[Disclaimer: I know the filmmaker Arun Karthick on Facebook. In principle, I don’t write about films by people I’m acquainted with. But since Nasir had a worldwide screening on YouTube as part of the We Are One festival, I thought it okay to write about it. Take it with a pinch of salt all the same.]
Arun Karthick’s Nasir is built on a series of refusals. As a non-Muslim filmmaker telling the story of a poor Muslim man, Arun seems to have felt that the only way he can negotiate this dilemma is by refusing to give in to objectifying characterizations of Muslims typical of a whole lot of non-Muslim cinema. So very little about Nasir (Koumarane Valavane) marks him as a Muslim in the viewer’s eyes. He doesn’t wear a kurta, doesn’t have a skullcap and doesn’t shave his moustache. We never see him eat meat or biryani. He doesn’t live in a Muslim ghetto, his impoverished neighbourhood accommodating poor of all stripes. His speech is plain, largely untouched either by Dakhni Urdu or the prevalent Kongu accent of Tamil. His household isn’t teeming with children; in fact, Nasir doesn’t have a child of his own, and he takes care of an orphaned, developmentally challenged teenager at home. This considered refusal of artificiality must not be confused with authenticity.
This extends to the dramatic construction as well. Right at the outset, we learn that poor Nasir needs money: he has an ailing mother and a memorial ceremony is around the corner. It’s the most melodramatic of all premises. But the film refuses to take Nasir through a parade of frustrations, disappointments and humiliations. The drama is constantly deferred, relegated to the margins, until late into the film. The filmmaker is mostly content in observing Nasir’s workaday over 24 hours, starting from his morning routine until his walk back home from work late in the evening. Nasir works at a clothing outlet, and the film captures his interaction with colleagues, customers, his boss and his family at length, interspersing it with pensive moments of Nasir smoking beedi.
Nasir is a relic from another time, something of a poet adrift in a commercial world. He listens to music on a tape recorder, writes loving letters to his wife who’s away from home for just three days. Like his poetry, his understated but distinctly innocent romanticism are at odds with a universe of short-term relationships and teenage affairs. His long letter to his wife—doubling as an elaborate expository device read out as voiceover—is interrupted thrice by instances of violence. But Nasir is out of pace with the world in other ways as well. As an unmarked Muslim unbound by his community and uninvolved in debates surrounding Islam, he mentally lives in a time and place in which he could survive behind the general anonymity of the city and the marketplace.
Echoing this isolation, the film hems close to Nasir’s perspective of things. The viewer experiences only what the protagonist experiences. Nasir is the centre of the cosmos on whose margins tumultuous things unfold, things that he keeps at bay unwittingly or not: signs of anti-Muslim sentiment and political mobilization in the city. A shorter sequence at his shop transposes Nasir’s condition temporarily onto a female co-worker. As the men at the outlet discuss porn, sex and adultery, the camera leaves Nasir to follow the young woman around the store as she tries unsuccessfully to ignore this ostensibly uncomfortable discussion.
Nasir’s observational approach isn’t new, and it plants itself firmly in the Hubert Bals-sponsored tradition of meditative fiction filmmaking. The film starts out with extreme close-ups of scenes from Nasir’s household, partially blocked or obscured images offered through layers of fabric or grills so that the viewer squints to perceive what’s happening. This formal scheme loosens up as Nasir sets out for the day, the scenes at the clothing shop serving both as visual and comic relief. The filmmaker often fixates on minute details of décor, setting or actors’ bodies, with one afternoon sequence around Nasir’s nap turning into an abstract vision of a state between dream and waking life. While this fetishization of the ordinary remains eccentric and tasteful for most part, it sometimes tips over into the exotic, such as when we see Nasir’s prayer at the mosque—a rare sign of his Islamic affiliation—at great, almost voyeuristic detail that goes against the general principle of the film.
On the other hand, the film’s treatment of the city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, where the story is set, is quite refreshing. My recent memory of the city on screen is in the noxious Suttu Pidikka Utharavu (2018), where it’s a contested town filled with treacherous North Indian immigrants and Muslims to be strictly policed and surveyed from apartment rooftops. In Nasir, in contrast, we witness the city almost exclusively from the eye level on the street.
To be sure, the film does not purport to offer an objective, value-neutral glimpse of the city. For instance, we hardly see any political or film posters on its walls, or hear Dravidian political rhetoric—sights and sounds that are integral to public experience in Tamil Nadu. And the same could be said of the deep-seated caste and ethnic fault lines of the city. In Nasir, it would seem that these details have been supplanted by a pan-national communal discourse: Jamaats and Mahasabhas announce themselves on the walls as Nasir walks from his neighbourhood to the larger city—sequences whose lengths seem determined by the soundbites from mosques or BJP speeches we hear on the soundtrack. And a vaguely suspicious North Indian presence is still felt on the narrative periphery, most notably in the ubiquity of Ganesha idols during the Ganesha festival, which here becomes an occasion for Hindu assertion and mob violence.
