In Life! Camera Action, Reina, a student at New York Film Academy, has been disowned by her parents for defying their wishes that she do something befitting a respectable middle-class girl. “America is a free nation,” Reina counters, “and so am I!” Luckily, Reina has passion, which, according to her professor, is what matters most: “All successful people, in any industry, Bill Gates, Anil Kapoor–you know him, right? Played the host in Slumdog Millionaire. Or Danny Boyle, director, Slumdog Millionaire, very successful.” But since neither passion nor parents pay the bills, Reina has to work two jobs (Indian video store, Indian restaurant) and continues to do so even with the deadline for her unplanned thesis film a week off. Given such long odds, muses the professor, “Satyajit Ray is going to come out of his grave to help you, right?” (Unfortunately, Ray was cremated.)
The dutiful nods, name-checking rather than artistic reference, appear as well in Autograph, which contains a curious tension between the dewy-eyed antagonist’s ambition–to create a new version of Ray’s Nayak, garnished with “a bit of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries“–and the style of the film, which is glossy and conventional. And in Slackistan, in which the doe-like Hasan, saddled with post-college ennui and an untouched digital video camera, drifts around the city looking without success for a copy of Mean Streets. The city is Islamabad, which makes the film one of a few non-Indian submissions to sneak in under cover of SAIFF’s first two initials. Slackistan (“Pakistan’s first-ever slacker movie,” which one of the film’s stars went so far as to call “the anti-Slumdog” but which happily borrowed that film’s fractured yellow typeface for the intertitles punctuating Hasan’s peregrinations) is exceptional as well because its Westernness feels not anxious but innate. Hasan, played by the nonprofessional Shahbaz Shigri, is American in his speech, his sneakers, even his body: the broad, rolled-forward shoulders, the titanic adolescent slouch; like Jake Gyllenhaal with eyes from a Safavid miniature. Hasan and his friends, cruising aimlessly in a parental Benz, wincing at mobile-phone videos of beheadings, checking status updates on what one of their mothers calls “MyFace.”
“One thing’s for certain,” says an ex-insurgent to an ex-would-be-insurgent in Harud (“Autumn”), whose own aimless youth live in Indian-occupied Kashmir. “The path to paradise does not go via Pakistan.” The ex-would-be is Rafiq, who looks like a beautiful sad frog. Harud is a stately, elliptical film that looks inward rather than abroad, yet even Srinagar’s slackers wonder about their audience. “America has their own satellites. They’re watching the whole world. Who knows, they may be listening to our conversation right now.” So hopes Gandu‘s Gandu: “Gandu will get a red-carpet welcome on the streets of New York!” So worry the goons in With Love to Obama: “They’ll send the F.B.I. after us.” “You remember Saddam? Bush and Saddam had enmity for generations. The whole world tried to stop Bush, but he sent the F.B.I. after him. First Bush got him checked by a doctor, and then got him hanged.” “He is an American, the news will reach Bush very soon!”
As the wall graffiti in Slackistan says, “NO MORE AMERICAN ENSLAVEMENT.” As Mr. Khan said, “A film has to be local. It cannot be designed with the international film-festival market in mind.” As the lusty outlaw dares the alabaster beauty in Raavanan, “Wander in the sun with us and turn dark like us.” As the head gangster repeatedly admonishes his star-struck subordinate in With Love to Obama, in an untranslatable phrase that the subtitles render literally: “Take off your American ghost!” Easier said than done. As Ray said just after receiving a lifetime achievement Oscar and just before he died, “I have survived because of my foreign market. Without that I wouldn’t have survived at all. I would have stopped making films and gone back to my old profession, advertising.”
Mr. Kroll-Zaidi is the managing editor of Harper’s Magazine.
