Celebrating 2007’s Dharm, Subhash K Jha revisits Bhavna Talwar’s excellent drama and we hear from the director with her thoughts about the Oscar’s controversy.
To miss this movie on the true meaning of religion is a crime for any cineaste. How much poorer one would be if one allowed this penetrating masterpiece to pass by without a standing ovation! Debutante director Bhavna Talwar paints a map of the human heart in confident bold vibrant but gentle strokes. Varanasi, the city of holy dreams and unholy nightmares, and the clash between old-world values and new-world connivances, has seldom been captured with such exquisite and tender splendor. Straddling this world of colossal pain and redemption as defined by the individual’s desires and emotions, is Pundit Chaturvedi (Pankaj Kapur), a potbellied, bare-torsoed symbol of religiosity who could easily have become a parody in lesser hands. In the first half-hour of this tightly-wound homage to the aroma of incense on the angry ghats, the director establishes Chaturvedi’s rigidly ritualistic world as qualified by the priest’s own dormant, tolerant take on humanism.
The dawn scenes depicting the unruffled priest striding briskly through the gallis of Varanasi with huffing disciples in tow, as he’s accosted by a sneering conniving opponent (Daya Shankar Pandey) are designed in vibrant colors bringing alive the predominance of ritualistic religion in a city that’s submerged in so many subtexts. The dramatic focus of the plot emerges when a baby is abandoned at the Priest’s residence triggering off what can only called a conflict between religious compulsion and the individual conscience culminating in one of the most rousing and radical denouements on religious bigotry and communal prejudice put on screen since Man invented malevolence and cinema. The narrative is driven deftly forward by a powerful script (Vibha Singh) and an editing pattern that embraces austerity at a time of tremendous dramatic excesses in the plot. What truly holds up this taut tale and rescues it from becoming perched on the ruinous precipice of polemical pirouette, is the debutante director’s vision. Bhavna Talwar’s vision encompasses both acute sensitivity and immense compassion. The pulls and pushes of an ancient religion that remains dynamic in spite of its dark decadence emerge in scenes that are written not to impress us with drama but to underscore the spiritual underbelly of the plot.
Bhavna Talwar, whose Dharm was a strong contender as India’s entry to the Oscars, was angry and upset at Vinod Chopra’s Eklavya being chosen instead. “The chairperson of the Oscars jury, Vinod Pande, called up my producer yesterday to say Dharm was the film that deserved to go. He kept saying he was sorry and that he called for an open ballot among the jury. Isn’t that against the rules? The rules call for a secret ballot. Why was that rule flouted? And as the chairperson of the jury isn’t it Mr. Pande’s duty to stand up for a film that he believes in? It’s all about personal agendas. Strings are being pulled all the time. And if Mr. Sudhir Mishra thinks the film is technically sound then please have the balls to enter Eklavya in the technical sections in the Oscars. I won’t let this go. In recent times every year the wrong film has gone. The Film Federation of India is embarrassing not just the film industry but also the whole country. Yes, Lagaan and Shwaas deserved to go. Other than these films, we’ve been sending the wrong films to the Oscars. I’ve seen Eklavya. I was bored. I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. What was that whole ending about? What’s the film saying? My Dharm has a much larger statement to make. At the Venice film festival I was with Danny Houston and Michelle Yeoh. They loved Dharm. We went to the Palm Springs festival, which is the precursor to the Oscars. Which significant festival has Eklavya gone to? A film may not be a matter of life and death. But come on, if we send films like Eklavya they’re going to say we don’t know how to make films. Apart from big budgets and big stars what does Eklavya have?”
