White Tiger anti-hero delivers in biting satire
THE WHITE TIGER HHHH
Cert 15A, Netflix
‘Ithink we can agree that America is so yesterday… It’s the century of the brown man and the yellow man.” So says Balram (Adarsh Gourav), the anti-hero of this Eastern morality fable and, given the recent images from Capitol Hill, it is hard to argue with him.
But even had the West not been on a collision course with idiocracy, as it has the last while, The White Tiger (based on Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker winner) would still sing subversively off the screen about a long overdue tilt in the global axis of power. And within that axis itself, there lies tangles of class exclusion, post-colonial fallout, and the very worst degradations of market libertarianism. Adiga’s novel managed to do what all great tales do — explain the broad brushstrokes through a macro lens.
Balram is of a rural lower caste. A promising pupil, he is removed from school as a boy and forced to work to pay off a family debt to the Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar), a local coal magnate who scalps a tax from the impoverished community. When an opportunity arises to chauffeur the Stork’s glamorous son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and Ashok’s wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), Balram, intent on finding a master to serve as his caste decrees, puts sharp elbows and cunning to use.
The couple are on a visit from New York and bring with them progressive and enlightened perspectives about servitude and workers’ rights that are alien to Balram. Only it quickly becomes apparent that for all their talk, Ashok and Pinky will never be on his level due to their inherent privilege. When the three are involved in a tragic accident one night in Delhi, it is Balram who is coerced by the Stork’s family to take the fall.
True colours are shown to Balram of not only the glib, Americanised young Indian couple who have thrown him under the bus, but also the wider India and how the caste system is no more complicated than “those with big bellies and those with small ones”.
He has been bred for appalling treatment by his paymasters, and society tells him that this is his lot. From behind the wheel, he overhears conversations of a state with ideals that amount to little more than foreign investment for its cheap labour and an endemic culture of corruption and bribery to facilitate that (Adiga began life as a financial journalist).
Iranian-American writer-director Ramin Bahrani adapts Adiga’s novel, keeping Balram’s epistolary narrative (a letter to a Chinese premiere ahead of his visit to India) but adding in some cinematic devices, not all of which were necessary, you feel, given the power of the story. India’s chaos, dysfunction, wealth chasm, and the scale of it all, are strikingly captured, but so too are the hazy beauty and cultural richness. While deeply critical, it is criticism from within.
Rao and Chopra Jonas orbit Gourav closely and vividly, but it is Gourav, a relative newcomer to the world of feature films, who is the big talking point. In Balram, he is tasked with a character wrestling with resentment and conflict underneath his beaming, gushing servility. The grin he carries is cracked and slightly desolate. It is a career-defining performance for the young actor.
The great satirical clout of The White Tiger, the thing that you find yourself dwelling on the most, is the duality of Balram’s own moral code itself and what it speaks to about his society.
When he decides that he has had enough, it is merely the release of a valve, not some great moral stand. He is not interested in fixing the world, only his world. He won’t end up like the rest of his caste, willingly awaiting their fate like the roosters he sees in the market.
He remarks, matter-of-factly, that modern India is both darkness and light, deceit and sincerity, crooked and straight, all operating concurrently. It is a disillusionment we are perhaps not used to seeing in our part of the world in cinema from the subcontinent.
Balram’s eventual epiphany is an acid-laced thing when it comes along in the third act. By the time the finale has played out, it makes you uneasy and questioning many assumptions about the character and the world in which he exists, just as all good satire should. And even in that reaction, as a Western viewer watching this tale play out from a place mercifully sheltered from such hard decisions, there is a sting to this story that you don’t see coming. Not quite as darkly delectable as, say, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, but similarly disquieting.
MLK/FBI Now on ifi@home HHHHH
The storming of Capitol Hill felt like it was almost inevitable given the brewing divisions in American society. And, although Samuel D Pollard’s documentary focuses on the FBI’s obsession with civil rights leader Martin Luther King (MLK) in the 1960s, it feels enormously relevant to these recent events.
Using archive footage, interviews and recordings, the documentary outlines FBI boss J Edgar Hoover’s growing obsession with, and fear of, MLK. Hoover was not alone, the fear of civil rights ran very deep and the FBI milked it, trying hard to paint King and the entire civil rights movement as a threat to civilisation.
As the personification of that threat, King became a target. The FBI wire-tapped him and after first painting him as a communist, they moved on to say he was a moral degenerate, both of which fed into deep long-held terrors about reds under the bed and black male sexuality. King’s objection to the Vietnam war pushed yet another button for those who were scared of equality (how dare he get involved in politics), turned US President Lyndon B Johnson definitively against him and created a schism within the Civil Rights movement. It is hard not to believe that MLK’s murder shortly afterwards, in 1968, became inevitable, in the same way that the storming of Capitol Hill did.
DANIEL Usual digital platforms from tomorrow HH
Kidnap for ransom has long been a risk for aid workers and journalists in conflict zones. The kidnap might make the news once or twice, but for the victims and their families, it is a long, awful and terrifying time.
Daniel Rye was a Danish photographer who was captured by IS in Syria in 2013 and held for
398 days. This fictionalisation of his story looks at the reality for both the prisoner and the family
left at home. Daniel (Esben Smed Jensen) is on a mission to photograph real life in war-torn Syria when he is kidnapped and held by particularly zealous and cruel British IS captors. After a gruelling period of solo captivity, Daniel is moved to join other hostages, including American photo journalist James Foley (Toby Kebbell).
Writer Puk Damsgård looks at how the kidnapped men cope with their confinement and at the Rye family back in Denmark. The Danish government does not negotiate with kidnappers so the family must come up with the huge ransom money, as failure will surely mean Daniel’s death.
A workmanlike telling of the tale, worthy but a bit turgid, that struggles to maintain suspense.
AWAY
Usual digital platforms from tomorrow
HHH
There are films that are hard to categorise and Latvian film maker Gints Zilbalodis’s fantasy animation is a case in point. Animation, yes, fantasy, yes, but it is not for children. It is silent and allegorical, and while mightily impressive in many ways, it’s a film that will appeal to specific tastes.
The average animation has an enormous crew but Zilbalodis made this movie alone at home. He even composed the music. It took him three-and-a-half years and he made some of it up as he went along. Sometimes the animation looks a bit simplistic but the muted palette overall makes it feel like a cross between the Iron Giant and The Red Turtle.
A man hangs from a parachute stuck in a tree. A huge faceless monster in the distance forces the man to flee into the first chapter, The Forbidden Oasis. There, as fortune would have it, he finds a bag of survival equipment and a motorbike. He also befriends a cute little bird and off they set through often beautiful forests and mountains, the monster always near. For Zilbalodis, it was an allegory for making his film, But each viewer will have their own interpretation.