Road movie is a genre of films in which the roads play a
very important role, either as a metaphor or as an active agent. The people who
set out for the journey in their motorbikes or cars never reach their
destination or come back home as the same people. People get transformed by the
road where the strangers become gods and strangeness becomes natural. Road
movies are also called coming of age movies for the touch of roads at times is
visceral, sensual as well as intellectual. Chance meetings change the
travellers; sexual encounters in cars, open lands or in seedy hotels,
accidental meetings with revolutionaries, desperados and so on change the
perspective of life itself. Roads change people and they change absolutely, and
that’s why most of the people do not dare to travel. The growth of motor
industry in the post-Second World War had facilitated the origin of road movies
and road novels. The latest in the road novel genres was Orhan Pamuk’s ‘New
Life’. And there would not be a single youth in this world who has not heard of
Che’s ‘Motorcycle Diary’.
Babu Eswar Prasad, one of the Indian contemporary artists,
has always wanted to make a movie and when he finally decided to make one he
chose the genre of road movies. His debut film ‘Gaali Beeja’ (Wind Seed), however
has turned out to be a quasi-road movie in which the characters meet by chance
and leave without making any substantial transformations in their
personalities. Thinking of this part of transformation, at times one could also
see the ordinariness of lives lived by billions of people all over the world
and millions of them on the road for one or the other reason. They go back home
as they have come out. Road just does not affect them. Babu’s film oscillates
between the wonderful alchemy that happens to personalities on the roads and
the Beckettian absurdity of changelessness, where ‘nobody, nobody goes and
nothing happens.’ This awfulness is often taken for granted till one is thrown
out of his/her own devices and becomes a subject of external forces which lay
out of his control.
(A still from Gaali Beeja)
The protagonist in Babu’s ‘Gaali Beeja’ is a road engineer.
As a part of his work he drives between Bangalore and Mumbai, two economic hubs
of India, helping the state to acquire new (agriculture) lands, rendering farmers
helpless and paving way for the development to take out its grand procession. But
this road engineer does not seem to be aware of the outcome of his road design
strategies; even if he is aware certain kind of coldness has come into his
being. The travels between the cities turn this young man into a machine
driving another machine, almost unaffected by what he sees along the road. He
has risked his comforts and even his romantic life to keep the absurdity and
awfulness of his dreary job on. But it cannot be always so. A chance meeting
with Jaffar, an erstwhile pirated DVD seller who hitches a ride, after knowing
that he travels always between the cities, gives him a set of DVDs of the
widely acclaimed road movies that include Alice in the Cities by the German
filmmaker Wim Wenders.
The strange similarity between the life of the road engineer,
mostly spent on road and motels, and that of Alice and the narrator in Wim
Wenders movie, however does not change the protagonist in Babu’s movie
fundamentally. He is a passive viewer but the films have touched him somewhere that’s
why at some point when he takes the pictures of the roads, suddenly he becomes
sensitive towards the termite dunes (which are a sort sand castles, firm, deep
and full of activities) and happens to compare it with a high rise housing
complex coming up in a nowhere land with the hope that the real estate cost
would go up once the highway is laid in the near future to which our road
engineer also contributes his bit. Also, he happens to see a picture card of Hieronymous
Bosch painting and to this fantasy world of strange being, he cuts and paste a
road during his leisure moments in a hotel, to his own amusement. This cruel
joke or even a self-critique is quite poignant as we see a couple of other
characters who cross the paths with the engineer, but for their own reasons.
(Amrish Bijjal in Gaali Beeja)
A farmer who waits for something to happen or someone to
come from somewhere is a strong metaphor or rather a poignant symbol of the
human beings all over the world waiting for their savior to manifest. In the
apparent narrative of the film, as Babu puts, the road that leads from one city
to the other gets ‘distracted’ by the side roads and the side story. The
waiting farmer is such a side story but gets more focus than the main story
because of the enigmatic presence who almost witnesses things changing around
him. From his attire we understand he is a farmer who has lost a ‘life, family
and land’ at the altar of development. But he does not join the protestors who
try to stop the surveyors. He just goes to the bus stop and waits. This waiting
symbol is at once the emblematic waiting of the human beings for their savior,
and also of them who have lost the agency of change or resistance due to the
ideological interventions of politics, culture and economics in their lives. As
they have already forgotten what they are waiting for, the very waiting becomes
an absurdity. Nobody comes, Nobody goes and Nothing happens. The road Engineer
and the farmer become brothers in arms at least when we realize their plight.
