Mrinal Sen – Genesis (1986)

A farmer (Naseeruddin Shah) and a weaver (Om Puri) exchange their products for goods provided by a regular passing trader (M.K. Raina). A woman (Shabana Azmi) arrives, forcing the two men’s desires but also urging them to obtain more recompense from the trader. After a visit to a village fair , the two men become more acquisitive and jealousies break out over the now pregnant woman who simply ups and leaves .As the two men fight each other, the trader’s men attack and enslave the workers again.

Here is a brief review from the New York Times:
”Genesis” is not a biblical extravaganza. The Indian director Mrinal Sen’s 1986 movie, now at the Public Theater, is a simply conceived, artfully rendered parable of love and jealousy, freedom and slavery. The tale is rudimentary, its themes a touch obvious, yet the telling, done with grave humanity, carries meanings of its own.

Rest easy. Despite the title, ”Genesis” is not a biblical extravaganza. The Indian director Mrinal Sen’s 1986 movie, now at the Public Theater, is a simply conceived, artfully rendered parable of love and jealousy, freedom and slavery. The tale is rudimentary, its themes a touch obvious, yet the telling, done with grave humanity, carries meanings of its own.

A weaver and a farmer, in flight from exploitation, settle near a desert, where they live like brothers. The weaver supports the bare and smoky household by exchanges with an itinerant trader, the movie’s one ambiguous figure. The farmer tends the land. Life goes so well that the two can delude themselves that ”we are slaves to no one, we are our own masters.”

Into their sparse Eden comes a teen-aged woman with a lantern, a needless symbol for so luminous an actress as Shabana Azmi. She proves a hard worker who scrubs the sandy floor and also scrubs away some of the men’s crudeness. She softens their lives and joins in their play.

They compete in their efforts to please her, and you will not be surprised to learn that this means trouble. As the worldly trader warns, ”There are two of them and one of you.” She tries to give fair shares -”I accepted you both because you needed me,” she tells them in pure affection – but it doesn’t do. Here, as in the Old Testament Genesis, the brothers are riven.

Although Miss Azmi has an angel-with-a-dirty-face quality, Mr. Sen, who wrote the screenplay, keeps his characters down to earth. They stand for human beings through the ages, unable to master either their own emotions or life’s circumstances. Now and then there is a frightening roar overhead, the sound of the world, that sends them cowering.

Mr. Sen’s evident intention to connect man’s inner and outer forms of slavery does not click. Even if this two-man-one-woman community could have continued amiably, it would still have been destroyed by the bulldozers brought in by the trader. The director’s final reliance on destruction ex machina stems from his politics rather than from his characters’ passions. Yet with the help of Carlo Varini’s camera and Ravi Shankar’s music, ”Genesis” brings home the sparseness, beauty and perils of existence at a basic level.

Although Mrinal Sen has made about 25 movies in India, for American audiences ”Genesis” marks a notable beginning.

1.38GB | 1h 33m | 352×288 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/867483A352B6DAF/Genesis_1.avi
https://nitro.download/view/139AD1D08B30935/Genesis_2.avi
https://nitro.download/view/FAF57FDC0AA4D09/Genesis_Part_1.srt
https://nitro.download/view/F2C086B4AC8C6AF/Genesis_Part_2.srt

Language(s):Hindi
Subtitles:English