“The Householder” - James Ivory (1963)

Sometimes an epiphanous moment can elevate what was otherwise merely a good film to the level of greatness. So it was, with a scene near the close, for The Householder (1963), a contemporary domestic drama set in Delhi. The film tells the story of how a young man and woman, brought together in an arranged marriage, try to come to terms with being on their own in the big city. I will come to that epiphany-inducing scene later.

This work is notable for being the first collaboration of the famed Merchant-Ivory production team, whose eclectic background comprised

• James Ivory, an American-born film director who originally started making documentaries.
• Ismail Merchant, an Indian Muslim film producer. 
• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a woman novelist of German Jewish parentage who was born Ruth Prawer, but who took on her husband’s name when she married Parsi Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala and moved to India in 1951.

At this point Merchant and Ivory, who had first met in 1959, were just starting out, and they were looking for a suitable script to make their first feature film together.  They enlisted actress Leela Naidu for one project, but their financial backers did not like their film script and dropped the project.  Then Ms. Naidu suggested to Merchant and Ivory that they try making a film of a novel that she liked, The Householder; and so they approached the novel’s author, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, which was the initiation of their long partnership [1].

Actually this initial Merchant-Ivory outing bears more similarities to Satyajit Ray’s cinematic work than it does to later Merchant-Ivory offerings – and no wonder.  Satyajit Ray, who was already more experienced and established than the fledgling Ivory-Merchant team, was a major contributor and influence on the film’s production.  Ray essentially acted as a mentor for Ivory and Merchant, loaning them his cameraman, Subrata Mitra, as well as some of his stock actors. In addition, Ray, who was an accomplished musician and composer, took charge of the music production and enlisted the services of famed sarod musician Ali Akbar Khan. In the end, Ray also re-edited the final version of the film.  So the Satyajit-Ray feel to The Householder is certainly no accident, and we might consider Ray to be a contributing auteur.

Above and beyond these valuable production values, though, is what I think is the most important virtue of this film: the sensitive acting on the part of the principal characters.  To this end, Ivory was fortunate to have at his disposal some experienced acting talent, notably:

• Shashi Kapoor, who plays the young husband, Prem Sagar.  Shashi Kapoor came from an almost dynastic Indian cinema family, which included his acclaimed brother, actor-director Raj Kapoor.
• Leela Naidu plays Indu, Prem’s wife.  In 1954 at the age of fourteen, she had been crowned  Femina Miss India – the Indian candidate for the Miss Universe contest – and had been listed by Vogue magazine as one of the ten most beautiful women in the world [1].
• In addition there were several supporting players who were well-established and long-serving actors in Indian cinema and who added dramatic emphasis to their roles:
• Durga Khote, who plays Prem's domineering mother,
• Achla Sachdev, who plays the landlord’s wife, Mrs. Saigal, and
• Harindranath Chattopadhyay, who plays Prem’s self-serving senior colleague, Mr. Channa.

The most important elements of all, though, were the performances of Kapoor and Naidu. They make this film what it is.  Note that the contrast between the acting styles of these performers is what makes this film particularly effective. While the older performers (such as Khote, Sachdev, and Chattopadhyay) are emphatic and theatrical, the younger leads (Kapoor and Naidu) are subtly withdrawn and more sensitive. As the characters played by Kapoor and Naidu find themselves dominated in situations in which they don’t know how to react, they often remain silent – but they express themselves by subtle glances and expressions to which the viewer increasingly becomes attuned.  I believe that it is this delicate dimension of expression, as manipulated by Ivory and the performers, that makes the film outstanding.

At the outset, the viewer is presented with verses 87 and 89 from Chapter VI of The Laws of Manu (Manusmrti) that reflect ancient Vedic wisdom dating back some 3,000 years concerning the four ordained stages of a man’s life [2]:               

“The student, the householder, the hermit, and the ascetic, these constitute four separate orders, which all spring from the order of householders.” (verse 87)

“And in accordance with the precepts of the Veda and of the Smriti, the householder is declared to be superior to all of them; for he supports the other three.” (verse 89)

The story begins with Prem (Shashi Kapoor) and Indu (Leela Naidu) attending the wedding of one of Prem’s colleague’s brothers.  As Prem looks at the groom, on whose sullen brow appears to rest the heavy weight of Indian tradition associated with his arranged marriage, Prem reflects on his own experience of an arranged marriage over the past year, and he lapses into an extended flashback that constitutes the bulk of the film.

Prem is shown as a junior teacher at a small urban college.  He is barely able to control his unruly students, and he is intimidated by the college’s domineering principal, Mr. Khanna, who is often accompanied by the sycophantic senior teacher, Mr. Channa. At home, Prem gets no comfort from his new wife, whom he did not apparently choose and whom he barely knows. He is frustrated to see his idle wife, who has no domestic skills, laze about all day, while he is busy working for his miserably low salary of 180 rupees per month.

For her part, Indu is bored, and she, like Prem, looks back on her teenage years when she could frolic about with her friends and have all her needs catered for.  When Prem and Indu attend a faculty tea party hosted by Mr.  and Mrs. Khanna, Prem is humiliated in front of his colleagues to see his wife uncouthly gorging herself on sweets at the table, while the other ladies look on disapprovingly. 

Prem’s dissatisfaction is getting clearly laid out.  He frets about having no money.  He is insecure about his job.  And he gets no satisfaction from his wife, who is like a stranger to him.   Much of the ensuing focalization of the film is centered on Prem and his frustrations in these areas.

