the play goes on

hart_keith

I saw this in a Paris cinema on a Sunday afternoon. The French audience loved it, as did I. They clapped at the intermission and they clapped to the music while the credits were running. I thought the song and dance routines were great, providing the perfect bridge to a semi-mythologised narrative. The audience sometimes laughed at the exaggeration and coincidence of the plot, especially at the end -- the rain, the Englishwoman who never married. Astonishingly they even got the joke about 'this country will be the future of this game'. It seems that lack of knowledge of cricket and subtitles with words like 'runs', 'overs' and 'no ball' were not a handicap. Of course the pillorying of the British didn't go down badly here. I especially liked the representation of the Raj, not as a moderrnising influence, but as straight agrarian civilisation, extraction of the food from peasants' mouths.

I was on the edge of tears throughout. Why? Because this was the first Indian production that to my knowledge has won a world audience. And it provided a new sentimental bridge to the world for my own trajectory. I could see how Bollywood is the only film-making centre that actually could do what Hollywood does, but in its own distinctive way, with a much more universal human interest. And the music of course. The plot and characters were caricatured, but that made it all that more accessible and touching, like a medieval passion play. I loved the symbolic roles contrived for the Muslim, the Untouchable, the Sikh, the collaborator, the headman, the intellectual etc.

Above all, the plot of learning the game and beating the masters was perfect. It was CLR James to the tee. Beyond a Boundary indeed , with society in the shape of the crowd as much of the action as the players. And the idea of the bet! Play comes from an Old English word whose first meaning is to wager. The idea of life as a game of negotiated risks is very widespread among hunter-gatherers, where people have to be trained to respond instantly to the flash of white tail in the bush. Obviously it sometimes pays for peasants (and citydwellers) to pick up these skills. The play goes on.

score 9/10

hart_keith 8 July 2002

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0805381/