Caricature of a Culture
[Note: This post may come across as an opinionated, even a little misinformed rant. What I am attempting to do is briefly elaborate (?) on a somewhat common issue I had with Lost In Translation and The Darjeeling Limited. Haven't really gone the whole hog nitpicking in detail, but tried putting across my point all the same. Do let know of your opinion on the same.]
Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character.
-Winston Wolf in PULP FICTION
There are numerous exceptional films which imbibe and absorb a city/country into their narrative, soaking and embedding themselves in the geographical and cultural landscape of the location and reflecting its ethos so beautifully that we describe it saying that the city/country is ‘a character in the film.’
And then there are those films- perhaps much more common- which turn a full blooded geographical/cultural/political entity into a ‘character’, the kind Winston Wolf talks of in the above quote. Now the film in question may or may not be a very good cinematic specimen, but that is besides the point- for the question I am asking here is: Is it (or to what extent is it) right to set a picture in a foreign land and impose on the landscape restrictive and ethnocentric paradigms, humour, and in general, a directorial vision or point of view that often reduces a rich culture into a shallow caricature and a bundle of stereotypes?
I recently happened to watch Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation and Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and found this aspect of both films particularly disturbing. I would perhaps brush it off had the film been an Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom, but in this day and age when we live in the proverbial ‘global village’, when awareness is increasing, and considering the fact that both of these are ’serious’, meaningful and perceptive films by talented filmmakers, not regular Hollywood blockbuster trash, it was annoying to see scant respect or understanding of the cultures of the lands where these films are set.
Lost In Translation, for all the rave reviews, Best Screenplay Oscar statuette and a very healthy 89 Metascore left me pretty cold. Oz says that ‘20 years from now with so much more experience in life and seeing so many places, people, career…’ I shall ‘have a very different take on the movie’, and while I agree that I might not have been able to absorb the much touted cinematic merit of the film in one viewing, I doubt if my take vis-a-vis the depiction of Japan in the film will change. I have no connection with or special affinity for Japan or its people, but by the end of the film, I almost felt insulted myself.
The film is an almost overly subtle love story of two individuals suffering from ennui and isolation, but what isolated me from the film is the fact that I began to soon feel more sympathy for the Japanese characters than the two American protagonists who often seemed like people who actually deserve to get bored. The crude humour directed at the Japanese often felt at odds with the otherwise delicate, poetic narrative of the film. I well understand that the film was from the point of view of the protagonists, and that the experience of an outsider in Japan as portrayed by the director may well be accurate, but how I wish Coppola had displayed a little more cultural understanding herself and afforded even a shred of humanity or dimensionality to the Japanese characters who remained unwitting catalysts for a kind of comedy that for me, gradually turned from funny to sickening.
I concede and agree that calling the film ‘racist’ or ‘racially offensive’ might be making a mountain out of a molehill. But I also think that while its okay to make harmless jibes at various cultural quirks, this must be tempered with a little more sensitivity and insight. After all, good inter-cultural humour is formed out of genuine understanding and not just shallow observation and every possible mocking stereotype.
While Lost In Translation used some bizarre cardboard Japanese characters to craft the emotions and plot of the film, Anderson in The Darjeeling Limited isn’t even concerned with ‘ethnic’ characters or language (the only Indian who came remotely close to being an actual character in the film was Rita, the saucy stewardess Jack screws on board the otherworldly train). Instead, he uses India as a prop, a thoroughly fetishized and exoticised entity for his three dim-witted protagonists to embark on their ’spiritual’ quest.
Now, while Anderson doesn’t ever ridicule Indians (atleast not blatantly or visibly), his wet-dream-fantasy-like image of India gets on one’s nerves after a while. I am roughly aware of the similar surreal nature of the settings of Anderson’s other films (which I haven’t seen but read about), but even then, I find his succumbing so totally and enthusiastically to the stereotypes of ‘Oriental culture’ pretty unacceptable, especially since that is what an unaware Western audience mostly takes as reality. What India ends up as is a ‘colourful’ and ‘mysterious’ spiritual junkyard where elite white people can attempt to ‘cleanse their souls’. Chinua Achebe accurately and acerbically described this phenomenon in one of his essays criticising Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness:
“A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind?”