Soon Prem is faced with a further problem – he learns that Indu is pregnant.  When he complains that he cannot afford another mouth to feed, Indu becomes angry and says she will return home to her family.  So as a householder Prem is unable to manage all the circumstances around him – his professional life at the college, his finances, and his wife.  To help deal with the latter problem, he sends a message for his mother in his remote home town to come to live with them in Delhi during his wife’s pregnancy.

As soon as Prem’s mother (Durga Khote) shows up, however, things become worse. The mother is possessive about Prem and highly critical of her new daughter-in-law’s domestic capabilities. Soon Prem is unsuccessfully trying to serve as a neutral moderator between the two feuding ladies. Hoping to mollify Indu, he buys her a nice saree, but when he arrives home, he discovers that she had become fed up, packed her bags, and left for her parent’s home.

Weeks go by, and despite their past quarreling, Prem realizes that he misses his absent wife.  He prepares a letter to her (it’s not clear whether he actually sends it):

“Why did you go away?  What hurt did I do that you had to go away from me?  When are you coming back?  Already you have been gone three weeks."

Bewildered by how to cope with his new life, Prem seeks counsel from friends concerning how to get a pay raise and how to deal with married life.  An older, married pal, Raj, tells him you have to be tough with women.  But this advice doesn’t suit Prem’s more sympathetic temperament.  On the other hand, his teaching colleague, Sohanlal, is kindly but seems spineless.       

Prem encounters a youthful American spiritual tourist, Ernest (Ernest Castaldo) who has come to India on his personal “journey to the East” in search of enlightenment. Ernest’s enthusiasm for everything mystical is puzzling to Prem, who is trying to deal with the world’s more down-to-earth problems. When Prem speaks to Ernest about how he misses his wife, Ernest gushes that “everything is Maya”, and therefore dismissible. 

This part of the film is weak because of the ludicrously histrionic characterizations of Ernest and his associates presented as naive spiritual seekers. On the other hand, when you think about it, it offers up an intriguing "double-distancing" on the part of the narrative witness.  The film (as I saw it) is presented here in English [3], so we have a Western audience seeing a situation from the perspective of an Indian native.  Now to a native Indian, the sight of American spiritual tourists must be at least as exotic as a mystical “Easterner” might appear to a Western viewer.  So the filmmakers have put the Western viewer metaphorically into the Easterner’s frame, so to speak, by showing in this respect the spiritual seekers not at all realistically, but as outlandish caricatures that convey how bizarre they must appear to an Indian.  Perhaps this double distancing (i.e. the displaced, extra perspective of the narrative witness) arose from the unusual eclecticism of the filmmakers [4].

Eventually Sohanlal introduces Prem to his spiritual guide, a genuine Hindu Swami (Pahadi Sanyal). Prem, perhaps inspired by Ernest, is swept away by the Swami’s calm spirituality and vows to become his loyal disciple.  But the Swami tells him that at this stage of his life, he should  attend to his duties as a householder. He can seek enlightenment with the Swami later.

When Prem comes back to his apartment, he discovers to his delight that Indu has returned. He quickly agrees to arrange to have his meddlesome mother return to her own family. Things appear to be improving. But he still has his wretched material circumstances to deal with.  On Raj’s suggestion, he composes letters to give to his principal, Mr. Khanna (asking for a pay raise) and to his landlord, Mr. Saigal (asking for a modest rent reduction). 

But like all his past efforts, he bungles these operations, and they all come to nothing.  He returns home disconsolate, telling Indu that it is all hopeless and that noone cares.  All his frustrations as a householder catch up with him, and he cannot hide his sadness from Indu.

But then there comes that wonderful moment.  Indu smiles and says to him,

“What does it matter? We will manage. . . .

You’re crying.  What is there to cry?  So let them all go. 
I am here.  You are here.  Don’t do it.  

Just once let me see you smile, . . . ., only once. 

There!   You are happy. 

Say it.  Say, 'I’m happy'.  

Of course, you are,   
and I also. “

With that beautiful moment, Prem’s life as a householder is redeemed, and so is the film. The Swami’s advice was wise. We see how the householder can get his or her own glimpse of nirvana . . . . through love.
★★★★

Notes:

1. “Leela Naidu”, Wikipedia (6/4/2015).
2. “The Laws of Manu”, George Bühler, translator, Internet Sacred Tex Archive,  (Sacred Books of the East, Volume 25). 
3. There were actually two separate versions of the film made, one in English and one in Hindi.
4. Indeed, consider the following East-West combinations of the filmmakers:
• Ivory (a Protestant American) and Merchant (an Indian Muslim), besides being lifelong professional collaborators, were also "life partners".
• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a German Jew, was married to an Indian Parsi.
• Shashi Kapoor (an Indian) was married to a Jennifer Kendal (a British actress).
• Leela Naidu’s father was an Indian physicist, and her mother was a Swiss-French journalist.

“The End of Summer” - Yasujiro Ozu (1961)

Yasujiro Ozu’s penultimate film, The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke No Aki, 1961),  had several similarities with his previous work, Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960).  We would naturally expect similarities in connection with Ozu’s unique style of visual expression, but the commonalities between these two films also extended to characters, themes, and even the leading actresses. 

Ozu’s visual style is, of course, what stands out when we encounter one of his films.  In this respect there are two main aspects: (a) narrative presentation and (b) visual expression.

• Narrative Presentation.
  Ozu usually tells his entire story by presenting a series of short conversations between the main participants, which, because of their being situated in the layered social context of Japanese cordiality, consist mostly of polite small talk. The pace is leisurely, with many connecting shots showing (a) people simply looking idly into the mirror as they dress, (b) putting on clothes, or (c) walking down a hallway to answer a phone, etc.  This is all part of Ozu’s use of the “slow disclosure” narrative technique, whereby the viewer only gradually discerns the background context of a given situation.  On top of this, Ozu often omits presenting key action events of the story; the viewer only learns about these events when they are discussed later in one of the film’s short conversations.  This at first may sound like intentional obfuscation on Ozu’s part, but it has the effect of drawing the viewer into the important social context that is a key aspect of the story.
   
