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SAWNYRIVER (Noida, India)

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Parallel Narratives

Recently our films have been replete with multiple storylines. Parallel narratives in both literature and films add a fascinating dimension. In its varying perspectives, this genre can make a work self-reflexive, layered, open ended and liberating. Because it disrupts the existence of a single unified reality, in some ways, it brings a work closer to reality.

Dosar and Yu Hota to Kya Hota are two recent films that deal with relationships using multiple storylines. In Dosar, Rituparno Ghosh uses a character based parallel narrative and in Yu Hota to Kya Hota, Naseeruddin Shah uses a location based parallel narrative. While Dosar delves into the theme of infidelity ,through the narratives of four couples, Yu Hota to Kya Hota speaks of the American dream and how it moulds the lives of four individuals.

Dosar begins with an accident that the male protagonist of the film meets with while he is out on a tour with his paramour. His paramour dies, but the accident brings him face to face with a shocked and estranged wife. Glimpses of the extra-marital affair keep coming back as the wife goes through the poems and letters her husband and his paramour exchanged. The second story is linked to the wife’s middle-aged friend and her young paramour. On the one hand the wife is shown trying to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity and her changed view of her own identity, on the other hand she is shown encouraging her friend to break out of a crumbling marriage and start afresh. The third story revolves around the embittered husband of the other woman who tries to come to terms with his wife’s infidelity through revengeful promiscuity.

Each story adds a different dimension to the central theme and each one’s perspective is shown without any judgemental nuances. If the extra-marital affair is given its presence and poignancy through a refrain-like poem, the middle-aged friend’s point of view is expressed through the wife’s voice. The revengeful embittered husband, even in his uncouth reactions, is not devoid of compassionate treatment, his complete helplessness is voiced in his own words when he tells the wife, “You can be angry and fight with a living person, but whom do you ask questions and show your anger to when the very person is dead.”

In the beginning, the parallel narratives do add layers to the central theme; however, halfway through the film, different strands stray away and do not add to the theme of the story. The middle-aged friend’s narrative ends abruptly when she realises she still wants to talk it out with her husband, and her paramour leaves saying he was for her a passing need. The embittered promiscuous husband’s is left in a limbo and his character comes across as a rather flat one.

The need for communication in marriage is something that the director tries to bring out even in the central male protagonist’s desperate need to reach out to his wife. However, the very depiction of this communication remains rather vague and unexpressed, thus unconvincing in all the strands.

Had the journey of the central couple been well narrated, it could have been an open ended liberating script.

For me the film leaves a mark only in its depiction of the wife’s struggles with her contradictory feelings of anger, disgust, shock, humiliation, love and compassion. She reacts with both disgust and concern. She keeps looking after the needs of her husband; but, she also keeps voicing her disgust and anger in front of his family, his office people and him. It’s interesting to watch how she intermittently externalises and internalises her turmoil. At times she is shown expressing her anger in a revengeful sarcastic way, again at times she is shown withdrawing into her feelings for her husband.

The black and white medium gives her turbulence and the marital discord a natural depth.

Expressions of her selfhood are found in her work, in her world with her friends and in the words of her mother-in-law. There are a few brilliant intimate and tender marital scenes. The scenes where the wife helps her husband have a bath and where the husband comes to her room only to be rebuffed subtly depict love and hate in an almost Strindbergian manner. However, these scenes dissolve into reconciliation too easily and abruptly.

Ironically, the inward journey of the wife and the couple are expressed in the film through the poems of the other woman. Even in the end, when the husband and wife are shown together, in the background, one can hear the archetypal poetry of surrender to love and the submission of selfhood. It is as if both women ultimately share the same language and the same destiny, and the reconciliation is a tender fragile veil.

The refrain-like images, throughout the film, of an unknown couple in the same motel room in which the protagonist’s extra-marital journey started gives the sense of life moving on in its own way. Even when the film ends, one couple is shown vacating the room for another.

In Yu Hota to Kya Hota too, the story unravels through parallel narratives. A bright young student finally struggles out of his poverty stricken situation and reaches out for the American Dream. Throughout the film, he is shown shying away from the dream till his ailing father passes away, and all ties are lost. After his father’s death, one of his friends helps him make up his mind, both financially and emotionally. Their relationship is shown in the tender light of a friendship that is deep, close to a romantic relationship and yet far away from it.

On the other end, a middle aged man who owns a dance troupe meets his lost beloved and daughter after a very long time. Trying to save his lady love and daughter from the clutches of an inebriated man, he takes his daughter along with him, in search for the American Dream. If the director shows the tender love of youth with sensitivity, his treatment of middle aged love too touches subtle chords.

The other two couples have more demonstrative relationships. A struggling businessman, smitten with an older woman, escapes to America, to flee from his professional and personal debacles. Similarly a young bride desperately reaches out for the land of dreams, to move out of the hostile and disturbed home of her in-laws. She strives to reach the America in which her husband lives.

All these four stories are interwoven with tender irony. Each strand is dealt with depth and finesse.

The money-minded thrifty middle-aged lover whose greed cannot take a backseat with his beloved, but can fade in the presence of his daughter; the frustrated desperate businessman who cannot accept the liberated life-style of his girlfriend, the dancer who even in promiscuity cannot let go of her one true love; the affluent girl who finds her purpose in cherishing the undiscovered dreams of a struggling friend; the mentally disturbed, separated sister who tries to accept as well as ward off the blossoming bride of her brother are all extremely real and complex characters. And what is remarkable about this film is that even in their short spans each story has its characters well etched out within the central theme of the American dream.

The only thing that I disliked about this film is the end. All the characters, except the new bride, die in the September 11 tragedy. While the sudden demise of the American Dream in their lives is apt, the link up to the tragedy seems too late and bit of a cliché. However, the director redeems it by abruptly ending the film with the destruction. There are no didactic link ups.

In the last scene, a sense that life moves on is created, as the steps of the new bride gradually approach the shadows of her grief-stricken husband.

Both films use the trope of parallel narratives; however, the second film actually manages to live up to the dynamics of the form. In Naseeruddin’s film, the central theme gains a many layered presentation through the different stories. While Dosar remains a powerful sketch of a betrayed woman and her selfhood, each character in Yu Hota to Kya Hota is important for the storyline. The portrait of extra-marital relationships in its varied shades remain incomplete in Ghosh’s film, but in Yu Hota, love, of all ages, expressed and unexpressed, legitimate or illegitimate are successfully shown in a “slice of life” manner. Thus, in this film, apart from the parallel stories, a parallel narrative exists even in the treatment of two themes, that of the American Dream and the many shades of love.

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