Peepli (Live)

Paradoxically, a film on the Indian media that shines only when the media is off-screen.

Peepli (Live) does’t tell us anything about Indian broadcast journalism that we don’t know. The film is presented as a satire and has plenty of scatological humour, with a liberal use of expletives. At the start, the lead character falls into a pile of cow dung, and later, when he becomes the centre of media attention, TV cameras zoom into his excrement as evidence of his last ‘shit bite’.  

 The trouble is that director Anusha Rizvi has allowed her obsession with the media to hijack the real issue in the film, that of abject rural poverty, crushing debts and a callous and indifferent State, all of which are presented very effectively in the first 20 minutes of the movie, before the TV cameras arrive. The last few minutes, once the media circus exits the frame, are again tender and real, giving us an idea of the kind of film it could have been.

Television news in India is a hydra-headed monster, but has this film exaggerated its importance in the realpolitik of a remote village? Television would indeed go berserk set in urban, middle-class India.  But two brothers, dirt poor, inarticulate, buried in debt, with their land mortgaged in a village mired in complex state politics, doesn’t look an eyeball catcher for advertisers. Even with the drama of one of the brothers, Natha (Manikpuri), deciding to commit suicide for compensation, Peepli seems an unlikely location for  prime-time ‘Breaking News’. 

Along with the other brother, Budhia (Yadav), the film is well cast and reasonably well acted, with the surprising exception of Naseeruddin Shah as the Minister of Agriculture. He plays the role lazily, and for a politician with such a sensitive portfolio, he seems too laidback to be real. 

In short, Peepli (Live) has taken  reductive television and presented it as the game changer. Surely, that was not its intention, was it?

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Ajit Duara