Mani Kaul, the representative of the Indian New Wave, in 4 films

You like Indian cinema. You know Satyajit Ray and a handful of Bollywood movies. But have you heard of Mani Kaul? If this is not the case, do not beat yourself up because this great Indian filmmaker, also a teacher, known to specialists, is still a well-kept secret in France.

Fortunately, to change the game, four feature films – Uski Roti (1969), One day before the rainy season (1971), Duvidha (1973), Nazar (1989) – signed by this eminent representative of the Indian New Wave, are finally released on our screens.

Uski Roti

Student of Ritwik Ghatak, the craziest and most experimental of the great Indian filmmakers, disciple of Robert Bresson, Mani Kaul began his career at the end of the 1960s, with a master stroke, Uski Roti (Our daily bread). A contemplative, almost silent film, with an explicitly feminist theme, which is a great gateway into a cinema that is social, poetic and radical at the same time. In this story of a couple, between a man who is always absent and a woman who waits, all in a remote village, it is less the almost documentary narrative that impresses than the way in which Kaul frames the female faces like so many enigmas and the syntax he invents to capture the invisible, multiplying strange or, in any case, unexpected connections, without forgetting a soundtrack full of abstract silences.

One day before the rainy season

Two years later, Mani Kaul made an astonishing film, One day before the rainy season, adaptation of a major play, written by a certain Mohan Rakesh, a pioneer of modern Hindi literature. Contrary to Uski Roti, here, it is therefore the word that is queen. A noble and quite literary word that suits characters who seem anchored in an immemorial writing. The story, which we do not know exactly when it is set, revolves around the relationship between a poet and a young woman, both inhabitants of the same village. Constructed in three acts, like the play from which it is adapted, the film, in the form of a camera, above all gives Mani Kaul the opportunity to paint the extraordinary portrait of a young girl torn between sacrifice and spiritual freedom.

The staging, of great elegance and great virtuosity, plays with confinement while constantly escaping the filmed theatre. By his lofty view mixed with a certain triviality and his way of taking poetry at face value, One day before the rainy season anticipates, by a few decades, the BrightStar by Jane Campion. It is the most beautiful of the four Mani Kaul films offered to us for the start of the year.

Duvidha

The last two, Duvidha and Nazar, are probably a little less strong but they remain, despite everything, fascinating. Almost entirely in voiceover, Duvidha is a fable whose argument is quite fascinating: a spirit takes possession of a man’s body to replace him with his wife. The problem is that the man is not dead but only absent for reasons related to his work. When he returns home, after several years away, he tries to hunt his double… Anything but illustrative, Duvidha offers new proof of Mani Kaul’s poetic inspiration, but on a more childish side, that of the tale.

Nazar

As for Nazarlater, since it is vintage 1989, it is a new version of Softshort story by Dostoyevsky, already adapted by Bresson, twenty years earlier, in A sweet woman. By measuring himself against his French master, the Indian filmmaker takes the risk of being compared to him. Even if his camera movements are of great beauty and he joins the feminist subject of the three other films proposed, Nazar does not have the edge of the unforgettable Bresson film. It’s even a small disappointment, especially if we compare it with the three other Mani Kaul films mentioned before.

If Mani Kaul’s filmography is not limited to these four feature films – he has directed several documentaries and experimental short films -, the discovery of his austere and powerful cinema is undoubtedly the cinephile event of this beginning of the year 2023. discovery that gives the feeling of stepping straight into an aesthetic and spiritual world of great intensity. Like a real gift offered to us on a set, a little more than ten years after the death of a filmmaker whom it was really time to identify on the map of world cinema.

Uski Roti (1969), One day before the rainy season (1971), Duvidha (1973), Nazar (1989) by Mani Kaul – in theaters on January 4, 2023