(Still from Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani by Jiju Antony)
Holocaust and the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent have
given us more burning images than any other world events could impart. Perhaps,
if you just close your eyes, closer to home images of horrifying images might
pop up. And you often wonder why, if given without a suggestion to think a good
or bad image, but just an image, why you imagine only those horrible images? Do
images an innate horrible side to it? Does each beautiful image engender a
horrendous image? Do the good images hide the bad ones? While the latter cannot
be doing the same to the former ones, in dire contexts or even in the
controlled contexts of a concert hall or a theatre or even in a drawing room
where you read your daily dose of newspaper, the sad images could lead you to a
cathartic experience and after the mental climaxing you may, yes you may, come
out of the experience as a much refined being, at least temporarily. That’s
what art does to a person. Jiju Antony’s movie, ‘Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani’ (EELS-2017)
does the same to a viewer, especially when one sees it against the backdrop of
the images of migrant laborers walking miles to get home streaming into his consciousness.
(Filmmaker Jiju Antony)
The word could be cathartic, when spoken in the context of a
movie or art form as just mentioned above, but in a real life situation the
images could something else; a pure indignation could fill inside you, an
unreasonable dejection might engulf you, an inexplicable gloominess would
envelop you, provided if you are a human being. If you are in a high rise
building, move away from the balcony for you might feel this itch to jump down.
If you are in possession of a gun, keep off from it for you might pull the
trigger against yourself for you and I know it is a gloomy Sunday. Art could
however make life imitate it inversing the oft-held notion of art imitating
life. Here, almost four years before, Jiju Antony, the director of EELS seemed
to have imagined the life imitating art. This line of thought becomes all the
more poignant and powerful when you tend to see each abstract face in the
milling crowd of daily wage earning men and women throng the bus stations in
the blistering hot, making the drone shots a jumble of human pixels, a story.
Like a shot where an image comes into focus after hovering around in out of
focus for a long time, the faces become clear and each face belongs to a human
being and each of them has a story to tell.
(EELS poster)
They do not tell it. They perhaps tell it to their silent
nights through sighs of longing and pain. But there are sensitive film
directors like Jiju Antony who would walk an extra mile to eke out stories from
those faces. In EELS the protagonist is a taxi driver (when we see him in the
narrative for the second time) and in due course of time we come to know that
he is an orphan named Prakash Jadhav. As we see him on his day of hanging
inside the jail and also in the 9th segment him committing a rape
and double murder we ourselves have given the judgement that he deserves the capital
punishment. Hailing from the underbelly of this vast country called India, any
innocent looking person could turn into a potential criminal and that is what
we learn to believe. A flotsam in the urban pool of life, these people are
looked at with suspicion and distrust. And each time we confront them we make
them believe that they don’t belong. “Tere aukat kya hai yeh toilet use karneka’
(What’s your right to use this toilet) asks the lady who has employed him as
her personal driver. The relationship between the employer and the employee is
so tentative and flimsy that any moment the latter could explode. He doesn’t do
it because he does not want to be a criminal; but each time he knows that one
beast is growing in him. He doesn’t even spit that hatred growing in him like
the way the protagonist in Arvind Adiga’s novel the White Tiger, Balram, a
driver does.
(Prathap Joseph, cinematographer of EELS)
What makes one a criminal is the question that many a film
has explored. But in EELS, done in the Decalogue fashion, ten stories, of the
same person but done in a reverse order but not strictly in a flashback
fashion. Also one could see Jiju auto-refers the short movie, ‘An Incident at
Owl Creek Bridge.’ However, Jiju’s idea is not to justify the rape and murder
committed by Prakash Jadhav but explore how he has become one. In a way the
culprit is not Jhadav but the events that unfold in his life which lie beyond
his control. By the time we reach the last section we almost sympathize with
the six year old Jhadav and wonder how this boy could do such atrocities in
life. He goes through a series of setbacks in his life. Orphaned at a young age
he is brought up by a Christian priest who subjects him unnatural sex which
makes him escape from that hell. His baptism through street life and
destitution finally makes him a taxi driver and in the meanwhile his
experiences have made him impotent. His impotency is treated in the movie as a
trope that makes him rethink about his worth and manliness and he could express
that only through violence.
