Review: Ship of Theseus

In 2000, Eidos Interactive released John Romero’s Diakatana. As First Person Shooter games go, Daikatana was supposed to be the absolute pinnacle. One of the early commercials infamously read, ‘John Romero’s about to make you his bitch’ followed by ‘Suck it down.’ When the game finally released, players and critics minced it into a fine paste. Today Daikatana is a cautionary tale of hubris.

Yesterday I travelled to the other end of Delhi to be Anand Gandhi’s willing bitch. After all, Dibakar Banerjee, Amir Khan and Anurag Kashyap had already sucked him down before me and I usually trust their taste. Moreover short films are making a commercial comeback in India and from the celebrity blurbs all over the internet (yes, I’ll call them blurbs and not bytes), I expected Ship of Theseus to be the next Teen Kanya. It isn’t.  Not that it doesn’t have its moments, nor that it’s in any way inferior to Bombay Talkies, the last ‘serious’ Mumbai production, but (a large, ripe luscious BUT) it’s definitely not the film which according to Kashyap’s own acknowledgement has made him ashamed of himself.

Let’s begin with the most important question: how cerebral/ pretentious is Ship? Well, the first epithet could be applied to the first short and the second epithet to the second. The third short which ties the narrative together is a sack with a decaying bottom. Let’s analyze the three plot strands one by one:

1. A girl takes up photography after losing sight to cornea infection.  This is the strongest story of the three. Film-maker Alda-el-Kashef is perfect as Aliya Kamal, the blind photographer who won’t accept condescension from her partner and is severely critical of her own work.  In the later part of the short when she regains sight and becomes more appreciative of her art, or when she wonders whether the transition from sightlessness to sight is worth it and binds her eyes with her hair band is cinematic genius. One particular scene stands out. After the successful cornea transplantation, a mirror is carried across a hall to Aliya’s hospital room. She looks into it and smiles. Her boyfriend clicks photos of her looking at the mirror. Her mother and sister, on the other end of a video conference call smile at her being photographed while she’s looking at the mirror. Poetry, sheer poetry!

 2. A monk (Neeraj Kabi) fighting for the rights of lab animals is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and wonders whether to die an idealist or to undergo liver transplantation and live on drugs that have been tested on lab animals. This is probably the best shot of the three shorts. DOP Pankaj Kumar captures the monk’s walk along railway tracks, under windmills, and between large metal pipes and when the monk finally reaches a decision, there is no need for words. Much of the film is silent and this is probably why the brief interludes of spiritual discourse are so jarring. The priest gazes out of the window of a large monolithic building, a red panopticon and debates with his protégé, a young lawyer, on life, impulse and decisions. The philosophy is unoriginal and uninspired.  Sample this: ‘Everything we do has a consequence on every atom in the universe. Every action, even inaction leaves a karmic record’. Naah, didn’t work for me.

   

3. A number of sub-plots actually. However, the central story is this: a stock broker (Navin Parnami) accused by his grandmother of being insensitive chances upon a daily wage labourer who has been robbed of his kidney and travels to Stockholm to meet with the receiver. As mentioned earlier, this is where Gandhi fails and fails on multiple fronts. The running time is too long (painful, as a friend remarked), the ending too cheesy and the resolution formulaic. It is revealed that the stock broker, the monk (now in plain clothes, having probably surrendered his monastic vows) and the photographer have all received organ donations from the same person, the metaphorical Ship of Theseus. A couple of years ago, Hany Babu summed up a similar paradox in a more horrific manner. It was a class on the resolution of a sentence to morphemes and Mr Babu’s argument was this: ‘Suppose you cut a man’s finger, does he still remain a man? Proceed further and hack off his hand. Is he still a man? Go one step further and… forget it, it’s too gross an example’. Gandhi leaves the film at a similar junction. To his credit, the film doesn’t turn into a tank of glycerine as the Will Smith starrer Seven Pounds.

One of the defects of the film is the use of subtitles, especially in the last short. Now when it is known that you are marketing a film for an urban audience, where is the need to translate Swedish dialogues to English and let a character re-translate it to Hindi? In fact, why does the organ receiver have to be Swedish at all? Make him an American or an Indian industrialist or something. Three years ago Q showed us the way with the highly energetic Gandu. I won’t comment on the film but he made subtitles a work of art.

Canon EOS 1D Mark IV is the real winner. Whether it is the close up of a fly preening its legs or of cloud formations in Sweden, the camera always entertains. Then there are the moments. The sightless photographer reminisces over a childhood memory of a cart pulled by swans which, she is convinced, is a true memory. However, when she gains sight, she realizes that this scene, so vivid in her memory is actually an illustration in a childrens’ book. It is fitting that the short ends with the lens cover of her camera, her instrument of sight, falling into a mountain stream.  Nature and chance won’t allow her sightlessness ever again.

Gandhi has his realism in place. Whether it is the courtroom scenes or the daily life of the monk, they are much better treated than in mainstream Indian cinema. The cuts from one short to another are splendid. The second short begins with a person rising from bed. It’s not yet dawn, there is a draught from the open window and the naked torso of a man in a lungi rises from bed. It’s a long establishing shot but I didn’t know if the person was the photographer’s boyfriend or a new character until the next shot showed the monk walking out on his begging rounds. Similarly, the second film ends with the monk’s ignorance of the existence of a soul and the scene cuts to lush green grass waving in the breeze. The next short begins in a hospital ward with a  A Band of Boys song playing in the background.

Coming back to the beginning. Like Diakatana, Ship of Theseus comes after three years in production. Like Diakatana, it uses a marketing strategy so in your face that it makes you gag. Unlike Daikatana, Ship of Theseus will recover its budget and more. Anand Gandhi will make a far better movie. And when it is released, I’ll be his willing bitch again, whether he asks me to or not.