Deepa Mehta's Videsh provocatively blends theatre with cinema.
Recently I was drawn to watch the film Videsh because I had heard that it is based on Girish Karnad’s well-known play Naag Mandala and its Punjabi production by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhery. The play itself has been inspired by a popular Kannada folk tale where the Naag, with all its magical powers and associations, changes shape and appears as an active character in the play, leading to questions about the relativity of truth. The famous Punjabi poet Surjit Singh Pattar’s adaptation of this play into Punjabi is sheer poetry and lends the story a mythical quality. Neelam Mansingh’s production, one of the best of this play, not only captures its poetry but transforms it to give us a world inhabited simultaneously by tangible reality and magic. The switch between the man and the snake through the play is almost seamless. This is heightened by the actors, Ramanjeet playing the woman with a rare sensuality, and Vansh Bharadwaj, who is amazing in the way his whole being seems transformed whenever he enters as the snake in the shape of her husband.
The very fact that Deepa Mehta decided to take up this story for a serious film (not the Paheli brand, though the story is somewhat similar) was enough to rouse my curiosity about its treatment in a medium like cinema. After all, the way the audience accepts the mythical and unreal in theatre is not the same for films. It was even more intriguing when I heard that the film is set in Canada and is about domestic violence. So it was with a mixed bag of expectations and apprehensions that I had gone for a private viewing of the film.
The film creates very real characters in very real surroundings. The newly-wed Chand (Preity Zinta) leaves for Canada and lands in a typical lower-middle class Punjabi migrant family, with seven people crowded in a tiny, two-room apartment, which too is rented during the day for extra income. And soon hell for her begins with a short-tempered husband Rocky (Vansh Bharadwaj) beating her without any provocation.
Helpless in a foreign land, she tries to deal with the violence by recalling beautiful stories that she has heard from her mother. The movement between her world of violence and dreams is handled very poetically and with great delicacy, both in terms of the poetry of the text and the camera work. In her moments of weakness, when Chand is desperate for love and solace, a naag (cobra) in the guise of her husband enters her life and provides her what she is longing for, which leads to further complications in the story...
At this point the story steps clearly outside the ambit of realism, but this is where it becomes more complex and layered. The treatment of the story and the film allow us the ambiguity that the metaphor of the naag creates. One is forced to traverse the thin line between dream and reality to encounter the real dilemma that this narrative poses — the dilemma between truth and untruth, between illusion and reality, between right and wrong. To treat the presence of the Naag as an unreal entity rather than as a metaphor would be to miss the point of the story and the film altogether.
For such an unconventional cinematic narrative, Deepa Mehta has made a very intelligent adaptation, down to small details, translated very sensitively by Surjit Singh Pattar. If you have read the play you would realise how well situations and characters got translated from the original folktale setting into this contemporary story, that too set in Canada! The cinematography and lighting captured the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere where this story unfolds in such a way that the violence appears more frightening, and the love of the snake husband provides relief, but mixed with the anxiety of some impending doom. Performances by Preity Zinta and stage actor Vishal Bharadwaj are very intense and take the audience with them. The film also takes a thematic leap at its closing, with the girl, having given the naag pariksha, is finally able to confront and defy her husband.
I really loved this imaginative and provocative blend of the theatrical and cinematic.
