Seven Islands And A Metro English Movie
It's not often that we get a visual and spiritual insight into a city like Mumbai. For starters, to define its multiculturalism is as tough as catching a portion of the sky in your hands.
Madhusree Dutta, alumni of the National School of Drama (NSD), pursues this elusive dream to visually represent what is at best an idea, vision and dream called Mumbai in her docu-drama "Seven Islands & A Metro".
The ethnic multitude of the city is captured not so much in words, but in the narration, that features fictional voices of Urdu writers Sadat Hassan Manto and Ismat Chugtai.
It's the common people - the grass-root level migrants, the fisherwomen, the bar girls and the neighbourhood coffee-wallah from a north Indian village - that give a tangible flavour to Dutta's slice-of-life representation of a city that's indescribably restless.
Dutta's cameraman Avijit Mukul Kishore gives priority to people instead of the architecture of the city. While the rich and privileged elite of Mumbai remain largely in the background, the grassroots level comes to life in stinging vignettes of un-staged drama.
The bar girl, who looks emotionless, says: "I get Rs.2,000 to cover my face and Rs.1,000 to uncover it"; the coffee-wallah cycling down Mumbai's highway narrates his tragic love story from back home; stunt queen Reshma, who did actress Hema Malini's famous tonga chase in "Sholay", looks at us and says, "Tell me what was lacking that I couldn't become a top heroine?"
Questions, questions... What drives destiny to favour some, shun most?
What drives hundreds of migrants every week into Mumbai, impelling a Koli fisherwoman to look into the camera with her tired eyes to say, "We've been uprooted in our own city by migrants."
Then there's the terrifying underbelly of intolerance growing among the ostensibly decent enlightened section of Mumbaikars.
An Anglo-Indian woman, well meaning for all outward purposes, says, "Why do they all come to Mumbai? Don't they have food and jobs in Bihar?"
Dutta captures the tough poignancy and amazing grit of a city forever on the edge.
The editing (Reena Mohan and Shyamal Karmarkar) is purposely loose, as though to capture a city running out of time and space, but still finding a core of humanity in its cluttered underbelly.
What adds to the extraordinary tenor of non-judgemental insights are the locations and people - all real and familiar and yet unexplored in a way every individual is.
"Seven Islands & A Metro" looks at the heart of a city with affection, pride and sorrow.
The question swimming just below the surface is - does the city get its looming pride and prejudice from its cosmopolitan profile? Or is the mythical 'cosmopolitanism' now a jaded dream waiting to be wiped out by sectional self-destructive biases?
Thought-provoking, stimulating and sobering, "Seven Islands & A Metro" gets its glory from its maker's penchant to look unblinkingly at an indefinable city.
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