Early on in Ruchika Oberoi’s Island City, an IT company Manager reminds his employees that its temporary tagline, the three words, all beginning with F, do not constitute the company’s ‘motto’. The latter consists of three words beginning with O. Three, just in case you missed the point. She goes on to mount three stories, tenuously linked, based in Mumbai, but not directly about the trials and tribulations of living in a city that once consisted of seven, sparsely populated islands.
It’s a long way from Dhanbad (her home, population 12 lakh, earlier in Bihar, now in Jharkhand), to Mumbai (her adopted home, 240 lakh), but the perspective is palpable. Don’t forget, she had a stop-over at Xaviers Institute of Communication (XIC), Mumbai and the Film and Television Institute of India (Pune, Mumbai’s twin city, till the satellite township called Navi Mumbai dislodged it), and has been waiting in the country’s film capital for 18 years, to see her first release.
It is not really about any island or, for that matter, about Mumbai. The title is a convenient peg to hang the film on. What come to mind immediately, on reading the title, are one really old, compelling quote, and a 1962 film.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island (1624)
In Europe, as in Asia, as in India, as in Mumbai (2016).
In the film, No Man is an Island, a true story, Jeffrey Hunter stars as a lone Navy serviceman, fighting for his survival on Japanese-occupied Guam, during WWII. As Pearl Harbor is attacked, a Navy radioman finds himself trapped. All other military personnel have either been killed, or have surrendered to the invading Japanese forces.
No similarity in plot whatsoever. Message-wise, you might find many things to mull over from either premise.
Island City strings together three stories with staggering contradictions. While the first story is about a middle-aged man, a diligent worker, who wins a “Fun Committee Award” in his IT company, and finds himself whisked away to participate in situations of unwilling but mandatory fun and free shopping. The second is about a comatose man on life-support. His family, finding relief in the situation, buys a TV and gets glued to a popular soap every night, as the man, almost a dictator to his family, had banned TV. The third one is about a lower middle class woman getting burdened under the pressures of earning a living. She is in a loveless, arranged relationship, a prelude to impending marriage, with a self-centred loudspeaker-maker always astride a motor-cycle and addicted to his mobile phone. A letter addressed to the girl that arrives one day changes everything, at least in her psyche.
Oberoi has written the first two stories herself while the third one is based on an idea by her husband, Sidhharth Sharma, software programmer and musician, who runs rBus. "However, I completely changed the characters and the setting, to incorporate some of my own impressions of Mumbai city." As themes go, these three stories are tributes and odes to many a master whose work Oberoi must have ingested and digested by the dozen.
Now that I have told you what Sharma does, it should not be much of a surprise to you that in two of the three tales, Artificial Intelligence and software programming are dominant. The middle fable is an unabashed contextualising of the epic, cult Doordarshan TV serial, Ramayan, that was shown in the 80s, when Oberoi was a teenager.
Well-nuanced and duly satirical, it dwells dangerous territory when it sympathises with a premise that a foul-mouthed, idiotic, ill-tempered man going into a coma is a god(pun intended)send opportunity for his family to find solace in the TV soap opera ‘avatar’ of a deity. (Ruchika Oberoi was associate director of a children’s film titled Chutkan Ki Mahabharat--Mahabharat being the other epic serialised on Doordarshan in the late 80s--directed by Sandeep Meshram, her colleague at the Digital Academy Film School, where the two lectured). Oberoi also produced and directed Filmy Fundas for MTV. There’s more of media in her Islandscape. The ugly duckling works in a newspaper printing press and her father runs a photo-copying shop. Conclusion: it is a lot about media—media, as in IT, and media, as in television, media as in print, media as in photo-copying, media as in mobile phone.
She takes a dig at the statistics-obsessed, dehumanised, cubicle ‘architecture’ of IT based companies, for whom only numbers and orders mean everything. Get into George Orwell (1984, ‘Big Brother is Watching’), Charlie Chaplin, Bert Haanstra and Aki Kaurismaki, for a while, and, if you have the knack, you cloud churn out a Fun Committee. Completely real, mundane and tedious, to surreal, black comedy and back to normal, all in one click of a mouse. If you can suspend disbelief totally for about 25 minutes, you are in for some good fun in this chapter, gunning for you.