• Visual Expression.
  Ozu relies heavily on static, low-angle medium shots that cumulatively can have a hypnotic effect on the viewer.  In some of these conversations, the speaking character is shown to be looking straight into the camera, which has the psychological effect of engaging the viewer (who is normally the “invisible witness” to what is happening), directly with the character speaking.  In addition there are almost no moving-camera shots, although there is some cutting on action. Sometimes specific conversational contexts are punctuated by interspersed static cityscape shots that are devoid of people.  These cityscape moments break up the flow and often serve to mark the passage of a bit of time. 

In the following I will use abbreviations to indicate two of the key Ozu technique when they occur in the narrative.  MA means that some “missing action” has taken place off-camera, and the viewer must infer what has happened.  SIC means that a particular character is looking “straight into the camera” when he or she is speaking, which suggest moments when particular sincerity is being expressed. (In this film it seems to me that there is an unusually high percentage of SIC shots – even for Ozu.)

Thematically, Ozu’s films often covered various issues associated with the Japanese family as it was affected by the entire society undergoing significant postwar social upheaval.  These issues included

• Cross-generational issues,
• Tradition versus modernity,
• Individual authenticity versus social role-playing,
• Selfish opportunism versus empathy for others,
• Fatalism versus determined ambition.

What makes The End of Summer rather complicated compared to the rest of Ozu’s oeuvre is that all of these issues are touched on in this film. 

There are nine principal characters in the story, and they each represent a position in this multidimensional social issue context.  So the viewer has a lot to keep track of.  In fact, although the English title for the film is "The End of Summer”, the Japanese title, “Kohayagawa-ke No Aki”, means in English, “Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family”, and what this film presents is a rather wide-spectrum view of how this complicated extended family is dissolving.  The nine key characters are

• Kohayagawa Manbei (played by Ganjiro Nakamura) is the elderly patriarch of the Kohayagawa family and is the owner of a sake brewery.
• Akiko (Setsuko Hara) is Manbei's widowed daughter-in-law. (Setsuko Hara had important roles in many Ozu films.)
• Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa) is Manbei's youngest daughter.  In this film Yoko Tsukasa and Setsuko Hara almost reprise their respective roles and their relationship they had in Ozu’s immediately preceding Late Autumn, as the “younger (modern) woman” and the “older (traditional) woman” both searching for meaningful relationships in marriage.
• Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) is Manbei's older daughter and is married to Hisao.
• Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi) is Fumiko's husband and works in the family-owned sake brewery office.
• Sasaki Tsune (Chieko Naniwa) is the former mistress of Manbei.
• Yuriko (Reiko Dan) is the Ms. Sasaki’s daughter.
• Kitagawa Yanosuke (Daisuke Kato) is referred to as the “uncle," and Manbei's brother-in-law.  (Daisuke Kato had memorable roles in Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), , and Yojimbo (1961).)
• Isomura Eiichirou (Hisaya Morishige) is a man interested in marrying Akiko.

The wearing apparel of these characters is revealing in connection with their association with modernity.  Manbei, Ms. Sasaki, Akiko, and Fumiko wear traditional Japanese gowns and kimonos, while the rest of the men and women wear modern Western clothing. 

Although the film comprises a sequence of small conversations, we can group them into four phases of narrative development.

1.  Akiko and Noriko

The first part of the film revolves around attempts of the Kohayagawa family in Osaka to find suitable husbands for the thirty-something Akiko and the much younger Noriko.  In fact the film opens with Kitagawa Yanosuke at a cocktail lounge describing Akiko’s virtues as a marriage partner to Isomura Eiichirou.  Akiko is invited to join them for dinner for an “interview”, but her self-effacing politeness conceals whatever true feelings she may have about the proposed match-up.   It is only later that we learn that she declined the dinner invitation (MA).

There are three main theaters of action for the conversations here. 

1. Akiko, her teenage son, and Noriko live together in an apartment.  Whenever Akiko and Noriko speak to each other, they are always shown in SIC shots.
2. There is the sake brewery where Hisao works and Manbei visits occasionally (we soon learn that the sake brewery is not doing well financially). 
3. And there is the household of Hisao and Fumiko (they have a small son), where Manbei also lives. 

Later at the Fumiko home, Yanosuke comes to discuss Akiko’s marriage prospects with Isomura.  It is evident that the Kohayagawa family sees it as their obligation to find a suitable mate for the widow in their family, as well as finding a mate for Noriko. 

Then Noriko is shown at work in a modern office, where she is invited to a good-bye party for a male friend, Mr. Teramoto, who is not the man who has been selected by the “family” (Fumiko, Hisao, and Manbei), but to whom Noriko is romantically attracted.  To Noriko’s further dismay, Mr. Teramoto is about to leave Osaka, because he has accepted a faculty position in far-away Sapporo.  At the party, the assembled friends curiously sing a farewell song that has Japanese words, but to the tune of “Oh, My Darling Clementine”. Perhaps this was a further signal of the encroaching Western influence on Japanese life.

So far, the story interest has developed around Akiko and Noriko and how they will respond to the well-intentioned but coercive family pressure to find them marriage partners.  But at this point the narrative focus shifts to a new concern.

2.  Focus on Manbei
Manbei has been frequently away from the sake brewery running errands, and the brewery’s chief clerk wants to know why.  They soon learn that Manbei has been secretly seeing his old flame, Sasaki Tsune, with whom he had an adulterous affair that began some twenty years earlier.  Although, with Manbei now being a widower, his renewed relationship would seem innocent enough, he keeps it secret, because he knows that others around him will object.  In particular, his daughter Fumiko is highly suspicious of Manbei’s secretive behaviour and feels that he is not acting  appropriately for a man of his age.

