In 1983, the great Indian director, Satyajit Ray, suffered a near fatal heart attack. His recovery was long and apparently arduous. In many of his films, Ray operated the camera, wrote the script, directed, and composed the music as well. In his prime, he seems to have produced movies the way that birds sing -- that is, apparently effortlessly. After his heart attack, Ray's physical faculties were much diminished and his doctors ordered him to severely reduce his cinematic exertions. The result is that Ganushatra, Ray's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is restrained and somewhat claustrophobic -- the movie is shot indoors, using only a couple of locations, and the camerawork is exceedingly prosaic: shot and reverse shot with inserted close-ups for emphasis: we see some reactions to events occurring in the film in big close-ups and there are images of telephones, vials of holy water, and a woman's hand touching her husband's hand when he is under public attack. The movie is well-acted, but, if the truth is told, a bit of a slog. Ray has produced a work that is essentially a record of a filmed stage-play -- some of the movie is memorable, but it's a disappointment, not as compelling as it should be. To some extent, the fault may lie in Ibsen's source material, very freely adapted by Ray -- Ibsen is one of history's preeminent playwrights, but, as is often the case with Shakespeare, his intricately crafted theater works may read better than they play. That is, stage-productions of Ibsen often pale in comparison with the effect experienced when you read his plays.
In broad outline, Ray follows Ibsen's Enemy of the People closely although, ultimately, the effect of his film is very different from the ambiguous and radically unresolved theater-piece by the Norwegian writer. In Ray's film, a kindly and self-sacrificing doctor (Dr. Ashoke Gupta) notes an uptick in cases of hepatitis and jaundice in the provincial city where he practices medicine. Gupta discovers that the holy water dispensed by a local Hindu shrine is polluted and causes illness. The doctor wishes to avert a health crisis by writing an article for the local paper, a so-called "liberal" and "progressive" periodical, warning the public as to this danger. Unfortunately, Gupta's younger brother, a successful politician in town, opposes the doctor's cautionary efforts. This politician, Nishin, seems to act from a combination of pious and mercantile motives; he says that by definition "holy water" from the shrine can't be impure and, further, the town depends upon revenue earned from pilgrims to the temple -- shutting it down would devastate the town's economy. Nishin persuades the newspaper, operated by "crusading" journalists (who are, in fact, servile), to kill the story. Frustrated, Dr. Gupta seeks another way of advising the public as to the clear and present danger presented by the polluted holy water. A local theater group, a collection of young radicals, offers the physician use of their theater to make his case that the temple should be banned from dispensing its sacred water -- the stuff is doled out to crowds of pilgrims in small doses poured from tiny clay pots: people suck down the water or rub it into their scalps. Nishin, with the cowardly newspapermen, appears at the lecture, turns the affair into a sort of public meeting at which his allies preside, and Gupta is prevented from making his case. (The scenes in the theater are performed against a frieze of headless figures woven from sort of bamboo or other fabric; it's a weird backdrop for the speeches presented in that space and seems to have some symbolic significance that eludes me.) The crowd of pious Hindus challenge Gupta's status -- "Are you even a Hindu?" someone asks -- and shout him down. The next day mobs assemble at Gupta's house and throw rocks through his windows. The doctor cowers inside with his wife and adoring daughter, fearful that their home will be overrun by the hostile crowd. Their landlord arrives and apologetically advises that they will be evicted from the home and Ranin, Dr. Gupta's daugher, announces that she has been fired from her job as a schoolteacher. (Dr. Gupta says he will start a school in his home where she can teach slum-kids.) The mob advances and more windows are broken and just when it seems that an attack on Gupta and his family is imminent, the doctor hears a counter-protest on the street outside. The cavalry has arrived in the form of a crowd of radical young theater people and, as the film ends, we hear them chanting praise for Dr. Gupta's courage.
In broad outline, Ray's film tracks the much longer and more complex play by Ibsen. But there are striking deviations from Ibsen's original theater-piece. In Ganushatra, the doctor is much older than his brother, the politician; this inverts the casting in Ibsen's play in which the protagonist, Dr. Stockmann, is twenty years younger than his brother, the town's mayor, Peter Stockmann. A devious old man who makes a spectacular appearance at the beginning and end of Ibsen's original (a greedy speculator named Morten Kiil) is entirely absent from Ray's version of the story. (Ibsen likes down-to-earth details that involve stocks and promissory notes and contested wills; Ray has no interest in commerce of this sort and so Kiil who buys shares in the poisoned spa, with his grandchildren's inheritance, to blackmail Dr. Stockmann is nowhere in evidence in the Indian film.) Most importantly, Ibsen's conception of Dr. Stockmann as a vainglorious, stubborn man, gleeful in his role as the gadfly subverting the town's economic well-being, doesn't translate at all into Ganushatra. Ray's conception of Dr. Gupta is simplified and schematic -- the doctor is a kindly, rational man of science who stands in opposition to the religious bigotry embodied by the pious pilgrims (and their institutional supporters). Ibsen's play is powerful precisely because of its complications and cross-currents. Everyone in the Norwegian's Enemy of the People acts in their own self-interest and Dr. Stockmann's pride and Schadenfreude hurls him into an otherwise avoidable confrontation with his fellow citizens, a conflict that a more temperate and less vain man could have avoided. These themes are absent from Ray's much simplified, and, somewhat, cartoonish depiction of the conflict as enlightened science versus benighted religious fervor. Ibsen's play supports different interpretations of the nature of the fundamental conflict that the work dramatizes: on one dimension, Ibsen's Enemy of the People is about science and reason in opposition to ignorance, but the play also supports readings in which the conflict is between commerce versus public safety as well as the "democratic" mob versus the elite enlightened individual and, of course, the clash between truth and lies (in the case of both play and movie, the "fake news." All of these interpretations, and others are valid approaches to Ibsen's play which authorizes many and largely parallel (that is, not mutually exclusive) readings. By contrast, those who seek to "adapt" Ibsen's work generally end up selecting one of the various meanings embodied by the play and developing their work along those lines exclusively. (Arthur Miller in his adaptation from 1950 made the play about the 'democratic" mob in conflict with lonely hero who must defend the Truth to the death -- his version of the play was written in the shadow of the McCarthy blacklist ) Ray wants the play to be about the darkness of religious superstition versus scientific enlightenment -- Ray is working in the context of an India desecrated by pollution and mass disaster as exemplifed by the Bhopal catastrophe. Ray's film, accordingly, is considerably less effective and interesting than Ibsen's play -- at least as it is read and imagined by the reader. (It may well be a director producing Ibsen's Enemy of the People might have to elect in favor of one of the piece's various meanings in order to produce a coherent version for the stage.) Ibsen's work ends with the mob outside Dr. Stockmann's house threatening its inhabitants and more rocks hurled through windows. Ray pits one mob against another to contrive a happy ending. The mob of Hindu fundmantalists in Ray's vision is opposed and thwarted by the mob of Leftist theater workers -- in Ray's account, the theater (or cinema) saves the day.
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