Looking, again, and again
The closing moment in Karthik Subbaraj’s Jagame Thanthiram (The World is a Snare) speaks more eloquently than many others in a film that holds, or tries to hold within its compass such diverse things as Brexit, immigration, adventurist foreign policies, various citizenship acts, the tragedy in Sri Lanka, and a critique of global capitalism. As the hero and his men prepare to depart after having dumped the bad guy in the middle of an international nowhere, their driver says ‘Big desert’, and steps out of the red truck to hand him a jerrycan full of water.
This moment is one of the answers that the film offers to a question that it sets up and follows over one hundred and fifty minutes. Is the principle of ‘every man for himself’ sufficient armour against the treasons, stratagems and spoils that the world inevitably resolves into? This is an ambitious question to ask; to do so is to go against the irresistible current of common sense in our times.
I like this film, despite its faults, for knowing what it wants to be ambitious about.
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Dhanush plays Suruli, a Madurai rowdy who ends up working for a London-based crime lord and white supremacist named Peter Sprott.
Peter and Suruli are versions of each other in different worlds. Both of them are improbably ludic figures, combining a flair for verbal mischief with brutal violence.
When we meet Peter for the first time, he’s busy going about a gory re-enactment of Marvell’s ‘the grave’s a fine and private place.’ A few minutes later, he has a shotgun pointed down the squeaky-voiced Vicky’s crotch, and promises him a severance package he won’t like. Several incidents later, he picks Suruli to accompany him to peace talks, and ho-hos about caring for workplace diversity.
Suruli goes about murdering people with a similar comic-book gusto. He stops a train by parking on the tracks, and gets on it to subject a North Indian business rival to a series of language accident jokes featuring the artistes Tamizh and Hindi: Unga annan ko pulao is one, and irangu, un irangalai therivikkiren, mashing up the words for getting involved in violence and condolence giving. A moment later he promises to let him live if he can answer a quiz question. When the man answers, after a fashion, he awards him the prize of four bullets in the chest because this correct answer is an embarrassment to his sidekick and mapillai. There’s more gusto when this murder leads to a retaliatory attack in his parotta-shop. He runs upstairs, rolls several country bombs while the air buzzes angrily around him with bullets, and then lights the fuse on the bombs with a borrowed cigarette.
When Suruli meets Peter for the first time, he listens to him go on in English about his ‘business problem’, and breaks into a guffaw. He has made a mental connection, another punning mash-up. Somebody who runs off his mouth in English is called a Peter in Tamizh slang and he now knows why. Peethura Peter-u, he says in the tone of a mathematician delivering a QED, because peethurathu is to talk nonstop, or to blow your own horn.
If you look beyond all this verbal elan, they are brothers twice over because they froth in different ways about outsiders/immigrants breaking into their homelands and walking off with the profits.
Multiple ironies here; they are both blind to being beneficiaries of global exchanges, for all that Peter struts about in a white Rolls Royce with the vanity plate WHITE POWER. He curses a minion for splashing his cashmere scarf while shooting another underling. In a quick parallel, Suruli rages at a sidekick for splashing his silk shirt after a rather energetic machete slash.
Remarkably, they also fail to notice what they are putting into their mouths. The cigars that Peter likes to chew on and the parottas that Suruli makes a living from are both, if you think about it, immigrants of a kind.
This brotherhood is also expressed in terms of a doctrine of looking out for oneself without ‘trying to be a hero’, or surrendering to ‘bleeding heart stuff’ in Peter’s words. Or without any ‘Tatthuvam pesuradu’ (to talk philosophy/theory) in Suruli’s words. Indeed, when Suruli makes his grand entrance, it resolves into a loud anthem of sovereignty through self-interest (Enakku rajavaaa naa vaazhuren/ethuvum illanaalum aaluren) that might compel the good, dead Adam Smith’s skull to break into headbanging approval if only he could hear it.
Suruli has to go into hiding and also countenance the minor inconvenience of a cancelled wedding because of all the showboating (showtrain-ing?), and it is at this point that he receives the offer to go to London to help Peter deal with the rather serious damage inflicted upon him by a ‘brown gang’ led by Sivadoss. Peter is led to Suruli by Vicky, engineering graduate from Madurai, and team lead through, of all things, an appraisal process at a software company, owned by, well, Peter.
