EPIC SPRAWL AND DIVERSE STORYTELLING

AHMAK/THE IDIOT(1991)

Running just few minutes short of four hours, this epic film is based on Fyodor Dosteovsky’s THE IDIOT. Under Mani Kaul’s penchant for reinventing the cinematographic idiom, the ensemble keeps up with the sprawl of personalities spread out over locations shrouded in an inner urban darkness.

This interplay of light and shadow becomes eventually fascinating even as the slow-boil is rife with amoral connections across units, integrating at least two generations who, it seems, are always divided by this inheritance of confounding mores that subvert a conventional social gaze.  Happiness is ever-elusive and contentment the last resort.

Dialogues interject, sputter, enter and exit within the chaotic implosion of pseudo-liberal settings. But there are moments of clarity to drive the plot forward. There’s obviously a huge credit to a theatrical style of staging and executing the scenes in congested spaces. It signifies a moral bankruptcy on the part of the individuals here as well as fortunes lost to idle ventures, infidelity, financial handicaps and alcoholism. The style is gloomy precisely because doomed families and extended units of friends and acquaintances become accustomed to a sentience that is gray and always faltering. Mental states falling into disarray too are subsidiaries of such a network.

In all this, Ayub Khan-Din as Myshkin is a sole bright spot, willing to be a beacon of trust, camaraderie and companionship to some of the most doomed young minds, including Nastashia( Mita Vashisht) and Raghujan( Shahrukh Khan in one of his earliest parts); to others, this model ‘good man’ is a curio of sorts, a puzzle since he’s so unaffected by his past as an epileptic and never given to rash moral judgements. So they indulge in mind-games and petty manipulations to center him as the odd one out. Under the guise of friendship, he’s made a target of cruel jokes and is often shrugged off as an imbecile.

The sprawling narrative has few moments that stand out. Like when Amba( Navjot Hansra, so haunting as the picture of doomed innocence in Kumar Shahani’s KASBA), and her female family members warm up to Myshkin and the mother asks him if he’s a ‘good man’ or that extended scene where Nastashia makes her major entry in a living space and others follow her with words and deeds that represent all that an amoral world has to offer. Or at the party presided by her where more details spill out. Especially when Myshkin meets Raghujan at his living space and the latter moves like a ghost or a seductive force drawing in the former man to his beguiling den of apathy and self-serving ends.

A lot could have been excised here or given a more ‘normal’ narrative treatment. It is a flawed enterprise and the acting doesn’t always escape from its whispered intonations and awkward turns. But Vashisht is natural and fiesty, vulnerable and wounded whenever required. Mr. Khan-Din is innocence and guilelessness personified, an attractive presence whose stilted use of Hindi serves to highlight a locational and social alienation. On the other hand, Mr. Khan shows early signs of that hyena-like laughter and restrained villainy which eventually got patented in the annals of his early hits. He’s not an anomaly here in hindsight as much as he’s a pivotal being.

AHMAK/THE IDIOT is an unusually produced work. The sum of its parts don’t produce much impact. But whenever it taps into the layers of units, generations or the manner in which inner doom translates to our locational spaces, it is captivating in the way its constituents move within a frame. They carry a repressed energy.

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BEN-HUR(1959)

The epic sprawl of this mammoth M.G. M. work is justly cognizant of a fictional history, presented with the vulnerable tempers of a hero who suffers terribly at the hands of fate. His fate is orchestrated by the man he loved as a friend. But heirarchies are dangerous and toxic to every era. That’s the root cause of the major conflict here. Ego destroys. Authority is to be exercised with caution. Friends don’t always become family. History is not shaped by superhuman strength but endurance and forbearance.

Having watched BEN-HUR without the starry-eyed expectations I once held for it given its legend, I can say that the editing choices don’t always pass muster, the pace is slack and unmoving at many dramatic points. The acting beats also are moulded within fairly predictable terms. But this sprawl of fictional history captures the mannerisms and movements of epic storytelling very well indeed.

The friendship between Judah Ben Hur( Charlton Heston) and Messalah( Stephen Boyd), the realisation that power and authority on the latter’s part has driven a serrated wedge in their bond and the manner in which Ben-Hur and his family members are betrayed and made to suffer for crimes they didn’t commit are stirring. It is also a political statement on the way a community has historically been made to cower under regimes and conquests. The contemporary tone of fascism is injected into the Roman empire representatives, putting history in a timeless, direct correlation with the events presented.

For me, the toil, exhaustion and physical feats of under the deck crew members rowing away for the sake of dear life, of which the titular protagonist becomes a part, is arresting especially when the sound design aligns with the drum-rolls and movement of the ship. The extended chariot race is an unforgettable feat from start to finish. The majesty, brutality, speed and roar produced by the kinetic wheels within the arena is top-notch. I am not sure if the parts featuring Jesus of Nazareth( Claude Heater) really add anything substantial here. However, by choosing to show him as a burgeoning figure of fascination for common folk and without revealing his face, his enigma is maintained. There are two scenes of lasting empathy where offering water to those in throes of life and death scenarios bind Ben-Hur and Jesus even though they don’t know each other personally.

Watch Ben-Hur for its epic scope even when its many emotional moments don’t always register. The sincerity of craft and a sense of compassion shows in its movement through history and changing tides of time.

NOTE: all the clips here are courtesy YouTube.
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