Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound Tracks The Unmaking Of Modern India
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Ghaywan’s sophomore feature archives a country suffering from an amnesia of feeling; the filmmaker reiterates what we have become only to recall who we are, and can be. Ishita Sengupta reviews.
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| | | Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor | | | | IN NEERAJ GHAYWAN'S Homebound, an essay is breathed into existence. For The New York Times in 2020, journalist Basharat Peer had reported on the COVID-19-infected period in India through the account of two friends’ struggle to reach home. Titled Taking Amrit Home, the piece elaborated on the government-sanctioned lockdown when migrant workers, stranded due to the indefinite closure of urban workspaces and transportation, were forced to walk back to their villages. Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar, the men in Peer’s article, were part of the exodus ,and while Ghaywan’s film, based on the text, tracks what becomes of the two men, it unfolds as a more lucid adaptation of the unbecoming of a country. India, with its culture and religious multiplicity, elides easy markers. But for over a decade now, a coercive government has been streamlining the heterogeneity of the nation into majoritarian homogeneity. The apathy found fresh evidence in the pandemic when preventive decisions, such as the lockdown, proved to be selective. What was supposed to insulate everyone unravelled as an ill-planned move that robbed the livelihood of the poor and pushed them to the brink of uncertainty. According to reports , more than 10 million workers walked hundreds of kilometres to their rural hometowns and were subjected to police brutality and social stigma. The plight found visual documentation; one such was a picture of a man holding another on his lap. Peer’s essay sprang from it and filled in the context: they were friends and, at the time of image-making, lay fatigued, walking from Surat to Devari, a village in Uttar Pradesh. Ghaywan, in his rendering, honours the curiosity but also decenters the image to make space for subtext. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! Homebound opens with hope. Sitting on top of a vehicle, two men are studying by torchlight. They have an exam to take and expectations tied to it. Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), sons of gig labourers, are friends. They are also citizens of a country that refuses to treat them as equals. Shoaib is a Muslim and Chandan a Dalit — the caste and religious denominators in India, which are minorities by default and marginalised by intent. The job of a police constable, the position they had applied for, holds out a fairness denied to them. As Shoaib explains to his friend, “When you wear that uniform, your faith and caste no longer matter.” |
| | One Battle After Another Is A Mic-Drop Moment By Paul Thomas Anderson
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Paul Thomas Anderson, at his most accessible, turns the politicisation of everything into a hilarious, chaotic war where radicals, zealots, and their own desires clash in absurd ways, writes Rahul Desai.
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| | Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson |
| Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti | | | | IN MODERN AMERICA, and perhaps most littered democracies around the world, radicalism and rebellion have become two sides of the same coin. In terms of ethno-cultural imposition, it’s hard to tell the difference: fascism is a reaction to evolution, and resistance is a reaction to fascism. It’s as if one cannot exist without the other. Each is now an aesthetic: an image posing as a performative ideology, and spokes in the wheel of a cycle stuck in motion. Amidst this politicisation of every choice and emotion, the fundamental war between right and wrong has mutated into a petty battle between the right and the left. There is a label for everything — insiders and outsiders, natives and immigrants, legitimate and illegal, communism and socialism, settlers and invaders — except compassion itself. None of this is easy to explain, understand, see or engage with. It isn’t supposed to be. But Paul Thomas Anderson goes one step further. He makes it all ridiculously entertaining, funny and farcical in One Battle After Another, a film that skewers every side with precision and guile. PTA at his most accessible is Tarantino without the posturing, Spielberg without the sentimentality, Scorsese without the machismo and Nolan without the dispassion. Nobody is spared here. There’s a Black revolutionary outfit called the French 75, who identify as guerrilla agents of chaos: attacking deportation camps and migrant detention centres, blowing up electric towers and freeing the downtrodden from an oppressive regime. But their dissent looks more like a kink than a moral choice. De facto leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) gets sexually involved (to put it mildly) with her reptilian nemesis, Colonel Lockjaw (an Oscar-bound Sean Penn). She demands he “get it up” in their charged first encounter; they’re both turned on by the power (im)balance, and it helps that he’s the kind of pervy Trumpian zealot with a fetish for dominant Black women. Perfidia crumbles the moment real life (postpartum depression) hits her, and the survivors of the outfit are reduced to weed-growing nuns who aren’t even slick enough to protect their own. Stream the latest films and shows with OTTplay's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149. There’s the comically white supremacist organisation called the ‘Christmas Adventurers Club,’ whose membership Col. Lockjaw covets 16 years into the future. Except his record is not spotless: he has a Perfidia-sized secret. So he sets out to hunt down his teen daughter, Willa, under the pretext of raiding a border town full of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Lockjaw, like most self-respecting fascists, hides his personal agenda behind public displays of nationalism and faith; his walk, too, is a cross between too-much-leg-day stiffness, GI-Joe-coded-military swag and shove-the-flag-up-my-butt pride. He suspects that Willa is his spawn: a “mixed-breed” that might tarnish his chances of becoming a Christmas Adventurer with a street-facing office. The chase to erase traces of his tryst plays out much like the name of the actress behind Willa (Chase Infiniti), where Duel fuses with Mad Max: Fury Road and Terminator 2 to reveal an infinitely anticlimactic pursuit of rhythm and recklessness. |
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