There hadn’t yet been a work in Nepali cinema that addressed the gamut of human involvement, the inter-personal mess, that was the political or the revolutionary. Tulsi Ghimire’s Balidan, and other films like Aago and Janayuddha are a few examples of what existed. The latter was produced by the Maoist party machine, and is an atrocious piece of badly written, badly acted propaganda. We should all watch it at least once. Balidan, on the other hand, was a tearjerker perfectly poised between the fall of Panchayat and the start of the Maoist revolution. Political films, however, have been numerous, and trite: hagiographies or xenophobic documents that can be dismissed as blights on cinema generally.

Then, along came Uma. It had a lot of expectations attached to it – the actors are among the best of their generations, and the director Tsering Rhitar Sherpa is a pioneer among his peers, for the breadth of his vision and for his courage to make fiction-films like Mukundo and Karma. Yet, strangely, in the theaters where Nischal Basnet’s Loot had done such phenomenal business that people expected it to  breathe new life into a dying industry, Uma failed to earn at the box office, in spite of the flood of critical acclaim it gathered. Over at www.setopati.com, Director Deepak Rauniyar explains why Nepali films fail to do well, and in the process, has generated a debate.

Director (and writer) Tsering Rhitar Sherpa, writer (and assistant director) Tsering Choden, and writer (and actor-in-cameo) Kumar Bhattarai – and you can see, in this web of relationships, the very intimate space from where this film arises – have made a brother-sister-mother melodrama that is neither revolutionary, nor political, but quite a bit of both. That leads the film down a labyrinth of confounding choices, confused morality.

Uma can be called a Buddhist meditation, or mediation. It is the aesthetic middle-path:

– between extremes of ideology and emotion;

– between a cinematic sensibility geared towards the public and one that hews closer to the personal vision of the writer/director;

–  and, between a grand ambition (to wrest away from politicians or their cronies the articulation of what the conflict meant, how it was manifest in the lives of the ordinary – be they a thug born-again as a rebel, or a girl who keeps remembering, to her annoyance and inconvenience, that she’d been forced to become a guerrilla fighter, to squeeze the trigger and hit targets without questioning why, or a young child witness to the execution of her father), and a humble submission (before the whims of the ‘film-going public,’ who, through their mysterious box-office ballots, as the arm of the invisible hand, direct the director in turn to cook with specific ingredients and spice with particular spices). All three are in reality manifestations of the same compulsion.

But, as can be said cynically of the middle path, it is the path of the middle-class, the group that lacks the courage to stand up against the oppressors, and also lacks the empathy required to fight for the oppressed. In trying to supply a moral prescription for how its middle-class audience should consider the conflict, Uma fails to placate either side, reactionary or revolutionary.

Let’s take two instances from the film: one for the brother (played admirably by Saugat Malla), and another for the sister (played equally admirably by Reecha Sharma). The policeman brother’s existential quandary: traditional duty. The guerilla sister’s: revolutionary duty. Both race towards the fatal conclusion of the film. But both of their actions ring hollow, given the specific rigidity of their moral cages. The middle-class morality or duty fails the policeman brother when his rebel sister visits on the eve of his wedding; the sense of revolutionary duty fails the rebel sister when she realizes the target of her assassination-mission is accompanied by the universal token of innocence – a girl child. In either case is an appeal to what passes for universal humanity, but is in reality in conflict with both reactionary and revolutionary logic. If the brother had arrested the sister, the fatal conclusion would have been avoided; if the sister had steadied her hand and found her target, the fatal conclusion may have been avoided. But that would fail a superseding logic at work: the need for melodrama, as fuel for cinematic immersion.

There is no difference between the policeman brother eating what his superior’s wife has cooked, and his rebel sister tending to the tea-burned hand of a too-young revolutionary. Both gestures are superfluous and icky-sentimental, without any light towards illuminating something new in the characters, which would have brought into better relief the thread of cause-and-effect that runs through the film. And that is a lamentable loss.