Moving into the last of the islands, it is not easy avoiding recurring images of The Ugly Duckling (fairy-tale, filmed many times since 1931), Main Sundar Hoon (Mahmood in the 1971 Hindi film, performing as only he could) and Pakeezah (1972, released around the time she was born). After the post-screening Q&A, Ruchika half-admitted to this writer that both she and her husband had seen Kamal Amrohi’s classic, about a courtesan (by no means a Plain Jane), who wakes up in a train sleeper one morning to find a short letter left behind by a fellow traveller, in which he showers praise on her feet, for that was all he could have seen in that moment. Those two lines impact her life as nothing before.
Delineating her protagonists carefully, she calls the office robot Suyash Chaturvedi, an obvious North/Central India name, helping fortify the alienation. He is probably 1,500 km away from home, single and lives alone. The Joshis are unmistakably Marathi-speaking, though they keep reverting to Hindi too often for it to pass un-noticed. They are local, practical and able to cope better with adversity than migrants. Bickering is both resented and tolerated in the family, as a given. Aarti’s family is Gujarati and lives in a chawl (shanty), with her father’s dialogue dropping the ‘h’ in words that include ‘sh’, as many Gujarati’s are prone to. Jignesh, a common Gujarati name, by contrast shows no semblance of Gujarati in his accent, which is distinctly mainstream Hindi.
Vinay Pathak (Chaturvedi) is a natural when it comes to the poker-faced, sad, overwhelmed, spaced out loser. But any more of these roles, and he might get hopelessly strait-laced and woefully type-cast. Directors who like his work, please do him a favour, and challenge him. Amruta Subhash (Sarita Joshi) was a revelation in Astu (Marathi), pitched opposite no less a veteran than Dr. Mohan Agashe. She continues to impress, though her impeccable Urdu diction is at variance with the milieu she represents. Not her fault at all. Dusky Delhi-ite Tannishtha Chatterjee (Aarti) finds herself on the road that has seen Smita Patil, Seema Biswas, Aneeta Kanwar, Nandita Das and more tread ahead of her. Her potential is still to be tapped, notwithstanding the subtlety with which she plays second fiddle and pillion-rider in Island City.
As Jignesh, Chandan Roy Sanyal’s role needed some more working on. Irreverent cricket league host Samir Kochhar enjoys an incongruous piece of casting as Purshottam, a symbolic re-working of the legend of Rama, who is also known by the moniker of Maryada Purshottam (ideal, best man). Look hard for the trace of an out of character grin that creeps up on his face on at least two occasions. Obviously, he’s having a ball!
Marathis as Marathis is good. Which Marathis, though? Uttara Baokar as Aji (grand-mother) and Amruta’s real mother Jyoti Subhash as the unwelcome tea-time visitor are tours de force. Ashwin Mushran, the third ‘Bihari’ in the ensemble (Vinay and Ruchika being the other two), fits the role, and the hamming, at least this once, is not too irritating. Also in the cast are Sana Sheikh, Mithun Rodwittiya, Bhushan Vikas, Naman Banthia, Jaswinder Singh, Manoj Sharma and Mukul Chadda. Chadda, as the completely de-sensitised insurance company executive, is right on...over the top.
Part of the treatment is slick and smart, part laboured and repetitive, taking time to prepare for the punch.
Under a CiTyScan, Island City is a collage of opportunities and possibilities, some realised, some lost. Multi-layered to a fault, it might mean different things to different people.
Check it out for yourself.
Rating: ** ½
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W5ql0PiFag
Island City was the first screening in a partnership forged between National Film Development Corproration of the Government of India, and G5A. Under this arrangement, NFDC, which funds/produces/markets/releases independent cinema, will provide first films of directors once every two months for screening at G5A's Black Box theatre, in central Mumbai, which will be followed by a Q&A. Nilofar Shamim Haja, Senior Manager for Programmes and Projects at G5A, introduced the event, while RJ Sidhharth (Mishra), who works for an FM radio station, anchored the event. Good idea. A little suggestion though. You cannot have a 55-minute post screening inter-action for a 111-minute film. How about cutting it down to 28 minutes? Inhabitants of the Island City often commute 20-30 kms to reach venues, and by the time many of the crowd rang their door-bells, turned their keys or punched in their paaswords, it would have been midnight, well-past dinner-time.
Awadhesh (NFDC), Samir, Amruta with a child-actor, Ruchika, Sidhharth, mike-holding child actor, Tannishtha, onlooker child actor, Ashwin and Vinay