Dhobi Ghat (2010) (Mumbai Diaries)
Kiran Rao
Hindi/English
Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat (2010) is a film about Mumbai (duh!). More precisely, it’s a film about the impossibility of making a film about Mumbai, an impressionistic look at the city which argues that it is the only possible way to look at the city at all. Everyone in Rao’s film is an artist. No, not just the four lead characters but everyone – even the myriad Jia-esque immigrant workers who literally build the city’s canvas – is an artist here, albeit removed from reality to varying degrees. If Rao’s Mumbai is the film crew, the sea at its end is the cinema screen, before whose stoic permanence social divisions vanish. (One character notes that the sea air smells of people’s desires). Everyone, and specifically the quartet at the centre, seems to attempt to find in art a subliminal hope of transcending class, of being on a level ground. Arun (Aamir Khan) – the film critic figure – can relate to the city space only through the arts. Shai (Monica Dogra) desires to level all spaces through her photography. Munna (Prateik Babbar) – ever at right angles to life – dreams of hitching to the mainstream through cinema. Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra) seeks to rationalize her condition through her art and hopes it will outlive her. Alas, right from the first scene, reality seeps in to foil such utopian plans. Rao, likewise, has a keen eye for urban and screen spaces, dividing and subletting the frame to emphasize the fragmentation that exists on multiple levels. This fragmentation is integral to Dhobi Ghat, for it is terrified of a complete view of the city, suggesting that a total understanding of the city – with its frightening disparities, unspoken calamities and tragicomic ironies – can only result in deep silence – of acknowledgement, of paralysis and of powerlessness. Like Arun’s last painting, like the old woman next door, like the sea.
The Seventh Art 
February 9, 2011 at 11:02 am
What I ask is this. Can the same film be not made about Chennai, or Delhi? Can a fragmentation and helplessness not exist in the other sectors of the vast urban expanse?
Srikant, what you’ve mentioned is just about the perfect description of the film, but then, why the melodrama about a city? I just don’t get how Mumbai is any different? I’ve lived there, and I think a film can be made where the arts are not the only sources of understanding. I think films like Dharavi and now this share almost the same cliched view of the city.
Why cannot the city just be?
I don’t know, there’s probably an inherent flaw in the very ambition of putting any city on the screen. The canvas, so to speak, is just too huge, and the screen is too small.
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February 10, 2011 at 9:50 am
Satish,
Are you asking: Why a film about a city at all? Well, it’s always been photography’s (ambitious) preoccupation to portray a city, as if it’s reading its ECG. Right from Ruttmann to Jia, filmmakers have been trying to study their cities, the people in it, its dynamics and rhythm, eventually trying to understand a society or oneself. The city shapes our world as much as we shape the city. I think the city symphony is an extremely important sub genre.
If you’re asking about this particular film’s attitude towards this particular city, Yes, there are moments of dramatic emphasis, as any decent pseudo-indie movie would. While Rao’s treatment might not be as holistic and distilled as we would want, it si still to be admired that she knows exactly where she stands with respect to her city and the insufficiently of her view of it.
True that it might be true of most cities, but Mumbai somehow seems to be the ideal poster boy for it. The mroe particular you become about the city, I guess, the more universal it becomes. Having said that, I think a more authentic, lived in account of the city is surely possible, especially as documentary.
Thanks and Cheers!
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February 10, 2011 at 11:45 am
Cool that you bring up Ruttman and symphony.
I once tried to watch Symphony of a City, without the accompanying score, on my laptop, sitting out in my car, on the side of Aundh road in Pune, so that I’m not dictated by any musical cues, and let the (un)predictable “sound of the city” allow me give full chance to the film.
Result? Fail.
On a second thought, passed with flying colors.
Nothing, except the big station banners that read “BERLIN”, or the German language making an appearance, gave me a rason to say with any confidence that this was BERLIN I was watching. Or experiencing.
A city is a city is a city. It is just a place with a lot of machinery and concrete and nature. It is we who romanticize these elements, probably framing the earlier sentence as – lot of intimidating machinery and chillingly hot concrete and only the melancholy remnants of nature.
It tells us a lot about our tendency to reduce everything to a human form (Solaris), because but itself it stands incomprehensible. Therefore it must have a soul.
I think in Ruttman’s case, in his failure lay his success. And those are the same eyes watching those images that belonged to Arun here, in Dhobi Ghat.
A city can never take shape through a single auteur, or a movie. It takes shape in a collection of work, across genres, across years, and across filmmakers.
That is why I say any attempt like this here, is shallow, and bourgeoisie pretension. Honest and self aware of its pretension and vantage point, but pretension nonetheless.
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February 10, 2011 at 12:05 pm
True, a city is nothing but a sum of perspectives. A city lies to be interpreted. And each film interprets in its own way, taking a vantage point,
But what do you mean by pretension here? It does not pretend to give us grand truths about the city. The opposite in fact. Do you mean to say its reductive? Perspectives generally are, be it bourgeoisie or otherwise.
Cheers!
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February 10, 2011 at 12:33 pm
A pretension that comes naturally by taking up that role. Of observation. Of distancing one’s self from the daily rigors. The pretension and self-righteousness of an artist, that gives him the confidence to be ambitious and capable enough to actually make a jab at understanding the city and giving observations.
It does confess that it cannot give grand truths about the city, but it does feel the capability to indulge in poetry of the city. And poetry, I guess, is done when one feels to be in a position of having “experienced” and “observed” the length and breadth of the subject. Problem is, in that feeling of assumption, one forgets the safe distance one’s viewing it all from.
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February 10, 2011 at 1:18 pm
One criticism I can’t accept is that one has to have “lived and experienced” a thing before she can talk about it. This stance is not far removed from the routine take down of arm chair intellectuals and politically committed artists Just because you’re at a safe distance does not mean you can’t talk about it. It’s a Schrodinger cat situation then. If you’re in hell you have no way to talk about it and if you are outside observing it, you have no right?
That makes all artists hyprocrites or narcissists – a unfrutiful and reductive view, that flushes most documentary filmmaking down the drain. Art is a luxury and many great art are attempts to come to terms with this unfair privilege. Suffering can be portrayed in cinema – I use cinema in a specific, wider sense – only with if the maker has a distance from it. Moreover, can anyone ever experience the length and breadth of the city in its entirely? I doubt, because that experience itself is a function of social standing and world perspective.
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February 10, 2011 at 1:51 pm
There are different facets to this criticism, and even I don’t completely break those armchairs. In fact, the armchair is an important perspective.
But I do not reduce all artists into this criticism Srikanth. I think we all have seen Apichatpong. I think I completely committ to Jia’s perspective, as much as I do to Mann.
But then, isn’t there a difference between the confessions of Ben Affleck and David O Russell in their examination of a class, ergo a place, and say the distant and safe examinations of Eastwood.
No Srikanth, I am not one to use that “lived and experienced” argument, not in films, and not in sports and not anywhere. But are we observing and raising questions, or are we trying to make some kind of commentary? Nishikant Kamath did something similar with Mumbai, but then did he try to provide any kind of commentary on the city. Then why does it feel different from Kiran Rao’s? That is my question. I hope you get the drift. And I guess you gave the answer yourself – specifics.
Filmmakers like Jia put the city in its rightful place – background – and then let it makes its existence known from there.
Films like Dhobi Ghat and Berlin flatten out the people and territory and everything else onto the same canvas. The buildings and the people are one and the same. That is the distance I speak of. That safe distance. Where everything is a sight.
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February 10, 2011 at 2:00 pm
That city where Sylvia is a distinct place in my memory. I can feel the place, just as I can feel it in Still Life.
And as far as documentaries are concerned, those guys aren’t sitting on an armchair. The documentary is their experience.
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February 10, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Phew, this has sent me on a hundred tangents. Will try to gather scattered thoughts slowly. Now I think I’m getting the drift of your argument.
I don’t know how more authentic O’Russell’s and Affleck’s towns are than Eastwood’s and I’ve only seen parts of Kamath’s film (all the characters seemed to be middle class, a class which absorbs anything thrust on it. So you can pretty much play safe), but yes, I do agree that degrees of truthfulness can vary.
[I’m just trying to understand here, what are you referring to by ‘specifics’? Geographical specifics? Mise en scene? I hope not. Or if you are referring to authenticity of storytelling (experience of characters) itself, I’m not sure if your formulation can allow for multi-class based script that Rao’s is since that would betray a ‘safe distance’ on the narrator’s part. But I can also see AMORES PERROS as a (flawed) counter example to this]
In some ways, Rao appears to be similar to Sofia Coppola, who laments that she is too privileged to be an artist and earnestly says – in her latest – that she has nothing to say. Much of Rao’s film takes this perspective – impressions of Mumbai in a diary format (which is why the scenes with Munna alone are the weakest, although the subplot involving his brother was acceptable).
