Monthly Archives: October 2020

  • The Disciple

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chaitanya Tamhane (2020)

    Sharad Nerulkar, a young Mumbai man, is dedicated to performing and preserving the tradition of khyal classical singing despite its declining popularity and lack of commercial potential.  The Disciple, which received its British premiere as a one-off online screening on the opening night of this year’s London Film Festival, covers around twenty years of Sharad’s largely unavailing mission.  His dogged determination chimes with writer-director (and editor) Chaitanya Tamhane’s uncompromising storytelling.  Tamhane’s debut feature Court (2014) sometimes demanded a good deal of concentration from the audience.  This, his second feature, demands  more of the same – perhaps even stoicism.

    Viewers ignorant of Indian music generally (let alone this esoteric form of it, which dates from the eighteenth century) are made aware from the start of the cultural challenge they’re in for, and of how this might be mitigated.  Tamhane starts with a khyal recital by an elderly man (Arun Dravid) – the protagonist’s guru, referred to throughout as Guruji.  Three younger performers accompany him on musical instruments and, like Guruji, sit cross-legged on a shallow platform facing the audience.  They include Sharad (Aditya Modak).   Although Guruji’s song, known as a bandish, has lyrics, these aren’t translated into English subtitles.  Fair enough:  it’s soon clear the singing is more a matter of improvisation and abstract music values than lyrical interpretation.  An uneducated ear struggles to appreciate these values but the introduction is followed immediately by Sharad’s taking part in a singing competition.  Even though I could only guess that he alone was performing khyal in it, a screen contest of almost any kind is basically comprehensible – the nervous preparations of the competitor we’re interested in, her or his performance, the suspenseful announcement of results in reverse order, reactions to these.  This contest is no exception, and helps give us our bearings.  Sharad finishes outside the top three.

    Tamhane uses two elements repeatedly to convey important aspects of Sharad’s training – the relationship between him and Guruji, and the words of Guruji’s own (late) guru, Maai.  The former goes some way beyond master and pupil, thanks, at least in part, to Guruji’s gradually declining health.  Sharad makes his tea and gives him massage, takes his teacher to doctor’s appointments and pays for them (presumably with his earnings from transferring rare classical music LPs and cassettes to CDs for a man who sells them).  Riding on his motorcycle to and from his own home (he lives with his grandmother[1]), Sharad listens to recordings of the voice of Maai – the performing name of Maestra Sindhubai Jadhav.  She didn’t record her performances for posterity but left instructions on the state of mind, rather than the technique, needed to deliver them rightly.  Technique, according to Maai, is merely a medium for expressing one’s inner life.  A singer sings not for the audience or for patrons but only for their guru.  The process of understanding the melodic framework for improvisation (raag) amounts to a lifelong, ascetic quest for Truth.  Sharad listens to the elderly Maai’s pronouncements as he travels down largely deserted roads.  On one occasion, he gets off his motorbike and takes out his earphones.  The resulting noise of traffic – the sound of the real world – isn’t loud but, in these sequences, so unusual that it’s striking.

    The Disciple (with mostly Marathi dialogue) begins in 2006, when Sharad is twenty-four.  Around halfway through, the action jumps forward to the present (of when the film was being made).  A short coda moves several years into the future.  This progression through time is punctuated by a few flashbacks to Sharad’s childhood, in which the dominant figure is his father[2].  The latter instructs Sharad in khyal, despite his wife’s urging him to let the boy go outside and play with other kids.  When father and son travel overnight to attend a recital, the father’s conversation on the train, with two other aficionados, is all about the music.  Sharad briefly wakes up to join in:  he’s asked to name four different raags with chocolate as a reward.

    Sharad inherits the Maai recordings from his late father, and more.  The father – who writes about khyal but, despite his learning, never mastered the art of performing it – has an air of defeat about him that persists in his son.   If it’s really the case (as his IMDb entry indicates) that Aditya Modak hasn’t acted on screen before then his performance is remarkable.  Apart from the childhood scenes, Modak plays Sharad throughout – in his mid-twenties, late thirties and at some unspecified point in his forties (but well on into them).  The most striking feature of Modak’s Sharad as a young man is his large, liquid, melancholy eyes.  By the time, he’s thirty-seven, they don’t have the same light, although Sharad’s life is largely unchanged and he remains true to his vocation – teaching as well as performing and attending to Guruji.  Always stocky, Sharad gets heavier as he grows older.  This isn’t weight gain in the Raging Bull class but the extra poundage is expressive of how Sharad feels.  Dejection seems to settle on him – to weigh him down.