To be fair, let’s say that Anderson actually is gently making fun of the sheer daftness of the three brothers, their lack of any cultural awareness and their whimsical idea of a ’spiritual odyssey’. But this naivete and (possibly unconscious) ’superior’ attitude is soon apparent in the director himself and his excited hipster-style filmmaking. In what is a terrible attempt at generating pathos, Anderson (literally) stages a funeral scene of a child who dies in a previous sequence where the three dimwits attempt to rescue three village boys (and also, presumably, their own souls) from drowning. (“I couldn’t save mine”, Adrien Brody sheepishly says.)
Irrfan Khan plays the boy’s father, and trust me, the only reason I felt sad during the following scenes including the funeral was the pain of seeing such a fine actor playing a part that in my opinion, could have well been played by an extra. I can’t find words to describe the emptiness of the scene, that again serves to be some kind of intensely spiritual experience for the three idiots, and we are promptly served up a ‘cool’ shot of them walking in slow motion with Kinks music as background, while everything in the backdrop turns spotlessly white (it almost reminded me of this song in Karan Johar’s last film). As the brothers finally bid goodbye to the village, we have the villagers standing with the uniform glazed expression that adorns all their faces throughout pretty much all the scenes where they interact with the Whitmans with an uncomfortable awkwardness. It is here when the film actually comes out of its comfortable cocoon that its fatal flaws become exposed and it becomes difficult to feel for the Whitman brothers.
I’ll say I still enjoyed watching The Darjeeling Limited throughout despite all this, and Anderson comes across as an interesting filmmaker whose other films I would love to see. But while the Whitman brothers manage to get rid of their baggage (both emotional and Louis Vuitton) in the ’spicy smelling’ land of snake charmers, the film, for me doesn’t really manage to shake off its inherent ‘white man’s burden’.
Tags: Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola, The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Jahan, whats new in it. Hollywood has yet to grow up with regards to understanding Asia or Asian culture, and quite often i found this bias with ordinary Americans too, for all the tolerance and diversity they crow about. But forget about Asia, it has been the same case with cultures other than US.
To date many Austrians hate The Sound of Music, saying it is a movie made for American tourists. For them Orson Welles Third Man, is a more accurate depiction of Vienna.
In most of the Hollywood flicks, dealing with Asia, we have this great white man, comming there, and either he ends up feeling bored( Lost in Translation), or he becomes a hero( The Last Samurai) or he is the noble hero who sacrifices his life for the unwashed masses( Painted Veil).
In movies having a Latin American backdrop, either the Latinos are shown as kidnappers( Man on Fire), drug smugglers( Clear and Present Danger) or terrorists( Proof of Life). Is it any wonder that the Hollywood adaptation of Love in The Time of Cholera, was a huge fiasco?
I really don’t see Hollywood’s attempting to remove its blinkered goggles so soon, with respect to other cultures. Best thing is to just ignore it, laugh it, and do what the Chinese,Korean, Japanese,Iranians have done. Make world class cinema.
Ok add the Mexicans and Brazilians also to that list.
I guess you just need to watch Hollywood movies as a movie, and pretend that what they are showing about a place is just fiction.
And if you really want to have the idea about a place, watch East Asian or Latino or Iranian cinema.
take it easy
.
i don’t concern myself
with who understand india what
.
when it comes to india
who the hell sofia coppola or farncis ford coppola is
.
when it come to the godfather
same way
francis ford coppola would say that who the hell is vishrant
.
i would never understand the godfather
the way coppola understands
.
coppola would never understand india
the way i do
.
in a love relationship
no body else matters
i love india
even if no body knows that there is a country like india
it would not make a difference to my love for it
.
no matter what others think
ITS JUST DOSEN’T MATTER
.
people use to say to majnu
that you go on repeating laila laila whole day
and we have seen laila, she is an average girl
we can not see any thing special in laila
majnu said – laila ko dekhne ke liye majnu ki aankh chahiye
.
unko bhi jeene khane do
koi kuch bhi samjhe kya fark padta hai
.
kashi ke assi ke tanni guru ka dialouge yaad rakho
“maa chu… duniya, ham bajaye harmuniya”
*kashi ke assi ke tanni guru ka dialouge yaad rakho
“maa chu… duniya, ham bajaye harmuniya”*
LOL!