DHOBI GHAT is a liberatarian film like thousand others, but it differs in that it knows that such liberatarianism on film amounts to almost nothing. As far as I can recall, except for Noor’s voiceovers, there is nothing attempted to be poetic as such. Both Arun’s and Shai’s segments appear highly truthful. Noor’s segment is limited by the tapes alone and seem pretty honest as well. It is the Munna segment where the film seems to teeter between miserablism (of MAN PUSH CART, because I’ve been thinking about this one for some time now after your comment) and dignity (of CHOP SHOP). I think a little brush up there would have helped.
I think, given the subject, it is rather difficult to chart out how one might treat – with honesty, empathy and respect – Munna’s segment. I think this difficulty is what drives many filmmakers of recent times.
Lots to chew on here.
Thanks and Cheers!
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February 11, 2011 at 11:28 am
Even, we here in some of these Hindi films, draw a lot of portraits of Sydney, of Europe, of America of what not. I mean, Kites was probably just as much in love with Las Vegas as <emDhobhi Ghat is with Mumbai. A very interesting example is Karan Johar’s Kabhi khushi Kabhi Gham which built an artificial Chandni Chowk. And despite keeping it in the background, and despite the “specifics” of its story, it felt hollow.
So yeah, we could just as well say that the Las Vegas of Kites sits at one end of the spectrum, and probably Sylvia’s city, or Isan province, or Mann’s LA sit on the other end.
I gotta confess, I can easily places films and their cities on this spectrum, but if someone asks me why I might find it difficult to explain. So with the help of this scale, let me see if I can articulate my stance.
A film like Dhobi Ghat watches its middle class, its dhobi ghats, its wife cooking in the morning scenery with the same eye with which it watches the complete landscape. Those people and their lives are part of the canvas, and I think the distance I speak of renders that canvas two dimensional, so that it becomes a screen. The locality in Rachel Getting Married is something I feel.
I guess, I cannot have shots that contain generalizations. A crane shot, or an overhead shot of the Dadar station would never work for me. Frankly I feel, it is the first thing one feels when one gets a camera in his hand – a certain distance from the events. One feels removed, and that is why we have so many such shots. I would for one prefer frank shots like that of Saathiya (though I confess I don’t remember the film that well.) I don’t remember 7/G Rainbow Colony but I knew that colony man. The camera needs to be a part of the crowd. Not away from it. Not looking at it. The best of documentaries feel like a part of it.
To be honest, I couldn’t have any of Shai or Munna or Yasmin rise above concepts, probably because the scenarios depicted felt pretty banal to me. I mean, women cheated by marriage is, I don’t know, almost a concept. And yes, it knows its liberalism means to nothing to the reality here because it is so far removed from it. Does Blue Valentine’s decision of Cindy marrying outside her class with Dean have similar parallels (at least a part of it)? I got to think over that.
Did I make sense? Let me post my comment, and read it from a “distance”?
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February 11, 2011 at 11:59 am
Let me an additional point. I felt that the liberatarian aspects of Dhobi Ghat pretty much echo that of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. I think Bertolucci acknowledges the naivety of this almost revolutionary/reactionary/romantic liberatarianism, while Kiran Rao is herself in that emotional state.
But then that is what I felt, an it is just about as valid as what you felt.
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February 11, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Srikanth, I do not think that the multi-narrative by itself would draw a distance. I mean, it would, but that would be a narrative distance, and not the distance I speak of. Uhm, Amorres Perros might be one example (though I’ve some qualms with it), but a more fierce example might be the very same filmmaker’s 21 Grams which cuts an altogether distinct personal picture of L.A. then say PTA’s in Magnolia. The Edge of Heaven is another such example. The distance is there, but it is as if the film exists inside a circle where these people and the city form the circumference. The film is Actively connecting them and running between them.
In Dhobi Ghat would I be wrong if I say that it is not a circle as much as it is a canvas?
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February 11, 2011 at 8:57 pm
I think I’m getting your argument. So, will I be right in assuming that one of your claims is also that these characters don’t seem to exist for their own sake and wold probably vanish after the editor has cut their scene? I think that’s a valid claim, at least w.r.t Munna.
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February 11, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Let me put it this way. This is a world (film)running inside the filmmaker’s mind, and they have nothing to do with any living or dead person. Once cut, they will fade out of memory.
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February 27, 2011 at 6:22 pm
[…] façade? And what’s so kitschy about it? I had quite an involving exchange with my man Srikanth here, in response to his piece on Mumbai Diaries, and I find some support to my stance from Lee […]
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