Drinking, driving and death: the moral divide

The first visual of Eesan, a Tamil film released in 2010, is a slow motion capture of flowing dark red liquid. A falling ice cube reveals that the liquid we are watching is not blood, but alcohol being emptied from a bottle. But the film’s implication that blood and alcohol are not separated by much is apparent within the first ten minutes of the film. Eesan begins with scenes from a party at an underground club on the outskirts of Chennai. A young woman leaves the party on her bike. On her way back through the sparsely populated East Coast Road a group of inebriated youngsters in an SUV begin tailing, and harassing her. What follows is a road accident resulting in the woman’s death. [caption id=“attachment_24174” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Kalki Koechlin in Shaitan. Publicity still from movie. Image courtesy Viacom”] [/caption]Watching the events of Anurag Kashyap’s latest production Shaitan unfold earlier this month, I could not help but hark back to that opening scene in Eesan. The inflection point in Shaitan is brought about by a very similar incident. A group of wealthy, prescription drug abusing young wastrels lose control of their Hummer and inadvertently kill two cyclists. Two similar beginnings, but let’s take a look at how the events that transpire in both films are constructed. Shaitan spends a great amount of time introducing us to the five rich kids in that Hummer. We become intimately familiar with their dreams, disappointments and debaucherous lives. While it is a little hard to identify entirely with such wantonness, the Hindi film would like us at some level to not judge them as we may after a cursory glance at a news article covering yet another drunken driving accident. In Eesan, however, the accident is an invitation, almost a request to the audience to sit in judgment on their lack of morality. The faces of the victims in the road accident in Shaitan are never revealed. (In fact, we see the victims’ legs run over a second time when the five back up and escape but never their faces) The Tamil film however presents the entire accident from the point of view of the girl on the bike. Another difference between the films is the unfolding of events immediately after the accidents take place. There are few witnesses to the incident in Shaitan, which seems very improbable considering it takes place in Mumbai. The five youngsters manage to flee the scene of the crime with no hindrance. Eventually a cop does discover that these five are responsible for the accident. But rather than bring them to justice he decides to begin extorting them instead. In Eesan the perpetrators are immediately accosted by the public and arrested. However they have political pull. (They are good friends of the son of a minister in the state cabinet) So they are them released within 24 hours. The corrupt law and order system ensures that the life lost is not atoned for or repented in either film. But it is important to see how differently the two films present this reality. Shaitan clearly separates the personal corruption of its protagonists from the systemic corruption. It also clearly insinuates that the systemic corruption has far more dangerous consequences. Eesan is content with conflating these two different types of corruption by making its villainous youngsters a cog in the cycle of illegal influence. Anurag Kashyap and M.Sasikumar, the director/producer of Eesan, are self-confessed admirers of each other’s work. They are contemporaries who both strive to create and promote ‘meaningful’ cinema in their respective industries. Yet their film’s approach similar situations from starkly different points of view. A vastly different moral ethos. Ebert’s famous law of film states that “a film is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about”. Few instances demonstrate this law as clearly as the accident scenes in Eesan and Shaitan.