Anybody in the audience will be confused by the elation and deflation that she will experience as she sits through Uma – after a brilliant point on how, if the arts were dedicated to bringing about change, the violence of an armed struggle would be utterly unnecessary, comes a twee and sentimental setting-up of a minor character whose later death will set a protagonist down an inevitable path. Remove that sentimentality, and let the protagonists still make the choice to fling themselves into the face of the inevitable: then their humanity and Fate’s Strong Hand would seem more plausible plot devices.

But the frustration with Uma also comes from the moments of elation it gives: Tsering Rhitar Sherpa’s sensibility and his considered worldview is present throughout. The lightness of his touch is delightful – two little children dance to an Ambar Gurung song as segue into a more traditional hero-heroni dance. A propaganda revolutionary song-dance-flag routine seems so real that it at once registers itself to be the flawed kitsch that it really is. Nischal Shrestha says, “I don’t believe in castes, Anu! I’ll tear that thought out of the society! No, I’ll tear it out of my father’s mind!” and reminds us that we are watching a film, in a theater, and we’re happy for it. When Tulasi Ghimire explains how the movie business works, Uma puts aside the pretense of the heavy melodrama we came to watch, and pulls us into the film.

A more serious turn – Tsering Ritar Sherpa’s movie makes us deeply uncomfortable, with commentaries coming at the least expected places. Two policemen dig a grave in the deep dark of a rainy night. As they bail the grave with their shovels, they discuss a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi scheme: agents of the oppressive feudal and capitalist state-machine enthusiastically discuss the possibility of undeserved fortunes. But, as the post-conflict years have shown, the Maoist leadership had been selling the same Ponzi scheme to their cadres: Loss and gain have been very unevenly stacked since, don’t you think, Comrade?

Another – take account of the characters whose fates are left unresolved. If there is a conscientious, earnest guerilla who escapes into the night, there is another rebel, a potential rapist, a known murderer before joining the Party, who is also out there somewhere, now intractably ensconced in power. If there are hardy, long-time comrades at a meeting saying Lal Salaam to Prachanda – this name, ridiculously, silenced by our cowardly Censor Board – there are also very young children, forced into the fold. If there are people who came into the revolution through personal circumstances or ideology, there are others who confess to have been shanghaied into it.

This isn’t equivocation – this is equal-accusation. This was certainly the problem that disquieted Comrade Lal Dhwoj, who chose to stick to a safe reaction: that humanitarian sentiments have been portrayed well in the movie. If he’d agree with the director’s vision, he’d have to concede that the protagonists acted from a personal consciousness more often than they did from class consciousness – and that’d undo the Comrade’s revolution. On either side of the conflict, Uma doesn’t show the leaders of the classes in conflict – neither the feudal or monarchical oppressors (safe in their Kathmandu mansions), nor the revolutionary ideologues (safely ensconced in Indian hospitality). What are left on the board are the pawns, taking one step forward at a time, until the fatal diagonal move into certain ruin. Uma does that – it forces the audience to question their moral and political expectation from the film.

And that ability makes Uma a very important work of Nepali cinema, perhaps the most important Nepali film to have been released in the past twelve months. But it has become a frustrating and uneven work that it is now because it tries to please the theater-going audience, and in the process sacrifices pace, ambition and focus. Is that extra tinge of melodrama, that muting of a more ambitious idea, that choice of sex or violence just to take the audience’s mind off more pressing, more troubling questions, borne out of the audience’s insistence upon sex, violence, melodrama, and watering-down of difficult issues? If the director believes he has to make a movie that everybody will like, in order to attract enough revenue at the box-office to make future projects feasible, what does this say about the audience? Are we, as film watchers, getting what we deserve? Then, why do we grumble?

I hope there comes a day when a director of such talent and skill and passion for thoughtful storytelling as Tsering Rhitar Sherpa doesn’t have to add or subtract from exactly the film he wants to make, just in order to attract people to the cinema. I hope the audience of Nepali films will grow the courage necessary to demand better cinema by becoming better participants in the creative dialogue.