    Sharad not only shows the growing strain of commitment to a moribund art form.  He also continues to lack self-confidence, a problem Guruji does little to alleviate.  He’s a harsh critic of his pupil, on one occasion even during a public performance.  Sharad’s singing, his master says, is sometimes superficial, sometimes constricted – ‘Sing with an open throat,’ Guruji tells him.  Even for those of us with no experience of hearing khyal, it’s true that Sharad’s voice, compared with Guruji’s and other voices heard in the course of the film, often sounds tense.  As an instructor, Sharad lacks the authoritative presence of his mentor but shares Guruji’s proud inflexibility.  Karan, one of his students, is respectful enough to ask Sharad’s blessing to join a ‘fusion’ band at university, though his mother thinks he should go straight ahead and do so.  Sharad tells Karan he’s free to join the band but, in that case, must cease to be his pupil:  to continue would be a waste of time for them both.  The boy and his mother depart, in distress and high dudgeon respectively.   Scrolling down the few, unappreciative comments on YouTube videos of his recitals, Sharad pauses on a ‘boring’.  He then embarks on a detailed reply, explaining how the person who made the comment doesn’t understand khyal.

    The hero remains a sympathetic figure largely because he’s so often on the receiving end.  He decides to donate his father’s recordings of Maai’s lectures to a music library:  an unfriendly archivist agrees, with a mixture of irritation and indifference, to take them off his hands.  It doesn’t lift the viewer’s mood that Sharad in his personal life is such a solitary figure.  Near the start of The Disciple, Guruji says that he and his contemporaries, until they were forty, devoted all their energies to their musical apprenticeship.  This is picked up in a much later scene when Sharad, out of breath from jogging, has a phone conversation with his mother.  He tersely reminds that he’s only thirty-seven – that talk of his getting himself a wife is still three years away.   In a startling juxtaposition of early sequences, Sharad and a fellow musician sit and talk together in his room.  When he touches her arm, she gets up to go:  the moment she’s left, he texts her a ‘sorry’.  Tamhane then cuts to Sharad masturbating as he watches porn on his computer.  He’s doing the same thirteen years later.

    The recurring similar situations and the consistency of Aditya Modak’s portrait make for a substantial and credible central character.  Even so – and even allowing that Tamhane clearly regards reiteration as an important means of conveying Sharad’s disheartening predicament – you can’t help thinking he’s making the same points more often than necessary.  It’s some relief when another contest enters the film.  Sharad (the thirty-seven-year-old version) and his grandmother are having supper, as she watches a TV talent show called ‘Fame India’, at the audition stage.  Sharad’s attention is caught by a plump, plain young woman whose singing is distinctive.  Plenty of X Factor/BGT tropes are in evidence here.  ‘That wasn’t good’, one of the judges tells the contestant, whose face falls, ‘You were great!!!’  She’s rewarded with a Golden Ticket to the next round of the contest.  We also see evidence of her progress, if that’s the word, through later rounds.  Her appearance, needless to say, has been transformed into something conventional; ditto the garishly staged numbers she performs.  This summary of the homogenising tyranny of shows like ‘Fame India’ is hardly less depressing than the rest of the story but is refreshing because it’s simply and sharply satirical, and Tamhane doesn’t dwell on the subject.

    The Disciple would benefit from more tonal departures like these bits – and a scene in which the younger Sharad meets with a big noise in the Indian music industry.  This complacent knowall succeeds, rapidly and blithely, in rubbishing the performing careers of Sharad’s idols, including Maai, whose music he dismisses as ‘elitist crap’.  When he also declares that Guruji stuck to khyal recitals because he couldn’t handle the pressure of performing in front of large audiences, Sharad throws a glass of water in the man’s face.   The encounter is then revealed as a flashback in the protagonist’s mind:  Tamhane cuts to a different discharge of water as the older Sharad bathes the infirm Guruji.  The counterpoint, although obvious, is instantly effective in a way that few other moments in the film are.  It’s admirable in principle that Tamhane strenuously resists the facile but you wish he’d cut himself a bit more slack.

    Perhaps the most dispiriting scene of all comes at the end of the present-day part of the story.  There are more empty chairs than before in the small auditorium for Sharad’s recital.  He suddenly decides he’s had enough and abandons the performance.  Even Chaitanya Tamhane seems to feel he needs a somewhat consoling postscript to this.  In the next scene, Sharad, a bit heavier still, is travelling on a train with a woman who’s clearly his wife and a young girl who’s clearly their daughter.   We then see him interviewed at the publicity launch of a company he’s set up ‘to promote North Indian classical music to wider audiences’.  This hint of commercial compromise is quickly eclipsed by the return train journey that ends the film.  A busker moves through the carriage where Sharad and his family are seated.  Sharad’s face is impassive but we may infer that the busker, singing a song about a ‘seeker’, is a kindred spirit – another voice in the wilderness.

    Michal Sobocinski’s supple lighting gives the images a wonderful depth of clarity throughout.  Like Court, the film is produced by Vivek Gomber (with Alfonso Cuarón one of the executive producers).  The sense that you’ve been watching a major undertaking is reinforced by the vast list of names on the closing credits.  The title character isn’t the only one who needs discipline to keep going with The Disciple but there’s reward, as well as exasperation, to be had from staying the course.

    7 October 2020

    [1] An elderly female relative, at any rate:  I wasn’t sure if this was Sharad’s grandmother or an aunt but am assuming the former.

    [2] I can’t credit this excellent actor or most of the others in the film.  The IMDB cast list doesn’t include the names of characters, except for Aditya Modak’s.  The same goes for the Wikipedia cast section, with the addition of Arun Dravid’s character.

  • Norma Rae

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Ritt (1979)

    Norma Rae is a fictionalised account of the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, an American labour union organiser and the subject of Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance, a 1975 book by the New York Times journalist Hank Leifermann.  Sutton (as Leifermann’s subtitle implies) was the latest generation of her family to work in textile mills owned by the J P Stevens & Company in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.   She was provoked to activism by ‘the paltry wages, the bone-tiring work and the stingy benefits that she and her parents had suffered’ and by ‘want[ing] something better for her children’ (Wikipedia).  In 1978, she was fired by the company after trying to unionise fellow mill employees.  Sutton was vindicated when, later that same year, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union began to represent workers at the plant.  Only a few months subsequently, Martin Ritt’s film opened in American cinemas.

    The screenplay is by the husband and wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr, who wrote several Ritt films, most famously Hud (1963).  Norma Rae retains the North Carolina setting even though the location filming actually took place in Alabama.  The titular heroine is a thirty-year-old single mother of a young daughter and son (from two different fathers:  one died, the second is alive but absent).  At the start of the film, Norma Rae (Sally Field) and her kids live with her father, Vernon (Pat Hingle).  He and Norma’s mother (Barbara Baxley) – both, like their daughter, work at the O P Henley cotton mill – appear to be separated.  Norma’s life changes with the arrival in it of two very different men.  Union organiser Ruben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman), a high-strung, hyper-articulate New Yorker, arrives in town on an assignment to try and unionise the mill’s workforce.  Despite Norma’s antipathy to management, the first exchanges between her and Ruben are fractious; a rousing speech he makes to mill workers is a turning point in their relationship.  Norma also has an early run-in with Sonny Webster (Beau Bridges), who used to work at Henley’s.  Divorced and with a child of his own, Sonny starts dating Norma and she accepts his speedy proposal of marriage.

    Her performance in Norma Rae landed Sally Field the first of her two Best Actress Oscars.  The second came five years later, for Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart.   In that film, Field, with her open face and determined gait, was too obviously cast as an indomitable widow and mother.  Norma Rae is indomitable, too, but Martin Ritt uses Field’s unaffected prettiness more imaginatively.  Unlike the heroine of Places in the Heart, Norma isn’t a model of good behaviour:  she goes to the local Baptist church and sings in the choir but also has a reputation for sleeping around.  Field’s straightforward acting, a limitation in Places in the Heart, really works for her in Norma Rae.  She’s especially good at suggesting that Norma isn’t politically transformed by Reuben; that he supplies her, rather, with the means to act productively on feelings she already had.

