Udaan Grounded

The Cannes selection may well be the best thing that can be said about Udaan because nowhere in the world is it more difficult to defy the mainstream than in India. The canted credits of the pre-release publicity promised an unorthodoxy of style and content that the film unfortunately does not live up to. It only reinforces some of the jaded stereotypes of Indian popular cinema that the film intends to oppose by infusing some degree of lived personal experience into it.

In the first place, the visual quality of the image leaves a lot to be desired. It may have had something to do with the digital projection at the theatre I saw the film (Movietime)  but the colours seemed washed out and the image was grainy like a 16 to 35mm blown-up print; it even pixellated at certain points. I am not sure whether this was an intentional effect of de-glamourising the image to make it look ‘real’ but certainly there is a desire to adopt a Dogme 95-style of filmmaking. I doubt whether the low-light scenes can survive a DVD transfer. More than a ‘cool’, ‘indie’ look, visually it felt like a 1980s Hindi film, in more senses than one.

The greatest problem with the film is the simplistic, one-dimensional villainous father in the film and the film’s use of cheap melodramatic tactics. The father-son relationship trauma has been the staple of several Indian films and so there is no inherent novelty in that. This is particularly disappointing because we have associated Anurag Kashyap with a kind of filmmaking where even the most villainous characters are understood on a human level and when the world is seen through their eyes, as in Black Friday where the most heinous acts look somewhat justified, leaving the viewer in a state of moral ambivalence. This approach to filmmaking looked at the same facts from so many points of view that it altogether undermined the notion of a unique stable perspective from which ‘the real truth’ can be known.

Udaan is devoid of any such understanding. That rich empathic attitude gives way to a simplistic, easy categorisation of good and evil in the most pathetic tradition of Indian popular cinema. Possibly the scriptwriters didn’t want to provide any backstory information but it leaves so many things vague that one feels the scriptwriters have conveniently brushed all the relevant aspects of the story under the carpet. For example, the man had two previous wives; the question remains where are they, what happened to them? Both of them could not have died. Did he kill them?  If the second wife was still alive, why did she not care about the kids? We do not even see the boys talking about their mothers. This is a world devoid of women but also devoid of any kind of tenderness or affection. The only flush of understanding that comes from the uncle is soon defeated by the crassness of ruthless masculinity. The only women who find a few frames of attention are either hookers in theatres or the third wife who looks the same or the aunt who is cold and distant. This has now become a huge problem with all of Anurag’s scripts.

It is this simplistic vision of life that trivializes an authentic pain by melodramatising it, by creating false oppositions of good vs bad, man vs woman, small town vs big city, child vs adult. The use of a cute but hapless child with markings of beatings on his back (who nevertheless tries to keep it a secret) is not something I would expect from a writer of Anurag’s calibre. It is the cheapest trick in Indian ads and films to instantly pull at people’s heart-strings. Bombay is seen as Paradise, a place of liberation, where teenagers start business outfits like restaurants and become instantly successful. Please, give me a break!

The film that obviously served as an inspiration and reference point for the film – Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959) – had also depicted a ‘wild child’ trapped in an oppressive social institution like a boarding school but did not have to rely on such melodramatic trappings. The film is alluded to several times in the film through the use of the liberational ‘running away’ or the final freeze frame but the fact that the boy has co-liberated his kid brother is a bit too much, that too in search of ‘Bombay’ (not the symbolic sea as in 400 Blows) suggests that his sense of freedom is another delusion.  

The ‘real look’ of the film cannot disguise the falsity of the world that Motwane/Kashyap seek to represent.