Newton, afraid of its politics, is the dangerous new art film
The ever-boorish Naseeruddin Shah, in a recent interview, made snide remarks about the art cinema of the '60s, '70s and early '80s in India and contradictorily spoke of the wonder that was Jaane Bhi do Yaaro, one of the best comedies ever made in India, and how such a film could not be made today.
Mourning the death of Kundan Shah, one cannot but be nostalgic about that art cinema and its "commitment" (a term Naseeruddin Shah was particularly derisive about) to a certain politics and a certain vision.
That politics and vision are certainly not part of the new version of art cinema in India in the 2000s, the multiplex film. Amit Masurkar's much-hyped Newton is symptomatic. It is a film that is hyper self-conscious about everything but its own politics. Its vision, if any, is the sort of mindlessly artful satire of everything - no person is spared, no position left unscathed. Satire has to have a vantage point, a position, but Newton reduces satire to a neoliberal product that garnishes every carefully set-up vignette in the film.
Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro offered a savage critique of corruption and the nexus of the media-politicians-police-builders in the early '80s through a marvellous use of satirical comedy. Newton offers us a bland, sepia-tinted vision of a curiously flattened world and the only comedy in it is tribals being infantilised and laughed at by audiences in every metro.
Newton opens with a strangely statist definition of Naxalism. Naxals never appear in any frame of the film which makes one wonder why they open the film. The film gets its name from its central protagonist Nutan aka Newton, a lower caste and lower class government officer whose stuttering principles and idealism are mocked from the first frame. In being honest, you are only doing your job, he is told. Don't carry it around like a badge. He is reduced to a farce in the end and settles for awards for turning up to office on time.
The politician is, of course, a sickening figure who wants laptops and mobiles in every one's hands to transform Naxalism into progress. The army are a bunch of ill-equipped, bumbling fools who don't make enough money and are not safe at all defending the country from the Naxals. The adivasis are the laughing stock through the film, the comic relief. The one adivasi woman can't make up her mind whether she is a Naxal sympathiser or whether she believes that the poor adivasis are just haplessly caught between the violent state and the equally violent Naxals. Lower caste and lower class men and women are dowry-taking, money-making, self-protecting (they will not go to dangerous areas and develop heart conditions when asked to) cowards.
Each of these positions is set up in artfully and utterly clichéd scenes where everyone speaks in the same deadpan manner and the one-liners are tired and super-smart and utterly, flatteningly uniform (this is undoubtledly some of the dullest and most uninspiring screen writing ever by Mayank Tewari). Everyone mumbles, everyone's smart alecky, everyone has gyaan to offer.
If there is no one who is spared critique in Newton, how do we locate its politics and its vision? What is Newton committed to? The fact is that Newton is committed to nothing but its own smart-aleckyness. It mimics the art film of the '60s and '70s but only the empty shell of its form (the film is slow, badly lit, monochromatic and were it not for Newton's mention of the possibility of his working for a call centre, it could well be located in the '60s or '70s and be talking of Naxalism then). But if all of that in the earlier art film was because those guys didn't really have any money, what was undoubtedly in those films was commitment to critique of hegemonic ideas and a vision.
The absence of this in Newton is particularly galling (if symptomatic) because the bogey of Naxalism in the contemporary moment is an excuse for the systematic genocide of tribals across the length and breadth of mineral-rich India. In the name of "development", tribals are raped and killed on a daily basis (reduced in the film to a few tribal boys being made to sing by the army) and this "development" is missing almost entirely from Newton (barring one languid, meaningless shot of a ravaged landscape). More troublingly, vicious state violence in the form of the Salwa Judum or the Grey Hounds (reduced in the film to a cutesy army officer - a thoroughly confused Pankaj Tripathi - who monkeys around, wins our sympathy for the army by barely being able to afford his groceries and leads a bunch of bored lackeys) are entirely missing.
Genocidal violence is manifested as faint brushstokes and every character from every position is put on the same level plane and sent up for some characterological flaw or the other. There's no need to take a position in today's art cinema.
Using the form of the earlier art cinema is the new cool. The politics and the vision were a sham, says one of that cinema's best actors, Naseeruddin Shah. The other Shah who made Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro died a long while ago.
Also read: Newton is a slap in the face of cool, urban Indians