India’s first global gong in 20 years!

Director Chaitanya Tamhane decodes Venice's Best Screenplay and Special Jury award-winning Marathi film, The Disciple, as it drops on Netflix

While it’s not listed on his IMDb, director Chaitanya Tamhane feels almost as if he has three features to his credit — Court (2014), The Disciple (2020, which drops on Netflix, April 30). Third being? Alfonso Cuaron’s Best Director, Cinematographer and Foreign Film Oscar winner, Roma (2018). Tamhane was around all through the filming of Roma, besides during the edit. He’s the only one who had read the movie’s script; not even the cast and crew had. And the only one allowed to sit before the monitor, while the movie was being shot: “It was that kinda super-secret project!” 

A mentorship programme had brought Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gravity), and Tamhane together, wherein the latter was neither assistant nor student: “It was a dialogue between two creators. Just that one artiste happens to be in a different phase of their career.”

A still from The Disciple

Cuaron treated Tamhane as an equal, “a friend.” As is usual with the securely accomplished. There was a scene during Roma’s shoot that Tamhane felt wasn’t consistent with the rest of the film. Cuaron tried a different take, and turned to him to remark, “Your questions really freak me out!” Tamhane doesn’t specifically recall which scene, perhaps to not deflect attention from the master’s work. 

He was, for the most part “a fly on the wall” — on occasion unwittingly distracting Cuaron, by performing magic tricks during lunch break, that the producers had to drag him out of. Which isn’t a surprise: “Any film-lover and filmmaker would be fascinated by magic. It’s so close to cinema. Cuaron kept asking me to show him more tricks.”

He would’ve of course been first drawn to Tamhane, like film-buffs across, for a proverbially Tiger Woodsian directorial debut, the multi-lingual Court — a devastatingly realist  portrayal of lower judiciary in India. 

Chaitanya Tamhane

This is how the Mexican master is now executive producer of Tamhane’s second film, The Disciple — altogether in Marathi, set in the “thriving” sub-culture of Hindustani classical music (in Mumbai). The only recent Indian folk/classical music and global-cinema connect, I can think of, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 
concert doc Junun (2015), filmed at the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. 

That’s a soundtrack. The Disciple dives way deeper into the guru-shishya (master-disciple) parampara, which frames traditional learning of Hindustani classical music.

It’s a world Tamhane was himself a journalistic outsider to, taking around two years to simply interview/research, examining “truth and untruth, point and counterpoint”, and actually drafting the final script in about a month and half, once he’d eventually got to the tough first page!

Alfonso Cuaron

A patient process, I guess, quite similar to Court. Which he recalls was triggered off by a story he’d heard of a person falsely arrested in a case. The accused just needed a printout to prove his alibi/innocence. But the cops in the station were bumbling over how to plug in the printer, or produce a printout. Tamhane was watching a typical American courtroom drama thereafter, wondering for a comic idea, “What if I do a ‘Bong Joon-ho court-room drama’, set in a lower court of Mumbai?” He learnt about the ‘system’, as he went along. 

He isn’t sure if there was an equivalent trigger for The Disciple. But the starting point was essentially legends and anecdotes he’d listen to — presumably from audiences, experts and exponents — about the masters of Indian classical music:  “Modern day mythologies about djinns, secret ragas, long hours of practice…”

The film, primarily placed in 2006, follows the life of a young, dedicated vocalist (Aditya Modak), and his evolving relationship with classical art, his aged mentor/guru (Arun Dravid), and the world around. Hopefully I’m not revealing the script’s secret sauce to suggest this isn’t quite a hero’s journey, as it were. 

That standard structure Tamhane wanted to steer clear of, anyway: “What’s the point of a story that I know, from the first scene, how it’s gonna end? There is anyway too much focus on the hero, and his conquest-driven journey, and his achievement. A discourse like: ‘If you try hard enough, and believe in yourself, you’ll get it’. No. That’s not true for 99 per cent — people who work for us, or clean our toilets, have dreams and aspirations. But they have zero upward mobility.” 

The other trope he evidently avoids, given the subject, is an aggressive tone/drama, often associated with the tyranny of the master-student culture in music, in particular. Recall the more recent series, Bandish Bandits (Amazon Prime Video). Or, for that matter, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014).  

Tamhane reasons, “Those deviations are based on personal, observable truth — that artistes are just humans, like you and me, with down time, contradictions and temptations. There is no extreme success, or extreme tragedy. And we don’t all end up either superstars, or drunk on the road! We adapt to situations with so many greys.”

The film therefore isn’t fully clouded by the mythology surrounding the idea of the great artiste, so to say. It isn’t an unquestioning hagiography, purposed around bhakti. It is dialectic enough. 

This may have something to do with Tamhane’s journalistic approach itself, and the attendant occupational hazard — that Shakespearean saying about familiarity, and contempt: “Research is a journey [you set off on with] romance in your head. The more you know, the romance gets demystified, which can also happen by knowing the artistes, rather than merely hearing about [them]. As a [fiction] writer, you have to infuse the romance back into the work — reminding yourself why you were fascinated by the subject in the first place.” 

The film’s third lead character (or perhaps second, in order of appearance) is a voice-over of a late, great vocalist, named Maai. On the script, Tamhane had written this part as God. Hearing an interview of veteran Marathi filmmaker Sumitra Bhave, 78, he knew he’d found that authoritative voice that almost guides the narrative — managing to convince her to make her acting debut. Bhave passed away on April 19. 

Similarly, Vira Sathidar, Nagpur-based Dalit activist, who played the protagonist (the lok shahi poet) in Court is no more. “His death [on April 13] has completely changed my relationship with the film. He was the face,” Tamhane says. Like Court, The Disciple chiefly stars non-professional actors.

The lingering, steady, wide frames from a distance allow audiences an interrupted access into the world Tamhane surveys — revealing through layer after layer, the fine details of classical music as a scene/sub-culture — playing with sound, and playing off real people, if you may. 

The Bombay, for the most part, is a quieter version of the city: “[There is some] sorcery to depict the period — 2006 is very different from Bombay in 2021. Also the city starts out as full of possibilities for [the young lead character] Sharad. The [quiet] night becomes his haven/cocoon, where he doesn’t have to confront reality. The city starts getting noisy, dynamic and closing in on the character as his journey progresses.”
 
Through that journey you discover more than a thing or two about classical music, of course: “That, like a politician, you’re young at 40 in this field — that it’s impossible to be a fluke/overrated.”

Subtly, Tamhane also round-trips to make a more personal point about art itself, and its relationship to patronage. The guru-shishya in The Disciple belongs to a fictional Alwar gharana. The gharanas, as their names suggest, relate to princely states, that don’t exist anymore. Does art suffer as a result?

Tamhane points out: “Look at patronage for cinema. Is that why we confuse breadth for depth; quantity for quality? There are no independent institutions to fund cinema [in India] anymore. Like there are in Europe, and elsewhere —and that’s why you find more refined films, commenting on the human condition. Here it’s a do or die kinda situation.”

The Disciple is the first Indian film, in 20 years — ever since the New York-based Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding  (2001) — to compete at the main competition stage of any of the Big Three (global film festivals) — Cannes, Berlin, Venice.

Tamhane picked up Best Screenplay, along with FIPRESCI (special jury) prize for Best Film at Venice. Having seen the film only now, unlike when Jallikattu was sent as India’s Oscars entry, it’s a mystery to me why The Disciple was overlooked. It should piss Tamhane off. He reasons, “But this is a question for others to ponder over. We did what we could, which is to apply.” Maybe guru Cuaron should’ve weighed in!

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