India: Matri Bhumi
                  
Director: Roberto Rosselini
Year: 1959
Rating: 6.0
It is hard to know how to approach this film from Roberto Rossellini. It is a meld of fable, fiction and fact with a narration from changing characters but told through the same voice in Italian. Rossellini took a journey through India in 1956 and made this film. In each stop along the way, he tells a story about a character - has locals act it out and narrates it as if from the main person. Again, in Italian which makes it lose its realism. What, I kept asking myself was he trying to accomplish. Was he trying to tell the story of contemporary India? Was it based on some religious text? Or were they just simple stories that he and his writers came up with on the spur of the moment. I feel like I missed something deeper than me because this film is praised to the skies by film critics. For years it was unseen after its initial release - but as the film explains an enormous effort was made to assemble if from various sources and then clean it up, re-do the colors which had faded.

 

But this is India. Even back 60 years ago it held a large percent of the world's population with hundreds of dialects, multiple ethnic groups, languages, customs, religions, regions. Rossellini barely can take a nibble at it in 90 minutes. So, what was he aiming for I kept asking. Why do parts of it bore me, other parts interest me. He needed more time. A bigger canvas. But what does he really understand about India? A white man with no background in the subject comes to India with a camera and tries to unfold this? But there are universal truths. Was that what he was looking for? Someday when I am more ambitious, I want to tackle Louis Malle's six-hour documentary Phantom India about the country. Another European come to India looking for something.

 

I was suspect about this from the beginning when it begins in Bombay (Mumbai) and the narration tells us about the incredible diversity and how they live together in harmony. What? The Partition was only nine years previous to the filming - there was not a lot of harmony as thousands were slaughtered in the streets for not being the right religion. Then I read Rossellini was there at the invitation of Nehru who wanted a positive portrayal of India by a famous director. Ok. Now I get it. And that tilting of the truth runs through the film in its adoration of India. Everything is steeped in mysticism, spiritualism. In the first section he scripts a story about a Mahout - trainer, keeper and rider of elephants. There is a lengthy section on the use of elephants to clear the land of trees and then carrying them away. The narration talks about the "alliance" of man and elephant. Not really. The elephant did not enter that alliance willingly and for me it was painful to watch these beautiful beasts of burden being overworked.

 

Later in another segment, it is a monkey in a circus that he focuses on - while we see other free monkeys happily swinging from tree to tree. Maybe that was the point. There are two other sections - an 80-year-old man who takes his two beloved cows into the jungle where he comes across a tiger but the tiger isn't as scary as the intrusion of mining into the jungle that destroys the balance between man and animals. Finally, we visit a man who has been working on an enormous project - to build a dam. And that was incredible watching it built as the narration says rock by rock as hundreds of men and women haul away the stones in baskets and on top of their heads. For me, it was the non-story parts that I liked. People at work, play, traveling, the boat trip on the Ganges passing Benares and all the magnificent decaying temples. I don't really know what the scripted parts added to this. There was a poetry to the narration, but that language was clearly being imposed by the filmmakers and not by people out in rural India where nearly all this takes place. Let them tell their own stories. Apparently, when Nehru saw it, he was as perplexed as I am.