On the big V day, I post my fumbling reflections on a movie arguably about love, inarguably lovely.Spoiler warning hereby issued.
A city is so much crumpled space. Lives are colluded upon irregular bends, opening ridges, crinkling edges, disappearing corners are brutally contested, unlikely alliances are inspired in well-shaded clefts. A city never sleeps, it merely crumples over and over again, denting every fortitude of line into ever finer fissures of space. Economies falter, policies change, governments fall, jobs outsource, friends relocate, prices rise, landlords oust, cars crash, values devalue. There are people who like to be rearranged thus, they engage with the conversing landscape, they even teach it to move to new sounds. Then there are others who like to stand still on flat feet and touch walls. They like the certain bend of boxes. Their toes get caught in the uneven terrain of the city, they lose balance and fall to bloody noses and splintered eyes. In them the city finds its filthiest sewers, collecting at its base mean sin, stale frustrations and tired fears. In Dhobighat, Kiran Rao has deftly captured this crumpling through compelling characters that have remained with me, remaking themselves constantly into fuller, fingered and nostriled persons.
I wonder why Arun fascinates with Yasmin when he has Shai, a far more interesting person, to contend with. Shai is a more familiar archetype, conspired of the same socio-economic milieu as he, whose life is negotiated not just by the circumstances of her birth but by the shape of her will. She has chosen to come to Mumbai and she has chosen to take a sabbatical, spending it doing what she claims to love, photographing lividly. Then there is Yasmin, an immigrant by marriage, corseted into a life hard for the breathing, trying to keep balance on grounds that shudder at her gross naivete, her slack pace, her protruding gaze. I found her observations most pedestrian, and if I were Arun, I might not have continued on to the 2nd and 3rd tapes. She came to the city from a village or town with many boxes of expectations of what a marriage ought to be – boxes of double pressed firmness placed into her hands by the rule-makers, the tradition-keepers who define conduct, consequence and roles. And when her boxes empty out inexplicably, she can find no repair to the situation but to deaden the hands that have no more carrying to do. A Shai might have walked out months ago. A Shai might have moved with the city. But for Yasmin, the city had just moved away her boxes. And she stood alone, unable to sketch a life without the support of firm straight lines. Nobody showed her how to live with so much lightness.
Of all the capturing devices used in the film, her eye was the least artistic. Why was Arun so attracted to her? Arun is a painter and a voyeur. He crumples reality, shapes squish with colour, light with shadow, dull human meandering with profound symbolic meaning. His life is chaotic, his marriage asunder, his child apart, he fetched life in the same way his canvas fetched form, with spite for rigid rules, reared practices, easy, meeting lines. I think his attraction to Yasmin, besides satisfying his voyeurism, is the attraction that order, structure has for the non-conformist. I have felt this too, this grotesque fascination for those whose futures are knowable (first study, then marry, then build, then breed, then marry the bred), whose actions have the consequence of heaven or hell in the waiting, for whom socially sanctioned boundaries have so successfully confined desires and dreams. So simple, so comforting to know how to live and how to die, like Yasmin did. One wants to imbue that smugness, to consume a tiny bit of that sweet tasting certainty, to cling to the rooted. I know I do.
Why does Shai like Arun so much? Why does she gild him in that much gold? Perhaps because Shai found in Arun's expanse of canvas a resonating vision of the city. He never saw her work, to him she was still an investment banker groveling after money, not the artist with a conscientious gaze and a captivated heart. Somewhere in an artist's interpretation of the world is a strand of truth about it, perhaps in his most furious exertion, a stroke or a colour reveals the shape and shade of God's hand. Perhaps Shai spotted this and was altered by it. Of course she stalks him. He bent her hands to the fit of his paint brush.
Munna loves Shai because he wants her freedom, from leaking roofs, from murdered brothers, from detergent hands and numbered collars. He is the aspiring Indian, dangling at the ends, who hopes that in the next crumpling, the city will finally fetch his feet. Shai implicates herself in his dream by publishing his portfolio. She is independent and apparently fascinated by his poverty compromised life. She wants to box it up and display it in exhibitions. Uncertain existence framed in firm certain lines. He indulges her voyeurism, never quite understanding it. It is enough to be the subject of such beauteous meditation. Shai is obviously attracted to Munna but never pursues it. Perhaps she is too infatuated by Arun, or perhaps because, when crossing class boundaries, a modicum of distance preserves the social order so necessary to propel the economy and maintain internal 'security'. It is this distance that will most likely keep Munna in his place, killing rats for the benefit of wood laden, sea-aired kitchens of higher placed Mumbaikars. Shai fell into bed with Arun on first encounter, but didn't dare touch Munna in a series of encounters. There is charity in her gaze undeniably, and it will always keep Munna from being her equal.
