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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
PEEPLI LIVE Thousands of farmers in India commit suicide each year because their poverty-stricken families cannot repay crushing debts. The bitter irony that the government waits to extend aid only as a death benefit is the basis for the broad, entertaining satire Peepli Live. In the beginning, two quarreling brothers travel back from a fruitless meeting with their banker for a mortgage extension. Debut writer/director Anusha Rizvi, who has a background in documentaries, illustrates the vast cultural gulf (as much as the geographical distance) in their long journey back home from the big city—first on a crowded train, then a bus, and finally on foot past oxen on the dirt road to their rural village of Peepli (filmed in central India, near Bhopal). The beleaguered brother who takes responsibility for owing the money is Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri). The amusing and carping interplay between Natha and his older brother Budhia (Raghubir Yadav, whose career goes back to Mira Nair’s 1988 Salaam Bombay!) are more than matched on screen by the feisty antagonisms between Natha’s querulous wife, and their screeching, demanding invalid mother, whose medical bills forced them to take out the devastating loan. An eavesdropping journalist interprets Budhia’s joke that Natha would be better off dead as an actual threat to commit suicide. His front page news story is picked up by an ambitious big city television news reporter (pretty Malaika Shenoy, a former TV anchor in Mumbai), which sets off a hilarious, escalating media circus and political storm during a regional election. Will Natha do it? And when? And how can everyone else use his dilemma for their own benefit? Even his young son looks forward to using the death grant to pay for training as a policeman. The film has a funny field day lampooning right- and left-wing political parties, both championing the poor as their leaders regally enjoy living the high life. (One politician declares himself “Messiah of the Lower Castes.”) Harried civil servants are ordered to appease indebted farmers by shifting around meager funding programs, but these have absurdly inapplicable requirements. (For Kafka-esque universality, they sound eerily similar to forms that those living along the U.S.’s Gulf Coast have to deal with these days). As the frenzy builds about Natha’s impending death, the media scrum around his besieged house turns into a full-fledged Fellini-esque carnival, complete with tightrope walkers and a Ferris wheel. Meanwhile, his fellow villagers would rather just zone out with frequent tokes of ganja.
Rizvi
cites as influences Indian social realism films of the 1970’s, not Billy
Wilder’s bitter Ace in the Hole (1951) or Jack Arnold’s
light-hearted The Mouse That Roared (1959), which will seem more
comparable to American audiences for their little guys caught in a
manufactured maelstrom. Even with some exaggerated silliness, Peepli
Live rises above the current Bollywood international releases that
are covering political issues with musical interludes. (This soundtrack
is notable for not including the usual sentimental love ditty, but
heartfelt pleas about the farmers’ plight.) What happens to Natha is a
sobering reflection on the difficulties for the farmers and those who
try to help them.
Nora Lee Mandel
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