When Manbei and Ms. Sasaki are shown alone together, they seem innocently cordial, with plenty of SIC shots when they converse.  Ms. Sasaki has a 21-year-old daughter, Yuriko, who shows up and appears to be Westernized and selfish.  When she sees Manbei, she calls him “Father” and nags him as to when he will give her a mink stole.  Later though, after Manbei leaves, Yuriko asks her mother if Manbei really is her father.  Her mother seems not to be sure, herself, and says it really doesn’t matter, anyway.

3.  Crisis in Arashiyama

Now they all go to attend a memorial service for “Mother’s” (Manbei’s deceased wife's) death to take place in Arashiyama, which is close to Kyoto and about fifty kilometers from Osaka.  We see Akiko and Noriko in conversation and learn that Akiko has already been presented with Isomura’s wedding proposal (MA), but is hesitant about it.  The rest of the family (Hisao, Fumiko, and Manbei) separately sit around a tea table and discuss the merits of the proposal, too.  At the same time Fumiko rudely taunts Manbei about the likelihood of his visiting someone in Kyoto (a veiled reference fo Ms. Sasaki).  Manbei is upset, leaves the room and soon reportedly has a heart attack (MA). 

A doctor is summoned, and various members of the extended Kohayagawa clan arrive from out of town, assuming that  Manbei’s death is imminent.  But miraculously, Manbei quickly makes a full recovery (MA) and seems as cheerful and robust as ever.

Meanwhile Akiko and Noriko privately discuss their further thoughts about marriage and whether they should accept the mates that have been selected for them.  Akiko advises that a girl should marry a man with “character” – “you can alter behaviour, but you can’t alter character.”

4 Kohayagawa Family Coming to a Close
In the film’s final phase, a climactic event initiates change.  This is marked by four conversations that each elliptically refer to offscreen action (MA).

• Manbei has sneaked away from his family again and taken Ms. Sasaki to a velodrome for bicycle racing where they can place wagers on the outcomes.
• Yanosuke and Isomura are waiting again at the same old cocktail lounge for Akiko to show up, and it is clear that Isomura has given up on the hesitant woman.
• Hisao and Fumiko are at home discussing why Manbei has sneaked away again.  Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Yuriko that Manbei has had another heart attack.
• Sasaki Tsune and her daughter Yuriko are shown sitting respectfully next to Manbei’s protrate body.  It takes some moments to discern that he is dead. While Ms. Sasaki appears devastated, Yuriko looks bored and attends to grooming her nails.  When her American boyfriend shows up to take her out on a date, Yuriko takes her leave of the corpse by crossing herself before, thereby suggesting that she has become a Christian.

The extended family members arrive again, and a funeral is held.  But it is all surface ceremony, and the inner family members are now more worried about what will happen to the sake brewery. Akiko and Noriko, walking alone in the cemetery, finally come to their decisions. Noriko vows to go to Sapporo and pursue her true love, while Akiko says she prefers to remain unmarried and attend to her teenage son by herself.

The overall message of The End of Summer  is not clear cut, and the roles the characters play with respect to Ozu’s traditional issues are mixed.  Reviewing those issues again, we see some unexpected positions:

• Cross-generational Issues and Tradition vs. Modernity. 
  Youth is normally identified with modernity, but in this film, the oldest person, Manbei, had a more free-wheeling outlook.  His daughter Fumiko, meanwhile, was steadfast in asserting traditional mores.
   
• Selfish Role-playing vs. Empathic Authenticity. 
  In some of Ozu’s other films the men are opportunists, taking advantage of traditional authority when it suits their purposes and embracing modernity when that proves to be the convenient option.  In this film, though, things are a little more complicated. Some of the women, particularly Yuriko, are self-absorbed, while Manbei seems attentive to others. Authentic interactions showing empathy and sincerity are signaled in the film by SIC shots, and these are most consistently associated with Akiko, Noriko, and Manbei.  But we know that Manbei is also selfish – he gambles away family money at the bicycle races and has had at least one adulterous affair.
   
• Fatalism vs. Ambition. 
  When Manbei’s body is cremated, two farmers are shown watching the smoke rising from the cremation smoke stack and reflecting on the transience of existence and the inevitability of change.  This is presumably the traditional Oriental fatalistic perspective, and it is sometimes seen as a virtue.  But Ozu’s perspective doesn’t seem to be so clear-cut on this point.  For the men in Ozu’s stories, a deep concern was the looming horrors of the faceless salaryman’s suffocating existence in modern business life – so movingly evoked in Early Spring (1956).  The salarymen are little more than robots attending to the dictates of what we now term “big data”.  This contrasted with the heroic self-image that most men (in every society) have been traditionally schooled to embrace and embody.  At the end of the film, the workers at the Kohayagawa sake brewery are faced with the likelihood of the brewery being bought out by a larger firm.  They would all then become the eviscerated salary men of their nightmares.

What kept these men from being salary men earlier?   It was Manbei, a spirited individual who took a direct interest in the people with whom he interacted. So with Manbei gone, a vital flame of the Kohayagawa family has gone out. At the end of the film, it is not the men, but two women, Akiko and Noriko, who decide to take control of their destinies. They are authentic and empathic, like Manbei (but hopefully a little more responsible).

Manbei’s reported last words were, “Is this it?  Is this really it?”  These are not the words of a man who is satisfied with his ending.  He is  asking, “is that all there is to it?”  He wants more.  So does Ozu, and so do we.