Even so, Nasir does a good job of capturing the unique visual culture of the state, the sensory overload it imposes on the public, vying for its attention akin to the shop worker who calls out to potential customers: flashy private vehicles at a mofussil bus depot, serpentine chains of stores selling the same wares, coloured decorations cutting across roads like wires, etc. More importantly, it touches on the fragile cosmopolitanism of the city, easily upset by politically-motivated communal polarization.
Critics have hailed Nasir for its reserve, its abstinence from grandstanding, its relegation of the political to its margins and its refusal to give a message. While some of it is true, I think this profoundly mischaracterizes the film. For one, the rejection of messaging is new only as far as one compares it to mainstream Indian cinema, a comparison with little possible ground. Nasir is as far from mainstream Indian cinema as it is from Hollywood; its lineage is different and specific. Considered in light of other Rotterdam-funded films of the past two decades, its minimization of the political and its refusal to preach is wholly in line with that tradition.
Moreover, it isn’t to the film credit to say that it focuses on some fuzzy humanism, keeping the political and the communal out of its scope. Nasir’s indifference is a virtue only as far as there’s the threat of political and religious violence about him. The marginalization of the political is part of the film’s emotive substructure and not some independent artistic choice outside of its desire to follow Nasir’s life. One collapses without the other. Finally, it seems plain as day to me that Nasir has a message and one it wishes to convey ardently. It isn’t an ambiguous film by any measure, and there are no dozen ways of reading it. It isn’t any less message-oriented than many liberal-minded mainstream pictures, and to acknowledge that doesn’t take anything away from the film’s accomplishment.
[Spoiler alert]
Which brings me to the film’s ending. As Nasir walks home at night, reciting the letter to his wife on the voiceover, a Hindu mob confronts and kills him. Where arthouse filmmaking would typically omit this graphic event, presenting vignettes of its aftermath alone, Arun chooses to depict the violence. The camera unhinges from the tripod, frenetically following the men pouncing on Nasir. The shaky camera abstracts the lynching such that that the mass of men is reduced to an indistinct blob of low-def colours, with a face or a snatch of dialogue emerging from time to time to pin down the meaning of the event.
It is a bold choice that finds a novel (and morally defensible) midpoint between the iniquity of representing such violence and potential perversion (not to mention the aesthetic staleness) involved in artfully eliding the event. But I do wonder whether it isn’t a superfluous ending that could’ve been done away with altogether. I understand that it’s intended to inscribe homicidal violence within the everyday experience of the poor Indian Muslim. But I also think that it topples the affair by suggesting that the travails of Indian Muslims could only make sense within the optic of murderous communal violence. In other words, the low-key struggles born of structural problems—lack of state support, the dearth of economic opportunities, the obligation to ply one’s trade under neutral names, the pressure to move to the Gulf, the intersectional violence on women and the disabled—that are the focus of the most part of the film risk being relativized by what is evidently a coup de théâtre. It reduces the admirable qualities of the film to the setup for a dramatic punchline.
June 7, 2020 at 5:27 pm
Your review encompasses all my demurrals and admiration for the film. Among all the reviewers I read, you are the only one who actually broached the political implications of the film and its supposed lack of political message. Great work as usual.
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June 8, 2020 at 9:04 am
Thank you, Anand.
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June 11, 2020 at 1:06 am
Very insightful writing and review – one of the more balanced that I’ve read. I don’t mind the lack of drama and conflict – it’s usually the case with many an art house film. However, in my opinion, the film was far from apolitical.
The Hindu characters in this film (as far as I could determine one from Nasir’s unadorned Muslim) could be viewed as porn addicts, engaged in underage sexual trysts, subverting traditions related to modesty, proponents of violent resistance, foul-mouthed, corrupt, and drug abusers. Nasir, on the other hand, is (or was?!?) pure-as-white, considerate, caring, clean, romantic, contemplative, and poetic. He is as saintly as saintly gets. Personally, this type of crude juxtaposition takes away from the authenticity of the world they did a great job in shooting. The aforementioned characteristics are usually shared by people across faiths; History and current events tell us that we all have a good chance of being lured into such actions or born with such peccadillos.
