After Rahul Jain’s debut documentary Machines circled global festivals with its heart-breaking contrast between the beauty of Indian textiles and the inhuman way they are manufactured, his second feature Invisible Demons feels, if anything, even more ambitious in its critique of how unchecked economic growth and greed are destroying the city of Delhi. With 30 million inhabitants and counting and minimal government regulation of industrial waste, India’s capital is high on the list of the world’s most polluted cities.
Viewers who saw the film in Cannes and El Gouna were suitably impressed by the locomotive force of Jain’s arguments and his powerful images of a city sinking into environmental destruction. But other voices noted that his portrait of disaster over-shot its mark and poor Delhi still has its good days. Certainly many of the impressive images are violent, disturbing and often so shocking they invite denial. Or perhaps it’s just the nature of films about climate change to try to win hearts by summing up the effects of man-made ecological folly until no ray of hope remains. Certainly no one will leave this film with a light heart, or any clear idea how to get out of such a lethal situation.
Jain, who earned his M.A. at Cal Tech while launching his film career, has described Invisible Demons as a visual representation of the Anthropocene era, when human activity is having a strongly negative impact on planet Earth. So the film’s approach is more of a red alert than a warning, and probably a necessary one given the disasters that Jain and his co-writers Yael Bitton and Iikka Vehkalahti bring so expressively to life. Most of all, they are happening now, not in the future. One only wishes there was a stronger through-line to structure this stream of unhappy facts and give the viewer a greater sense of their context, India’s race for economic growth.
The film opens on a characteristically striking image: a workman appears to be fumigating a public garden with thick white smoke that billows into the air, investing passersby, while he himself disappears behind the wall of poison. You unconsciously hold your breath while watching the white cloud spread.
It’s 49 degrees Celsius (120° F) in Delhi that day, a TV reporter tells her audience. She is standing at the city’s most polluted intersection, where gridlock combines with air pollution and the heat wave, in a knockout punch. Why is the air so bad? The narrator, who describes himself as having led an “air conditioned childhood,” mentions the big question: who benefits from the world’s fastest growing economy? Disappointingly, the film leaves it hanging.
Sidestepping politics, we see one source of air pollution in the systematic burning of field stubble by farmers in outlying areas; winds blow the billowing black smoke over the city and into the lungs of the poorest residents, above all, who are seen coughing and hacking. We are told that 10% of the city’s annual deaths can be linked to air pollution.
A trio of fine cinematographers capture image after image, set to Kimmo Pohjonen’s apocalyptic score. A suffering ox with a rope threaded through its nostrils struggles to pull a cart through traffic. Motor rickshaws clog a street full of tightly packed pedestrians. Monsoon flooding, the worst in decades, envelopes cars. And so on.
In what is perhaps the most haunting and original scene in the film, the one image most viewers will never forget, we see three Hindi women in saris, wreathed in smog and wading through the monstrous white toxic, malodorous foam that chokes the sacred Yamuna river. And still people go to perform religious rites in the midst of the pollution.
But how is this litany of disasters connected, who is responsible, how can the clock be turned back to a cleaner, healthier time for the city? That isn’t where this film is going. But it does alert us to the epic proportions of Delhi’s current problems.
Director: Rahul Jain
Screenwriters: Rahul Jain, Yael Bitton, Iikka Vehkalahti
Producers: Iikka Vehkalahti, Heino Deckert
Executive producers: Frank Lehmann, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Jaya Jain
Cinematography: Saumyananda Sahi, Tuomo Hutri, Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva
Editing: Yael Bitton
Music: Kimmo Pohjonen
Sound design: Bruno Tarriere
Production companies: Ma.Ja.De Filmproduktion (Germany), Toinen Katse (Finland), Participant (US)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Out of competition)
In English, Hindi
70 minutes
