Waiting is a wonderful example of the so called ‘Hindie’ development in Indian film production – films made mainly in Hindi but not as part of mainstream Bollywood or specifically as art films. Instead they are ‘Hindi Independent films’. However, as I’ve indicated in the title of this post, the language of Waiting is officially registered by the Central Board of Film Certification as ‘Hinglish’. This means that the dialogue between the central characters is usually conducted in the English used by educated middle-class Indians punctuated by phrases from Hindi that are slipped in almost unconsciously. Some of the minor characters speak Hindi. Even though the action is mainly located in Kerala, nobody (that I noticed) speaks in Malayalam – but there is a joke about a character’s refusal to do so and about North v. South speech patterns generally. I was slightly disappointed that we don’t see much of Kerala apart from a couple of scenes by the backwaters – Kochi (Cochin) is one of the main tourist destinations in India. It wouldn’t be appropriate to have too many beautiful landscapes/waterscapes in this film. It’s mainly an internal narrative for the two central characters. The setting in Kerala is important for a narrative that is built around binaries – in this case the the calmer, more academic/intellectual tone of middle class Kerala and the more brash, materialistic world of Mumbai. Further binaries are associated with age/generation and with the backgrounds of the film’s two stars. Naseeruddin Shah has been a leading actor in India for more than forty years, going back to the parallel cinema of the 1970s/80s as well as later appearing in Bollywood and international films. Kalki Koechlin had a first major role only in 2009 but quickly established herself in the new world of ‘Hindie’ films, becoming something of a ‘poster girl’ for this new type of Indian film. When this couple come together there are many opportunities for narrative development.
The two stars play characters who meet at the very swish new hospital in Kochi (Cochin) where their respective spouses have been admitted, each in a comatose state. Shah’s character Shiv is a retired professor whose wife has been supported for some time on a ventilator and it seems unlikely that she will ever wake up. The cost of her care is steadily bankrupting Shiv after the medical insurance benefits have run out, but still he hopes for a recovery. Koechlin’s character Tara has just flown in from Mumbai after hearing that her new husband has been in a serious road accident during a business trip and she will face decisions about major operations that she must sanction knowing they carry significant risks – but also that they are needed if he is to recover at all. This sounds like it could be a distressing narrative or that it might turn into a sentimental Hollywood type of film. Instead it becomes a deeply humanist film about two people who develop a relationship in very difficult circumstances. Very importantly, there are no contrived endings for either character. The drama – and the comedy – in the film develops from the situations in which the characters find themselves and how they react differently and still try to support each other.
The comedy comes from the clash between Shiv’s fairly austere and cultured academic and Tara’s modern young woman enmeshed in social media. It is also there in the behaviour of minor characters of the young man representing Tara’s husband’s company and Shiv’s neighbour’s maid who brings him home-cooked food. These are polite young Keralites bemused by both Shiv and Tara. The narrative also has a kind of ‘pantomime villain’ in the shape of the doctor/consultant Malhotra looking after both medical cases. He’s played by actor-writer-director Rajat Kapoor, another major figure from independent cinema in India. It’s a difficult role and the film gently satirises Malhotra as appearing like a ‘company man’ mouthing platitudes and dealing with the economics of the care as much as the medical prognosis. Yet Dr Malhotra has difficult decisions to make just like everyone else. In a flashback we do see Shiv’s life with his wife who is played by Suhasini, the partner of Tamil director Mani Ratnam. This flashback is balanced in the narrative in structural terms by the arrival of Tara’s best friend Ishita who provides advice and support, some of it helpful, some of it not. But the final decisions must remain with Tara and Shiv.
Waiting is written and directed by Anu Menon, making it part of the celebration of ‘Women in Global Cinema’ at HOME in Manchester during 2019 (the film shoot also had a primarily female crew). Anu Menon is from a South Indian background but she grew up in Delhi, gained a degree at a prestigious technical university and then began to work in advertising. Eventually she realised that selling soap and soft drinks was not what she wanted to do and she enrolled at the London Film School. Waiting is her second fiction feature. The film was shot by Neha Parti Matiyani who is one of the few experienced women in the Hindi film industry.
When I screened this film for an audience the first time, I remember one person suggesting that it wasn’t very ‘Indian’ – in fact it could have been set anywhere. I was reminded of that comment this week when I have been working on the film Timbuktu and watching interviews with its director Abderrahmane Sissako. His view seems to be that stories are usually about people and that people everywhere face similar problems, only the context and how we view them and their problems changes. This is I think one of the tenets of the humanism that has informed many of the most successful ‘global filmmakers’ since 1945. Waiting is a humanist film that just happens to involve the educated middle-class. It does make me wonder, however, what is happening in private hospitals like this during the coronavirus pandemic in India. Waiting seems to have been well received by critics in India but its box office results arguably don’t match the appreciation that most critics and audiences expressed. I don’t think the film received a UK release and these Hindie films still struggle to get a release in the UK unless they are acquired by a UK arthouse distributor. The film has been compared to films like The Lunchbox (2013), which did well in the UK through Curzon, and I would recommend Waiting. It can be found online and on DVD in the UK.
The Case for Global Film 