A few weeks ago Canadian-Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta and her producer husband David Hamilton completed principal photography on Midnight's Children, the film adaptation of Salman Rushdie's iconic novel. The film is scheduled for release in late 2012. Reading Stephanie Molen's location report from Sri Lanka, published in the Globe and Mail, I confess I was initially both fascinated and also a little alarmed.
It described, among other things, seven cobras rearing their heads and hissing in unison, and a field littered with fake corpses stuffed with fish heads (to attract crows). Somehow or other, perhaps not least because of the vision of a snake slithering away on the floor towards the end, I thought instantly of the epic Cleopatra with its lavish sets, larger than life stars Burton and Taylor, and overall big-budget extravaganza vibe before it ended up as a box office dud.
While part of me is intensely curious and excited about the film version of Midnight’s Children, whose working title is Winds of Change but expect that to almost certainly be revised, the literary purist in me is slightly apprehensive. This, I have realized upon some reflection, has less to do with the film itself, which lies in very capable hands, and more to do with my own misgivings every time a favourite book is about to hit the screen. It raises the obvious question. Should beloved books be adapted for the big screen?
A year ago, Rushdie and Mehta spoke at Emory University where Rushdie is Distinguished Writer in Residence, about the adaptation of the novel into film, just two weeks after completing the screenplay. The writer recited an old joke about two goats breaking into the projection room of a movie theatre. As the goats munch on the spools, one says to the other, "So, how's the movie?" The second goat responds, "The book was better."
How often have we heard this lament? Sometimes it's true. Once in a while it isn't. There are plenty of very good movies made from equally good works of fiction. Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and A Clockwork Orange, David Lean's Doctor Zhivago, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient. At his talk, Rushdie singled out two examples of excellent adaptations – Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, based on Edith Wharton's novel, and Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, from the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
And still, the poor adaptations outnumber the good. The Remains of The Day, The Hours, The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina (multiple attempts), and pretty much any adaptation of a Jane Austen novel.
A recent example that comes to mind is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, only because I grew up adoring the book. Despite Howard Shore's haunting score, New Zealand's lush national parks, excellent cinematography and effective casting, the film was predictably disappointing because it seemed to me the standards of the book were impossible to live up to. Tolkien did not just write the most compelling quest narrative ever, with cliffhanger chapter conclusions and age-old values of loyalty, friendship, trust and community, all extremely well-suited to blockbuster cinema. He also wrote a book of immense imaginative scope and breathtaking poetry.
Yet, it is difficult to think about the book now without being haunted by computer-generated images. In this day of visual overload, can the beauty of any literary work hold its own against a film adaptation?
This debate becomes even more complicated when the books we're talking about are magical realist novels. How does one combine the elements of reality and fantasy effectively? What about the stylized, often dense, always clever, language, the elaborate wordplay that someone like Rushdie is famous for? How do you cinematize a voice? The magical realist novel is characterized by a whirl of language and a baroque accumulation of concrete and sensory detail. It is informed with deep self-conscious post-colonial irony that weaves together multiple narrative strands, and layers the political with the personal, the natural with the supernatural.
The most celebrated examples in the genre, such as Ben Okri's The Famished Road or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits have never been filmed successfully. Mike Newell's adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera is probably the worst adaptation of a work of literature I have ever seen.
The non-linear narratives, the accumulation of detail, the rush of language, are all elements of magical realism that the exponents, notably from Latin America, have used to subvert the traditional Western forms of story-telling. The style and voice are as much a part of these books as their plots or eccentric characters. How can these elements be adapted for the screen, and if they are not, then isn't there a danger that the vision of the novel will be forever overshadowed by the more mundane, entertaining, and undoubtedly more accessible representation of the film?
Perhaps a saving grace comes when the novelist himself writes the screenplay. Last spring, at Emory, Rushdie and Mehta discussed their collaboration and the understandable decision that he would be the one to write it. Who else would have had the nerve? Rushdie said he "could be disrespectful of the text in a way no one else could be," while others "might have been crippled by respect."
And let's face it, the fact that it's his screenplay makes this film a little bit special. One can't help but be curious about what he chose to include and what he chose to leave out. One of the things both he and Mehta harped on was how they almost uncannily agreed on the list of narrative events that should be included in the movie. Mehta saw it as a good omen. Rushdie reiterated why he thought Mehta was the right person for the project after several failed attempts in the past by other filmmakers to impress him. About Mehta, he said, "We are trying to make the same movie."
