Chaitanya Tamhane (2014)
Charles Gant’s industry pieces are among the consistently interesting regular features of Sight & Sound: ‘Development Tale’ explains how a particular film came to get made; ‘The Numbers’ examines box-office trends. In this month’s issue of S&S, ‘Development Tale’ focuses on Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature Court; ‘The Numbers’ begins: ‘With cinema audiences for foreign-language films declining in English-speaking markets …’ This latter piece is actually about films by Italian directors at the UK box office but the juxtaposition is apt (and literally a juxtaposition: Gant’s pieces appear on the same double-page). Court – which includes dialogue in Gujarati, Hindi and Marathi, as well as English – was released in Britain on 25 March. Until this last week, I looked for it in vain at the LondonNet schedule of films showing in London. A few days ago, it was listed at the Watermans Art Centre in Brentford and I went to see it there. This was the only place in the London area screening Court in the movie-week just ended. This week, it’s showing at the Tricycle Cinema in Kilburn but no longer at Watermans.
Court is set in present-day Mumbai. The movie’s first few minutes focus on a man in his sixties, Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar). He is first seen teaching a class of pre-adolescent children. When he leaves the class, Kamble catches a bus and arrives at an outdoor event in the city, where he’s introduced to the audience and takes the stage. Kamble is a performance-poet-cum-folk-singer. With a small group of backing singers, he vibrantly delivers a resounding agitprop message. His set is interrupted when police officers arrive to arrest him. The crime of which Kamble is accused relates to a song he’s alleged to have performed at an earlier public event. The lyrics of this song exhorted the worst-paid members of the Indian work force, because their lives aren’t worth living, to kill themselves. The police claim that, as a result of hearing Kamble’s words, a sewage worker called Vasudev Pawar, who lived close to where the performance was given, committed suicide.
Although Kamble remains the pivotal character of Court throughout, he doesn’t have the most screen time. Much of what follows concentrates on the trial proceedings in one of Mumbai’s lower courts. The defendant is often absent from these proceedings – although he remains in custody: his application for bail is rejected by the judge (Pradeep Joshi) before the trial gets underway. And it’s well on in the film that we next see Kamble outside court – in a hospital bed, his health having deteriorated sharply during his time in custody. The scenes outside the courtroom aren’t much concerned either with the planning for the trial of either the prosecution or the defence lawyers. Chaitanya Tamhane does, however, include plenty of description of the personal lives of the public prosecutor Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni) and Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber), who defends Kamble.
Tamhane makes clear in his interview with Charles Gant how keen he was to subvert mainstream courtroom drama, and to get a kind of performance far removed from Bollywood, which ‘has a very strong influence on the acting style and the way people work here’. Once the lower court has become the centre of the action, I wondered for a while if Court was depending too heavily on avoiding these conventions – if it was, in other words, engaging thanks chiefly to the surprise of its naturalistic style and eschewal of histrionics. You pick up things going on in the background in the courtroom but these are of documentary rather than dramatic interest. It sometimes takes a real effort to concentrate. The film is increasingly powerful, though, because of the widening discrepancy between the realistic presentation of the court proceedings and the (to Western audiences) bizarreness of the legal process and of much of what the prosecutor has to say.
The phrase ‘having your day in court’ takes on a new meaning here. The trial is not continuous but a succession of one-day sessions. At the end of each session, the judge announces the date – often several weeks hence – of the next one. It comes as a shock but not a surprise when, deep into the story, we hear that cases heard in a lower court in Mumbai can go on for years. When the deceased man’s widow (Usha Bane) eventually turns up in court to give evidence and her answers aren’t helping the prosecution, the judge asks if Nutan has further questions and she replies that she’ll resume her examination another day. Nutan, to quote Naman Ramachandran’s S&S review of Court, ‘examines the case in all seriousness, liberally quoting Victorian legal arcana in the most prosaic manner possible, while her opponent, defence lawyer Vora, is at his wits’ end trying to demonstrate that laws created in the 1850s may perhaps not be relevant in modern society’.
The disciplined quasi-documentary style and the satirical force of Court are an unusual combination. One of the user reviews on the film’s IMDB page is far from unperceptive but reckons that:
‘The Indian legal system is portrayed very well and (as far as I can see) objectively, not leaving a bad impression behind. Prosecution and defense council act believably and competently, and each gets their say.’
Although it seems obvious that Chaitanya Tamhane’s intention isn’t ‘not [to leave] a bad impression’ of the system described, this misunderstanding underlines the fact that Tamhane’s controlled, observational approach is unexpected in a political satire on the screen, and potentially deceptive. This young writer-director (he’s only twenty-nine now) puts the knife in with remarkable restraint and impact. The appalling working conditions of the likes of Vasudev Pawar are conveyed not through any breast-beating but in his wan, uneasy widow’s answers to questions in the witness box. Vora brings to the court unarguable evidence that a key prosecution witness is in cahoots with the police and that Pawar died as a result not of suicide but of the physical consequences of his daily work routine. There are no emotive reactions. Judge Sadaverte’s response is laconic and his tone peevish: ‘Madam, your case is suddenly very weak’, he tells Nutan, although it turns out that the trial is far from over.
While it’s clear where Chaitanya Tamhane’s political sympathies lie, he’s agreeably ready to show the ridiculous side of those on the receiving end of the judicial system (and this is often funny). Vora, from a wealthy family, is shown to be a generous fool at various levels. Pawar’s widow Sharmila is anxious that she can’t afford a second appearance at the trial: she’s comes back to the city from her village and has already lost work as a result. Vora offers to help her out financially; she tells him quietly but definitely there’s no need for that but that she has to work. When bail for Kamble is eventually agreed, on the grounds of his ill health, the judge sets an amount that the defendant can’t afford to pay and forbids any sureties. Vora foots the bill. He has to contend in this trial, however, not only with the obdurate residues of colonial law but also with a client who’s unwilling to help himself. We can infer from Kamble’s confident, almost defiant walk in the opening sequences, before his arrest, that he’s a man of firm conviction; he turns out to be excessively proud of his political opinions. Asked in court about the inflammatory lyrics he’s accused of singing, he denies having written, let alone having performed, such a song but he makes clear that he thinks doing so in future is well worth considering. Once he’s released on bail, Kamble immediately resumes his agitprop activities. He’s arrested again, caught in the act of supervising the printing of political pamphlets which the authorities deem seditious.
One of the good points made by the IMDB reviewer quoted above is that ‘the story seems to drag some of the time, just like the actual court case does’. In its last twenty minutes, the movie’s pace quickens and its concluding episodes are more explicitly pointed. This makes Court more immediately compelling to watch but I’m not convinced it strengthens the film. Kamble’s return to political action is the first of these episodes. It’s certainly in character that he would refuse to keep a low profile but his comeback requires a rapid recovery from his poorly condition in the hospital sequence we’ve just seen: when he gives another public performance, he’s so energetic that I wondered at first if this was a flashback. Otherwise, though, this sequence is very nicely done. In spite of the angry vigour of its message, Tamhane shows Kamble’s performance being watched, outdoors and late on a fine evening, by an audience that seems attentive rather than inflamed. He’s followed on stage by a troupe of teenage girl dancers, who reinforce the family entertainment flavour of the scene.
The final courtroom sequence, until its very last moments, is also impressive. With Kamble back in custody, Vora again requests bail for his client. It’s the last day of court hearings before a summer recess. When the judge denies the bail request, Vora protests at the unfairness of Kamble’s spending a lengthy period in custody before the trial can resume but Sadaverte is unmoved. The trial is duly adjourned and we watch the courtroom gradually emptying. The largely silent process of tidying up and the end-of-term departures create an atmosphere that’s a curious mixture of relief and desolation. The last person to leave closes the door and reduces the image on the screen to darkness. It’s only the subsequent fade to black that’s a little too protracted – and quickly revealed as a device to trick you into thinking the film was over.