Dhobi ghat is closeted love, slowly deteriorating happiness, mediated gazing, crumpling spaces.
A city is so much crumpled space. Lives are colluded upon irregular bends, opening ridges, crinkling edges, disappearing corners are brutally contested, unlikely alliances are inspired in well-shaded clefts. A city never sleeps, it merely crumples over and over again, denting every fortitude of line into ever finer fissures of space. Economies falter, policies change, governments fall, jobs outsource, friends relocate, prices rise, landlords oust, cars crash, values devalue. There are people who like to be rearranged thus, they engage with the conversing landscape, they even teach it to move to new sounds. Then there are others who like to stand still on flat feet and touch walls. They like the certain bend of boxes. Their toes get caught in the uneven terrain of the city, they lose balance and fall to bloody noses and splintered eyes. In them the city finds its filthiest sewers, collecting at its base mean sin, stale frustrations and tired fears. In Dhobighat, Kiran Rao has deftly captured this crumpling through compelling characters that have remained with me, remaking themselves constantly into fuller, fingered and nostriled persons.
I wonder why Arun fascinates with Yasmin when he has Shai, a far more interesting person, to contend with. Shai is a more familiar archetype, conspired of the same socio-economic milieu as he, whose life is negotiated not just by the circumstances of her birth but by the shape of her will. She has chosen to come to Mumbai and she has chosen to take a sabbatical, spending it doing what she claims to love, photographing lividly. Then there is Yasmin, an immigrant by marriage, corseted into a life hard for the breathing, trying to keep balance on grounds that shudder at her gross naivete, her slack pace, her protruding gaze. I found her observations most pedestrian, and if I were Arun, I might not have continued on to the 2nd and 3rd tapes. She came to the city from a village or town with many boxes of expectations of what a marriage ought to be – boxes of double pressed firmness placed into her hands by the rule-makers, the tradition-keepers who define conduct, consequence and roles. And when her boxes empty out inexplicably, she can find no repair to the situation but to deaden the hands that have no more carrying to do. A Shai might have walked out months ago. A Shai might have moved with the city. But for Yasmin, the city had just moved away her boxes. And she stood alone, unable to sketch a life without the support of firm straight lines. Nobody showed her how to live with so much lightness.
Of all the capturing devices used in the film, her eye was the least artistic. Why was Arun so attracted to her? Arun is a painter and a voyeur. He crumples reality, shapes squish with colour, light with shadow, dull human meandering with profound symbolic meaning. His life is chaotic, his marriage asunder, his child apart, he fetched life in the same way his canvas fetched form, with spite for rigid rules, reared practices, easy, meeting lines. I think his attraction to Yasmin, besides satisfying his voyeurism, is the attraction that order, structure has for the non-conformist. I have felt this too, this grotesque fascination for those whose futures are knowable (first study, then marry, then build, then breed, then marry the bred), whose actions have the consequence of heaven or hell in the waiting, for whom socially sanctioned boundaries have so successfully confined desires and dreams. So simple, so comforting to know how to live and how to die, like Yasmin did. One wants to imbue that smugness, to consume a tiny bit of that sweet tasting certainty, to cling to the rooted. I know I do.
Why does Shai like Arun so much? Why does she gild him in that much gold? Perhaps because Shai found in Arun's expanse of canvas a resonating vision of the city. He never saw her work, to him she was still an investment banker groveling after money, not the artist with a conscientious gaze and a captivated heart. Somewhere in an artist's interpretation of the world is a strand of truth about it, perhaps in his most furious exertion, a stroke or a colour reveals the shape and shade of God's hand. Perhaps Shai spotted this and was altered by it. Of course she stalks him. He bent her hands to the fit of his paint brush.
Munna loves Shai because he wants her freedom, from leaking roofs, from murdered brothers, from detergent hands and numbered collars. He is the aspiring Indian, dangling at the ends, who hopes that in the next crumpling, the city will finally fetch his feet. Shai implicates herself in his dream by publishing his portfolio. She is independent and apparently fascinated by his poverty compromised life. She wants to box it up and display it in exhibitions. Uncertain existence framed in firm certain lines. He indulges her voyeurism, never quite understanding it. It is enough to be the subject of such beauteous meditation. Shai is obviously attracted to Munna but never pursues it. Perhaps she is too infatuated by Arun, or perhaps because, when crossing class boundaries, a modicum of distance preserves the social order so necessary to propel the economy and maintain internal 'security'. It is this distance that will most likely keep Munna in his place, killing rats for the benefit of wood laden, sea-aired kitchens of higher placed Mumbaikars. Shai fell into bed with Arun on first encounter, but didn't dare touch Munna in a series of encounters. There is charity in her gaze undeniably, and it will always keep Munna from being her equal.
Dhobi ghat is closeted love, slowly deteriorating happiness, mediated gazing, crumpling spaces.
