The opening scene is assured, compact and immediately sets the mood. At the same time, one never gets the impression that the plot of an American movie has been arbitrarily picked up and moved to an Indian setting with incongruous results - the shift to a small desert town in Rajasthan here is done just as convincingly as the placing of Othello in the Uttar Pradesh heartland in Omkara. Manorama doesn’t end on a comparably bleak note (in fact, it’s possible to argue that the last few minutes are a bit of a cop-out), but otherwise its tone is very similar to Polanski’s film. Chinatown, about a private eye investigating corruption in the Los Angeles water department while also trying to figure out the motivations of the woman who has hired him, was an uncompromisingly cynical view of human nature that didn’t give the viewer a shard of hope, let alone a silver lining. Manorama Six Feet Under works with the template of Roman Polanski’s superb “neo-noir” film Chinatown, but it uses that template selectively and intelligently.
(Raghavan actually played a couple of minutes from the early 1970s film Parwaana to show how its plot inspires his protagonist, but this didn’t at all make Johnny Gaddaar seem jaded or derivative.) They know a lot about other cinemas and about a variety of filmmaking styles and genres, but are secure enough about their own talents to be able to openly acknowledge their influences and to build on them.
These are films made by directors who are unafraid to play auteur, bring very personal visions to the big screen, and who are serious movie buffs themselves – as much students as practitioners (much the same way as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and the other “kids with beards” were in the late 1960s, and the French New Wave directors a decade earlier). Other notable recent movies of this type include Sriram Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar and Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (posts on these here and here). Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under is another in a line of very interesting, relatively low-profile films that haven’t done too well on commercial release but which seem likely to acquire cult followings on DVD.
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