BackThe pros and cons of choosing ‘The Good Road’ for the Oscars
Aesthetics trumped commerce in rejecting ‘The Lunchbox’, and since when did that become such a bad thing?
Premium(A still from ‘The Good Road’, India’s official entry to the Oscars. Unless the movie gets an American distributor any time soon, it will be one of many DVD screeners that will reach the Academy selectors in time for the final selection.)
In any other year, the decision of the Film Federation of India to select The Good Road as the country’s submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar would have been hailed as mature, tasteful and in step with the current language of cinema around the world.
Unfortunately for the federation, this year happens to be one in which there were at least three well-crafted and international-minded films in the running—Ship of Theseus, The Good Road, and the favourite, The Lunchbox. Until the federation announced its decision on 21 September, few people had heard of The Good Road, let alone seen it (the movie had a limited release for a week in Gujarat in July). The twin morals of this story: don’t trust press statements and Twitter declarations, and don’t underestimate the federation’s ability to spring surprises.
In its sparse approach to plot and characters, its use of landscape and language, and simultaneous suggestion of transience and eternity, Gyan Correa’s Gujarati movie is one of the most assured debuts to come off the National Film Development Corporation’s production line in a while. Some viewers might consider The Good Road to be slow moving and minimalist by Indian standards, but others will recognise Correa’s confidence in letting ideas develop organically.
The Good Road unfolds over the course of a day and cross-cuts between a boy who gets separated from his parents, a truck driver and his cleaner who take in the boy, and a young girl who seeks shelter at a wayside brothel. The three sets of characters travel through the bleached landscape of the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, whose people are as taciturn as their surroundings are unsparing. The only known faces in the movie are Mumbai actors Sonali Kulkarni and Ajay Gehi, who play the missing boy’s parents.
The inexplicably mysterious team of 16 selectors at the federation, of whom only one, committee chairperson Goutam Ghose, has been identified, must have seen the merit in Correa’s handling of place, time and characters. Ghose and his unidentified comrades resisted Twitter-fuelled pressure to name Ritesh Batra’s equally assured debut, The Lunchbox, and also ignored Anand Gandhi’s accomplished and ambitious philosophical treatise Ship of Theseus and Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra’s crowd-pleasing biopic Bhaag Milkha Bhaag.
Had it selected The Lunchbox, which opened on 20 September to rave reviews on the back of glowing endorsements from celebrities in India and the US, the federation could have gone along with the logic that India should send a movie that actually has a chance of bagging a statuette rather than a movie that people might like but not vote for. If India truly wanted an Oscar in the Foreign Language Film category, which it has never won, it could do no better than select The Lunchbox, about the romance that develops between a neglected housewife and a lonely accountant over a mis-delivered lunchbox. A movie that is sent to the Academy Awards for consideration needs to have a different pair of legs to run along with other contenders. It helps tremendously to secure the backing of an American studio, which The Lunchbox has in the form of Sony Pictures Classics, the independent cinema arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Sony Pictures Classics will be releasing The Lunchbox in the US in December or late January, and if not the Oscars, the well-timed distribution strategy will definitely boost the movie’s chances of being top of the mind for such bellwether events as the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Golden Globes, both in January.
It’s not every day that all the forces align in a film’s favour—glowing reviews, widespread domestic support and international backing. The Good Road has its journey cut out for it. Unless the movie gets an American distributor any time soon, it will be one of several screenings organised for members of the Academy. It won’t have the advantage of influential critical opinion, such as The Hollywood Reporter, which named The Lunchbox as one of the top contenders for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. It will have to compete on its own merit, which sounds great on paper, but doesn’t work in the real world, or more precisely in Hollywood, where time-strapped jurors must take quick decisions on selecting movies that make sense to their collective reality.
One filmmaker’s tragedy is another’s triumph. The official Indian selection isn’t just a proud moment for the NFDC, which has backed several independent productions and has been running an annual development market at which movies like The Good Road and The Lunchbox have landed up over the years to seek scripting improvements and funds to produce or complete projects. The Good Road’s crew includes home-grown talent from the Film and Television Institute of India—sound designer Resul Pookutty, cinematographer Amitabha Singh and editor Paresh Kamdar. Pakistan’s official entry, Zinda Bhaag, also features cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul, editor Shan Mohammed, and sound recordist Vipin Bhatti, all from the institute. If it’s national pride we seek through the Foreign Language Film submission, then The Good Road ticks at least a few of the boxes. But if it’s the big prize that we want, perhaps we need to find some way to compete independently at the Academy Awards rather than waiting for the approval of a government-approved committee.
The hand-wringing over Twitter (mostly by people who hadn’t see The Good Road) that accompanied the federation’s announcement indicates the divide within Indian independent cinema. There are indies that are made through independent sources, there are indies supported or produced by the government-funded NFDC, and then there are indies that get picked up by big-name banners or studios, such as The Lunchbox. The industry support for The Lunchbox represents the warming of companies like Dharma Productions, which attached itself to the production after its completion, and Disney UTV, which distributed the movie on 20 September, to non-formulaic storytelling modes. Complementing the film trade’s increasing openness to non-formulaic cinema is the federation’s maturity in finally looking at sending movies that break away from the norm and are bereft of song-and-dance routines. The committee seems to have said that we want the world to know we can make such films as The Good Road. It might not be the most pragmatic decision, but if it helps the movie to journey into new directions, so be it.
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