 |
|
|
A still from Peepli Live
|
Film: Peepli Live
Cast: Omkar Das, Raghuvir Yadav, Shalini Vatsa, Farrukh Jaffar, Malaika Shenoy, Vishal Sharma, Nowaz, Sitaram Panchal, Naseeruddin Shah, Aamir Bashir, Dan Husain
Director: Anusha Rizvi, Mahmood Farooqui (co-director)
Rating: **
Cast: Omkar Das, Raghuvir Yadav, Shalini Vatsa, Farrukh Jaffar, Malaika Shenoy, Vishal Sharma, Nowaz, Sitaram Panchal, Naseeruddin Shah, Aamir Bashir, Dan Husain
Director: Anusha Rizvi, Mahmood Farooqui (co-director)
Rating: **
In 2004, reporting on the continuing agrarian distress, we stood surrounded by a group of farmers in a cramped hut of a village where a peasant had taken his own life. As the widow poignantly narrated to us the tragic process that had led her husband to commit suicide, a slim man, a farmer, sitting in the gathering said in the rustic local dialect, even as others giggled: “Amhi bi lainit havo ji [We, too, are in queue]."
Vidarbha’s countryside is full of such dark humour, which comes alive even in gloom.
Once the gathering had stopped giggling, the man added with chilling poise: “We must fulfil different conditions before we die if our families are to get compensation.”
As we found out and reported later, the man was right. The government indeed had some 40 conditions for the bereaved family to get compensation, a pro-forma that was dropped later to give quick aid to the families, a majority of whom are still to come out of trauma.
The first comment was dark humour; when he added his observation, it became satire.
That small event had ‘text’ (something had happened); ‘context’ (it’s been going on); and ‘sub-text’ (what people think about it), something that I expected to see in Peepli (Live), given the expectations aroused in the run-up to its release. It’s being lauded as a landmark film, but I came back unimpressed.
The film, seen like any other movie, is good, but in the context of discussion on it, it fails to meet those expectations and inexplicably stops – every time it promises to – short of entering into serious satirical depths.
I love good humour and effective satire. And I think our generation is missing films from that genre that blend contemporary issues with satire. The one movie that immediately comes to mind in that league is Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. I am not comparing the two films, but Peepli (Live) neither comes through as satire nor as a comment on the issue. I’d rate Well Done Abba, a Shyam Benegal film, as one recent film in that league.
Peepli (Live) uses the farmer (Nattha) as a hook, something that a television serial Bairi Piya did some time ago with the stereotypical portrayal of farm widows. Farmers’ suicides as an issue are on the public conscience. So they get used as a hook, but the film’s central plot gets lost in how the media trivialises an issue – any issue. Or their saturation coverage!
It’s a film that, like many other attempts in recent time, tries to scratch the surface, but as a commercial reality stops probing the core. In the process, it harps on stereotypical portrayals and flows with the popular general perceptions: corrupt and selfish politicians, poor and drunkard farmers, insensitive babus, quarrelling women, and raucous media.
A friend once argued, villagers are neither Luddites nor slaves; can we, as the media, not drop our preconceived notions about village life and look through the changes? In Peepli (Live), the filmmakers have not even attempted to show that changing village life.
The film has its moments and there are scenes that make you laugh, and some that are poignant and a telling comment on the state of affairs in the country, the most sensitive one being where Budhiya and Nattha (the two farmer brothers) are talking about how they are set to lose the land their forefathers tilled for ages.
This is the scene where the two talk of committing suicide to save the land for their future generations. Or the one where the babus deliver a hand-pump (Ek Lal Bahadur) as a solution to their problems!
Every time I thought the film was about to enter into depth, it stopped and deviated to another episode. It avoided getting into detail. There isn’t a scene where either Nattha or Budhiya are shown working their farms. You don’t see them as farmers.
I also found the characters half-baked: Nattha, Budhiya, the village itself, Nattha’s wife and mother (who are always quarrelling with each other), and even the agriculture minister Salim (played by Naseeruddin Shah).
In the end, I wondered, what’s the message that the film is attempting to deliver? Does it make me more sensitive or aware about the issue? Does it challenge my assumptions? And of all the questions, will it stay in my conscience for a long, long time? Alas, no!
Jaideep Hardikar, DNA's correspondent in Nagpur, has covered Vidarbha's agrarian crisis extensively.
Comments