The third character, the man who sticks bills/film posters
on the village walls and bus stops, despite his age and agility is an ancient
machine/a rusting cycle or a captive of it. Like the engineer he too moves from
one end of the village to the other sticking posters. He is connected to the
world of cinema because he sticks the posters. But he seems to be absolutely disinterested
in films itself. His search is for a black dog which had bitten him a few days
before and is more worried about the dog than his own fear for getting rabies. He
too comes across the engineer and at a point he even gives a race to the
engineer and leaving it in between without feeling depression or elation. He
could eke out some laughter from the audience but his pathos that evokes a
smile is what links him with the engineer; they too are doing the same absurd
thing, going between places and pasting up dreams.
(Rizawan as the farmer in Gaali Beeja)
Gaali Beeja in Kannada means ‘Wind Seed’, a seed that flies
around with/in the winds. The seeds that fly off take roots in far off places
provided they find the right climes. At the same, the seeds that fly off
connote the generations that break away from the roots and families; this is a
sort of anchorless state of being. But what about those wind seeds that find no
landing place at all? Babu is concerned about such people. This he expresses through
a mad young man who wanders at the periphery of the village and along the
highway. He is also in the move but reaches nowhere, perhaps comes back to the
same place again and again. Babu shows him appearing in the film for the first
time in a shot cleverly placed behind a burnt and rusting body of a bus
abandoned. The degeneration of the purpose and the body that could have
fulfilled the purpose (of journey) is now broken down. The rusting of life and
also the life’s ultimate struggle to climb up even along the rusting bodies
have been an interesting subject for Babu and he had expressed it in his major
video work titled ‘Vortex’ (2008). The road engineer perhaps does not have a
rusting body but rush seems to be getting into his mind as he has fallen victim
to the routine. Road has not changed him perhaps road will never change him.
But somewhere he is touched by the films, in which Babu believes as a director.
Babu makes his engineer character to pass the DVDs on to a freedom loving woman
traveller who gives him a lift on her Enfield Motorbike.
Though Babu would accept that Gaali Beeja started off as a
road movie, it definitely did not end as one. In the course of making the movie,
what changed was not only the story but also the very idea of making it as a
road movie. But in the final analysis, it has to be a road movie because though
the parameters that define a road movie are not met to the dot in this movie,
finally the transformation of the film as well as the director itself is caused
by the road and the experiences given by it. In that sense it is a complete
road movie. What I liked at the outset itself was the irking length of the city
views in Bangalore (mostly constructions) that Babu captures in due course of establishing
the movie (which a Bollywood or Kannada director would have shown by two or
three cuts of the Vidhan Soudh and the IT Hubs with glass facades) which slowly
becomes a dreary trap from which the engineer tries to escape and ironically
helps in making the same trap elsewhere through laying out of new roads. His
journey between Bangalore and Mumbai becomes liberating only in the sense that
while on road he is not in the two domain traps namely Bangalore and Mumbai.
(from Babu Eswar Prasad's video Vortex)
Babu Eswar Prasad’s movie is a tribute to many film makers.
As an avid film watcher, Babu has almost 5000 film titles in his own archives
and he has been adding to it by befriending those young school drop outs who
sold pirated DVDs of international movies. Jaffar who hops into the engineer’s
car is a living character and interestingly in every big city one would find
one or two such Jaffers. With the arrival of speed downloading and special
movie sites, the piracy sector is a dying one. Like Gaali Beeja, now what they
could do is to spread the DVDs in the fertile minds. Babu’s film has got the
problem of a man who knows too many things about films (including road movies)
but does not have the technical know how of making one. The learning process
seems to be good. And the confusion that he faced at the censor board that kept
wondering whether it was a feature film or a documentary or none of the above,
stems from the off-traditional narrative style. He does not tie the loose ends
of the film; there is no solution by bringing the three characters together at
some point (in the Anurag Kashyap format) and leave the viewers satisfied. The
actors have to be appreciated for the commendable job that they have done as Mohammed
Rizvan and Amrish Bijjal, two fellow artists who have also acted in the art house
movies done by other friends in Bangalore. While watching the movie I kept
wondering why Babu chose a conventionally handsome man (who could be mistaken
for a film star in real life) to play the lead role of the road engineer.
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