Tamhane includes a final section that features Judge Sadaverte on vacation, with various relatives, at a family holiday resort. The characterisation of the judge in the courtroom scenes has been effectively ambiguous: he’s self-satisfied, indifferently pedantic but not grossly prejudiced. Each of the short scenes in the holiday resort epilogue is trenchant but Chaitanya Tamhane, for almost the only time in Court, registers disapproval too forcefully. The judge, when we first see him in casual dress on the coach bound for the resort, is almost unrecognisably reduced from the robed figure in the courtroom. Tamhane then proceeds to cut this dispenser of justice down to size in a more tendentious way. In a conversation with his son about the latter’s son, who has learning difficulties, Sadaverte opines that language therapists are all very well but that the son would be better off consulting an astrologer for advice on the boy’s future, and goes on to recommend a particular kind of stone as possibly therapeutic. In the closing scene, the judge is dozing on a bench in the sun. The children in his family creep up to the bench and startle him awake. Sadaverte is annoyed. The backward grandson who was discussed in the earlier conversation doesn’t flee the scene of the crime as quickly as the others. The judge slaps him and makes him cry.
This description of the judge’s life outside court, as a discrete series of scenes, has an inherently more emphatic structure than the corresponding descriptions of Nutan and Vora. When the public prosecutor leaves the office, she chats with another woman on the bus about saris and the price of rice. When she gets home, she prepares the evening meal for her husband and children. Later, we see the family on an outing to the theatre. They watch a domestic-romantic comedy that’s undemanding but in which the differing languages of the Marathi-speaking girl and the Hindi-speaking boy she’s brought home to meet her family obviously matter. Geetanjuli Kulkarni, who plays Nutan, is best known in India as a stage actress but her acting here is resolutely untheatrical. She’s expert at showing the different sides to Nutan’s narrow-minded conscientiousness. Vira Sathidar, who really is a poet, singer and political activist, cuts a striking figure as Narayan Kamble but Kulkarni and Vivek Gomber were the only two professional actors in Court.
The film has received several prizes on the international festival circuit; on the back of winning the national equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar, it has also enjoyed considerable commercial success in India. It’s clear from Charles Gant’s ‘Development Tale’ that Vivek Gomber is the hero of the story of how Court happened. Chaitanya Tamhane had had festival success with a short film called Six Strands in 2011 but he was ‘completely broke’ and in no position to develop his film-making career. He had previously directed Gomber in a play and the two had become friends. Tamhane explained his predicament and his idea of making a movie about a lower court in Mumbai to Gomber, who ‘agreed to fund his friend … with no strings attached, so he could develop his screenplay idea’. When the screenplay was complete, Tamhane and Gomber, serving as producer, couldn’t get funding to make the film so Gomber committed to financing it himself.
As if this wasn’t enough, Vivek Gomber delivers a superb performance as Vinay Vora. Even though the story doesn’t revolve around his character to anything like the same extent, Gomber’s work here stands comparison with Vincent Lindon’s in The Measure of a Man. Like Lindon, Gomber blends perfectly into a cast of non-professionals while interesting the viewer, to a unique extent in the film, in the person he’s playing. He creates a rich portrait of a clever, essentially thwarted man. Vora seems weighed down by a sense of defeat; you see it even in the way he puts articles of food and drink into his basket as he shops at a supermarket at the end of the working day. He lives alone but there are fine scenes involving Vora’s family and friends. He’s exasperated by his parents when he goes to lunch at their home; a subsequent lunch with them and his sister at a restaurant ends startlingly. As the group leave the restaurant, Vora is set upon by adherents of a (fictional) religious sect, outraged by what they regard as insulting remarks about their sect that he’s made during Kamble’s trial. This moment and the follow-up sequences are a particularly effective illustration of Chaitanya Tamhane’s subtle technique. We hear rather than see Vora being roughed up. Tamhane then cuts to a backview of him, sitting alone on his bed, sobbing with shock and, no doubt, shame at suffering this indignity in his family’s presence. Then he’s back in court, showing no signs of what happened in the street outside the restaurant. There’s another good sequence in which Vora, a male friend and two girlfriends go to a bar where a young singer is performing a number which, she explains, she picked up while travelling in Brazil. The camera moves away from the group and onto the singer, and you become almost fully absorbed by her song – it’s a sudden, vivid expression of a world beyond India.
After Slumdog Millionaire, it’s been greatly refreshing to see Mumbai and its people brought to the screen by Indian directors – by Ritesh Batra with The Lunchbox and now Chaitanya Tamhane. I see from reading Naman Ramachandran’s review that many of the signifiers of class and language distinctions in Court went over my head. But it would be hard to overstate how interesting I found this film and how much I look forward to what Tamhane and Vivek Gomber do next.
14 April 2016
