonist Vinayak (Sohum Shah) is grown up and wealthy. His wealth is associated with his occasional trips to Tumbbad, from where he returns mysteriously laden with gold coins, which allow him to live a life of wantonness. If this second part is associated with British rule the third part takes place after Independence, although one is not quite sure how this political segmenting of a horror fairy-tale contributes to the project.

Tumbbad is exquisitely crafted in terms of ambience but we wish it had been more coherent. The problem, I believe is that it mixes genres arbitrarily – without being aware of it. Consider first the primary story meant to be like something out of a Panchatantra tale, with its cautionary moral about human greed. A story with a moral (i.e. a fable) does not conceal information because its primary aim is to deliver its message unhindered. Also, the message is rendered through the principal character being subject to experiences, usually salutary. My proposition here is that a fable does not lend itself to suspense or surprise, where something normally revealed upfront is deliberately withheld. It is the same with a fairy tale or a legend where counsel with regard to everyday life is offered – Viy, for instance, is about tests of courage that a young man is required to undergo in a haunted house.

This will give the reader some sense of how inappropriate it is for a legend about a god being structured in such a way that key information required to comprehend it is revealed only at the end. A ghost or a monster is a different proposition because, unlike a god, it is a local entity that inhabits or haunts a location and can be discovered by an outsider. Also, in horror stories that rely on suspense or surprise the protagonist discovers something he or she did not know about initially. But in Tumbbad Vinayak has known everything – since his family is custodian of the secret; so why is there surprise here at all, since there need to be characters in the story to who something comes as a ‘surprise’? This is a problem I elaborated upon while writing about Andhadhun – that character subjectivity is the key to suspense. There needs to be a knowledge gap between characters, the protagonist having less knowledge than someone else; a story cannot be related through the omniscient camera eye if it tries for suspense. It cannot suddenly spring something as a surprise if the protagonist has already known about it. Drishyam is another film that errs in this way, by ‘cheating’, as it were.

To a legend about a god told (inappropriately) in the manner of a horror story about a monster and including the surprise element, the directors add a third component, which is colonialism and India’s independence. In an interview the director explains that the three moments – 1918, 1933 and 1948 – represent ‘feudalism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘capitalism’, making out that the film is allegorical. Its inspiration may be Guillermo Del Torro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which tries to blend fairy tale with a story set in Franco’s Spain. I am not a great fan of Pan’s Labyrinth and it is not relevant here but my argument is that something as ancient as a ‘god’ cannot be affected by political changes in a country, since a ‘god’, by definition, has a presence that is eternal. Moreover, if Hastar is only ‘political allegory’, how can his presence also infuse the spectator with a visceral emotion like horror or disgust?

As already acknowledged Tumbbad is visually rich but as theorists (Frederic Jameson) have argued, visual richness is worth little if it is not bolstered by narrative, since only narration gives meaning to the cinematic image.

Among the various characteristics of Hindi popular cinema noted by film scholars and theorists, one that is of importance is that it is indifferent to the attractions of suspense and surprise and that it favours the familiar rather than novelty. How things will happen is more important than what will happen (1), which will be familiar. This comes to the fore in Andhadhun, one of the best Indian films of 2018. Indian films, ever since DG Phalke, borrowed from the theatre and, rather than be realistic in the documentary/Lumiere sense, tried to make ‘real’ traditional belief, which was seen to transcend sensual perception (2). Phalke insisted that his mythological films were ‘realistic’ in the sense that they were bringing known ‘truths’ alive.

Sriram Raghavan, one of the more inventive film directors in Bollywood is, judging from his films, also a cinephile who knows world cinema well and he does not hesitate to drawn inspiration from it, although he always has something to add. His last offering Andhadhun owes in a small way to a short film L’accordeur (2010) from France, which runs to less than 15 minutes. Using motifs from international films is not an easy task since each film has to be Indianized, which does not mean only adapting to a different milieu, but also using a different grammar. In L’accordeur (‘The Piano Tuner’) a piano tuner who makes himself temporarily blind to sensitize himself to sounds, is witness to a murder; the perpetrators are clients who believe he is blind and conceal nothing from his gaze. In Andhadhun, Raghavan uses the same motif as the basis of his film and it is a difficult device to adapt to Indian cinema.

