Shoebox: Of Memory and Transformation
Shoebox is a quiet and slow-paced film, which dwells on themes of memory, heritage, and culture. It is woven around a pravasi Bengali joint family in Allahabad. The elder brother, Madhav, is passionately absorbed by the single-screen theatre he runs, but a tragic accident at the beginning of the film leaves him a changed man, and transforms the destinies of his family and his theatre. Fast-forwarded to years later, we now re-enter the film through the gaze of his grown-up daughter, Mampu, a PhD scholar, who rushes back home from another city when she hears of her father’s failing health. A considerable portion of the film traces the father-daughter bond with the kind of attention that is unusual in our cinema (barring notable exceptions such as Piku).
The film is also a fond elegy to the thrill of watching and rewatching pulpy cinema in the single-screen theatre — a practice that is all but obsolete in the gentrified ethos of cities and towns today. This is most poignant in the scene where we see a lone man with his phone in his hands and his earphones plugged in, propped up against the wall of a closed theatre’s ticket counter, (presumably) watching a film uploaded to his phone by the recharge shop run by that very theatre’s erstwhile projection man. Such theatres stand in danger of being replaced by multiplexes that would be unaffordable for working-class viewers like him.
All of this is set against the backdrop of a city undergoing rapid transformation, with Allahabad being ‘rebranded’ as Prayagraj. The film raises the ‘composite culture’ v/s ‘development and parivartan’ debate, but except for a brief, somewhat stilted scene, it does not pontificate on this at length. Instead, it shows us the transforming rhythms of the city in a way best captured on screen: evocatively, through its melancholic cinematography. The plot also draws attention to the model of development orchestrated by political and corporate zealots, which stem from a common impulse of violent uprooting.
Stuck between love and guilt, Madhav is neither able to renovate his now defunct theatre nor let go of it. In contrast, his younger brother Joydeep is more adaptable to change, passionately defending the city’s renaming and urging Madhav to accept a builder’s lucrative offer to buy the theatre and erect a mall in its place. Madhav responds angrily, demanding to know why demolition is seen as the only solution and pointing out the difference between the value of the same land being mere ‘property’ for some and irreplaceable for others.
Ostensibly, this is only a discussion about a derelict theatre, yet, this sequence invokes larger political and cultural debates raging around us. What constitutes a sense of identity of a place and a sense of belonging in its people? Who can lay claim to territory or heritage in the name of culture? If change is inevitable, what is worth preserving from tradition? Can something new be built except on the ruins of the old? What differentiates healthy transformation from unhealthy disruption?
However, Madhav is also a man trapped in the world of memories, living in nostalgia and denial, unable to keep pace with the times and his own age, not unlike his old city. In comparison, his daughter is an in-between figure, who has grown up between two cities and who revels in the nostalgia of WWF trump cards and the old Fiat, yet who also tries to gently or sternly persuade her father to let go of old possessions and habits and move cities with her. But, their relationship is not as abrasive as that of the father-son duo in the Bangla film Cinemawala, where the inter-generational conflict reflects the clash between the viewing cultures of the single-screen and the pirated DVD. For all their many frictions, Mampu has inherited her father’s love for theatre and cinema, bunking school to slip into the theatre and building a pinhole camera for a school project — for both of which she is punished by her father, as if he is shielding her from his own passions.
Mampu the child is revealed to us as a champion of justice and a rebel in a series of disconnected flashbacks, but as an adult, even as she retains her keen sense of justice, she also carries with her the maturer realisation of the importance of conserving legacy by preserving memory. With its juxtaposition of two contrasting worlds represented by two contrasting kinds of valuable papers, the film ends on a note of one man’s trash being another woman’s treasure. It leaves us with the suggestion that the memories worth preserving need not only be tied down to physical spaces which may cease to exist someday, but can also be found in personal artefacts and written records, gesturing towards the importance of archiving. This is the small triumph that the helpless researcher wrests from the aggressive world of the builder and the politician.
Mampu’s childhood friend Kaustubh is loyal but careless; he fails to recognise the extent of his own brother’s political ambitions and his ruthless conspiracy against his friend’s father. Towards the end of the film, when he regrets his inability to recognise all that was unfolding before his eyes inside his very home and his failure to connect the dots in time, he appears to speak for us all, and our silence and complicity in the violence unfolding around us in the name of development and transformation.
Several of these themes, as well as characters, sometimes appear lightly sketched in, and the film’s occasional eruption into scenes of high drama give it a somewhat uneven tone. A tighter screenplay would have worked in the film’s favour. But the film’s use of motifs and symbols on the other hand, is thoughtful in conveying its essence. Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and art, is a patron deity for both the family that worships her and is engaged in cultural and intellectual pursuits, as well as the city that prides itself as a centre of learning and cultural and spiritual confluence. But equally, Saraswati is also the mythical river, whose extinction is invoked by a folk song about pollution and climate crisis that warns about the wrath of the gods upon the city of Kumbh mela. And then there is the shoebox which gives the film its name and keeps shifting in meaning throughout — as a gift, as memory of a gift, raw material in a class project, and a holder of tangible and intangible memories. In this sense, it functions much like Saraswati’s mythical box mentioned in the film’s epigraph, which contains fading memories of her past existence as a river. For what is memory but a river with its changing rhythms, always in flow, and never the same river twice, and what is cinema itself but an attempt at collating and archiving memory in motion?
Note: Shoebox is Faraz Ali’s debut feature film that premiered at the Dharmshala International Film Festival earlier this year. It is headed for the International Film Festival of Kerala and MAMI Mumbai Film Festival early next year.
