Joint ventures

The other day I watched — for what was perhaps the fifth time — Jean Renoir’s superb 1939 class comedy The Rules of the Game, about the romantic misadventures of a group of French socialites and their domestic staff. It’s a film I always think I won’t be able to re-watch in its entirety, but then I get so engrossed in its splendid cast of characters that before I know it I’m more than halfway — it’s one of the most accessible of classics, a warm and engaging tragi-comedy.

One thing that makes it such a pleasure is its skilful handling of a large group of people, none of whom is in an obvious sense the “protagonist” — the seven or eight main characters share screen time and space, and their stories intersect in intriguing ways. Renoir used complex scene set-ups and skilful long takes to create a buzzing world; in some scenes, he employed deep focus (not a widely used technique at the time) to show us foreground and background action at the same time, so we can observe different sets of events involving different characters.

This is one of the most prominent early examples of the Ensemble Film — a sub-genre that directors like Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson would later specialise in. It’s no surprise to learn that Altman was a Renoir devotee (“I learn the rules of the game from watching The Rules of the Game,” he said once). His 2001 film Gosford Park — set in an English country house in the 1930s — was his most obvious homage to Renoir’s classic, but much of his best work, going back to the 1970 M*A*S*H, featured an assortment of characters and naturalistic, overlapping dialogue.

Watching Altman movies like Nashville (about 24 people involved in the country-music industry), I wonder why we don’t have a strong tradition of ensemble cinema in India: after all, this is a bustling, overpopulated country that loves communal events, from showy weddings to public festivals. Hindi cinema has always had multi-starrers, of course, but those are very different types of films. The 1970s masala movies about brothers separated at birth had undoubted virtues, but their storytelling mode was episodic — the narrative rotated between the protagonists, making sure the heroes got equal screen time, songs, romantic scenes and fights. But the type of ensemble film I’m talking about typically puts lots of people together in the same room — or at least the same broad setting — and follows them about, building a story out of their interactions.

Outside of mainstream Hindi cinema, there have been such works as Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri and Govind Nihalani’s Party, but the best example of a home-grown ensemble film I can think of is Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding. It isn’t a “Bollywood movie” (though the characters in it are very conscious of the Bollywood way of doing things), but it’s certainly an identifiably Indian story, centred on a large wedding where skeletons clatter out of the family closet. It shares with Rules of the Game a pointed reference to the class divide: in the same way that the French servants’ indiscretions parallel those of their employers in Renoir’s film, Monsoon Wedding has a stirring thread where a lower-class wedding contractor falls in love with the rich Verma family’s maid. But there’s something else it has in common with the much older film — it’s more intricately structured than a viewer might at first realise. Because the storytelling is so fluid and the characterisations so rich, one tends to get absorbed in the plot and not notice the craft behind it. It’s a quality that nearly all good ensemble movies share.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer