It comes again to my mind
why I consider Indian cinema as one of the most vibrant ones of our
time. As the glory of the past of Indian cinema once appalled the
dominance of a mostly Euro-centrist film historiography, it´s
exciting present is often ignored by the so-called big Film
festivals. Some Indian short films I saw recently reassure myself in
appreciating Indian cinema which is just not very much trendy and
obviously not in fashion among the majority of festival programmers
but nevertheless at least as exciting as interesting than films from
Iran or China which frequent all kinds of European film festivals.
Trapeze is a 13
minutes long nightmare but one of these nightmares which feel to real
to be forgotten soon. At the beginning, a surreal image of a road
traffic which moves backwards. A young man called Sandip receives a
phone call from a friend who told him that he is is arrested for
murdering his fiance. From one second to the next the world of
Trapeze is split into two parallel worlds. Radio and
television report without cease about violence and terror attacks.
When Sandip takes a shave, a pure every day action, the sink is
suddenly filled with blood. To distinguish what is imagined and what
is real, becomes difficult.
There is a scene when
Sandip fights with his fiancé Ipshita, if I remember correctly,
about religious fanaticism in which Sandip is involved. On the
surface a mundane quarrel between a couple. The violence is
subliminal in this scene filmed in close ups and it is visible in the
angry and almost hate filled face of Sandip. An every day quarrel
between a young couple or is it already a hint to a fathomless drama?
As the images also the soundtrack moves from seemingly mundane sounds
to distorted and alienated ones.
Later, Sandip encounters
in a cellar-like room a strange clown who seems to be in his
viciousness a close relative to Heath Ledger´s Joker in Christopher
Nolan´s The Dark Knight. His gestures are like an even more
cynical variations of Chaplin´s “The Great Dictator. No one
can escape his horrible laughter. In front of him, we recognize
Ipshita´s corpse, her throat cut open.
Mundane living rooms turn
into catacombs of fear and guilt, ordinary people into monsters of
hate.
Trapeze is a
miniature filled with old and very primary motives from the history
of cinema, for example the “Doppelgänger”-motive or the split
personality in the fantastic films from early German cinema, the Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-theme, but also the motive of real and imagined
murder in Hitchcock´s Strangers on a Train. And like
Hitchcock, the terror grows in every day objects or between every day
actions. The world we inhabit turns from one moment to the next into
a scary place.
The news about violence
there and then invades the here and now. The recent history of
violence and terror attacks has arrived the living together of what
we call civilization.
The film is always most
disturbing in its transitions from what we call mundane life and the
nightmare mankind finally create. I refer here to an end ,a seemingly
happy ending” which returns with one single cut to the nightmare
again we want to escape and what the whole film is about. If we
thought we “wake up” from a nightmare, we realize that we are
still in the middle of it.
It is still amazing that a
13 minutes long film can be much more though provoking and affecting
than all the news shows in the world. What remains, is a memory of a
weird dream in which we try to hold on certainties which always blur
into doubt.
Trapeze is like a
shock wave. The news on violence and here the terror attacks in
France finally have reached the private and more intimate space. We
see Sandip often running through narrow lanes. There is no real
escape and there is no real escape from the nightmare the film
evokes. Last but not least, Trapeze is an exciting fusion of
experimental cinema with interwoven genre-elements.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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