Subhash K Jha re-examines Aamir Khan’s Peepli [Live], one of the game-changers of the first decade of this millennium.
The Aamir Khan produced Peepli [Live] , released on August 13, 2010, is a work of damning ramifications. Debutante director Anusha Rizvi’s writing skills are never made evident in the vast canvas of rural characters who cling to the poverty line hoping that some government-sponsored miracle would rescue them from the dread and drudgery of daily extinction.
Though there are echoes of films as far-ranging as Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (remember Nargis’s husband Raj Kumar vanishing after a farming accident?) to Mazhar Kamran’s Mohandas Anusha Rizvi’s treatise on the common man is an original take on the sins of squalor. The characters are all played by brilliantly self-effacing “actors” (are they really actors?), so much so that you wish the known faces , seasoned and brilliant as they are, like Naseeruddin Shah and Raghuvir Yadav would not come into the docu-drama content of this ode to the wretched and the damned.
To most of us, farmers’ suicide is just a headline. Read, regretted, and then put to bed. Peepli [Live] is that savagely raw and hurtful wake-up call for the conscience which does not mince words. Yes, it has very funny moments when death becomes a laughing raw-stock for the television camera. But Peepli [Live] is not a funny film. Not really.
The dialogues are not what you will hear in the inner chambers of a fashion show. The words don’t seem written. They just seem to come to the two brothers Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav) and Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) as they walk the slushy muddy paths of a village that seems to exist outside camera range. To Raghuvir Yadav’s credit , he blends into this symphony of anonymity as fluently as the screen Natha, though Yadav is of course a well-known actor.
In a sequence written with the taang firmly away from the shriek , between them the two brothers choose Natha for the suicide that would bring some financial succour to the impoverished family. There begins the circus of the self-serving. Politicians are of course brutally satirized by the script. And you wonder, is it really the politicians to blame for the condition of the Nathas in our part of the world?
It’s the electronic media that comes for the most ruthless reprimand from the script. The journalists played by actors who seem to be wedded to the tyranny of the TRPs are all so splendid in their news-hound roles you wonder which came first the news-bytes or this film about biting into the byte!
Peepli [Live] is shot by cinematographer Shanker Raman in stern solid colours connected to Mother Earth. We can’t say the camera is unobtrusive. But this film is about the infinitely intrusive nature of the camera…right?
Should one comment on the quality of the performances in a film where “acting” is not an assumed conceit? The “actors” all uniformly blend into the fertile earthy fabric of this homage to the grassroot.
But a special word for that extra-special actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui. He is the only character with a conscience in this film populated with merciless opportunists. The means to survival is to be among the fittest. Anusha Rizvi is an astonishing addition to the repertoire of directorial forces that matter. By making her first film on those who don’t matter beyond a random survey during the electoral consensus she has proved that the conscience as a cinematic commodity still survives.
With one feature film chronicling the adventures of a farmer on the rocky road to suicidal benefits, Anusha Rizvi has joined the ranks of the important directorial voices of our times.
Subhash K Jha spoke to Rizvi after the release Peepli [Live]: “Quite honestly, this film was such an accident. It just so happened that this story came to me. And it was so compelling that it had to be told. I’ve spent six years with it. In 2004, I read an interview of Aamir Khan where he said he was on the look out for new scripts to produce after Lagaan. I got his e-mail ID from a common friend. Later, Aamir told me he replied because he was working in Mangal Pandey:The Rising and my script was called The Falling and he thought someone was pulling his leg. Then the four drafts of the script happened.
When she was asked, ‘Does it bother you that at the end of the film, audiences would probably be thinking of how to get their cars out of the multiplexes rather than those poor farmers?’ the director replied, “It didn’t bother me that much because I refused to give audiences a cathartic finale. That’s what everyone wanted from me. I didn’t want everyone to cry and go home feeling cleansed. No way! This is the way it is. Face it.”
Talking about the number of characters in Peepli [Live] she reveals she was daunted, “As the writing progressed my husband Mehmood Farooqui and I felt we had to put in so many important voices and characters. The material had to be seriously edited at every point. A lot of editing happened during the script writing. Then my editor Hemanti Sarkar and I sat over the footage. Then we waited for our producer Aamir Khan to come into the project. He was busy for some months. We showed him the first cut. I remember when he saw the film he was taken aback. What Aamir said to me was the film is 80 per cent there (vis-a-vis the script).”
Adding about the classification of Peepli [Live] as a comedy before the release she said, “Peepli [Live] was never meant to be a big film. It’s a film we’ve made with a lot of conviction. I don’t want it to be perceived as a comedy. Should these people be made fun of? It isn’t even a satire fully. Please don’t push it into classified genres. This is a product made by 150 committed people. It didn’t anger me. Such ideas are generated from the film’s promotions. Maybe I’m being much too naive about these things. Naive or idealistic? There is a very thin line between the two, is there not?”
In closing she told Subhash K Jha, “If the aim of any film is to have a big opening like say, Aamir’s 3 Idiots, then his presence in our film’s marketing was a must. The other route is to let smaller numbers of people see a film and spread the good word if they like it. Peepli [Live] has definitely become a big film because of Aamir Khan. It will make a lot of money. That’s all fine. I want to see if at the end of five years anyone remembers my film. That would be the true test.”
