Berlinale 2024: How ‘In The Belly Of A Tiger’ Navigates an Un-Incredible India

There is something suspicious and gratifying about seeing Indian films be peacocked in the festival circuit abroad. By virtue of coming from countries that need to be “represented” as opposed to coming from countries that just secrete art, Indian films are consumed more ethnographically, a depiction often fantasised as a representation. They come with the additional burden of explaining the country, and some filmmakers take it upon themselves to completely evade this demand, but some sink into it, or under it, knowingly or otherwise, in small and large ways. When Raam Reddy was introducing his film The Fable to the audience, he spoke of a trite ‘where we come from’ birth-of-a-soul analogy to describe how by watching the film at its premiere we have birthed it. But sometimes, this ‘where we come from’ tenor seeps into the very texture of the storytelling. What then?

Welcome aboard Un-incredible India, verbose poverty and worn-out class-rhetoric that can only insist on beauty through the language of magic realism and rips of cinematic liberties, bright pops of monochrome fabrics wound over weary, dust-beaten bodies. It is challenging to see Siddartha Jatla’s In The Belly Of A Tiger, which premiered at Berlin, in the Forum section, one dedicated to “reflection on the film medium, social-artistic discourse and aesthetic stubbornness”. This is a carefully calculated production, incubated in labs like the NFDC Film Bazaar, Busan’s Asian Cinema Fund, and Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, pulling artists from around the world — co-producers from China, Taiwan, Indonesia, America, and India, with an Indonesian editor and a Japanese composer.   

Here, however, you can see through the mechanical strategy and creative choices, how it wants to both buy into the exotic and the kitchen sink. You can see how the starched Hindi dialogues don’t necessarily translate to shoddy English subtitles — how does one subtitle uneasy pauses in speech? — how the amateur actors’ discomfort in front of the camera is masked by forced posturing and the studied pose of the film. Its dryness flakes, like dead skin. 

The Metaphor of a Tiger

The film begins with a spine-trembling image of blood being applied like moisturizer on the face of an old man looking haunted, broken. Later, he is found dead, and the word on the street is that he has been mauled by a tiger. His family demands compensation from the government. Right off the bat, Jatla cleverly keeps the question hot on its toes — is there really a tiger? Or did the family kill the old man off to spoon in some money. I suppose it would be no surprise that in a film festival of all places, the titular tiger would actually be a metaphor. You can stretch it with meaning till it snaps. 

This idea of the older generation sacrificing themselves or being made to sacrifice themselves in exchange for cash is a troubling trend that plagues societies struck by poverty. Witch killings is another such incarnation, where women deemed to be witches and killed are, statistically, older, widowed dependents, creating some space in the monthly cash inflows. But if witch killings are shrouded in myth and belief in craven character, the tiger maulings here are more practical, their solution more bureaucratic, and their victims, men.

Jatla does not answer this question so directly in the first hour, but as the film changes gear in the last act, expressing himself with a studious, synthetically sincere clarity, you can almost see him as a screenwriter withholding information while penning the first hour. This is, after all, a film which invites such digressions, because the surface is so thin, almost transparent, you feel like you are peeping into its other side.

Of Hardship and Resilience

Set in some nameless region, somewhere in the North of India — though the “UK” number plate gives it away, and in interviews Jatla mentions Uttar Pradesh — the film follows Saharsh (Sourabh Jaiswar), a landless farmer who, through debt, is forced to sell his labor to an exploitative brick kiln. With this he is supposed to feed his parents and two daughters, while mourning his wife, who appears in shimmering saris as a tepid ghost. The acting is uniformly stiff, and you would think this is the intended posture of the film, except whenever the youngest daughter, Chatkila played by Jyoti, shows up, offering a presence of both instant charm and impending devastation. 

Against this are local theatrical recreations of Vishnu protecting an elephant from a crocodile, swirling in the ocean of milk, contemplating the world into being. The film is almost begging for an interpretation at this point, unsure as it is of its emotional grip. 

Jatla, who also handles the camera, is unwilling to immerse us in the world, happy with his clean, distant frames. When Saharsh tries to scare Chatkila by making her close her eyes and then placing a cockerel upside down, next to her face to rip her composure, the camera is lax, not allowing that force of fear, that jolt of laughter. Even the mythical theatrical stagings are written and performed without a full bodied presence, without evoking the devotion — in either framing or writing — it is evoking in its audience within the film. There is an anesthetic camera at work here, which, then, requires the frame to be capable of holding a moment. But the frame’s symmetrical desires soon fray. 

Between Beauty and Brutality

Professor of religious studies, Fred Clothey, when speaking of how Britain framed India in their imagination at the dawn of the colonial empire, spoke of a few phases through which they waded. The first was a romantic exotism. The second was “pejorative putdown”. There was a discreteness with which Europe was looking at India, as categories that don’t necessarily leak, but as blanketed ideas. That to look at something with such a clinical, archeological distance is to be unable to see it in its complexity, to frame this-and as either-or. 

Beauty in Jatla’s film is outside of the world the characters inhabit materially, because he does not care, nor is interested in looking at their world itself as a source of beauty, something bleeding through the cracks. These distinctions make the film wobble around, between beauty and brutality, as separate ideas, sealed in a palatable, worn-out narrative shape. The beauty is painstakingly created, apparent, and the seams of beauty and un-beauty, too clear.  When you see the beautiful, the surreal, the densely hued saris, you can feel the intervention of the director, the intentional swerving he is doing from traditional narratives of village poverty. The film never plays as a cohesive object.   

Further, the film’s frustrations build. The dialogue between Saharsh’s parents, Bhagole (Lawrence Francis) and Prabhata (Prabhata) lean so heavily on telling, not showing — a conservative dictum, to be fair — that it collapses onto it, hoping that the postured longing in the inert gaze would speak what the dialogues cannot, and will not. That both Prabhata and Francis are theatre actors is discernible because theatre actors are used to summoning a whole world into a moment with the power of words and throw of voice, and for the longest time, watching them summon theatre without Jatla using the cinematic toolkit at his disposal to translate theatre to cinema, is to endure a film that is looking elsewhere for things that are right in front of it. 

Film Companion’s coverage of the Berlinale was made possible by the support of Goethe Mumbai