Assi ghat k naam se to wahan ki bhaang waali chai yaad aa gayi, waise hum aap ki baat se totally agree karta hun Jahaan. The problem is of understanding and manipulating things for convenience. Instead of understanding the culture they tend to take cheap shortcuts. To be honest I hate the way Indians are portrayed in American Sitcoms, but that’s a cheap way for them to get laughs for the audience. All we can do is hope that sense prevails in these film makers and they start showing different cultures in the right light. Till then kashi ke assi ke tanni guru ka dialouge yaad rakho………
I saw LIT quite some back but the first thing that struck me was that it was not a love story. 2 bored people connect at a particular level and I felt that for them coming together, the background being completely not understanable to both was a catalyst. It had to be there I felt. Else, I’m not sure if SJ’s and BM’s characters would have even got together in the first place.
May be I got too involved in these 2 chracters that I dont remember finding anything offensive in the way Japanese culture / people were portrayed. So I can’t comment on that but I didnt quite get what was so wrong about the embedded LIT video here. What is so racially discrim @ this? It could happen to any 2 poeple who dont speak the same lanug. If I’m missing something plz elab. I guess I’ll have to see the films to get the premise that you put forth here.
(And we look at the manner in which Hd treats Asian cultures. I seeen it happening in Indian films – where on region actually mocks the other. South-Indians’ portrayal in Hindi films; Punjabi stereotyes in some SI films. Its there..)
@jahaan – okay, i’d concede a few points for “Lost in Translation” although the point of the movie itself was a little about missing home and the little negativity that comes across for the japanese characters through the humour i suppose were more the feelings of the characters themselves rather than the director’s attitude reflected. sofia coppolla is after all an american director and is entitled to portray the same. however i don’t think your criticism of darjeeling limited stands. why wasn’t the sikh guy real to you, the whitmans were totally intimidated by him and he wasn’t a caricature or a stereotype. they might appear to be so if you’re unfamiliar with the general quirkiness anderson gives to his characters. i absolutely love all of his work and in my opinion ‘Rushmore’ was a genre defining movie where it comes to existential comedy. also i’ve always felt wes anderson movies tend to grow on you. Darjeeling Limited felt aloof to me on the first viewing but the second time the characters were behaving exactly like they should have.
Kashi ke assi ke tanni guru ka dialouge bharatiya cinema ke itihaas me swarn aksharon me likha jayega. Jai Ho!!!
@jahaan: i gather tat u seem pretty upset bcos western film-makers r not observing cross-cultural sensitivities. but then, y blame them wen we do this all the time ourselves. the way our movies poke fun at ppl from diff regions/race/caste etc. the stereotyping of characters and dumbing down ppl of community, all for a few laughs. parsis r still portrayed for funny sequences even in a movie like taxi9211 which is supposed to be urbane; all south-indians r madraasis etc etc.
for the west, we still r a land of snake charmers and ppl who came up with gr8 inidan rope trick. our technology or financial growth or economic advancement means nothing to them, coz they still want to see us as a 3rd world country. whether we accept it or not, they dont want to see us as successful scientists at nasa or successful patel entrepreneurs running hotels in ny; they want to see us as ppl who renounce life and walk into the himalayas, practise yoga or deal in mystics …
I think if u ask me the best way to deal with it, do what the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Iranians have done. Say balls to you, and showcase your culture and ethos through your own movies.
If i want to know something of China, i would rather watch Crouching Tiger or The Hero or Raise the Red Lantern than The Painted Veil. And no Hollywood movie maker can capture the Japanese ethos better than Kurosawa. And i would rather watch City of God to experience Rio, rather than Blame it on Rio. And gimmes an Amos Perros any day, over Man on Fire, to know Mexico.
Sorry mean Amores perros.
I think this year, we are gonna have another biopic of Che directed by Steven Soderbergh.
