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 There is a lingering moment towards
the end of this unvarnished look at life, way beyond the poverty line,
when the village strewn with vehicles, equipments and over-curious
mediapersons is suddenly emptied out. What we are left to look at is a
village, a family, a life and a situation on the same threshold of pain,
humiliation, hunger, and poverty, where the whole rigmarole had
started. The silence between that moment of excruciating emptying-out and
embracing that emptiness is so palpable that we the audience cannot
miss its significance.
Peepli (Live) 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 one helluva original take on the sins of squalor.
The characters are 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 out here sitting in the auditorium, farmers’ suicide is
just a headline. Read, regretted and then put to bed. Peeply (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 Rahuvir Yadav’s credit, he blends into the symphony of anonymity
as well 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
that 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.
Starring: Omkar Das Manikpuri, Raghuvir Yadav, Malaika Shenoy, Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Written and Directed by Anusha Rizvi
Rating: *** ½
Subhash K. Jha/Sampurn Wire
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