    Norma Rae achieves a satisfying balance of involving storyline and convincing characters.  This goes not just for the protagonist but also for the two main male roles, despite the fact that one of them might seem overwritten and the other underwritten.  Reuben has an awful lot to say:  since Norma does, too, you’re bound to suspect wordiness is a quality of Ravetch and Frank’s writing as much as of the people delivering their lines.  Yet Ron Leibman persuades you that verboseness is natural to Reuben – a necessary part of the combative energy that keeps him going.  For a while, Sonny looks to be in the film chiefly to underline the inevitable conflict between Norma Rae’s roles as wife and mother, and her increasing involvement in union activities.  But a kitchen showdown between them – when Sonny complains she’s not keeping house and Norma reacts with furious, physically demonstrative sarcasm – ends with him capitulating:  he loves her even when she’s angry.  It’s a clichéd idea, elevated by Beau Bridges’s native warmth and authenticity.  In a much later scene, Sonny asks Norma if she’s slept with Reuben.  She says no (which is true) but admits ‘he’s in my head’.  Sonny replies that he’ll stand by her come what may and that ‘there’s nobody else in my head’.  He speaks the words sincerely but they also seem to say, ‘Whether you like it or not’.  Her husband’s response registers strongly with Norma.

    Two episodes are designed as dramatic highlights.  The first is the better of the two and Norma Rae‘s best-known scene.  Henley management tries to arrest the momentum of the unionising campaign by creating divisions between white and black members of the workforce, posting notices that contain racially insulting language.  On Reuben’s instructions, Norma copies the notices verbatim, to use as evidence for federal authority sanctions against the mill.  She’s fired on the spot for creating a disturbance in the workplace; the police are called to remove her from the premises.  Before they arrive, Norma writes ‘UNION’ on a piece of cardboard, stands on a table and shows it to her co-workers.  One by one, they turn off their machines as a sign of solidarity.  Ritt makes the noise of the machinery an important element throughout the narrative:  its effect on the workforce is literally deafening for them on occasion, and they always have to shout to make themselves heard above it.  Because the noise has functioned as a persistent reminder of inimical working conditions, the eventual silence of this sequence is highly effective.

    The second big moment is the announcement of the result of the ballot to unionise the Henley plant.  The workforce, totalling around eight hundred, votes by a majority of nearly a hundred in favour of unionisation.  Like the preceding set piece, this one delivers emotionally but it’s conventional, and the film’s ending feels rushed:  the farewell scene between Norma Rae and Reuben, before he drives off back to New York, follows too instantly on the ballot result.  It’s very well played, though, by Sally Field and Ron Leibman.  As Reuben tells Norma how much he thinks of her, both actors’ faces show that the characters’ feelings for each other run deeper than their words suggest – but they part with a disciplined handshake rather than a kiss.  Earlier on, Reuben lent Norma a book of Dylan Thomas poems.  A weaker detail in the closing sequence is Norma’s telling Reuben she’s now bought her own copy – it’s too pat a summary of her enlightenment, and Reuben’s role in it.

    It’s evident that some of those in small parts are local people, playing more or less themselves.  There’s an occasional imbalance between this group and professional actors in minor roles – as one of the mill workers, Grace Zabriskie sticks out as consciously histrionic.  On the whole, though, Martin Ritt handles the varied cast skilfully.  He does well to show management, and others hostile to Norma and Reuben and what they’re trying to do, communicating this through their physical stance rather than a theatrically scowling face.  The oppressive summer heat of the setting is successfully conveyed in persistent sweat patches on clothing, and shortened tempers.  The opening and closing titles are accompanied by a dreary song, ‘It Goes Like It Goes’, written by David Shire and Norman Gimbel, and sung by Jennifer Warnes.  (The chorus – ‘So it goes like it goes and the river flows/And time it rolls right on/And maybe what’s good gets a little bit better/And maybe what’s bad gets gone’ – gives a flavour of the whole.)  This wimpy creation, which won Norma Rae its other Academy Award, isn’t typical of a strong picture that has aged well.  The film-makers’ left-of-centre standpoint is clear throughout.  It’s nonetheless refreshing in 2020 to watch a political screen drama in which the characters’ moral standing derives not from their basic ‘identity’ but from what they choose to do.

    5 October 2020

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