★★★

The Two Religions

There are two religious streams – call them, “Religion 1" and “Religion 2".  Many severe problems of the world have arisen from mixing and confusing these two streams.

• Religion 1 is founded on compassion and love.  It has appeared at many times and in many forms, but perhaps its purest expression is the tathagatagarbha, which refers to the compassionate “Buddha” (often latent) within all sentient beings.  Sufism [1] and sectors within Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam represent exemplars of this stream.   
   
• Religion 2 is founded on guilt, subjugation, and control.  Inspirational guidelines from Religion 1 have devolved to precepts which have then been conflated with traditional authoritarian, and by no means compassionate, social codes [2]. 

While many of the world’s religions may have been founded as Religion 1, almost all of the religions organizations and their administrative hierarchy operate according to Religion 2.
   
Not long ago former US President Jimmy Carter severed his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades [3].  A religious man, he had presumably had enough of Religion 2. 
   
Notes:

1. See: "Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam", The Film Sufi, 2015.
2. See: Alan Strathern, “Why are Buddhist Monks Attacking Muslims?”, BBC Magazine, 2 May 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22356306.
3. Jimmy Carter, “Losing My Religion for Equality”, The Age, 15 July 2009, http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/losing-my-religion-for-equality-20090714-dk0v.html.

"Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam" - Simon Broughton (2005)

William Dalrymple, a British historian specializing in the history and cultures of South Asia and the Middle East and one of my favourite writers, wrote and presented the material for the documentary film, Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam (2005) [1].  Dalrymple’s principal thesis, presented here in the made-for-TV film directed by Simon Broughton and photographed by Chris Vile, is that music is a fundamental element of Sufism and a key to its practice.

What I particularly like about Dalrymple is his appreciation for the unique contributions that Indic cultures have made to the world [2]. The fact that he has lived for much of the past twenty-five years in India undoubtedly contributes to his deep understanding of Indian culture. In particular, Dalrymple is sympathetic to suggestions that Indian notions of nonviolence (including vegetarianism), meditation, and oneness-with-god (think of Yoga, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) have made their way into Western spiritual thinking via Gnosticism and Sufism.  Sufism, then, is the Islamic practice that encompasses this syncretism of Eastern and Western spirituality. 

A key element of Sufi practice is its use of music to bridge the mind-body split that characterizes conventional, orthodox religions.  Orthodox religious thinking uses text, privileged though it may be, to express its knowledge, including esoteric knowledge.  Words evoke abstractions and categories that enable us to build lexical and narrative models of the world.  But words necessarily establish a separation between us and the world “out there”.  Music, on the other hand, temporally unites consciousness and our physical being into a unified embodied presence.  And this, in particular, is what Sufi music emphasizes.  Over the course of this film, Dalrymple outlines this idea in various contexts.

At the outset, Dalrymple wishes to remind the reader that the tensions with Islamic groups around the world today are mostly associated with fundamentalists who disapprove or ban music in their societies.  But, he says,

 “there is another strand of Islam where music is placed at the heart of religious devotion.”
 . . .
 It is love, rather than fear of God, that lies at the heart of Sufism.” [3]

He then moves on to examine Sufi music in various areas of the world.  In all those locations, the film shows local Sufi music that is designed to contribute to a spiritual rapture of the listeners.

Syria
Travelling to Syria, Dalrymple witnesses Sufi music in Aleppo, where the musicians repetitively beat on drums in order to bring themselves to a psychic state closer to God.

Then he goes on to discuss the origins of Sufism in the deserts of that region.  ‘Suf’ is the Arabic word for wool, and the word evokes the image of the “Desert Fathers”, who were early (third century CE) Orthodox Christian hermits who wished to abandon the growing rigidity of orthodox Christianity and find enlightenment and communion with God by being alone in the desert [4]. The Desert Fathers may well have been influenced by the Gnosticism that emerged in Egypt in that era and whose extant documentation is comprised mostly by the Gnostic Gospels discovered only relatively recently in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945.

Prominent among the Gnostic Gospels is the Gospel of Saint Thomas which concerns Thomas the Apostle, who, according to tradition, travelled to India in 52 CE to spread Christianity.  Elaine Pagels, a scholar in this area, has suggested that the Gospel of Saint Thomas suggests the influence of Indian tradition on Gnosticism [5].  She notes three significant differences between the Gospel of Saint Thomas and orthodox Christianity [5]:

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from Its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.

Second, the "living Jesus" of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal -- even identical.

Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source:

Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out.... He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him."

So Dalrymple’s argument tracing influences on Sufism presumably goes along these lines:

1. Sufism was influenced by the Desert Fathers
2. The Desert Fathers were part of the Gnostic tradition
3. Gnosticism was influenced by Indian tradition

The precise origins, instances and modes of influence can be disputed, but there is no doubt that given the travel and trade between the East and West in those times, there was likely awareness of Buddhist and Christian ideas in the Middle East that predates the rise of Islam and were incorporated into Islamic doctrine.  An example of Christian influence mentioned by Dalrymple is  the Lenten Feast that became Ramadan in Islam.  Whereas orthodox religionists always wish to emphasize the exclusivity of their religious message, Dalrymple is the syncretist and wishes to emphasize the commonality among religions.

Turkey
After covering Sufism’s origins in Syria, he travels to Konya, Turkey, the home and tomb location of the 13th century Sufi mystic, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (“Mawlana”, aka “Mevlevî”). There is due coverage of the famous Whirling Dervishes, but the Turkish government’s attitude towards Sufism is problematic.  It is willing to exploit the fame of Rumi’s poetry and the tourist attractiveness of the Whirling Dervishes for monetary gain, but it has outlawed Sufism as a religious practice since Kemal Ataturk banned Sufism in 1925.  Nevertheless, there are still underground Sufi groups today, and the filmmakers manage to film one of their clandestine sessions.