BTW saw the trailer, for Valkyrie, about the attempt on Hitler by a group of Nazi officers. Tom Cruise plays the chief conspirator Claus Von Staffeunberg. Other than the fact that he wears an eye patch, its the same old Tom Cruise, u have seen in Jerry McGuire and Last Samurai. He said that he studied for 8 months about Stauffenberg, but his accent is as American as it is. Welcome to another History according to Hollywood version.
Thought I’d repeat my last comment on Jahan’s LIT post, in which I most agree with his contention regarding Lost in Translation
“He’s not a business traveler jaded with being a different place every week. He’s an actor. And apparently a good one, though slightly over the hill. He’s supposed to keenly observe the human experience.
She’s a stay at home wife who’s been in Tokyo for a while. She’s obviously an intelligent, curious person – towards the end, we see her take a trip to Kyoto to see ancient Japanese temples.
If place doesn’t matter, then would Francophile Sophia have set the same story in Paris? If this is about the alienation and ennui of two individuals outside of their context, then why is this film called “Lost in Translation” and set in Tokyo?
And why did Sophia think it was necessary to pack the film with every last cliche about Japanese society (karaoke session – check, kinky weird call girl – check, crazy talk show hosts – check).”
I think I can safely answer at least one of my questions here. Sophia Coppola would not, in a million years, set this film in Paris. Ever.
@Abhisaal: The Sikh character came across as a total (albeit stern) bufoon to me. Still, as I said, it’s just my thoughts on the film. Darjeeling Ltd did grow on me, and I like many things about the film, I found the portrayal of India and its people quite pathetic. There was nothing ‘quirky’ or funny about the whole funeral sequence, and this is where the whole ‘tongue-in-cheek’ facade falls flat.
@Crazyrals: The problem is not just about poking fun. I think robbing a culture or character of any dimensionality or substance is much worse than merely poking fun at them. Indian movies also often do that with foreign countries, but then they are mostly brain-dead flicks like Singh Is King.
From my review:
http://jahansinghbakshi.blogspot.com/2008/10/review-singh-is-kinng.html
“Singh is Kinng is a film completely oblivious and haughtily indifferent to how embarrassingly awful, unfunny and even racist it sometimes is (though coming from the man who produced and directed the thoroughly racially-offensive Namastey London, it isn’t exactly surprising.)”
Jahan, i think there is a slip up there, Namastey London was directed by Vipul Shah, whereas SIK is by Anees Bazmee.
Vipul Shah produced Singh is King.
@Ratnakar: Yup, that ain’t no slip up.
(Ref-18)
the funeral sequence was supposed to be the ‘false epiphany’moment for the brothers and hence shot in characteristic anderson fashion, the shot when the young kids call the three out of the bus and Irrfan Khan and the rest in white with the sound-track and slow motion is something you’d find in all of anderson’s movies. the scene with bill murray in the pool in rushmore being a perfect example (it had Kinks’ playing in the background too) it’s like the feeling you get when you have a soundtrack running in your head of which other people are oblivious. if you didn’t get that then perhaps you weren’t Anderson’s audience anyways.
and as to why you find Waris Ahluwalia’s character a buffoon i find difficult to respond to for your reasons in saying so are still unclear to me. what i saw as a guy struggling between a cheating girlfriend and troublesome passengers with the added responsibility of behaving with dignity as the chief steward of the fictional palace on wheels. would you term his character in ‘the inside man’ (spike lee’s) also buffoonish. in my opinion such portrayals in hollywood films would atleast bring some touch of reality to millions of ignorant americans who have difficulty distinguishing an arab from a sikh. darjeeling limited was as close to reality in its portrayal of India than any other Hollywood movie has ever been.
@Jahan
and please don’t call Anderson’s direction hipster-style filmmaking. he’s one of the modern auteurs. for a moment forget about the classical filmmakers who developed their skill of transposing moving pictures to the screen inspired by their tradition of theatre, paintings,photography and other such artforms and think of the modern filmmakers grown up with a steady diet of music videos and television. Anderson has been accused of being ‘hip’ earlier too but in his own words “I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience. I feel I get criticized for style over substance, and for details that get in the way of the characters. But every decision I make is how to bring those characters forward.”
