For years I had been lead to believe that the Indian cinema basically consisted of the florid excesses of Bollywood and the restrained humanism of Satyajit Ray. No-one told me that it could be as marvellous as this, combining the vibrant, visual energy of Bollywood, the depth of character of Ray, with a narrative complexity, formal daring, and willingness to experiment alien to both.
Like that other overwhelming Indian masterpiece I experienced recently, 'The Cloud-Capped Star', the film betrays a knowledge and mastery of the Hollywood melodrama, taking not only its visual cue from it (compositions that constrict characters; lighting and editing that reflect sensibility rather than reality etc.), but its use of a despised, populist form to create a charged, critical work.
Many of the characters recur through Indian cinema - the workshy men who produce only dreams, sapping their families; the women forced to become breadwinners in a rigidly patriarchal society, often becoming hardened and soul-calloused in the process; the children who seem to breathe the fresh air of a freer future, but are eventually suffocated by tradition and circumstance.
And Benegal doesn't stint on the melodramatic aspects. The expected emotional rollercoaster is here - quiet joys (a walk in a beautiful countryside; joking about with friends) alternating with scenes of harrowing violence (the beating of a young girl; the dragging of an unfaithful wife to swear fidelity before an altar).
What is different from Ray, say, is that these are put into an intelligently worked out context. Not some spurious historical one - Rajan listens to the radio droning, useful for giving us chronological markers otherwise absent. People's lives don't change in spite of the shattering historical events going on we normally think of as important. Benegal is interested in the lives that exist parallel to official history, that remain untouched.
this is where his complex narrative framework comes into effect - the present story punctuated by sepia flashbacks. This format is now a narrative cliche, but Benegal richly patterns his, creating a vicious circle imprisoning his heroine, doomed to repeat the mistakes of her mother and grandmother, just, we fear, as her daughter and granddaughter will repeat hers. Trapped in a loveless marriage, or, later, literally in the house of a fundamentalist lover, she is also trapped in time, in narrative, as a woman in a society where being a woman is a role, it doesn't matter who fills it.
The film is full of repetitions, of the heroine being brought back to scenes again and again, situations, people. The pretexts for these scenes may change, but their fundamental character - someone else wielding power over her - remains unaltered; any escape can only lead to humiliation, degradation, violence, becoming an outcast, a broken non-person, stripped of a role that is not life-defining, but life itself.
This is why 'The Role' is such a brilliant film about films; not naval-gazing about itself like Hollywood or il Maestro, but showing how popular modes can reinforce certain roles for their audience. The heroine may be an actress, but there are no paparazzi or glitzy cars here: for all her popularity, she is socially despised. ironically, although the Bollywood movies she stars in may seem formulaic, they give her an acceptable forum with which to express her anguish - as well as allowing her the freedom to try out roles (including a gender-bending swashbuckler), and to question assumptions, normally denied her in real life. The film may reveal the gap between fantasy and reality, but the distinction is never THAT easy.