Note that although Rumi is the most famous Sufi poet in the West, the focus here is not so much on his poetry but more on Rumi’s favourite musical instrument, the ney, which is a reed flute.  Dalrymple speaks with and listens to a famous ney player, Kudsi Erguner, as well with a modernist musician, Mercan Dede, who combines his own ney-playing with electronic music, thereby achieving a kind of fusionist rock blend.

Pakistan
Dalrymple travels to Lahore, where he watches the dhol drum players beating on their drums while they whirl madly about in circles.  This is less ritualised than the Turkish whirling dervishes and more a mad, extemporaneous dance.  He also shows some footage of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was a celebrated singer of the Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufism in South Asia.  Again, we see that Qawwali singing has the extemporaneity of jazz singing.

India
They visit the tomb of Amir Khusrow, a 13th century Sufi musician and the creator of qawwali music. He is buried in a tomb next to his master, Nizamuddin Auliya, a famous Sufi saint.  Their tombs are a place where Muslims, Christians, and Hindus all come together to pray.

Pakistan (again)
On another visit to Pakistan, the film speaks with and shows the performance of Abida Parveen, a famous woman Sufi singer, which is a rarity in that society.  Dalrymple also manages to interview a hardline mullah who, as we expect, condemns all music: “these musicians are wrongdoers..”

Morocco
They finally come to Fes, Morocco, and speak to the director of the Fes Festival of Sacred Music, who believes that “within Islam, Sufism has a role to play today.” This festival features and juxtaposes religious music from any creed or faith.  Among those shown is the popular Senegalese singer, Youssou N’Dour, who remarks,

“Before the recent problems, for the majority of Muslims, Islam was always a religion of peace and tolerance. . . . Music can correct the image of Islam.”

Throughout all the Sufi music played in the various regions visited over the course of the film, there is a commonality to the music, despite its customization to the local musical instruments and cultural modes of the regions.  This common feature I refer to is the relentless, almost trance-inducing, rhythms that are created, both vocally and by means of the instruments.  What this produces is a form of embodied meditation, if you are in the right mind.  The important thing is for the music to conjure up feelings of love and harmony that overcomes reflective thought and critical judgement.  It is by this means that the Sufi soul is invoked.

Dalrymple closes with a parting message:

“We’re now in the middle of a clash of civilizations.  But not one between East and West, as much as within Islam – a battle for the soul of the Muslim world.  Will Muslims opt for the confrontational, Puritanical approach, represented in its most extreme form by Osama Bin Laden?  Or can we hope that they will embrace instead, the peaceful, plural, tolerant aspect of Islam, of which the Sufis form such a prominent part.”

★★★½ 

Notes:

1. It is available for viewing on YouTube.  Try looking here.
2. See, for example: 
• William Dalrymple, "The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms", The New York Review of Books, (21 May 2015).
• William Dalrymple,  "The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition", The New Yorker, (29 June 2015).
3. See also: "The Two Religions", The Film Sufi, (2015).
4. “Desert Fathers”, Wikipedia, 23 May 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers.
5. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (1979), Vintage Books, pp. xiii-xxiii, extract cited in “Frontline: The Gnostic Gospels”, The Public Broadcasting Service, (April 1998), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html.

"Jules and Jim" - Francois Truffaut (1962)

Perhaps Francois Truffaut’s most memorable film was Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962).  It was the third feature film for the 29-year-old former film critic, coming directly after his outstanding Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste, 1960), and for many people it ranks as the seminal film of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) in cinematic expression.

The story is based on the mostly autobiographical first novel of the same name by Henri-Pierre Roché, which he published in 1953 at the age of 74 and which described his experiences many decades earlier.  Truffaut is said to have run across this novel in 1955 at a used book stall in Paris and had been so enthralled by it that he vowed to make a film out of the story [1].  Truffaut and Roché gradually worked out the script of the film, although the author’s death in 1959 prevented his seeing the finished project.  Nevertheless, Roché did know about and approved the idea of Jeanne Moreau playing the pivotal role of Catherine in the story [2]. 

Actually, Jeanne Moreau’s performance is so electric that many viewers, particularly women, in my experience, feel that the film is really about her character.  Ms. Moreau’s lengthy career was full of acclaimed showings, often as a femme fatale, but most people regard her role here in Jules and Jim as her signature performance. It may well have been vitalized by the fact that she and Truffaut were apparently having an affair at the time of production [2].  The entire cast, though, is excellent and features:

• Jeanne Moreau as Catherine
• Oskar Werner as Jules
• Henri Serre as Jim
• Vanna Urbino as Gilberte, Jim's fiancee
• Serge Rezvani as Albert, a friend of Jules's
• Marie Dubois, who was wonderful in Shoot the Piano Player, has a memorable cameo role as Thérèse, a woman who has a brief affair with Jules.

In addition to the fine acting, Jules and Jim is graced by the dreamy music of Georges Delerue, who wrote the scores for many films, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and several other Truffaut films, including Shoot the Piano Player.  Another key ingredient was the dynamic cinematography of Raoul Coutard, who apart from working with Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player and La Peau Douce) was more famously associated with several films directed by Jean-Luc Godard.  Here his cinematography is particularly enlivened by interestingly-composed long shots, moving-camera shots, and freeze frames.

This inventive mise-en-scene of Truffaut and Coutard is one of the principal virtues of Jules and Jim, because it imbues the film with a pervasive sense of melancholy, even including those early scenes representing care-free enjoyment.  We know from the narrative voiceover that this story is one of recollection, remembrance of things past, but the cinematography accentuates this psychological experience by highlighting (using, for example, freeze frames) those special moments that persist in one’s memories of long ago experiences. This contemplative, melancholy flavouring is one of the things that makes the film special.