Indian films hardly succeed as suspense thrillers, and the reason is that most stories are related using the [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]omniscient eye[/highlight]. Fiction films of the world use three elements that combine to produce ‘cinema’ – objective reality, authorial subjectivity, which is in the nature of distortions to demarcate the real from the director’s subjective take on it, i.e.: the exercising of his or her powers of expression. Lastly, there is the notion of character subjectivity and this is the element needed to be used in abundance to create suspense. Suspense depends on knowledge of events being held by some and not by others. The spectator is in the position of someone from whom elements of information are withheld and the viewpoint of the film corresponds to that of a person with partial knowledge. If one studies Hitchcock’s film Rear Window (1954), for instance, the camera takes the protagonist’s viewpoint; it is what he cannot see of what is going on in another apartment that creates the suspense.

Indian films are all-seeing – in that they try to show all happenings ‘as they are’ – rather than as perceived by the filmmaker (authorial subjectivity) or by characters in the story (character subjectivity); to my only Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Anantaram (1987) has ever used [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]character subjectivity as an element[/highlight], although this was not to create suspense but to understand what imprints itself upon a person in his or her life. There have been good thrillers like Nihalani’s Aakrosh (1980) and Dhrishyam (2015) in which the truth is revealed at the end through a flashback, but this is simply the concealing of facts; our viewpoint is not restricted to that of a chosen character or characters. In Rear Window, it should be noted, what is underway is being speculated upon even as it is happening in the opposite apartment; it is not sprung to the spectator as something not suspected.

Why Indian films are omniscient in perspective is not easy to explain but my view is that it lies in the notion of transcendental truths in which people have more faith than in the evidence of the senses, judged to be ephemeral; this is perhaps why most films have eternal messages to relate, usually from the epics or traditional wisdom. To illustrate, the notion that one’s parents are to be worshipped is not ‘subjective truth’ from an author; it is believed to be eternally valid. Even art cinema has ‘eternal messages’ to relate, although these could be from social texts (like those written by Marx) instead of tradition and the epics – messages like the dishonesty of the powerful and working class solidarity.

Coming to Andhadhun, the film is based on the protagonist, also a pianist pretending to be blind, getting only a partial view of what has transpired but having to act on it. If Sriram Raghavan had developed the idea into a suspense film, he would have been true to it – i.e.: the central dilemma would have been how the protagonist would have reported seeing a corpse in an apartment and still carry on his pretence at being blind, assuming that has its own benefits. When I commenced to view the film I was quite excited by how it might proceed since there is another partial witness who also has evidence about who came and who left the apartment, and when. Would the protagonist and this woman make contact, I wondered, and how would two partial views of an event, neither witness was certain of, be stitched together to constitute a comprehensive truth they might not suspect? As it stood, the film might even have gone the way of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), where a photographer takes a picture casually in a park and, when he develops it, finds a corpse his eyes had not seen.

But then, Andhadhun is a Bollywood film made for a public unaccustomed to the [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]notion of subjective viewpoints[/highlight] rather than messages. What Raghavan does is to turn the film into a comedy – no doubt successful on its own terms. He introduces another motif, a shadowy group stealing body parts for huge sums of money. Rather than being a suspense thriller Andhadhun becomes what Hollywood might have termed ‘screwball comedy’ – a genre more compatible with Bollywood than the suspense thriller.

Notes/References

1. Rosie Thomas, Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity, Screen, 26 (3-4), 1985, p 130.
2. A parallel between Phalke’s exercises in film and what Ravi Varma did in the medium of oil painting has been suggested since both of them attempted a recreation of the mythical past to reclaim it as a nationalist proposition. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 14-15, 1987, p 61.