Peter Sprott is thus a Trumpian figure: a genial, guffawing beneficiary of a bro capitalism which thrives on contradictory free market enterprises such as software, and on privatising public institutions such as prisons and refugee camps, alongside the useful xenophobia that funds such privatisation. Suruli is catapulted in to this big league as hired hand who will decimate Peter’s rivals, and does this job so well that he too earns fabulous rewards without asking too many questions. To the extent that he is soon lording it over his own little bit of London turf, called Little Madurai, and brings family over.
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Where then is the problem? In two things. In that Suruli meets people in London-the impossibly named Attila (Aishwarya Lakshmi), an old Madurai connection named Murugesan (Gajaraj), and gets to know Vicky (Sharath Ravi), now his interpreter, quite well. And in the fact that Sivadoss is not just a rival gangster, but a polar other to Peter.
Suruli studies Sivadoss’s methods and figure out that he is able to run circles around Peter’s outfit by running guns, and other things, for gold through a bunch of innocuous across-the Channel businesses. The hits on Sivadoss’s gang lead eventually to Suruli being captured. Sivadoss invites him to turn on Peter for more money, and Suruli agrees. A peace meeting is organised between the gangs, but Suruli pulls off a betrayal, leading to Peter killing Sivadoss and wiping out nearly everybody in the gang.
In Suruli’s book, Sivadoss is a sucker despite his many gifts. Events force a reconsideration.
He has fallen in love with Attila, after hearing her sing in a local dive. His persistence seems to charm her, especially his refusal to be put off by her revealing that she is mother to an 8-year-old. She asks him to take her out on a date, but that romantic moment is marred by an attempted hit by the remnants of Sivadoss’s gang. Suruli survives, and it becomes clear that Attila is hand in glove with the gangsters.
When he confronts her, two things happen.
She reveals the ties of loyalty that bind her to Sivadoss. She has suffered the loss of husband and family in Sri Lanka, and suffered the indignity of pretending to be married to her brother to get refugee status, and has made it to England only because of Sivadoss’s kindness. His racketeering has not been for personal gain, but to help other Sri Lankans, and eventually, other immigrants, find a home in the UK, .and to help them fend off criminal gangs that would prey on their continuing vulnerability. She is consumed with rage that such a man should fall victim to a sell-sword like Suruli, and is yet unable to carry through her desire for revenge. Suruli is shaken by her story of survival, and by the realisation that she could have betrayed him in the same coldblooded way that he did Sivadoss in, but was held by something.
Suruli is stricken by something now, having seen himself in Attila’s eyes. He makes peace with Sivadoss’s men, and helps them gain access to the reserves of cash that will enable them to continue their work. He prevails upon Peter to free Attila’s brother, who has been in detention in one of his camps for illegal immigrants. Peter agrees, because he has one more job for him; the assassination of the shadow Minister, Andrews, who has been leading the opposition to a controversial BICORE bill that would enforce stricter controls on immigrations and allow for more deportations.
Suruli agrees, initially, but something else happens. His mother has listened to Attila’s story, and now announces her decision to leave for home. She has been able to ignore and forgive his many misdeeds, but the Sivadoss story is too horrible for her to bear or forgive. The categories she evokes at this moment are metaphysical: duroham and paavam. Terms such as betrayal and sin do not do justice to the disgust she expresses on encountering what feels like treason against human nature in her own son. This is probably one of the most unusual variants of Amma-sentiment that Tamizh cinema has seen.
When he tells Peter that he won’t be able to go through with the assassination, the squeeze is put on him. Machine-guns shoot up his parotta shop, and then come calling through Attila’s windows. Murugesan, his manager, is done for by the first burst.
Suruli runs into the grizzled Murugesan, an acquaintance from his Madurai past, during his first meeting with Attila. Murugesan, who left Madurai with dreams of running a restaurant in London, is still doing dishes, and Suruli shares some of his new prosperity in making him manager of the parotta shop he sets up in London. Murugesan is a fount of conversation, and has opened Suruli’s eyes to the anxieties over citizenship that threaten stateless people like himself. His determination to find a place for himself in a hostile cosmos, and the summary dispatch of these aspirations cause Suruli to finally turn against Peter.
Murugesan’s life and death are the source of one kind of self-recognition for Suruli. Of the aspiration for something better that connects Sivadoss, Murugesan and himself. And the fact that men like Peter see this as a footling consideration.