The narrative covers the long-standing friendship of two men, Jules and Jim, and how they attempted to accommodate themselves to the love they both felt for the same woman. The two men have distinct personalities, which makes their friendship rather interesting.  Jules is sensitive, giving, and vulnerable.  Jim is gentlemanly, but also more self-sufficient – he plays by his own rules and doesn’t give in so easily to others’ demands.  Nevertheless, they formed a firm partnership, such that they were likened by others to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  One might first think that the confidant Jim was the Quixote character, and the less dominant Jules was the Sancho Panza.  But recall in that ancient tale that Don Quixote was the idealistic dreamer, while Sancho Panza was the worldly and pragmatic operator.  In addition it appears that Jules is wealthier than Jim.  So I would say that Jules is the Quixote character, and Jim is the Sancho Panza of the twosome.  And yet one could also say that in a certain sense the truly “quixotic” one is Catherine. Anyway, the focalization of this tale is on Jim, whose perspective mirrors the experiences of Henri-Pierre Roché.  Just about everything that we see in the film is from Jim’s viewpoint or what Jim would probably have been told about.  Note that since this is all reminiscence, what Jim remembers could also be scenes that he devised in his mind from what he was told.

As the story of their friendship evolves, it passes through a series of stages.

1.  Jules and Jim Form a Friendship

The story begins in 1912 when Jules, a diffident Austrian, becomes friends with Jim, a bohemian Parisian, because of their mutual interest in culture and art.  Soon they are getting together daily to talk about everything, including their mutual pursuits after women, at which Jim is decidedly more successful.  It is in this sequence that Jules forms a romantic friendship with the capricious Thérèse, who memorably performs her inverted-cigarette choo-choo prance in front of Coutard’s closely tracking camera.

The two men visit Jules’s friend Albert, who shows them some slides of ancient sculpture, one of which, a sculptured head of a woman with an enigmatic smile, so captures the fancies of the two friends that they decide to go and see it firsthand on its Adriatic island.  Later they meet a young woman, Catherine, who reminds them of that statue and similarly haunts their fantasies. 

2.  Jules, Jim, and Catherine
Jules takes an immediate interest in Catherine, and pleadingly whispers privately to his friend, “Not with her, Jim, OK?”.  It is clear that Jules feels hopelessly inferior to Jim on the romantic plane.  But anyway, Jim already has a girlfriend, Gilberte, who loves him without reservation and hopes that he will ask her to marry him.

Gradually the volatile and intense personality of Catherine comes to the fore.  Although she is ostensibly Jules’s girl, Catherine frolics with them equally, in the fashion of a threesome.  In this group, she always wants to be the center of attention.  On one occasion Catherine dresses as a man, and the three of them take to the streets fooling people into believing that they are three men together.  At another point when Jim is helping Catherine with her suitcase to make a short trip, Jim notices that she packs a bottle of sulfuric acid to use against any man who might abuse her.

Later while they are walking in the evening after seeing a theatrical play together, Catherine becomes bored and frustrated with her companions’ intellectual reactions to the play.  Catherine says she liked the girl in the play, because “she wants to be free and live each moment of her life”; while Jules and Jim dismiss her psychological analysis and prefer to discuss the “metaphysics” behind the play.  After hearing them go on about this, Catherine impulsively jumps off a bridge into the Seine river.  The voiceover narration at this point tells how favourably impressed Jim was with Catherine by this act.

Finally, Jules telephones Jim to tell him that he and Catherine are going back to Austria to get married.  But shortly thereafter World War I breaks out, and the two men are conscripted to serve in the armies of their mutually opposed countries.  During the war, Jules writes passionate love letters to Catherine, while Jim manages to see Gilberte on one of his infrequent furloughs. 

3 Jim’s Postwar Visit to Austria
After the war, Jim, who is now working for a newspaper, is invited to visit Jules and Catherine in Austria for a month.  Although at first Jim seems to be visiting a happily married couple, now with a young daughter named Sabine, he soon learns that their marriage is failing.  Jules privately tells Jim that Catherine is unhappy with him and has already had several affairs, “one as revenge for something I did, but I don’t know what.”  He confesses glumly to his friend, “I am not the man for her.”

After hearing this, Jim recalls Jules’s past “errors” with other women.  This reflects more on the character of Jim than on that of Jules.  To the manipulative Jim, a successful relationship depends one’s abilities to perform the “correct” actions towards the other.

After a week, Jim and Catherine become more familiar, and they go for a walk alone in the evening.  Jim is now wrestling with the fact that he has always been attracted to Catherine, and he wonders what he should do.  While they walk, Catherine is amazingly frank in describing her failed marriage. 

“I hoped to heal him [Jules] of his crises with cheerfulness, but I realized that his crises were part of him.”
. . .
“Our last argument and true breakup was on his first leave [from the army]”.  I felt like I was in a stranger’s arms . . . He left.  9 months later Sabine was born.”
. . .
“As a husband to me, Jules is finished.”

She tells him that they now live in separate rooms and that she has only been back for 3 months, after being apart during a 6-month affair.  At the moment, she is having an affair with Jules’s old friend Albert.  In response to all this, Jim tells her that he always knew that Jules would be unable to hold on to her and that he has understood her; but Catherine defiantly answers by saying, “I don’t want to be understood.”

However, Jules still loves Catherine and desperately wants to be a part of her life, no matter how diminished his role might be.  He tells Jim to go ahead and romance Catherine and marry her, just so he will have the chance to see her sometimes.

