Making a movie takes a lot of control: control of the lighting, the environment, the actors' expressions and lines, all to produce something that is ultimately judged on how well it reflects real life. This irony and the people caught in the struggle for control is explored in the Indian film "An Unfinished Letter," which was screened last night as part of the 34th Cairo International Film Festival.
The film opens with Meenu, an aging Indian film actress, writing a suicide note. Meenu has broken her fifteen-year-long retirement to star in a feature from an up-and-coming young director, Imtaeaz Hiyaa, known for his previous critically acclaimed box office bomb. She is still beautiful (although, the film is careful to highlight that only the men who truly love her see her beauty as unconventional) and, more than that, she has the kind of half-used brain that benefits from its supporting role in her life; her simmering intellect is all in her eyes.
Meenu and Imtaeaz fall in love, and although she has reservations about their age difference, he is insistent in one of the film’s most concise lines: "Shut up, woman. Shut up and be kissed." It doesn't take long for him to break her heart by moving on to a much younger actress, one who, to make matters worse, admires Meenu so much she helps wipe her tears while telling her "how gorgeous you still look."
The romantic betrayal spills into the professional sphere when Imtaeaz casts the young actress in a role he promised to Meenu. When the film returns to her suicide note — "This is the only thing under my control" — it is clear she means to kill herself over the end of her career and relationship. It takes a good deal of flash backs to make the audience understand that this recent heartbreak is only part of the story.
During her girlhood, Meenu’s mother is engaged in a "temple" marriage to a man who without repercussions or need for legal divorce leaves them. Scenes depict Meenu's childhood home in a chaos even greater than that of the city outside, full of loose fowl and screaming women. It is a place that Meenu is desperate to escape and which she calls "That awful hole, clinging to my father's memory."
Although she surrounds herself with fellow students who recite poetry by Mayakovsky, Tagore and Yeats and rant against the government, Meenu's choice of escape comes with her first role, as a blind girl in a movie (or "picture" as it is derisively referred to) from a popular director. She throws herself into her role after her love is hunted down and shot by the police, and wins India's highest acting honor for it.
The script implies that the decision to immerse herself in popular art rather than lead a riskier, and poorer, life of an intellectual (she professes a desire to be a novelist) is Meenu's first betrayal of herself and the beginning of her downfall. But this barely registers in her character, who seems not to mourn her idealistic youth until she shuffles through the detritus of her life as she writes and rewrites her suicide note.
The bulk of the movie is a chronicling of Meenu's rise as a star and all the off-screen dramas that unfold, including the standard party life of a starlet, having children out of wedlock and a devastating airplane crash. Occasionally, the film nods to Bollywood’s over-the-top sing-along tragicomedies with campy numbers or abrupt duets. In its most convincing moments, it is difficult to tell the difference between Meenu's real life and her stage life. This is extremely effective when a stricken peasant wife played by Meenu stays in teary character while watching her unfaithful love get into a car with his wife. It can also be unintentionally alienating and a little overblown like when Imtaeaz carries Meenu a la Gone with the Wind from a house that was intentionally set aflame for the movie.
"My life seems to be a series of make-believes," Meenu whines, in a moment that is indicative of the film's downfall. Meenu is, we are to believe, being killed by her own want for control; suicide, after all, is the epitome of that futile desire. But, in trying to make the point that control is an illusion, that we are all actors, and, tepidly, that cinema should be for the people, "An Unfinished Letter" tries to be so neat that it sews itself shut. Cinema might be a series of carefully constructed make-believes, but the best of it, like life, should be mysterious.
