SOME TALES- PART 2

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER(1955)

Charles Laughton, the capable actor who this cinephile had watched in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION and SPARTACUS, directed his one and only feature in the form of this noir thriller. I finally watched it on Amazon Prime  few days ago and while the artifice of its sets and obviously practiced performative style never actually betray themselves in the larger tale, the large, prescient shadow of evil it explores is chilling.

There are images here galore which I cannot erase from my mind, with the chapel-shaped bedroom where a mother falls into an uneasy slumber, her body submerged in the river amid weeds and the two fists revealing dual facets of humanity chief among them.

From its beginning, the thrust is on a world of children witness to adults’ moral degeneration. Patriarchal, paternal traps hoodwink a community. Faith whiplashes reason until a woman’s innate innocence is used against her, sending her to an early grave. The cycle of evil on the part of males who take charge of this household presents another chilling indictment of social mores.

It’s the second half that plays like a Huckleberry Finn fable as the two children travel down a river and the flora and fauna of rural America guides their journey to safety. As Lilian Gish makes her immense presence felt as their guardian in a home for underprivileged children, the tale comes to its conclusion, with it upholding the virtues of a just and prosperous world for them.

The sense of camaraderie among the children and Ms. Gish makes its volte-face towards one of maternal empathy stand out.

**

QUARTET(1981)

What I took away from this work is the cyclical import of humankind’s worst impulses. Ms. Isabelle Adjani’s  Marya is left at the hands of wolves wearing decency’s garb( exemplified by none other than Dame Maggie Smith and Alan Bates here)

Her victimisation puts her position as a female (and a young, beautiful one at that) at the forefront of depraved social mores. Once again, Merchant-Ivory manage to show us the slippery, amoral trappings of the noveau rich. For them, the world is a playground and every vulnerable individual a fly to be swatted for their own vapid leisure.

The sordid racial undertones( with the words ‘creole’, ‘savage’ used by an apathetic gentry in regular conversations) are appropriately noticeable too.

Set in the 1920s, this one forecasts and beams sordid human truths orchestrated by internalised patriarchy to an even worse epoch in civilization.

***

WHERE DID I LEAVE MY PURDAH?(2021)

This Mahesh Dattani creation, again a teleplay broadcast by Zee Theatre, is about generational trauma, blinkered sisterhood, artistic evolution and the manner in which genocide and bodily siege designs a nation for posterity.

It’s stirringly delivered, with its thrust on a post Partition narrative multiplying its hold on the women of a household. Past and present get dragged through the mud. Sohaila Kapoor, Swara Bhaskar and Divya Dutta ace their thorough understanding of this arc.

A conversation between a man and a woman preparing to stage pivotal scenes from a play,  as they are ensconced within the dressing room during interval, is unforgettable for the multiple strands of trauma it addresses.

***

I share one of my own poems, published here few years ago, which I feel justifies this work’s core concerns.

A GRANDMOTHER’S LAMENT

A solitary Om circled her ablutions,
holding the pain of those post war years in her ribs,
when she was young and on her way to the bed chamber,
praying for lesser contractions of torment,
consummating a war-torn union with her eyes to the ceiling.

Broken bangles, shattered pots,
leaking vessels of the Shergill women,
severed heads of cows and crows
and approaching stilts of vultures upon the river’s bank.
She escaped all that with her wedding procession,
for the countryside’s doomsday was two weeks later.

Telegraphs of the carnage reach her,
from those zigzagging pole wires and squinting birds in the balcony,
her memory drawing palms towards the heads of brides and grooms,
now asking for eternal peace and her elderly wisdom.
Another marital procession seeking her ancient presence,
in the arterial vista of generations.

**

She was young once,
when her tongue limned the outline of his shoulders
and his fingers caressed the very essence of her body.
The idea of existence,
of sandalwood aromas reeling with sweat and smells of new beginnings,
all garnered a few towns away from her own place,
where intimacy took beastly garbs to snap hymens
and midnight guards broke their sacred words,
to ransack humanity.

“Blessed be the union of these two souls,
prosper and progress as pilgrims on this eternal road,
in faith and in fidelity,
draw strength and make amends the first time around in brewing conflict’s way, “
Her words comforting a small town that always lay outside the epicenter of her heyday.

**

Her town burned,
looted and pillaged,
sacked to become refuge of wandering ghosts
and a blot on nostalgia’s subtle arc.

She remembers swings swaying past the rainbow,
the fairs bedecked with children’s hoots,
parental vigils of joy
and the day before a prognosis of bloodshed doused the fire of youth.

She remembers.
The lament of her ‘long agos’ gone
with the last smoke of the past,
her failing memory
and the joy of the town congregating for a couple’s future.

She remembers.

*****

POISON (2023)

Hare-brained tactics, genuine concern, tensile nerves following a resting man’s fear of being bitten by a snake and a doctor’s intervention find a caustic, funny and trenchant take in Wes Anderson’s seventeen minute short POISON.

In the end, the frenetic scrambling for a solution to the problem at hand, the absurdity invested in the humour, the perfectly delivered expressions by Sir Ben Kingsley, Benedict Cumberbatch and Dev Patel point to a larger malaise. Racism rears its ugly head, like a veritable snake in the grass and this colonial era tale finds its footing as much more than a children’s fable.

That last scene indicts human interaction, latent prejudices and the helpless resignation for those at the receiving end.

***

NOTE: all the above clips are courtesy YouTube while the image is from IMDB.