The Indian courtroom has seen a great amount of needless dramatics in film over the years. It has been turned into a shrine for theatricality time and time again by unworldly filmmakers who have not quite grasped its significance or perhaps its scope. B.R. Chopra's landmark courtroom-drama Kanoon paved the way for Indian auteurs to explore this genre in 1960, but somewhere along the way, the symbolic courtroom has been reduced to a place where justice and forced patriotism come after an enthusiastic display of histrionics.
Informed of the gross misinterpretation, young Chaitanya Tamhane takes it upon himself to set the record straight and debuts with the fantastically poised Court, a downright spellbinder that delivers what is an intricate and composed study of the country's shaky judicial system. What begins as an unassuming trip into the predicament of an aging folk singer who is picked up on charges of abetting the suicide of a manhole worker swiftly and with careful deliberation deviates from its central thread to study the context of a lower court.
The first and last shots of the film piqued my curiosity. It opens with a cluster of children packed densely in a small room reciting poetry and ends with the protracted image of an old man dozing in a large, empty garden. The two shots mystifyingly contrast with each other; in the first, an old man sits among the kids, evidently fond of them but in the last, another old man is clearly shown to be disapproving of them. What does it imply? Were these bits of details mere coincidences? There is a world of meaning imbuing these frames but Tamhane does not shed any light on it. That's probably how I would sum Court up: there is a cosmos of thought behind each frame, each little detail, but it is intentionally left inscrutable, unexplained. Tamhane provides a window for thought, for questioning everything that we see and everything that he insinuates, and Court can only be enjoyed, for lack of a better word, if we truly indulge in it. And if we possess the patience to sit through it.
Informed of the gross misinterpretation, young Chaitanya Tamhane takes it upon himself to set the record straight and debuts with the fantastically poised Court, a downright spellbinder that delivers what is an intricate and composed study of the country's shaky judicial system. What begins as an unassuming trip into the predicament of an aging folk singer who is picked up on charges of abetting the suicide of a manhole worker swiftly and with careful deliberation deviates from its central thread to study the context of a lower court.
The first and last shots of the film piqued my curiosity. It opens with a cluster of children packed densely in a small room reciting poetry and ends with the protracted image of an old man dozing in a large, empty garden. The two shots mystifyingly contrast with each other; in the first, an old man sits among the kids, evidently fond of them but in the last, another old man is clearly shown to be disapproving of them. What does it imply? Were these bits of details mere coincidences? There is a world of meaning imbuing these frames but Tamhane does not shed any light on it. That's probably how I would sum Court up: there is a cosmos of thought behind each frame, each little detail, but it is intentionally left inscrutable, unexplained. Tamhane provides a window for thought, for questioning everything that we see and everything that he insinuates, and Court can only be enjoyed, for lack of a better word, if we truly indulge in it. And if we possess the patience to sit through it.
As the film progresses, we figure that there's something more to it than just a story of a wrongly accused man. And this is particularly aggravating, for we find out what is on Tamhane's mind only at the end of the film. Like a seasoned auteur, he skillfully calibrates how much we know about the characters, diligently and patiently sculpting them throughout the film's runtime. We follow them around as they go about in their personal lives and how they transform from hardened lawyers and judges to commonplace folk who take the local transport to go home, who have silent dinners that are punctuated by the sounds of television and doorbells. Tamhane juxtaposes their private and professional lives and urges us to look beyond their versions in the courtroom. And at the end, we have a multidimensional portrait of each one of them, so true to life that one might fault them for being real individuals. And these lives are so desperately lifeless, the characters being alienated victims of their own selves, that it is strangely affecting.
Court is, by no means, an ordinary feat. The story is really quite plain and eternally evolving, but the approach is levelheaded and purposeful. There were lengthy spells when I grew restless and then there were spells when I wanted the film to go slower to soak up the detailing. It succeeds in providing an authentic, often amusing and disheartening depiction of how a lower court functions and how an acquitted person ultimately ends up being a casualty of its quirks. The writing is incisive and dryly funny, with seemingly improvised dialogue lending a layer to the film's naturalistic setting.
What impressed me above all was Tamhane's attention to the technicalities. The camera is usually static and penetrating, rarely capturing any intimate close-ups of the characters (a premeditated move, as Tamhane stated in an interview previously) and that hinders us from studying them up close. The editing is--bafflingly--slack, which pokes me to pose the question: was it intentional and why? The pacing is languid, probably a figurative indication of the slow delivery of justice by the judicial system, but the editing pattern mildly frustrates.
Eventually, Court is nothing but a productive character study that supplies plenty of fodder to the intellect even if it is at times immensely indulgent. One is constantly compelled to question and interpret what each scene means, how it shapes the characters. It takes us deep into the minds of the people who are involved in the cases that are argued upon everyday in the drab courts. And the actors who play them, mostly non-professionals, are miraculous. The disparity between their personal and professional selves is what makes Court remarkable.
It's a debut of rare maturity and confidence and subtlety. Coming from an Indian filmmaker, this is an act of reassuring cynics like me that the film scene in this country is really changing.
Court is the best film I have seen all year, and possibly the best Indian courtroom-drama since Saeed Akhtar Mirza's 1984 satirical masterwork, Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho!. And after a long time, I was ecstatic to watch a film with an audience that recognized a great film when they saw it. I partook in paying a prompt homage to it by applauding when the end credits rolled.
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