Mrinal Sen’s In Search of Famine initially
immerses us in the exuberance of movie-making, with a crew arriving from the city to
film a drama about a 1943 famine, settling into the dilapidated mansion they’re
to use as a base; early on, the fascinated locals crowd around to observe the
filming of every scene, marveling at the magic being created (a nice throwaway
scene has a someone riding through town advertising a screening of The Guns
of Navarone, described as a unique masterpiece starring the world’s
greatest actress, “Anthony Queen”). But the filmmakers’ moral compass is
rapidly shown to be confused, the plot seeming to be tangled in melodramatics,
and with inadequate thinking about the representation of such suffering (in one
scene, they use historical photos of famine victims as a guessing game to while
away the time); when they hit on the idea of casting a local as a woman forced
into prostitution to feed her family, it triggers an outrage, exacerbated
by the film crew’s destabilization of the shaky local economy, and the crew
quietly packs up and leaves, probably headed for the greater comfort of the studio. The
final moments focus on the sad subsequent fate of one of the women with whom
they cross paths, her face receding into darkness, a piercing cinematic moment emphasizing
all that the film within the film fails to grasp or engage with. Sen’s
treatment of the crew, a strenuously urbane, quote-spewing bunch, often verges
on satire, but of a kind tinged with melancholy; more broadly, the film is
deliberately hard to read in its desired equilibrium of sorrow and anger, in
the degree of culpability we should assign for various events depicted. If it
doesn’t ultimately feel completely satisfying, that may be as it should be; developments
of subsequent decades (such as the proliferation of the reality genre) increase
the film’s ambiguous richness.
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