Opinion Shyam Benegal,family man

The central character in Trikal is a rich landlady in Portuguese Goa,in the immediate days before its “liberation” by the Indian army. The character is played by Leela Naidu with superb aplomb. The movie opens with a funeral sequence. Ernesto Souza-Soares has just died. Despite his errant ways (getting numerous peasant girls pregnant was an obligatory habit with him), Ernesto’s widow remains obsessed with him and refuses to let the funeral proceed. Benegal’s ability to pull off the sense of claustrophobia,as relatives,friends and neighbours throng the dead man’s house,marks him out as a “great” director. He repeats this later in the movie when he captures the engagement party of a young couple. I was reminded of the extraordinary wedding scene in The Deer Hunter. Great directors know that cinema is a medium that can capture simultaneity,unlike a literary work where descriptions are sequential. There is a pictorial quality about these crowded scenes where different characters are quite simply doing their different things. W.H. Auden,in his famous poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”,describes how Breughel captures unrelated (are they really unrelated?) persons and events. Benegal emerges as the Breughel of the dynamic medium of cinema. As the movie unfolds,the reluctant widow pursues her dead husband using an Ouija board,setting the stage for a relentless unravelling of Portuguese Goa — a world that we sometimes forget,lasted for five centuries. A romance between cousins,the seduction of a servant girl (one of Ernesto’s illegitimate children),tension with the Portuguese establishment as one nephew emerges as a revolutionary,tensions between siblings,one of whom is distinctly less beautiful than the other — all of these covered with a patina that haunts — the collaboration of the Souza-Soares family in earlier years with the cruel Lusitanian conquistadors. The music,the settings,the immaculate furniture,the costumes,all come together like a coda that one wishes would never end. But the old world does end (who cannot help but think of Tolstoy’s incendiary Moscow?). Leela Naidu is etched in my mind as the last soulful remnant of a Mediterranean experience somehow gone wrong in the tropics.

Kalyug is simpler in some respects,as it recreates the Mahabharata in the context of a rich Indian family in the licence-permit raj days. The names — Bhisham,Karan,Subhadra — echo the epic,as do the scenes. The young nephew drives into a nest of trucks waiting to hit his car — like Abhimanyu entering the Chakravyuha (I found this quite easily the most frightening and memorable scene in a movie replete with them),Karan being run down while changing the wheel of his car (his namesake died while changing the wheel of his chariot),and so on. But the surface simplicity should not fool us. Benegal can be devilishly clever as he paints layer upon layer of a sinister palimpsest. Any rendering of the Mahabharata has to deal head-on with Draupadi’s preference for Arjuna over his brothers. Benegal deals with this,while at the same time,giving us a glimpse of the quasi-incestuous possibilities within a modern Indian family: the husband’s younger brother is fair game for the amorous sister-in-law. Shades of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata of course. Jealousy,stupidity and recurring nightmares of illegitimate inheritances take their toll. Benegal extracts outstanding performances from so many brilliant stars: Rekha,Shashi Kapoor,Raj Babbar,Anant Nag,Kulbhushan Kharbanda among others. He forces us to confront the underbellies of our own families,which we would rather hide.

Family movies are difficult to make. One cannot get away with song-dance-fight extravaganzas. One cannot rely on technical gimmicks. Each moment,each silence,words said and unsaid,gestures of triumph and tragedy — all need to be captured in the moving image that needs to move fast,but quite slowly. To do this with panache and dexterity — that is the sign of a master. We in India have been lucky to have lived during Shyam Benegal’s extraordinary career.

The writer is chairman of the Nasscom Foundation