NEW WAVE’S GENTLE GIANT
What’s eating Saeed Mirza? In a conversation around his new book, the veteran director discusses his city, the politics that have shaped his films and the cost of forgetting one’s roots
Bachchan’s films channelised generic anger. His films were safe…when anger becomes specific and closer to the bone, people can’t take that. SAEED MIRZA,
Writer and director
In one of the many stories, real or imagined, about the countdown to the Russian Revolution, is a story about a pickpocket. As protesters throng a railway station to occupy it, the Tsar’s police prepare to crush the challenge with their full might. The pickpocket decides to join the protesters even though this meant letting go of a day’s earnings. That one day in his life, when he became a revolutionary, was to determine the rest of his life.
The act of solidarity can be a moment of art as much as politics. And the pickpocket, the artist, and even the worker, hesitant to join a strike, can at any moment close ranks and assert their right to it. Saeed Mirza, 75, one of the front-ranking directors of India’s ‘parallel cinema’, knew this. Through the ’70s and the ’80s, Mirza made films based on this unstable yet transformational moment as it was being experienced in an urban setting, and in his case, in his city of Bombay.
The ’70s and the ’80s were the decades when the aftershocks of global and national upsurges such as the Vietnam War, the anti-Apartheid movement, Naxalbari and its suppression, the great Bombay mill strike and its failure, were still being felt and decoded. “How the universal and the local intersect, I’ve always tried to understand that,” says Mirza during a conversation about his latest book, Memory in the Age of Amnesia, and his films. One cannot understand one without the other. Much like his films, Mirza’s book is the journey of disparate strands – the Gujarat violence; medieval scholar Ibn Khaldun’s intervention to save the city of Damascus and its libraries; Mirza’s own residential building in Mumbai; the rise of the mill workers’ hero, Krishna Desai, and his murder – trying to arrive at substance and meaning.
In his films too, Mirza’s heroes seem to have several tracks running in their heads and for a considerable amount of time are unable to decide on which to run. In Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978), a businessman’s son trapped in a businessman’s life is caught between making profits and to be seen as doing the right thing by his workers. In Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho (1984), the fate of a building depends on the tenants unanimously calling out the landowner’s greed; by the time they unite the building comes crashing down. A car mechanic (Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai, 1980) overstates his proximity to rich car owners because they let him drive their cars during the servicing period and looks down on his father for joining the mill workers’ strike but in the end joins them himself. This may or may not be ideological confusion. Mirza, an avowed Left- travel to India to repair their relationship as it falls apart. The storyline is connected to a real encounter Liu had in Varanasi, a city she had visited after her first movie. On its ghats, Liu had seen, for the first time, burning pyres, red vermillionsmeared temples and tea-sellers who were tellers of myths as well.
“A Chinese couple was staying at the same hotel I was in Varanasi. They had met in Varanasi during an earlier visit, returned to China, got married and returned for their honeymoon,” says Liu ist, makes his case dispassionately; his films ask questions. Saeed Mirza was born in Bombay in the early ’40s. His father Akhtar Mirza, a migrant from Bhopal, got work as a writer in the film industry. Mirza says his “work was good but he was uncompromising which meant he did less work.” Saeed Mirza inherited that spirit. Mirza’s longtime collaborator Sudhir Mishra who has assisted him in many of his films such as Mohan Joshi... says “like his father, Saeed had to find resources to survive. He had to create his own Bombay.” And he did.
Mirza’s cinematic city is not the place of durability or of happy endings or a city where, if a man works hard, is guaranteed his place. However, till the early ’80s, before the riots upset all settled social equations in the city, Mirza would not rage against Bombay, says Mishra. It’s as with the rains. Despite all its problems, for Bombayiites, there’s no such thing as a terrible wet day.
“That all is not lost is still evident in Albert Pinto…. In Naseem [Mirza’s 1995 film made in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and the ensuing Mumbai riots] what remains is a cry of pain, yet knowing Saeed I don’t think he wants to be anywhere else,” adds Mishra. “Like all Bombayiites proud of the city’s cosmopolitanism, the riots showed that this cosmopolitanism was a surface thing, the city’s spirit might collapse; well, so be it, he would collapse with it….”
Mirza chose to walk away. By the ’80s, the National Film Development Corporation of India also stopped funding parallel cinema. Mirza, who had wanted to make a film on Krishna Desai, the mill-worker leader – there’s a chapter on him in the book – could not move ahead with the project. But wouldn’t the film have got an audience, especially as the superstar of the time, Amitabh Bachchan, was riding a career raging against the system from the dock (Deewar) coal-mine (Kaala Patthar) and railway station (Coolie)? “Sure,” says Mirza, “Krishna Desai would have been a great film but would have been a guaranteed failure. Bachchan’s films channelised generic anger. His films were safe. When anger becomes specific and closer to the bone, people can’t take that.” Mirza changed tack and co-directed Nukkad (1986) with Kundan Shah for television.
Pavan Malhotra, the Salim of Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989), who also had a major role in Nukkad, says the streets have always been important for Mirza. “The structure of the serial was so open that in any episode you could talk of anything. Gagar mein sagar (in a pitcher was
‘LOST IN GANGA’ IS A RARE CHINESE FILM SHOT ALMOST ENTIRELY IN INDIA
as we meet at a chic café in Beijing. “But they were continuously fighting….” Liu decided to make a movie about a journey of love set in India. The film has an Indian actor too. Sandeep Bhojak, a theatre artist, plays a priest to whom the woman protagonist goes to for advice.
“In my film, the woman goes through a dry period in her relationship and then an abundance of desire. So, I needed to show that metaphorically. I needed a place which was dry and then a place with water. Hence, the deserts and forts of Rajasthan and the river in Varanasi,” she explains.
The movie begins at the desert and concludes at the river, Liu says, adding that it was only in India that she would have found the contrast in landscape she was looking for, for her movie.
“I really love India,” Liu says. Tagore seemed to be an important reference for her. “A stranger might not like India on the first visit. But the more you stay, the less you want to leave…China’s metros have become like the cities of Europe. In India everything is different. I am attracted to India’s multi-layered culture.”
Lu Xing Chen and Wang Chuanjun, two emerging Chinese actors play the lead roles in Lost... From its inception (including planning and pre-production) to getting the recent nod from the Chinese government to release it by end 2018, the movie took five years to complete. Ironically, it took just a month ( October 2017) to shoot. The date for the film’s release in India is not known. It is likely to release first in China later this year.
The shooting schedule was an adventure, says Liu, and her crew often had to improvise on the sets to get work done. Filming a sequence with a snake, hired from a local snake charmer, was particularly tense, she recollects.
Liu’s focus will now be on an Indiabased documentary and a new feature film set in China. Liu heads back to India later this year to continue work on a long-term documentary on three families from Rajasthan and Bengal whose histories are entwined with and shaped by India’s Partition. A rough-cut of the India documentary created a buzz in Beijing last year.
“With the event also live-streamed on websites including v.qq.com and v.ifeng.com, more than 300,000 people tuned in to watch,” the Global Times tabloid reported about the screening. “I am proud of this movie,” says Liu. “Many Chinese film makers who have seen it, were drawn to its lyrical language,” she says. This lyricism, she says, is inspired by India and Tagore.