Should cinema as a medium unsettle you or lull you into a false sense of wellbeing? For those who don’t regard this oft-abused medium as opium for the masses, Deham raises some truly uncomfortable questions on the quality of life and relevance of death in the new millennium.
The startling futuristic film opens with a couple, whom we soon get to know as our protagonists, making desperate love. The love-making scene reminds us of Om Puri and Smita Patil in Govind Nihalani’s directorial debut Aakrosh many years ago. This couple projects the same desperate anguish, as though time was running out on the doomed characters.
Like Aakrosh, Deham is about human exploitation. While the earlier work depicted the shocking oppression of a tribal couple in the hands of power brokers, Deham moves forward by several decades into the year 2022. According to playwright Manjula Padmanabhan, from whose futuristic play the film is adapted, in the next 20 years Mumbai would be a breeding ground for a ferocious give-and-take. The powerful first-world countries, mainly the US, would do all the taking, while the third-world countries would have no choice but to give until we’re stripped to our bare bones.
We may have a problem accepting this doomsday prophecy in its entirety. But there’s certainly no ifs and buts about Nihalani’s powerfully visualized treatise on emotional and physical subjugation. In the way he presents the characters as casualties of economic bondage and the way he encompasses these brutalized lives as though a television monitor had turned them into prisoners in their own homes, Nihalani has constructed a futuristic Aakrosh in Deham.
While the battle lines in his earlier films between the haves and have-nots, the oppressed and the oppressors, have always been sharply defined, here the aggressor is far too invisible and therefore far more threatening and dangerous. Nihalani’s exposition on doomsday profiteering, whereby a powerful US company named Interplanta takes over the body and mind of a remarkably unremarkable family in a Mumbai chawl, could have lapsed into a clumsy futuristic teleplay.
The masterful narrative control, the vivid interplay of light and shadow among the characters (and hats off to Nihalani’s unflinching camera that captures every twitch in the rich tapestry of characterizations), and the economy of words (so surprising in a film adapted from a stage play) keep us riveted, as we watch an American girl named Ginny (Julie Ames) take full control of Om Prakash (Joy Sengupta), his wife Jaya (Kitu Gidwani), his brother Jeetu (Aly Khan), and mother (Surekha Sikri).
Ginny’s dialogues from the “contact module” installed in Om’s one-room chawl tenement circle, absorb and suck the family’s life like a life-sapping drug. The “contact module” as a metaphor of subjugation works so mordantly because of the terrific kinetic energy that flows from character to character.
This isn’t the first time that Nihalani has adapted a stage play to the screen. His Party did the same, but adhered to the sheer staginess of the original material. In Deham, the director cuts away at the verbosity, and re-defines the characters as predatory hounds and the underdogs through a series of meticulously crafted scenes where a lighthearted bantering tone used for conversation between the man who has sold off his body parts and the woman representing the purchasers melts into a hard conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed.
The effectuality of Nihalani’s futuristic drama is directly linked to his fine performers. The underrated Joy Sengupta brings a desperate urgency to his role of the reluctant donor who writes off his body parts to feed his family. The way Sengupta’s tone changes to a colonial singsong each time he speaks to Ginny on the contact module installed in his house is an expressive symbol of the uneasy equation between the privileged and under-privileged sections of the global society.
Aly Khan, as Joy Sengupta’s gigolo brother, is stylishly emblematic of the sicknesses that supersede and destroy a consumerized and acquisitive society, as is the hero’s old mom, who becomes rapidly sucked into the world of virtual reality on television.
But it’s Kitu Gidwani as Joy Sengupta’s wife who invests her pivotal role with enormous depth, dignity, and poignancy. The way she reacts to and recoils from imperialistic subjugation, and her final flourish of rebellion against powers that threaten to take over her womb, are so resonantly rich, we wonder why Kitu isn’t among the most in-demand actresses of our times.
Her climactic pitch against the tyranny of the greenbacks is so powerful and haunting, Kitu leaves us with a sense of immense satisfaction in having witnessed a slice of wretched humanity cemented by timeless emotions that tumble out of her being like water on parched ground.
Nihalani’s film is full of stylish special effects employed to enhance the film’s futuristic design. But, as is the wont in his films, it’s the human conflicts that absorb our interests, remind us of the uneasy power equations that govern the exploiters and the exploited as they confront each other in the barren battlefield of workaday life.
Deham is among the most important films in Govind Nihalani’s oeuvre. Though it lacks the raw energy and emotions of Aakrosh or the gripping narrative mode of Ardh Satya, what makes Deham special is its skilful allusion to humanistic ideas on power play in contemporary societies.
Parts of the film may appear a little too sci-fictional to breed emotional motivations in the narrative. But the convictions secreted by the characters are never falsified by the futuristic design, nor defeated by the film’s budgetary constraints.
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