The long-suffering Vicky, who killed many exams to find a job in London while Suruli was killing people, is the unlikely source of another self-recognition. It is he who reads Peter’s intentions in having Suruli assassinate Andrews. It would be the perfect finish for BICORE’s progress to have an immigrant kill the white man leading protests against the legislation. Suruli finally sees that he is no more than an entirely dispensable catspaw for Peter despite the talk of brotherhood.
Suruli, Attila, Vicky, and Sivadoss’s men come together to outsmart Peter and give him an unexpected comeuppance. They drop him off in the no man’s land between Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria with a passport from Mattuthavani, the inter-state bus terminus in Madurai. The idea, perhaps, being that even Peter can be led to a sort of informed political consciousness, through hard experience if not through a capacity for natural empathy.
Suruli’s movement is away from selfishness to self-awareness, from a kind of mercenary blindness to a form of understanding, and risky political commitment. From being consumed by a Madurai version of Sprott’s xenophobia to being an ulagatamizhan, a Tamilian who lives the truth of Kaniyan Poonkundran’s Sangam-era poem that begins Yaathum oore, yavarum kelir (All lands are home, all people my folks).
This could have been done through easy sloganeering and signposting, and it could have ended up being shite. It is done instead through an intricate detailing of character, through a process of seeing and recognising one’s own self in the little slivers of narrative that other characters offer in conversation.
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Suruli ultimately recognises and tides over what some Marxists would call the problem of false consciousness, and this is key to his freeing himself from exploitation.
The counterweight to his initial blindness is the capacity for clarity that Sivadoss carries.. The gang he runs is truly international, even though it may not have any Sinhalese men visible. We don’t hear his backstory, even though we know he is Sri Lankan. We are also shown a glimpse of him reading a Tamizh version of Marx’s Das Kapital.
Joju George’s portrayal of Sivadoss’s capacity for understanding his world is at its most impressive in his tragic, final moments. He utters the words Duroham, nam inatthin saabam, or “Betrayal, the curse that dogs our people’. What we end up having is tragedy in a tailspin. The tragic death is Sivadoss’s portion, but the tragic flaw, the hamartia is in Suruli’s capacity for duroham.
Duroham, nam inatthin saabam is perhaps the most succinct statement in the film in that it covers what Indian and Lankan governments did to the Eelam Tamils, what the LTTE did to the political diversity of the Tamils thorough their intolerance of dissent, and through the assassinations of saner, milder voices like Appapillai Amirthalingam, and Neelan Tiruchelvan, and finally what was done to the LTTE. These words are his parting gift to Suruli.
If it is these strivings after understanding one’s experiences and circumstances that make freedom from false consciousness possible, what is it that causes it in the first place?
Suruli offers the plea of ordinariness while attempting to explain this to Attila: “Naalu kaasu paatthoma, nalla vazhnthuttu setthomanu pora koottam than. Vettu kutthunnu kootu vanthaynga. Vantha velaiya paathittu, poundla sambarichittu polamnu vanthen. Enakku eppadinga ithellam theriyum.” (“The sort of people who’d think about making some money, and living well before dying. They brought me here to kill. I came here to do precisely that and earn in pounds and take it with me. How will I know all this?)
This is Suruli’s longest examination of himself in the whole film, and is very different in character from the response he makes when Sivadoss asks if he will do anything for money. Even as he offers us the lack of awareness as the reason for his amoral choices, it is worth noting that the reflex description for himself is the word ‘koottam’ which ranges across class and caste.
This moment continues: “Rottula setthu kidakkirana, ‘Ayyayyo’, kashtapadurana, ‘adappavame’, Ilankaiyila poruna, ‘enna kodumai’nu ucchu kottittu adutha velaya pakkira kootamunga nanga. Enakku eppadinga ithellam puriyum, eppadinga ithella oraikkum” (If someone lies dead on the road, ayyayyo; if somebody is struggling, poor guy; if it is war in Sri Lanka, we are the crowd that will say’ how terrible’, and shift to the next thing. How will I understand all this? How will all this register with me?”)
We should take Suruli’s temporising with a pinch of salt, but there remains the fact that he returns to finger caste position as a kind of insulation from the ethical questions. Or that membership in a caste legitimises privilege, and a stock, unfeeling response to the suffering of others, a script , without feeling, if you like. I’d like to draw your attention to the idiom he uses: “ucchu kottittu”, literally to empty out “ucchus”, the standard lizardly clicking of the tongue to show regret or concern.
