Perspectives at play

Shardul Bhardwaj

Majid Majidi’s recently released Beyond the Clouds (2017) seems to have joined the line of films like Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and City of Joy (1992), directed by English and French directors Danny Boyle and Roland Joffé, respectively. All three above-mentioned films were made in India by non-Indian directors, highly regarded for their contribution to cinema. However, these films could possibly be considered to be at the bottom of the lists when one talks about the respective oeuvres of these directors. In these films, these directors seem to have gone exactly against what they have been previously lauded for.

Functional representation of poverty has become the norm in certain films made about India. Beyond the Clouds could have been a different film had there been a harder attempt to delve deeper into the lives it claims to portray. Beyond the Clouds is not a cause for celebration but an occasion for introspection about the politics of power and representation.

It’s an open secret that certain films are made on India with a view to cater to American and European audiences. From Conrad to the present times, western scholars and artistes have portrayed the colonised as pity-worthy with attempts to justify the inherent violence of colonialism. The present western audience has not been able to challenge or question the established facts, cooked up by colonialists, en masse. The western audience’s way of looking at India is still informed by books written by the likes of James Mill and Macaulay. Hence, to delve deeper into the lives portrayed in films like Beyond the Clouds and Slumdog Millionaire would mean shaking the beliefs of these audiences and that means bad returns.

Majidi and Boyle, in their previous films, have been able to give agency to the most dispossessed and outcaste individuals of the society. The heroin-addicted youngsters of Trainspotting or the poor father in Children of Heaven, who wants to send Ali to apprentice under a carpenter, are not depicted as evil, helpless or good. They have been shown as people who have the ability to make choices about their lives and that those choices are not born out of any heroism within them. The characters of their films have agency and are not depicted as stereotypes with polarised personality traits because essentially ‘good’ and ‘bad’ depictions of characters are reductive and bad alibis for portrayal of people. In Beyond the Clouds, if one goes beyond Ishaan Khattar’s dire performance in the scene where he decides to not sell the little girl to the pimp, one will be able to see the script, the framing, the background score, along with the scene that follows all point towards the essential goodness of Khattar’s character. This scene is prototypical of the tendency in popular cinema to paint male characters as grand heroic figures. Majidi, in his previous works, has been able to extract the beauty in the mundane with an emphasis on establishing a close-knit relationship between image and sound — be it the long duration close up of aged hands repairing a shoe in Children of Heaven or the use of the sound of chirping birds as audiences encounter the visually impaired Ali in Colours of Paradise.

Jamal Malik from Slumdog Millionaire and Amir from Beyond the Clouds are portrayed as larger-than-life heroes, far away from ordinary-everyday individuals their real-life counterparts may be. The issue with heroism is that it disregards the daily struggles and complications of individuals. This kind of convergent heroism with respect to leading male protagonists seems to validate upper-classes reprimanding the dispossessed for their miserable poverty. The figure of a hero is nothing but an ill-informed outlook towards class reinforced by capitalism.

It is quite a daunting task to make sense of how someone with Majidi’s knack for nuance and perception could not escape the clichés executed in the script and acting of his most recent film. Questions that come to mind stem from the desire to investigate the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of the filmmaking process: firstly, how much of a creative say did Majidi have with the producers of the film — Zee Studios and Namah Pictures, and secondly, was there an acknowledgement of the disparities between the modes of representation involved and the reality? 

One could assume that Majidi, Danny Boyle and Roland Joffe have been used by producers to mint money in western markets. This situation is akin to a ‘star’ being cast in popular cinema. It seems as these projects were as much of a commercial venture as popular cinema to start with and hence all claims of making socially relevant cinema and aesthetic work in case of these films seems fictitious. These have to be viewed as products, packaged to appear what they are not. Audiences have to discern what is underneath that packaging and, consequently, not be puppets of a capitalist economy of misrepresentation and manipulation.