But writing the screenplay wasn't easy, even for him. From an early draft that was two hundred pages long, way too long for a film, to strip it down to its final length took over a year. And it wasn't painless for the novelist to hack away at his book and leave out no doubt beloved sections. In order to do this, Rushdie and Mehta had to do some serious thinking. "What's the essence of the story? What story do you have to tell without which it would not be Midnight's Children? What can you strip away?" One thing that made it easier was not only that it was his own book "but (his) own book from a long time ago," approximately three decades. Of course, he ended saying that having adapted the novel "three times too many" – once for a BBC mini series that was never made, once for a Royal Shakespeare Company play, and now for this film – he will hopefully never have to do it again.
At the time, Mehta refused to divulge much about the film, including who would play the adult Saleem Sinai who had already been cast. All she would say was, "He has a perfect nose. We might need prosthetics." In what seems to be a delicious irony, it's now been revealed that Saleem is being played by Satya Bhabha, the actor who played Matthew Patel in Scott Pilgrim and the World. He is of course the son of none other than Homi Bhabha, leading post-colonial theorist and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard.
Bhabha's ideas of hybridity and mimicry of the colonizer as resistance, expressed in his landmark book The Location of Culture (1994) became fundamental concepts in post-colonial theory. That his son, with a British accent, is playing Saleem, is interesting to say the least. And perhaps a little unfortunate for the actor who deserves to be judged on his performances alone.
However, the irony of Bhabha's son playing the protagonist of a landmark postcolonial novel, a work that is also a narrative of India's Independence, cannot be ignored.
Who understands the experiences of hybridity and liminal spaces better than Satya Bhabha, who was born to an Indian father and German Jewish mother, grew up in England and was educated in the US? Well, perhaps Salman Rushdie does. For who has used the colonizer's language to subvert literary tradition better than him? Rushdie has often been accused of elitism and of not being really Indian, whatever that means, by several Indian writers. Homi Bhabha has himself, like other postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, faced the same allegation. Perhaps it is quite fitting then that Saleem Sinai, himself a rather cosmopolitan, hybrid character, whose own identity is always in question – Whose son is he? Where does he belong? - should be played by the younger Bhabha.
Yet, this casting does give rise to a question that has been plaguing me in recent times, ever since I watched an Indian "slumdog" speaking with a British accent. Why are Indian characters, when featured in English-language movies directed by Western or diasporic filmmakers, so frequently played by Western actors with pronounced British accents? Is it to better reach Western audiences and distributors? This may not, in itself, be a bad thing, but it does raise the issue of how Indian are these films and if they are not, then should they be claimed as such? It was one thing to have Indian-born Ben Kingsley play Gandhi in 1982, in the pre-globalization era, but now, with more and more talented, cosmopolitan – there's that word again – Indian actors around and hungry for global recognition, why do we still see British actors playing Indian protagonists?
Of course the argument can be made that in a global world where many of us increasingly occupy liminal spaces, national distinctions and generic borders cease to matter. Perhaps there is no other novel that would enable this discussion better than the one that revels in the pickling and "chutnification of history." Perhaps the best person to answer these questions is Homi Bhabha himself.
I have succumbed, despite my best intentions, to the temptation of analyzing the film version of Midnight's Children as a post-colonial text even before it goes into post-production. Can it, once released, escape the fate of becoming a scrutinized text in classrooms? Unlikely. Fortunately or unfortunately, English-language films adapted from contemporary novels, such as Mira Nair's The Namesake (adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri's book) end up as the subject of seminar papers, scholarly articles, and university exams in a way that contemporary regional-language Indian cinema often does not even when it's obviously informed by the same concerns and identity politics.
Yet, at the end of the day, it's important to remember this. Deepa Mehta is making a movie, not a post-colonial or post-modern text. She emphasized that the idea was not to make a visual representation of the book but to make a film that "stands on its own, keeping the themes of the novel intact." Comparison between two different mediums is, however inevitable, in the end unfair. This was the final, unspoken verdict implicit in the graduate course Rushdie taught at Emory this year, called "Great Works of Fiction Made Into Great Films."
After spending a semester reading Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), Alberto Moravia's Contempt, Joyce's short story, The Dead, and Nabokov's Lolita, and watching the film adaptations by Ray, Jon-Luc Goddard, John Huston, and Kubrick respectively, students and audiences may have realized what they knew all along. That literature and cinema are two completely different art forms, and what is transferred from one to another in an adaptation are, essentially, the story and the themes.
I happened to sit in on the final class which was a discussion of Lolita, the book and the film. By the end of the three hour discussion where almost every important difference between the two texts was examined, I came away feeling like the goat who thought the movie tasted quite good, but the book was even better. The emphasis here is on the word "even". I love books. Lolita is a brilliant book. Period. This does not undermine Kubrick's interesting and funny film, as much as it prioritizes for me personally the position of literature.
