Nine ways to say nothing: the ‘Navarasa’ anthology

Opinion | The ‘Navarasa’ anthology showing on Netflix now is as shallow as the cultural spaces we occupy today

Much has been written about the cinematic disaster that is the anthology film Navarasa, now showing on Netflix. And while one usually dismisses bad films with a shrug, these nine shorts come from Tamil cinema’s supposedly top filmmakers, which makes the mediocrity a bit inexplicable. Worse, the series is created by star director Mani Ratnam, about whose cinematic mojo the less said the better after this outing. But what stood out for me after the four-hour anthology was the extraordinary aridity of the cinematic imagination on display. And this, I believe, comes from the great cultural vacuum we now occupy where all creative energy is expended on negotiating what, for want of a better word, I will call the ‘middle’. Nothing else explains why the segment on ‘Wonder’ could not frame a 30-minute futuristic plot about a time machine without dragging in astrology and God and feeling compelled to name its protagonists Vishnu, Krishna and Kalki. The inability of Indian artists and writers to go beyond mythology might at one level be looked at simply as artistic failure but I would argue that this bogging down also explains our continuing lack of creativity in, for instance, engineering or pharmacology or even dance, where bold, original, cutting-edge ideas still elude us. A society that continuously harks back is ill-equipped to meet the future and that gets reflected in this anthology as well, whether in its decision to rake up the ancient Natyashastra or in its failure to craft a critical and contemporary lens to explore the nine rasas.