By Aadesh Ramaswamy
Cahiers: Early films tell us a good deal about the period in which they were made. This is no longer true of 75 percent of current productions. In Pierrot le fou, do contemporary life and the fact that Belmondo is writing his journal give the film its real dimension?
This was something that was said in Cahiers du Cinema interview of Pierrot Le Fou with Godard…. Imagine this being said in 1965, only 70years post the invention of cinema… This phenomenon only has worsened as Cinema has grown older, with more and more films selling fictional realities of real-world events rather than fictionalise real life… And it seems that somehow post pandemic, the idea that we are not even living in a reality seems to be setting in…
At least in 1965 when Cahiers made this comment, films were being shot “at that time”, irrespective of providing any insightful comments or not. Probably one of the best “films” of last year, Jigarthanda DoubleX makes extremely useless points about the “beauty” of cinema and exists in a period of time where cinema is competing with Instagram, TikTok etc for people’s attention… Jalsaghar seems to be happening all over again…
It seems either the producers are trying to recreate the old times of cinema or directors have lost their marbles in confronting the producer’s interest…. Even films like Leo, Vikram, Jailer etc which are supposedly set in post 2020s periods, seem to show lifestyles of pre 2015 people….
How does the face of Parthiban reach Das and Co?. If it was post 2020…. Nvm even if it was post 2018 (the same year Major Kathiravan was caught on a Facebook post by White Devil/Sathyamoorthy), he’d have been in 1 Instagram/Facebook post/photo posted by any close friend or even by his own kids, especially his daughter…. But look at the way Parthiban or Leo is found… After eons of days post the Café Shop incident, someone randomly sees him in the newspaper and then someone takes his photo and then it reaches Das and Co…
So,in which year does the film even take place? I do not know… The characters have advanced technology but live as if they are primitive minded…. (Fitting considering Antony’s “MOODANAMBIKKAI”) … It seems they have adopted, as family, a timeline that seems to reflect on the surface level, a contemporary world, but instead, like The Village, have created within that their own universe (like the LCU) which seems to be removed from the fears that modern films have about people’s attention span…. There seems to be no user of phones, hence no fear…. But you might ask, why not? Why not show the world in the way they want to?
Maybe you are right, but I can’t figure out how can you show a human as being not dependent on air for breathing? Or that a person is a non-vegetarian without showing that he eats non-veg? Because if you are showing that, the audience demand an explanation, despite being silent… Similarly, if you show me that the characters are residing in that year, prove it to me…… Like the way Allius Ceasar is scared of a rising talent named Rajinikanth in DoubleX, Like the way Sam Rothstein’s daughter tells Lester, the pimp, that she wishes to see “The Elephant Man”, Like the way Arun sends a Vadivelu GIF to Divya (or Vice Versa) …. Like Arun’s friends, our filmmakers seem to use 2022 for its name without wanting the cultural/historical baggage that such a year has…. Without wanting to handle the fact that some people wish to wear masks despite it being 3 years post-Covid, without wanting to handle the fact that people probably don’t watch their films with their eyes only but also use their phones to watch them….
What happens when you actually film with a camera? Not the emotional experience that one experiences, as in Jigarthanda DoubleX. But as a consequence of filming, whom do you capture? You capture the reality of a fiction (in the case of a film like KGF, JDX, Viduthalai) but the reality itself in the case of films like Lover…. I would include a film like Love Today but it seems to create a world wherein everyone uses a phone only because they live in that world rather than like Lover wherein everyone seems to use a phone because they are humans living in 2024/23….
But what happens when you capture the reality of fiction? It seems to be stuck in an identity crisis as it neither is a film in 1987 (in the case of Viduthalai), 1970s (Like JDX) nor “fictional” film about 2024….
As it has been known, the history of the world is the history of cinema itself…. Thus, when DilwaaleDulhaniye Le Jayenge is played in Gangs Of Wasseypur, we know which year the film now is in.
But as the history of world marches on, it seems that cinema is detaching itself more and more from reality. I’m more surprised as to what year people will consider JDX to be in if and when it is shown in a film…. The image has been synonymous with reality from its Inception….And image has always been Cinema…. But now, it seems that somehow the responsibility/duty to capture reality has been offloaded to “lesser” mediums like Web Series, YouTube Shows etc, which somehow seem to correlate with us more and more……
There is no denying the fact that the democratisation of Cinema with the advent of YouTube and Digital Cameras and the subsequent making of “content” for YouTube has normalised the now “Not worth for watching It in theatres” sentiment… A Film like Lover, if not for its unique structure, would probably have been labelled as such a film… And the subsequent setting in of the Pandemic has further established this sentiment….
Take Lover…… Despite all the technical brilliance of the film, the shot of Arun and Divya texting with GIFs was revolutionary to me…. Or the shot of him seeing a MrWhoseTheBoss video…. It was at that moment that GenZ was born… There is increasing doubt as to whether we will be seeing it in coming movies…. But as Lover has shown, it can and should be done…. For our valarpu depends on cinema only…..
Baradwaj Rangan 
Posted on June 18, 2024
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