@jahan
if you still doubt Anderson’s credentials and his command over pure substance check out ‘Hotel chevalier’ with Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, also billed Darjeeling Limited – part 1 with Jason playing jack whitman and natalie as his girlfriend he refers to when talking to adrian brody in darjeeling limited. if not for the superb direction you might ckeck out just for it being the only film for which natalie portman took off her clothes
@Abhisal: I have seen Hotel Chevalier. Nice, though I would still not call it ‘pure substance’, Anderson’s filmmaking seems to be very indulgent and very personal in nature, and I like it that way, though it also limits his films. I can only speak for Darjeeling limited, and for me it worked most when it was limited to Anderson’s closed-in artifice, in this case physically embodied by the train. I get Anderson’s quirks and find his style very interesting and compelling in a strange way. I have already said that I still liked the film despite my issues with it. I know that Anderson is a rare modern auteur and would love to see more of his work.
As far as the Sikh guy goes, I guess you read him differently, I didn’t think of that- maybe (and i hope) you are correct. And no, I didn’t find Waris Ahluwalia’s character bufoonish in Inside Man.
But as far as I am concerned I found india in Darjeeling Limited too overly exoticised and presented in a way that reinforces cliches. I wish he had found a way to make his kind of film and maintain the somewhat surreal setting without resorting to such terrible stereotype. People who are unaware of India get a very wrong impression. Even Ebert’s review suggested that he actually thought that Anderson showed a very real picture of India- ‘that nation of perplexing charm’. Ew.
Looking fwd to Danny Boyle Slumdog Millionaire- looks like he has really taken pains to get the portrayal right and make a film that actually feels like it’s in India. Hope it doesn’t disappoint.
am eagerly looking forward to slumdog millionaire too, with Irrfan Khan playing a major role it’s got to be kickass, specially with Boyle at the helm and an incredibly existential yet compelling plot. i love the rehmaan soundtrack in the trailor too. i understand one of your major grouses against ‘darjeeling ltd.’ was irrfan getting a raw deal and i was quite irked about it too. but he still played it better than any other actor could have (one single line in hindi, thats all! that too after the namesake?) and may be he just wanted to work with Anderson even if it was only a cameo.
Anderson has had Indian characters in most of his films as far as i remember and i actually foresee irrfan working again in the future because of this association, trust me Irrfan’s going to be big in the west too very soon, just wait and watch.
@Abhisal: Irrfan’s also doing Mira Nair’s short film segment in ‘New York, I Love You’ (On the lines of ‘Paris, Je T’aime’) and he’s co-starring with… Natalie Portman!
The short film’s called ‘Kosher Vegetarian’. Check this out:
http://justjared.buzznet.com/2008/03/14/natalie-portman-kosher-vegetarian/
http://justjared.buzznet.com/2008/03/13/natalie-portman-brooklyn/
@jahan
thanks for the link, am a big natalie portman fan. she’d be directing one of the shorts in the movie too, more than enough reason to watch out for the movie. i wonder when we’ll have a delhi je t’aime. mumbai already got theirs with ‘mumbai meri jaan’, didn’t they?
@Abhisal: Mumbai Cutting is more like it- wonder when it releases. MMJ was more like our own crash. For now, Saddi Dilli has to contend with Dibaker Banerjee I guess,
http://passionforcinema.com/why-raj-thackeray-should-watch-mumbai-cutting/
@jahan
thanks again, i hadn’t even heard of the movie till right about now
Came across this film ‘The Pool’ directed by American Chris Smith but has a complete Indian starcast – Nana Patekar, Venkatesh Chavan and Ayesha Mohan.
I am going to see this film sometime for sure but am not sure about its relevance here to the article. But still, I’d thot I’d put it up.
About the film:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0911024/
Its been getting pretty positive reviews and the storyline too is kind of unsettling with very good performances by all the leads.
http://www.cinematical.com/2008/09/06/review-the-pool/
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/movies/03pool.html
@Arthi.V
Our very own Srinivas has asisted the movie( The Pool). It was shown at IFFLA 2008. It has garnered some good reactions overall.