Through the woman's lens

WOMEN WHO make films often protest against gender labelling just like women who write or paint do. After all, Peter Jackson is not called a male film maker, while Sophia Coppola has to carry the `woman' tag. But speaking on the closing day of the international festival of films ``Made by Women," Aparna Sen declared that she was happy to be identified as a woman director, it meant that she had a vision quite different from the male. This ratified the aim of Mumbai-based Point of View which put together a package of five films from four continents to tour seven Indian cities: ``The mission of the festival is to explore women's images, talent, their distinct ways of seeing.''

Made by Women was presented in Chennai by the Indo Cine Appreciation Foundation and Ellements (April 2-6). ``Didn't we see how sensitive Mira Nair was in handling the child abuse sequence in `Monsoon Wedding?' Aparna Sen had no blatant imagery for communal violence in `Mr and Mrs Iyer.' Deepa Mehta makes her point in effective visuals. Their approach moves me,'' said film maker Janaki Viswanathan. Many viewers saw the event as a welcome focus on women directors facing uphill struggles in a male dominant industry. Chennai's women directors like Suhasini Maniratnam and Revathi were conspicuous by their absence, as also film star Khushboo, slated to inaugurate the show. The festival drew sizeable crowds, even though the films were not new, being the early works of their makers.

For many first time viewers, Aparna Sen's ``36, Chowringhee Lane'' was a revelation of what was achieved 23 years ago in a low budget, off beat production. Documentarist R. Buvana said, ``Some men did remark that Sen could have avoided scenes of sexual intimacy. But what was important was that the old women whom the lovers betray saw something tender and spontaneous in it, and what a wonderful performance by Jennifer Kapoor! In fact the entire film scared me by showing how natural human interactions can be on the screen, and how far we have to go as film makers to achieve it, and whether we can ever get audience empathy for such portrayals in this part of the country.''

Vera Chytilova's ``Daisies" (Czech Republic) had a strong appeal for poet Kuttirevathi, where two young women, Marie I and Marie II, engage in endless pranks to combat boredom in a sterile society. `` `Daisies' says everything visually, and without a conventional narrative line. Abstract, absurdist and political, nevertheless communicative.'' Jane Campion's ``Sweetie'' (Australia) attracted her with its theme of the painfully thin and miserably fat sisters.''

A family summer interlude in a torpid country house, the sluggish ''Swamp'' (Lucretia Martel, Argentina), had few takers. But Samira Makhmalbaf's ''Apple'' proved gripping. Combining documentary and feature in a realist-expressionist venture, Samira painted a graphic picture of how women are perceived in a hidebound theocratic society. The `male gaze' acquires new meanings with the frail, bespectacled father guarding his blind, foul-mouthed wife and twin daughters by locking them in the house. ``Girls are flowers, they will wither under the sun,'' is how he justifies imprisonment to the social worker who demands that the children must be free to roam in the outside world. How can he agree when the `sun' enters even his own yard in the form of boys who jump in and out as they play? The spare screenplay fascinates by using words to mean things other than their literal import. Samira's empathy is not only with the deprived girls but also with the destitute father who prays for death. How can he be blamed for ignorance? The mother too must emerge from seclusion and taste the fruit of knowledge.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

The Japanese wife
Kunal Basu
HARPERCOLLINS * Rs 395 * PP 212

 
Kunal Basu's writing is so unrelieved in its tediousness that it is a minor miracle that he has produced in his collection of 13 short stories titled The Japanese Wife, one story worth reading - the eponymous one.

The story is an unusual tale of a pen-friendship between Snehamoy Chakrabarti, a mathematics teacher in a secondary school in Shonai, an island in the estuarine area of the Bay of Bengal, and Miyage, a Japanese woman, that leads to an unexpected marriage.

The story is an unusual tale of a pen-friendship between Snehamoy Chakrabarti, a mathematics teacher in a secondary school in Shonai, an island in the estuarine area of the Bay of Bengal, and Miyage, a Japanese woman, that leads to an unexpected marriage.

This, despite the two protagonists never having set eyes on each other. Snehamoy lives with his ageing aunt, who has raised him, and lives for his wholly epistolary relationship with Miyage.

Into this set-up arrives the woman who he was supposed to have married, now widowed and with a son. A subtle bond of compassion develops between the two while Miyage writes to Snehamoy with news of her terminal illness.

There is the obligatory twist in the tail. But it's done with feeling and a keen sensitivity. It is rich with emotional restraint and a kind of truth that answers to the heart.

There is a kite-flying sequence in it that is beautifully orchestrated in both its literal and metaphorical keys. The rest of the book is marked by Basu's sensational and characteristic inability to create tone, its utter and absolute lack of style, even, sometimes, its unstable grammar, punctuation and syntax and its appalling (lack of) editing.

The stories skitter around the world: Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, Delhi, Agra, Java, the Sunderbans. We've had the Tourism Board school of Indian writing; here is the World Travel Bureau version. The rest of the book is marked by Basu's sensational and characteristic inability to create tone, its utter and absolute lack of style, even, sometimes, its unstable grammar, punctuation and syntax and its appalling (lack of) editing.

Tellingly, the jacket author bio picks this out as the first thing to say about its author: "Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta and has travelled widely." That's all right then, he must be a good writer. Well, not quite.

Take the story Lotus Dragon, about an academic couple, Rudra and Supriya, who go to Beijing on their honeymoon, make friends with Wang, a student interpreter, and eventually get caught up in the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Everything about this story rings wrong, wrong, wrong: the slew of exclamation marks; the risible dialogue; Wang's pseudonym, Byron (I'm not making this up); the pure cardboard figures; the pure cardboard marriage; the pure cardboard ending, straining for an emotional effect that remains arrested in its constipatory straining.

Or take Lenin's Cafe, an ill-advised nostalgia-fantasy - set in Zitrich, of course, to emphasise the globetrotting theme that shines an unintentionally cruel light on this kind of typically Bengali Marxist-Leninist posturing.

In fact, throughout the book we get an empty wistfulness about a particularly Bengali brand of communism. Basu chooses to tattoo his texts with a kind of vacuously decorative lefty referencing that is nothing more than flashing a brand name to advertise its wearer's trendy credentials.

Then there's Gratefill Ganga, in which the seduction of a young American widow, Evelyn, by Yoginder Singh, a Delhi travel agent, is powered by the engine of popular Hindi film songs.

When Junot Diaz creolises his English to mint anew the language of Dominican immigrants, or Vikram Chandra strikes a miraculous balance with the delicately judged seam of Hindi running through the English in Sacred Games, they remind us of the infinitely supple possibilities of the English language.

Basu, alas, holds forth an awfully translated Hindi English schoolbook from standard 4. It is a sign of the times that this book is being sold not on the merits (sic) of the writing in it but solely on the back of the much-publicised fact that Aparna Sen is making a film of the title-story. Which would explain that cunning elision of the usual ...and Other Stories from its title.