Caste comes with its own ideology preloaded, and determines who you should pay attention to. In Suruli’s account, it offers an anaesthetic function that is exorcised by the contrary listening posts that storytelling and unfiltered conversation offer. Suruli is also speaking for his generation in the film, and for the contracting public sphere that they are accustomed to, for his mother does not offer the same reasons for her silence.
This is a different Suruli from the one who responds to the London offer with these words of evident relish: ‘Chola naaattu paramparaiyil oru London dada” or “Now there’s a London dada in/with Chola lineage”.
One of the consequences of the mythomane processes around caste in Tamizhnadu is the conferring of royal pasts, perhaps the Indian counterpart to what Freud called ‘family romance’. In Freud’s account, children experiencing psychosexual tensions produce narratives where their own parents are merely fostering them while they must wait for their real, more important parents to return and claim them. This anxiety is experienced by castes in India, not by individuals.
It is worth noting that there are at least two OBC communities and one Dalit caste that claim Chola lineage. So what indeed is Suruli’s caste? Here we have to note two things. One is that he could belong to any non-Brahmin caste, this being an example of the caste fluidity that Tamizh film-makers often adopt as a survival strategy. The other is that there are certain metonymic markers, or semiotic cues, that exist to speak without doing so overtly in Tamizh cinema.
In a very kickass paper that is available under open access here, Kartikeyan Damodaran and Hugo Gorringe offer a term, and a formulation:
“Madurai Formula films” or 3M films (Murder, Mayhem and Madurai…)….The films, explicitly or implicitly, celebrate caste dominance and become vehicles for, and expressions of, the assertion and pride of intermediate castes. Pandian (2000) details the socio-political mobilization of the intermediate castes during this period and, even where the films do not explicitly state the caste of the protagonists, the everyday markers, actions and attitudes leave the audience in little doubt as to who is being signified (cf. Krishnan 2008).”
I’m going to take the term 3M and mess with it just a little bit to read Machetes, Moustaches, and Madurai for greater semiotic logic, and euphony. Because these are the signifiers that surround Suruli when we meet him. He and his pleasant company sport handlebar moustaches which are contentious symbols of caste pride-these disappear when he goes to London, but come back in evidence around the time of his betrayal of Sivadoss. It is with a machete secreted by Suruli that Peter snuffs out Sivadoss. The Madurai signifiers are multiple-from the South Avani Moola Veedhi location that he mentions, to the name Suruli, which denotes both a tributary of the Vaigai, and a temple in the region dedicated to Murugan.
When Suruli tries to locate the moneybags who have disappeared with Sivadoss’s money, we see the full range of the caste-fluidity that his network is endowed with-conversations with people that are deliberately shots of a church, a mosque, and various temples with caste connections.
The sequence ends with a conversation between Suruli, and Theerthamalai, the man he calls Annei, and defers to otherwise. The favour Theerthamalai asks in return is to do with a woman from his community who has run away with a man from a lower caste. Suruli says two rude things-turn it into a series on Sun TV, and hang from the short and curlies on caste pride. He then says there are bigger things to worry about, we are all lower life forms for white people. Suruli’s response is clearly uncharacteristic, judging from Theerthamalai’s baffled response.
As part of this abjuring of caste, or indeed the pursuit of a genuine caste-fluidity rather than the tight exchanges of feudal patronage, Suruli binds himself over to two different fathers. One is Sivadoss, a father by implication in that he chooses to follow through with the Sri Lankan’s work.
The other father he explicitly binds himself to is Murugesan whom he pledges to avenge in a goosepimply lament that ends with the words enna pettha ayya. Murugesan, from the small string of memories he reels off, is from a refugee camp in Madurai, and is thus a very different Sri Lankan Tamil in terms of caste. Probably a Plantation Tamil, judging by his accent.
Murugesan affirms a dignity of labour that Suruli does not immediately understand. He sets aside the position of manager that he has been given to go back to washing plates and sleeping in the kitchen, and says wryly that over many years of menial labour he has learnt to have conversations with the plates that he washes. That the remnants on the plate tell him volumes about the people who ate off them. Murugesan is the other tragic figure in the film, dying in the crossfire of a fight that has nothing to do with him, and living with all his might in pursuit of a life of his own, a home of his own, in the face of events that conspire to make him a stateless nobody.