As you say, the film could have centered on “low key struggles”, but having said that, those struggles are shared by the poor across faiths. So, this makes the ending necessary, because it clarifies, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this film intends to highlight the subjugation of one religious group by another. How reviewers can say that the politics are “hidden in the margins” is beyond me. The politics stares us in the face.
The grander question for me is whether the film is an honest attempt to uncover the unique inequities of life as a Muslim in Coimbatore (with a dramatic punchline), or deliver blunt force “trojan horse” propaganda. Films tackling these types of topics usually tread lightly and play both sides (unless we are talking about the holocaust or genocide) for good reason, because there is no one such thing as one-sided truth, and violence in and of itself only begets violence and nothing more.
Eeb Allay Oo, another very well made film, took a less-direct approach to reach a similar target.
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June 11, 2020 at 9:13 am
Hello Box o’ fun,
You raise some important points.
I wouldn’t say that the film ascribes those features to its Hindu characters. I see no reason to believe these behavioral traits has anything to do with their “Hinduness”. Most of them are neutral characters with diverse traits whom Nasir happens to encounter. I think the film should be given more credit than such a polar generalization.
Also, it seems to me that Nasir’s “low-key struggles” cannot entirely be shared by those of other faiths, because they arise out of his existence as a poor Muslim, not as any poor man. I believe the film succeeds in making that distinction.
Finally, I would hesitate using the word “propaganda” for this film. It is a committed film seeking to say something concrete. In my view, it would have been wholly disingenuous had the film tried to portray “both sides” and Nasir as some bystander caught between two equally-dangerous forces. That for me reeks of cynicism. One of the things Nasir gets right IMO is that there are no two sides to this scenario.
On the other hand, I do agree with your point about Nasir being too saintly. That he is “a good Muslim” who stays in line, desiring what can be desired, limits the script’s dramatic power, at best, and plays into the the hands of the film’s very opponents, at worst. But such, I suppose, is the pitfall of working negatively through refusals. I do not think it’s an easy dilemma to solve at all. “What to do with the Other?” is an extremely hard problem that has to do with a filmmaker’s subjective and social position vis à vis his subject. Artists work lifelong on the question, still without a definitive answer.
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June 11, 2020 at 4:10 pm
“Also, it seems to me that Nasir’s “low-key struggles” cannot entirely be shared by those of other faiths, because they arise out of his existence as a poor Muslim, not as any poor man. I believe the film succeeds in making that distinction.”
How are they unique to a Muslim man in the story world? He has to get water from the central tank and bathe in shared facilities? Okay, I think that sucks, but that’s a life shared by many due to bad infrastructure and policy planning. He has to go to the Middle East? Again, unfortunate, but 2 million Hindus work in the Middle East; Is he looking for cash to feed his family or is he forced to flee? Lack of economic opportunities? He has a job (at what I presume to be a Hindu store given the idols) despite being a Muslim.He has a disabled boy? Okay, I’m sympathetic, but again, it’s not uncommon. He doesn’t get a pay advance? Okay, he needs the money, but the manager lays out solid religion-agnostic reasons for that and even gives him an opportunity to get what he wants. Personally, these are areas where the story world is at its weakest. Small injustices and tiny micro-aggressions do exist, but the film does not dive into these in any meaningful way. This is far more interesting (and has greater reach) than obvious overt violence.
The only time I got a sense that Nasir was under real duress (and for me the best moment in the film) is when he banters with the store clerk who wants to thwart a Muslim procession. Nasir snarls and simmers, but shows great restraint by supplanting a potential expression of hate with recited poetry. I felt Nasir’s pain and thought that poetry was not only an innate skill and interest, but also a coping mechanism against imminent threats. But that, for me, was one of the few moments. I wanted to know more about his struggle.
Anyway, I will continue to follow your posts in the future.
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June 11, 2020 at 6:36 pm
I see where you are coming from.
But no matter that non-Muslim Indians work in the gulf, it remains primarily associated with Muslim emigrants from India, because that’s a tried and tested path with a support structure around it.
Moreover, we know for a fact that Muslims in India are the poorest community by far. To my mind, Nasir’s child would have had a better chance at finding schooling finance were he of some other faith.
We also know that Muslim-owned shops, unless within the ghetto, can rarely function under a Muslim name. You either see bland acronyms or some religion-neutral names taking that place. It’s a rule that doesn’t spare even the biggest businesses (think Prestige Group, MK Retail). That is the case with Nasir’s friend’s setup too, which is called Kovai (Coimbatore) Clock Repair or something.
I do think that by severing Nasir from his own community, the film obscures some of these particularities. At the same time, I find it hard to imagine that the film would’ve remained the same had Nasir been swapped out for a poor non-Muslim man.
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