But where would great filmmakers get their inspiration from if not from the world's best storytellers? Mehta probably chose the novel because of its dramatic, sweeping, highly entertaining story. At Emory she said, gleefully, "It's a great yarn…a journey of despair, happiness, love, rejection, and finally hope."
She's right. Forget the politics and the scholarship for a moment – even though I myself obviously find it hard to do that, having studied the novel in four universities on three continents and taken doctoral comprehensive exams on it – and think about the fun factor of Midnight's Children. The love story where Saleem's grandfather catches his first glimpse of his wife through a hole in a sheet, the swapping of babies at birth, Jamila's singing, the villainous politician razing slums and forcibly sterilizing the poor, the location changes from idyllic Kashmir to cosmopolitan Bombay to political Delhi, Saleem's "unspeakable sister-love," the supernatural powers of midnight's children.
The book is informed by Rushdie's wicked sense of humour. The characters are idiosyncratic and delightful. The twists and turns in the plot provide unending entertainment. Everything about the novel is larger than life. How can this not be a highly enjoyable film?
In the hands of a more mainstream Bollywood director, it may have run the risk of becoming over the top, with or without hissing cobras. Luckily, Mehta, who has already adapted one novel that deals (more prominently) with partition, Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man (published in the US as Cracking India), is an intelligent filmmaker who doesn't want to turn the book into an extravaganza.
She clarified last year before shooting began that the two films she envisioned as influences on Midnight's Children were The Leopard and Mizoguchi's UgetsuI, where the ghost's appearance, as Rushdie pointed out, is always naturalistic and subtle, not like "a fairy tale". It turns out that those are two of Rushdie's favourite films as well, once again confirming that the two have, "every step of the way, been instinctively on the same page".
Trying to articulate her vision of the film, Mehta said she wanted to combine wide shots with tight shots, an alternating of opening and constriction of the lens, to film the more realistic and the magical or absurd events in the same film. She insisted that the magical elements will be "classy, not showy," subtle, not over the top, a blend of both lyrical and classical elements. Hearing her speak, it was hard not to be both curious and excited about the final product.
One only hopes that amidst all the hype that's inevitably going to accompany the film's release next year, Indian moviegoers will be able to watch it other than through pirated DVDs. So far, the film has been, according to reports, pre-sold in half a dozen countries including France, China, Canada, Japan, and England. But it has not found a single distributor in India yet. What reasons lie behind this lack of interest there? In Molen's report, she reminds us of the past controversies revolving around both Mehta, whose film Fire provoked Hindu fundamentalists to shut down theatres and Rushdie of course who is still hounded by Muslim fundamentalists, with officials from Iran reportedly having tried to stop the recent filming in Sri Lanka.
I remember camping outside Mehta's hotel room in Calcutta about ten years ago as a newspaper reporter, in the vain hope of getting an interview when the state government banned her from shooting Water there. Ultimately, that film too had to be shot in Sri Lanka.
But these controversies would surely help promote the new film in India. Yes, the film deals with political events such as Partition, but so do many Bollywood productions in recent times. Even the representation – we do not know how much if any of it is in the film, but I would certainly expect it given its importance in the book - of Indira Gandhi's Emergency and her son's razing of slums and forcible sterilization surely cannot be censored in 2011. Or can it?
It's likely that the main reason distributors aren't beating down the producer's door is because English-language Indian cinema does not command as substantial an audience in India as they would like. Add to that a film based on a highly complex, literary and not easily accessible novel, and there might be worry about box office returns. One suspects – or hopes anyway – that over the next year or so, excitement will rise in the subcontinent. It would be absurd, no pun intended, if the film weren't released in Indian theatres.
And while they're at it, authorities might want to consider lifting the ban on The Satanic Verses in India too. It's about time. How Indian resident Indians consider Rushdie to be on their scale of Indianness is up to them (I suppose), but what he and his books have done for Indian writers and the publishing industry is indisputable.
In the meantime, while we wait for what promises to be one of the most talked-about movie releases of next year, here's a quote from Rushdie's introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of Midnight's Children, published in 2005:
"Like all novels, Midnight’s Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways which its author cannot wholly know. I am very glad that it still seems like a book worth reading in this very different time. If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure. I will not be around to see that. But I am happy that I saw it leap the first hurdle."
The release of the film version of this remarkable novel next year might well ensure that it becomes accessible to another generation or two. Movies, thankfully, have a way of doing that to books.
Comments
0 comment