The Madurai Formula Film is part of a social adjustment so formidable that even those who would like to question caste consolidations have to make their peace with it, as Kartikeyan and Gorringe would have it. The path that Karthik Subbaraj charts for Suruli is a manifesto of intent; of the desire to disembowel this caste affirmatory formation and cast it to the four winds.
The self that Suruli commits to seeking is neither to be found in a return to the ‘premodern’ identity that moustaches and machetes reflect, nor in an embrace of the shiny modernities that mere capitalism seems to lead to. It is in the bits and pieces that he recognises of himself in the others around him, in their stories, in their struggles, in their aspirations.
I’m not particularly enthusiastic about Marxism, but I like the way this film employs an understanding thereof to open a zone of fruitful dialogue with films built around Dalit assertion by directors like Pa. Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj-is there an ethical compass possible for the Avarna who is not Dalit? It also holds up some challenge to the Ambedkarite response to global capitalism
The thing we shouldn’t miss, of course is that Dhanush, who plays Suruli, is Dalit. There is sometimes a Mona Lisa smile under that handlebar moustache, and sometimes a waiting burst of manic energy, if we look carefully at how a Chennai hero chooses to fill this role in a Madurai film.
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Is an imagination created in the obsessive watching of cinema another kind of false consciousness? Subbaraj’s film sets up this question in some form, but produces an ambiguous answer.
When we meet Dharani, one of the Sri Lankan gangsters, for the first time, he is lying in wait along with others to knock off Matthew, Peter’s nephew, but erupts in delight because he hears Ilayaraja’s Kalyana Maalai on the car radio, and tries to turn up the volume. He receives a wigging for being an impractical, useless person from Dheepan, a senior member. And yet, for all that he’s largely useless, this Dharani is warm, full of life, and never in any moral doubt about what to do.
Suruli himself is not very different from Dharani; the films he has watched are an endless source of analogy and comment on events in his world. In his first five minutes on screen, he manages to work in references to Samsaram Adhu Minsaram and to speculate on which actor carried the betel leaves in Nayakan. The same song serves to start a connection between him and Dharani a little later. The director leaves open the question of whether cinema-veri is partly responsible for the ethical impoverishment we noticed earlier.
There are two interesting flourishes that we must not omit. When Suruli claps eyes on Attila for the first time, she is performing Kathodu Thaan Naan Paduven from Velli VIzha. He experiences a kind of time-bend, and the entire room is suffused in the monochrome of the original film. When the film edges to its climax, the simple signal for mayhem to start is a full volume blaring of Rajinikanth’s Oruvan Oruvan Mudhalali from the pursuit car. These moments seem to bookend a progression from a kind of passive receptivity to an informed act of bricolage, a way of using cinema to make something happen in the world.
Several inspirations and conversations from World Cinema are duly acknowledged. The train murder contains a little City of God tribute. The idea of a crime lord adrift in a far country is a borrowal from Takeshi Kitano’s Brother. There are two or three acks of this debt: one is that Sivadoss’s bombs guy is called Kitano. The car-crash feint on the road to Birmingham is set up to acknowledge a similar scene from the Kitano film.
The film that Karthik Subbaraj has an extended conversation with is Jacques Audiard’s Theepan. This Palme D’Or winner begins in Sri Lanka, and moves soon to France, and is silent about what happened in between. His curiosity about this silence materialises as an extremely compressed sequence that begins in the camp at Vavuniya, and a boat at Mannar, followed by a camp at Rameswaram, mentions of stopovers at Singapore and Moscow, a rather grisly walking sequence though the Uzhanskyi National Park in Ukraine along a route littered with corpses, Slubice in Poland, the Oder River border with Germany, a stopover in Berlin, followed by small towns in France named Lecelles and Corbehem. Attilla and Dheeran are separated from her brother here, and spent another three years trying to trace him.
Subbaraj goes to great lengths to acknowledge gratitude to Audiard and Dheepan. Three strangers who first met at the refugee camp pretend to be a family in Dheepan. That element of pretence figures here as well. In Berlin, Dheeran’s father sells cheap toys to earn money for food in a nod to a moment from where we see multicoloured blobs resolve into a shiny toy thingamajig that Dheepan is wearing as part of sales patter to make some money to get by. The exact same snatch from Nayagan’s Nila Adu Vanathu Mele appears in both films with many tajums. And last but not least, the character Dheepan’s real name is Sivadasan in the French film. Subbaraj, interestingly, splits these names among two two characters: Sivadoss and his successor Dheepan.
