Paradox and a cinematic ambition - Anand Gandhi's 'Ship Of Theseus'

What are you willing to make allowances for as an audience? When you are picking a film to watch, you are actually deciding which of your sensibilities must be squashed for the next few hours. The audience must enter with a different mindset than what decides if a Bollywood film is a hit or a miss and here the focus is on the intriguing idea that built it than the set of events that make up the plot of this film based on Plutarch’s Theseus paradox. 

“If all the planks of a ship have been replaced, and a new ship is made of those planks, does the identity of the ship remain the same?”

A visually impaired photographer forms her photograph by her power of perception. She seeks moments through sound than sight. But when her sight is restored, even though having gained something so vital, she loses her power of perception along the  way. Her photographs lose their essence and she finds herself trying to blindfold her eyes. Yet she finally removes the fold only to drop her lens cover in a scene, to lose control of her art that was dictated by her perception. Does she remain the same person? The paradox poses as a question to the figure of the person.

The protagonist of the second story is a monk who amid the good natured banter of a slightly verbose plot  files a petition against to improve conditions for the animals used for chemical testing. The monk confronts an ethical dilemma with a long held ideology when he is diagnosed of liver cirrhosis, that requires him to take the same medicines tested on  animals to ease his suffering and has to choose between his principles and death.

“Zindagi mein khushi chahiye aur shayad thodi si manavta” is stockbroker Navin’s philosophy but his conscience is strangely awakened when he hears about a poor man’s stolen kidney near about the same time that he had a kidney transplant. He follows trail and discovers how intricate morality could be. Navin questions whether his actions have made any difference at all and is reassured with “Itna hee milta hai”.

Taken together, these stories ask how much an individual’s actions can affect the world, and spells it in an intimate, worm’s eye storytelling.

What troubles me slightly is Maitreya (the monk) and a young lawyer  Maitreya works with on the animal testing case being mouthpieces for the director’s own ideologies with the lawyer being named Charvaka after the branch of Indian philosophy that embraces philosophical skepticism.

All stories converge into a scene when the loci of interrogation, the characters find themselves in the same room. That open-endedness – the sense that what we have seen in these two hours is just a fragment of an immeasurably large and interconnected answer picture.What the film images is, “I pass on an idea to you, are you still the same person?”. One can not depict single meaning from the movie, several conclusions are attached to it, the movie does not try the several years old paradox but tries to explore it even more in a storytelling manner.The film demands its viewers to be engaged at every moment.

And as Rajeev Masand aptly put it, “It targets that organ of the body that Hindi cinema consistently overlooks, the brain” 

PS. In case you have not seen the trailer ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5xt0cKasDw )