Watching a short film titled Andheri recently, I thought about movies that attempt to capture the character and pulse of a big city. The best way, perhaps the only way, to do this is to look at individual stories — at the fears, hopes and aspirations of the people who populate a metropolis and make it what it is, but who also have an ambivalent relationship with it.
Andheri, directed by Sushrut Jain, is a spare, simply told story about a young live-in maid, Anita, who runs away with dreams of leading an independent life. In a bus, she meets a newlywed Muslim girl who has just arrived in Mumbai with her husband, and they strike up a conversation. Then something happens that makes Anita realise how foolhardy it is to try and survive alone in an impersonal world.
The film doesn’t underline its point with needless talk — the story is told through the uncertainty on the faces of the two women and their tentative smiles, through images of crowded colonies and tall buildings flashing by, and the comical way in which total strangers collide with each other whenever the bus stops abruptly. But by the end, there’s no escaping the contrast — from Anita’s point of view — between the anonymity of the streets and the cosy familiarity of the flat where she has to work for a sharp-tongued old woman but where she at least has someone she can call her own (and watch soaps on TV with). At the same time, we get a fleeting sense of the loneliness of the old lady who is probably also, in a different way, a victim of city life.
A video essay on the film’s website (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.andheri-themovie.com/) mentions that Mumbai, “the most densely populated place in the world, is home to millions of stories of hope and despair”. This observation reminded me of the famous closing line of one of the most vivid “city films” ever made, Jules Dassin’s 1948 The Naked City. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” says the film’s narrator at the end, “and this has been one of them.”
The reference is to the population of New York — where the film was set — and the line would later become the catchphrase for a popular TV series of the same title (a forerunner of detective/police procedural shows such as NYPD Blue). Dassin’s movie, inspired by Arthur Fellig’s book of photos about everyday life in New York, follows a homicide investigation: when a young model is found murdered in her apartment, a team of detectives headed by the avuncular Irishman, Lieutenant Muldoon, gets cracking on the case. A suspect is soon nailed, but a few twists and turns lie ahead, and this entails a lot of legwork for the youngest member of the team, Jimmy Halloran. As he walks the streets and the narrator comments on the city’s bustling life, the tone of the film starts resembling that of a documentary.
The narrative is very engrossing, but for me one of the film’s most telling scenes is the one at a morgue, where the dead girl’s parents have to identify the body. The mother initially tries to be detached but fails, and in her grief we see how the lure of city life can break up families and presage human tragedies. These are small-town people whose daughter had — in the face of their disapproval — run away from home and become involved with the wrong sorts of people. Eventually, she became just another statistic, just one of the eight million “stories”, soon to be forgotten. For all the beauty of the film’s location shooting, it’s possible at this moment to see the city as a mechanical monster swallowing victims by the minute.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer