Paradesi (“foreigner”, “nomad”), the latest by noted Tamil filmmaker Bala, is a film that’s not going to win any new converts for the director. Those who find his work to be representative of the best of Tamil cinema are going to come out nodding while those who question its merit, among whom I’m moved to classify myself, will find themselves shrugging. It’s either the next logical step in the evolution of a personal vision or the result of a filmmaker becoming prisoner of his own image. Perhaps it’s both. The title “Bala’s Paradesi”, two words that feed into each other, kicks off the opening credits, which consists of a series of monochrome sketches depicting a community of natives forced to pose for the artist. Locating Bala’s film in the representative, visual tradition, the sequence also unwittingly bestows upon its author the role of a chronicler, a mute observer and of a person in and colluding with power. In the first shot, the camera cranes down quickly from a bird’s eye view of a village down onto the ground, as though indicative of a world where God has fallen, before nimbly snaking in and out of the muddy alleys to give us a sense of life in this village. This is India a few years before independence, we are told, but the seemingly anachronistic village seems to be completely isolated from the happenings elsewhere in the country. We are introduced to the local announcer and workhorse Rasa (Atharva Murali), a quasi-outcast who falls in love with an upper caste girl – a union that gets rejected by the local council thanks to his profession, which primarily involves trumpeting news of death. To marry the girl, he tries to rise above his position and find a more honorable job outside the village. By turn of events, he, along with hundreds of others from the village, ends up as a bond labourer at a tea plantation estate owed by an undesignated Briton. Doomed fatalism and an affable mythic simplicity characterize this first half, which functions as a portrait of Man’s dignity and the transformative power of love. More importantly, this section of the movie is studded with images of silhouetted bodies and huddled masses endlessly traversing through barren landscape. Human body and land – the two chief material elements of Paradesi, as much as DI-inflected brown and green are its two major chromatic elements – are in perpetual conversation in Bala’s movie. The Marxist transformation of nature through physical labour and decimation of bodies by and for the sake of land are two actions that recur throughout. The second half of the film, which bears an aesthetic and thematic symmetry to the first, comes across as something of a heightened, contorted version of the former. At the tea estate, the classified community of the village is flattened, with slavery of one person, Rasa, transmogrifying into the slavery of an entire populace. This juxtaposition is becoming of Bala’s film, which comprehends slavery less as a political phenomenon and more as a human condition. This stance enables Bala to wallow in his signature brand of miserablism, with its characteristically condescending camerawork and wailing soundtrack. For his film, slavery is a universal condition enforced upon one people by another with no room for resistance. It elides, on a conceptual level, the question that the plantation owner in Quentin Tarantino’s new film asks: Why don’t the slaves all rise up and kill the masters? (For a Hegelian examination of slavery, see Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan (1993).) There’s an unknowing yet eerie parallel between the idea of a group of lumpen workers surrendering their bodies to an all-powerful plantation owner on the promise of remuneration and the way Bala uses non-professionals and their bodies in his film. If Tarantino the filmmaker, like his bounty hunters and plantation owners, deals in corpses, Bala, like his many mythical villains, deals with human bodies, exotic and imperfect. (One shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Bala, like Tarantino, is incriminating himself here. The film itself is oblivious to the similarity and the parallel is curious, at best.) Of course, I could list all my fascinations and problems with the film, but I would only be repeating myself. Bala’s method here, despite the film’s CGI-finish and surface gloss, is at times reminiscent of Third Cinema films, both in its cut-and-dried ideology and roughhewn dramatic values – broad acting, blunt satire, authorial omniscience and a superficial mythic allegory that reveals its social criticism as much as it conceals it.
The Seventh Art 
April 3, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Yet to see it – “Bala’s Paradesi”. [Somehow] this calls to mind Au hasard Balthazar, but Bala helplessly demonstrated with Avan Ivan he cannot make anything but his what I would call well-as-world movies with barely any interesting variations.
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April 17, 2013 at 12:48 am
“For his film, slavery is a universal condition enforced upon one people by another with no room for resistance. It elides, on a conceptual level, the question that the plantation owner in Quentin Tarantino’s new film asks: Why don’t the slaves all rise up and kill the masters? (For a Hegelian examination of slavery, see Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan (1993).)”
The film does have a scene – if one cares to take a closer look; an extremely well done scene to my mind (just for the way it captures and lingers on the sheer work of wood cutting) – where Raasa is denied kUli for his work (the shopkeeper is genuinely surprised he’s asking for money) and also beaten up earlier in the same scene for sitting on the bench. This is the lead-up to Kangani making his offer to Raasa. Recall his bright smile when Raasa mentions where he’s from. All this underlines Raasa’s position in the caste hierarchy. So it’s not at all like everything was fine and they end up in the tea estate hell! It’s perhaps fair to say the film doesn’t dwell on this enough.