(Deewar by Yash Chopra 1975)
One may find Jiju’s movie thematically a bit overdone
especially in the mainstream cinema where a harrowing life is attributed to the
protagonist to make him an anti-hero that a society craves for especially when
it collectively feels the political impotency. But the way the film has been
created is different. One doesn’t even come to know the transition of tone in
each segment to not only show the time in past but also to emphasis the dying
innocence of the man. By the time he commits crime, he is in color. One good
thing about the movie is that neither the character Jhadav nor the director
justifies the wrong doing of the protagonist. There is a sort of inevitability
of events in the movie that couldn’t have controlled by any other parties. It
is not even like the man flowing with the stream but it is more like an episode
caught by the storm of history, as Walter Benjamin would put it. Perhaps, the
grand tragedy of Jhadav is the collective tragedy of the laborers in India.
Disorganized and anchorless these people are pushed to the edges of the
society, as dregs of life. It is an effort to find a meaning to its own incomprehensible
existence. It is not like the grand narrative of Deewar (Yash Chopra 1975)
where the protagonist from the village living on a footpath looks at the high
rise, promising himself to reach there by hooks or crook. Vinay Lal, the
sociologist and cultural historian speaks of two viewpoints of the movie; one
from the footpath and one from the high rise. ‘Mera pass gadi hai buglaw hai…sab
kuch hai, tuhmare paas kya hai?’ (I have got a bungalow, car and everything what
have you got?) ‘Mere pas maa hai’ (I have got mother).
(Cultural Historian Prof.Vinay Lal)
This effort to belong versus the natural belongingness (to mother,
mother India, mother earth and so on) was the great point of crisis in 1970s
and the grand narratives of the time sold the dream that one could make it in a
city like Mumbai. But the post-global scenario unveiled a new reality where the
movement from the footpath to high rise became impossible. Prakash Jhadav, with
his surname connoting his lower caste identity is bound to end up either as a
taxi driver or a small time worker. There is no emancipation for him in this
city. The termite like existence that has brought them out during the corona
crisis into the streets of Delhi underlines the fact that the rich has to exist
with this kind of poor and make them constantly invisible. This sudden
visibilizing of them through a calamity in fact has caught the rich unprepared
and that has exposed their vile. Jhadav’s crime is not his crime but a
collective crime which got manifested through him. It is constant
invisibilizing of Jhadav and his ilk makes them assert their visibility through
the most horrendous ways. Jiju Antony definitely does not endorse the criminal
act but he calls out (like Lawrence Fishburne calls out ‘wake up’ in Spike Lee’s
‘School Daez’, a black redemption movie) ‘Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani’ ‘Oh God Oh
God Why have You Forsaken Me?’
(Lawrence Fishburne in Spike Lee's 'School Daez)
Christ calls this out to God and it is what each person
today on the road calls out. Perhaps it is what each person who have come down
with Covid 19 calling out ‘Oh God, why me and why have you forsaken me?’
Prakash Jhadav could have been anybody else. But the question is that why he?
So the story should go back. Had he been born to a rich family he would never
have been this. Prakash Jhadav could have been an IAS officer, a doctor or
anything of his choice had the events in his life were different since his
birth. Hence, those who are back home relaxing and feeling okay about the
migrant laborers and the destitute, Jiju Antony’s movie tells you, should know
that they are lucky only because they are born in a different condition and
grew up in a different way. Your crime is not lauded but the question remains,
why oh God, if you are there, why have you abandoned me by ‘choosing’ me?
Produced by NiV Art Movies and Kazhcha Film forum the film EELS has excellent
cinematography by Prathap Joseph, himself an award winning indie film maker and
is edited by another award winning film director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan.
-JohnyML
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