4.  Jim and Catherine Get Together

The next evening Jim unleashes his passions and makes his approach to Catherine.  In a romantic scene, they kiss, and the voiceover says, “their first kiss lasted all night.”  (I have always remembered that line.) 

The next morning Catherine tells Jules that Jim should live with them.  They become a menage a trois, or perhaps un amour a trois.  It is truly three-way, since Jules and Jim love each other, platonically, too.

However, not long later, boredom for Catherine sets in again.  One Sunday afternoon, she decides to seduce Jules, much to the consternation of the now-infatuated Jim.  The “amour-a-trois” relationship has its limits.   Eventually Jim’s newspaper recalls him to Paris.  On departing, Jim tells Catherine that he wants to marry her and have children.

5.  Jim and Catherine Struggle

Back in Paris, Jim tells Gilberte of his plans to marry Catherine.  Then he writes to Catherine that he will be returning soon, but first he has to make “a few farewells”, a phrase that on receipt angers Catherine.  When he returns to Catherine, she provocatively tells him that she went ahead and made her own “farewells”, too.  They decide to go ahead and have a baby, but when Catherine doesn’t become pregnant straight off, she becomes frustrated with the mechanics off baby-making.  They quarrel, make up, and then quarrel again and finally decide to separate for three months.

Back in Paris and now sick with the flu, Jim receives a letter from Catherine that sets off a message exchange that highlights their mutual mistrust and unwillingness to surrender to love (only Jules and Gilberte in this story could do that).

1. Catherine’s letter tells Jim that she is pregnant, and for him to come immediately..
2. Jim writes back jealously saying he is sick and not coming back.
3. Jules writes to Jim saying they doubt that Jim is really sick and that he should come back anyway.
4. Jim writes back saying, given Catherine’s promiscuity, he doubts that he is the father.
5. But at the same time (their letters crossed in the mail), he gets a letter from Catherine saying that she really loves him.
6. So Jim writes a second letter to Catherine saying that he loves her and is coming.
7. Catherine, meanwhile, has received Jim’s earlier letter, and angrily writes back telling him to get lost.
8. Then Catherine gets Jim’s subsequent letter, and writes to him that she loves him and for him to come.
9. Finally, Jim gets a letter from Jules informing him that Catherine had a miscarriage and that Catherine wants to terminate their relationship.

Time passes. Jim and Catherine are now apart, but there are further occasions over the years when they meet up. Catherine continues alternatively to solicit Jim’s interest and provoke him.  Jim, the earlier avowed risk-taker, meanwhile, becomes more and more defensive and standoffish. For him Gilberte appears to be tactically the safer option.

There are increasingly dramatic encounters between Catherine and Jim, but things are not headed in an optimistic direction, and I will leave it to you to see what happens in the end.  In the final scene, Jules reflects that the relationship he had with Jim had no equal in love.

There are fascinating and attractive aspects of Jules and Jim, but there are weaknesses, too.  The story covers a considerable duration, some twenty years, and yet the passing of time is not well presented in the film.  The film begins in 1912, and by the end of the story we are aware of Nazi book-burnings, which must make it around 1933.  And yet the characters show no signs of aging or acknowledgements that considerable amounts of time have passed since their earlier encounters.  One could perhaps argue that this is the nature of memory – we situate our memories in the past, but we don’t emphasize the passing of time.  Our memories represent snap-shots of experiences that we have simply had in the past, which is “back there in time”, but may have little temporality to them.  We don’t think of ourselves as having changed very much, at least psychologically, it is only the external world of circumstances that has changed. 

What makes the film interesting, nevertheless, is its psychological exploration of love and friendship between men and women.  In particular, it highlights the fact that men can have strong, platonic love for each other that is not necessarily homoerotic. In the current cultural climate, people might accuse Jules and Jim of being “closet queens”, but that would be a misrepresentation.  Men can have this strong friendship, a form of love, without any physical attraction.  And I think this love is very different from that between a man and a woman.  In Jules and Jim we have both of these relationships and an attempt to reconcile the conflicts that can naturally arise in these circumstances.

In this respect we have three distinct, but realistic, personalities. 

• Catherine is willful and spontaneous.  She lives for the moment.  She can be likened to the Anny character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, who was always searching for the perfect moment.  This is not an exclusively feminine trait, as attested to by Goethe’s Faust.  But Catherine is also selfish and lacking in compassion.  She wants to be possessed by an “alpha male”, but only for a moment.  Then she wants to break free and look for something else.
• Jim is inspired to be the “alpha male”, but he is concerned about his own dignity and his faithfulness to higher principals.  In this connection, he is conscious of avoiding “mistakes” when dealing with women he wishes to possess.
• Jules is compassionate and giving, but he evinces neither the commanding nature or the mystery that Catherine desires. 

We encounter these personalities and conflicts all the time. The desire to be completely one with another entails a certain degree of possessiveness. There is no way to avoid this conflict when mutual friends like Jules and Jim run into such a situation. The beauty of Jules and Jim comes from its melancholy fatalism in this regard.

To a certain extent, I see both Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard as frustrated romantics.  Though they had different styles of cinematic expression, they both showed worlds depicting romantic possibilities that were thwarted not by bad luck, but because they were intrinsically doomed to be thwarted.  This is the nature of tragedy.  It is to Francois Truffaut’s credit that he could depict this kind of tragedy in a cinematic fashion that, by combining music, temporal sequences, and psychologically-inspired images, showed how far one could go beyond the written word to express these feelings.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Truffaut would later make another excellent film based on Roché’s only other novel, the also semi-autobiographical Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent, 1971).
2. Chale Nafus, “Jules and Jim”, Austin Film Society, (2014).