Watched Peepli Live recently and though the director did a remarkable job. The issue of farmers committing suicide in India is serious and shameful one - it has made plenty of headlines over the years but the news cycle has moved on. The plight of this community only grows worse. Notwithstanding the weight of her chosen topic, Anusha Rizwi delivers a scathing dark comedy that makes the viewer laugh at times while feeling awful that they find any of this funny,
The situation for India’s more than 260 million agricultural workers is dire. Nearly 30 people in the farming sector die by suicide daily, according to the most recent figures available, typically due to overwhelming debt. Indeed in 2020, more than 10,000 people in the agricultural sector ended their own lives, according to government data.
It was interesting to read a western reviewer's take on a style of story-telling that would be a bit niche even for audiences from India.
..most of the satire has a secondhand feel to it, the sense that we’ve seen this all before. Worse, it often turns to an unnecessary didacticism to hammer home its points, as when a veteran reporter lectures a younger colleague on the reasons why this particular would-be suicide is news, but the plight of all the country’s other farmers who die every day is not. Still, Rizvi occasionally hits on an inspired bit by amping up the absurdity factor. In one scene, a reporter examines Natha’s “droppings,” musing on the ways in which the colors of a man’s feces reflect his mental state..
As a desi born and raised, I don't see things the same way. The point of the movie to me was to demonstrate how the extremely poor and dispossessed in India have absolutely no winning moves in life or death. They are considered irrelevant and dispensable given their large numbers. No one in the movie ever had even a fleeting interest in the plight of this poor farmer who had to auction his land to settle his debt. He was just a pawn in the game whose set of players and rules evolved all the time. The only certainty the story shows that the viewer should already expect if they are from that part of the world - things will end badly for Natha, they will go from bad to worse and he will accept it as his lot. To that end, I am not aligned with this reviewer's summation:
..left to wonder whether Rizvi, amid all her zeal for crafting cheap laughs at easy targets, has forgotten to “consider the person” in whom she’s allegedly interested.
Rizwi is not interested in Natha per se, she is interested in making the audience feel squirmy very about their response to his life circumstances as she douses it with absurdity to elicit "cheap laughs". What does it say about a person who watches this while eating their oversize bag of popcorn and laughing. That is the person I believe Rizwi is considering with interest.
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