This fascination that Subbaraj reveals is really about how far cinematic narrative can travel, and the engagements it allows. The salience between cinema and curiosity pangs about the worlds it contains is perhaps the deduction that the viewer must make.
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The making aspect of film-making receives a continuous, loving attention in the director’s hands.
Vasanam, or dialogue, has always been a key locus in Tamizh cinema. We’ve spoken of this a little already, but there is a pitch perfectness that also needs to be acknowledged. It’s almost as if there was a trained linguist on board, paying attention to speech rhythms, and details of word-choice, and syntax. At least five different varieties of Tamizh needed to be managed both in terms of writing and delivery-the Madurai dialect, the Jaffna dialect, Attila’s anglicised Lankan Tamizh, Vicky’s in-between skills and accidents with Tamil-accented English, and Murugesan’s dialect. Nick Bain’s English script manages the same fresh, live idiom quality, and at no point do the speech rhythms of the film ever sag or feel staged, or inadequate. This is not an easy thing to achieve.
The writing is so tight that there is rarely a word out of place. The film is constructed like a whispering gallery; some things that are said keep coming back. The word duroham, for instance. Suruli describes Sivadoss when they meet as somebody who put his finger inside the white man’s eye and rotated it. During their final showdown, he repeats the phrase to Peter, and asks him if he knows what it means. Attila’s world weary Porai thudanga than mudyium, or ‘You can only begin a war, never end it, comes back later in the film as Suruli’s prediction for what Peter will do eventually.
Mise-en-scene, the elements that go into the frame, is fascinating in how it extends our sense of characterisation and explains individual motivations.
Peter’s fastidious self is revealed in the clothes he wears, and in the manner in which a sumptuous luxury keeps bursting out of the interiors and exteriors he frequents. The Ku Klux Klan memorabilia in his house is a grim reminder of how far this fastidiousness goes. Sivadoss and his men surface now and then, but for most of the film function from sparse, dark interiors that mirror their need to avoid attracting attention while still announcing their internationalist credentials. A poster that abbreviates a well-known Eelam slogan for this purpose is one such detail.
Interestingly, we nearly always see Suruli in transit, on his way somewhere else. He is at rest only when he nearly dies, and then the leaves outside his window slowly turn russet. You see him in a place that could be home only one other time, just before the machine guns begin their speeches outside his window.
Still with all the made bits, the placards at every demonstration that we catch a glimpse of need a mention. They are super punchy and say the same things in many different ways-a lot of effort into cooking up enough street poetry to suggest a climate of opinion.. One anti-BICORE poster reads “Fail Mark’s Proposal”, and another goes “No man is an island/No country by itself”. A third reads “Immigrants Made Britain Great”.
I loved the country bombs. Very non-Holly/Bolly/Kollywood in that they look like inkbursts from an escaping squid, and sound shy. Their effects are anything but gentle, but that i suppose is a Madurai contradiction we will have to live with.
There are two mad bits of camera work; one just before the peace meeting has Sivadoss with his back to the camera, lost in a moment of worship. At the same time, Suruli and Peter prepare for it as men of appetite, one chomping away on a plate of biryani and the other alternating between whisky and a cigar. The other is during the peace meeting when Sivadoss makes his move; the camera literally turns into a revolver, and you half-expect it to start coughing out bullets.
The soundtrack probably deserves a piece to itself. I will just point out the elliptical purposes for which the songs are used, often to compress action, or to move things along at a faster clip. Thei Piraiye, written as an apostrophe sung by a motherland to her departing homeless, becomes the means by which we follow Attila and her new family as they make their way to England. Kalare Kalarvasam in Anthonidasan’s voice is both a dirge for Murugesan as Suruli’s father, and also the means by which they plan their revenge.
This ability to take the familiar and make it do new work means that the viewer will find new coherences on looking again. When we began, we spoke of the black man who is caring enough to provide a strange white man a drink of water. In the drama of that moment, there is an innocuous detail that half sat in my head, and compelled me to look for it again. He takes something off as he steps out of the truck, and when he returns to his seat, he puts his kufi back on. He is neither Muslim, nor Christian in that moment, just one person looking out for another, when he hands Peter the jerrycan and says ‘Take care’.
What is the pleasure of cinema if it is not the compulsion to look again, and again, and again?