Also it must be said the question you mention is a somewhat obscene one really, given the various law enforcements that are expressly made to undermine such possibilities and the systemic horrors that are given as punishments for transgressions. I’ll readily admit I’ve little idea about the punishments given for tea estate workers (indentured labourers) but I’m not being naive here. I haven’t seen the Tarantino film yet, but when I first read this review, I googled this question and the first post I saw was basically talking about why the question in the film misses the point and went on to list the various law enforcements and punishments in case of a rebellion. So (without going into the merits of the analysis of the film I stumbled upon in passing) while it is okay to dwell on this question as to start from a zero point for a reinterpretation or something of that sort, it’s far too often assumed to be implicitly understood in case of fiction with a historical background (as opposed to something the filmmaker/writer conveniently chooses to elide)! Again it’s fair to claim he doesn’t go deep enough into examining imperialism and so on.
Which brings me to the point about the universal dimension of the portrayal. The film does portray calculative slavery as a universal phenomenon. I actually agree with you here. And it is this epic sweep that raises far more elementary questions. What if exploitation and slavery is not a distortion of the various systems we build but the very BASIS of the systems that continue to exist and that we continue to consume and benefit form? This is admittely a simple universal question (man is the only animal that enslaves its own kind etc. etc.) but the film problematizes our own construction of the world we live in in a far deeper way. To talk of racial slavery as a horrible past is one thing, to remind us of our own world, migrant worker classes in Arab countries, construction workers from Bihar and so on is something else altogether.
Incidentally, I thought nAn kadavuL (tremendous accomplishment as it was) was a failure on this front in that it didn’t look at the two-way relationship between the master and the slave. Remember discussing it in the context of another film (angAdith theru) in a forum and we talked about Vidheyan there as well. :) Sadly, I never got to actually watching the film though. Anyway, in nAn kadavuL, my main problem was, the film implicates the audience so thoroughly (more on it below) and yet it imagines this all-powerful villain. Especially considering how in the novel it’s loosely based on, the man who owns the beggars group is actually an ordinary middle-class person affectionate towards his family and so on and who sincerely believes he’s taking care of the beggars under his umbrella. Here the scenario is revealed in all its true dimensions and the implication of the audience (which I’d argue is far more important than the superficial question of how the villain is portrayed – in broad strokes or in very real terms – as an end in itself) would have been much much stronger.
“There’s an unknowing yet eerie parallel between the idea of a group of lumpen workers surrendering their bodies to an all-powerful plantation owner on the promise of remuneration and the way Bala uses non-professionals and their bodies in his film. If Tarantino the filmmaker, like his bounty hunters and plantation owners, deals in corpses, Bala, like his many mythical villains, deals with human bodies, exotic and imperfect. (One shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Bala, like Tarantino, is incriminating himself here. The film itself is oblivious to the similarity and the parallel is curious, at best.)”
Ouch. I think this insight comes 2 films late. Bala dealt with this parallel quite elaborately in nAn kadavuL. All beggars dressed up as various gods quite like actors; recall their initial role playing scenes, the police station scene where another group performs for us, the seamless transition from the specific beggars group to the wider world with various street performers in the pichchaip pAththiram song and so on. Bala even makes the parallel explicit when the Malayali guy proposes exchange of people and Thandavan draws an analogy to how filmmakers keep changing their actors! So many moments in that film implicate the indifferent audience wherein the film functions more or less like a sardonic kick to the audience constantly calling attention to its own artifice. What’s the MGR song that the guy plays to? “kaNNai nambAdhE / unnai EmARRum / nI kANum kOlam / uNmai illAdhadhu / aRivai nI nambu / ullam theLivAgum / adaiyALam kAttum / poyyE sollAdhadhu”
At the end of the day, (one must concede) Bala has made this as a straight narrative, his agenda here is to simply just “show what happened/happens,” and it’s fair to claim his is a straitjacketed approach compared to cheeky/bold narratives that play with history (a la Inglourious Basterds) and so on. But nevertheless I think it would have been more or less a repetition for him to have explored it further here. But note how he had to draw attention to the parallel through the promos! (Leave aside the whole tired debate about directing/enacting. Why did they cut a promo like that, ending with Bala’s evil satisfactory smile?!)
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April 18, 2013 at 5:12 pm
And oh, just so the comment is mapped to the right Internet-being, this is equanimus. :) (Realized the default WordPress name is different only after submitting the comment.)
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