Reel life: Watching Madam Chief Minister on the big screen in UP

Of the many ways that the pandemic and the consequent lockdown have affected us, one has been in the fashioning of an acute awareness in our minds about dates. The most significant one for me has been a Friday the 13th, in March 2020. It was the last time in 2020 that I ventured into a multiplex—to watch Homi Adjania’s Angrezi Medium—little realizing that it would be the last film of the astoundingly talented Irrfan Khan that I would see on the big screen and that many a barren month would stretch ahead of me, when I’d be denied the darkness of the theatre, the flickering of moving images on screen consumed voraciously with the samosa and café latte on the side.

I can’t recall when in the past I’ve been forced to stay apart from the cinema hall for so long. Even before films became bread and butter for me as a journalist and critic, one-film-a-week outing was de rigueur. Even something as momentous and monstrous as the crucial board exams couldn’t come in the way of our strong liaison. Even the increasing hold of the streaming platforms couldn’t lure me away from my steadfast commitment to the big screen.

But as the months of separation piled on, so did the attempts to fill the absence and the yawning void. Life took a predictable turn towards OTT. If a Gulabo Sitabo or Shakuntala Devi had decided to make it home, I had to knock on their doors as well. Somewhere in September, with the Toronto International Film Festival going online, a new beast called Shift72 woo-ed me to its folds. The online video streaming platform continued to hold me in thrall with the first online edition of the Dharamshala International Film festival (DIFF). Suddenly I was not missing movies. I recently savoured as real an experience of virtual viewing of films and hobnobbing in a market as possible at the NFDC Film Bazaar and, as this piece goes to bed, I am getting ready to attend the Sundance Film Festival that promises to recreate the community viewing experience on our individual screens even while we watch them in various corners and time zones of the world.

Cheesy as it may sound, the pandemic hasn’t been able to play villain in the on-going love affair with films. We may not have been able to have our usual rendezvous at the regular haunts but met at other places—Vimeo, Cinando, Festivalscope...Yes, it’s not as heady as going out, travelling and seeking out films but who’s to complain if the films from the world over travel to your living room of their accord.

Meanwhile, landmarks in the recent personal history have kept getting posted with films as a running thread. After almost nine months, on December 10, 2020, I watched a film on the big screen—Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy, in an open-air screening, social distancing adequately maintained. I stepped gingerly into a multiplex after nine months—on December 20, 2020—not to watch a film mind you, but to participate in a panel discussion on Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha, Pakistan’s official Oscar entry this year.

And then, just out of the blue, last Friday, January 22, 2021, after ten months and nine days, I decided to take the plunge to watch Subhash Kapoor’s Madam Chief Minister in a neighbouring multiplex, on being denied access to the screeners by the producers.

Not that I was dying to see the film but because at that moment it felt like some boundaries needed to be breached, some hurdles—physical as well as psychological—needed to be surmounted. It was an intensely personal call, one more step, taken carefully, towards seizing normalcy armed with mask and sanitisers. A decision which another person may desist from taking and understandably so. And, perhaps, even I might not take again for a while. Mind, after all, is a strange loop for all of us these days in which movies matter and yet they don’t.

A sparklingly clean but dismally empty lobby, denuded snack counters, spiritless ushers and two other people in the audience apart from yours truly. Another site of the pandemic at its most apocalyptic. In between the constant spraying of sanitizer, it was strangely reassuring then to encounter Sunita Tomar, the face of India’s anti-tobacco campaign on screen, despite knowing that she herself had passed away, way back in 2015.

Under normal circumstances, watching a film set in UP, in a UP multiplex, like I was doing, would have spun a parallel narrative of its own, especially with its protagonist inspired from ex UP CM Mayawati. Would the short-haired and shrewd turn by Richa Chadha have got catcalls of approval or boos of protest in the home ground? How would the one, and perhaps only significant moment in the film, of two victimised communities of the state—Dalits and Muslims—joining hands on stage, have echoed with the masses?

All I could do was speculate, as the film, ostensibly on caste divides, fumbled alarmingly on the issue and sent worst mixed messages on religion and gender politics. It barely scratched the surface and, in the façade of caste, religion and gender, became yet another drama about the hunger for political power and the games people play for it. Haven’t we seen that so many times before?