The late film critic Manny Faber had an evocative phrase for the kind of movies he preferred. He called them “termite art”, as opposed to the “white elephant art” that proliferates in awards seasons and major festivals. The termite artist was small and unobtrusive, spurning the flash, technique and classicism of the white elephants, while still being capable of carving out its place. It didn’t literally mean art about termites, although you could make the case for Amartya Bhattacharyya’s Son of Adam being termite art in both senses. A low-budget, hand-made odyssey, it also has a repeated motif of ants and insects. In one scene, ants crawl over an abandoned radio while a newsreader issues a preposterous report about a rebel leader being attacked by a bug in his underwear. The bug, the newsreader solemnly intones, is being blamed on a conspiracy.
There are lots of these odd, satirical flourishes in Son of Adam, as well as elements of surrealism and magic realism. A scene where the protagonist digs up an old-fashioned landline telephone from the earth recalls a similar scene in one of the key texts of cinematic surrealism, Stefan Uher’s The Miraculous Virgin. This is where the film’s claim to termite status breaks down, because there is an awful lot of capital-S Symbolism and Significance in Son of Adam. It parallels the ascent of man, in both religious and evolutionary terms, with one man’s coming to accept his place in the world, beginning and ending in stunningly-photographed Edenic nature.
This isn’t necessarily a problem. I’m more comfortable with visible ambition than Farber was; there’s a pleasure in watching someone take a big swing. Two of recent cinema’s biggest swings have involved musical numbers, thanks to Todd Phillips and Jacques Audiard. Son of Adam is also an unlikely musical, although the fact that musicals are still a staple of Indian cinema means it’s not self-conscious about this. Watching a lot of modern Western musical cinema, you can’t shake the suspicion that the directors chose this genre because it’s seen as “wacky”, or at least a challenge. Son of Adam has plenty of eccentricities, but its songs aren’t among them. They’re treated simply as a soundtrack that tells the story.
Just because Son of Adam starts off in a better position doesn’t mean its musical elements work, though. Its songs are taken from Rupam Islam’s album Aami, but while they may work as an album they’re lacking as a soundtrack. Bhattacharyya chooses to avoid any scenes of actors lip-syncing and dancing, perhaps to signal the film’s distance from commercial Indian cinema. Instead, the songs are played out over montages, making it all too easy to treat the songs as background music, rather than a driver of the film’s narrative and themes. It doesn’t help that Islam’s songs are fairly one-paced, lacking the shifts in tone and tempo that a musical’s songbook should have. One song features the line “I’m poisonously mad”, sung in exactly the same mellow, blissful tone as the rest of the songs.
Son of Adam has its pleasures if you approach it as a scrappy, diaristic film, full of montages of whatever aspects of Indian life fascinate Bhattacharyya. By the time Adam was listening to a non-corporeal presence quoting Wordsworth at him, I felt that the film’s meaning had slipped my grasp, and I think that’s only partially down to my limitations. For all its ambition and love of life, Son of Adam ultimately feels insular, as insular as its protagonist becomes when he spurns the human world. Another line from those spoof news broadcasts might serve as a summary: “The government has refused to respond to the intellectuals, because their questions could not be understood”.
SON OF ADAM HAD ITS UK PREMIERE AT LIFFF 2024
Graham’s Archive – Son of Adam
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