I, Poppy
(India, 81 min.)
Dir. Vivek Chaudhary
Programme: International Spectrum (World premiere)
For centuries, the story of India has been one of contrast. The divisions between rich and poor, and the powerful and the exploited, have shaped life for the billions of people who call the country home. Whether the systemic remnants of British colonialism or the contemporary corruption endemic to the world’s largest democracy, or the historical caste system, the plight of the individual facing of the force of bureaucracy holds little in the way of optimism.
It’s in this context that a quixotic quest is undertaken by Mangilal, a schoolteacher and the son of a long line of poppy farmers. His mother, Vardibai, toils in the fields while her son fills young people with stories of equality and justice. Mangilal spends the rest of his time gathering supporters to help eradicate the corruption and exploitation of his fellow growers.
The main product of the poppy is, of course, opium, extracted from the slightly sliced bulbs that emit a rubbery liquid that dries and is processed to a number of pharmaceuticals and narcotics. For generations, this family has farmed under the tight control of government handlers who restrict cultivation while extracting additional fines from those who farm. To make up for the shortfall, many are caught between bribing officials, selling their wares to the black market, or simply giving up an occupation that they’ve held onto for generations.
While the son is out challenging the status quo, going as far as the capitol Delhi to state his case along with a few dozen fellow protesters, his mother is aghast at both his effrontery and possible costs for causing trouble. She bemoans the fact that she educated her son—and he too only half-jokingly wishes he were more ignorant, which echoes Hamlet’s existential angst about the burden of knowledge.
Mangilal’s own sons have little respect for his mode of protests. Their own finances and college education is put at risk while promise after promise of financial support is broken. The family situation proves as complicated as the political and social dynamics that Mangilal fights against outside his household, exposing yet another facet where there are no simple answers to be gleaned.
The divisions run even deeper than that, with a tearful Vardibai talking about their lot in life as “Dalit,” the lowest of the cultural castes or divisions that have shaped in profound ways Indian cultural injustices as much as any overt exploitation. The fact that it’s an “untouchable” who speaks truth to power is but one facet of Mangilal’s story that is both immensely inspiring while simultaneously appearing at once foolish and self-destructive.
While the son is stuck to his mobile device, dictating text notes to drum up support, the mother stoops over the produce from her field with her creaky bones bent while picking out the good seeds to plant. This collision between the modern and the timeless, the technological and the agrarian, is yet another seemingly impossible divide that in this context is shown to be utterly entwined, not always to the benefit of each element.
Shot in a gauzy yet engaging way, Chaudhary balances the need to be subtle and observational combined with the occasionally overt querying of his subjects. The result is a powerful portrait that borders on the strictly observational, while still maintaining a journalistic style of engagement and curiosity that a more formally austere project would have lacked.
What’s perhaps most remarkable, if not entirely surprising, is how the film ends in a way that’s entirely free from any form of catharsis. Real life is messy, and this film portrays that messiness in ways that begin a conversation rather than tie up a situation in a nice bow. While there’s plenty more to explore, and in some ways the film feels like it’s a precis for a longer work that follows the doc’s concluding moments, that’s not to say the work feels under-baked. Instead, we are treated to a deeply personal, highly specific story that has universal resonance, the multifaceted and well-drawn subjects avatars for so many people around the world forced to confront similar contradictions and challenges.
The poppy is robust on the outside and delicate on the inside, its scarred exterior sliced so that it bleeds a substance that, paradoxically, is literally intoxicating and frees one from pain. Whether all these facets can be drawn from the poetic title I, Poppy may be up for debate, but as a metaphor for how all these disparate elements can all be seen in one small field, and in one small family’s struggles, Chaudhary’s film succeeds enormously.
